The World Needs a Renaissance, Not Enlightenment

By Adam Sedia

Featured in New Lyre Summer 2023

Calling someone “enlightened” is considered a compliment: they see clearly, as opposed to groping blindly in the darkness. With this same connotation the “Enlightenment” of the eighteenth century is viewed as a positive development: an age when science triumphed over superstition and Europe emerged from the darkness of religious dogma. At least that is the narrative. 

“Renaissance” is a more neutral term, signifying rebirth. Something old is new again. It lacks any notion of progress, of light shining through the darkness, enabling forward vision. Indeed, it implies something of a throwback, a return to something earlier and therefore more primitive. 

These connotations require serious reexamination. Comparing the Renaissance of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries with the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century reveals how wrong the connotations are, and how an “Enlightenment,” at least as conceived in the eighteenth century, is a dream that produces monsters. And “Renaissance” for its part is not just rebirth, but the preservation of what is beautiful and truthful in the old to forge something new. 

This is a crucial feature of the Renaissance, and what made it such a transformative period in Western Civilization. The artists and scholars of the day were not strict “restorationists” attempting to relive Classical Greece and Rome exactly as they were, nor even “fusionists” seeking to graft one culture onto another. Instead, their aim was to rediscover the ideas and aesthetics that made Classical culture so attractive to them and apply them to their own society as it was. In this paradigm, “old” and “new” are meaningless; the good in both is in harmony and eternal because it is good. 

The historical development of the Renaissance illustrates how this development actually occurred. 

The Renaissance 

The vernacular term “Renaissance” refers to the more specific Golden Renaissance, beginning in Italy in the fourteenth century and expanding to the rest of Europe in the following two centuries. It was actually the fifth in a series of renaissances that attempted to restore classical culture to its original flourishing in Ancient Greece and Rome. These prior “mini renaissances” flourished in the courts of Justinian, Charlemagne, Otto I, and Frederick II, all of whom bore the title “Caesar” (Kaiser in German) and attempted cultural revival as part of a larger program of political revival of the Roman Empire. 

The renaissance that we today term the Renaissance, by contrast, had its origins not among emperors, but among the scholarly class of Northern Italy. It was an organic development, the product of many factors. The prior renaissances preserved Greek and Roman manuscripts through copying, giving scholars access to the classics. The Medieval Church’s development of universities, created great libraries and a new class of academics. The Castilian conquest of Córdoba in 1236 acquired the great library assembled by the Arab rulers, and disseminated the collection throughout Europe, including many Greek works previously thought lost, including those of Aristotle. And the relative independence of the cities of Northern Italy, separated from the German Emperor by the Alps, combined with their great wealth from the Mediterranean trade gave rise to private wealth and with it the luxury of studying arts and antiquities.