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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Kenneth Clark's Civilisation
Chapter 11
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For almost a thousand years the great creative force in western civilisation was Christianity. Then, in about 1725, it suddenly declined and in intellectual society practically disappeared.
Of course it left a vacuum. People couldn't go on without a belief in something outside themselves, and during the next hundred years they concocted a new belief which ... has added a good deal to our civilisation: a belief in the divinity of nature.
It's said that one can attach fifty-two different meanings to the word "nature." In the early eighteenth century it had come to mean little more than common sense, as when in conversation we say: "but naturally."
But the evidences of divine power which took the place of Christianity were manifestations of what we still mean by nature, those parts of the visible world which were not created by man and can be perceived through the senses.
The first stage in this new direction of the human mind was very largely achieved in England -- and perhaps it was no accident that England was the first country in which the Christian faith had collapsed. In about 1730 the French philosopher Montesquieu noted: "There is no religion in England. If anyone mentions religion people begin to laugh."
Montesquieu saw only the ruins of religion and ... couldn't have foreseen that ruins ... were part of the very subtle way in which faith in divine power was to trickle back into the Western European mind... the prelude to the enjoyment of natural beauty...
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... the fact remains that when an ordinary traveller of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries crossed the Alps it never occurred to him to admire the scenery -- until the year 1739, when the poet Thomas Gray, visiting the Grande Chartreuse, wrote in a letter: "Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry." Amazing! ...
...Rousseau's belief in the beauty and innocence of nature was extended to plants and trees to man. He believed that natural man was virtuous...
Robert Burns ... felt deeply distressed at disturbing a field mouse's nest...
The simple life: it was a necessary part of the new religion of nature, and one in strong contrast to earlier aspirations. Civilisation, which for so long had been dependent on great monasteries and palaces ... could now emanate from a cottage...
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