Catalysts for Change: The Why and How of the Renaissance and Reformation

When has any such thing been even heard or seen; in what annals has it ever been read that houses were left vacant, cities deserted, the country neglected, the fields too small for the dead and a fearful and universal solitude over the whole earth?... Oh happy people of the future, who have not known these miseries and perchance will class our testimony with the fables. We have, indeed, deserved these [punishments] and even greater; but our forefathers also have deserved them, and may our posterity not also merit the same...

So wrote Petrarch concerning the Plague to his brother, the lone survivor of his whole village. It wasn't until this class that I really began to understand what a magnificently incredible (and terrible) thing the plague was. To put it into perspective, imagine if by the year 2020, one-third to one-half of all America was wiped out. Imagine what that would do to our society—economically, financially, politically, religiously, and every other possible category you could think of. It would completely change the way we live, and think, and associate with each other. It may cause us to climb a mountain or two and rethink society; maybe even look back to former times as we work forward towards better ones. In Italy, a place hit particularly hard by the Black Death, a movement began. As Joseph from my salon group stated, it was in Italy where the ideas of humanism, and ad fonts (returning to the ancient Greek and Roman sources and thinking), and exploration really took root and sprouted.  The plague had sparked a reaction. But just like every good chemical reaction needs a spark to ignite the process, it also needs a catalyst to speed up and multiply the reaction—and that is what Gutenberg provided in movable type and the printing press.

There is a reason why the Middle Renaissance is labeled as beginning in the middle of the 15^th century. That is when Gutenberg began his work in mass producing ideas. Every age has its technological catalyst. The Information Age has the Internet. The Industrial Age had the steam engine. The Renaissance and Reformation Age had the printing press. Hellenism spread by the power of the sword. Calvinism and Lutheranism spread by the power of the pen metal movable type. This technology made a return to the source—the Bible—easy and accessible.

As ideas continue to become easier and easier to share, moral relativism also becomes more common. As Latter-day Saints we believe in absolute truth—God—and that as society moves further and further away from God—the source—so will society degrade.  What will it take for us to return to the source and change our course? Dwight Shrute once said, “We need a new plague.” This may be the case. It took the Plague to spark ad Fontes in the past. Maybe we need something so catastrophic, so fundamentally life altering to get us back on track: perhaps another plague, or perhaps a Second Coming.