There are two ways of understanding the present: as the past of the future and as the future of the past. And let the reader not think that this introduction is a mere play on words. It is an indisputable fact – almost a platitude – that previous centuries have prepared us and that, according to the same rule, the children we have produced are the future in our hands.
This is why history has always been considered a mirror: looking at it, we find ourselves and already glimpse the future. So let us turn our attention back down the winding road of the millennia in order to unravel the path by which we arrived at our current situation, and more importantly, to discern whether we should continue along it…
Old novelties
The Renaissance. One of the last great turns in history that changed the course of humanity. Not abruptly, of course, but slowly, inexorably and… completely. “It is enough to pronounce the syllables of this word for multiple, contrasting images to come to mind, but all equally endowed with a singular brilliance.”1
After the transition from the pagan to the Christian world, the most radical period of change in history was that in which the Middle Ages were transformed into Modernity. And among the most powerful factors in this mutation was undoubtedly the Renaissance.
This historical period, which could broadly be placed between the beginning of the 14th and the middle of the 16th century in the Christian West, is considered the cradle and nursery of countless inventions and discoveries. However, it would be an exaggeration to attribute to this alone the moral, psychological and, above all, religious changes that marked it.
In fact, it is not its novelties that best portray it, but the silent revolt against its time and the declared return to the standards of dead eras. As its name suggests, this period was not one of birth, but of rebirth. And its main exponents presented their inventions as rediscoveries, “as a return to the traditions of Antiquity, after the long parenthesis of what they were the first to call the ‘Middle’ Ages.”2
The goddess Athena – Vatican Museums; in the background, ruins of the Erechtheion Temple in Athens
Digging up the dead
The evil of this transformation was not in the progress it would bring, whether in art, philosophy or science. Of course not. The problem was not what it introduced, but the spirit in which it did so, as we will see further on.
So, while this change in mentality reintroduced Rome and Greece into European civilization, it at the same time expelled Christianity, which was then at its height. In a lecture given in the 1960s, Dr. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira3 made an accurate analysis in this respect, the main ideas of which we transcribe below.
Like a disease, with symptoms apparently less serious than those of the three Revolutions that formed its retinue,4 it opened an initial and deep fissure in the medieval world, through which penetrated the germs of destruction that worked all the rest, from Protestantism to Communism, arriving at the worldwide chaos of the 21st century. In the elegance of the resurrected Ionic columns, in the cheerful counterpoint that began to flood European scores, in the perfection of the human representations on canvases, walls and marble, all the moral horror that followed was in seed.
It would be difficult to introduce this kind of horror into the medieval soul, always hungry for the marvellous. The Renaissance therefore presented itself in a tantalizing guise to men thirsty for beauty: it would be a wide-ranging revolution in the name of art. And not just any art, but that which had been buried under the ruins of imperial Rome, the only culture – according to the Renaissance – capable of satisfying the yearnings of the human soul. The other cultures that grew at the foot of this leafy tree were nothing more than “dialects”, mere underdeveloped bushes. The time had come to resurrect this dead and “immortal” culture.
This was an unnatural process: digging up a corpse instead of producing that set of conceptions, knowledge and tastes that make up the culture and mentality of a civilization. Culture is born out of the convictions and conditions in which a particular people live, and therefore of historical circumstances. Reassuming a foreign culture – to the point of holding it as the only valid one – is absurd. And the Renaissance was built on this absurdity.
And the sepulchre became a cradle
To erect a building on such a weak foundation would have been impossible if it had not been on very favourable ground. And Italy was then a well-prepared field.
In fact, while the whole of the West was still in the throes of the slow agony of medieval civilization, a visceral and irreversible transformation was already taking place in an effervescently artistic Florence, an enriched and mercantile Venice and a Rome that had just been vacated by the Pope – transferred to Avignon and taken up by the concerns of the subsequent schism.5
Little by little, a new state of mind was emerging on the Italian peninsula: thought was tending towards dissipation, towards investigation of the merely natural, towards an uprising against dogma and faith; the will, irritated by the moral constraints imposed on it, was undermining the basic disciplines; the very meaning of life seemed about to be openly questioned.
Three symbolic men
The main figures of Humanism, who flourished in that springtime of geniuses patiently generated by the Catholic medieval universities, embodied the old, but reworked mentality.
Francis Petrarch, considered the father of this historical period, despite having taken holy orders, cultivated a jungle of pride and vanity alongside his Virgilian verses. He judged the sciences of his time and challenged them all: Philosophy, Theology, Medicine and Law… For him, universities were “nests of pedantic ignorance.” After all, the redeemer of human knowledge had not yet arrived, the “new Socrates”, as he considered himself. Such self-esteem did not spare him, however, from envying Dante’s glory, which would overshadow his splendour among posterity. In fact, as Petrarch confessed, “the longing for immortality of name was such a serious illness that he could not rid himself of it.”6
For Michelangelo, “the body of man is the only means of decoration as well as representation,” and he wanted, in the illustration of the vaults, “the constant display of the human body as the epitome of energy, vitality and life.”7 His works express the lamentable horizons of those intemperate and libertine spirits who became “the true precursors of the greedy, sensual, laicist and pragmatic man of our day.”8 It is no coincidence that the Pietà, despite its masterly strokes, inspires so little piety, and that the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel makes chaste souls lower their eyes, instead of raising them to Heaven.
Another great icon: Leonardo Da Vinci. In 1476 – when he was twenty-four – he was arrested in Florence for his debauchery. Modesty and the respect we have for our readers compel us to omit details.9 With him, art would no longer be at the service of the invisible, but became anthropocentric and naturalistic. Human proportion, outlined in his “Vitruvian man”, would become the measure of beauty and of the new civilization: man, not God.
anthropocentric
Francis Petrarch – Municipal Gallery of Lecco (Italy); Leonardo da Vinci – Museo delle Antiche Genti, Lucania (Italy); Michelangelo – Galerie Hans, Hamburg (Germany)
The engines of the revolution
The first characteristic of the Renaissance, as Dr. Plinio10 rightly observes, is a kind of saturation with medieval life.The ideal of the Middle Ages was a balanced existence that was ordered and directed towards its ultimate ends – in a word, holy. And its decline saw the upsurge of an insatiable thirst for pleasure: “The appetite for earthly pleasures is transformed into a burning desire.”11 What is wrong with this trend? Above all, that man, fascinated by it, forgets his purpose, his duties, the idea of God, of Heaven, and of hell. And that is what happened.
With the twilight of medieval austerity, the ideals of paganism, which would propel the entire revolutionary process that was being born, could emerge in the dark, without showing their hideousness: pride and sensuality. The latter, it seems to us, was well sketched out when we described some of the Renaissance’s leading figures above. As for pride, it was the king of the party: “A characteristic note of those humanists was their extraordinary vanity and ambition for glory, which made them imagine themselves superior to the human race.”12
A conflict in the conscience
What happened then? The struggle of light against darkness, of twilight against night in the firmament of souls. The Rome of Christ and the Rome of Jupiter were fighting a deadly duel in the conscience of men. Caesar was fighting God for the empire of hearts. The outcome was different in each arena, in the battle waged within each individual. But in the general context of the war, we can distinguish three results.
Firstly: the total, albeit gradual, triumph of paganism over Christian tradition in those for whom classical culture acted as a corrosive; mere contact caused tremendous damage. The first great atheists and their dilutions arose: materialists and agnostics.
Secondly: the victory – so often partial – of the Church over the Pantheon. They were men who reacted against this pagan ideal, many of them insufficiently, perhaps even unconsciously. All the saints fought in this army. Also, a Philip II of Spain, a Don Sebastian in Portugal and a Scanderbeg in Albania were medieval souls at the height of the Renaissance.
Between these two small antagonistic currents – just like a long sentence between two thin brackets – we find the greater part of the battlefields. Mysteriously, perhaps due to a lack of depth, coherence or sincerity towards themselves, an armistice took place between them. Neither side was defeated, and one was victorious. Yes: the invader is victorious when he is not expelled. These men – for they are the field of conflict – absorbed both influences, remaining more or less Christian and more or less neo-pagan. Half earth, half water: mud.
From left to right, Notre-Dame Cathedral, Paris; Beau-Dieu statue of the same cathedral; the crowning of Louis VIII and Blanche of Castile, “Grandes Chroniques de France” – National Library of France, Paris. In the background, the interior of Sainte-Chapelle, Paris
Art seems to have materialized this third group of souls: Michelangelo’s Moses more closely resembles a Capitoline Jupiter, basilicas have become Greco-Roman temples where Mass is celebrated, some Kyries chanted in them are reminiscent of the melodies of ancient bacchanals.
Yesterday and today, the same problems
And we, watching these duels of a time that is not ours, will we remain like the spectators at the Colosseum, just smiling at the exchange of blows? Our position – I am sorry to inform you, dear reader, if this bothers you – in the face of this war is not that of observers, but of combatants. Our part is not the applause, the jeers or the bleachers. It is the weapons, the arena.
Yes, because this battle between the cathedral and the Hellenic temple has stretched on for centuries. And what used to happen, happens again in new clothes. Permit me to explain, based on explanations made by Dr. Plinio.13
The modern world has been thoroughly affected by viscerally anti-Catholic leavens. By “modern world” we do not mean – and we hope the reader does not understand it this way either – the set of material developments introduced over the last few decades and the astonishing collection of knowledge gained in all areas. Rather, we are referring to a certain spirit, a certain neo-pagan mentality that is willing to accept everything that is opposed to religion, simply for the sake of earthly pleasure, forgetting that life does not end here on earth and that we will be judged by God according to our adherence, hatred or indifference towards Him.
In the face of this fundamentally anti-Christian – not to say diabolical – influence, the same three scenarios play out. There are Catholics who pay such a tribute of admiration to everything sinful the world offers that they pay the supreme tax of selling their own souls. On the opposite side, we find the faithful who, in their reaction to current impiety, become crusaders in order to remain Catholic. Then there are the always numerous intermediate attitudes, those who try to reconcile the irreconcilable, the spirit of the Church with that of Satan.
How sad is the latter’s situation! Having two masters, they live between two fears. On the one hand, they retain a certain fear of abandoning religion; they pray when they remember, they hold Holy Mass on Sundays as sacred… as long as it not overly inconvenient. Deep down, they want to be better. They even feel the inclination to follow the example of the saints, their total surrender and their love. But the world… Here is another great fear: human respect for being different, for being a light in the darkness, for being the only one living in a field of the dead. And so they give in to the modern spirit; they sympathize, they allow themselves to be imbued, they allow themselves to be… killed.
However, a Catholic is only truly Catholic when he or she belongs to the Church without any admixture or heterogeneity of anything foreign to her. A Catholic can only be entirely Catholic. A half-Catholic would be like a half-virgin, like a healthy glass of water with just a few drops of poison. A divided Catholic, who obeys two masters, fears both and loves neither. He fears Jesus Christ, his Judge; he does not love Jesus Christ, his Redeemer.
From left to right: “The Forerunner”, by Eleanor Fortescue – Lady Lever Art Gallery, Merseyside (England); Moses, by Michelangelo – Basilica of St. Peter in Chains, Rome; Tempietto de Bramante, Rome. In the background, Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence (Italy)
The dilemma
Who would have thought that the Renaissance could teach us so much! … The past has its novelties. For many, even its shocks.
Humanism looked like a simple advance in culture. Its scope, however, surpassed the realm of art, politics, thought and the centuries, touching the deepest part of our souls right up to the present day. The dilemma posed by the resurrection of Classical Antiquity still stands: neo-paganism or the Catholic Church?
The fact is, however, that the answer given often represents a third way, utopian and worse: paganism and the Catholic Church. What a tragedy!
In fact, the Renaissance is not as dead as is often claimed… ◊
Notes
1 DANIEL-ROPS, Henri. História da Igreja de Cristo. A Igreja da Renascença e da Reforma (I). São Paulo: Quadrante, 1996, v.IV, p.171.
2 BURKE, Peter. El Renacimiento europeo. Centros y periferias. Barcelona: Crítica, 2000, p.12.
3 CORRÊA DE OLIVEIRA, Plinio. Conference. São Paulo, 15/9/1966.
4 The Protestant pseudo-reformation, the French Revolution and communism. For a deeper understanding of these revolutions and the historical process that unites them, see: CORRÊA DE OLIVEIRA, Plinio. Revolução e Contra-Revolução. 9.ed. São Paulo: Arautos do Evangelho, 2024, p.35-43.
5 Cf. WEISS, Juan Bautista. Historia Universal. Barcelona: La Educación, 1929, v.VIII, p.128.
6 Idem, p.134.
7 DURANT, Will. História da civilização. A Renascença. 2.ed. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1953, v.V, p.384
8 CORRÊA DE OLIVEIRA, Revolução e Contra-Revolução, op. cit., p.38.
9 Cf. DURANT, op. cit., p.163.
10 CORRÊA DE OLIVEIRA, Conference, op. cit.
11 CORRÊA DE OLIVEIRA, Revolução e Contra-Revolução, op. cit., p.36.
12 WEISS, op. cit., p.129.
13 CORRÊA DE OLIVEIRA, Conference, op. cit.
