The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [465]
There is no better clue to the new spirit underlying the Renaissance than the great staircase designed by Piero della Francesca for the palace of the Duke of Urbino in the mid-fifteenth century. The steps are so arranged that it is impossible to descend them except in the most stately and dignified fashion. Merely to walk down a set of stairs gives a sense of elevation and nobility. One cannot do so without having to `walk tall'. The Renaissance was thus inspired by a vision of man being drawn up to his fullest stature, realising the highest potential of which he was capable: as we see in the lofty view of humanity conveyed by those grave and luminous figures in Piero's own paintings. It was in this sense that Kenneth Clark identified the essence of the Renaissance in the words of Plato's Protagoras: `man is the measure of all things'. It was this vision of human nature at its most ideal, with all darkness and deformity purged away, which inspired the artists of the later Renaissance, such as Leonardo and Michelangelo. It was a new vision of the perfection of the Self. But it was far removed from that worldview of the Middle Ages in the time of Dante only 200 years before, with its image of a fallen humanity which could only hope to be made perfect on the plane of eternity.
A further great hole was punched in the frame of that mediaeval world-picture by the great voyages of exploration at the end of the fifteenth century, which opened up the realisation that whole `new worlds' lay beyond the confines of Christian Europe, above all those vast unknown continents across the Atlantic. But just as important as these discoveries themselves was that, in order to make them, men were coming to rely on a new perception of what constituted `reality; as something which lay in the outward, physical world. In doing so, they were learning to reject that central assumption of the mediaeval world-picture that the earth was flat in favour of a new, empirical realisation that it was round.
Another significant chunk of the unified world-picture slipped away when, all over northern Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century, men challenged the authority of the Papacy to rule over Western Christendom. No longer were they prepared just blindly to accept the rule of a system which had become only too obviously worldly and corrupt. Like Luther when he declared `here I stand, I can say no other', they had found a new source of authority in their own judgement, as they looked anew at the image of Jesus presented in the Bible, the book on which Christianity rested. Possessed by this new vision of the Self, they set about destroying all those outward trappings which had been designed to convey religion as the gateway to an other-worldly spiritual dimension. In their newfound zeal, they tore down statutes of the saints and images of the Virgin, poured contempt on the belief in Purgatory, and lectured bemused worshippers that unless they were among the `elect, chosen by God, they faced eternal damnation. But as they did so they became all too easily inflated by that self-righteousness which arises from confusing ego with Self, potentially the most deadly form of egotism of all.
Yet another shock came from the discovery of the later sixteenth century, with the aid of new scientific inventions such as the telescope, that the earth did not stand at the centre of the universe. Again, this derived from the growing perception that true `reality could only be established through understanding the structures of the outward, physical world. But the way this shook the foundations of Western man's sense of identity was caught by one of the most intelligent thinkers of the early seventeenth century, John Donne:
When Donne spoke of how `all coherence' had been lost, what he was really talking about was the disintegration of that mediaeval world-picture which had seemed to explain so perfectly how everything fitted together with everything else, in that