Renaissance Archives - Rest and Trust

What is donegality? Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man represents the “perfect man,” based on the ancient knowledge of ratios and proportions in human anatomy. Leonardo, often called a Renaissance man, depicted something very different from the medieval understanding of man.

His Vitruvian Man is autonomous. There’s nothing around him. He is in the center. In the visions of Hildegard of Bingen, born in 1098, a man is also depicted in the center, except that the space/cosmos he is in is surrounded by the figure of God. The man is literally inside the womb of God.

In the medieval understanding, the man is in the center, and yet he is not. He exists in God’s embrace. The space/womb he is in is part of a Universal Body that has a head, face, hands, legs, and feet. The medieval man was not autonomous. He was loved. Embraced by the personal cosmos.

He lived, breathed, and moved inside the Divine womb. When the baby is inside the womb, they can’t see the mother, but they can divine her motherly presence in all things. She is hidden behind the walls of the world, and yet she is present in everything. The baby literally eats her body and lives off of her — her body is his whole world. The mother is hidden and yet revealed from the inside out.

C.S. Lewis once visited County Donegal in Ireland and was struck by the specific feel of the local landscape. He coined the term “donegality” to describe the unique atmosphere or mood that gives a particular setting or narrative its distinctive character. Donegality is a unique feel of something.

The Chronicles of Narnia is intentionally suffused with a certain donegality so we can recognize the Mother. All its symbolism — the talking animals, mythological landscapes, magical transformation — the whole atmosphere creates an irresistible sense of wonder and and an invitation to ask the main question: “Who?” Who is behind it?

To be born means to go out of the womb and see the mother face to face. But while we are in the womb, we live in her donegality. We see her dimly, as if through the looking-glass. We swim in the cosmos of her Divine Body, eating and drinking her self-revelations.

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s worlds, this “donegality” is even more pronounced because Iluvatar, the Divine Source, is mentioned only in the beginning of The Silmarillion. In the rest of the legendarium, he is not mentioned but implied. He is the force behind all forces. An attentive reader divines his Presence in all the peripeteia of the plot. Tolkien plunges us into the donegality of the Music of Iluvatar.

Both Lewis and Tolkien represented a deeply medieval understanding of man. The man is only himself when he is embraced by the cosmos of Divine love. The Divine love puts him in the center and nourishes him until he is ready to see her face to face. When in the womb, he sees her only in dreams, visions, symbols, metaphors, and parables. She is revealed from the inside out.

St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), a Byzantine monk and theologian, taught that even though God is unknowable in his essence, he is revealed in his energies. While in the womb, we cannot see God face to face, but we can know him partially through his energies. God manifests himself through his donegality, the unique atmosphere of the world.

That’s why Jesus said, “He who has ears, let him hear.” Hear what? The heartbeat of the mother, the warmth of her womb, the nourishment of her Body. When we feel embraced, we become ourselves. Divine donegality gives us the energy to be who we are.

What led to the birth of the Renaissance? Huge movements that shape the course of history always start in a small group. In the mid-14th century, Europe was devastated by a plague known as the Black Death. According to some sources, one-third of the population of Europe died. At such a time as this, people always face a difficult choice — to despair and “die before you die” or to find a way to continue living while you are still alive.

Such times are unbelievably fruitful in terms of their history-shaping power. They birth individuals and small groups who want to bring heaven to earth in the midst of hell. That’s how Boccaccio’s Decameron was written. In it, ten people — seven women and three men — get together in a secluded villa to discuss a fundamental question: how do you continue living when you don’t know if you will survive one more day?

Scholars say that out of this impulse, the European Renaissance was born. Renaissance is not so much an interest in reviving classical antiquity; it is primarily, a desperate search for Meaning in total meaninglessness. People struggled with the thought: “Life is scary, but to live without meaning is scarier.”

Renaissance was an answer to the crisis of Meaning. It was an attempt to revive the only thing that could revitalize people in times of spiritual catastrophes. Boccaccio noticed that in times like this people lose the will to live. Renaissance began as an answer to a pressing question: where do you find a desire to live when you know you will probably die tomorrow?

That’s how Boccaccio discovered Dante — the “Poet of Desire.” He realized that the Divine Comedy was a better guide from Inferno to Paradise than Decameron. Eventually, he was hired by the mayor of Florence to publicly read and interpret Dante.

Boccaccio delivered his lectures at the Church of Santo Stefano in Badia and the construction site of Santa Maria del Fiore. He would read fragments from the Divine Comedy and explain them to common people who would pass through the site on their way to the market.

In Dante, hell is a frozen lake, Cocytus. It’s a place of no desire. Those in hell have killed their Desire — by burying it or by satisfying it with the wrong thing (the surrogate). The devil (from the Greek “diabolos,” meaning the divider) separates the person from Desire. He does it in one of two ways: either by making the person give up on their desires altogether (renounce them) or by satisfying them with surrogates. Both lead to the death of Desire. We end up frozen in Cocytus.

What revives the desire is the stars. Every cantica in the Divine Comedy ends with the Italian word for stars. The star is a symbol of a burgeoning desire — a desire brought to life by the “Love that moves the Sun and other stars.”

Surprisingly, the word for “desire” in Italian (desiderio) contains the root “sidere” (star). To rekindle Desire, we all need “sidere.” Our Desire comes from the stars — a symbol of being moved by the Divine love. When we don’t see “sidere,” we are deprived of desire — “desiderio.” When we don’t see the stars, we have zero desires. We die before we die.

To avoid the trap of “diabolos,” the divider, we need “symbolon,” the Symbol. Someone or something moved by Divine love. Our desire is born out of the Symbol and satisfied in and by the Symbol.

Renaissance was an answer to the Black Death. People instinctively felt that the only way out of Cocytus was to be moved by the stars.