To me history is a part of philosophy. Philosophy is an attempt to achieve a wider perspective, a larger perspective of life and reality — a large perspective which will then determine your attitude toward any part of reality or life; for example, will it make your more understanding and forgiving? Now you can achieve a larger perspective in at least two ways; one through science, by studying the various sciences that color all the aspects of external reality, but you can also achieve a larger perspective by studying history; which is the study of events in time — rather than of things in space. I gave up the first kind, because I felt that it was too external and mathematical; it was unreal to the element of vitality that I found in myself and in other things. I said that I will study history to find out what man is — I can’t find that out through science. So that history is the attempt to achieve philosophical perspective by a study of events in time. Consequently, if you will allow me to say it, I believe I am a philosopher writing history.
Human history is a fragment of biology. Man is one of countless millions of species and, like all the rest, is subject to the struggle for existence and the completion of the fittest to survive. All psychology, philosophy, statesmanship, and utopias must make their peace with these biological laws. Man can be traced to about a million years before Christ. Agriculture can be traced no farther back than to 25,000BC. Man has lived forty times longer as a hunter than as a tiller of the soil in a settled life. In those 975,000 years his basic nature was formed and remains to challenge civilization every day.
Furthermore, in those thousands times a thousand years, man had to be pugnacious, always ready to fight — for his food, his mate, or his life.
If he could, he took more mates than one, for hunting and fighting were mortally dangerous and left a surplus of women over men; so the male is still polygamous by nature. He had little reason to contracept, for children became assets in the hut and later in the hunting pack. For these and other reasons acquisitiveness, pugnacity, and ready sexuality in the hunting stage — that is, they were qualities that made for survival.
They still form the basic character of the male. Even in civilization the chief function of the male is to go out and hunt for food for his family, or for something that might, in need, be exchanged for food. Brilliant though he may be, he is basically tributary to the female, who is the womb and mainstream of the race.
Virtue now had to be redefined as any quality that made for the survival of the group. Such, I believe, was the beginning of civilization — i.e., of being civil citizens. But now, too, began the profound and continuing conflict between nature and civilization — between the individualistic instincts so deeply rooted in the long hunting stage of human history, and the social instincts more weakly developed by a recent settled life. Each settlement had to be protected by united action; cooperation among individuals became a tool of competition among groups — villages, tribes, classes, religions, races, states.
Most states are still in a state of nature — still in the hunting stage. Military expeditions correspond to hunting for food, or fuels, or raw materials; a successful war is a nation’s way of eating. The state — which is ourselves and our impulses multiplied for organization and defense — expresses our old instincts of acquisition and pugnacity because, like primitive man, it feels insecure; its greed is a hedge against future needs and dearths. Only when it feels externally secure can it attend to internal needs, and rise, as a halting welfare state, to the social impulses developed by civilization.
Individuals became civilized when they were made secure by membership in an effectively protective communal groups; states will become civilized when they are made secure by loyal membership in an effectively protective federated group.
How did civilization grow despite the inherent hunting nature of the male? It did not aim to stifle that nature; it recognized that no economic system can long maintain itself without appealing to acquisitive instincts and eliciting superior abilities by offering superior rewards. It knew that no individual or state can long survive without willingness to fight for self-preservation. It saw that no society or race or religion will last if it does not breed. But it realized that if acquisitiveness were not checked it would lead to retail theft, wholesale robbery, political corruption, and to such concentration of wealth as would invite revolution.
If pugnacity were not checked, it would lead to brawls at every corner, to domination of every neighborhood by its heaviest thug, to the division of every city by rival gangs. If sex were not controlled, it would leave every girl at the mercy of every seducer, every wife at the mercy of her husband’s secret itching for the charms of variety and youth, and would make not only every park, but every street, unsafe for any woman. Those powerful instincts had to be controlled, or social order and communal life would have been impossible, and men would have remained savages.
The hunting-stage instincts were controlled partly by law and police, partly by a precarious general agreement called morality. The acquisitive impulses were checked by outlawing robbery and condemning greed and the disruptive concentration of wealth. The spirit of pugnacity was restrained by inflicting punishing injury to persons or property. The sexual impulses — only slightly less powerful than hunger — were disciplined to manageable order by banning their public excitation and by trying to channel them at an early age into responsible marriage.
Laws lose their edge by their multiplication and their bias, by the venality of legislators, by improvements in the means of escape and concealment, and by the difficulty of law enforcement in a population breeding beyond control. Public opinion loses force through division, fear, apathy, and the universal worship of wealth.
So the old instincts return unchained and untamed, and riot in crime, gambling, corruption, conscienceless moneymaking, and a sexual chaos in which love is sex — free for the male and dangerous for the race. Consultation gives way to confrontation; law yields to minority force; marriage becomes a short-term investment in diversified insecurities; reproduction is left to mishaps and misfits; and the fertility of incompetence breeds the race from the bottom while the sterility of intelligence lets the race whither at the top.
But the very excess of our present paganism may warrant some hope that it will not long endure; for usually excess generate its opposite. One of the most regular sequences in history is that a period of pagan license is followed by an age of puritan restraint and moral discipline. So the moral decay of ancient Rome under Nero and Commodus and later emperors was followed by the rise of Christianity, and its official adoption and protection of the emperor Constantine, as a saving source and buttress of order and decency.
But there are more pleasant prospects in history than this oscillation between excess and its opposite. I will not subscribe to the depressing conclusion of Voltaire and Gibbon that history is “the record of the crimes and follies of mankind.” Of course it is partly that, and contains a hundred million tragedies — but it is also the saving sanity of the average family, the labor and love of men and women bearing the stream of life over a thousand obstacles. It is the wisdom and courage of statesmen like Churchill and FDR, the latter dying exhausted but fulfilled; it is the undiscourageable effort of scientists and philosophers to understand the universe and envelops them; it is the patience and skill of artists and poets giving lasting forms to transient beauty, or an illuminating clarity to subtle significance; it is the vision of prophets and saints challenging us to nobility.
Unhampered by government, the spontaneous impulses of the people — their desires for bread and love — would move the wheels of life sufficiently in a simple and wholesome round. There would then be few inventions, for these merely add to the strength of the strong and the wealth of the rich. There should be no books and no industries, only village trades — and no foreign trade.
The Old Master draws a sharp distinction between nature and civilization as Rousseau was to do in that gallery of echoes called modern thought.
Nature is natural activity, the silent flow of traditional events, the majestic march and order of the seasons and the sky; it is the Tao (or Way) exemplified and embodied in every brook and rock and star; it is that impartial and impersonal, yet rational, law of things, to which the law of conduct must conform if we desire to live in wisdom and peace. This law of things is the Tao, or Way, of the universe, just as the law of conduct is the Tao, or Way, of life. In Lao-tze both Taos are one; and human life, in its essential rhythms of birth and life and death, is part of the rhythm of the world.
All things in nature work silently. They come into being and possess nothing.
They fulfill their function and make no claim. All things alike do their work, and then we see them subside. When they have reached their bloom each returns to its origin. Returning to their origin means rest, or fulfillment of destiny. This reversion is an eternal law. To know that law is wisdom.
Quiescence, a kind of philosophical inaction, a refusal to interfere with the natural courses of things, is the mark of the wise man in every field. If the state is in disorder, the proper thing to do is not to reform it, but to make one’s life an orderly performance of duty. If resistance is encountered, the wiser course is not to quarrel, fight, or make war, but to retire silently, and to win, if at all, through yielding and patience; passivity has its victories more often than action. Here, Lao-tze talks almost with the accents of Christ: If you do not quarrel, no one on earth will be able to quarrel with you…
Recompense injury with kindness… To those who are good I am good, and to those who are not good I am good; thus all get to be good. To those who are sincere I am sincere, and to those who are not sincere I am also sincere, and thus all get to be sincere… The softest thing in the world overcomes the hardest.
All these doctrines culminate in Lao’s conception of the sage. It is characteristic of Chinese thought that it speaks not of saints of of sages, not so much of goodness as of wisdom; to the Chinese the ideal is not the pious devotee but the mature and quiet mind. Even of the Tao and wisdom the wise man does not speak, for wisdom can never be transmitted by words, only by example and experience. If the wise man knows more than other men he tries to conceal it. He attaches no importance to riches or power, but reduces his desires to an almost Buddhist minimum.
He remarked sadly that he had never “seen one who loved virtue as much as he loved beauty.”
What was his basic philosophy? It was to restore morality and social order by spreading education.
The Upanishads teach much more; Yoga as a cleansing of the self, and rebirth as a punishment for selfishness.
But one day the thought came to Gautama that self-mortification was not the way. He perceived that no new enlightenment had come to him from these austerities; on the contrary, a certain pride in his self-torture had poisoned any holiness that might have grown from it. He abandoned his asceticism, and went to sit under a shade-giving tree, and resolved never to leave that seat until enlightenment should come. What, he asked himself, was the source of human sorrow, sickness, old age, death? A vision came to him of the infinite succession of births and deaths, each of them darkened with pain and grief. Birth, he concluded, is the origin of all evil.
Why is not birth stopped? Because the law of karma demands new incarnations, in which the soul may atone for evil done in past existences. If, however, one could live a life of perfect justice, of tireless patience and kindness to all; if he could tie his thoughts to eternal things, not binding his heart to thous that begin and pass away — then he might be spared rebirth, and for him the fountain of evil would run dry. If one could still all desires for oneself, and seek only to do good to all, then individuality, that fundamental delusion of mankind, might be overcome, and the soul could merge at last with unconscious infinity. What peace there would be in the heart that had cleansed itself of every personal desire! — and what heart that had not so cleansed itself could ever know peace? Happiness is possible neither here, as paganism thinks, nor hereafter, as many believe; only peace is possible, only the cool quietude of craving ended, which is Nirvana. And so, after seven years of meditation, Gautama went forth to preach Nirvana to mankind.
Let a man overcome anger by kindness, evil by good. Never does hatred ceased by hatred; hatred ceases only by love.
Sin is selfishness, the seeking of individual advantage or delight; and until the soul is freed from all selfishness, it will be repeatedly reborn. Nirvana is not a heaven after death; it is the quiet content of selfishness overcome. In the end, says Buddha, we perceive the absurdity of moral and psychological individualism. Our fretting selves are not really separate beings and powers; they are passing ripples on the stream of life, little knots forming and unraveling in the wind-blown mesh of fate. When we see ourselves as parts of a whole, when we reform ourselves, and our desires, in terms of the whole, then our personal disappointments and defeats, our griefs and pains and inevitable death, no longer sadden us as bitterly as before; they are lost in the amplitude of infinity. When we have learned to love not our separate selves but all human things, then at least we shall find Nirvana — unselfish peace.
I was shocked to find, on the wall of a Buddhist monastery in Kandy, a spacious painting showing the gentle founder of Buddhism distributing ferocious punishment in hell. When I protested against this barbarization of the idealist who had preached, “Let no man kill any living thing,” a monk explained that unless a religion preached terror as well as virtue and bliss, it could not control the lawless individualism of mankind. In China, Japan, and Southeast Asia a theologically reconstructed Buddhism is flourishing, and the godless Buddha has become a god.
We need not pretend to sit in judgment on her — we so far away and so imperfectly informed. It may be that the economy, politics, and society of India had fallen into disorder, incompetence, and venality, and called for the stern hand of a central and decisive power. In ancient republican Rome, law allowed — in a crisis — the appointment of a dictator for a year; but when that year had expired, and if the dictator persisted, anyone might depose him, legally or not.
Abraham’s eldest son, Jacob, we are told, wrestled with a stranger who turned out to be an angel or a god; and Jacob fought so powerfully that the Lord gave him the new name Israel — “he who has fought with God”; this became the name of the tribe and the land.
It is a happy ending, but tame and joyless, and yet again the best that we can make. Who are we — mites in a moment’s mist — that we should understand the universe? Philosophy is a study of the part in the light of the globe; and its first lesson is that we are very small parts of a very large whole. The harmony of the part with the whole may be the best definition of health, beauty, truth, wisdom, morality, and happiness.
For in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
They give two answers: make your peace with God and the universe; and brighten your life with love.
Two ideas fascinated him: change is universal, and energy is indestructible and everlasting. Nothing is, everything becomes; everything is always ceasing to be what it is, and is becoming what it will be; “all things flow” and “you can never dip your foot in the same water in a flowing stream”; the universe is one vast, restless, ceaseless “Becoming.”
The individual soul is a passing tongue of the endlessly changing flame of life.
God is the eternal Fire, the omnipresent energy of the fluent world. In the universal flux anything can in time change into its opposite; good can become evil, evil can become good, life becomes death, death become life.
Opposites are two sides of the same thing; strength is the tension of opposites; “Strife” (competition) “is the father of all and the kin of all; some he has marked out to be gods, and some to be men; some he made slaves and some free.” In the end, Heracleitus concluded, “strife is justice”; the competition of individuals, groups, institutions, states, and empires constitutes nature’s supreme court, from whose verdict there is no appeal.
This ardor for the advancement of knowledge and the adornment of the city seems to have least affected Sparta, which saw itself as guardian of the gates against “barbarian” (i.e., alien) inroads or infiltration from the north, and therefore subjected its citizens and its slaves to a martial discipline that left little room for the humanities and the graces of life. By contrast a dedication to speculation and beauty excited the Athenians, who felt protected by their navy, and so made their theaters the voices of philosophy, and their temples marble hymns to their gods.
He disappointed the extreme radicals by making no move to redivide the land; such an attempt would have meant civil war, chaos for a generation, and the rapid return of inequality. But by his famous “Removal of Burdens”, Solon canceled “all existing debts, whether owing to private persons or to the state,” and so at one blow clear Attic lands of all mortgages. The rich protested that this legislation was outright confiscation, but within a decade opinion became almost unanimous that the act had saved Athens from revolution.
Besides, he added, no lasting justice can be established for men, since the strong or clever will twist to their advantage any laws that are made; the law is a spider’s web that catches the little flies and lets the big bugs escape.
Solon accepted all this criticism genially, acknowledging the imperfections of his code; asked if he had given the Athenians the best laws, he answered, “No, but the best that they could receive” — the best that the conflicting groups and interests of Athens could at the time be persuaded to accept.
He saw democratic politicians catering to the whims of the common herd until, in his view, liberty had become anarchy; and old standards of conduct and taste, which had protected civilization in manners, morals, and arts, were debased by a spreading and triumphant vulgarity. And he made his imaginary Socrates go on, as if describing today:
Socrates: In such a state the anarchy grows and finds a way into private homes. The father gets accustomed to descend to the level of his sons, and the son to be on a level with his father, having no fear of his parents, and no shame. The teacher fears and flatters his pupils, and the pupils despise their teachers.
The excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction. The excess of liberty, in states or individuals, seems only to pass into slavery, and the most aggravated form of tyranny arises out of the most extreme forms of liberty.
In the second book of the Republic, Plato considered a communistic utopia, but explained that it was impractical because men are by nature individualistic, acquisitive, and, occasionally, murderous. He went on to portray a “second-best” state, organized around a system of education open to all, and ruled by “guardians” emerging alive, aged fifty, from the severest tests of the educational mill. These guardians, Plato argued, should have no property, no money, no wives, but should be dedicated to plain living and high philosophy; they should be a communistic isle ruling a surrounding sea of free enterprise.
The goal of conduct is happiness, but the secret of happiness is virtue, and the best virtue is intelligence – a careful consideration of the reality, the goal, and the means; usually “virtue” is a golden mean between extremes. Politics is the art of compromise between the classes that constitute a society. All men are created unequal, and the upper classes will as readily revolt if an unnatural equality is enforced, as the lower classes will rebel when inequality is unnaturally extreme. So Aristotle favored a “timocracy” (rule by honor) — a combination of aristocracy and democracy, in which the suffrage would be restricted to property owners, and a numerous middle class would be the pivot and balance wheel of power.
It was just as well that he died at his zenith; added years would almost surely have brought him disillusionment. Perhaps if he had lived, he might have been deepened by defeat and suffering, and might have learned — as he was beginning — to love statesmanship more than war. But he had undertaken too much; the strain of holding his swollen realm together, and watching all its parts, was probably disordering his brilliant mind. Energy is only half of genius, the other half is harness; and Alexander was all energy.
We miss in him — though he have no right to expect — the calm maturity of Caesar, or the subtle wisdom of Augustus. We admire him (as we admire Napoleon), because he stood alone against half the world, and because he encourages us with the thought of the incredible power that lies potential in the individual soul.
And we feel a natural sympathy for him, despite his superstitions and his cruelties, because we know that he was at least a generous and affectionate youth, as well as incomparably able and brave; that he fought against a maddening heritage of barbarism in his blood; and that through all battles and all bloodshed he kept before his eyes the dream of bringing the light of Athens to a larger world.
Order in the family, in the early Republic, was based on the almost absolute power of the father; he alone had any right before the law; even his wife’s dowry belonged to him. If his wife was accused of a crime, she was committed to him for judgment and punishment; he could condemn her to death for infidelity, or for stealing the keys to his wine. Over his children he had the power of life and death, or sale into slavery; over his slaves his power was limitless.
These rights of the paterfamilias were gradually checked by public opinion, custom, the clan council, and the growth of security and law; otherwise they lasted till his death. Presumably they reflected the frequency of war, and the need of habituation to strict discipline. They were harsher in the letter than in practice, and did not bar a deep and natural pietas, or reverential affection, between parents and children. The tomb statuary of the Romans is as tender as those of Greece and our own.
Never before had a religion had so many gods; Petronius complained that in some towns of Italy there were more gods than men.
Did this religion help Roman morals? In some ways it seems to us immoral: its ritual suggested that the gods rewarded not goodness but gifts and formulas; and its prayers were nearly always for material goods or martial victory. Nevertheless the religion made for order and strength in the individual, the family, or the state. Before the child could learn to doubt, faith molded its character into discipline, duty, and decency. Religion gave divine sanctions and support to the family; it instilled in parents and children a mutual respect and piety never surpassed. It invested every phase of public life with religious solemnity, and fused the state into such intimacy with the gods that piety and patriotism became one, and love of country rose to a passion stronger than in any other society known to history. Religion shared with the family the credit for forming the iron character that for 500 years enabled Rome to govern the classic world.
The power of the Senate remained supreme despite these advances toward democracy. The cost of winning and holding office — which was unpaid — disqualified the poor. The richer plebeians now cooperated with the patricians in checking radical movements. Businessmen fell in with patrician policy because it gave them contracts for public works, openings for colonial and provincial exploitation, and commissions to collect taxes. The Senate took the lead in legislation, and custom sanctioned its authority far beyond the letter of the law.
Hoping to divide Italy for his own security, Pyrrhus crossed the Adriatic and defeated the Romans at Heraclea and Asculum; there, however, his losses were so discouraging that he reckoned, “One more such victory and we are undone” — so giving us an adjective.
He had disciplined his body to hardship, his appetite to need, his thought to fact, his tongue to silence. He was “the first to enter the battle and the last to leave the field.”
Nothing arises in the body in order that we may use it, but what arises brings forth its own use. It was no design of the atoms that led them to arrange themselves in order with keen intelligence, but because many atoms in infinite time have moved and met in all manner of ways, trying all combinations.
The soul (anima) is a “vital breath” which is spread as a very fine matter throughout the body and animates every part. It grows and ages with the body, and its atoms are apparently dispersed when the body dies. Life is given us not in freehold but on loan, and for good so long as we can make good use of it. When we have exhausted our powers, we should leave the table of life as graciously as a grateful guest rising from a feast.
Death itself is not terrible; only our fears of the hereafter make it so. But there is no hereafter. Hell is here in the suffering that comes from ignorance, passion, pugnacity, and greed; and heaven is here in “the serene temples of the wise.”
Virtue lies not in the fear of the gods, nor in the timid shunning of pleasure; it lies in the harmonious operation of senses and faculties guided by reason: “the real wealth of man is to live simply with a mind at ease.” Marriage is god, but passionate love is a madness that strips the mind of clarity and reason. No marriage, no society, no civilization can find a sound basis in such erotic befuddlement.
Social organization gave man the power to survive animals far stronger than himself. He discovered fire from the friction of leaves and boughs, developed language from gestures, and learned song from the birds; he tamed animals for his use, and himself with marriage and law; he observed the heavens, measured time, and learned navigation.
History is a procession of states and civilizations rising, prospering, decaying, dying; but each in turn can transmit the civilizing heritage of customs, morals, laws, and arts; “like runners in a race they hand on the lamps of life.”
He was a jolly companion and a generous friend, devoted to wine, women, battle, and song. He lived extravagantly, yet pleasure never interfered with his duties, except that his conduct as a husband might have been more honorable. He mad his way rapidly, above all in the army, his happiest medium; he treated his soldiers as comrades, shared their work, their marches, and their dangers; “his only effort was not to allow anyone to surpass him in wisdom and bravery.”
Tired of war, power, glory — tired perhaps of men — he surrounded himself with singers, dancers, actors, and actresses. He wrote his Commentaries, hunted and fished, ate and drank his fill. His men called him Sulla Felix, because he had won every battle, known every pleasure, reached every power, and now lived without fear or regret.
No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.
The courts, though now preempted by senators, rivaled the polls in corruption. Oaths had lost all worth as testimony, and almost any verdict could be bought.
There was much love of children — but a dearth of them — among the educated Romans, who had long since learned contraceptive arts. Caesar worried lest the native stocks should be swamped by the immigrant households that were growing in number and size in the cities. In his legislative days he promised the ladies state reward for large families, but he found that children were a luxury which only the poor could afford.
As reward he asked from the Senate, and received appointment, as “consul without colleague,” a phrase which Cato the Younger recommended as nicer than dictator.
But this great statesman was not above vanity. He continued to wear daily, in order to hide his baldness, the laurel crown that had been placed upon his head in a triumph. He ordered his statue to be erected in the Capitol next to those of Rome’s ancient kings, and he deposed from office the tribunes who removed from his statue the royal diadem placed upon it by his friends.
The people of Rome, and of Italy, accepted this disguised monarchy with the humility of experience. They were no longer enamored of freedom, but wearily wished for security, order, and peace; any man might rule them who guaranteed them games and bread. Vaguely the understood that their clumsy comitia, clogged with corruption and racked with violence, could not govern an empire.
He kept under his control three cohorts of soldiers in the city, and six near it, to ensure public order and his rule. These nine cohorts became the Praetorian Guard, which in AD 41 raised Claudius to power and began its fatal subjection of the government.
He found it easier to restore prosperity than to reform morals. The decline of the ancient faith among the educated classes had dissolved the supernatural supports of marriage, fidelity, and parentage; the passage from farm to city had made a child less of an asset, more of a liability and expensive toy; women wished to be sexually desirable rather than maternally revered; many native Romans avoided wedlock, or limited their families by contraception, abortion, or infanticide. Augustus saw in these phenomena the decay of parental authority, social order, and the Roman character.
Conscious of his own skill, he composed a letter later entitled The Art of Poetry, telling young scribblers the rule for good writing: clarity, directness, mingling the useful with the pleasant. Art assumes feeling as well in the artist as in the recipient: “If you wish me to weep, you must first grieve yourself.” But art is not feeling alone; it is feeling conveyed in disciplined form — “emotion remembered in tranquility”; here is the challenge of the classic to the romantic style.
To achieve form, study the Greeks day and night. Avoid words that are new, obsolete, or sesquipedalian — “foot-and-a-half words.” If your product survives all this, hide it away for eight years. If then it still pleases you, publish it, but remember that it may shame your maturity. If you write drama, obey the three unities — of action, time, and place. Study life and philosophy, for without study and understanding, a perfect style is an empty vessel, to fragile for our use.
He reluctantly concedes that there are bad men in the world. The way to deal with them is to remember that they, too, are men, the helpless victims of their own faults by the determinism of circumstance.
A really good man is immune to misfortune, for whatever evil befalls him leaves him still his own soul. Philosophy is not logic or learning, but understanding and acceptance.
One must try to feel the place and time of Jesus’ birth, the relation of his land and people to the Roman Empire that had engulfed them, the bitterness of the conquered nation, its proud heritage of religion, law, literature, and philosophy, its passionate hope for liberation, its dream of a coming kingdom of freedom, justice, and glory. It took all of these acting upon a sensitive and understanding spirit — to form the carpenter’s son, and lead him to the cross.
But these rulers sought consecration by the pope as a necessary prop and confirmation of their power — they could at any moment lose that power if the pope excommunicated them. Year by year the papacy grew in influence, until the kings recognized it as the supreme authority in all matters of morals — which might mean almost any major issue.
State and Church united in a frightened attack upon heresies that would, in their view, undermine the complex structure of law and morals which kept men from reverting to moral and political anarchy. Nearly every challenged government had turned to inquisition, and punished opinions and conduct considered dangerous to the state.
Freedom is a luxury of security.
First of all was the transformation of medieval Europe — north of the Rhone, the Rhine, and the Danube — from a wilderness of forest, jungle, and marsh into the earthly basis of new and enduring civilizations. Men an women cleared roads, cut canals, dug wells and mines, built habitations, domesticated themselves and useful animals, organized villages, towns, and cities, developed laws, juries, parliaments, and disciplined youth through parental authority, schools, and religion.
Medieval man risked all on religion. He had seen, or had been told of, a Roman civilization dying with the death of its gods, or the lapse of human fear thereof; he knew, from his own youth, the power and persistence of unsocial habits and desires; and he welcomed in maturity the theological beliefs, moral commandments, priestly exhortations, and theological terrors that might in some measure check the pride and insolence of youths, the crimes of adults, and the wars and sins of states.
The Middle Ages passed into the Renaissance when, on Good Friday 1327, in a church at papal Avignon, Francesco Petrarca saw Laura di Sade, whose delicate beauty, doubled by modesty, made him forget all other divinity but hers.
For five years he pursued her with poetry and prose. She let him wait till other purses ran dry, and then accepted him till his purse ran dry.
So, in its very infancy, the Renaissance was voting for delights and challenges of this earthly world instead of the hypothetical pleasure of a postmortem paradise. The Renaissance restored not only the literature of classical antiquity, but equally its pursuit of a hedonistic freedom. It was in part a pagan liberation of the senses after a thousand years of moral discipline resting on supernatural beliefs.
But it took more than a revival of antiquity to make the Renaissance. First of all it took money — smelly, bourgeois money: the profits of skillful managers and lowly labor; of hazardous voyages to the East, and arduous crossing of the Alps, to buy goods cheap and sell them dear; of careful calculations, investments, and loans; of interest an dividends accumulated util enough surplus could be spared from the pleasures of the flesh, from the purchase of the senates, signories, and mistresses, to pay a Michelangelo or a Titian to transmute wealth into beauty, and perfume a fortune with the breath of art.
So Italy advanced, in wealth and art and thought, a century ahead of the rest of Europe; and it was only in the 16th century, when the Renaissance faded in Italy, that it blossomed in France, Germany, Holland, England, and Spain. The Renaissance was not a period in time, but a mode of life and thought, moving from Italy though Europe with the course of commerce, war, and ideas.
He was on cordial terms with cardinals and sultans. He contributed so heavily to public works and charities that the populace quietly accepted his indirect dictatorship of Florentine affairs.
History also gives him its vote because he found money enough to finance a score of scholars, artists, poets, and philosophers.
Fair is youth and void of sorrow,
But it hourly flies away.
Youths and maids, enjoy today;
Nought ye know about tomorrow.
His eager mind took up one study after another — poetry, philosophy, architecture, music — and achieved in each some outstanding excellence. Politian described him as a paragon in whom Nature had united all her gifts: “tall and finely molded, with something of divinity shining in his face”; a man of penetrating glance, indefatigable study, miraculous memory, and ecumenical erudition, eloquent in several languages, a favorite with women and philosophers, and as lovable in character as he was handsome in person and eminent in all qualities of intellect.
What can be more desirable to a well-regulated mind than the enjoyment of leisure with dignity? This is what all good men wish to obtain, but which great men alone accomplish. In the midst of public affairs we may indeed be allowed to look forward to a day of rest; but no rest should totally seclude us from an attention to the concern of our country. I cannot deny that the path which it has been my lot to tread has ben arduous and rugged, full of dangers, and beset with treachery; but I console myself in having contributed to the welfare of my country, the prosperity of which may now rival that of any other state, however flourishing.
In order to draw well he studied all things in nature with curiosity, patience, and care; science and art, so remarkably united in his mind, had there one origin — detailed observation.
Perhaps he entered upon each work of art with a view to solve a technical problem of composition, color, or design, and lost interest in the work when the solution had been found. Art, he said, lies in conceiving and designing, not in the actual execution; this was labor for lesser minds.
The prior complained of Leonardo’s apparent sloth, and wondered why he would sometimes sit before the wall for hours without painting a stroke. Leonardo had no trouble explaining to the duke that an artist’s most important work lies in conception rather than in execution, and “men of genius do most when they work least.”
What is she smiling at? The efforts of the musicians to entertain her? The leisurely diligence of an artist who paints her through a thousand days and never makes an end? Or is it not just Mona Lisa smiling, but all women, saying to all men: “Poor impassioned lovers! A Nature blindly commanding continuance burns your nerves with an absurd hunger for our flesh, softens your brains with a quite unreasonable idealization of our charms, lifts you to lyrics that subside with consummation — and all that you may be precipitated into parentage! Could anything be more ridiculous? But we too are snared; we women pay a heavier price than you for your infatuation. And yet, sweet fools, it is pleasant to be desired, and life is redeemed when we are loved.”
Picture the old pope mounting the frail frame, aided to the platform by the artist, and asking, impatiently, “When will it be finished?” The reply was a lesson in integrity: “When I shall have done all that I believe required to satisfy art.”
We should exalt Renaissance Italy beyond its due if we did not note that there, as elsewhere, civilization was of the few, by the few, and for the few.
The simple common man tilled the earth, pulled the carts, or bore the burdens, toiled from dawn to dusk and at evening had no muscle left for thought; he let others think for him as others made him work for them. He took his opinions, his religion, his answers to the riddles of life from the air about him, or from the ancestral cottage. He accepted not only the fascinating, comforting, inspiring, terrifying marvels by which were daily conveyed to him the traditional theology, but he added to them the demonology, sorcery, portents, magic, divination, and astrology that composed a popular metaphysics which the Church deprecated as more troublesome than heresy.
It is the most honest and immoral of books. It expounds, clearly and frankly, the doctrine that a state need not, must not, practice the moral code which it recommends to its citizens. It may justly punish perjury, fraud, theft, cruelty, and murder, but it may rightly practice any or all of these if it considers them necessary to the protection of the state. Machiavelli interpret the old Roman rule salus populi suprema lex to mean that the safety of the state — that is, the people organized — is the supreme law. Moreover the Christian ideal of peace may enervate a citizenry; an occasional war is a national tonic, restoring discipline, unity, and strength. Virtue, in the Roman Republic, was not humility or gentleness, but manliness, virility, courage armed with energy and intelligence. A war that strengthens a nation is good.
When a state ceases to expand, it begins to die.
The proud palaces and fluid promenade of the Grand Canal led the traveled Philippe de Comines to pronounce this “the most beautiful street in the world.”
Even the enemies of Venice admired her government and sent agents to study its structure and functioning. It was controlled by a closed oligarchy of old families, who chose a Greater Council, which chose 60 men to serve as a legislative Senate, which chose a doge (leader) as executive, who, with 6 privy councilors, constituted the Signoria. To guard against internal or external conspiracies the Greater Council yearly chose a Council of Ten as a committee of public safety. Through its spies and swift procedure, its secret sessions and trials, this Consiglio dei Dieci became for a time the most powerful arm of the government.
And though he was transferred to Venice in his 10th year, those mountains, like supernatural entities hovering over human absurdities, lingered in his memories and landscapes.
And other dedicated souls for a time made Italy the “Light of the World”; and we have forgotten the last decade and labors of Michelangelo, who entombed dead Medici with immortal sculpture and crowned St. Peter’s with a cupola that is still, in a doubting age, the center and peak of Western civilization.
We honor Michelangelo because through a long and tortured life he continued to create, and produced in each main field, a masterpiece. We see these works torn, so to speak, out of his flesh and blood, out of his mind and heart, leaving him for a time weakened with birth. We see them taking form through a hundred thousand strokes of hammer and chisel, pencil and brush; one after another, like an immortal population, they take their place among the lasting shapes of beauty or significance.
We cannot know what God is, nor understand a universe so mingled of apparent evil and good, of suffering and loveliness, destruction and sublimity; but in the presence of a mother tending her child, or of an informed will giving order to chaos, meaning to matter, nobility to form or thought, we feel as close as we shall ever be to the life and law that constitute the incomprehensible intelligence of the world.
The Roman Catholic Church is one of the most remarkable organizations in history, and an objective study of its origins, purpose, methods, vicissitudes, faults, and achievements would shed more light upon the nature and possibilities of man and government than the study of almost any other subject or institution open to human inquiry.
When the fading belief in Rome’s pagan deities could no longer give moral support to a disoriented and imperiled state in the task of controlling the native individualism of men and groups, a new faith in a stern, yet forgiving God, and his redeeming and inspiring Son, gave to a growing minority a creed that both fed and calmed human wonder and fear, and developed a moral code and social order that made a new civilization possible.
The old masculine Latin of Roman soldiers was softened to fit hymns and chivalry; literature frolicked and experimented in a hundred forms; art added the joy and exultation of Gothic ornament and spires to the calm nobility of colonnades and domes. And the Roman Catholic Church grew to such acceptance and devotion that it could check the natural self-seeking of men and state with the power of the venerated world.
By AD 1300 that majestic structure had been eroded by the nature of man.
Some administrators of the Church proved human, venal, biased, oppressive, or extortionate; some kings — made stronger by social order and developing economies — rejected papal claims to secular power and mourned the passage of their people’s money to a foreign potentate.
To begin with, said the little book, the human race owes its existence to folly.
For what man in his senses would pay for a moment’s pleasure with a lifetime of monogamy? What sane woman would pay for a transient ecstasy with the pains of birth and the tribulations of motherhood? Could anyone be happy if he faced the facts of life, or knew the future? If men and women paused to reason, all would be lost. However, science and philosophy are ignored by the people and do little damage to the vital ignorance of the human race.
They and 77 others were “free cities” — they made their own laws, and acknowledged no political allegiance except to the emperor, who was usually too indebted to them for men or money to attack their liberties.
The situation that now confronted the pope, the German princes, and the young emperor involved some of the basic problems of government and history: How far does a government depend upon psychological factors for the maintenance of its rule, and how far do psychological factors depend upon economic conditions and political power? Were the authority and efficacy of a ruler dependent upon the aid of religion in maintaining social order, public obedience, and governmental prestige? And could a government acquire or preserve power by securing control of religious institutions and revenues? Those German princes who protected Luther against the Catholic Church gambled on their ability to organize and use the religious beliefs of their people independently of the Roman papacy; and Leo gambled on the unlikeliness that German rulers would use this opportunity to free themselves from papal power over the German Church and its growing revenues.
Any man against who sedition can be proved is outside the law of God and the Empire, so that the first who can slay him is doing right and well… For rebellion brings with it a land full of murder and bloodshed, makes widows and orphans, and turns everything upside down… Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel. It is just when one must kill a mad dog…
The wealth of the papacy was an Italian heirloom and vested interest; any Italian who proposed to end that tribute-receiving organization seemed to most Italians to be verging on lunacy. The upper classes quarreled with the papacy as a political power over central Italy, but they cherished Catholicism as a vital aid to social order and peaceful government. They realize that the glory of Italian art had been bound up with the Church through the inspiration of her legends and the support of her gold.
Catholicism itself had become an art; its sensuous elements had submerged the ascetic and the theological: stained glass, incense, music, architecture, sculpture, painting, even drama — these were all in the Church and of her, and in their marvelous ensemble they seemed inseparable from her. The artists and the scholars of Italy did not have to be converted from Catholicism, for they had converted Catholicism to scholarship and art.
Hundreds, thousands, of scholars and artists were supported by bishops, cardinals, and the popes; many humanists, some polite skeptics, had risen to high positions in the Church. Italy loved attainable beauty too much to despoil itself over unattainable truths. And had those fanatical Teutons, or that sour popelet in Geneva, or that ruthless ruler on the throne of England, found the truth? What depressing nonsense those reformers were shouting — just when the intellectual classes in Italy had quite forgotten hell and damnation!
What is a man profited if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?
Men continued, in Catholic and Protestant countries, to lie and steal, seduce maidens and sell offices, kill and make war. But the morals of the clergy improved, and the wild reform of Renaissance Italy was tamed to a decent conformity with the pretensions of mankind.
Shakespeare mourned his loss of faith as reducing human life to an unforgivable succession of pains and griefs culminating in the transformation of even the most virtuous soul into a defeated dream. His resentment of this defeat of theology by biology darkened some of his greatest plays into the bitterest indictment of human life in English literature.
She found England exhausted and despised, and left it rich and powerful; and the sinews of learning and literature grew strong in the breadth of her understanding and the wealth of her people. She continued the despotism of her father, but moderated it with humanity and charm.
Denied husband and child, she mothered England, loved it devotedly, and used herself up in serving it. Wise in her choice of councillors, and helped by their counsel, she was the greatest ruler that England has ever had.
Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much, and so much only, as he has observed, in fact or in thought, of the course of Nature; beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything. Human knowledge and human power meet in one, for where the course is not known, the effect cannot be produced. Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
Human knowledge as we have it is a mere medley and ill-digested mass, made up of much credulity and much accident, and also of the childish notions which are at first imbibed.
Therefore we must, at the start, clear our minds of all preconceptions, prejudices, assumptions, and theories. We must turn away even from Plato and Aristotle, we must sweep out of our thought the “idols,” or time illusions and fallacies, born of our personal idiosyncrasies of judgment or the traditional beliefs and dogmas of our group; we must banish all logical tricks of wishful thinking, all verbal absurdities of obscured thought. We must put behind us all the majestic deductive systems which proposed to draw a thousand eternal verities out of a few axioms and principles.
Here, we feel, is a powerful mind — a man, one in a century, at home equally in philosophy and government. It would be interesting to know what the philosopher thought in politics, and what the politician thought in philosophy.
With the vanity inherent in authorship, he wrote, in dedicating these to Buckingham, “I do conceive the volume may last as long as books last.”
He rejected in advance the mechanistic biology of Descartes. With careful ambivalence he “seasons” his philosophy with religion as with salt.
Virtue should be practiced in moderation, for the wicked may take advantage of the indiscreetly good. A little dissimulation is necessary to success, if not to civilization. Love is a madness, and marriage is a nose. “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises.” Friendship is better than love, and married men make unsteady friends.