The Finite Renaissance

Te Finite Renaissance margreta de grazia irst published in German in 1860 and in English in 1878, Jacob Burck- F hardt’s Te Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy continues to be credited with having brought into being the distinct historical period known ever since as the Renaissance. And yet there is one basic aspect of the period Burckhardt defned that has been overlooked: its terminus ad quem. According to Burck- hardt, the Renaissance ended with the Reformation. One reader of Burckhardt’s Renaissance in Italy, however, did not miss this endpoint: Burckhardt’s sometime friend and junior colleague at the University of Basel, Friedrich Nietzsche.1 For Nietzsche, the Renaissance was cut of, pre- maturely and conclusively. Only in his mind’s eye did it attain full-blown glory: I have a vision of a possibility, one that has perfect, super-terrestial magic and multi-coloured charm:—it seems to shimmer with all the tremors of refned beauty, it seems that an art is at work in it, so divine, so diabolically divine that you will look in vain through millennia for a second possibility like this. (64) What is the subject of this “vision of a possibility”? “Cesare Borgia as Pope” (64)—the impious Renaissance renegade seated on the sancta sedes. Te image comes into focus as an artwork, a portrait, perhaps, like those painted by Ra- phael of the great patron Julius II or the illustrious Medici Leo X. But the sitter that Nietzsche envisions is not Christ’s vicar but the notorious Borgia despot. He relishes the irony, “Christianity . overcome at its source,” the long history of the holy apostolic Church from St. Peter onward culminating in Cesare Borgia, a marvel of self-aggrandizing individualism: “with this [victory], Chris- tianity was abolished!” (65). the journal for early modern cultural studies Vol. 14, No. 2 (spring 2014) © 2014 %F(SB[JBtTe Finite Renaissance 89 Tis “vision,” however, is only a virtual one, for history had taken another course. “What happened?” Nietzsche asks. “A German monk, Luther, came to Rome,” saw that very same “vision,” but totally misconstrued it. Luther thought it an image of “papal corruption” when in fact “Christianity was not sitting on the papal seat anymore!” Occupying it instead was the unabashed worldliness of the Renaissance. Mistaking his target, Luther “few into a rage . against the Renaissance.” In doing so, he not only spared the papacy but ushered in a new and more virulent strain of Christianity, “the most unclean type of Christianity, that there is, the most incurable, the most irrefutable, Protestantism.” By resuscitating and redoubling life-negating Christianity, Luther destroyed “the last great age, the age of the Renaissance.” 2 For shatter- ing the possibility of a triumphant life-afrming Renaissance, Nietzsche will never forgive Luther and his legacy: “If we do not get rid of Christianity, it will be the fault of the Germans . .” (65). Perhaps Nietzsche’s febrile musings here should be attributed to his imbal- anced mental state, for they were written in 1888, a year before his breakdown. But the narrative source for his “vision of a possibility” is Burckhardt. It is Burckhardt who invites speculation as to what might have happened had Cesare, “the great criminal” (71), made it to the papal throne. According to his account, after the death of Cesare’s father, Pope Alexander VI, all stood propi- tious for Cesare’s succession: the papal ofce was on the verge of collapse, en- feebled by the rapacious worldliness of its occupants. Poison had weakened opposition in the conclave; a strong army was in place to back Cesare and none stood to resist him. At this point Burckhardt also lapses into a counterfactual reverie: “And what might not Cesare have achieved if, at the moment when his father died, he had not himself been laid upon a sickbed! . In pursuing such a hypothesis, the imagination loses itself in an abyss” (73). Again and again, Burckhardt invites the reader to imagine history with no Reformation: “without the Reformation—if, indeed, it is possible to think it away—the whole ec- clesiastical State would long ago have passed into secular hands” (79); “[a]nd who can say what fate was in store for the Papacy itself, if the Reformation had not saved it?” (284). It is Burckhardt, then, who sets the stage for the vision so thrilling to Nietzsche: worldly Borgia prevailing rather than godly Luther. For Burck- hardt, as for Nietzsche, without the animating jolt of the Reformation, the apathetic Church would have collapsed under the weight of its own corruption. In 1500, it was already tottering, weakened by sheer rapacity; but its demise 90 5IF+PVSOBMGPS&BSMZ.PEFSO$VMUVSBM4UVEJFT t űŴŲ “was adjourned for centuries by the German Reformation” (Burckhardt 79). By opposing the papacy, the Reformation ironically revived it, by spurring it “to raise itself from the soulless debasement in which it lay, and to place itself at the head of all the enemies of this Reformation” (79). Rising to Luther’s chal- lenge, the papacy recovered the spiritual authority and political power it had all but lost. “In this sense,” maintains Burckhardt, “it can be said with perfect truth that the spiritual and political salvation of the Papacy [was] due to its mortal [Lutheran] enemies” (79). But what if Christianity had not been stirred back to life? While Burck- hardt stops short of that counterfactual abyss, Nietzsche plunges in headlong.3 Indeed it is possible to read his Anti-Christ as a feshing out of that “vision.” What-might-have-been at the turning point of 1500, he makes happen in 1888, the year Anti-Christ was written. Te “revaluation of all Christian values” (66) undertaken by the Renaissance, but aborted by the Reformation, is brought to fulfllment almost four centuries later in Anti-Christ. Te historical clock is reset accordingly, not from “the dies nefastus when this catastrophe began . the frst day of Christianity” but “ from its last day,” the day when Anti-Christ is delivered to the world, “30 September 1888 according to the false calculation of time,” but “on the frst day of the year one” by the new (66). Troughout Renaissance in Italy, Burckhardt had emphasized Christiani- ty’s waning spiritual and imperial powers. Indeed it was the weakening of me- dieval religiopolitical strictures that made way for the bourgeoning of self- determining individuals. For these free thinkers, “[e]very thought of the world to come” was eclipsed, or else given “a poetic instead of a dogmatic form” (304). Yet not all transcendent beliefs were repudiated. Te book’s fnal chapter, “Morality and Religion,” describes the extension of tolerance and indiference to non-Christian faiths, especially to Islam, as well as to beliefs in magic, as- trology, theism, and deism. Only Christianity had no adherents among the great Renaissance individuals.4 Why should it take Nietzsche’s radical polemic to point out something so basic to Burckhardt’s Renaissance as its termination in the sacralizing Refor- mation? Why have we assumed that the Renaissance mutatis mutandis contin- ued in other climes beyond the Reformation—in England, for example, or in France? To some degree, this is Burckhardt’s doing, for he repeatedly hails the Renaissance as the start of the modern world, as if the quattrocento phenom- enon had extended itself into his own nineteenth-century present. At least thirty times he refers to the Renaissance as “the most modern state in the %F(SB[JBtTe Finite Renaissance 91 world,” “the frstborn among the sons of modern Europe,” “the early develop- ment of a modern man,” and in the book’s fnal line, “the leader of modern ages.” 5 Te current interchangeability of the two period terms, Renaissance and early modern, begins with his repeated conjoining of them. But what in Burckhardt’s own modern era warrants this strong genealogi- cal link? According to David Norbook, had mid-nineteenth-century Europe looked in Burckhardt’s Renaissance mirror, it would have been hard pressed to recognize itself.6 Certainly it is difcult to see the Renaissance’s individuat- ing spirit or rogue politics in his native and famously banal and Protestant Switzerland, with its newly federalized (1848) democratic constitution.7 Nor would it be easy to see much resemblance between Renaissance Italy’s individuals and the citizens and subjects of the rest of modern Europe (including Italy), as it accelerated toward centralization and egalitarianism. As Hayden White comments, “[t]he Renaissance was everything that [Burckhardt’s] modern world is not” (247). More often than not, Burckhardt confnes the defning attributes of the period to ffteenth-century Italy. Even the revival of antiquity, the “rebirth” that gave the period its name, “took place only in Italy, and there not until [after the fourteenth century]” (107). Also singular to Italy, as the opening sentences of Renaissance in Italy insist, was its political constitution. Italy alone had shaken of the strictures of feudalism (“almost entirely”) so that it was left “in a political condition which difered essentially from that of other countries of the West” (2). In France, Spain, and England, the earlier feudal system had settled into unifed confessional monarchies, and Germany at least notionally remained under the sway of the Holy Roman Empire. But Italy consisted of “a multitude of political units” (2), and the factious papacy remained a “perma- nent obstacle to national unity” (80). When Burckhardt moves forward in time and out of Italy, he resorts to diferent period designations, both recently con- structed, and both deeply religious. After the Reformation, the Renaissance drops out of the picture: in the south, there is the Counter-Reformation intro- duced by his teacher Leopold van Ranke, and in the north, there is the Ba- roque, elaborated by his pupil Heinrich WölFin.

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