Catholic reform was as sensual as it was spiritual, for at the core of the Catholic faith lay the claim that all of creation is a gateway to the Creator and that matter and spirit are not antithetically opposed to one another. Exuberance is the hallmark of Catholic art and music from this period. In the nineteenth century, derisive moderns would dismiss this ebullience as baroque—a French word meaning “strange” or “bizarre”—but in the seventeenth century especially, lack of restraint became a virtue in Catholic aesthetics and so did the blurring of distinctions between the heavenly and the earthly, and this baroque sensibility became the very essence of the faith. Nowhere could the senses be more overwhelmed than in a baroque church at High Mass, and nowhere else could the stark aesthetics of Protestantism and its sola scriptura principle be more thoroughly challenged or denied.
Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650 by Carlos M. N. Eire.
Authority. Who has it and why? A good place to look, historically, is the period of restorations after the Renaissance.
To grossly oversimplify, the Reformations were about answering the question of who or what has authority as the social and political structure of the Middle Ages gave way to raising secular rulers; a process accelerated by the printing press, which allowed the rapid transmission of ideas. These factors then combined with the Renaissance principle of ad fontes (literally “back to the sources” or perhaps better, begin at the beginning) to lead Northern Europeans to rely on the scriptures alone (sola scriptura) as the fundamental authority of Christian faith and not Catholic traditions, that had augmented scripture with the ideas of the Church Fathers and Greek philosophy, as imported through the Church Fathers.
The concept of ad fontes took intellectuals by storm in secular areas of study as well. The Enlightenment, following on the heels of the Reformations shifted authority in the study of the natural world from classical authorities like Aristotle to empirical testing of theories. This shift in authority during the Enlightenment was arguably the greatest intellectual earthquake since the birth of Christianity.
As a modern person I imagine to the extent you’ve thought about it at all, you believe that the result of the empirical testing of theories is the most authoritative. Why? Most of us aren’t scientific experts and wouldn’t understand quantum mechanics if a good physics professor spent a semester trying to get it into our heads. The honest answer is we just assume it; take it on faith. We went to the moon didn’t we? This was the exact same mindset of folks in the Renaissance who had faith in Aristotle. They didn’t know anything about how he arrived at his answers either. Put yourself in their shoes. This Galileo guy says the earth rotates! That’s obviously absurd. Wouldn’t one feel it move? When a ball was dropped from a tower it dropped straight down. Wouldn’t the ball hit the ground in a different place if the earth had moved while it fell? For we moderns, it is appropriate to ask who or what has authority in the field we are interested in. Science makes an excellent claim to authority where one wishes to study the natural world, but what about man’s subjective experience of reality? Who or what has authority to speak about Art?
During earlier European periods, like the Baroque mentioned above, it was clear: church or secular noble aficionados spoke with authority because only they could afford it and because they controlled the conversation of the art tradition. This relatively small group, who had the free time and education to enjoy their passion knew who the “in” artists were and they competed for their time and work. It was they, along with the artists of the period who created some of the greatest, most innovative and complex art, both visual and musical, that the world has ever seen. This was possible because of the confluence of money, the educated appreciation of a few men of long-term wealth, and the exuberance of the era, turbocharged as it was by the Renaissance.
Who speaks with authority today as to what constitutes great Art? Who indeed. We have no nobility. The key value of a noble class is long-term wealth, which allows its members to spend time engaged in interests other than survival such as art, continuing a conversation with generations of noblemen that at minimum guarantees a certain level of artistic achievement in the context of history . Sometime in the late 18th Century a shift in audience began to take place as a bourgeois class gained wealth and influence; think of the shift in musical aesthetic between Bach. extreme complexity, and Haydn, elegant long lines of music. The vast middle classes had less leisure time than did their noble forbearers and therefore they needed guides who could tell them what good art was. Critics arose in the large metropolitan areas like New York or Paris who would determine what good art was. In the 20th Century this process reached its culmination with the rise of the art critic and the capture of the “art world” by the academy and auction houses. This led to a very theoretical form of art, where the explanation of the art became a necessary component of the artwork itself. Is this a good thing? No, but if one adopts a democratic-republican system of government there is no way around this problem unless the demos speaks up and/or is honored by the oligarchy that rules them, e.g., think of Jazz’s productive influence on classical music in the mid-Twentieth Century. For now, if a young, ambitious artist wants to succeed in any worldly sense, they must seek the approval of the professional critics, who notably cannot produce art themselves, but who nonetheless define the artist’s field of endeavor for them. The center no longer holds, but this aberrant situation cannot continue much longer; given what we now call “art,” it is difficult to imagine how much lower we can go.
“And as everyone in our day and age knows, the arts—especially those favored by the elite—are the clearest expression of the spirit of the times.”
Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650 by Carlos M. N. Eire
Blog No. 75: Authority
Catholic reform was as sensual as it was spiritual, for at the core of the Catholic faith lay the claim that all of creation is a gateway to the Creator and that matter and spirit are not antithetically opposed to one another. Exuberance is the hallmark of Catholic art and music from this period. In the nineteenth century, derisive moderns would dismiss this ebullience as baroque—a French word meaning “strange” or “bizarre”—but in the seventeenth century especially, lack of restraint became a virtue in Catholic aesthetics and so did the blurring of distinctions between the heavenly and the earthly, and this baroque sensibility became the very essence of the faith. Nowhere could the senses be more overwhelmed than in a baroque church at High Mass, and nowhere else could the stark aesthetics of Protestantism and its sola scriptura principle be more thoroughly challenged or denied.
Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650 by Carlos M. N. Eire.
Authority. Who has it and why? A good place to look, historically, is the period of restorations after the Renaissance.
To grossly oversimplify, the Reformations were about answering the question of who or what has authority as the social and political structure of the Middle Ages gave way to raising secular rulers; a process accelerated by the printing press, which allowed the rapid transmission of ideas. These factors then combined with the Renaissance principle of ad fontes (literally “back to the sources” or perhaps better, begin at the beginning) to lead Northern Europeans to rely on the scriptures alone (sola scriptura) as the fundamental authority of Christian faith and not Catholic traditions, that had augmented scripture with the ideas of the Church Fathers and Greek philosophy, as imported through the Church Fathers.
The concept of ad fontes took intellectuals by storm in secular areas of study as well. The Enlightenment, following on the heels of the Reformations shifted authority in the study of the natural world from classical authorities like Aristotle to empirical testing of theories. This shift in authority during the Enlightenment was arguably the greatest intellectual earthquake since the birth of Christianity.
As a modern person I imagine to the extent you’ve thought about it at all, you believe that the result of the empirical testing of theories is the most authoritative. Why? Most of us aren’t scientific experts and wouldn’t understand quantum mechanics if a good physics professor spent a semester trying to get it into our heads. The honest answer is we just assume it; take it on faith. We went to the moon didn’t we? This was the exact same mindset of folks in the Renaissance who had faith in Aristotle. They didn’t know anything about how he arrived at his answers either. Put yourself in their shoes. This Galileo guy says the earth rotates! That’s obviously absurd. Wouldn’t one feel it move? When a ball was dropped from a tower it dropped straight down. Wouldn’t the ball hit the ground in a different place if the earth had moved while it fell? For we moderns, it is appropriate to ask who or what has authority in the field we are interested in. Science makes an excellent claim to authority where one wishes to study the natural world, but what about man’s subjective experience of reality? Who or what has authority to speak about Art?
During earlier European periods, like the Baroque mentioned above, it was clear: church or secular noble aficionados spoke with authority because only they could afford it and because they controlled the conversation of the art tradition. This relatively small group, who had the free time and education to enjoy their passion knew who the “in” artists were and they competed for their time and work. It was they, along with the artists of the period who created some of the greatest, most innovative and complex art, both visual and musical, that the world has ever seen. This was possible because of the confluence of money, the educated appreciation of a few men of long-term wealth, and the exuberance of the era, turbocharged as it was by the Renaissance.
Who speaks with authority today as to what constitutes great Art? Who indeed. We have no nobility. The key value of a noble class is long-term wealth, which allows its members to spend time engaged in interests other than survival such as art, continuing a conversation with generations of noblemen that at minimum guarantees a certain level of artistic achievement in the context of history . Sometime in the late 18th Century a shift in audience began to take place as a bourgeois class gained wealth and influence; think of the shift in musical aesthetic between Bach. extreme complexity, and Haydn, elegant long lines of music. The vast middle classes had less leisure time than did their noble forbearers and therefore they needed guides who could tell them what good art was. Critics arose in the large metropolitan areas like New York or Paris who would determine what good art was. In the 20th Century this process reached its culmination with the rise of the art critic and the capture of the “art world” by the academy and auction houses. This led to a very theoretical form of art, where the explanation of the art became a necessary component of the artwork itself. Is this a good thing? No, but if one adopts a democratic-republican system of government there is no way around this problem unless the demos speaks up and/or is honored by the oligarchy that rules them, e.g., think of Jazz’s productive influence on classical music in the mid-Twentieth Century. For now, if a young, ambitious artist wants to succeed in any worldly sense, they must seek the approval of the professional critics, who notably cannot produce art themselves, but who nonetheless define the artist’s field of endeavor for them. The center no longer holds, but this aberrant situation cannot continue much longer; given what we now call “art,” it is difficult to imagine how much lower we can go.
“And as everyone in our day and age knows, the arts—especially those favored by the elite—are the clearest expression of the spirit of the times.”
Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650 by Carlos M. N. Eire