Religion and the Rise of Modern Culture

The Form of Modernity

chapt er O N E The Form of Modernity Until recent years some cultural historians restricted the concept of modern culture to the Enlightenment. They assumed that the main significance of fifteenth-century humanism, of the Renaissance , and even of the first part of the classical seventeenth century consisted in preparing the mental attitudes of the Enlightenment. Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy may serve as a model of this approach. But principles such as the equation of the real with the objective, the emancipation from past political and religious traditions, or the autonomy of reason, characteristic of Enlightenment thought, by no means define the early modern epoch. Even today, the assumption of a straight continuity between the phases of modernity has not entirely vanished. To be sure, there is a modern culture, a mode of thinking, feeling, and creating that stretches from the fifteenth through the twentieth century. But it arrived in successive waves, each one bringing its own principles, which, though continuous with those of the previous one, do not follow from them with logical necessity. Modernity is an ongoing creative process that even today has not reached completion.  5 6 Religion and the Rise of Modern Culture By the end of the fourteenth century the cloud of dark resignation that hung over a civilization half destroyed by the plague and an intellectual life lost in a moribund theology began to lift. In those southern regions of Europe, which had never fully broken with ancient culture, the old sense of dignity was revived and the rediscovery of the past inspired a new confidence in the future. Nature suddenly assumed a more humane appearance: it once again was thought to re- flect human emotions, and appeared eminently worthy of human exploration . Classical and Medieval Precedents What, then, was the past out of which, and eventually in contrast to which, modernity developed? In the first place there was the classical culture, which had never ceased to influence the medieval one, and which suddenly in fifteenth-century Italy intensified that influence . Particularly, the concept of form acquired a new significance. For the Greeks, it had been both a physical quality and an intellectual principle. Proportion was a quality of nature as well as a primary attribute of the gods, who, by their formal perfection, surpassed the perishable, imperfect humans. In Plato’s thought, the notion of form implied the profound metaphysical principle that it belongs to the nature of the real to appear and to do so in an orderly, intelligible way. For a long time the Greeks had succeeded in preserving the unique identity of their culture, despite its dispersion over such remote islands as Sicily and such distant regions as Asia Minor and Southern Italy. It continued to do so for a while even after the Hellenistic empires extended it to the entire Middle East. At the end of that period Greek culture confronted its supreme challenge. It began when, in the Septuagint translation, Jews opened their sacred books to the Gentile oekumene. In Alexandria, now the intellectual capital of the Greek world, where this event had occurred, the Jewish philosopher Philo attempted to reconcile Jerusalem with Athens. But the Greek mind felt a strong aversion to the idea of a God who no longer formed a part of the cosmos but was its transcendent Creator. That early Christians, steeped in Jewish theology, fared no better in the The Form of Modernity 7 eyes of the Greeks appeared in the poor reception Paul’s speech received on the Areopagus (Acts 17:32–34). Christians did not give up the attempt to reconcile their faith with Hellenic wisdom. Religiously oriented Neoplatonic thought provided a fertile ground for dialogue. The Cappadocian Fathers adopted much of Plotinus’s philosophy, and soon most of the Christian East followed. For the last of the great classical thinkers, the divine still dwelled within the cosmos, yet at the same time transcended it. This truce between Christian and ancient culture was not to last. The tension between the two worldviews appeared when some of the eighth-century Macedonian emperors of Byzantium, who considered the iconic representations of Christ and the saints to conflict with the idea of a God hidden in impenetrable light, banned them from the churches. Most Christians resisted, appealing to the mystery of the Incarnation, which had forged an indissoluble...