A More Abundant Life
Few books open with the same topical brio as The Autumn of the Middle Ages, Johan Huizenga’s justly renowned history of late medieval culture in France and the Low Countries. The opening sentences of the work flourish its theme before us:
When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness that joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child. Every event, every deed was defined in given and expressive forms and was in accord with the solemnity of a tight, invariable life style. The great events of human life – birth, marriage, death – by virtue of the sacraments, basked in the radiance of the divine mystery. But even the lesser events – a journey, labor, a visit – were accompanied by a multitude of blessings, ceremonies, sayings and conventions.
In the pages immediately following, Huizenga provides a dazzling panoply of the sights and sounds that crammed that exuberant world, a realm of “processions, shouts, lamentations and music.” There were nobles going about in ostentatious show of “weapons and liveried servants,” “lepers shaking their rattles and…putting their deformities on open display,” lovers “carrying the emblems of (their ladies),” all the while church bells in the background “acted in daily life like concerned good spirits who, with their familiar voices, proclaimed sadness or joy, calm or unrest, assembly or exhortation.” Extremes of holiness and cruelty offered a regular spectacle to the people of that era: the head of an executed burgher is displayed “dressed with a crimson, fur-lined hood,” while a beloved preacher travels with “large numbers of supporters who, every evening after sunset, go on processions with flagellations and songs.” The very titles of Huizenga’s chapters – “The Passionate Intensity of Life,” “The Craving for a More Beautiful Life,” “The Heroic Dream” – suggest the spiritual scope of the period and its cultural ambitions.
Readers familiar with Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy will recognize that same “passionate intensity of life” as the key note in his own study. What Burckhardt limns for us is a world in which the “enthusiastic devotion to (culture), the recognition that the need of it is the first and greatest of all needs” is pervasive, in which this enthusiasm enflames a desire to “master all the elements of the culture of the age” in order to become the “all-side man – l’uomo universale,” and in which an unrestrained, unapologetic reverence for the achievements of their ancestors supplied the materials required to realize these monumental spiritual aspirations. Life possessed a breadth and variety nearly unimaginable to us; a figure like Federigo de Montefeltro, ruler of Urbino, in the course of a single afternoon could stroll through the confines of his flourishing city, supervising the military exercises of the young men, visiting the artisans in their shops, and conversing on sacred matters with the abbess of the local convent. Personal dress was “in the highest degree varied in color and loaded with ornament;” public spaces were crammed with sculpture and classical façade and resounded with voices of the donkey-men singing verses from Dante; trionfi and jousts offered regular spectacles to the crowds, and vehicles of lasting glory to their sponsors and victors (Poliziano writes one of his most famous poems about Giuliano de’Medici’s participation in one such contest). As in the medieval world depicted by Huizenga, the energies released during this extraordinary period in Italy culminated in actions of a wholly disparate moral tenor: the same thirst for glory which impelled Petrarch in his pursuit of literary fame is said to have motivated several assassinations carried out by men consumed with a “burning desire to achieve something great and memorable.”
The profound intellectual and cultural affinities between the two worlds featured in these studies of course causes us to consider whether the stark division we make between the Medieval and Renaissance ages is really all that tenable. A highly interesting and fruitful debate might follow from such a consideration, though it is not my intent to delve into that topic here. The simple point I want to make is that no reader can examine the books of Huizenga and Burkhardt without coming away with an impression that life in the eras and locales that they depicted had a capaciousness which has been wholly lost in the modern world. The variety and panache with which men and women lived out their daily lives is so remote from our own experience that it has the appearance to us of something almost mythical. The dimensions of man’s spirit were far wider, of his public life far richer, than they are with us. One personality might simultaneously harbor characteristics disparate and even antagonistic to one another – artistic genius alongside a propensity for violence, genuine devotion combined with a fervor for self-aggrandizement. Art reverberated with political loyalties which reverberated with theological commitments, in a manner that potentially invested every gesture and every song with an infinity of meaning. Life then was not “better,” but far more interesting. The people were not “better,” but in a very real sense, far more alive than we are.
A thousand examples would serve to illustrate the dynamic I am alluding to; consider only one. Bertran de Born is best known to history as the headless figure looming over the schismatics in the Eighth Circle of Dante’s Inferno. In real life, the man was both far more sinister and far more brilliant than this memorable image suggests. Castellan over a relatively small territory in the south of France, Bertran found himself caught up in the relentless conflict between the English and French nobilities that consumed his era; an avid warrior, Bertran sought to maintain his status by exacerbating the rivalries of the great lords who took turns vying for supremacy. He established his fame as one of the great troubadours of the period, though unlike most of his peers, he did not take the vagaries of love for his primary poetic topic, but specialized in the sirventes, or poem of political invective, which instrument he used to tease and mock kings and dukes into taking up arms. His most famous poem is probably the one he wrote in praise of the battlefield and its turmoil, one passage of which reads: “It pleaseth me when the scouts set in flight the folk with their goods; / And it pleaseth me when I see coming together after them an host of armed men. / And it pleaseth me to the heart when I see strong castles besieged, / And barriers broken and riven, and I see the host on shore all about shut in with ditches.” Yet this undeniably contentious, not to say bloodthirsty, man could be fantastically loyal; his devotion to the “Young King” – Henry II’s eldest son, who rebelled against his father’s rule – was legendary, and inspired a planh, or lamentation, of evident sincerity on his death: “O skillful Death and full of bitterness, / Well mayst thou boast that thou the best chevalier / That any folk e’er had, hast from us taken; / Sith nothing is that unto worth pertaineth / But had its life in the young English king.” This zealous fighter ended his days in a monastery, where he presumably devoted his mental energies to prayer; no poems of his are dated from this period. An apocryphal story of Betran tells of his capture by Henry II, who berated the troubadour for his former boasts concerning his wits:
The king said, “now it would seem you have lost your wits altogether.” “My lord,” said Betran, “indeed I have.” “And how is that?” asked the king. “My lord,” said Betran, “the day your son, the valiant Young King died, I lost my wits, judgment and mind.” And when the king saw Betran’s tears and heard what he said of his son, a great grief entered his heart and eyes, and he could not keep from fainting.
Although almost certainly fictional, the story captures what his contemporaries found so remarkable and congenial in his character, the extraordinary manner in which the extremes of ferocity and tenderness were mixed in the soul of one man, both a poet and a warrior.
But it was not just one man: the civilization of the Western world was distinguished for centuries by the prevalence of such l’uomo universale, and the variegated modes of life they embodied. A man like Leon Battista Alberti, for instance, seemed to incorporate into his single person the potentialities of our whole species. He was poet, artist, mathematician, inventor, architect and architectural theorist, and an athlete of such incredible physical dexterity that he was said to be able to leap over a man’s head from the standing position. Burckhardt catalogues his literary contributions, “first of all those on art, which are landmarks and authorities of the first order for the Renaissance form, especially in architecture; then his Latin prose writings – novels and other works….his elegies, eclogues, and humorous dinner speeches. He also wrote an Italian treatise on domestic life in four books, and even a funeral oration on his dog.” Burckhardt goes on to elaborate upon the springs of such breathtaking creative fecundity, which lay in a personality unusually generous and magnanimous, marked by a “sympathetic intensity with which he entered into the whole life around him.”
At the sight of noble trees and waving cornfields he shed tears; handsome and dignified old men he honored as a ‘delight of nature,’ and could never look at them enough. Perfectly formed animals won his goodwill as being specially favored by nature, and more than once, when he was ill, the sight of a beautiful landscape cured him.
Small wonder that such a man should choose for his motto the saying, “men can do all things if they will.”
And Alberti was hardly even unique in his own time and place. The man who ruled over his city at the end of his life, Lorenzo de’Medici, left a similar name for multifaceted talent and expansiveness of soul to posterity. A statesman of the first order, he almost single-handedly upheld a period of peace among the city-states of Italy at a time when they had been engaged in incessant warfare for generations. On one occasion, when Florence was threatened with invasion by an alliance of powers led by King Ferrante of Naples, Lorenzo traveled personally to the court of Ferrante, incurring no small amount of danger to his person, in order to establish peace between the two realms. Severe when required to be so, Lorenzo commonly revealed discomfort with the effects of his severity. So after an army he sent to put down a revolt in Volterra brutally sacked the city and inflicted numerous horrors on the population there, Lorenzo penitently appeared among the Volterrans and attempted to make amends for those horrors. And in the wake of the Pazzi conspiracy, while the conspirators were being hunted down and executed, Lorenzo went out of his way to protect numerous suspected citizens from the blind fury of the mob. Remarkably, while so competently administering the state, Lorenzo preserved the energy to throw himself with elan into the efflorescence of mind and spirit that was Quattrocento Florence. Perhaps the greatest artistic patron of all time, Lorenzo played a decisive role in the careers of Botticelli, Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, and, most famously, Michelangelo. Supporter of the Platonic Academy of Marsilio Ficino, Lorenzo relished late-night conversations with its learned company about the nature of the summum bonum, and other philosophical conundrums. A tender and devoted father, he was highly interested in his children’s education, and on one occasion wrote a play for their performance. The affection and devotion Lorenzo inspired in those close to him was profound; everywhere he went, into whatever endeavor he threw himself, he seemed to disseminate among his friends the exuberance of his own personality. He competed at calcio, reveled in telling ribald jokes, bred rabbits with great care, dabbled in the playing of the lyre, and wrote poems of such sprightly brio that they are still read with appreciation by students in Italy to this day.
The city which formed these men, and which they in turn adorned, in itself exemplified the vitality and capaciousness of that old way of life. On any given day in the 14th or 15th century, one could wander the streets of Florence and bump into flocks of young revelers singing and playing on flutes, or wagons bearing gilded replicas of the towns subject to Florentine rule, or processions of monks reenacting the passion while dragging behind them ornate chariots holding the most sacred relics of the city, or a frothing mob brandishing the severed body parts of some recently executed political foe. A stroll through the central piazza might bring you face to face with a staged boar hunt, or with the unveiling of the new statue of David commissioned by the Signoria. Like a bubbling pot always ready to spill over, the restive populace of Florence seemed to look for any excuse to riot, and were constantly dying the streets of their city with the bloodshed of their partisan brawls, yet when the Visconti dukes of Milan enveloped nearly the whole of northern Italy towards the end of the 14th century, intimidating or suborning the authoritarian rulers of one city-state after another, it was the Florentines who stood alone against their aggression and in defense of republican liberty. This passionate devotion to their city was unquestionably one of the prime sources of those energies that exploded into a profusion of genius and bravado throughout the period of the Renaissance. Like a loving father intent to lavish the beauty of his daughter with every jewel he can afford, the Florentines graced their city from end to end with statue, fresco, façade, and song. And yet these were the people so entranced by the penitential sermons of Savonarola that they were led to conduct the infamous Bonfires of the Vanities. One can hardly ascribe a single adjective to the character of the Florentines without quickly qualifying that ascription with its antonym: they were pious, yet epicurean; brilliant, but puerile; lovers of dissension and of the harmonies of beauty in equal measure.
Everywhere we search through the records of Western civilization, we can discover such antinomies of personality, in the individual and the collective, that with us would never be conceived as anything other than mere dichotomies. The ideal of manhood, for instance, that prevailed for centuries in the West encompassed attributes of body and the mind that we would now tend to regard as incompatible. Raleigh embroiled himself in repeated battles and voyages, braving the untrammeled rain forests of South America on two occasions, and on his returns to England dashed off a handful of poems that remain among the most impressive lyrics of the Elizabethan era. His contemporary Ben Jonson killed a man in single combat on the battlefield, and also established the standard of the English comedy through his dramatic works. Such men were more cerebral than our typical nerds, more virile and physically daring than our typical jocks. We tend to make a distinction between the artist and the man of the world – the former profound but abstracted, the latter vigorous but thoughtless – but Rubens could paint masterpiece after masterpiece in the midst of his diplomatic duties, and Gluck could revolutionize the opera while serving as a key confidante to a queen, and Goethe could serve in a variety of administrative capacities in the city of Weimar while penning works still unrivaled in the German language. With us, there is a time for intellectual pursuits and a time for conviviality, but the members of The Club – luminaries like Edmund Burke and Edward Gibbon and David Garrick and Dr. Johnson himself - joined on a biweekly basis to participate in some of the most substantive conversations ever recorded, all while polishing off hogsheads of claret faster than their patrons could provide them.
However we frame the comparison to the past, the tenor of life in the modern world, in both its private and public facets, inevitably comes off as something constricted, listless, drab, trite, and insubstantial. We root for our local sports team; the Siennese bathed the floors of their local chapels praying for their contrada’s triumph in the Palio, and paraded with music and costume alongside their horse on its way to the Campo. We gather on holidays to share gifts and a meal; the citizens of York and Coventry and Wakefield gathered to behold dramatic depictions of cosmic history that lasted for days on end, upon the production of which various segments of society competed to lavish the greatest talent and expenditure. We build dull office parks and strip malls; generations in Amiens and Chartres and Canterbury and Cologne labored to erect soaring edifices that were intended to symbolize the entire universe, and which enacted such dazzling interplays of light and stone that people still travel from every corner of the earth to marvel at them. We mark the passing of a loved one with a wake; Greville and Jonson and Henry King did not think their friends were properly mourned until their elegies had been written. We elect politicians to office; the Venetians wedded their doge to the sea and the French shook the vaults of Reims Cathedral with imprecations that their king “with the strength of a rhinoceros, may scatter enemy nations to the ends of the earth.” We give to charity; St. Catherine toiled daily in the hospitals and prisons of Siena, and St. Elizabeth of Hungary used to regularly steal from the castle with loaves of bread stuffed under her royal robes to distribute to the poor. We attend church; saints like Benedict and Hildegard von Bingen tossed away all their worldly goods to seek out some wilderness recess where they could hear the voice of God in all its pristine beauty.
To inquire into the causes of this narrowing of modern life would necessitate a study extending from volume to volume. But the short of it all would be that our ancestors had a culture, and we do not. They cherished repositories of wisdom and heroic conduct on which their characters were formed in youth, and nourished in adulthood. They were surrounded by examples of beauty which served as an ever-present reminder that the destiny of a human life was nothing meaningless or trifling. They felt themselves enmeshed in an assortment of legends, both local and cosmic in their scale, which invested the most quotidian of tasks with an eternal significance. They expressed themselves in a variety of forms that were not intended for distraction or utility, but for edification. The breadth and vivacity of spirit so evident in the people and peoples of the past was no accident, but resulted from their assiduous efforts to take “the best that had been thought and said in the world” as the standard of their own character. They were souls for whom, as Burkhardt describes them, the cultivation of the soul was the thing of primary importance, who sought out whatever resources they could find – unearthing ancient ruins, recovering musty codices, corresponding with men of far-flung nations – to aid them in this most precious of labors.
But it was not just any culture which fed earlier generations in the Western world, but the one that took specific impetus from the spirit of the Greeks, and their singular discovery of the forms adequate to express an awe at all the forms into which human life throws itself – epic, tragic, pastoral. And it was the culture that was molded over many centuries by the influence of the Gospel, with its straightforwardly impossible injunction to “be perfect,” and with its proclamation that, for all time, every manner of man and woman, of whatever walk of life or stripe of sinfulness, was to be regarded as a manifestation of the divine image. Except against the background of a faith rooted in the belief that God made all things good, and then redeemed them Himself from the invasive power of evil, we cannot imagine how the full-throated, whole-hearted, raucous, riotous, exuberant via positiva that is Western culture could have ever assumed its distinctive contours. The whole of our civilizational heritage seems to attest to Christ’s promise, that He came for us “to have life, and have it more abundantly.”
The reappropriation of Western civilization for our own times, which is presently in its earliest stages and which has as its earliest fruit the advent of the classical schooling movement, must aspire to recover that same scope of human life that exhilarated our ancestors. The endeavor should bear some broad resemblance to a remodeling project, smashing down the gloomy, suffocating walls of modern life and opening up light-filled vistas stretching seemingly forever through bright corridors and salons. Or, to alter the metaphor, like the artistry of some whimsical tailor, who takes from us our stuffy business suit and gives us in exchange long silken robes, decorated all over with bright colors and brocade. It should be a constant invitation to young souls to leave behind the stupid and degrading confines of popular “culture,” in order to enter like royalty into the sprawling palace of their cultural heritage. Like the clarion summons of a trumpet, the classical revival should ring throughout our age proclaiming that the breadth of personality and experience inscribed across our cultural history need not be a thing of the past, but only waits upon our efforts to be realized in our own times, since “men can do all things if they will.”