In its claims of rebirth the Renaissance made a breach with a continuity that stretched back through Patristics to pagan philosophy, by taking pagan culture in isolation from later developments, discovering humanism and cutting itself off from the transcendent and canonical tradition. Then, in its dismissal of all that came before it the Enlightenment by its own naming displays a tendentious agenda in painting all that came before as benighted - from Classical Greek philosophy to Aquinas and the Scholastics.
Most of the evils of today are dismissed by the advocate of the secular Enlightenment as counter -Enlightenment, but Fascism, Nazism, Communism are all creatures of the Enlightenment. They would not have been possible without that breach with the transcendent and canonical tradition, the sophia perennis, so to speak. If one contrasts Kant and the Marquis de Sade, one must understand that de Sade is impossible without Kant, who reduced morality to rationalism. The Enlightenment was the final cut with the link to transcendental and eternal meaning. It was the final stage that began with nominalism, was developed through Renaissance Humanism and finally developed in the aforementioned great revolution in thought, the so-called Enlightenment.
We all exist in a post-Renaissance and post-Enlightenment paradigm. Our language is not one of mysticism or the transcendental or the divine, but of revolution, rights, procedures, modernisation. Taking Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment together, we find a reduction of all meaning to power games. Post-modernism in this regard is merely a continuation of the philosophical idea that supposed higher meanings conceal base power agendas.
We should not underestimate the evil figure of Machiavelli anymore than we should underestimate the Marquis de Sade in understanding the modern West. As John Milbank, the Anglican theologian, put it:
"It is [Machiavelli's] explicit preference for the Roman option and his return to the etymological root of virtue as 'heroic manliness', to be cultivated supremely in war. This preference encompasses also the view that continued class conflict within the republic is functionally useful in preserving political 'liberty' - the habit of independence."
Here in this complete rejection of the Christian ethos, we find a root behind the perpetual conflict of democracy, the state of continuous revolution. From feminism to Black Lives Matter we can see what Milbank terms - the ontology of violence. We are in a perpetual state of conflict for our rights. This is a direct contradiction of the Christian ethos to "resist not evil". And it helps us understand why everyone in the West feels the only politically legitimate position is one of rebellion, while priding ourselves that the inevitability of conflict is resolved through democratic process. The existence of perpetual conflict and revolution is assumed to be the natural state of existence. And it is in this way, amongst many others, such as the invention of the individual genius artist and abandonment of iconography, that Renaissance humanism makes an ethical and spiritual breach with the Sacred Tradition.
Christ's incarnation settled the questions of the Greek philosophers as much as the prophesies of the Jews. The Renaissance attempted a radical return to pagan humanism, by ignoring the succeeding development and evolution of the canonical story through Christ and the Church.
The Enlightenment only further contributed to the idea that traditional meanings were cloaks of meaning concealing realities of power. This was of course developed politically by Marx, but the idea is very much there in all the major thinkers of the Enlightenment. They too, made a deliberate breach with the inherited wisdom of the canon, as per Kant's exhortation in his essay "What is Enlightenment?" Empirical science could now discredit faith and tradition with objective data. The likes of Voltaire, Diderot and the Encyclopedists asserted the institutions of the ancien regime and religious faith were a trick of hiding true power, because everything can be reduced to power. All this manifested politically in the American and French revolutions.
Lost was the Byzantine sense of the Christian Imperium. After the fall of Constantinople though, a new force entered the West - occult magic and alchemy. Brought by refugee magicians who had existed on the margin of Orthodox Byzanitium, their practices found a fertile ground in mainstream Western society. Magic appealed to a mind-set where all was reduced to power. Manipulation of the world as objective data gave rise through magic to the later empirical science used to undermine the Church and the Tradition. This is what Descartes would later understand as the dichotomy of the human subject and the objective world to justify his own Enlightenment philosophy so pivotal to the development of the Enlightenment, but Heidegger would identify as engaging with the world as standing reserve. It led to technical power but a deep inauthenticity of Being.
Taken in isolation the rediscovery of pagan philosophy (as ancient wisdom was brought out of Orthodox East) Neoplatonic ideas for example meant a return to a dark mysticism developing into the occult. Neoplatonism had been developed through Church Fathers such as Dionysius the Areopagite and Saint Gregory of Nyssa and others into a foundation of Christian theology. In isolation from later developments in thought rediscovered Platonic ideas became dangerous encouragement to Luciferian power and thereby the reductive humanist agenda of the Renaissance.
Why though did the interaction with ancient wisdom play itself out in this way in the West? Because even before Machiavelli there was an emphasis on power within Western thought. After the schism with the Orthodox Church, Saint Anselm, the Norman Archbishop of Canterbury worked out an idiosyncratic understanding of Christian soteriology. In mimicking the world of the recent Norman conquest, Anselm understood God the Father as a feudal monarch demanding payment for sins. This was his satisfaction theory of salvation. He reduced the meaning of the crucifixion to payment of debt for a sin to a vengeful God the Father. The idea of Christ freeing us from death and the Devil on the cross was reduced to a payment necessary to a feudal Lord. The story of the crucifixion is reduced to one of power relationships. The deeper and more profound soteriology of the Orthodox East meant it could tolerate magic on the margin of the municipality without being corrupted. In the West we were already reducing all to power narratives and magic as manipulation of the standing reserve of the world found a fertile home. And magic led on to the excesses of techne through science and the enframement of which Heidegger writes.
Machiavelli was right to look back to ancient Rome to understand society as power battles for liberty, becasue this is where such a concept of power was rooted. And in the idea of Papal Supremacy that led to the Great Schism (the Pope regarding himself like Caesar as the Pontifex Maximus) we find an assertion of power and rights that broke the West from the Orthodox Church, making room for the power-theology of Anselm.
It is important not to be too reductive though, as the West still retained much that was Orthodox. In the last stages of the Medieval world Dante was a figure of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic resistance. In his understanding that all motion in the cosmos is motivated by love we find a traditional, canonical and Orthodox perspective. This runs entirely contrary to the Machiavellian idea of virtue as power. Dante's perspective was the Christian one. Importantly he did not dismiss our pagan heritage, but was guided by Virgil and met the classical philosophers in the afterlife. For Dante, as with Saint Vincent's "what has been believed everywhere, always, by all", we find a sophia perennis fully realised in revelation and the Incarnation, precursors of which existed in the pagan world.
Techne when misused as power and manipulation, Heidegger's "machenschaft", separates us from Being and authenticity. It is the manipulative exercise of power over the world as an objectified "standing reserve". Such a mind set became dominant and politics became all-pervasive as expression of power - be that the power of the individual over himself through his rights or the power of the State over the person through the rights of the race or the proletariat. Liberalism is not distinct from Fascism or Communism in its metaphysics. Only the Church answers the problem of power. Whether the LGBT protestors or the Brownshirts, all is rooted in a metaphysics of power, assertion of rights and one form of revolution or another.
And here we must mention one of the most heretical and Luciferian thinkers of them all - William of Ockham. This reduction of all to power narratives would not have been possible without his Luciferian theories. In his rejection of universal truths for particularity, in his argument that universal truths were nothing more than names and therefore artificial categories we find the break down in the participation of higher meaning. Centuries beforehand he had laid the foundation of the Western Enlightenment. Contrast this with Platonism and the higher meanings human beings participate in as their very telos and the chasm in perspectives is striking. We understand, as evidenced by the renaissance that a return to Platonism by itself leads to the occult and political manipulation. Understood through the Church Fathers, plundering the Egyptians as per Saint Basil of Caesarea, Platonic philosophy is baptised to help us understand participation in higher levels of meaning. Ironically through a return to a Christian understanding where life is based on love as the fundamental foundation and not power, we can reconcile the apparently mutually contradictory philosophies of classical Neoplatonism and Twentieth century Phenomenology. It is through something like Husserl's intentionality that we are able to recognise higher meaning and the spiritual. Through both phenomenology and Christianised Platonism we can see past the reductive narrative of power and rights, revolution and political might, to the higher meaning of love as an eternal and transcendent value, but not as an impersonal force, but as very personal relationship - as the worship of the Triune God.
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