Literature of Western Culture through the Renaissance - Essay Example

Literature of Western Culture Through the Renaissance During the Middle Ages, ical civilization was transformed by contact with three cultures: Germanic invaders, Christianity, and Islam. The Western values of individualism, consensual government, and recognition of religious differences began to emerge during the Middle Ages. In 500, the “West” was not yet a political or cultural entity, but by 1500, the map of Europe looked very much as it does today (Lawall & Maynard 12). People in the Renaissance named the period the Middle Ages because it was considered a culturally empty time that separated the Renaissance from the Classical past, which it admired. The Middle Ages is mistakenly thought of as a culturally homogeneous period, but this period contains many different kinds of people of many different cultures (Lawall & Maynard 16). As the Middle Ages developed, the Catholic Church gradually extended its spiritual and institutional authority across most of Europe. Although the period is often described as an “age of faith,” the commitment to Catholic Christianity was neither uniform nor lacking in an understanding of its complexities and contradictions (Lawall & Maynard 22). The period is also described as an “age of chivalry.” The code of chivalry stressed gentility, generosity, concern for the powerless, and a capacity for experiencing selfless and passionate romantic love. The intellectual and religious foundations of the modern Western outlook were laid in the Mediterranean basin between 800 B.C.E. and 400 B.C.E (Lawall & Maynard 26). Hebrew religion was founded on the idea of one God, the creator of all things, all-powerful and just a concept that was revolutionary in its time. By 63 B.C.E., Palestine was absorbed by the Roman Empire. The modern state of Israel was created in 1948. Minoans flourished on Crete; Myceneans flourished on the Greek mainland. The Greek concept of the gods represents the blind forces of the universe that man cannot control and are not always thought of as connected to morality (Lawall & Maynard 28). The Greek city-states were united by a common Greek heritage—culture, religion, and a sense of “Greeknesss”—but differed in terms of custom, dialect, and politics. The city-states were constantly at war for more territory. At the beginning of the fifth century B.C.E., Athens was a direct democracy (Lawall & Maynard 32). The Peloponnesian War lasted from 431-404 B.C.E. Athens capitulated to Sparta. Most women in the ancient world were prohibited from owning property, holding office, or voting; a woman’s primary duty was to produce male heirs (Lawall & Maynard 35). Protagoras expressed a supreme confidence in human intelligence and a secular view of humanity’s position in the universe when he said, “Man is the measure of all things.” In the last quarter of the fifth century B.C.E., there were two new developments: the flowering of Athenian rhetoric and the revolution in philosophy brought about by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle that laid the foundation for later Western philosophy (Lawall & Maynard 42). Socrates developed the dialectic method: a search for truth through questions and answers. Greek culture spread though the known world in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great. By the middle of the third century B.C.E., Rome dominated Italy, and victory in the Punic Wars against Carthage turned Rome into a world power (Lawall & Maynard 45). By the end of the first century B.C.E., the Roman Empire stretched from the Straits of Gibraltar to Mesopotamia and the frontiers of Palestine and as far north as Britain, and created the concept of the world-state. The Romans brought peace, orderly government, a talent for practical affairs, and a belief that the strongest authority was “the custom of predecessors” to conquered territories (Lawall & Maynard 48). Augustus, the first Roman emperor, brought the empire under one authority and ushered in a long age of peace and reconstruction with his victory at Actium against Mark Antony. In the third and fourth centuries C.E., the empire disintegrated under constant invasions from people from the north. Through the Hellenistic contact with non-Greek people, Judaism flourished in Alexandria. The philosophies of Cynicism, Skepticism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism influenced Roman culture. Thomas Aquinas’s “neoplatonism” synthesized Christian doctrine with Platonic teachings. Eventually, Christianity would emerge victorious over the ancient world’s disparate religious practices and beliefs. Hebrews left a religious literature founded on the idea of one God, creator of all things, all powerful and just—a revolutionary concept. Early Greek culture produced a body of oral epic poetry; raw material for Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (Lawall & Maynard 53) . The great characters of the Homeric epics served as models of conduct for later generations of Greeks. The Olympian gods retained the attributes set down by Homer. Latin literature began with a translation of the Odyssey; with the exception of satire, the literary model was always Greek. Virgil based the Aeneid on Homer and glorified the beginnings of Rome as a world power. Satire, exemplified by Petronius’s Satyricon, painted a sardonic portrait of the nouveau riche for whom religion had lost its im While Renaissance means “rebirth,” the term more accurately pertains to a vision that the artists and intellectuals of the Renaissance possessed of the world of antiquity, which they then saw “reborn” in their own works (Lawall & Maynard 58). Italian humanist scholars began to use new scholarly methods that gave them fuller access to the cultural legacy of the ancient world of Greece and Rome. Although the Renaissance began in Italy, it peaked at different times in different countries. The Renaissance was occupied more with this life than with the life beyond. Church and state seemed inextricably bound together; the Papacy was a political and military power as well as a spiritual one (Lawall & Maynard 64). Every cultured person studied Greek and spoke Latin, which became the international language, while alluding to classical mythology, philosophy, and literature as well as references to the Scriptures was the common linguistic currency. Human action was judged not in terms of right and wrong or good and evil, with reward or punishment in the afterlife, but in terms of its present concrete validity, effectiveness, and beauty. The Renaissance lost the firm belief in the final unity and intelligibility of the universe, and once the unity of design had lost its authority, certainty about the final value of human actions was no longer to be found (Lawall & Maynard 68). The result was called “Renaissance melancholy.” The people of the “New World” produced in the European explorers a sense that reality had been decisively altered and could never revert to older familiar ways. The moral question hovering over the conquest of the New World became paramount with authors, who wanted to shock Europe and implement reforms in the colonizing mission because they believed the marvels of the New World had been utterly destroyed by the colonists. In all modes of exploration—discovery, conquest, and defense or self-critique—Renaissance Europeans staged an encounter with their own ethical convictions about what it meant to be human in an ever-changing world (Lawall & Maynard 75). Renaissance writers explored the relationships of literary characters and their society; the characters that populate Renaissance literature have greater autonomy and more fully realized personalities than their Middle Ages counterparts. Characters are often presented in debate with themselves and others as they investigate a course of action. Renaissance authors inhabited a world of such widespread revolutionary change that they could not passively receive the traditional wisdom of the previous ages (Lawall & Maynard 78). John Donne wrote about the psychological threat the new discoveries and theories posed to those who were unable to cope with so much uncertainty. Petrarch anticipated certain ideals of the Renaissance: a lofty conception of the literary arts, a taste for the good life, a basic pacifism, and a strong sense of the memories and glories of antiquity. “Fame” and “glory” became associated with the art of poetry because the Renaissance drew from antiquity the idea of the poet as celebrator of high deeds, the “dispenser of glory.” Prior to the Renaissance, the values of European civilization were based on the codes of honor and chivalry that reflected the social relations of the traditional feudal hierarchy. During the Renaissance, these traditional values were transformed to reflect both the ambition and the pride of the commercial class that dominated Renaissance Italian society (Lawall & Maynard 94). In contrast to traditional European noblemen, who competed for prestige on the battlefield or in jousting and fencing tournaments, successful Renaissance men competed with displays of civic duty that included patronage of philosophy and arts (Lawall & Maynard 118). At the center of the Renaissance system of values was humanism. Renaissance humanism combined an admiration for Classical Greek and Roman literature with a newfound confidence in what modern men could achieve. Accordingly, Renaissance humanism was characterized by the studia humanitas, an educational program founded on knowledge of the Classical Latin and Greek languages. Once these languages had been mastered, the Renaissance humanist could read deeply in the Classical works of the ancient Greek and Roman authors, absorbing what the philosophers of the last great Western civilization had to teach them about how to succeed in life and how to live a good life (Lawall & Maynard 122). In conclusion, the work of the Renaissance all the great nations of Europe shared. But it must never be forgotten that, as a matter of history, the true Renaissance began in Italy. It was there that the essential qualities which distinguish the modern from the ancient and the mediaeval world were developed. Italy created that new spiritual atmosphere of culture and of intellectual freedom which has been the life-breath of the European races. As the Jews are called the chosen and peculiar people of divine revelation, so may the Italians be called the chosen and peculiar vessels of the prophecy of the Renaissance. In art, in scholarship, in science, in the mediation between antique culture and the modern intellect, they took the lead, handing to Germany and France and England the restored humanities complete. Spain and England have since done more for the exploration and colonization of the world. Germany achieved the labor of the Reformation almost single-handed. Works Cited Lawall, Sarah N., and Maynard Mack. The Norton anthology of world masterpieces, the Western tradition Literature of western culture through the Renaissance. 7th ed. New York: Norton, 1999. Print. Read More