Link to Chronology
Europe wakes up and then goes to hell
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book Nine
The Renaissance and the Reformation
Introduction
p501 ...Before the Renaissance, the intellectual history of Europe was merely a chapter of the history of the Church... even those who contended against the Church were entirely dominated by it, and thought only of transforming it. They were not freethinkers but heretics. With the Renaissance... The Cleric no longer had the monopoly of learning. Spiritual life... became secularized; philosophy ceased to be the servant of theology, and art, like literature, emancipated itself from the tutelage which had been imposed upon it ever since the 8th century. The ascetic ideal was replaced by a purely human ideal, and of this ideal the highest expression was to be found in antiquity. The humanist replaced the cleric, as virtue (virtus) replaced piety... Not only for the Italian humanists, but also for Christians as convinced as Erasmus or Thomas More, the claim of the theologian to domineer over learning and letters, and even morality, was as ridiculous as it was harmful. They dreamed of reconciling religion with the world. They were tolerant, not unduly dogmatic, and extremely hostile to the secular studies which Scholasticism had superimposed upon the Bible. They were interested above all in moral questions. Their program, which we find in Miles Christianus [not sure what this is supposed to be. It seems to be a literary work and not THIS.] and the Utopia, is that of a broad, rational Christianity, entirely devoid of mysticism, which would make the Church, not the Bride of Christ and the source of salvation, but an institution for moralization and education in the highest sense of the word... they were optimists, and they hoped that it would be possible to induce... [the Church], by gentle pressure, to enter upon the new path [of reform].
p502 ...The Reformation, on the other hand, attacked the problem with passion, violence and intolerance, but also with profound faith, and the passionate longing to attain to God and to salvation which was destined to conquer and subjugate men's souls. There was nothing in common with it and the Renaissance. It was... the antithesis of the Renaissance. It replaced the human being by the Christian; it derided and humiliated the power of reason... Luther was much more akin to the Middle Ages than to the humanists... Erasmus and More very soon turned aside from this revolutionary... They divined the tragedy which was about to commence, and they shuddered at it, understanding that it meant the end of their hopes of reconciliation.
Yet it was not Lutheranism that provoked the catastrophe of the wars of religion. After a first popular effervescence, marked by the rising of the German peasants and the insurrection of the Anabaptists, it submitted with docility to the control of the princes. It abandoned the Church to the secular power so completely that when Charles V decided to take action against it he had to fight the princes, and the conflict that followed was far more political than religious...
p503 But then Calvin made his appearance, and with him the... comparitively peaceful course... was suddenly modified. An austere, exclusive, intolerant religion claimed the right to impose itself upon the government, and to force it, even by rebellion, to obey the Word of God. Calvinism was no longer satisfied with the national existence which had hitherto contented Protestantism. The Calvinist propaganda aspired to conquer the world. The faith which it inspired in its "elect" urged them to political action, and this action was the beginning of the tragic epoch of the wars of religion...
...the industrialists, capitalists and politicians were protesting and rebelling in their turn against the restrictive system of trade corporations, against the economic limitations, the traditions and prejudices that impeded the free expansion of their activities. Everything was undergoing transformation, the economic world no less than the intellectual; the birth of modern capitalism was almost contemporaneous with the appearance of the first scientific works, and it collaborated with science in the discovery of the East Indies and America... we should do wrong to restrict the application of the word "Renaissance" to the new orientation of thought and art; it should be extended to the whole field of human activity, as revealed in its manifold aspects from the middle of the 15th century...
90's Music
And by that I mean the Pop music I heard on the radio during the 1990s. I think people think I'm joking when I praise 90's music, which seems to lack even the ignore-the-hair popularity of 80's music. But I'm serious.Like the Beatles -- and how often do you hear that comparison -- 90's Pop music has been so easy to hear on the radio that I've never bothered to buy it for my iPod. (Some artists, like the Indigo Girls, did not get much radio play so I do own them). Last night the YouTube algorithm offered me a Goo Goo Dolls hit, which lead to a little binge of their music and the music of some of their contemporaries. Lisa Loeb seemed as shocked as I was that she was performing her hit, "Stay," again twenty years later.
I know I've written about this before, but there's something disconcerting about being reminded that the artists of a much younger generation -- that you discovered and liked as you were on the verge of middle age -- are now middle aged themselves.
My fondness for the music of the '90s -- like my fondness for the music of the mid to late '60s -- may be at least in part because that was a good decade for me, over all. (Even Sid & Susie stopped their series of covers with the 1980s. Did they run out of gas as an act, or did they really think there was nothing worth covering in the next decade?)
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