This task is much more complex than it might seem. Traditionally the Harlem Renaissance was viewed primarily as a literary movement centered in Harlem and growing out of the black migration and the emergence of Harlem as the premier black metropolis in the United States.
Music and theater were mentioned briefly, more as background and local color, as providing inspiration for poetry and local color for fiction. However, there was no analysis of the developments in these fields. Likewise, art was discussed mostly in terms of Aaron Douglas and his association with Langston Hughes and other young writers who produced Fire!!
And there was even less discussion or analysis of the work of women in the fields of art, music, and theater. Fortunately, this narrow view has changed. The Harlem Renaissance is increasingly viewed through a broader lens that recognizes it as a national movement with connections to international developments in art and culture that places increasing emphasis on the non-literary aspects of the movement.
First, to know when the Harlem Renaissance began, we must determine its origins. Understanding the origins depends on how we perceive the nature of the Renaissance. For those who view the Renaissance as primarily a literary movement, the Civic Club Dinner of March 21, , signaled its emergence. Charles S. Johnson, the young editor of Opportunity , the National Urban League's monthly magazine, conceived the event to honor writer Jessie Fauset on the occasion of the publication of her novel, There Is Confusion.
Johnson planned a small dinner party with about twenty guests—a mix of white publishers, editors, and literary critics, black intellectuals, and young black writers. But, when he asked Alain Locke to preside over the event, Locke agreed only if the dinner honored African American writers in general rather than one novelist.
So the simple celebratory dinner morphed into a transformative event with over one hundred attendees. African Americans were represented by W. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and others of the black intelligentsia, along with Fauset and a representative group of poets and authors. White guests predominately were publishers and critics; Carl Van Doren, editor of Century magazine, spoke for this group calling upon the young writers in the audience to make their contribution to the "new literary age" emerging in America.
The Civic Club dinner significantly accelerated the literary phase of the Harlem Renaissance. Frederick Allen, editor of Harper's , approached Countee Cullen, securing his poems for his magazine as soon as the poet finished reading them. As the dinner ended Paul Kellogg, editor of Survey Graphic , hung around talking to Cullen, Fauset, and several other young writers, then offered Charles S.
Johnson a unique opportunity: an entire issue of Survey Graphic devoted to the Harlem literary movement. Later that year Locke published a book-length version of the "Harlem" edition, expanded and re-titled The New Negro: An Interpretation. For those who viewed the Harlem Renaissance in terms of musical theater and entertainment, the birth occurred three years earlier when Shuffle Along opened at the 63rd Street Musical Hall.
Most of its cast featured unknowns, but some, like Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson, who had only minor roles in the production, were on their way to international fame. Eubie Blake recalled the significance of the production, when he pointed out that he and Sissle and Lyles and Miller accomplished something that the other great African American performers—Bob Cole and J.
It introduced him to the creative world of New York, and it helped to redefine and energize music and nightlife in Harlem. In the process, it introduced white New Yorkers to black music, theater, and entertainment and helped generated the white fascination with Harlem and the African American arts that was so much a part of the Harlem Renaissance.
For the young Hughes, just arrived in the city, the long-range impact of Shuffle Along was not on his mind. In , it was all about the show, and, as he wrote in his autobiography, it was "a honey of a show:". Swift, bright, funny, rollicking, and gay, with a dozen danceable, singable tunes.
Besides, look who were in it: The now famous choir director, Hall Johnson, and the composer, William Grant Still, were a part of the orchestra. Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle wrote the music and played and acted in the show. Miller and Lyles were the comics. Florence Mills skyrocketed to fame in the second act. Everybody was in the audience—including me. People came to see it innumerable times. It was always packed. Shuffle Along also brought jazz to Broadway. It combined jazz music with very creatively choreographed jazz dance to transform musical theater into something new, exciting, and daring.
And the show was a critical and financial success. It ran performances on Broadway and spawned three touring companies. It was a hit show written, performed, and produced by blacks, and it generated a demand for more.
Within three years, nine other African American shows appeared on Broadway, and white writers and composers rushed to produce their versions of black musical comedies. Music was also a prominent feature of African American culture during the Harlem Renaissance.
The term "Jazz Age" was used by many who saw African American music, especially the blues and jazz, as the defining features of the Renaissance. However, both jazz and the blues were imports to Harlem.
They emerged out of the African American experience around the turn of the century in southern towns and cities, like New Orleans, Memphis, and St.
From these origins these musical forms spread across the country, north to Chicago before arriving in New York a few years before World War I.
Blues and black blues performers such as musician W. Handy and vocalist Ma Rainey were popular on the Vaudeville circuit in the late nineteenth century. The publication of W. Handy's "Memphis Blues" in and the first recordings a few years later brought this genre into the mainstream of American popular culture.
Jazz reportedly originated among the musicians who played in the bars and brothels of the infamous Storyville district of New Orleans. Jelly Roll Morton claimed to have invented jazz there in , but it is doubtful that any one person holds that honor. Johnson described the band there as "a playing-singing-dancing orchestra, making dominant use of banjos, mandolins, guitars, saxophones, and drums in combination, and [it] was called the Memphis Students—a very good name, overlooking the fact that the performers were not students and were not from Memphis.
There was also a violin, a couple of brass instruments, and a double-bass. During World War I, while serving as an officer for a machine-gun company in the famed th U. Infantry Division, James Europe, fellow officer Noble Sissel, and the regimental band introduced the sounds of ragtime, jazz, and the blues to European audiences.
Following the war, black music, especially the blues and jazz, became increasingly popular with both black and white audiences. Europe continued his career as a successful bandleader until his untimely death in Ma Rainey and other jazz artists and blues singers began to sign recording contracts, initially with African American record companies like Black Swan Records, but very quickly with Paramount, Columbia, and other mainstream recording outlets.
In Harlem, one club opened after another, each featuring jazz orchestras or blues singers. Noble Sissle, of course, was one of the team behind the production of Shuffle Along , which opened Broadway up to Chocolate Dandies and a series of other black musical comedies, featuring these new musical styles. The visual arts, particularly painting, prints, and sculpture, emerged somewhat later in Harlem than did music, musical theater, and literature.
Early the next year W. Du Bois published Douglas's first illustrations in The Crisis. Due to his personal association with Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and other African American writers, his collaboration with them in the publication of their literary magazine Fire!! And while these connections to the literary part of the Renaissance were notable, they were not typical of the experience of other African American artists of this period.
More significant in launching the art phase of the Harlem Renaissance were the exhibits of African American art in Harlem and the funding and exhibits that the Harmon Foundation provided. Even more important to the nurturing and promotion of African American art were the activities of the Harmon Foundation.
Beginning in the Foundation awarded cash prizes for outstanding achievement by African Americans in eight fields, including fine arts. Additionally, from through , the Harmon Foundation organized an annual exhibit of African American art. Situating the Harlem Renaissance in space is almost as complex as defining its origins and time span. Certainly Harlem is central to the Harlem Renaissance, but it serves more as an anchor for the movement than as its sole location.
In reality, the Harlem Renaissance both drew from and spread its influence across the United States, the Caribbean, and the world. Only a handful of the writers, artists, musicians, and other figures of the Harlem Renaissance were native to Harlem or New York, and only a relatively small number lived in Harlem throughout the Renaissance period. And yet, Harlem impacted the art, music, and writing of virtually all of the participants in the Harlem Renaissance. Nicholas Avenue. Originally established in the seventeenth century as a Dutch village, it evolved over time.
Following its annexation by the city in , urban growth commenced. The resulting Harlem real estate boom lasted about twenty years during which developers erected most of the physical structures that defined Harlem as late as the mid-twentieth century. They designed this new, urban Harlem primarily for the wealthy and the upper middle class; it contained broad avenues, a rail connection to the city on Eighth Avenue, and consisted of expensive homes and luxurious apartment buildings accompanied by commercial and retail structures, along with stately churches and synagogues, clubs, social organizations, and even the Harlem Philharmonic Orchestra.
By , Harlem's boom turned into a bust. Desperate white developers began to sell or rent to African Americans, often at greatly discounted prices, while black real estate firms provided the customers. At this time, approximately sixty thousand blacks lived in New York, scattered through the five boroughs, including a small community in Harlem.
The largest concentration inhabited the overcrowded and congested Tenderloin and San Juan Hill sections of the west side of Manhattan. When New York's black population swelled in the twentieth century as newcomers from the South moved north and as redevelopment destroyed existing black neighborhoods, pressure for additional and hopefully better housing pushed blacks northward up the west side of Manhattan into Harlem.
Harlem's transition, once it began, followed fairly traditional patterns. As soon as blacks started moving onto a block, property values dropped further as whites began to leave. This process was especially evident in the early s.
Both black and white realtors took advantage of declining property values in Harlem—the panic selling that resulted when blacks moved in. Addressing the demand for housing generated by the city's rapidly growing black population, they acquired, subdivided, and leased Harlem property to black tenants.
Year by year, the boundaries of black Harlem expanded, as blacks streamed into Harlem as quickly as they could find affordable housing.
By , they had become the majority group on the west side of Harlem north of th Street; by , the population of black Harlem was estimated to be fifty thousand. By black Harlem had expanded north ten blocks to th Street and south to th Street; it spread from the Harlem River to Amsterdam Avenue, and housed approximately , blacks.
The core of this community—bounded roughly by th Street on the south, th Street on the north, the Harlem River and Park Avenue on the east, and Eighth Avenue on the west—was more than 95 percent black.
By , Harlem, by virtue of the sheer size of its black population, had emerged as the virtual capital of black America; its name evoked a magic that lured all classes of blacks from all sections of the country to its streets.
Impoverished southern farmers and sharecroppers made their way northward, where they were joined in Harlem by black intellectuals such as W. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson.
Although the old black social elites of Washington, DC, and Philadelphia were disdainful of Harlem's vulgar splendor, and while it housed no significant black university as did Washington, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Nashville, Harlem still became the race's cultural center and a Mecca for its aspiring young. It housed the National Urban League, A. Marcus Garvey launched his ill-fated black nationalist movement among its masses, and Harlem became the geographical focal point of African American literature, art, music, and theater.
Its night clubs, music halls, and jazz joints became the center of New York nightlife in the mids. Harlem, in short, was where the action was in black America during the decade following World War I. Harlem and New York City also contained the infrastructure to support and sustain the arts. In the early twentieth century, New York had replaced Boston as the center of the book publishing industry.
Furthermore, new publishing houses in the city, such as Alfred A. Knopf, Harper Brothers, and Harcourt Brace, were open to adding greater diversity to their book lists by including works by African American writers.
In the s, when recordings and broadcasting emerged, New York was again in the forefront. Broadway was the epicenter of American theater, and New York was the center of the American art world. In short, in the early twentieth century no other American city possessed the businesses and institutions to support literature and the arts that New York did.
In spite of its physical presence, size, and its literary and arts infrastructure, the nature of Harlem and its relation to the Renaissance are very complex. The word "Harlem" evoked strong and conflicting images among African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century.
Was it the Negro metropolis, black Manhattan, the political, cultural, and spiritual center of African America, a land of plenty, a city of refuge, or a black ghetto and emerging slum? For some, the image of Harlem was more personal. Emerging out of the subway at th and Lennox Avenue, Gillis was transfixed:. Born in the Italian city of Pisa, at a young age Galileo was multi-talented, playing the lute and organ taught by his father, a professional musician , building toys, and doing skilled painting.
But none of these were to be his calling in life. Leaving this for lack of funds, he then switched fields to mathematics. Though a devout Catholic, Galileo fathered three children out of wedlock. Feeling that his two daughters were thus unmarriageable, he sent them to a convent at an early age, where they remained the rest of their lives. His son, however, was later legitimized and allowed to marry.
When he published a work defending the sun-centered system, opposition arose against him within the Catholic Church on the grounds that his views ran contrary to scripture and Church authority. An edict was issued requiring him to renounce his theory, which he did. He was sentenced to imprisonment, then commuted to house arrest, where he lived another eight years, producing more writings before becoming blind.
It took another one hundred years for Galileo to be fully acquitted by the Church, when it authorized the publication of his complete scientific works. When aggressively putting forward his views on astronomy, Galileo was well aware that he was entering territory controlled by the Church.
He responded by arguing that science and religion are different arenas of knowledge and should be kept separate. The immediate problem was that the Church was taking an overly-literal interpretation of biblical passages in support of the old earth-centered system, such as passages about the movement of the sun. The role of scripture and religion is to teach us truths about salvation, which would not be available to us by any other means than divine revelation.
This is precisely the case with astronomy, he argues, since the scriptures say virtually nothing about the subject. Thus, scientific investigation should not begin with scripture, but with experimentation:. In discussing natural phenomena we ought not to begin with texts from Scripture, but with experiment and demonstration. For, from the Divine Word, both Scripture and Nature do alike proceed.
And I can see that that which experience sets before our eyes concerning natural effects, or which demonstration proves to us, ought not on any account to be called in question, much less condemned, upon the testimony of Scriptural texts, which may under their mere words have meanings of a contrary nature. Accordingly, Galileo argues, Church officials should not presume to tell scientists what they are to believe.
First, under the older sun-centered system, the universe was of finite size: at the outer edges all the stars were attached to a single orbital sphere that rotated around the earth at its inner core. Under the new system, though, the universe is infinitely large, with stars strewn everywhere across the sky, and the earth is no longer the physical center of things.
Second, under the old system, heavenly bodies such as the sun, moon and planets were thought to be made from perfect eternal substances that were vastly different in composition from the finite and imperfect material stuff that made up the earth.
Under the new system, though, heavenly bodies are stripped of their eternal nature and instead composed of the same finite stuff as the earth. Third, under the old system, God was seen as an active force in the daily functioning of the universe, and the ultimate source of all motion.
Under the new system, though, the physical universe is potentially self-sustaining. Born in Grantham, England, Newton was educated at Cambridge University and spent many years teaching there, gaining an international reputation through his mathematical and scientific publications.
His Principia Mathematica , one of the greatest contributions to science, presented groundbreaking theories on motion, gravity, and the movement of the planets.
To assist him in making the mathematical calculations in the Principia , Newton developed the calculus, but kept this a secret for several decades until German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz developed then published his own version of the system.
This resulted in a protracted controversy between them over who was the true inventor; the consensus today is that they both invented it independently.
He died at age For, even a few tiny differences in the size and gravity of the planets would throw them into irregular orbits. To make this system, therefore, with all its motions, required a cause which understood and compared together the quantities of matter in the several bodies of the sun and planets and the gravitating powers resulting from thence And to compare and adjust all these things together in so great a variety of bodies, [such a design] argues that cause to be, not blind and fortuitous, but very well skilled in mechanics and geometry.
The universe exhibits a high degree of precision in mechanics and geometry. It is improbable that this precision resulted from chance. Therefore there is a creator of the universe who is skilled in mechanics and geometry. God clearly tried hard to make the universe self-sustaining. But did he succeed in making it completely self-sustaining? Newton is less clear about this, and he suggests that it depends on differing views of the universe itself that we might reasonably adopt.
For example, if the universe is of finite size, then God is needed to prevent all the celestial bodies from converging on each other through gravity and making a single lump of stuff. On the other hand, if the universe is infinitely large, then God might have evenly spaced out all celestial bodies so that, by evenly tugging each other in all directions, they stay in place. In that case, God would not need to continually intervene to keep the universe from collapsing in on itself.
The secularizing force of the Renaissance also impacted the dominant conception of morality during the middle ages, namely, natural law theory. We will look at the views of two early modern philosophers who developed non-religious views of natural law: Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes.
Hugo Grotius — was born in the Dutch city of Delft, where he was a child prodigy thanks to the educational influence of his father, a city official and curator of Leiden University. He attended the University at age 11, and, while on a diplomatic mission to France at age 15, the King there praised him as the miracle of Holland.
Beginning in his late teens, he assumed various positions in the Dutch government that involved issues of international laws and treaties and began writing on the subject. Imprisoned for three years for his role in a religious controversy, he dramatically escaped with the help of his wife by hiding in a book case.
He took refuge in France for ten years, and then resumed his career in the Dutch government once the political climate there became safe. He died from exhaustion at the age of 62 after being shipwrecked while on a diplomatic mission. Its central theme is that natural law establishes the just conditions for declaring and engaging in war. In this way, natural law is a secular phenomenon, not a divinely-created one. Natural law, he argues, is on the same level as truths of mathematics insofar as the denial of the laws of nature would be contradictory.
Now, God is a rational being, and so too are we human beings. As such, God and humans are both bound by that high moral standard of rationality, and our actions are judged right or wrong accordingly. According to Grotius, there is a highest moral principle of natural law which is embedded in our rational nature, namely, that we should be sociable.
This means that we should live in peace with one another and uphold the social order. From this general moral obligation of sociability, we can infer five more specific rules of natural law, each of which is central to preserving social stability: 1 do not take things that belong to others; 2 restore to other people anything that we might have of theirs; 3 fulfill promises; 4 compensate for any loss that results through our own fault; 5 punish people as deserved.
According to Grotius, the above five principles of natural law are not only at the core of all morality, but they form the main ingredients of social and political obligation, within our individual countries and between countries internationally. The basis of all international law, he argues, is that we must fulfill the agreements that we make with others as expressed in the famous Latin phrase pacta sunt servanda , pacts must be respected ; this is a direct application of the third principle of natural law above.
When situations arise that force us into war with a neighboring country, these principles also underlie the justness of our behavior towards our enemy. Grotius is thus advocating a position of just war theory , that is, the attempt to distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable wars.
For Grotius, natural law theory gives us the exact litmus test we need for making that distinction. The first involves the just causes of war, that is, why we might be justified in waging war with any country to begin with. He says that there are three main just causes: to defend ourselves against attack, to seek reparation for some harm that an enemy country has done to us, and to punish a country for inflicting us with some harm.
Some wars result merely from the desire to inflict cruelty, completely disconnected with any good reason, and such acts of aggression are clearly unjustified. While every country that engages in war attempts to justify its actions, many justifications are only pretexts which do not stand up to moral scrutiny. The second component of his just war theory concerns the types of combat techniques that we might rightfully use against our enemy. Can we kill enemy prisoners?
Can we kill civilians? Can we lay waste to an entire countryside? For Grotius, there is a moral mandate of moderation that requires us to temper our actions during war.
First, we need to preserve the lives of the innocent whenever possible:. Though there may be circumstances, in which absolute justice will not condemn the sacrifice of lives in war, yet humanity will require that the greatest precaution should be used against involving the innocent in danger, except in cases of extreme urgency and utility.
Grotius is here drawing a fundamental distinction between combatants and noncombatants, which in contemporary just war theory is referred to as the principle of discrimination.
For Grotius, innocent noncombatants include women, children, and religious ministers. Killing these would serve no military purpose, and would be nothing short of cruel. Protection also needs to be extended to farmers, merchants and artisans whose activities help sustain the society itself.
Killing off this segment of the population would permanently cripple a country and would not be justified on military grounds. In addition to the principle of discrimination, Grotius also articulates a principle that we now call proportionality : destruction should not extend any further than is necessary to make the aggressor pay for his offence.
Now, driving off some of our cattle, or burning a few of our houses, can never be pleaded as a sufficient and justifiable motive for laying waste the whole of an enemy's kingdom. Polybius saw this in its proper light, observing, that vengeance in war should not be carried to its extreme, nor extend any further than was necessary to make an aggressor atone justly for his offence.
And it is upon these motives, and within these limits alone, that punishment can be inflicted. But except where prompted to it by motives of great utility, it is folly, and worse than folly, to needlessly hurt another.
Any destruction that goes beyond these three situations is unjustifiable. We access the basic principles of natural law through human reason, and this guides both our individual moral conduct and the rules we devise for international law. Natural law tells us under what conditions we might justifiably wage war against a foreign country, and it also tells us what kind of warfare tactics are morally justifiable when we engage the enemy.
A second great contributor to a new conception of morality and natural law was Thomas Hobbes — , who took a more skeptical approach to the subject than did Grotius.
Born in Wiltshire, England, Hobbes was raised by an uncle when his father, a disgraced clergyman, deserted his family. After completing his university education at Oxford, for several decades he worked as a private tutor for distinguished families, one of his pupils being a future King of England.
During that time he continued his studies in Greek and Latin classics, traveled through Europe, and became acquainted with some of the greatest minds of the time. His efforts culminated in his greatest book, Leviathan , which immediately drew harsh criticism for its skeptical and anti-religious implications.
Fearing imprisonment for heresy, he fled England for a few years; upon his return, he was prohibited for a time from further publication. He continued writing until his final years when he died from a stroke at the age of The standard view of the subject since the middle ages was the dualist position that the universe contains both material things like rocks, and non-physical spirits such as God and human souls.
Hobbes denied this view, holding that the universe is comprised entirely of material stuff. The very notion of an immaterial spirit is groundless, he says, and the first conception of it arose from an abuse of language:. All of the contents of my mind consist only of physical stuff in motion, including thoughts, perceptions, desires, emotions, pleasures, pains.
To understand human conduct, then, means understanding the operations of the human physical machine. Hobbes sets out his political philosophy by considering how humans behaved in a time before the creation of civil governments. However, this unregulated liberty led to a condition of war of everyone against everyone in the battle for survival. He describes this condition of brutality in one of the most famous passages in philosophy:. In such condition, there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
The conflict between people is so entrenched that it grinds all social progress to a halt, and all I can do is wait for my neighbor to attack and kill me, or try to get to him first. In this condition there is no natural basis for justice or morality:.
To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent, that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice and injustice are none of the [instinctive] faculties, neither of the body nor mind. First, there are limited resources that we all desire for our survival.
Second, human beings are naturally selfish, and do not have the psychological capacity to help other people merely out of the goodness of their hearts. All of my actions aim to benefit me, and are selfishly motivated.
Today philosophers call this position psychological egoism. Second, human beings have largely the same mental and physical abilities, and, consequently, there is a more or less equal playing field when we compete for the same things. Thus, the state of nature is a miserable amoral condition that we should escape from if we hope to have a long and happy life. But how can we do that? The solution, for Hobbes, is to devise an agreement with others.
That is, we form a social contract by which we agree to set aside our hostilities to create a peaceful society in which we can have long and fruitful lives. Law one, for Hobbes, is to seek peace as a means of self-preservation. Peace, according to Hobbes, is the best way of surviving. Law two is that, in our efforts to secure peace, we should agree to mutually divest ourselves of hostile rights. That is, I should give up my survival right to attack and kill you under the condition that you give up your corresponding survival right to attack and kill me.
Peace can only come about if we both set down our weapons at the same time. Law three is that we should keep the agreements that we make. Making an agreement to forego hostilities is one thing, but sticking to that agreement is entirely different. Hobbes recognized that there is a strong temptation to break our agreements.
To assure that people keep their agreements, we need to create a government that has absolute authority to punish offenders:. For the laws of nature, as justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and, in sum, doing to others as we would be done to, of themselves, without the terror of some power to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions, that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge, and the like.
And covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all. For Grotius, natural laws were rational principles like mathematics, and thus independent of God. For Hobbes, though, the laws of nature are rational from a practical standpoint: they are the sorts of laws that any rational person should adopt to save his or her hide:.
A law of nature lex naturalis is a precept or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life or takes away the means of preserving the same, and to omit that by which he thinks it may be best preserved.
Thus, the laws of nature are nothing like rational principles of mathematics; they are grounded only in the human desire to survive, and thus are rational only in a pragmatic sense.
During the Renaissance, philosophy began to have a more modern feel, and, compared to what went on in ancient Greek and Medieval times, it is one that we can more easily identify with today. Their first efforts were to breathe life back into the old Greek philosophical schools, which, they believed, contained a vitality that was lost in the middle ages.
The freedom to newly explore those classical schools, though, required philosophy to move out from under the control of the Catholic Church. Since ancient times, philosophers were regularly in trouble with legal and religious authorities, and even during the Middle Ages the most innovative philosophers found themselves accused of heresy. While by our standards today the Renaissance was still a religiously confining environment, the Reformation sparked an era of religious experimentation which gave more freedom for philosophical speculation.
What perhaps launched Renaissance philosophy forward the most, though, were the dramatic advances in science. Scientific achievements in astronomy, chemistry, biology and engineering set a high standard for all intellectual disciplines, and philosophers followed that model of scientific rigor.
Bacon believed that philosophy and science were virtually inseparable, particularly regarding scientific method. In the centuries following the Renaissance, as we will see in later chapters, philosophers drew heavily on the science of the time.
They were knowledgeable about the latest scientific advances, some being notable scientists themselves, and often shaped their writing style in the form of scientific treatises. Introduction: If one writing more than any other represents the spirit of the renaissance, it is Pico Della Mirandola's Oration on Human Dignity.
While the work retains a religious tone, it uses it as an allegory to express a more universal value, namely, the importance of creating our natures through free choice, and hopefully choosing a higher rational path for ourselves rather than a lower animalistic one. But I am dissatisfied when considering the reasons for these assertions [such as the following].
Man intermediates between all creatures, being familiar with the gods, yet rulers of inferior creatures. We interpret nature by the sharpness of our senses, the judgment of our reason, and the light of our intelligence. As the Persians say, we are the binding force, no, the marriage union of the world.
These reasons are great, but not the principal ones. That is, they do not possess the privilege of the highest admiration. For, why should we not have more admiration for the angels and the beautiful heavenly choirs? Ultimately, it seems to me, I now understand why man is the most fortunate of creatures, and worthy of complete admiration. I understand what their allotted position is in the hierarchy of beings, which is a role envied by the animals, by the stars, and by the minds beyond the world.
It is something wonderful beyond faith. And why not? It is for this reason that man is justly deemed a great miracle, and truly wonderful creature. So, with receptive ears, Fathers, listen attentively to what I say.
By the laws of his hidden wisdom, God the father and master architect built this worldly home which we observe, a most sacred temple of his divinity. The areas above the heavens he gave minds. He filled the dregs of the lower world with a variety of animals. But when finished, the architect wished that there would be someone to appreciate the work, to love its beauty, and marvel at its size.
Thus, all other things finished, as Moses and Timaeus report, he finally considered creating man. But there was nothing in his archetypes from which he could form new progeny, nor anything in his supply house which he might bequeath to a new son, nor was there an empty chair in which this new being could sit and contemplate the world.
All places were filled. Everything had been assigned in the highest, middle, and lowest orders. It was not part of his wisdom to waver because of a lack of a clear plan.
It was not part of his living kindness that he should be praised for his generosity to others, but condemned for lack of it on himself. Finally, the master architect declared that this creature, to whom nothing unique could be given, should be a composite, and have that which belonged exclusively to all other things.
The Importance of Choosing the Higher above the Lower. What great generosity of God the Father! What great and wonderful happiness of humanity! It is given him to have what he wants and to be what he wants. The higher spirits were immediately, or shortly after, what they were intended to be for eternity. But in embryonic humanity, the Father gave seeds of all kinds and the germs of all kinds of life.
They each will have grown and will grow in him. With the vegetative, he may become a plant. With the appetitive he may become an animal. With the rational he may rise to the rank of heavenly. With the intellective he may be an angel and a son of God.
If he is not content with any of these creatures, he may occupy himself at his center, become one with the Spirit of God, in the solitary darkness of the Father, who is above all things. Who would not admire our chameleon, or, indeed, what else could be more admirable? What makes the angel is spiritual intelligence, not freedom from a body.
If you see a man who is a slave to his stomach, crawling on the ground, then you see a plant and not a man. If you see a man made a slave to his own senses, bedazzled by the empty forms of the imagination and their allurement, such as by the charms of Calypso, then you see a brute and not a man. If, however, you see a philosopher, judging and distinguishing all things according to the rule of reason, you will hold him in veneration, for he is a creature of heaven and not of earth.
If, finally, you see a pure contemplator, unmindful of the body, wholly withdrawn into the inner chambers of the mind, here indeed is neither a creature of earth nor a heavenly creature, but some higher divinity, clothed in human flesh. This is why Evantes the Persian in his exposition of the Chaldean theology writes that man has no inborn and proper appearance, but rather many which are extraneous and accidental.
The Renaissance typically refers to a period in European history approximately between and Many historians assert that it started earlier or ended later, depending on the country. It bridged the periods of the Middle Ages and modern history, and, depending on the country, overlaps with the Early Modern, Elizabethan and Restoration periods.
The Renaissance is most closely associated with Italy, where it began in the 14 th century, though countries such as Germany, England and France went through many of the same cultural changes and phenomena. Many historians, including U. Wilde said that interpreting the Renaissance as a time period, though convenient for historians, "masks the long roots of the Renaissance. Renaissance thinkers considered the Middle Ages to have been a period of cultural decline.
They sought to revitalize their culture through re-emphasizing classical texts and philosophies. They expanded and interpreted them, creating their own style of art, philosophy and scientific inquiry. Some major developments of the Renaissance include astronomy, humanist philosophy, the printing press, vernacular language in writing, painting and sculpture technique, world exploration and, in the late Renaissance, Shakespeare's works.
The term Renaissance was not commonly used to refer to the period until the 19 th century, when Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt popularized it in his classic, " The Civilization of Renaissance Italy.
Contrary to popular belief, classical texts and knowledge never completely vanished from Europe during the Middle Ages. Charles Homer Haskins wrote in " The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century " that there were three main periods that saw resurgences in the art and philosophy of antiquity: the Carolingian Renaissance, which occurred during the reign of Charlemagne, the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire eighth and ninth centuries , the Ottonian Renaissance, which developed during the reigns of emperors Otto I, Otto II and Otto III 10 th century and the 12 th Century Renaissance.
The 12 th Century Renaissance was especially influential on the later Renaissance, said Wilde. Classical Latin texts and Greek science and philosophy began to be revived on a larger scale, and early versions of universities were established. Islamic countries kept many classical Greek and Roman texts that had been lost in Europe, and they were reintroduced through returning crusaders.
The fall of the Byzantine and Roman Empires at the hands of the Ottomans also played a role. This created an atmosphere for a revival in learning. Gottfried in " The Black Death. The Medici family moved to Florence in the wake of the plague. They, and many others, took advantage of opportunities for greater social mobility. Becoming patrons of artists was a popular way for such newly powerful families to demonstrate their wealth.
Some historians also argue that the Black Death caused people to question the church's emphasis on the afterlife and focus more on the present moment, which is an element of the Renaissance's humanist philosophy. Many historians consider Florence to be the Renaissance's birthplace, though others widen that designation to all of Italy.
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