peaceandlonglife@scepticwatch
Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519)
Lady with an Ermine
La Belle Ferronnière
>Portrait of a Young Fiancée
Vetruvian Man
The Turin Portrait
(Walter Isaacson, Leonardo Da Vinci, Simon & Schuster, 2017)
The Smile of Reason
Ignatius Loyola: the visionary soldier turned psychologist.
Kenneth Clark (1903 – 83)
Belief in Natural Law.
Belief in Justice.
Belief in Toleration. …
The philosophers of the Enlightenment pushed European civilisation some steps up the hill.
And in theory at, at any rate, this gain was consolidated throughout the nineteenth century.
Up to the 1930's people were supposed not to
- burn witches and other members of minority groups, or
- extract confessions by torture, or
- pervert the course of justice, or
- go to prison for speaking the truth
The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonising, humanising, civilising, the deepest impulses of ordinary people.
(Civilisation, 1969)
Contents
Clark, Kenneth
Leonardo da Vinci
Painting and Sculpture
Kenneth Clark (1903 – 83)
- Civilisation, BBC, 1969.
Romance and Reality
Man: The Measure of All Things
The Hero as Artist
Protest and Communication
Grandeur and Obedience
[The] rarest, and most precious of all emotional states [is] that of religious ecstasy.
[Bernini illustrates the passage in Saint Teresa's] autobiography in which she describes the supreme moment of her life — how an angel with a flaming golden arrow pierced her heart repeatedly:The pain was so great that I screamed aloud.
But simultaneously felt such infinite sweetness, I wished the pain would last eternally.
It was the sweetest caressing of the soul by God.
I wonder, if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit, has ever been conceived, or written down, in an enormous room.
The Light of Experience
The Worship of Nature
A sympathy with the humble, the voiceless, be they human or animal, does seem to be a necessary accompaniment to the worship of Nature. …
The new religion was anti-hierarchical.
It proposed a new set of values.
[It] was based on right instincts, rather than on learning. …
[A recognition] that simple people and animals often show more courage and loyalty and unselfishness than sophisticated people.
[And] a greater sense of the wholeness of life.
William Wordsworth:
One impulse from a vernal wood, may teach you more of Man, of moral Evil and of Good, than all the sages can.
Total immersion.
This is the ultimate reason why the love of Nature has been for so long accepted as a religion.
It is the means by which we can lose our identity in the whole.
And gain, thereby, a more intense consciousness of being.
The Fallacies of Hope
The revolutionaries [of the late eighteenth century] wanted to replace Christianity with the religion of Nature. …
People who hold forth about the modern world, often say what we need is a new religion.
It may be true.
But it isn't easy to establish. …
In 1792, France was fighting for her life against the forces of ancient corruption.
And for a few years, her leaders suffered from the most terrible of all delusions — they believed themselves to be virtuous. …
The men of 1793 desperately tried to control anarchy be violence.
[But were, in the end,] destroyed by the evil means they had brought into existence.
Robespierre himself, and many many others, followed the members of the old regime onto the scaffold. …
And thus for the first cloud to overcast Wordsworth's dawn, and darken the optimism of the first romantics into a pessimism that has lasted to our own day. …
Then in, 1798, the French got a leader with a vengeance. …
Communal enthusiasm may be a dangerous intoxicant.
But if human beings were to lose altogether the sense of glory — I think we should be the poorer. …
[After the storming of] the Bastille [it was] knocked down stone by stone.
But repression did not come to an end.
On the contrary, Napoleon organised the most efficient secret police in Europe.
[Rodin's] Balzac with his prodigious understanding of human motives, scorns conventional values, defies fashionable opinions — as Beethoven did — and should inspire us to defy all those forces that threaten to impair our humanity:The whole lot.
- lies,
- tanks,
- tear gas,
- ideologies,
- opinion polls,
- mechanisation,
- planners,
- computers
Heroic Materialism
It's reckoned that over 9 million slaves died of heat and suffocation in [the holds of slave ships], on the way to America. …
The anti-slavery movement was the first communal expression of the awakened conscience.
It took a long time to succeed.
The trade was prohibited in 1807 and, as Wilberforce lay dying, in 1835, slavery itself was abolished.
And in the middle of the century, Lord Shaftsbury, whose long struggle to prevent the exploitation of children in factories, puts him next to Wilberforce in the history of humanitarianism.
In the middle of the nineteenth century there was no children's hospital in London.
And children weren't taken into ordinary hospitals for fear that they might be infectious.
Shaftsbury was one of the founders of the Hospital for Sick Children — Dickens helped raise the money for it.
[Humanitarianism] was the great achievement of the nineteenth century.
We're so accustomed to the humanitarian outlook, that we forget how little it accounted in earlier ages of civilisation. …
We forget the horrors that were taken for granted in early Victorian England.
The hundreds of lashes inflicted daily on harmless men in the Army and Navy.
The women chained in threes, rumbling through the streets, in open carts on their way to transportation.
These, and even more unspeakable cruelties, were carried out by agents of the Establishment — usually in defence of property.
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