Sociology, Religion and Grace: A Quest for the Renaissance (review)

Sociology, Religion and Grace is, the author informs us, a work of interpretive sociology in the tradition of Weber and Durkheim, but the result is quite unlike what we might expect. In his interpretive sociology, historical and cultural facts are individual building blocks. He does not create a context in which we might understand a language, a lived religion, or even a work of art; rather, he uses his definition of a Renaissance to create a critique of what has gone wrong with modernity. Like Jacob Burckhardt, Szakolczai is no friend of the modern world. When he concludes at the end of his book that "We need a Renaissance now" (327), he expects that it will replace the cold rationality of the Enlightenment and the heated exclusivity of the -isms that have followed. But since Burckhardt complained that it was the Renaissance itself that started the breakdown that led to modernity, we must begin by asking what Szakolczai means by a Renaissance. The difference seems to be that Burckhardt's Renaissance developed from a self-serving amorality while Szakolczai's requires a grace that seems to combine creative brilliance with a Hebrew or Pauline sense of charity and community. The three parts of the book move at a dizzying pace from the birth of Grace in antiquity, through high- and late-medieval Tuscany to the flowering of Renaissance Grace.

Szakolczai warns his readers early on that the letter kills: that is, one should not hold too firmly to Enlightenment rationality or postmodern criticism. Rather, he argues for a genealogical analysis designed to identify and reconstruct what he considers "the 'good European' tradition" (xvi). The good tradition is found by isolating the constant struggle between Grace (a divine but humanly fostered sense of gift-giving and community) and what he calls the Trickster mentality of rationality, power, and materiality. Historical phenomena are like DNA fragments that allow him to fill in a puzzle that exposes Grace and manipulation. And this genealogical approach does explain what otherwise seem odd choices of organization. The ancient section, for example, is meant to identify Greek and Hebrew sources of Grace and show how the Tricksters, the Sophists, sucked the life out of ancient creativity. The second section too is odd in the sense that it begins with material culture, the rise of Lucca, Pisa, and later Siena in Tuscany. The point seems to be that in the twelfth century these communes had numerous, mostly material, advantages over Florence. That they failed to maintain control, he seems to suggest, is that they lacked the sense of grace that the Florentines were to develop. One might predict that the last section, "The Flowering and Demise of Renaissance Grace," would culminate in Florence, yet it is Raphael who is the ideal. Michelangelo, Szakolczai concludes, created an "intellectual and moral terror." He was, in a word, a Trickster. It is Raphael who calmly and openly combined creativity with Grace. He represents what the Renaissance can offer to the modern world.

It is not possible for a historian to comment adequately on interpretive sociology, but there are some things one can note about the method. The first is simply that Szakolczai shares with art critics of a century ago a love of spiritual descriptions of artistic creativity. He would reject Panofsky's complaint that Renaissance as a term of qualitative value is impossible to use comparatively. In comparing Pisan, Sienese, and Florentine Marian art, he simply concludes that Siena and Pisa "did not hit the right tone" while the Florentines got it right. And terms like Grace and Trickster are inflexible, and do not arise out of the context of the times and places he discusses. Most social historians of Florence could amass thousands of Florentine Tricksters — one might simply open any canto of Dante's Inferno — but their ubiquity would blur Szakolczai's typologies. Finally, for a book that has religion in...