By David Gosselin
“And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, yet pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
Modern Western civilization and modern science didn’t emerge the way most of us have been taught. It’s generally known that a pivotal shift in world civilization occurred with the advent of the European Golden Renaissance. However, how this mysterious transformation in Western civilization occurred remains an illusive story.
How did we arrive from the closed, static universe of the Middle Ages, with its imagined perfect circles and starry spheres above and a perpetual vale of tears below, all of which was meticulously segregated by a strict series of hierarchies, to a universe of infinite potential, creation and development?
The significance of the Renaissance is usually explained away with a few art history narratives about celebrations of the human form and its triumph over the static world of medieval abstractions. Misleading terms like “Humanism” are proffered as legitimate explanations, despite being invented centuries later and having never been used by the Renaissance founders. The period is otherwise treated as the herald of a new age of “free inquiry” during which the mind of man was no longer dominated by the arcane workings of a medieval priestly class and its theological strictures.
While it would be fair to characterize the Renaissance as an age in which a new revitalized image of man took root in the hearts and minds of Western civilization, the usual narratives conveniently obscure the deeper roots, ideas and players involved in bringing about the miracle that is modern Western civilization.
In our continuing “Renaissance, Not Reset” series, we’ll be uncovering the hidden history of the Renaissance, and the nature of those anti-Renaissance forces who would love nothing more than to keep this story secret.
As we’ll see, this very real tale holds the key to any new Renaissance in Western civilization today.
A New Middle Ages?
“Men of intuition perceive, all the signs and proofs show, that we have passed from an era of light to an era of darkness… Night is not less wonderful than day, it is equally the work of God; it is lit by the splendour of the stars and it reveals to us things that the day does not know. Night is closer than day to the mystery of all beginning.”
The End of Our Time – Nikolai Berdyaev
At the heart of the Renaissance was a re-conceptualization of man’s self-image. While Renaissance minds drew from the ancient classical world and relied on its models of eloquence, cultivation and artistic beauty to inform their own age’s tastes and judgements, this revived classical movement was now animated by a new conception: the Judeo-Christian notion that all men were uniquely created in the image of their Creator. As a divine reflection of the Creator—an imago viva dei (a living image of God)—man was endowed with a god-like capacity, a capax dei, which it was his divine duty to cultivate. Further, it was a society’s responsibility to encourage this development, such that all individuals might flourish to their utmost potential—and be availed of the means to do so.
However, the new image of man as a sovereign co-creator was not a welcomed change by all. In fact, it has been under assault ever since its emergence on the world stage.
For instance, the Russian orthodox philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev is celebrated as one of the early twentieth-century luminaries whose traditionalist critiques of the Renaissance and the modern world supposedly brought to light the fatal errors of the fifteenth-century revolution. For Berdyaev, the Renaissance ended the purer times of Medieval faith and craft, in which societies were rooted in their traditions and the collective belief in the mysterious workings of God. These beliefs held society together and gave it its spiritual vitality, we are told. With the advent of the Renaissance, breakthroughs in scientific thought and artistic composition would ultimately sever man from this collective mystery, leading to the radical individualism of modern times and the belief that man could act as an independent operator.
As a result of the Renaissance, man found himself fallen into a secular void populated by machines, mechanical relationships and soulless rationality. Berdyaev writes:
“The Renaissance had the seeds of death within itself, in its foundations lay the destructive contradiction of Humanism, which on the one hand exalted man and attributed to him unlimited powers, and on the other saw nothing in him but a limited dependent creature, knowing nothing of spiritual freedom. In order to make man greater, Humanism took away his likeness to the divine and subjected him to natural necessity. The Renaissance, based on Humanism, uncovered the creative powers of man as a natural being, not as a spiritual one; but the natural man alone cannot draw from inexhaustible springs for his creativeness: he drains himself dry, and only the arid surface of life is left.”
The Renaissance, Berdyaev and other anti-modern critics argue, instilled in man a false belief in his own independent creative powers, which led to a hubristic sense of self-reliance outside of God’s spiritual plan. With its magnificent artistic achievements and scientific endeavors, Berdyaev and other anti-modern critics argue the Renaissance created the illusion that man’s intellect could itself serve as the mysterious source of creation, beauty, art and truth—rather than God.
Today, a new growing alignment of anti-Renaissance influencers have emerged, all of whom capture the spirit of Berdyaev’s critiques in their own politically or spiritually expedient and subversive ways. For instance, mega tv hosts like Tucker Carlson and alt-right influencers publicly celebrate the anti-industrial manifesto of eco-terrorists like Ted Kaczynski; so-called “orthodox” philosophers like Alexander Duggin expound geopolitical philosophies which advocate for the end of nation states and the re-establishment of ancient empires to usher in a “New Middle Ages”. Meanwhile, the “Red-Pill Prince” and “neo-Monarchist” alt-right guru, Curtis Yarvin, has been preaching about a coming “dark enlightenment” overseen by a new Medieval Technate and its CEO-Monarch.
Positioning itself as a supposed orthodox, traditionalist, medievalist collective with a strange proclivity for esoteric ideas, all those involved are united by their longing for a romanticized Medievalist mystique, and a rejection of the malaise of modern disenchantment which arose in its absence. The notions of the consent of the governed, industrialism, the agricultural revolution, and modern scientific progress were supposed to free man and grant him a greater dignity, but instead they became the very forces of his enslavement, leaving modern man rootless, haunted, and wandering without a soul.
All this, Berdyaev tells us, was the result of the Renaissance and the belief in the natural powers of human reason which came to light during the Renaissance. The sins of the “natural man,” so we are told, gave us “individualism, Humanism, Liberalism and democratic theories,” and ultimately “a monstrous economic system compounded of Industrialism and Capitalism, of vast technical apparatus…” And all of it, Berdyaev the orthodox traditionalist tells us, can be traced back to the sins of Renaissance man:
“The ancient world elaborated man’s form and called forth his creative energy, but human personality was still under the dominion of unregenerate nature, the spiritual man was not yet born. Man’s second and spiritual birth was due to Christianity. Humanism itself got its humanness from Christ: antiquity alone was not able to give it. But the development of Humanism separated mankind from God and at the same time itself turned against man to destroy his image, for he is made in the image and likeness of God. When man became content with the image and likeness of nature, to be the natural man only, he returned to the influence of lower powers; he was too weak to resist, and is torn anew by spirits of wickedness. The spiritual centre of human personality is again lost. Humanism’s turning against man is the tragedy of modern times. It is the cause of the defeat and unavoidable ruin of the Renaissance.”
This view leads Berdyaev to conclude that Renaissance giants like Leonardo Da Vinci ultimately became the leading cause for the mechanization and materialization of modern human life:
“Leonardo, who is considered by some to be the greatest painter of all, is responsible for the mechanization and materialization of our life, for its deadness and for the loss we have suffered of its highest meaning. He did not know himself what he was working towards. There was within the Renaissance all that was needed for its own annihilation. It freed the creative forces of man and gave his powers their highest expression in art, and in that it operated within the realm of truth. But it also separated him from the spiritual fountains of life; it denied the spiritual man, who cannot but be a creator, and affirmed in his place the natural man alone, the slave of necessity. The triumph of the natural man over the spiritual man in modern history has lead to sterility, to the destruction of Humanism by its own self: the end of the Renaissance.”
For Berdyaev, an ostensibly orthodox traditionalist thinker, in exchange for man’s newly discovered identity as an individual maker capable of uncovering the natural laws of the universe, he would lose sight of those eternal mysteries and unchanging realities which lay at the heart of the purer, faith-based spiritual reality of the Middle Ages.
But now this is all coming to an end, predicts Berdyaev in his 1924 book. We are now ready to pass through “a new civilized barbarism,” which will sweep away the ruins of so-called secular Humanism and restore man’s faith in a Medievalist Creator. In a word: man will rediscover the freedoms of a darkly enchanted “New Middle Ages.”
Berdyaev’s foreboding works echo many of the loosely defined “Traditionalist” arguments and schools of our age, most of which ultimately favor a new post-industrial Medievalism in which Western man finally puts the Promethean genie back in the bottle and casts off the artificial strictures of modern science and technological progress, finally embracing the essential night and darkness of “traditional” faith.
Notably, today’s aptly named “Woke Right” traditionalism strangely aligns with Berdyaev’s views. It also parallels the Malthusian post-industrial “green” agenda of the so-called “Woke Left”, whose adherents long for a return to “Mother Nature” and the supposed “balance” everyone enjoyed before man was seduced by the demons of industrialism, technology, Reason and modern scientific progress.
Wittingly or unwittingly, both sides unequivocally adhere to anti-modern and post-industrial dogmas which, we are told, will bring humanity back into balance with God, Mother Nature, and the “traditional” hierarchical order of the Middle Ages. One side believes these policies will get us there by saving humanity and “Mother Earth” from the soon to be ushered in biblical floods and fires caused by modern civilization’s technological progress and industrial economic development; the other believes the same essential policies are necessary to revive man’s “traditional” spiritual relationship with God and the mysterious beauty of nature.
But what if we told you most of the modern warfare, psychological repatterning and geopolitics of the modern world could most easily be understood as the effort to reverse the achievements of the Renaissance? And what if modern man, exhausted by years of psychological and economic warfare geared towards destroying his modern freedom, living standards and sense of sacredness is being sold a false choice: one with “Traditional” Christian characteristicsand another with secular, “green” New Age beliefs—both of which lead him in the same darkly enchanted direction?
Keeping in mind that Berdyaev the traditionalist was himself a member of high Russian nobility, and probably knew nothing of the “traditional” life lived by most members of the Russian Empire, what if we told you that hidden beneath the flurry of modern spiritual appeals, both traditional and secular currents share a common goal? The industrial, scientific and technological “Age of Abundance” made possible by the Renaissance is regarded as an artificial creation of the sin-plagued natural man—a historical and spiritual aberration—which only the mystical night of a “traditional” Medievalist order can heal.
From Darkness into Light: The Secrets Renaissance
The psychological shift in man’s self-image which emerged with the Renaissance forever changed the course of Western civilization. Ostensibly, the shift was based on a concept which wasn’t itself at all new i.e. the Judeo-Christian notion that every human individual was made in the unique image of God. However, like most great and revolutionary ideas, this Judeo-Christian concept was born many centuries before it could see its fruit fully ripen. What was revolutionary was how this psychological shift was conceptualized and internalized during the Renaissance.
In his De Concordancia Catholica (1434), Nicholas of Cusa, the Renaissance genius, Catholic cardinal, philosopher, and mathematician made a revolutionary argument regarding the sacredness of the human individual in respect to self-governance and Natural Law.
Cusa wrote:
“All legislation is based on natural law, and any law which contradicts it cannot be valid. Hence, since natural law is naturally based on reason, all law is rooted by nature in the reason of man. All legitimate authority arises from elective concordance and free submission. There is in the people a divine seed by virtue of their common equal birth and the equal natural rights of all men so that all authority which comes from God, as does man himself, is recognized as divine when it arises from the common consent of the subjects. It is the common opinion of all experts on the subject that the roman people can take power to make laws away from the emperor because he derives his power from the people. When they order something contrary to a divine commandment, it is evident that the commandment does not share in the divine rulership, and no one should obey it. No one is obliged to observe an unjust law, and no living person is exempt from a just one.”
Cusa was rejecting the arbitrary system of hereditary control and those gnostic notions of an Aristotelian “Elect” born to rule over the natural serfs of the world. He made these arguments at a time when Europe was being ravished by perpetual religious wars and regional strife among the various feuding hereditary oligarchies of Europe. The concept of nation states and consent of the governed did not yet exist; Europe wallowed as a collection of fiefdoms dominated by an imperial ideology which subordinated all notions of Reason to arcane systems of rule by Europe’s hereditary “blue bloods”.
Against this backdrop, Cusa spoke of a “divine seed by virtue of their common equal birth and the equal natural rights of all men,” given all men had by their very nature a capacity for Reason, which was the precondition for Natural Law to flourish on Earth. Cusa’s revolutionary arguments would not coincidentally be echoed in the American Declaration of Independence centuries later when the Founding Fathers wrote:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
Today, the link between the Renaissance and the American Revolution is almost always skirted, given it provides a crucial historical link between the past, present and future of all republics.
In this light, perhaps nothing makes clearer the spiritual rut and cosmic implications of the pre-Renaissance world which Cusa rejected than comparing the before and after images of man. In an obscure book about the Renaissance titled Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Ioan Petru Culianu accurately describes the Aristotelian worldview that dominated the cosmology of pre-Renaissance man and his resultant self-image:
“In Aristotelian cosmology, the essential idea is not simply that the earth is located at the center of the universe but that it occupies the lowest point of the universe: that is, so to speak, the negative pole of the whole cosmos and that in this attribute it is characterized not by a superfluity of being but almost by a want of being; it amounts to less than what there is above it.”
Man was cast down at the bottom of celestial hierarchy and separated from the world of heavenly spheres by an infinite and unbridgeable logical gulf. But with a revitalized Christian-Platonist epistemology, Nicholas of Cusa directly contradicted this reigning Aristotelian image of the cosmos and its pessimistic image of man popular in the Middle Ages.
Culianu writes:
“Cusanus rejects the Aristotelian theory of the elements. For him, there is no differentiation in the cosmos, neither ontological nor spatial, between “high” and “low,” “above” and “below.” There is no incorruptible world of ether and pure fire beyond the lunar sphere, nor is there a corruptible one formed of the four elements this side of the moon. The world is spherical and turns on its axis. Aristotle’s concept, according to which “this earth is very vile and low,” terra ista sit vilissima et infima, is untrue.”
“Above” was qualitatively superior and different from “below” for the Aristotelian, but not for Cusa. This notion flew directly in the face of the Medieval Scholastics’ Aristotle cult-worship which dominated Christian Europe at that time. Aristotelians ascribed to the upper-most portion of the celestial hierarchy a static system of perfect circles and starry spheres. However, this world existed nowhere other than in the perfect logic of their arbitrary syllogisms i.e. “the most perfect shape is the circle, therefore the heavens, which are the most divine and perfect, must necessarily move in circles”. On the other hand, the other pole of the celestial hierarchy was characterized by eternally corruptible matter and endless sin. The consequences of the Scholastics’ logic were then imposed on all facets of human life, essentially making the coincidence of man and God, the earthly and the divine, heaven and earth a logical absurdity.
The implications were far-ranging. If man, the microcosm, and God, the macrocosm, were in no way linked by some intelligible strand through which disparate worlds could be bridged in some coherent manner, how could man discern those principles governing the universe as conceived by the mind of God? If above and below never coincide, neither could man and God, the finite and the infinite, the material and immaterial. The best man could do was rely on a blind faith in the divinely sanctioned authority of an Elect priestly caste. For as long as the coherence between these two worlds couldn’t be made intelligible in some form, man would ultimately have to rely on the arbitrary rule of this Elect, making faith based on Reason or understanding of man as a living image of God an epistemological impossibility.
However, Cusa recognized that as a microcosm the human individual was uniquely gifted with the ability to reflect and understand the ordering of the macrocosm in an increasingly less imperfect manner. Humankind’s ability to make fundamental leaps in scientific knowledge and artistic composition demonstrated that human creative thought and the natural laws governing the universe were congruent, such that man the microcosm was “the living description of eternal and infinite wisdom… Through the activity of our intellective life we are able to find within ourselves the object of our search.” (Nicholas of Cusa, The Laymen on Wisdom and Mind, III; On Mind). The development of man was thus a reflection of the development of the universe. Man was designed to actively participate and add to the beauty of the “kosmos,” rather than merely contemplate its “perfection” as an intellectual exercise.
But how could man contribute to the beauty of the kosmos if the universe was already perfect in the Scholastic/Aristotelian sense? How could man, a puny and sinful creature, improve the work of creation, which was already made perfect and unchanging by its infallible Creator?
As Culianu notes, Cusa’s mystical theology was aimed at elevating the lowly position allotted to man by the Aristotelian sect dominating the spiritual and intellectual life within the Medieval Church.
But if that wasn’t enough, by demonstrating the flawed logic of the Scholastics and Aristotelians using Reason and the powers of his intellect, Cusa would go on to make a series of revolutionary observations about the nature of the physical universe. Firstly, he suggested that the Earth was not at the center of the universe, given a center in the physical universe would always assume some other outside point of reference, leading to a logical absurdity. Instead, Cusa argued the universe had no center, or rather, the center was everywhere. The universe could thus be characterized as infinite and open, rather than closed and static. What was important wasn’t mapping out its beginning or end over time, so much as understanding the principles governing its development at any moment.
In this light, given heliocentric models of the heavens were known to exist going back to the ancient Pythagorean and Greek scientific traditions thousands of years earlier, the flawed and artificial Ptolemaic, Aristotelian and Medieval models imposed on Europe for centuries arguably served a very practical purpose for the Elect priesthood enforcing their doctrines onto Christianity. For the role ascribed to most serfs under this “Elect” system presumed a fixedness in the universe which was then ultimately prescribed for civilization. This was the celebrated “traditional” argument for the virtues of a Medieval hierarchy and the supposed “stability” it offered, which has become so romanticized in our chaotic age of incessant psychological and spiritual warfare against modern Western civilization.
Nearly two centuries after Cusa’s revolution, the astronomer Johannes Kepler, a devout Christian and one of the founders of modern astrophysics would expand on the cosmic implications of Cusa’s ideas about the microcosm-macrocosm relationship. He would do this by developing a new planetary model based on mapping out advanced forms of circular action i.e., elliptical orbits, using a harmonic conception of the solar system. Kepler in part achieved this by keying off Cusa’s work on the qualitative distinction between straight and curved lines i.e. rectilinear vs. circular forms of action, which allowed him to discern the physical pathways traversed by the celestial bodies, rather than simply modeling their pathways using abstract geometrical shapes. In this same spirit, Kepler identified the corrupting influence of Aristotelian logic and Scholastic syllogisms on the Medieval European mind:
“Where he [Aristotle] draws a universal conclusion, and convicts Plato of the stupidity which is his own fantasy, and finally where to the Platonic picture of the ‘self-taught’ slave he opposes a contrary picture of his own, asserting that the mind in itself is empty not only of other knowledge and of mathematical categories, but also of species, and is just a blank sheet, so that nothing is written on it… but everything can be written on it; from this aspect, I say, he is not to be tolerated in the Christian religion.”
The Harmony of the World (1564)
Here we see Kepler, like Cusa, zeroing in on the many false conclusions defended by the Aristotelian intellectual elite, but also striking at the heart of the flawed epistemology which underpinned its institutions and made scientific progress and creative discoveries essentially impossible for more than a half a millennium. Kepler did so by identifying Aristotle’s open hatred for the classical Platonic notion of mind, which recognized that even a slave boy, like the one depicted in Plato’s Meno dialogue, was capable of making genuine discoveries—of being “self-taught”—and conceptualizing universals which transcend the limitations of senser perceptual knowledge.
By the standards of Aristotelian logic, a slave boy could not make discoveries because that would negate Aristotle’s theory of phantasms, in which knowledge was comprised of the accumulated sense-perceptual experience drawn on the blank slate which the mind was believed to be. Even more heretic, Plato’s demonstration violated the central principle governing the relationship between slaves and masters in Aristotle’s Politics, namely, that slaves were slaves and masters were masters, which reflected the iron-clad “hierarchy” of an already perfect universe.
On the other hand, Plato recognized the existence of a soul which allowed man to recollect, that is, to unearth universal truths and solution-concepts which could be brought to light at any time, if only man would consciously direct his attention to them using the Intellect. The role of sense experience was subordinated to the soul’s ability to recognize paradoxes in the sense-perceptual world and use the Intellect to resolve them.
In conclusion, with the Renaissance we saw the overthrow of the intellectual hegemony of Aristotelianism and a refutation of its cosmic system of static no-change on the highest epistemological level. This intellectual blow moved the Earth from the fixed center it had been chained to for over a thousand years; and it delivered a resounding defeat to the ruling intellectual elites dominating the intellectual life of Europe since the days of the Roman Empire. Up to this very moment, those ancient priesthoods and mystery cults operating under the banner of pseudo-Christian beliefs and covert Paganism have never fully recovered. All this can be traced back to the psychological shift in man’s self-image brought about by the Renaissance. It is a legacy which those historic anti-Renaissance and oligarchical forces have sought to keep secret ever since it first emerged on the world stage. The belief is that by doing so they can shore up any attempts to continue or build on this progress, lest any new Renaissance be unleashed in our own days or any future age.
******************************************************************************
Stay tuned for our next instalment where we’ll delve deeper into the epistemological subversion of the Renaissance. We’ll explore the proliferation of those anti-Renaissance and anti-Platonist operations being run under the guise of mystical “Neoplatonism” and a host of modern mystery cults still active to this very day.