Thread by @culturaltutor

The Renaissance changed the course of history, but how did it happen?

Well, the people who created it didn't think they were doing anything new - they wanted to emulate the past.

It's a story of how innovative ideas aren't about originality, but imitation...

In the 5th century AD the Roman Empire had fallen, not so much toppled as slowly worn down and replaced by smaller kingdoms ruled by the Germanic peoples whose migrations had pushed Rome to its limit.

Antiquity was gone - the Medieval world was born.

Medieval Europe was a world very different to ours, from the complex system of allegiances that governed its feudal society to the colossal authority of the church.

Their worldview was unlike what had come before and what exists now.

The teachings of Antiquity were actually preserved by the Catholic Church, which had been established in the Roman Empire.

Whether through theologians like St Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin, or Carolingian scholars who scrupulously copied ancient manuscripts.

And so knowledge of the ancient world was not unusual. Indeed, the Graeco-Roman ideas of early Christianity were being taught in Medieval universities.

But much Classical learning was disregarded or lost, and what survived was understood through a Medieval mindset.

In the 14th century a poet by the name of Petrarch (1304-1374) started paying more attention to these ancient writers - even rediscovering forgotten works in old libraries - and taking them on their own merits rather than through the lens of the Medieval world.

It is because of Petrarch that we talk about the "Dark Ages" or "Middle Ages" at all; he believed they were an abberation from Antiquity.

For an idea of how Renaissance thinkers viewed their own age, consider what the influential scholar Leon Battista Alberti wrote in the 1430s:

Petrarch didn't consider this anti-religious - he was a devout Catholic.

Rather, he believed God gave each human vast intellectual potential meant to be fulfilled, and that classical learning was a way of doing so.

Hence the classical-religious art of the Renaissance.

And so "humanism" was born, so-called because it related to the study of the humanities - grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy.

Humanism saw the cultivation of learning as an end in itself; it was all about education, scholarship, and intellectual progress.

Renaissance humanism inculcated a mindset different to that of the Medieval world; it was a way of thinking rather than a specific set of beliefs, though one grounded in the ideals of the ancient world - of human potential - as distinguished from those of the Middle Ages.

Soon after Petrarch came a wave of scholars, poets, architects, painters, and politicians who took up this interest in culture of ancient Greece and Rome and sought to imitate it - the Renaissance had started.

Artistic, political, and scientific progress sped up.

Renaissance humanism would lay the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century and the Scientific Revolution after that. Then came the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution and... the world as we know it today.

Such was the influence of the Renaissance.

But Petrarch and those who followed him didn't think of themselves as trying to do something new.

They sought a return to what had come before - to revive classical culture and untangle the Medieval mindsets and systems which they believed had corrupted Christianity.

Renaissance architecture, led by Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) used the rules and forms of classical architecture as laid down by the Roman architect Vitruvius - a coherent system of proportion based on the human body. Hence Leonardo's Vitruvian Man:

The person who coined the term Renaissance was Giorgio Vasari, a 16th century biographer.

When referring to the painter Giotto, who reintroduced linear perspective into Western art, he descibed a "rinascita" - a rebirth - or Renaissance, from the French.

All of which indicates that the profound innovations of the Renaissance - changes which shaped the world as we know it today - were born not from a desire to do something novel but to imitate, learn from, and adapt the old into a different socio-cultural landscape.

This idea - that real and lasting innovation comes from imitation - was theorised by the French philosopher René Girard (1923-2015).

Girard believed the main prerequisite for real innovation is a "minimal respect" for the past and the mastery of its achievements.

Minimal - key here - means there shouldn't be so much respect it becomes a reverence in which the possibility of improvement is seen as impossible.

Regardless of whether innovation is itself good or bad, societies in which the past was revered to the extent that it was viewed as unsurpassably greater - intrinsically - showed relatively little innovation.

As was partially the case in Europe prior to the Renaissance.

Rather, Girard believed, there simply had to be enough respect that changes were built on what came before - even while ready to modify it - rather than totally diverging or overly revering it.

Such that it is from adaptation *within* a system that real innovation occurs.

Girard's claim, then, is that innovation really means renewal and rejuvenation from the inside rather than novelty from the outside - which is what the word means today.

That reinterpretation rather than pure, external originality is the key.

The Renaissance exemplifies such respect for the past - imitating the classical world - and internality - correcting Christianity.

And while Renaissance thinkers sought to emulate the model of the ancients, they increasingly believed that they might even match or surpass them.

All of this is perhaps best summarised by what Isaac Newton once said:

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Such is Girard's view of innovation, and if it sounds interesting then @david_perell and @JohnathanBi have produced a lecture on his understanding of modern society and his philosophy of innovation - and how civilisation arrived at where it is today: