As we, the children of the West, look back across our history, we can only be dismayed by the violent clashes that occurred in the period we are now considering. There is a scholarly theory (as well as a popular variant of it) that monotheism itself is responsible for the violence, because the worship of one God—by Jews from ancient times, by Christians from the time of Constantine forward when they gained political power, and by Muslims almost from their inception—necessarily encourages intolerance of other beliefs.
For Jews, we have only to consult the Bible itself, especially references to the supposed conquest of Canaan: “When the lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hast cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou: And when the lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.” The Book of Deuteronomy goes on to connect all the smiting to the worship of this one God, who finds polytheism in any form both unforgivable and intolerable: “But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their [sacred] groves, and burn their graven images with fire.” Nor are these the Hebrew God’s most antihuman instructions, which elsewhere include the slaughter of even the children and the animals of the polytheists.
For Christians, words like “Crusade” and “Inquisition” should induce sufficient historical nightmares; and, if not, slightly longer phrases, such as “the burning of witches” and “the exile and extermination of Jews,” should do the trick. For Muslims, the word “jihad” currently needs no further explanation (even if, in its core meaning, it does not refer to violence).
But it is not as if polytheistic religions can be characterized simply as peace-loving, still less as pacifist. In truth, plenty of human blood has been spilled in the name of virtually every religion and sect on earth; and whether or not more has been spilled on a per capita basis by monotheists than by others is not a matter that can be easily resolved. The question of whether this recurring violence relates more to theological belief or to political gamesmanship or to the ancient human suspicion of the Other complicates analysis still further.
So, having at least given voice to these questions, I leave them to others to settle. I would prefer to tackle the movements and trends that I can trace with some clarity.
One undeniable trend that we see in the history we have surveyed thus far is the new sense of the self that begins to emerge after the catastrophe of the Black Death and that continues to bud—and then to flower in ever more riotous blossoms in the course of theRenaissance.
Christopher Columbus is an extraordinary avatar of the New Man, projecting a new vision of the globe and of himself on the Europe of his time. It is a vision that will have traceable (and sometimes improbable) consequences for centuries to come. And these consequences will be not only far-reaching but profound and permanent, far more profound and permanent than if Columbus had somehow set off major earthquakes or tsunamis or even induced continental shifts. The lives of the inhabitants of the newly discovered islands and continents will be forever changed by his discoveries, as will be the lives of Europeans and finally of all humanity. And as if this were not enough, it may be argued that Columbus himself becomes the first identifiable model of a new mode of conducting one’s life and of negotiating society. No longer traversing medieval byways, no longer dependent merely on the structures and rules of a highly stratified society, he invents himself and his project—something we, for better or worse, are all still doing.
It is not as if there had never before been innovators. All the major figures to appear in the earlier volumes of the Hinges of History—Patrick of Ireland, King David, the Hebrew chroniclers and prophets, Jesus, Paul, Socrates, Plato, Hildegard of Bingen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Francis of Assisi, Giotto, Dante—were innovators. But in Columbus we meet not only innovation but self-invention and self-promotion of an entirely new sort. For better or worse, the personality of Columbus is an essential part of his story. This is also true of the stories of Lorenzo, Savonarola, Leonardo, Botticelli, Julius II, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Bernini. In these figures, attraction (and repulsion), fascination, and enchantment operate as they have never operated before. Whatever else these characters may have been, in their day they would all have made obvious candidates for cover stories in People magazine. Such a journalistic vehicle, utterly dependent on the spell cast by an individual, would not have been able to get enough of them. Indeed, though it is impossible to imagine our contemporary world without such journalistic phenomena as People, it is equally impossible to imagine such vehicles in the ancient or medieval worlds.
Those earlier societies lacked the invention of printing, which has surely assisted the exaltation of personality. But it hardly originated it. Personality cults were known in the ancient world, certainly as political phenomena. Think of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. But in the early modern period, a veritable culture of personality arises in Europe and the New World. The earliest figures, such as Torquemada, Ferdinand, and Isabella, seem somewhat intermediate characters, not as fully separate from their historical backgrounds, standing somewhere between the milder, more predictable figures of the Middle Ages and the astonishing new pop-up figures of the early modern period, more and more of them popping up from 1492 forward and all cutting spectacular figures in their day.
Nor does this breathtaking ascendancy of personality wane as we approach the Reformation. Was there ever a figure in history more attached to his subjective identity—to his “I”—than Martin Luther? As we approach the many characters in this unfolding drama, we shall find each of the reformers distinct and extraordinarily subjective. Their undying disagreements with one another tend to be the tags by which they are now remembered. In their own time, however, it was the individual force of each of their overwhelming Selves—the personal impact that each one exerted on his followers—that served as engines for the entire period.
As if to offer a visual confirmation of the assertions above, there is here presented for your enjoyment and edification a portfolio of portraits: Plates 30–53. Though there had been portraits in the classical period—we have a pretty good idea, for instance, of what Socrates, Plato, Alexander, and the Caesars looked like—we have none to speak of from the long Middle Ages. Hildegard’s portrait, perhaps even drawn by her, is just the Typical Nun. Similarly, the few appearances of Queen Eleanor in paint are of the Typical Queen. There may be one genuine likeness of Francis of Assisi, a homely little fellow painted by Cimabue; all the other dozens of depictions of Francis are simply the Typical Heroic Male Saint of the period.
But in the Renaissance and later, as Self ascended, so did portraiture, becoming the early modern equivalent of gossip columns and webcam videos. Bizarrely enough, these portraits will be almost the last burst of colorful visual art in this book. The reformers did not look kindly on the plastic arts, and not a few of them rejected all such art as a form of idolatry. (See the quotations from Deuteronomy, above, for their biblical warrant.) Nor would art survive in the Catholic world with the same sublimity and awe, or be cherished as it had formerly been. (See the quotation from Walter Pater on this page about reformed Catholicism’s incomprehension of the elderly Michelangelo; or see almost any Catholic church decorated after the Reformation, perhaps especially the gold-laden but dead churches of the new Jesuit order.)1
The majority of reformers went even further: they wished to destroy what art there was. They smashed the stained-glass windows; they lopped the heads off the statues; they scraped the paintings off the walls; they heaped the exquisitely wrought illuminated manuscripts on the bonfires. And, portraiture apart, they created only a few images of lasting significance.
1 Spectacular exceptions to the dead churches of the Counter-Reformation would include not a few Spanish mission churches in the Americas and, closer to our own time, the French chapels created by Le Corbusier (at Ronchamp) and by Matisse (at Vence). The mission churches are made lively by the pre-Christian sensibility of native American folk religion, the French chapels by post-Christian modernism.