Tuesday, February 3, 2015

A Collaboration of Genius

 “When investigating truth, there is no harm in adding to the diligence of one’s predecessors.” 
-Erasmus

The View From Mt. Ventoux
Men like Erasmus took what was from the past and brought it into a new world.  Each genius shared different ideas, some were scientific, others artistic, or perhaps religious, all were literary.  Though it seemed untrue in geniuses like Leonardo Da Vinci and Brunelleschi, it held that, "Onc ne furent a touts toutes graces donnees." ["All graces were never yet given to any one man."] - La Brebis.  As these men had not all graces in one, they had to take their knowledge and skill by following others.

“Stale water is a poor drink... Stale skill is worse. And the man who walks in his own footsteps only ends where he began.”
-Loyd Alexander



When Brunelleschi built the dome of Florence he walked in the footsteps of the ancient Romans, Luther in the footsteps of Erasmus, Erasmus in the footsteps of Aldus Manutius, and Aldus in the footsteps of Petrarch.  Petrarch, like Moses, walked up to the top of a mountain, and there he found his own burning bush, and so he lead heroes, valiant seekers of the new from the old into a promised land of free spreading of ideas. However, "Nemo altero fragilior est; nemo in crastinum sui certior." ["No man is more fragile than another: no man more certain than another of to-morrow."] Life was on the line for these thinkers.
They fought the conservative powers of their time and also nature itself. We noted on Monday that to explore new worlds, be they worlds of thought or actual lands across the sea, was dangerous.  Men and women mourned the death of Vasco da Gama before his ship even set sail to India, fearing that he and his men would be lost.

Luther and the reformers were among the bravest of these explorers.  They turned from the universal church and risked death so that the masses could take advantage of having God’s word.  These men fought for something larger than themselves, and they argued for their discoveries and beliefs using the words of the ancients.  We see that:

“(As) robbers prove sometimes gallant soldiers, so soldiers often prove brave robbers.” –Sir Thomas More

They were robbers of words and ideas, and, like Robin Hood, they shared the spoils with the masses.  When Luther and Erasmus drew upon their humanistic education to debate the merits of free will, when Machiavelli compiled his treatise on governing or when Montaigne explored the merits of the African cannibal, they drew on past sources and let those sources justify their views.  These views were then printed and spread far and wide.  Their true level of education was exposed as each wrote: “what he knows, and as much as he knows, but no more” -Montaigne

Loyd Alexander stated that the three foundations of learning are:
“See much, study much, suffer much.”

Who saw more than the explorers crossing the great seas?  Who studied more than Erasmus, Guttenberg, Castiglione, or Michelangelo?  And who suffered more than John Calvin, Martin Luther, and John Wycliffe?  The price of the renaissance was the price of knowledge in any time period.  Collaboration and competition of ideas, art and religion worked together to create genius.  Genius was the Renaissance.

2 comments:

  1. I like how you showed that they all built on top of what others before them had done. I think that's a cool way to show how they remembered the past but stayed focused on the future and learning new things.

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  2. I feel similarly, the word Renaissance means "to return" in a sense, and yet it was an extremely progressive period in Europe, especially when compared to the centuries preceding it. And reading, writing and speaking really seemed to contribute to that quite meaningfully.

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