The Frankenstein’s Monster of Science

 

Mary Shelley, the author of the gothic horror/sci-fi novel Frankenstein, could be said to have been a child of the Modern Age in more ways than one.   Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” (1792), one of the first modern feminists, if not the very first, as well as a defender of the ideology of the French Revolution who deliberately ended her history of this event in its first year in order to avoid talking about how the Reign of Terror had ensued from it.   Shelley’s father, William Godwin, had been trained as a Nonconformist clergyman, but seduced by the antichristian doctrines that had been brewing in the salons and cafes of eighteenth century France, turned to a career in writing, in which he enthusiastically endorsed every new philosophical idea and the most radical form of republican liberalism, while long labouring to destroy the Christian faith he was once appointed to preach.

 

Mary Wollstonecroft Godwin was truly her parents’ daughter and embraced their radicalism from her earliest childhood.   When she was seventeen, she began an affair with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a disciple of her father’s, Lord Byron’s best friend, and a Romantic poet in his own right.  Nineteenth century Romanticism was primarily a rejection of the classicism that had undergone a major revival in Europe during the Renaissance, and then again in the eighteenth century.   In the eighteenth century, classicism reached its apex, being embraced both by the orthodox, such as Dr. Johnson, and by the radicals of the Enlightenment.   Similarly, Romanticism had both its left and right wings.   The latter included those who started out with radical religious and political sympathies but who matured into Tories – the Lake Poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and William Wordsworth come immediately to mind – as well as life-long reactionary Tory Sir Walter Scott.   Shelley, like Byron, most definitely belonged to the other side of the movement.

 

When Shelley met Mary Godwin, his first wife Harriet was pregnant with their son, but this did not prevent him from seducing Mary, using the blackmail of empty suicide threats to do so.   They would meet in secret at the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft, which most people would regard as rather morbid, until William Godwin found out about it.   Then they ran off to France together, taking Mary’s stepsister Claire along as an interpreter, and embarked upon a tour of Europe, returning home when they ran out of money, with Mary now pregnant.   Their daughter was born premature and died within two weeks.   After Mary, whose health had been weakened by the pregnancy recovered, they took off again, this time to join Lord Byron at Lake Geneva, Switzerland for the summer.   By all accounts it was a miserable, rainy, summer, but it was an incredibly productive one for the trio of writers.   Lord Byron’s Don Juan, Percy Shelley’s Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, all had their origins in that summer together, although only the second of the three was actually completed that year and none were published prior to the following year.   Upon their return to England after that trip. Mary’s older sister Fanny and Shelley’s first wife Harriet, both killed themselves, (1) and the couple celebrated by getting married.

 

What’s that?   I don’t think much of the Shelleys?  I don’t know where you would have gotten that idea. 

 

Mary Shelley’s first and most famous novel was first published in 1818, two years after the summer at Lake Geneva where she first conceived the idea.   The title was likely taken from Frankenstein Castle in Germany, which the Shelleys would have seen, if they didn’t actually visit, when travelling down the Rhine on their first trip to Europe.   In the novel Frankenstein is the last name of the protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, who belongs to a wealthy and noble family from Geneva and studies science at the University of Ingolstadt in Germany, where he becomes obsessed with the idea of artificially creating life.   Constructing an oversized human body he successfully brings it to life, but immediately rejects his creation because of its ugliness.   The monster responds to this rejection, by murdering his brother.   The monster confronts his creator, relates his experiences since awakening and his rejection by everybody due to his hideousness, and demands that Victor create for him a bride.  Victor initially agrees to do so, but at the last minute reneges and the monster responds by murdering Victor’s own bride Elizabeth on their honeymoon.  Victor then pursues the creature, seeking its destruction, all the way to the North Pole, only to succumb to the elements after being found by Captain Robert Walton to whom he relates his story.   Walton also encounters the monster, repentant over the fate of his creator, who vows to rid the world of his own existence.   The story is told in the form of a series of letters from Captain Walton to his sister.  

 

The story has been adapted numerous times.   The image we all have of what Frankenstein’s monster looks like comes from the 1931 Universal Studios film in which Boris Karloff portrayed the monster.   It is from the same film that we get the idea of Frankenstein robbing graves, stitching the parts together to form the body, and animating it using lightening.   Shelley was much more ambiguous, although the filmmakers expanded upon some hints she had dropped here and there.   My favourite “adapation” is Mel Brooks’ 1974 Young Frankenstein, featuring Gene Wilders as Frederick Frankenstein, the American grandson of Victor, initially embarrassed at the association, but who later re-creates the experiment at the family estate (relocated to Transylvania).   Marty Feldman steals the show with his performance as Frederick’s hunchbacked assistant Igor (“It’s pronounced Eye-gore”).  

 

Did Shelley intend any particular message by her story?  Is there any larger significance to it than what she did intend?

The subtitle of the novel would seem to suggest that the answer to the first question is yes.   That subtitle is “The Modern Prometheus.”   Prometheus was a figure in Greek mythology.   He was one of the Titans, the race that had overthrown the Elder Gods, before themselves being overthrown by the Olympians.   In the war between the Titans and the Olympians, Prometheus, foreseeing that the Olympians would win, sided with Zeus.   Later, however, he would perform a series of tricks on Zeus, each of which benefited mankind in some way.   In the last of those tricks he stole fire and gave it to man.   Zeus then chained him to a rock, where a vulture would pick away at his liver, which would regrow each day.   Hercules eventually sets him free, and he reconciles with Zeus by providing him with the information that the nymph Thetis, whom Zeus and Poseidon have been competing for, is destined to give birth to a son who will overthrow his father, as Zeus had overthrown Kronos, and Kronos had overthrown Uranus. (2)  

 

What did Mary Shelly mean by giving her novel this subtitle?   Who is the “Modern Prometheus” alluded to?

 

It seems fairly obvious that Victor Frankenstein is the character who is supposed to correspond to Prometheus.   The structure of the title certainly indicates so, and the parallels are striking.   As the original Prometheus gave fire to mankind, so Victor Frankenstein gives life.   The original Prometheus trespassed against Zeus to do so, Victor Frankenstein commits a form of blasphemy by taking upon himself the divine prerogative of giving life.   Both figures bring torture and anguish upon themselves for their hubris.   In this, Mary Shelley, despite her associations with the leading figures of the Romantic Movement, was a classicist, for her Victor Frankenstein is Aristotle’s tragic hero, brought down by his own arrogance.

 

One interpretation which seems to jump out from all of this is Frankenstein as a kind of warning against the attitude towards science on display in Sir Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis.    In this unfinished utopian novel, a scientific foundation which has as its end or purpose “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible” by the pursuit of the same end creates an ideal society on the island of Bensalem.   Frankenstein seems to present a scenario in which someone with very much the same ideas and attitude as Salomon’s House in Bacon’s novelette, brings about his own destruction.

 

Yet it is hardly likely that Mary Shelley had any such meaning in mind when she wrote the book.   Such an interpretation would run contrary to the entire way of thinking that she had imbibed from her father and shared with her husband.      

 

Consider how Percy Shelley had himself handled the myth of Prometheus in a play he was working on when Frankenstein was first published, and which came out two years later. He took the title of Prometheus Unbound from a non-extant play of Aeschylus, one of a trilogy of tragedies of which only one, Prometheus Bound, survives.    Only fragments of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus The Fire-bringer have come down to us, but we know more-or-less, the story they tell, including Prometheus’ eventual reconciliation with Zeus.   Shelley presents a story that is the direct inversion of this.   In his play, Jupiter (Zeus) is challenged and defeated by Demogorgon in the third Act, bringing about the release of Prometheus.   While the inversion of Aeschylus is in part a reflection of Shelley’s politics, a revolutionary radicalism as opposed to Aeschylus’ conservatism, his meaning was more than just political.   His Prometheus represents the human will and spirit, and the message of his play is that of the Modern Age – the triumph of the human will and spirit over all that would bind and confine it, especially the divine.   The same message is evident in Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, which ends in the Ragnarok of Gotterdammerung with the burning of Valhalla, as man takes the place of the gods. Even Alfred Lord Tennyson, in his poem Ulysses, takes the tale of Ulysses’ last voyage, as first recounted by Ulysses himself in the torments of hell in Canto XXVI of Dante’s Inferno, and portrays what in Dante was the hubris that brought damnation down upon Ulysses’ head in a heroic light.   What is being lionized in all of this literature, is the driving spirit of the Modern Age, the idea that knowledge serves the human will, and that man should recognize no limits in his pursuit of that knowledge and the triumph of that will.   This is the spirit of modern science, which is why Oswald Spengler correctly identified the spirit of Modern Western Civilization as Faustian, after Goethe’s version of Faust, the scholar who sold his very soul to obtain boundless knowledge (in Goethe’s nineteenth century re-telling of the story, Dr. Faust gets a happy ending, unlike Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth century play which ends with his dismemberment and damnation). (3)

 

Since the Shelleys shared a similar, Modern, progressive, outlook, it is unthinkable that the author of Frankenstein intended a message so contrary to that of Prometheus Unbound.   Nevertheless, the message that man should beware scientific hubris because his own inventions may turn on him and destroy him, is the message that has come across to a great many readers.   Without endorsing the postmodern deconstructionist total divorce of a text from its author’s intent, this is, perhaps, a case of a story with a meaning much larger than what its author could see.

 

The view that science was the path to a man-made Paradise on earth was strong in the nineteenth century and even up until World War I.   This optimistic view was shattered by the atomic bombs which brought the Second World War to an end.   At that point, the message which Mary Shelley had not intended, but which many have derived from her best-known novel, began to resonate with people, and the concept of a world devastated by man’s scientific and technological hubris, became a standard feature of dystopian literature.  

Today, all those who want us to obey every draconian and totalitarian “public health” order issued in the name of saving us from the Bogeyman of COVID-19, which orders are turning our countries more and more into something that resembles Orwell’s 1984, tell us to “follow the science”.  

 

What if the science they are telling us to follow turns out to be Frankenstein’s monster?

(1)  Harriet Shelley was found drowned.   The inquest ruled suicide and that is the most likely explanation, considering that she left a suicide note, although there is some slight evidence of foul play on the part of William Godwin.   In the case of Fanny Imlay, Mary’s older sister from an affair Wollstonecraft had with an American diplomat before meeting Godwin, there is no doubt that it was suicide by laudanum overdose, although her motivation for doing so has been the subject of endless speculation.

(2)  This is the beginning of the background story of the Trojan War.   Zeus and Poseidon, based upon Prometheus’ information, agree to give Thetis up and marry her off to Peleus, king of Thessaly.   This is the wedding, to which all the gods except the goddess of discord are invited.   She shows up anyway, and tosses the apple of discord between Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena which starts the chain of events that eventually leads to the Trojan War.   Thetis does indeed give birth to a son destined to be greater than his father – Achilles, the greatest of the Greek heroes of said conflict.

(3)   The legend is based on an actual person, a German parlour magician, alchemist, and astrologer who lived in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and whose end, at least in terms of how he departed this earth, without speculating as to where he went after, corresponds more closely with Marlowe’s account rather than Goethe’s.

The Tory and Socialism

Whereas the neoconservative, a species of liberal, embraces market capitalism in its liberal formulation and on a global scale, the Tory, the classical conservative who upholds royal and ecclesiastical authority as established by prescription with a calling to work together for the common good, accepts business and commerce in their market setting as human goods, but insists that these, like human freedom in general, are made possible by the context of the social and civil order, especially in a cultural atmosphere informed by the classical and Christian tradition. The Tory recognizes what Dr. Thomas Fleming calls “the one essential insight of free-market economics” which is “that human beings are more efficient at providing for their own needs than any set of other people could possibly be, no matter how enlightened.” (1) He also recognizes that liberalism has a tendency to make an idol out of the market, thus making for man a master out of what is properly his servant, and that when men begin to serve the market rather than the other way around – when they make decisions, for example, based upon what is “good for the market” – that the market then begins to undermine and erode, the social, civil, moral, and cultural, context that it requires in order to be a force for human good.


In the nineteenth century a rival to liberal capitalism arose in the form of socialism and the rivalry between the two systems soon came to so dominate the field of economics that one could hardly express an economic thought except in terms of either capitalism or socialism. If the Tory’s attitude towards market capitalism is one of a heavily qualified acceptance, his attitude towards socialism is that of a lightly qualified rejection.


Socialism was born in response to the changes wrought and economic conditions brought about by the Industrial Revolution. While some might see this as suggesting an affinity between the socialist and the Tory, who sees industrialism as being at best a mixed-blessing, there is far greater affinity between the socialist and the liberal. The Tory wistfully weighs what we have gained through industrialism against what we have lost, whereas the socialist, a progressive like the liberal, looks only forward to an industrialism organized according to his ideals rather than those of the liberal.


The ideal that historically defined socialism, was that of the communal or societal, collective ownership of productive property – farms, mines, factories, etc. Early forms of socialism envisioned this on a small scale, in the communes proposed by Robert Owen, and the workers-association ownership of factories advocated by the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels envisioned it on a much larger scale, that of the national society and eventually the world.


This was not the first time this ideal had been raised. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates and his interlocutors engage in the thought experiment of devising an ideal city and collective ownership is proposed for the governors and guardians of the city. Closer in time to the actual rise of socialism, Thomas More depicted a fictional island society that practiced communal ownership and other absurdities, to which he gave the name Utopia, meaning "no place".


It is an ideal upon which history has passed severe judgement. Communal ownership has been tried on numerous occasions. The only times it has worked have been when practiced by a small community, such as a Hutterite colony, within a larger society in which private ownership is the norm. Otherwise it has generally been practiced for a short time then abandoned when the experiment proved a failure, as was the case with the Puritan colony at Plymouth Rock in the 1620s. When attempted on the scale of a large national society, the results have been universally disastrous, as the record of Communism in the twentieth century bears out.


The Tory accepts history’s judgement on the results of the socialist ideal but looks deeper and weighs its assumptions as well. The obvious assumption underlying the ideal of communal ownership, is that private ownership by individuals or families is unjust. This was explicitly stated by the early socialists, most notably by Proudhon who famously declared “Property is theft!” The condemnation of private ownership is, of course, the very basis of Marxism, which quickly beat out its rivals to become the most influential of socialist theories. Marx taught that private ownership generates misery, by dividing men into unequal classes of “haves” and “have nots”, the former of which oppress the latter who must sell their labour to live.


The Tory has no sympathy with this perspective. Injustice and misery, he says, are not due to private ownership of property, nor can they be eliminated through communal ownership, for the same reason – they are part of the human condition - and while we obviously have a duty to ameliorate that condition to the best of our limited ability, such amelioration is to be sought through the traditional institutions of the social and civil order. The Tory is inclined to explain this in terms of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin (2) – that man presently lives in exile from Paradise which he cannot regain through his own efforts, an exile in which sin and its consequences are always present – whether he accepts the doctrine literally or only figuratively.


This was the basis of Canadian Tory Stephen Leacock’s arguments against socialism. Leacock, while mostly remembered as a humourist, was a trained economist who taught political economy at McGill University for almost four decades. A stern critic of the liberal doctrine of laissez-faire, in his “The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice”, (3) he rejected socialism as an acceptable alternative, declaring that “the attempt to establish it would hurl us over the abyss” and that “the frying pan is at least better than the fire.” He explains this judgement by the fact that socialism would require managers and workers alike to be angels rather than humans as they are, for placing complete control over the distribution of consumption goods in the hands of government managers can only lead to corruption on a much larger scale than already exists, and divorcing the workers’ share of that distribution from the concept of an exchange for labour can lead only to idleness, a problem which in turn can only be solved by force, leading to the conclusion that “socialism, in other words, is slavery.”


The Tory, in affirming that private ownership is not an injustice but a good that is essential to the social and civil order, accepts the wisdom of the ages represented in the classical and Christian traditions. At the same time Plato was speculating about collective ownership in The Republic, Aristophanes was demonstrating the absurdity of the idea in his play The Assemblywomen. In the Christian tradition, the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament contain two that protect property (4), and the Book of Acts, even in its description of the voluntary communal ownership of the early days of the Church in Jerusalem, places an affirmation of the rights of private ownership in the mouth of St. Peter as he condemns Ananias and Sapphira. (5)


Socialists and their sympathizers like to accuse businessmen of greed and to say that capitalism is driven by greed. Greed, in Christian moral theology, is Avarice, one of the Seven Deadly Sins. There is nothing inherently avaricious about business, or the market economy that facilitates it, however. The appetite for material acquisition is not itself Avarice, any more than the appetite for sex is Lust, or the appetite for food is Gluttony. These appetites are natural to mankind and humanity could not get along without them. They become their respective vices when taken to excess. The most that can be said against the market economy is that it contains no internal brakes on the appetite for acquisition to prevent it from becoming Avarice. These must be supplied by the cultural and moral traditions that the Tory sees as providing the necessary context for the market.


Lust, Gluttony, and Avarice are the three least of the Seven Deadly Sins, in the traditional ranking that we find in Dante’s Inferno and Purgatario. Far higher in that ranking is Invidia, or Envy, which is second only to Superbia, or Pride, with which it is associated. This is the sin of looking at those who have what you have not, and hating them for it, wishing to take it from them and ruin them, whether it benefits you or not. Envy is the very heart and soul and life-blood of socialism.


Even this, however, does not fully capture the Tory’s indictment of socialism, for it is not just that it embodies the second worst of the cardinal vices while accusing its rival of a lesser vice, and not entirely justly at that. In socialism, Envy hides its face behind the mask of Charity, the greatest of the Christian virtues, albeit in the debased contemporary sense of the word. Fortunately the mask frequently slips, and Envy can be recognized for what it is in the hate-filled rhetoric the socialist directs against business and businessmen.


This, then, is why the Tory must reject and condemn socialism, qualifying his rejection only by making it clear that we must not make the mistake of throwing out true charity and compassion, merely because socialism hides its envious face behind masks made in their image.



(1) Thomas Fleming, The Morality of Everyday Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), pp. 18-19. Fleming observes that this insight is not new with Adam Smith, but was noticed by Aristotle in ancient times.

(2) Anthony Burgess, in the second volume of his memoirs, explains that his being a “kind of Jacobite Tory, like John Dryden and Samuel Johnson” was due to the fact that “socialism was positivist and denied original sin.” You’ve Had Your Time: Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess, (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1990), p. 140.

(3) Stephen Leacock, “The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice”, which can be found, among other places, in Alan Bowker, ed., The Social Criticism of Stephen Leacock, (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1973), pp. 71-145.

(4) Three if we go by the Roman Catholic way of numbering the commandments.

(5) Acts 5:4.

The Revival of Civilization

The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt, translated by S. G. C. Middlemore, London, Phaidon Press, 1960, 462 pp.

The Renaissance is a period of European history which is of interest to people for many different reasons. For art aficionados the Renaissance was the era of the great masters - Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian, and so many others. For people who love political plots and schemes and intrigues the Renaissance was the age of the Medici, Sforzas, and of course the Borgias, and for those who take a more theoretical approach to politics modern political science was born in the Renaissance in the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli. The rediscovery and emulation of the Greco-Roman culture of classical antiquity makes the Renaissance an essential period of time for classicists, and for those of a scientific bent, the Renaissance was a time of ground-breaking discoveries about the natural world. It is the historical backdrop to the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.

The Renaissance is also an important historical period because it is the transition period between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. An early stage of the spirit of the Modern Age is discernible in the intellectual and cultural movement called humanism which developed in the Renaissance. Today, the term humanism refers to secular humanism, a movement which believes that religion should be completely a matter of private belief and should not be part of the organization of society. This rabid hostility towards religion was not present in Renaissance humanism, which was born centuries before the Enlightenment Project began, but the earlier humanism involved a transfer of focus from God to man which was arguably one of the first steps in the development of what would eventually become the later, secular humanism. The blessings and curses of the Modern Age both have their roots in the Renaissance.

Despite all of this it is only quite recently that we began to think and speak of this period as “the Renaissance”. The term “Renaissance” signifies a re-birth and the concept behind the term was that of a renewing of the high cultural achievements of the civilization of the ancient world. While some art critics such as Vasari, who dismissed medieval art as barbaric (1) had considered the new classical style to be a re-birth it was in the 19th Century that historians began to regard the 14th-16th centuries as the distinct period of cultural achievement that we think of as “the Renaissance” today.

Although he was not the first to write about the Renaissance, credit for making it a firmly established part of our understanding history must be given to Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt. Jacob Burckhardt, who was born into a prominent family in Basel, where he lived and taught for most of his life, was the son of a Protestant clergyman who ministered at the Basel cathedral. Like the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, another parson’s son who would become his student and for a brief time his colleague (2), Burckhardt initially began his academic career as a student of theology. History, however, would come to take the place of the queen of the sciences in his heart, and especially the history of art. Indeed, he was one of the pioneers of art history as a serious academic discipline

It is remarkable therefore, that his most widely known book, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, is not about art and does not include a section on art. The author himself, on the very first page draws our attention to this fact by stating that he had intended “to fill up the gaps in this book by a special work on the ‘Art of the Renaissance’” but had only done so in part. That he did not complete this intended work is unfortunate for the history of art.

In the same context Burckhardt had lamented what he called “the most serious difficulty of the history of civilization”, namely, “that a great intellectual process must be broken up into single, and often into what seem arbitrary categories, in order to be in any way intelligible”. This is a description of the structure of his own book. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is divided into six sections the largest of which are the first “The State as a Work of Art” and the last “Morality and Religion”. The other sections are “The Development of the Individual”, “The Revival of Antiquity”, “The Discovery of the World and of Man”, and “Society and Festivals”.

His misgivings about breaking down the Renaissance into categories appear to have been groundless because a unifying concept of the Renaissance does emerge towards which each of the sections contributes. The Italian Renaissance, as Burckhardt conceived it, was the first modern civilization, in which the individualism, humanism, scientific pursuits, and other characteristics of the modern age are first born in a country where the political foundations of modernity had not yet been laid.

Therefore, in “The State as a Work of Art”, we find a multi-layered account of the political situation in Renaissance Italy. There is a faithful narrative of the misdeeds and achievements of the Borgias, Visconti, and all the other colourful characters of this time and place, the sort of thing most historians would be interested in both in Burckhardt’s own day and our own. There is a comparison of the two basic kinds of city-states which existed in Italy at that time. Then there is an account of a nation-state, struggling to emerge in a country where feudalism had not developed in the direction of national unity as it had elsewhere in Europe.

It is this last concept, of how the dream of national unity underlay the aspirations and ambitions of Signoria and republican theorists alike, that contributes the most to the overall picture of the Renaissance Burckhardt was painting and he introduced the theme early by writing:

The struggle between the Popes and the Hohenstaufen left Italy in a political condition which differed essentially from that of other countries of the West. While in France, Spain and England the feudal system was so organized that, at the close of its existence, it was naturally transformed into a unified monarchy, and while in Germany it helped to maintain, at least outwardly, the unity of the empire, Italy had shaken it off almost entirely.

In the absence of that unity, Italy consisted of a number of city-states, some of which were republics governed by a senate, others of which were dominated by families which had attained wealth and then power through the hired soldiers called Condottieri, the leaders of which Burckhardt calls “despots” to distinguish them from the governing houses which had emerged from feudalism elsewhere in Europe. These sought legitimacy and security for their dynasties and dreamed of uniting Italy. Poets like Dante and Petrarch sought to capture the spirit of a national Italy in verse. These dreams of a politically unified Italy went unfulfilled, however. Italy would not be united until a year after Burckhardt’s book was first published in the 19th Century.

If a modern nation-state did not quite materialize in Renaissance Italy, modern individualism did. This, according to Burckhardt, made the Italian “the firstborn among the sons of modern Europe”. The consciousness of the individual personality, developed in both types of city-states alike, as man who had previously “been conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category” began to separate his outward view of the world from his inward view of himself.

This sense of the individual, according to Burckhardt, took its highest form in the universalism of the Renaissance humanism, both in the cosmopolitan belief that the learned man is at home everywhere expressed by Dante and Ghiberti and in the ideal of “’l’ uomo universale’”, the man who possesses knowledge in many different areas. Dante, Leon Battista Alberti, and Leonardo da Vinci are given as examples of this ideal and today we still speak of someone whose expertise covers many areas in which most people concentrate and specialize on one as a “Renaissance Man”.

This new individualism manifested itself in a number of different ways. Glory and honour, previously attached to groups and classes, now took the individual form that we know today as “fame”. The pursuit of fame led to great achievements, but also created many problems. “The corrective”, Burckhardt wrote “not only of this modern desire for fame, but of all highly developed individuality, is found in ridicule, especially when expressed in the victorious form of wit”. The latter “could not be an independent element in life till its appropriate victim, the developed individual with personal pretensions, had appeared”.

Following the short but pivotal section on the individual, Burckhardt turned to the aspect of the Renaissance which gave it its name, the rediscovery and revival of ancient civilization. He began by criticizing the term as being “one-sided”, which today seems more than a little ironic in light of the extent to which this very book popularized the term. Burckhardt insisted that it is “one of the chief propositions of this book, that it was not the revival of antiquity alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people, which achieved the conquest of the western world.”

This is how Burckhardt regarded history. A particular people in a specific time period would have a certain spirit which manifested itself in everything they did so as to lend its character to the era itself. In this case it was the spirit of the individualistic, non-politically unified, Italian people which manifested itself in the Renaissance. The renewal of the classical was a manifestation of that spirit, not that spirit itself. It was a spiritual movement, Burckhardt argues, in which the Italian people, no longer effectively ruled by either the Holy Roman Empire or the papacy, “awakened to self-consciousness, sought for some new and stable ideal on which to rest” finding it in the world empire of ancient Rome.

This vision of the ideal of ancient Rome inspired the study of ancient Rome, of the architecture of classical Rome still visible in a dilapidated form in the ruins of ancient buildings and roads, and more importantly in classical literature. Study of the classical languages, first Latin, a dialect of which had evolved into Italian, and then Greek became an important pursuit. People who had the wealth to do so (and some, like the monk who would become Pope Nicholas V, who did not) began to collect large libraries of classical manuscripts, and the science of textual criticism was born.

An awakened people, however, captured by the vision of an ancient civilization from which they could claim descent, was not satisfied and could not be satisfied, by treating that civilization as something dead to be viewed in a museum. The next step was to translate the Roman ideal into contemporary – for the 14th to 16th centuries – Italian. Enter the humanists. Dante (3), Petrarch, Boccaccio and their successors, imitated and built upon classical literary models, to give new life to Italian literature.

Humanism was not contained within the realm of literature, however, but spread throughout the universities, transforming existing disciplines and creating new ones, and laying the foundation for the modern approach to the humanities. The desire to discover the world gave birth to the exploration of men like Christopher Columbus and to a deep interest in the natural sciences. (4) This in turn led to new discoveries which provided inspiration for poetry and literature.

The renewal of civilization did not take place in an academic world cut off from the society around it. “Every period of civilization, which forms a complete and consistent whole manifests itself not only in political life, in religion, art, and science, but also sets its characteristic stamp on social life”. Social life in the Renaissance, as Burckhardt depicted it, was deeply affected by the fact that the nobles now lived in the cities, and so shared the interests of the burghers (enfranchised townsmen whose wealth was derived from commerce). One result of this was that birth had come to be of less importance in terms of social influence than wealth and education. This too is a distinctively modern phenomenon.

Overall, Burckhardt’s book is informative about many different aspects about the Renaissance, although it will undoubtedly be disappointing to those whose primary interest in that period is in its art. His depiction of the Renaissance, as the first modern civilization is a convincing one, even if some of the modern phenomena he describes, such as individualism and equality, meant something very different in their Renaissance context, then they do to us in the 21st Century – or for that matter than they meant for Burckhardt in the 19th Century. This has been one of the most influential books on the history of the Renaissance ever written and it is likely that its influence will continue.

(1) In the literal sense. Such art was dubbed “gothic”, i.e., of the Goths, the Germanic invaders who had sacked Rome.

(2) It was Burckhardt, as a matter of fact, who, upon receiving a postcard from Nietzsche after his mental breakdown, first realized that the philosopher had gone stark raving mad and notified the people who would arrange for him to receive the care he needed.

(3) Burckhardt regarded Dante, who “treats the ancient and the Christian worlds, not indeed as of equal authority, but as parallel to one another” as the first humanist. Subsequent historians have not followed Burckhardt in this.

(4) Here too Burckhardt pointed to Dante as displaying an early scientific interest in the natural world.

The Beauty of Nature, Man’s Dominion, and the Environmentalist Movement

Beauty is that quality of certain sights and sounds which appeals to us and draws us back to look or listen again in appreciative contemplation. There are many different kinds of beauty. There is the human beauty which plays a large role in sexual attraction, the beauty which men see in women, and women in men. Then there is the kind of beauty which human beings create in art. The arrangement of words in a poem and of notes in a symphony are examples of this kind of beauty as are the amphitheatres and temples of ancient Greece, the cathedrals of medieval Europe, the porcelain of the Song and Ming Dynasties in China, and the sculptures and paintings of the Renaissance masters.

Then there is what is often called natural beauty – the beauty of the world around us. This is the beauty that we will be considering in this essay and we will start by noting that there are different meanings attached to the word “natural” which correspond to the radically different ways of thinking about natural beauty which exist today.

The different meanings of the word “natural” are actually different meanings of the word “nature”, for natural is an adjective that derives its meaning from a source noun by attributing the qualities of that source noun to that which it is modifying. When we say that something is “natural” we mean that in some sense it is by, of, or from nature.

The word nature is derived from the Latin word for “give birth” and its earliest English usage reflects an important concept in classical philosophy. It was originally used to refer to something’s essence, to the qualities and traits which make that something what it is and not something else. We still use the word nature in this sense today. If we say that something is a certain way “by nature” then we mean that it could not be different and still be itself.

It is from this meaning of nature that the concept of the “natural sciences” was originally derived. Today we often use the word science to refer to the natural sciences but originally the term science was used to refer to organized knowledge of all sorts. When qualified by the adjective natural, it referred to the pursuit of knowledge of how everything in the physical world works. This was because people who pursued this kind of science were trying to discover the nature of everything they observed in the world around them.

This usage, however, led to a change in the meaning of the word nature. It came to mean “that which natural scientists study”, i.e., the physical world. From this it developed a narrower sense of “living organisms in the physical world”. Very recently it took on the meaning of “everything in the physical world, especially the living organisms, except mankind”.

The difference between the oldest meaning of nature as something’s “essential qualities” and the most recent meaning of nature as “everything except mankind” is reflected in the different ways in which people think of natural beauty today. This becomes clear when we ask the question: Does beauty have to be untouched by the hand of man in order to be natural?

Those who answer this question with a “yes” are using the word “natural” in accordance with the more recent meaning of “nature”. Those who answer the question with “no” are using the word “natural” in its classical sense.

Now let me state out front that I am one of those who would answer the question “no”. To that I would add that it is this understanding of “nature” and “natural” as excluding mankind and his influence that is precisely what is wrong with the environmentalist or “Green” movement at its worst.

In saying that I do not mean to suggest that humans are incapable of acting in ways which can have a negative effect upon their world and its beauty. Of course we are, we do it all the time. Human activity can mar natural beauty severely. Human activity can also enhance that beauty, however, and the idea that we have a responsibility, in choosing our behavior, to take our impact upon the appearance of our world into consideration and select behavior that enhances rather than mars that appearance, is environmentalism at its best.

We will return to that momentarily. Before doing so, I should note that natural beauty is a fairly recent subject of serious thought. The Athenian philosophers talked and wrote about beauty but they did not have the beauty of streams and fields, forests and meadows, in mind when they did so. They wrote about the beauty of human beings, the erotic love it inspires, and the higher ideal Beauty which it is an earthly image of.

The 19th Century German historian Jacob Burckhardt describes how the natural world came to be considered an object of beauty in the Italian Renaissance:

The Italians are the first among modern peoples by whom the outward world was seen and felt as something beautiful. (1)

Burckhardt believed that the ability to see the beauty in the world around us is “always the result of a long and complicated development”. He went on to summarize the history of the way people thought about the natural world – its beauty entered into the arts and poetry of the ancient world only after they had covered everything else, the Germanic peoples had a reverence for nature which they abandoned when they accepted the Christian faith, until finally around 1200 “at the height of the Middle Ages, a genuine hearty enjoyment of the external world was again in existence…which gives evidence of the sympathy felt with all the simple phenomena of nature—spring with its flowers, the green fields and the woods”. (2)

All of that, however, Burckhardt maintained, was “foreground without perspective”. It was in the writings of Dante and Petrarch that he saw the birth of modern serious contemplation of natural beauty. Of Dante he wrote:

Not only does he awaken in us by a few vigorous lines the sense of the morning air and the trembling light on the distant ocean, or of the grandeur of the storm-beaten forest, but he makes the ascent of lofty peaks, with the only possible object of enjoying the view—the first man, perhaps, since the days of antiquity who did so. (3)

Dante and Petrarch were poets, of course, writing at the dawn of an era in which the systematic pursuit of knowledge would be divided up into numerous specialized fields. It was much later that Alexander Baumgarten took the Greek word for “feeling” or “sensitivity” and from it coined the term aesthetics to refer to the philosophy of beauty, art, and taste. It was in the 18th Century that Baumgarten coined this term and Roger Scruton – himself a philosopher who specialized in the field of aesthetics – tells us that:

When, during the course of the eighteenth century, philosophers and writers began to turn their attention to the subject of beauty, it was not art or people but nature and landscape that dominated their thinking. (4)

This did not last long. Two chapters later Scruton begins his discussion of artistic beauty by telling us how in the 19th Century “the topic of art came to replace that of natural beauty as the core subject-matter of aesthetics”. (5) If natural beauty was bumped by art from the centre to the periphery of aesthetics in the 19th Century, however, it also came to be included within the context of an entirely different discussion, that of environmentalism.

Environmentalism is neither a science nor a branch of philosophy. It is an ideology and the political movement that speaks for that ideology. It purports to be based upon and informed by science, particularly the science of ecology (6), but as with all movements that make this claim it is questionable to what extent it allows scientific findings to influence its ideology rather than bending the science to fit its ideology.

Environmentalism started as a reaction against industrialization. Industrialization began a couple of centuries ago when modern science was applied to methods of producing material goods, and ways of producing goods in large quantities in short periods of time were developed. Industrialization brought many blessings to mankind – material goods became plentiful and more affordable, items previously considered to be luxury goods became more widely available, work hours were decreased and leisure time increased.

These blessings did not come without a price, however. There was a negative side to the industrialization process. The large scale production of material goods meant that the raw materials from which these goods were produced were being used up on a larger, faster scale as well. The production of usable goods from raw materials also results in byproducts which are often unusable and discarded as waste. The enhanced production of goods meant that waste was produced on a larger scale as well. Industrialized production required machinery which consumed energy resources on a larger scale than ever before and which produced smoke on a much larger scale than ever before as well.

The increase in the speed and scale with which we consume resources was a potential problem because of the danger that we would use up those resources faster than we could replace them, or, in the case of resources that cannot be renewed, that we would use them up altogether and be stuck without an alternative. The increase in the production of waste was a more concrete problem because that waste needed to go somewhere and many methods of disposing of it resulted in pollution of streams, ditches, fields, oceans, the underground water supply, and the atmosphere.

It was in order to address these problems that environmentalism was born. Originally, environmentalism had the good of human beings at heart. The concern that resources were being used up too fast was a concern that a tremendous amount of human misery would be produced when the resources are no longer sufficient to sustain the human population. The concern that the large scale production of industrial waste was creating pollution was a concern that human beings would be drinking tainted water, breathing polluted air, and would be living in an environment contaminated by pollutants.

One thing that stands out about these concerns is that they are intrinsically conservative in nature. This is even reflected in the name for the branch of environmentalism that addresses the question of resources. That branch is called conservationism a term derived from the same root as the word conservative. Those who dismiss these concerns, on the other hand, by affirming their faith that science and technology will always find an answer, are affirming a belief in progress. (7)

In North America, however, opposition to environmentalism is mostly found among those who identify themselves as conservatives and support of environmentalism is mostly found among those who identify themselves as progressives. This can partly be explained by the fact that many North American conservatives are really liberals. There is more to it than that however. (8) Environmentalism has changed from being a concern for the environment for the sake of mankind which needs that environment to being a concern for the environment for its own sake in which mankind is regarded as an enemy.

This brings us back to the meaning of nature and the question of whether natural beauty must be beauty that is untouched by man.

The topic of natural beauty inevitably became part of the environmentalist discussion because it is by definition the beauty of man’s environment. When we talk about pollution’s harmful effects upon the environment we usually think first about how waste products released into water or the air can make sick or kill the people and other animals who drink the water and breathe the air. Pollution can also harm the environment by marring its beauty and producing ugliness.

We recognize this immediately when we think about the kind of pollution we call littering. A lawn, garden, public park, or even a ditch beside a road, looks terrible when it is covered by empty potato chip bags, cigarette packages, and beer and soda pop cans.

Some people might be inclined to think that this is the most trivial of environmentalist concerns. The depletion of resources and the poisoning of others are matters which pose direct threats to human beings. It might annoy us if the appearance of our surroundings is marred by pollution but this does not threaten our existence. Are we not constantly told that outward appearances are superficial, trivial matters that only shallow people concern themselves with?

Cultural warnings against judging by outward appearances, however, pertain to how we regard other people not how we think about our environment. The idea behind them is that we should not allow a person’s appearance to overrule his character. And while it is true that other concerns might be of greater importance this does not make concern for the appearance of the world around us a trivial matter. Try and imagine living in a world where everything we regard as beautiful has disappeared and been replaced by something ugly. The thought of living in such a world should be sufficient to convince us that environmental beauty is anything but trivial.

We are able to appreciate beauty in ourselves, in art, and in the world around us because this ability is part of our nature as human beings. Our human nature also manifests itself in the universal human activity of attempting to make our personal appearances, the appearance of our homes, and the appearance of our arts and crafts, as pleasing to the eye as possible. In both of these aspects of human nature can be seen a tremendous human need for beauty. (9)

It is this human need for beauty which makes natural or environmental beauty something which we should try to conserve along with natural resources. To conserve something is to preserve it for the future by being careful not to waste it in the present. To conserve things we have inherited from past generations – our civilization, our culture, our laws and rights, our art, our resources, our environment – for future generations is to behave responsibly by taking a long view of things in which we rank our long term good higher than our immediate short term good. To take this view, requires that we think of ourselves primarily as communities or societies and only secondarily as individuals, for individuals have only brief lifespans in comparison with the multigenerational life of a community or society. It also requires that we cultivate and practice the virtue of temperance or self-control, of keeping our desires and passions subject to our reason, itself subject to the good of the community reflected in its laws.

These attitudes and behaviors are consistent with pre-modern classical and Christian thought. They are at odds with modern thought, however. Liberalism, the predominant ideology of the modern age, consists of unfettered individualism which insists upon the primacy of the individual over the community. The classical idea of governing our passions is the polar opposite of the message of “indulge yourself”, “express yourself”, and “if it feels good do it” that is found everywhere today. It should come as no surprise to us, then, that the idea of conserving our natural resources and the beauty of our environment finds itself at odds with modern utilitarianism and pragmatism.

It is unfortunate, therefore, that the movement which has concerned itself with the conservation of environmental beauty and natural resources, has aligned itself, not with the classical and Christian pre-modern traditions of Western civilization, but with the radical forces dedicated to their destruction. The result of this mismatched alliance has been that the environmentalist cause has been twisted and its very understanding of nature and natural beauty has been warped.

At some point the environmentalist movement began to lay the blame for the problems created by industrialization at the feet of Christianity. In Genesis 1:26-29, God creates man and gives him dominion over the earth and all living things therein. Environmentalists pointed to this passage and identified it as the source of industrialism’s use of science and technology to exert man’s will over the natural world, and therefore of industrial depletion of resources and massive production of waste and pollution.

Having placed the blame on Christianity for the industrial threat to our ecosystem, environmentalism then adopted a worldview in which nature was elevated to the level of the divine. In some cases this was very literal as some environmentalists turned to a naturalistic, neopagan religion, in which nature or the earth was worshipped as a goddess. These were the radical fringe of the movement – most environmentalists did not go this far but they insisted that we adopt an attitude of reverence towards nature of the kind that the Abrahamic faiths teach should be reserved for God

This was a reversal of the positions held by man and the rest of the physical world in the hierarchy of Creation in Christianity. One of its effects was to remove mankind from “nature” in the thinking of the environmentalists. In Christian doctrine, God created man in His own image, gave man dominion over the natural world within which He placed man. Man’s vice-regal dominion over Creation was to be exercised from within Creation. To elevate nature above man the environmentalists had to separate nature from man.

The concept of a nature which is separate from and does not include man is a false concept, a distorted concept and this has in turn distorted the way those who hold this concept view mankind. (10) Wendell Berry comments on the unnaturalness of this dichotomous view of man and nature:

The defenders of nature and wilderness – like their enemies the defenders of the industrial economy – sometimes sound as if the natural and the human were two separate estates, radically different and radically divided. The defenders of nature and wilderness sometimes seem to feel that they must oppose any human encroachment whatsoever, just as the industrialists often apparently feel that they must make the human encroachment absolute or, as they say, “complete the conquest of nature.” But there is danger in this opposition, and it can be best dealt with by realizing that these pure and separate categories are pure ideas and do not otherwise exist. (11)

Berry goes on to say that it is not good for human beings to live for very long in either “pure nature”, i.e., wilderness unshaped by man, or in “a condition that is purely human”, i.e., completely artificial or man-made. (12) He then explains that:

People cannot live apart from nature, that is the first principle of the conservationists. And yet, people cannot live in nature without changing it. But this is true of all creatures; they depend upon nature, and they change it. What we call nature is, in a sense, the sum of the changes made by all the various creatures and natural forces in their intricate actions and influences upon each other and upon their places. (13)

This is not an endorsement of industrialism, of which the agrarian Berry is a fierce critic, but it displays an understanding of the relationship between man and nature which is sorely lacking among most contemporary environmentalist critics of industrial activity.

If it is a mistake to divide “man” and “nature” into separate categories then the answer to our question about natural beauty must be no, that the condition of being unshaped or untouched by the hand of man cannot be the sine qua non of natural beauty.

Common sense would tell us this as well. A world in which cities of concrete and steel, roads of asphalt, advertising billboards, and landfills have completely hidden from view any trace of what it looked like prior to these things would be a world suffering from a beauty deficiency. But so would be a world consisting entirely of wilderness. It is no insult to creation or to its Creator to say that human activity can enhance a landscape and make it more pleasing to the eye than it was before. Since God placed man in this world, and gave him the ability to affect its appearance, it was clearly part of His intention that human activity would have just this effect.

We see this in the way in which well maintained lawns have a more refined beauty than wild grass that grows long and goes to seed, and in the way hedges which are trimmed and trees which are pruned of their dead branches have an elegant beauty that has been enhanced beyond that of the raw forest.

This is not to say that all parts of nature can be improved by mankind in this way. The world is a vast place with a wide variety of different views which respond to the influence of man in different ways. Some are best left as close to the way we found them as possible, others would seem incomplete without evidence of the presence and activity of mankind.

If God’s creation of man in His own image and placing him in the world with dominion over it included the intention that human activity which alters the appearance of creation would enhance and improve its beauty, then the free will that He gave to man, which created the potential for man to abuse his gifts and sin against his Creator, included the potential of man to mar and ruin the beauty of creation as well. Man, as the Scriptures tell and as can be seen everywhere we look, fell into sin and evidence that his sin has included the abuse of his creative abilities to distort and mar the beauty of creation is abundant.

This has been especially true in modern times. Large highways, paved with asphalt, do not complement their surroundings the way older country roads do. Large cities, in which urban dwellers can live their entire lives without seeing the beauty of the countryside, or even the beauty of a star filled heaven at night, do not blend into the country which surrounds them in the way smaller towns and villages do. The vast landfills needed to accommodate the waste of modern, industrial, urban living, are among the many eyesores which scar the beauty of the land as a result of modernization.

The modernization which produced these things does not flow out of the belief that God gave man dominion over creation. It comes rather from the belief that man must seize dominion over creation for himself by forcing creation to bend to his will rather than receive dominion over creation as a gift from the hand of his Creator. This unleashing of the human will to power is what we were left with when Christian faith began to wane in the modern age.

The desire to conserve the beauty of the world for future generations is a natural and a noble desire. It results only in folly, however, when those who posses that desire blame the Christian faith for the problems of industrialization, separate man from nature, deifying nature and demonizing man (14), and place their faith in government and international bureaucracies.



(1) Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon Press, 1944, 1960), p. 178. This is the translation by S. G. C. Middlemore which first appeared in two volumes in 1878. The German original was published in 1860.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Ibid, p. 179.

(4) Roger Scruton, Beauty, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 2011), p. 49.

(5) Ibid., p. 82.

(6) Ecology is the branch of biology which studies how living things interact with each other in a common environment. The term ecology was coined in the 19th Century to refer to this discipline. It comes from the Greek word word oikos. Oikos literally refers to a house, but the meaning that crosses over into “ecology” is “place where you dwell, surroundings”. The word economy is ultimately derived from the same root, but the Greek compound oikonomia was already in existence in ancient times to refer to “the administration of household affairs”.

(7) Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2004) which consists of his Massey Lectures for that year, is a work of doomsday scare-mongering which nevertheless correctly identifies the correlation between a belief in progress and an irresponsible attitude towards the conservation of resources.

(8) The environmentalist movement has to a large degree embraced socialism, an economic system based upon the rejection of private property. Conservatives and liberals – by liberals I mean “classical liberals” - both believe strongly in private property, and hence cannot accept socialism. Environmentalists should not be so quick to reject private property either. One environmentalist, the late Garrett J. Hardin, who was professor of human ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, (and also a conservative Republican), argued in a number of essays and books, that resources which are privately owned, are better maintained and conserved, than those which are treated as common resources. This has been observably true since ancient times. Other reasons why conservatives are suspicious of the environmentalist movement are its belief in, reliance upon, and support of government and international bureaucracies who interfere in people’s lives from afar, and its increasingly addiction to alarmist rhetoric and doomsday scenarios, such as the supposed “global warming” crisis. These are good reasons to be wary of the environmentalist movement, but not to reject its basic idea that earth’s natural resources and beauty are something we should conserve for future generations to enjoy.

(9) Roger Scruton, in the chapter on natural beauty in his book cited above, points to Immanuel Kant, who argued that beauty was a proper subject for philosophy because taste, the ability to appreciate beauty, was a human universal. This made natural beauty the primary object of taste, because all human beings can appreciate it, whereas appreciation for the arts is more limited. Scruton also discusses those, such as the Marxists, who held an opposing view, but he himself is quite sympathetic to Kant on this point.

(10) Environmentalism has allied itself, for example, with what Pope John Paul II called the “culture of death”, and environmentalists have frequently spoken of the propagation of the human species in extremely derogatory terms.

(11) Wendell Berry, Home Economics, (New York: North Point Press, 1987), p. 6. This is the first paragraph of an essay entitled “Getting Along with Nature”, which is the second of the fourteen essays which this book consists of.

(12) I can think of some people who would probably disagree with the second assertion but they are not good advertisements for their position because it arises out of the kind of perpetual immaturity that results from being completely immersed in technology all one’s life.

(13) Berry, op. cit., p. 7.

(14) Note, as Berry did in the first quotation above, that the environmentalists and those who see dominion over nature as something man must seize for himself, although each others enemies, have this separation of man and nature as their common ground.