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The Master and His Emissary CHAPTER 9 THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION

Author: Iain McgilChrist Publisher: London, UK: Yale University Press. Publish Date: 2010 Review Date: Status:💥

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how things are, rather than how they ought in theory to be,

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it is perhaps significant that one of the first great Renaissance writers, Petrarch, is also said to have been the first person to think of climbing a hill for the view, but it is striking that what he reports is, not the utility of the experience, but its beauty.

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Petrarch’s ‘view’ suggests an opening of the eyes: he saw what was there for all to see, but none had seen. This is a Renaissance characteristic, a sudden coming into awareness of aspects of experience that had unaccountably been neglected: in science, a return to looking at things carefully ‘as they are’ rather than as they were known to be;

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In the first part of this book I have referred to the fact that depth relies principally on the right hemisphere. Each hemisphere, however, has its contribution to make to perspective. Perspectival space is also related to individuality, another classic element of the Renaissance world view, since perspective mediates a view of the world from an individual standpoint – one particular place, at one particular time, rather than a God’s-eye ‘view from nowhere’. Like individuality, however, perspective is understood differently by the two hemispheres. Perspective is, on the one hand, the means of relating the individual to the world and enormously enhancing the sense of the individual as standing within the world, where depth includes and even draws in the viewer through the pull of the imagination; and, on the other, a means of turning the individual into an observing eye, a geometer coolly detached from his object’s space. Equally the rise of the sense of the individual as distinct from the society to which he belongs enables both an understanding of others as individuals with feelings exactly like one’s own, the grounds of empathy; and, at the same time, a detachment of the individual from the world around him that leads ominously in the direction of autism.

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The plays of Shakespeare constitute one of the most striking testimonies to the rise of the right hemisphere during this period. There is a complete disregard for theory and for category, a celebration of multiplicity and the richness of human variety, rather than the rehearsal of common laws for personality and behaviour according to type. Shakespeare’s characters are so stubbornly themselves, and not the thing that fate, or the dramatic plot, insists they should be, that their individuality subverts the often stereotyped pattern of their literary and historical sources:

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My favourite is the character of Barnardine, a prisoner awaiting hanging, whose only reason for being introduced into the plot of Measure for Measure is so that he can get on and be hanged, and his head substituted for that of Claudio; out of a sort of sheer bloody-minded refusal to be an idea rather than an individual, he will not ‘arise and be hanged’ when he should, and there is nothing for it, but a suitable head has to be found somewhere else.

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Shakespeare also famously confounded genres, introducing comic scenes into his tragedies, and characters such as Jacques into his comedies; at every level he confounded opposites, seeing that the ‘web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together’. Instead of standing outside or above his creation and telling us how to judge his characters, Shakespeare emphasises the inevitability of feeling for and with them, even with Shylock, again inherited with the story line as an a exemplar of moral corruption. Perhaps most importantly – and this was Maurice Morgann’s brilliant insight – Shakespeare brought into being figures such as Falstaff, that are incomprehensible in terms of the elements into which they could be analysed, but form, Gestalt-like, new coherent, living wholes.3 A coward, braggart and buffoon when taken to pieces and the evidence judged in the abstract, he nonetheless has qualities of bravery and generosity of heart which redeem what would have been just a catalogue of imperfections, not by ‘outweighing’ them, but by transforming them into something else within the quiddity of his being.

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3. Morgann, 1963.

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melancholy

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Passiontide,

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Comedy,

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tragedy).

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She notes that ‘emphasis on the groundless nature of the fear and sadness of melancholia declined in the eighteenth century. But it returned in nineteenth-century analyses …’13

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Radden, 2000, p. 57.

13. ibid., p. 12.

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The Renaissance is also the time when not just apparently opposed or contradictory ideas could be entertained together, when not just ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning in language are rife (from the obvious love for puns, ‘conceits’, and so on, to the whole array of fruitful ambiguities in which Elizabethan poetry inheres and consists), but when emotions are experienced as characteristically mixed.

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Michelangelo’s ‘la mia allegrezz’è la malinconia’* to the endless madrigals of sweet death and dying, reiterates the union of pleasure and pain, the affinity of sweetness and sadness.

Note: “my happiness is melancholy”

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Because of its reliance on indirect expression, metaphor and imagery, and its tolerance of the incomplete and unresolved, rather than on explicitness and the resolution of contradictory propositions in the pursuit of clarity and certainty, the epistemology of the right hemisphere is congenial to ambiguity and the union of opposites, where that of the left hemisphere cannot afford to be.

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It is worth saying something about the difference between desire and longing here. One of the tics, or tricks, whereby we nowadays dismiss anything that does not fit with the left-hemisphere view of the world, is to label it ‘Romantic’. Having done that we feel we have pulled the guts out of it. We have consigned it to a culture-bound view of the world which was relatively short-lived – not more than about fifty years or so – and long passé, with for good measure hints of excess, sentimentality and lack of intellectual rigour thrown in. Many of the views or attitudes that are so labelled turn out, however, to have enjoyed a rather more extensive and widespread existence than that would imply, as I hope to show later in this chapter. I would suggest that longing, not necessarily in the form of die blaue Blume of the Romantics, is one such concept, surely as ancient as humankind.

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One even finds prefigurements of the Romantic longing for what is lost with childhood in a poem such as Vaughan’s The Retreate, or in the Centuries of Traherne.

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It has been said that Castiglione, in his Book of the Courtier, perhaps too knowingly advocates the principle ars est celare artem (skill lies in hiding one’s skill). But is this too self-conscious? This has certainly been interpreted as encouragement to a form of benign deceit, whereby one pretends, especially if one is a gentlemanly courtier, to be able to do something effortlessly which in reality involves learning, and a degree of application. That may be true. However, skill is a process that is acquired – at times by mechanical and explicit methods, certainly – but increasingly, as one’s skill progresses, by intuitive imitation and by unreflective experience, a topic of relevance when one considers the fate of skills in the twentieth century. It is fatal to the art of skilled practitioners for them to display, during performance, any hint of the conscious effort that learning their skill involved (as Hazlitt said of the Indian jugglers): they must have achieved such a degree of mastery that they can perform intuitively, or the performance will fail. The technique, in other words, must be transparent: our eye should not be falling on the performers, but on what they do. That is not deceit, but being respectful of the nature of skill, a right-hemisphere intuitive process that remains implicit and embodied – in that sense hidden. This, I think, is the true meaning of Castiglione’s advice.

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individuality and originality, and the relationship between them, are going to be different depending on which hemisphere dominates. My view is that the sense of the importance of individuality and originality come in essence from the standing back mediated by both frontal lobes, and that the consequences are picked up in different ways by either hemisphere. We see ourselves as separate: in the right-hemisphere case, still in vital connection with the world around us; in the left-hemisphere case, because of the nature of the closed, self-contained system in which it operates, isolated, atomistic, powerful, competitive. Thus once again individuality and originality are not in themselves viewable as the prerogative of one hemisphere or the other: both exist for each hemisphere but in radically different ways, with radically different meanings.

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Magic is the way that the left hemisphere sees powers over which it has no control. This is similar to the paranoia which the left hemisphere displays in schizophrenia, in relation to the intuitive actions and thought processes stemming from the right hemisphere, ascribing them to alien forces, or malicious influence.

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the rehabilitation of earthly, embodied, sense-mediated existence, in contrast to the derogation of the flesh in the Middle Ages. For Montaigne, as for Erasmus, the body became present once more as part of us, therefore potentially itself spiritual, to be loved, rather than just seen as a prison of the soul:

Those who wish to take our two principal pieces apart and to sequester one from the other are wrong. We must on the contrary couple and join them closely together. We must command the soul not to withdraw to its quarters, not to entertain itself apart, not to despise and abandon the body (something which it cannot do anyway except by some monkey-like counterfeit) but to rally to it, take it in its arms and cherish it, help it, look after it, counsel it, and when it strays set it to rights and bring it back home again.32

One even begins to find an inversion of the until then usual assumption that the soul might be wiser than the body:

Forsake not Nature nor misunderstand her:

Her mysteries are read without faith’s eyesight:

She speaketh in our flesh; and from our senses,

Delivers down her wisdoms to our reason

wrote Fulke Greville;33 and in Marvell one finds A Dialogue between the Soul and Body in which the last word, literally and metaphorically, goes to the body.34

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32. Montaigne, ‘On presumption’, Essais, Bk. II:17 (1993, p. 738). See also Screech, 1983, p. 115.

33. Greville, ‘Chorus Quintus Tartarorum’, from Mustapha.

34. One sees something of the same in the visual arts, with the ‘choice’ theme, which had been a common topos in Greek and Roman mythological thinking, gaining prominence in Renaissance art. I agree with Hall (2008, p. 129) that it suggests an antipathy to moral absolutism which is highly characteristic of the Renaissance. More than that, the choices of the flesh are often rendered subversively eloquent: e.g. Raphael’s Allegory of Virtue and Pleasure, or Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love.

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The relationship between ourselves and the world that has depth was a source of endless fascination to the metaphysical poets, particularly Donne, Herbert (e.g. The Elixir) and Traherne (e.g. Shadows in the Water), who all use images such as the plane of the glass in the window, the flat surface of the mirror, and the reflective surface of a pool of water, to explore imaginative contact with a world beyond the plane of vision: seeing, but seeing through. The world is not a brute fact but, like a myth or metaphor, semi-transparent, containing all its meaning within itself, yet pointing to something lying beyond itself.

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As I suggested earlier, a sense of depth is intrinsic to seeing things in context. This is true both of the depth of space and the depth of time, but here I would say that it implies, too, a metaphysical depth, a respect for the existence of something at more than one level, as is inevitable in myth or metaphor. It is this respect for context that underlies the sense in the Renaissance of the interconnectedness of knowledge and understanding, the uncovering of answering patterns across different realms, ultimately implying the necessity of the broadest possible context for knowledge. Hence the rise of what came to be dubbed ‘Renaissance man’, Heraclitus’ ‘enquirers into many things indeed’.

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The return to the historic past, the rediscovery of the Classical world, was not a fact-finding mission, driven by curiosity or utility: its importance lay not just in the increase of knowledge in itself, but in the exemplars of wisdom, virtue, and statecraft that it yielded. It was recognised that human dignity lay in our unique capacity to choose our own destiny, through the models we choose and the ideals towards which we are drawn, not simply through the blind pursuit of reason wherever it might lead. This involved self-knowledge, and the fascination with the unique and different paths taken by different personalities towards their particular goals – hence the importance of the recording of individual lives, and the rise of both true biography (as opposed to hagiography) and autobiography.

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One of the most famous and entertaining of Renaissance self-portraits must be that of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, otherwise known as Pope Pius II. This is not only a landmark in the literature of self-exploration (as well as self-promotion), but importantly reveals a love of nature for its own sake, another feature of the new world of the Renaissance seen in Dante and Petrarch,

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In the first chapter of Part II, I suggested that there are two ways in which the inauthenticity of re-presentation, of the left hemisphere’s world, can stimulate a response. One is the tendency to redress the loss, through an urgent longing for the vibrancy and freshness of the world that the right hemisphere delivers; the other is quite the opposite – a rejection of it, since that right hemisphere world now comes to be seen as intrinsically inauthentic, and therefore as invalid. Instead of a corrective swing of the pendulum, therefore, there is a loss of homeostasis, and the result is positive feedback, whereby the left hemisphere’s values simply become further entrenched.

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Though we have been focussing on a return to the right hemisphere in the flowering of the Renaissance, with an almost magnetic attraction towards the newly discovered history, writings, arts and monuments of the ancient world, which opened eyes to the vibrancy of a living world beyond the mediaeval ‘world-picture’, the decline of the Middle Ages yields an example of both processes at work.

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One can see the second process (a rejection of the right hemisphere’s world) in the way in which the decline of metaphoric understanding of ceremony and ritual into the inauthentic repetition of empty procedures in the Middle Ages prompted, not a revitalisation of metaphoric understanding, but an outright rejection of it, with the advent of the Reformation. This cataclysmic convulsion is said to have begun with Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, which he nailed to the door of the Schloßkirche in Wittenberg in 1517.

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In the subsequent unfolding of events, however, Luther could be seen as a somewhat tragic figure. He was himself tolerant, conservative, his concern being for authenticity, and a return to experience, as opposed to reliance on authority. His attitude to the place of images in worship and in the life of the Church was balanced and reasonable: his target was not images themselves (which he actually endorsed and encouraged) but precisely the functionalist abuse of images, images which he thought should be reverenced. Yet despite this, he found himself unleashing forces of destruction that were out of his control, forces which set about destroying the very things he valued, forces against which he inveighed finally without effect. Describing the fanaticism of the time, ‘I have seen them return from hearing the sermon, as if inspired by an evil spirit’, wrote Erasmus, ‘the faces of all showing a curious wrath and ferocity.’39

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39. See Huizinga, 1957, p. 177.

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There are, I think, interesting parallels with the fate of Heidegger, struggling to transcend the Cartesian subjective/objective polarity, committed to the difficult business of authentic encounter with whatever ‘is’, a process requiring careful and scrupulous attention; but soon hijacked by those who wished to take his ‘problematising’ of the concept of objective truth as the signal for a free-for-all in which all values are ‘merely relative’ (interpreted as meaning values have no force), in which there is no longer any ‘objective’ standard of truth (interpreted as meaning no truth), and in which ultimately an anarchic destruction of everything Heidegger valued and struggled to defend was unleashed in his name.

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Here too, as in Luther’s case, I would say the original impulse, towards authenticity, came from the right hemisphere, but quickly became annexed to the agenda of the left hemisphere. Not by a revolutionary inversion, but by a slippage of meaning which repays attention.

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Luther perceived that the inner and outer realms, however one expresses it – the realm of the mind/soul and that of the body, the realm of the invisible and the visible – needed to be as one, otherwise the outward show had nothing to say about the inward condition. In other words, the visible world should be a ‘presentation’, in the literal sense that something ‘becomes present’ to us in all its actuality, as delivered by the right hemisphere. This perception, which is simply part of, and entirely continuous with, the Renaissance insistence on the seamlessness of the incarnate world, inspired Luther to decry the emptiness that results when the outer and inner worlds are divorced. But his followers took it to mean that the outer world was in itself empty, and that therefore the only authenticity lay in the inner world alone. The result of this is that the outer world becomes seen as merely a ‘show’, a ‘re-presentation’ of something elsewhere and nowhere – not an image, since an image is a living fusion of the inner and outer, but a mere signifier, as delivered by the left hemisphere. The transition that is made in this important derailment of Luther’s intention is not from belief in outer forms to belief in inner forms, but from a view of outer and inner as essentially fused aspects of one and the same thing to the belief that they are separate (‘either/or’). Thus it should not be thought that the impetus of the Renaissance was abruptly derailed by a contrary movement of the spirit at the Reformation: there was a seamless transition from one position into its opposite, the one morphed into the other.

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The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times. As Schleiermacher put it, the Reformation and the Enlightenment have this in common, that ‘everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed. Imagination is not to be filled with [what are now thought of as] airy images.’40 In their search for the one truth, both movements attempted to do away with the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere, particularly in its mythical and metaphoric function, in favour of the word, the stronghold of the left hemisphere, in pursuit of unambiguous certainty.

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40. Schleiermacher, 1893, p. 126: ‘… alles übernatürliche und wunderbare ist proskribiert, die Phantasie soll nicht mit leeren Bildern angefüllt werden’ (‘Über die Bildung zur Religion’, 1958, p. 82).

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Here I take Joseph Koerner’s recent magisterial treatment of Reformation theology, politics and philosophy through their relationship with the visual image, with symbolism, and with the written word, as a major source (there is no comparable work that so intelligently links these different aspects of Reformation culture).41 The problem of the Reformation was, according to Koerner, one of ‘either/or’, a ‘hatred based on the absolute distinction between truth and falsehood’.42 Because of the inability to accept the ambiguous or metaphorical,

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and because of a fear of the power of the imagination, images were objects of terror. Statues had to be reduced to ‘mere wood’. In fact the supposed ‘idolaters’ never had believed they were worshipping statues – that self-serving fiction existed only in the minds of the iconoclasts, who could not understand that divinity could find its place between one ‘thing’ (the statue) and another (the beholder), rather than having to reside, fixed, in the ‘thing’ itself. Luther himself said as much: ‘I believe that there is no person, or certainly very few, who does not understand that the crucifix that stands over there is not my God – for my God is in Heaven – but rather only a sign.’43

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43. Luther, 1883–1986, vol. 10, i, p. 31; quoted by Koerner, 2004, pp. 99–100.

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Decapitation of statues by the Reformers took place because of the confounding of the animate and the inanimate, and the impossibility of seeing that one can live in the other metaphorically. In a world where metaphoric understanding is lost we are reduced to ‘either/or’, as Koerner says. Either the statue is God or it is a thing: since it is ‘obviously’ not God, it must be a thing, and therefore ‘mere wood’, in which case it has no place in worship. To see that ‘mere’ wood can partake of the divine requires seeing it as a metaphor, and being able to see that, precisely because it is a metaphor rather than a representation, it is itself divine. It is not just something non-divine representing the divine, it is something divine.

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This is the difference between the belief that the bread and wine represent the body and blood of Christ, and the belief that they are in some important sense the body and blood of Christ, metaphors of it. It was the explicit analytical left hemisphere attempt to untangle this that had led, in mediaeval scholastic theology, to an ‘either/or’, and resulted in the improbable doctrine of transubstantiation: that at the moment of the priest’s pronouncing the words of consecration, what had been mere bread and mere wine became suddenly, and literally, the body and blood of Christ. What the right hemisphere had understood intuitively, being comfortable with metaphoric meaning, was forced into the straightjacket of legalistic thinking, and forced to be either literal bread and wine or literal body and blood. At the Reformation this problem re-emerged. To say it was not literally body and blood seemed to Catholic thinking to sell out to the view that it was just a representation, which clearly is inadequate to the reality of metaphoric thinking, in which the body and blood come about not just because of a few words spoken at a specific moment but because of the entire context of the mass, including all its words and procedures, the presence and faithful disposition of the congregation, etc. It is contexts, and the disposition of the mind of those who partake in them, another pair of right hemisphere entities, which enable metaphors to work.

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What Koerner’s book demonstrates at length and in detail is the way in which the Reformation replaces presentation with re-presentation (in the terms of this book, replaces the right-hemisphere realm with the left-hemisphere realm). What is experienced by the observer (itself a telling concept) is transposed to the meta-level. One well-known work approved by the Reformers, and emanating from their spirit, appears to deny the possibility that the work of art could be something greater than its transposition into verbal meaning: ‘its surfaces support words while its depths are filled only with what words refer to’. In such a canvas, ‘the choirboys sing from a hymnal displaying neither the text nor the music of their song, but the biblical command requiring them to sing. Words bathe in the grey light of what seems a useless significance.’44

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44. Koerner, 2004, p. 26.

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There are several ways in which the Reformation anticipated the hermetic self-reflexivity of post-modernism, perfectly expressed in the infinite regress of self-referral within some of the visual images which Koerner examines (pictures which portray the setting in which the picture stands, and contain therefore the picture itself, itself containing a further depiction of the setting, containing an ever smaller version of the picture, etc). One of Cranach’s masterpieces, discussed by Koerner, is in its self-referentiality the perfect expression of left-hemisphere emptiness, and a precursor of post-modernism. There is no longer anything to point to beyond, nothing Other, so it points pointlessly to itself. Rather paradoxically for a movement that began as a revolt against apparently empty structures, it is in fact the structures, not the content, of religion, that come into focus as the content. But such is the fate of those who insist on ‘either/or’, rather than the wisdom of semi-transparency.

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Images become explicit, understood by reading a kind of key, which demonstrates that the image is thought of simply as an adornment, whose only function is to fix a meaning more readily in the mind – a meaning which could have been better stated literally. This anticipates the Enlightenment view of metaphor as an adornment that shows the writer’s skill, or entertains, or aids flagging attention, rather than as an indispensable part of understanding. ‘Sacrament becomes information-transfer’, writes Koerner. ‘Its material elements convey not substances, but meanings, and these latter are immutably conveyed regardless of the form they take.’ In the twentieth century, too, we have seen liturgical reformers embrace a view that the ‘meaning’ is independent of the form, one of the most damaging legacies of the Reformation. Continuing the idea that sacrament has been reduced to information transfer, Koerner continues that the ‘seeming afterthought, that Christ’s words need explaining, completes a scenography of data downloaded from a storage medium. Even the words of sacrament count only if they mean something, for all else “serve[s] no purpose”.’48

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48. ibid., p. 151 (emphasis in original).

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This is the era of the triumph of the written word, and words actually acquire the status of things. (I am reminded of Sam Johnson’s wise admonition that ‘words are the daughters of earth’, whereas ‘things are the sons of heaven’.) ‘In Protestant culture’, writes Koerner, ‘words acquired the status of things by their aggressive material inscription.’ A compendium of consoling sayings consists mostly of ‘sayings about sayings’.49 It is fascinating that the way to get the meaning across is apparently to repeat the words endlessly, drumming it further and further into the realm of the over-familiar, again the domain of the left hemisphere. For example, the words verbum Domini manet in aeternum (‘the word of the Lord shall endure for ever’ – yet a further element of self-referentiality) became so familiar that it was reduced to the acronym VDMIE. (Note that these acronyms start with Roman bureaucracy (e.g. SPQR) and are, I would say, a hallmark of the bureaucratic mind – look at modern officialdom.) The letters VDMIE were embroidered and reproduced endlessly, ultimately becoming, despite the Reformers, a totemic, apotropaic device, a talisman with the status of an idol, as the reified words in their abbreviated form become the only available ‘thing’ for the sacred to attach to. As Koerner puts it, ‘materialised for display, words become objects of ritual action’; a point also made by Kriss-Rettenbeck: ‘the word freezes into an idol’.50 I would say that the abbreviations, like the impatient reduction to ‘etc.’ (‘the lamb of God, etc.’), betray the boredom and ultimate emptiness that attaches to signifiers that refer only to themselves, that have departed into the realm of the inauthentic through over-familiarity.

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Pictures were defaced, often replaced by boards with written texts, and sometimes actually written over: a concrete expression of the triumph of language. To detached observation the rituals of Catholicism, lacking speech, cultivating rather what has to remain imprecise, implicit, but richly metaphorical, became ‘senseless and indecipherable’.51 ‘Image-breakers ceaselessly say that images cannot speak’: their failing is their silence. They do not use words.52

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49. ibid., p. 283 (emphasis added).

50. ibid., p. 289; Kriss-Rettenbeck, 1963, p. 3.

51. ibid., p. 47.

52. ibid., p. 136.

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These different ways of looking at the world – ‘proclamation’ of the word versus ‘manifestation’ of the divine – are aligned with hemisphere differences. As Ricoeur demonstrated, the ‘emergence of the word from the numinous is … the primordial trait’ that differentiates proclamation from manifestation.53 For ‘emergence of the word from the numinous’ read the triumph of the left hemisphere over the right.

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53. Ricoeur, 1978, p. 21; see also Ashbrook, 1984.

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At this time, according to Koerner, pictures become ‘art’, moved out of their living context in worship, to an artificial context where they can become allowable and safe, with frames round them (often pictures had literally to be reframed because of the exigencies of smuggling them away from the iconoclasts to safety).

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Contexts bring meanings from the whole of our selves and our lives, not just from the explicit theoretical, intellectual structures which are potentially under control. The power-hungry will always aim to substitute explicit for intuitive understanding. Intuitive understanding is not under control, and therefore cannot be trusted by those who wish to manipulate and dominate the way we think; for them it is vital that such contexts, with their hidden powerful meanings that have accrued through sometimes millennia of experience, are eradicated. In terms of the conflict that forms the subject of this book, the left hemisphere, the locus of will to power, needs to destroy the potential for the right hemisphere to have influence through what is implicit and contextual. Hence the Calvinists set about an erasure of the past, involving the destruction of everything that would nourish memory of how things had been – a sort of Red Revolution, ‘that will leave nothing in the church whereof any memory will be’.54

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54. Koerner, 2004, p. 58.

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The body is the ultimate refractory context of experience. There was a revulsion against the representation of Christ’s body and his bodily suffering, which was thought to show nothing of importance. A Manichaeism is at work here which rejects the body: ‘Christ says that his own flesh is of no use but that the spirit is of use and gives life.’55 This is related to the more widespread loss of the incarnate nature of metaphor as a whole, and its substitution by simile: in the Eucharist ‘this is my body’ becomes ‘this signifies (is like) my body’. But there is another reason for rejecting the body: it is equated with the transient, ‘earthly corruption’, whereas the word is equated with enduring changelessness, which is in turn how the divine is now seen.

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55. ibid., p. 138.

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Some further interesting phenomena begin to appear. Rejection of the body, and of embodied existence in an incarnate world, in favour of an invisible, discarnate realm of the mind, naturally facilitates the application of general rules. In other words, abstraction facilitates generalisation. Both retreat from the body and the seeking out and development of general rules are fundamental aspects of the world delivered by the left hemisphere, and they are mutually reinforcing. The Reformers were keen to do away with the concrete instantiations of holiness in any one place or object. The invisible Church being the only church to have any reality, the Church existed literally everywhere, and actual churches became less significant: every place was as good as any other in which to hold a service. The force of this was that every place was as holy as any other, provided the word of God could be proclaimed there, which by definition it could.

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But holiness, like all other qualities, depends on a distinction being made. In an important sense, if everything and everywhere is holy, then nothing and nowhere is holy. Once freed from having to consider the actual qualities of existing things, places and people, ideas can be applied blanket-fashion; but the plane of interaction between the world of ideas and the world of things which they represent becoming, by the same token, ‘frictionless’, the wheels of words lose their purchase, and spin uselessly, without force to move anything in the world in which we actually live. A recognisably similar development became familiar in the twentieth century, where the retreat of art into the realm of the idea, into concepts, enabled it to become a commonplace that ‘everything is art’; or that, properly considered, everything is as beautiful as everything else; with the inevitable consequence that the meaning of art and the meaning of beauty became eroded, and it has become almost a solecism, seen as betraying a lack of sophisticated (i.e. left-hemisphere) understanding, to interrogate artworks according to such criteria.

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I have emphasised the left hemisphere’s inclination towards division, as opposed to the apprehension of connectedness made by the right hemisphere. But there are two types of division and two types of union. In Part I, I made a distinction, which is central to the thesis of this book, between two ways of looking at ‘parts’ and ‘aggregates’. In the left-hemisphere view, there is at one level the part or fragment, and, at the other, the generalised abstraction, aggregated from the parts. In the right hemisphere view, there is the individual entity in all its distinctness, at one level, and the whole to which it belongs, at the other. It is, in other words, the special capacity of the right hemisphere both to deliver wholes and to deal with particularities: these are not contradictory roles. It is the special capacity of the left hemisphere to derive generalities, but generalities have nothing to do with wholes; they are in fact necessarily built from parts, aspects, fragments, of existing things – things which, in their total selfhood, individuality, or haeccitas, could never have been generalised. Every existing entity comes into being only through boundaries, because of distinctions: which is perhaps why the Book of Genesis speaks of God creating by dividing – the earth from the heavens, the sea from the dry land, the night from the day, and so on. The drive towards separation and distinction brings individual things into being. By contrast, the drive towards generalisation, with its effective ‘democratisation’ of its object (of the holy, of art, of the beautiful), has the effect of destroying its object as a living force.

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Koerner draws attention to the bureaucratic categorisation that springs up in the Lutheran Church. And, as Max Weber emphasised, in his repeated explorations of the relation between Protestantism, capitalism and bureaucratisation, bureaucratisation (and categorisation, with which it is so closely related) is an instrument of power. Perhaps, more importantly, Protestantism being a manifestation of left-hemisphere cognition is – even though its conscious self-descriptions would deny this – itself inevitably linked to the will to power, since that is the agenda of the left hemisphere. Bureaucratisation and capitalism, though not necessarily themselves the best of bedfellows, and at times perhaps in conflict, are each manifestations of the will to power, and each is linked to Protestantism. Weber held that the cognitive structure of Protestantism was closely associated with capitalism: both involve an exaggerated emphasis on individual agency, and a discounting of what might be called ‘communion’. An emphasis on individual agency inevitably manifests itself, as David Bakan has suggested, in self-protection, self-assertion, and self-expansion, whereas communion manifests itself in the sense of being at one with others. ‘Agency’, he writes, ‘manifests itself in isolation, alienation, and aloneness: communion in contact, openness and union. Agency manifests itself in the urge to master: communion in non-contractual co-operation.’56 Success in material terms became, under Protestantism, a sign of spiritual prowess, the reward of God to his faithful.

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56. Bakan, 1966, p. 15.

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As Weber saw, modern capitalism is anti-traditional – desperate, like bureaucratisation, to do away with the past. Tradition is simply the embodied wisdom of previous generations. It should change, as all things subject to the realm of the right hemisphere change, develop and evolve, but it should do so organically: it is not wise to reject it or uproot it altogether and on principle. But to the left hemisphere, tradition represents a challenge to its brave plan to take control, now, in the interests of salvation as it conceives it.

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Removing the places of holiness, and effectively dispensing with the dimension of the sacred, eroded the power of the princes of the Church, but it helped to buttress the power of the secular state. The capacity for religion to crystallise structures of power and obedience was soon allied under the Reformers to the power of the state. ‘Sacred centres thus gave way to centres of attention’, writes Koerner, referring to the physical arrangement of the new church interior, in which the focus is no longer the altar, but the pulpit. The Lutheran assembly, despite its emphasis on the word, ‘controlled sight more rigorously’ than the Roman Catholic Church had ever done.57 Its emphasis on punishment for departing from the moral law, and its panoptical monitoring of the populace, are imaged in the exalted position of the pulpit, the place of dissemination of the moral law, often situated at a dizzying height over the heads of the masses near the roof of the church, high above the altar, with tiers of seating for the secular hierarchies in the galleries at the next level beneath, each positioned far over the heads of the obedient populace, ranged in geometric order below.

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57. Koerner, 2004, pp. 420–21.

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I would note that this geometricity of Reformed churches, the people neatly placed in symmetrical ranks on the floors which are laid out like graph paper (see Figure 9.3), is highly suggestive of left-hemisphere functioning.58

Remember that, for the left hemisphere, space is not something lived, experienced through the body, and articulated by personal concerns as it is for the right hemisphere, but something symmetrical, measured and positioned according to abstract measures. And this is something we can all recall from personal experience: in a congregation seated neatly in rows, one feels like an obedient subject, one of the masses, whereas standing in a crowd, as one would have done in a pre-Reformation church, one is part of a living thing, that is that community of living human beings, there and then: one of humanity, not one of ‘the people’. This is what Nietzsche is referring to, when he draws attention to the Reformed church’s one

Fig. 9.3 Sermon in the Hall of the Reformed Community of Stein near Nuremberg, attrib. Lorenz Strauch, c. 1620

speaking mouth [the preacher] and very many ears [the congregation] … Standing at a modest distance behind both groups, with a certain tense supervisory mien, is the state, there in order from time to time to recollect that it is the purpose, goal, and model of this odd speaking and listening procedure …

the procedure of Reformed religion.59

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58. See, e.g., Koerner (ibid.), figs. 209 & 201; (‘graph paper’) 209, 82 &

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The focus is on immobility and fixity. Where the Roman Church encouraged and incorporated movement, walking and processing, the new Church’s chairs are everywhere the most visible feature of the Reformed interior, enforcing stasis and system, and (interestingly, despite its democratic rhetoric) social order and hierarchy.

Having repudiated pious donation as belonging to a false religion of works, the Lutheran confession discovered in church seating a new, lucrative and … continuous resource. People’s desire to distinguish themselves in this world by sitting above or before their neighbour funded a church which preached that such distinctions were of no account.60

And Ernst Troeltsch takes the point further, emphasising the transfer of power to the state: ‘Thus the aim that was realized in Catholicism through a directly divine church order, Lutheranism, in its purely spiritualised form, stripped of every kind of hierarchical or sacerdotal organ, realized through the government and the civil administration, to which, however, precisely for that reason, there accrued a semi-divinity.’61 Instead of, as under the old dispensation, all being equal ‘below’ the priestly ministrants, representing the power of God, the people of the Reformed Church were thrown back on the petty gradations of secular difference. Significantly one sees in the iconography of the Reformers depictions of princes kneeling, not just before the anonymous priest, but before a particular human individual, Luther, where previously they would have humbled themselves before the anonymous power of the priesthood, representing Divinity.62

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59. Cited at Koerner, 2004, p. 429.

60. ibid., p. 415–16.

61. ibid., p. 413.

62. ibid., fig. 211.

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What I wish to emphasise is the transition, within the Reformation, from what are initially the concerns of the right hemisphere to those of the left hemisphere: how a call for authenticity, and a reaction against the undoubtedly empty and corrupt nature of some practices of the mediaeval Roman Catholic Church, an attempt therefore to return from a form of re-presentation to the true presence of religious feeling, turned rapidly into a further entrenchment of inauthenticity.

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Of course the Reformation was not a unitary phenomenon: the Elizabethan settlement was very different from anything in Calvin’s Geneva, and that too differed from the circumstances and beliefs of the Puritans who set sail for New England. But there are often common elements, and when we see them we are, in my view, witnessing the slide into the territory of the left hemisphere. These include the preference for what is clear and certain over what is ambiguous or undecided; the preference for what is single, fixed, static and systematised, over what is multiple, fluid, moving and contingent; the emphasis on the word over the image, on literal meaning in language over metaphorical meaning, and the tendency for language to refer to other written texts or explicit meanings, rather than, through the cracks in language, if one can put it that way, to something Other beyond; the tendency towards abstraction, coupled with a downgrading of the realm of the physical; a concern with re-presentation rather than with presentation; in its more Puritanical elements, an attack on music; the deliberate attempt to do away with the past and the contextually modulated, implicit wisdom of a tradition, replacing it with a new rational, explicit, but fundamentally secular, order; and an attack on the sacred that was vehement in the extreme, and involved repeated and violent acts of desecration.

In essence the cardinal tenet of Christianity – the Word is made Flesh – becomes reversed, and the Flesh is made Word.

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THE BEGINNINGS OF ENLIGHTENMENT

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‘I embrace most willingly those of Philosophy’s opinions which are most solid, that is to say, most human’, wrote Montaigne, but:

to my mind she is acting like a child when she gets on her high-horse, preaching to us that it is a barbarous match to wed the divine to the earthy, the rational to the irrational, the strict to the permissive, the decent to the indecent … A fine thing to get up on stilts, for even on stilts we must ever walk with our legs! And upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.63

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63. Montaigne, ‘On Experience’, Essais, Bk. III:13 (1993, pp. 1265–9). Translation adapted: Screech translates ‘mets sur ses ergots’ (which I have translated ‘gets on her high-horse’) more closely as ‘starts crowing out ergo’.

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In his classic analysis of modernity, Cosmopolis, the philosopher Stephen Toulmin, a disciple of Wittgenstein, saw two distinct phases to the origins of modernity. One was that of Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare and Montaigne, a tolerant, literary and humanistic phase, in which horizons expanded – literally as well as metaphorically, since this was the age of the explorer, and a fascination with other peoples and their customs, a revelling in difference. The second, a scientific and philosophical phase, he believes turned its back on the earlier phase, in terms more rigid and dogmatic: ‘there are good precedents for the suggestion that the 17th century saw a reversal of Renaissance values’.64 One might think that odd in view of, for example, the received version of Galileo’s dispute with the Church – a piece of hagiography that suits the dogma of our own age, that Galileo must have been the champion of reason in the face of irrational bigotry on the part of the Church. In fact his ideas were certainly not dismissed by either the pope or his cardinals, who indeed let him know that they admired his work; and, if it had not been for Galileo’s personality, he would not have found himself placed under house arrest, which led to his canonisation in the chronicles of science. As Toulmin points out, the Church did end up becoming less tolerant, but this came about during the Counter-Reformation, a reaction to the excesses of the Reformation, at a time when, as he amply demonstrates, philosophy and science, too, became more inflexible and doctrinaire.

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64. Toulmin, 1990, pp. 23–4.

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There was, according to Toulmin, a narrowing, not an expansion, of concern, as one moves from the sixteenth century to the seventeenth, from the world of Pantagruel to that of Pilgrim’s Progress, from Shakespeare to Racine, from Montaigne to Descartes – a ‘narrowing in the focus of preoccupations, and a closing in of intellectual horizons’. Reason itself became narrower in conception, no longer respecting context, as Aristotle had insisted, when he held that what was reasonable in clinical medicine was different from what was logical in geometrical theory.65 A universal, timeless theory became the only true subject of philosophy: abstract generalisations and rules for perfection superseded acceptance of the contingency of difference. Toulmin identifies during this period a shift from the reciprocal oral mode to the fixed and unidirectional written mode, from the local and particular to the general, from concrete to abstract, from practical to theoretical, from time-dependent and transitory to timeless and permanent: in each case, where both had been previously held in equilibrium (right hemisphere with left), only the second became acceptable.66 But, as Aristotle put it, ‘that which lasts long is no whiter than that which perishes in a day’.67

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65. ibid., p. 21.

66. ibid., pp. 30–34.

67. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1096b4.

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‘Few are more aware of the power of imagination than I am’, wrote Montaigne,

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In the end his poems demonstrate, as does the music of J. S. Bach, that, at this point in history, it was still possible lightly to unpick parts of the whole without losing the Gestalt – in Donne’s case, though, at times only just.

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And they were aware of it. It is not just Hamlet’s ‘the times are out of joint’, or Ulysses’ great speech in Troilus and Cressida (Act 1, scene 3): ‘Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark what discord follows…’ It is Donne, too:

Then, as mankinde, so is the worlds whole frame

Quite out of ioynt …

And freely men confesse that this world’s spent,

When in the Planets, and the Firmament

They seeke so many new; they see that this

Is crumbled out againe to his Atomis.

‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;

All iust supply, and all Relation:

Prince, Subiect, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,

For euery man alone thinkes he hath got

To be a Phoenix, and that there can be

None of that kinde, of which he is, but he.

This is the worlds condition now …

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While Shakespeare and Donne would inevitably have had in mind the political and religious upheavals of the age, it is surely something far greater than that, a different sort of power game, that they have intuited. They lament the loss of the relation of part to whole, of individual to community, of the context, the cosmos, to which each single soul belongs – each now standing alone. There is a loss of harmony (‘each thing meets in mere oppugnancy’, in Ulysses’ phrase), the whole has become a heap of bits and pieces (‘crumbled out again to its atoms’). And, as Ulysses reminds us, this can have only one ending:

Then every thing include itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite,

And appetite, an universal wolf

(So doubly seconded with will and power),

Must make perforce an universal prey,

And last eat up himself.

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‘The scientific revolution only gathered pace in the early seventeenth century, after the flowering of the Renaissance was over’, according to Peter Hacker.75 This would certainly fit with the publication of Galileo’s Dialogue in 1632. But the spirit does evolve out of that of the Renaissance and the respect for the natural world. The move to phenomenal observation led to the flourishing not only of the arts, but also of the sciences, which were importantly, not yet distinct from them.

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75. Hacker, 2001, p. 46.

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Francis Bacon’s advocacy of empirical method is an important factor in the scientific revolution. He was certainly an enquirer into many things (according to Aubrey, he died trying to create the world’s first frozen chicken), but the spirit in which his enquiries were undertaken has been mistaken by some recent commentators. It is true that he did coin the phrase ‘knowledge is power’, which in retrospect shows signs of less happy things to come; but it is often forgotten that the context in which he wrote those words was actually that of God’s foreknowledge of the world he had created, and could therefore only ever be applied by human beings to the knowledge we have of our own creations (machines) – never of Nature herself.76 There has become current an idea that Bacon advocated putting Nature (personified according to convention as a woman) on the rack. While there is certainly something in Bacon’s language that suggests forcing Nature to give up her secrets reluctantly, nowhere does he say that she should be tortured, or put on the rack, an idea that seems to have come from a casual remark by Leibniz in a letter to a colleague, and which was perpetuated by Ernst Cassirer.77 What Bacon says is that we learn more by constraining the conditions under which we make our observations, in other words by carefully designed experiments, than we can do from casual observation of Nature unconstrained – an acknowledgment that, in Heraclitus’ phrase, ‘Nature loves to hide.’ He was deeply respectful of Nature, and wrote that ‘Nature to be commanded must be obeyed … The subtlety of Nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.’78

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76. Bacon, 1859, ‘Of Heresies’, p. 253.

77. Pesic, 1999; Mathews, 1996.

78. Bacon, 1858, Bk. I, aphorisms III & X, pp. 47–8.

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It was not long, however, before Descartes, certainly, was saying, in very different spirit, that science will make us ‘the lords and masters of nature’.79 And gone is Bacon’s careful recognition that, while observing Nature attentively is essential, she is many times subtler than our senses or our understanding. If Descartes had observed that caveat, he would never have made the fatal mistake of believing ‘that I could take it as a general rule that the things we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true’.80 That was the fallacy that was to derail the next three centuries of Western thought.

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79. Descartes, 1984–91a, Part VI, pp. 142–3.

80. ibid., Part IV, p. 127.

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One of the defining features of the Renaissance must be its opening of the eyes to experience, initially almost exclusively personal experience, in preference to what is ‘known’ to be the case, the teachings of scholastic theory and received opinion. There is a corresponding respect for the quiddity of individual things and people, rather than their being seen as members of categories.

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As the Renaissance progresses, there becomes evident, however, a gradual shift of emphasis from the right hemisphere way of being towards the vision of the left hemisphere,

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originality comes to mean not creative possibility but the right to ‘free thinking’, the way to throw off the shackles of the past and its traditions, which are no longer seen as an inexhaustible source of wisdom, but as tyrannical, superstitious and irrational – and therefore wrong. This becomes the basis of the hubristic movement which came to be known as the Enlightenment.

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Notes