As we have said, the minds – young and not so young – of our era need to study history. It would therefore be a good idea if they rediscovered and reconciled themselves to the early achievements of modernity and reconsidered their opinion of the nature and human function of ‘tradition’. We need to get away from impassioned and fearful effusions and keep a reasonable distance between ourselves and the ‘deconstruction’, ‘postmodernity’ and ‘post-structuralism’ (which adds to our era’s emotional feverishness by making the assumption that rationality and truth are quite relative), reformulate new simple principles and establish the conditions for an elementary objectivity. The humanism of the Renaissance used art and philosophy to launch intellectual resistance movements that demanded the autonomy of the individual, reason and the sciences. It had to put a critical distance between itself and the Catholic Church and the power it wielded at that time. Love, reason, autonomy and freedom were both means and ends in a struggle for emancipation that was waged in the name of the status of man, science and progress. The origins of the process go back a long way: when Dante (1265–1321) invites us to follow him in Virgil’s footsteps on the initiatory journey of a Commedia that was later described as divina, he takes us to the gates of hell and heaven, where we meet representatives of an ancient and pagan philosophy who were neither recognized nor celebrated by the Christian tradition. At the gates of paradise, his beloved muse Beatrice becomes the guide who reveals the delights of success to the Dante figure: the female motif takes us a long way from the Catholic references that are still central to the Divine Comedy. The love that was celebrated in the courtly tradition (which aptly termed it fol’amor or fin d’amor) from the twelfth century onwards is associated here – at the heart of a Christian-inspired epic – with a certain recognition of the value of the Greek and Roman heritage, and especially of philosophical reason. The same phenomenon is even clearer in the work of Petrarch (1304–74), who was undoubtedly one of the most important representatives of Italian humanism. When he met Laura, it was love at first sight, and the encounter was to determine both his life and his work. Petrarch was an erudite scholar best known for his poetry. His initial project could not have been more explicit. He wished to ‘rediscover the very rich lessons of classical authors in all disciplines’, and never stopped reading, studying and compiling – and having his friends and family compile – ancient Latin texts. He left Italy and settled in France, first in Avignon and then in Carpentras. In Avignon, he fell foul of the clerical hierarchy but, in poetic terms, living in the Vaucluse and the south of France gave him direct access to the work of the troubadours who sang the praises of courtly love. In intellectual and philosophical terms, the humanist Petrarch was the link with the Greek and Roman heritage he wanted to rediscover, rehabilitate and set free. Rather than opposing the Church, he sought possible reconciliation. When Laura died, his poetry broke free and sang out, borrowing from all the sources he found around him and especially from the literature of courtly love. In his Canzoniere (‘Songs’) and especially the allegorical Trionfi (‘Triumphs’), Petrarch celebrates his physical and spiritual love for Laura, a woman who is at once physical, real, spiritual and ideal. The Canzoniere ended with a prayer to the Virgin Mary, but the Trionfi invoke Laura, the beloved woman who is carnal and highly sensual. This is a significant development that recalls the status of the ‘Lady’ in the literature of courtly love. The lover is the servant of a Lady who gradually takes the place of God.
We have here a double marriage that is highly significant. On the one hand, the ‘pagan’ heritage of Greece and Rome is reclaimed and associated with the faculty of reason, and, on the other, art and poetry are reconciled with a spiritualized celebration of earthly and physical love. The Graeco-Roman heritage, reason, art and love appear to be the wellsprings of humanism, the Renaissance and then of a modernity that owes a great deal to this history. If we analyse in greater depth the historical developments and the nature of the tensions involved, we find that this intellectual and cultural revolution is marked by an interplay between power and resistance. The humanists, and then the philosophers of the Enlightenment, had no qualms about using ‘a tradition’, namely the Graeco-Roman tradition, to free themselves from what they saw as the exclusive grip of a ‘Christian (and primarily Catholic) tradition’. The process was endogenous and emerged from within Western culture itself, but still contrasted the two traditions and used one to free itself from the other. Courtly love and the celebration of carnal love, which came into conflict with the Christian frame of reference, came from a different tradition. That tradition was exogenous, but it produced the same upheaval. In his Love in the Western World,[1] Denis de Rougemont reveals the Arab and Muslim influence on courtly literature, and shows how Arab and Muslim artistic motifs were reappropriated by the oral traditions of the troubadours of southern France. Anyone who is familiar with medieval Arab literature can easily recognize its influence. Unlike Catholicism, the Arab tradition does not demonize the body and physical love, and has no qualms about celebrating love. Once again, the resort to a tradition that is both artistic and religious (the reference to the divine and to ethics is still present) allows an escape from the limitations of the dominant tradition. Once again, transgression is a form of liberation. Humanism, the Renaissance and modernity have a history: traditions that were in tension and sometimes in conflict and quite distinct are either reconciled or contrasted; contradictory memories in quest for legitimacy, freedom and power.
If we recognize the objectivity of these intense and long-standing tensions (within the West’s relationship with itself), we are in a position to understand how the same tensions set in and played a determinant role with respect to neighbouring civilizations and traditions. The same logic and the same relationship of tension, potential conflict and power set in. Access to rationality, freedom, science and progress did not prevent men from privileging their own tradition and memories, no matter how humanist and enlightened they may have been. The phenomenon is at once disturbing in intellectual terms and very human. After the French Revolution, which was born of the demand for rights and freedom, the country experienced the cult of Reason and a devastating Terror. It was as though everything had been forgotten. As it happens, noble values had not been forgotten, so far as the French were concerned, but the attractions of power and the drive to have power over others never disappeared. Emancipatory movements that demand freedom for us neither prefigure nor guarantee equality and freedom for all. We always think on the basis of the state we are in, of our status and of our own tradition. Communism told us that the oppressed proletariat would have its revolution and establish a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. That dictatorship was supposedly a step towards freedom for all. History, and especially the history of power relations, teaches us that it was a real dictatorship, a point of arrival and not a stage, and a mere, if unfortunate, substitution of one autocratic and absolute power for another. The supporters of human rights, equality and freedom may well have resisted by brandishing those ideals, but that did not prevent them from forgetting about them when it came to dominating and colonizing America, Africa or Asia. The advocates of a ‘civilizing’ colonization may well have been, or have seemed to be, staunch supporters of the right to education for all and of respect for individual freedom where their own society was concerned, but some of them, such as Jules Ferry in France and Lord Cromer in Great Britain, had very few ‘humanistic’ scruples when it came to ‘civilizing’ natives (some critics note that, in the case of Jules Ferry, there was no real contradiction: the mission of the free and compulsory education he advocated was also to ‘civilize’ the interior of France and eradicate regionalisms and any other counter-powers). Political and economic domination and colonization, with the terror, torture and summary executions they brought in their wake, were suddenly justified . . . in the name of the meaning of history, which is always defined by the victors. We find the same phenomenon in the United States with the idea that America had been entrusted by Providence with a mission and had a ‘manifest destiny’, to cite O’Sullivan, that justified the genocide and deportation of the Native Americans. History, and the memories and traditions that fight over how events, values and references should be interpreted, have always been battlefields and the focus of power struggles. It is unlikely that this will ever change.
Things now seem to be crystallising in two polarizing trends. They appear to be contradictory, but are in fact the same. In the globalized world and in societies that are becoming more and more pluralistic, we find both demands concerning ‘the universal’ and demands for the recognition of ‘memories’, of the legitimacy of specific cultures and traditions and of specific historical experiences. We quarrel over who has the monopoly on the universal, and on the ‘truth’ of memories when it comes to the objectification of history. Further analysis reveals that it is always the same demand, put forward for the same reason: recognition of the legitimate status of our being, affiliation, tradition and truths. Passion gains the upper hand and leads to a flawed reductionism that has nothing to do with the heritage of humanism and the critical spirit. Because we are afraid and because our identity is in danger, we reconstruct our pasts, reduce, ideologize and purify them when, that is, we simply exclude anything that is ‘impure’ or alien. When, in his academic lecture of 12 September 2006, the Pope spoke of Europe’s Greek and Christian roots, he did not give an objective account of history. Whilst Europe obviously does have Greek and Christian roots, the fact remains that they are far from being its only roots and that Judaism and Islam have also long played a part in shaping Europe’s identity. Our analysis also has to take into account other comments from Cardinal Ratzinger, who subsequently became Pope Benedict XVI: he has often said that Europe would be under threat if it forgot its Christian roots, and that, in religious and cultural terms, it is now ‘in danger’. Fears about the present (the fear of secularization, dechristianization, of the presence of Islam or other spiritualities such as Buddhism) and the need to come to terms with new relations of influence (in terms of numbers and strength) that seem to be undermining a hitherto homogeneous tradition lead to selective and reductive reconstructions of the past. We are no longer talking about a common history but about a singular memory that is both discriminatory and selective. This can herald a future of passionate conflicts over roots as well as identities.
[1] Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
