Term Paper on "European Renaissance"

Term Paper 6 pages (1858 words) Sources: 3

[EXCERPT] . . . .

European Renaissance and the Birth of Science

The Western World has gone through many stages of development and growth over the course of the last two millennia. From the times of the ancient Greeks and Romans, to the fall of the Roman Empire and the Barbarian invasions, to the rise of the Feudal Order and European serfdom, and then to the Renaissance and the birth of the Modern world, the West experienced many different social orders, rulers, political systems, and historical permutations. Each epoch has had its own philosophy, religion, morals, and leaders. The Greeks and Romans had Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and metaphysics. The Middle Ages had Thomas Aquinas, Charlemagne, and Richard the Lionheart. The Renaissance had Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Galileo. It was this latter period which gave birth to the Modern world and scientific civilization as we know it.

The word Renaissance comes from the French and means "Rebirth." Though it was probably applied well after the fact, its use has ever been a means of describing the way in which the men of the Renaissance emerged from the cultural rigidness, enforced ignorance, and doctrinal monolith of the Middle Ages and entered into an era of scientific inquiry, openness, thought, skepticism, religious reform, technological advancement, and philosophical growth and discovery. The transformation was so great that it was almost as if the West had in fact been born again. The search for knowledge and understanding characterized an era which revived scholarship into the ancient world of the Romans and Greeks.

The Renaissance in the largest sense of the term, is the whole process of transition in Europe from the medieval to the modern order. The Revival of Learning, by which is meant more especially the resuscitated knowledge of classical antiquity, is the most potent and characteristic of the forces which operated in the Renaissance. That revival has two aspects. In one, it is the recovery of a lost culture; in another, of even higher and wider significance, it is the renewed diffusion of a liberal spirit which for centuries had been dead or sleeping. (Jebb 1946, 73).

This is the most important theme of the Renaissance and it is the reason that era is still of so much importance even today. The intellectual repression, superstitions, zeal for control, undying quest for religious (and political) unity, and overall megalomania of the Medieval Catholic Church finally crumbled under the weight of its own tyranny and corruption. The lost languages of Latin and especially Greek were revived and studied with vigor. This encouraged not only a new learning but also an artistic and cultural efflorescence.

This "New Learning" contributed to the inculcation of a widespread sense of commonality between all men. This liberal spirit of free exchange and thought culminated in the philosophy and movement otherwise known as Humanism. It must be made clear though that the Renaissance, starting in the early fourteenth century, was not fundamentally different from past epochs from a political perspective. This new sense of Humanism and fraternity should not be allowed to foster the misleading impression that somehow the ghosts of man's past ceased to haunt him. Murder, war, rape, pillage, and plunder were still the order of the day. If anything in the Italy of the Renaissance, these phenomena increased in frequency. Italy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the place of brutal, internecine struggle, sanguine military conflict, and viciously deadly political intrigue. City-states, Dukes, Emperors, and Popes all vied for power in what has been termed a "structural anarchy" (Sobek 2003, 209). Thus Humanism signaled more a change in thinking, especially on the part of scholars and intellectual elites, than it had anything to do with a change in the political affairs of men.

In order to find the source and epicenter of the New Thinking and scientific inquiry one must look to the universities of Renaissance Europe, for it was there that the real change and revolution was occurring. Men like Copernicus, Galileo, and Roger Bacon forwarded a new methodology for attaining knowledge which they used to make many early modern scientific discoveries.

Universities across Europe played extraordinarily significant roles in the Renaissance and the Reformation. They hosted innovative research in many fields and changed forever European religion and society. They were strife-ridden but seldom boring. Universities and their professors may have had greater influence on society in the Renaissance and Reformation than in any era before or since. (Grendler 2004, 1).

In the early stages of the Renaissance, a thirteenth century Franciscan friar like Roger Bacon mixed the tradition and power of the Church with a cultural atavism for the thought of Aristotle and Plato. He asserted a new means of discovering facts and knowledge which today is known as empiricism. Bacon advocated the use of reason to observe one's surrounding, collect any facts there found, and then to draw the proper conclusions. From an historical standpoint this was a major development. Roger Bacon was a "[master] of the whole knowledge of the age…When once the veil of illusion was torn asunder, when once the dread of nature and the slavery to books and tradition were overcome, countless problems lay before [him] for solution" (Burckhardt 1995, 212). Bacon's methodology, known as deduction, involved the collection of particular facts and the analysis of them using general principles. This laid the groundwork for the birth of modern science centuries later.

By the fifteenth century the Italian Peninsula was teaming with thinkers all making use of what amounted to the precursors to modern science. Ways of thinking about the physical world emerged which had not been advocated since the Ancients and which now began to become the main epistemological tools of Western society. "Not in literature or in art alone, but in every form of intellectual activity, the Renaissance opened a new era for mankind" (Jebb 1946, 73). This new era sought a new basis upon which to think about the world and man's place in it. The fact that nearly all knowledge of the physical world could, with the tools of science, potentially be acquired was truly earth-shaking. The philosophy which sought to give meaning to this new knowledge was Humanism. All the great minds of the time, if not open supporters of and adherents to it, were at the very least aware of its edicts and well-read as to its main proponents. "But when, with the fifteenth century, antiquity became the leading power in Italy, the breach it made in the old system was turned to account by every branch of secular science. Humanism…attracted to itself the best strength of the nation…" (Burckhardt 1995, 215). Scholars like Leonardo da Vinci were everywhere known as great and sagacious men who had brought "mathematics and the natural sciences" to a place of respect and authority they had not known for centuries. Learning took hold everywhere. Artists like Raphael painted and sculpted scenes which harked back to Europe's pagan past. The desire was to highlight a rediscovery of Antiquity after centuries of darkness during the Medieval era (Jebb 1946, 76-80).

Universities were bursting with life. At the end of the Middle Ages there were some twenty-nine active universities in Europe. By the close of the sixteenth century there were seventy-three "functioning universities" in Europe. The places of learning spread information on the sciences and thought all over Europe. They acted as emissaries of knowledge and culture between the Ancient World and the Modern (Grendler 2004, 2). The thirst for knowledge was not just driven by personal passions but also by political exigencies. Many kings, dukes, and emperors saw science as a means of developing new weapons, siege technologies, and military strategies. These rulers encouraged the creation of universities and only hindered their activities when they grossly interfered in political questions or all too brazenly violated religious norms. The new science of Humanism drew together and united all men in a quest for knowledge, some of which could be used for practical purposes. "Humanism was essential to this attitude; its critical perspective and habit of seeking knowledge and inspiration from the ancient world honored and supported scholarly investigation. Men also came to universities in order to acquire the degrees and marketable skills enabling them to secure good positions in society" (Grendler 2004, 2). A sort of nexus evolved which brought together commerce, the desire for knowledge, political needs, philosophical and scientific inquiry, and cultural growth. Those who could properly unite these many facets are today posthumously known as "Renaissance men." These men studied physical science, sculpted and painted, wrote political treatises, penned poetry, studied mathematics, and pondered the great philosophical questions.

Perhaps no man better encapsulates this spirit of inquiry, thought, art, and statesmanship better than Leonardo da Vinci. Born the "illegitimate son of a 25-year-old notary…and a peasant girl" Da Vinci was hardly a highfalutin aristocrat (Renaissance 2010). Though his inquiries and feats were many, his greatest contributions surely lay in the realm of the sciences.

Leonardo the scientist bridged the gap between the… READ MORE

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