THE MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY by Iain McGilchrist

Author:Iain McGilchrist
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780300170177
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2012-07-23T16:30:08+00:00

CHAPTER 9

THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION

THE PERIOD OF PERHAPS SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS THAT USED TO BE KNOWN AS THE Dark Ages, between the fall of Rome in the fifth century and what we now think of as the early Renaissance, in the twelfth, was by no means as lacking in vitality and colour as the name implied. That the term has fallen into disuse may be a recognition of the often remarkable quality of craftsmanship evident in what has survived from the period, or of the fact that it is no longer ‘dark’ in the sense that we know little about it – modern historiography has seen to that. It might also be due to its pejorative flavour; yet it would surely be a brave person who challenged the idea that the Renaissance was a remarkable, indeed unparalleled, step forward in the history of civilisation, akin to the developments of sixth-century Athens, in comparison with which the ‘Dark Ages’, whatever their merits, pale, relatively speaking, in significance.

In the next few chapters, I am inevitably going to have to use some much debated terms, such as the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism. To the left hemisphere these look like categories that should be definable; to the right hemisphere they are the products of experience of loose constellations of phenomena, which have a family resemblance. Conventionally, at this point, I should refer to a renewed interest, with the coming of the Renaissance, in the world at large, a thirst for knowledge of the natural world, and the historical world – the broader context in which we live, with the accent on how things are, rather than how they ought in theory to be, or are according to authority: the beginnings of modern science, history and philosophy. In the arts it is usual to speak of the new sense of the importance of harmony, of the relation of part to whole, a new spirit of conception that is both daring and tactful, graceful yet original. In all things, we learn, there was a new sense of the balanced reciprocities of individual and society, and of male and female. It is often said that it is in the Renaissance that the recognisably modern Western world begins. But, of course, it is more complicated than that.

That said, it might well look as if the Renaissance was the next great insurgence of the right hemisphere, perhaps even more pronounced than that of the Ancient World. But that, too, is an over-simplification. Once again there seems to have been a ‘standing back’, but this time a more self-conscious standing back than in sixth-century BC Athens. After all, from the outset there is a self-conscious retrospection towards that ancient world, a second level of self-consciousness. In view of the extended metaphor in the first part of the book, in which I related the activity of the frontal lobes to the ability to rise above the terrain, enabling the left hemisphere to see the world laid out as its

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