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eros and magic in the renaissance
Ioan Couliano's Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (1987) argues that modern science is born after the Renaissance, and represents an entirely new manner of acquring and working with knowledge. As such, Couliano argues, modern science does not represent a linear extension or progression of Renaissance science, but rather a wholesale replacement, which essentially abandons avenues of exploration opened by the Greeks and later re-opened by Italian Neoplatonists, such as Giordano Bruno and Marsilio Ficino. Couliano goes so far as to suggest that our trust in quantitative science is so central to our contemporary worldview that the subjectivity of a Renaissance-era thinker would strike us as fundamentally unrecognizable.
This book works both as a fascinating elaboration of this alien Renaissance mindset and a critique of the modern scientific worldview, with Couliano firmly rejecting the notion that its rise represents a kind of "progress." In Couliano's view, the Renaissance sciences—including astrology, alchemy, the art of memory, and demon-magic—serve as strategies for working with the unconscious or imagination, and that their abandonment serves as a sort of psychological crippling. Actually, as Couliano explains in his final chapters, these methods are less "abandoned" and are more supressed by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, who jointly align these sciences with heresy and persecute the practicioners. (It is interesting to note that this alignment is still with us: see for instance the continued resonance of the Faust legend, which represents a man of knowledge as a servant of the devil, or any of the countless films or other cultural products which have depicted Satan as an erudite Italian.)
This book also makes a compelling case that these suppressed methods of knowledge-work continue to exist today in the form of various sciences and quasi-sciences: advertising, mass media, psychology, cryptography, and what Couliano calls “applied psychosociology.” As these sciences are commonly used in the services of mass control, those of us who want to understand control logics would do well to attempt a more complete understanding of these techniques—which involves understanding their roots in the Renaissance. A difficult task, perhaps, but Couliano's book provides an excellent starting point. |
Sunday, December 19, 2004
3:58 PM
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