пятница, 17 июля 2020 г.

New Google Pinterest archives 17.07.2020 (4)

Giordano Bruno fell victim to the death sentence of Catholic opponents of his teachings. In the name of the triumph of knowledge, he did not renounce and went to the stake in 1600:

"Burn - does not mean to refute!"

The Frenchman Etienne Dole, the Italian Lucilio Vanini, the Spaniard Miguel Servet also paid for their beliefs with their lives, and the latter was burned at the stake not by Catholics, but by Calvinists. In 1535, he was executed on charges of opposing the introduction of the Anglican Church in England and of treason against the king, Thomas More, who was previously Lord Chancellor.

The late Renaissance (from the middle of the 16th century to the middle of the 17th century) was a tragic time. Those colossal shifts in society, the breaking of feudal foundations, which the humanists proclaimed in their time, turned into a hard struggle between the old and new social forces, protracted wars and the defeat of supporters of reforms in a number of countries. On the one hand, in Spain, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, in southern Germany, feudal Catholic reaction raged, the Inquisition extended its tentacles everywhere, the Jesuits tried to instill unconditional obedience to the authorities in new generations. On the other hand, the emerging bourgeois order already then led to the cult of money, the pursuit of profit at the cost of merciless exploitation of hired workers and robbery of the colonized countries. This went against the humanistic notions of respect for every person. The Renaissance thinkers themselves, who represented a small layer of educated people, were not fully understood by those in power, nor by the people. This gave rise among the best minds of that time to a mood of disappointment, annoyance and detachment from the world.

Please be quiet, don't you dare wake me up. Oh, in this age, criminal and shameful, Not to live, not to feel is an enviable lot. It's more comforting to sleep, it's more rewarding to be a stone.

Such a quatrain was prefaced by the great Michelangelo to one of his later creations - the statue "Night". He is in tune with the famous sonnet of William Shakespeare:

I call death. I can’t bear to see Dignity that begs for alms, Lies mocking simplicity, Insignificance in luxurious attire ...


"To be or not to be, that is the question?" says the hero of Shakespeare's tragedy, Prince Hamlet. It can be said that the entire Renaissance turned out to be like Hamlet or Miguel de Cervantes' hero Don Quixote - humanists passionately desired to improve, "correct" the world, believed in the unlimited possibilities of man, dreamed of the triumph of justice for all, but did not know how to achieve it, acting on intuition, like Hamlet, or naive, like Don Quixote.

But even in their decline, prominent humanists do not change their ideas. The Frenchman Michel Montaigne, who lived through long bloody wars between Catholics and Protestants in his country, reflected many sad conclusions and doubts in his book "Experiences". But then he noticed everything in spite of everything:

“Bliss and happiness, with which virtue shines, fill with a bright radiance everything related to it ... And one of its main benefits is contempt for death; it gives our life calmness and serenity, it allows you to taste its pure and peaceful joys ... ”Montaigne paid a lot of attention to education and upbringing:

“Let the teacher ask the student not only the words of the completed lesson, but also the meaning and very essence of it, and judge the benefits that he brought, but not according to the memory of his pet, but according to his life.”

The concept of universal enlightenment, whose task is to improve human society, was already paving the way for a new cultural era.

The Renaissance in European countries was a time of unprecedented rise of the human spirit. Man began to strive for external and internal independence in the world. The ideas of humanism formed the basis for the further development of science, social thought, literature and art. Up to the present day, people are turning to what was created by the creators of the Renaissance - this helps us to realize ourselves, to clarify the questions of worldview that are being asked anew by new generations. And humanist thinkers answer them from the depths of history.