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.
