For Hubert with love
Our excursion into the sources of the modern European awareness of happiness and misfortune should begin in the fateful and auspicious fourteenth century, when the first indications of a stillinfluential transformation in the mode of human being-in-the-world were heralded. From this point on, there were signs that humans no longer simply have a natural history in which the same things always happen. But they are just as little able to exist as mere participants in God’s history with them, which left its mark on the Christian calendar. A third kind of historicity becomes evident here, which could be called a humanized natural history – and that involves nothing less than the integration of natural history into human history.
This third type of history obviously only came into its own in the late twentieth century, and it is hard to see how it might end. The idea of civilization’s responsibility for the climate and indeed for global environmental conditions is on everyone’s mind, ever since human beings in industrial nations became aware of their impact on the Earth’s ecology and on its biosphere and atmosphere, due to their technological ways of life. And yet nearly everyone is also aware that the discovery that human beings actively affect the climate – in the broadest sense of the term – stretches at least as far back as the fourteenth century. We fail to properly understand the so-called Renaissance if we do not recognize the degree to which the oft-cited “discovery of the world and of the human being” was connected to steps that were taken in order to explicitly shape both symbolic and natural environments. In fact, from this time in European culture on, we find attempts to conceive a common history of morality and atmosphere. My talk today will be concerned with this nascent awareness and with the traces that it left behind in documents of the time.
I would like to cite the poet and philosopher Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) as key witness to what I am calling the discovery of the environment from the spirit of the plague. In The Decameron, which was completed in 1353 and literally means “ten-day journal,” Boccaccio sketched the outlines of what we have been discussing here as clearly as possible. In this opus, sometimes considered a frivolous book of anecdotes by those who are blinded by prudishness, he appeals to an audience of women with the explicit intention to heal them of the worst feminine illness, that of melancholy – which, according to him, arises from fixating on unattainable objects, and that can only be overcome by gradually redirecting our thoughts to amusing and achievable objects. The stories that Boccaccio calls the hundred novellas or novellettes are mainly intended for such women – they might even be called fables or parables or histories.
The frame story of The Decameron makes clear that Boccaccio has more in mind than a poetical gynecology. He is concerned with regenerating a society in ruins by using an exemplary cure, whose administration is supposed to allow us to again learn the art of living well – or as Pampinea, the beautiful and clever organizer of the main group in this book, puts it: We should not hesitate, even when confronted by the worst misfortune, to rationally avail ourselves of the remedy (remedii) that is suited for the preservation of our life (alla conservazione della nostra vita), according to the principles of natural law (natural ragione) that keep watch over the good life for all mortals (il ben vivere d’ogni mortale). The natural law of cheerfulness is here given pride of place. Morality and hygiene directly converge in such cheerfulness. Immunological ethics could never be more appropriate than in regard to the immense catastrophe of the fourteenth century that was known as the Black Death, a calamitous wave that originated in Asia and spread across Europe. There was widespread uncertainty regarding its causes, whether it was the result of the influence of celestial bodies or whether it should be attributed to the righteous fury of God, outraged by human misdeeds. Boccaccio makes clear that in the face of this calamity, human arts, medicine in particular, failed just as miserably as religious consolations. As a correspondent who ventured to the very front lines, he compiled a report on what happened in those days of horror:
I say, then, that the years [of the era] of the fruitful Incarnation of the Son of God had attained to the number of one thousand three hundred and forty-eight, when into the notable city of Florence, fair over every other of Italy, there came the death-dealing pestilence [P. S. – we should note the rhyming of the Italian adjectives that are here rendered as “fruitful” and “death-dealing” – fruitiferra and mortiferra – as though the author wished to indicate discreetly that the second event was enough to call the first into question] … many were the counsels given for the preservation of health nor yet humble supplications … made unto God by devout persons … this pestilence was the more virulent for that, by communication with those who were sick thereof, it gat hold upon the ound, no otherwise than fire upon things dry or greasy, whenas they are brought very near thereunto … one day … the rags of a poor man, who had died of the plague, being cast out into the public way, two hogs came up to them and having first, after their wont, rooted amain among them with their snouts … then, in a little while, after turning round and round, they both, as if they had taken poison, fell down dead upon the rags with which they had in an ill hour intermeddled…. And an infinite number of times it befell that, two priests going with one cross for some one, three or four biers, borne by bearers, ranged themselves behind the latter, and whereas the priests thought to have but one dead man to bury, they had six or eight, and whiles more. Nor therefore were the dead honoured with aught of tears or candles or funeral train … so great was the cruelty of heaven (and in part, peradventure, that of men) that, between March and the following July, what with the virulence of that pestiferous sickness and the number of sick folk ill tended or forsaken in their need, through the fearfulness of those who were whole, it is believed for certain that upward of an hundred thousand human beings perished within the walls of the city of Florence …1
Our correspondent’s observations yield a picture of an urban society that was acutely disintegrating. Shops remained closed, field work was neglected, palaces were emptied and fell into the hands of plunderers and apocalyptic revelers, domestic animals were scared away, even the most loyal dog was left behind by its master. Even worse, parents abandoned their sick children, while panic and shamelessness reigned inside houses and in the plazas. Boccaccio’s bon mot, according to which the healthiest people ate breakfast with their comrades in Florence only to then dine with their dead relatives in the next world, bears witness to just how much the human attitude toward life was in free fall.
Boccaccio counterposes his parallel novella-society to all of these calamitous events. Two miles from the plague-stricken city, on a hill with a panoramic vista of the Tuscan countryside, we encounter modernity’s first aesthetic republic, in fact we even encounter the first counterculture,2 composed of seven young women and three young men, all of whom were raised well and came from good families. In the church of Santa Maria Novella, they together hatch a plot to remain cheerful and courteous, and resolve to devote themselves to the regeneration of a life in ruins – which they achieve by obtaining a kind of nourishment [Lebensmittel] whose true significance is revealed when we see that the strange kind of nourishment they have in mind involves narrating – to put it more precisely: narrating novellas, novellare. The stories may derive from ancient sources, so long as the narrators give them a new point. They may be drawn from the present, provided that something remarkably stimulating occurs.
This revisionary [novellierende] activity should be more closely examined, since most of what, in later centuries, is characterized as “providing information” emerges from it (something that I can only suggestively indicate here). What Boccaccio presents us with is nothing more and nothing less than the emergence of modern information from the principle of reanimation. This virtually amounts to the discovery of mental immune systems. When these function as they are supposed to, they allow the morals of certain stories to be synthesized and immediately converted into an enhancement of a group’s social and erotic fitness.
What is the relation between the stories we have mentioned and this revisionary activity? Ten of them are to be narrated each day, so that after ten days the number of stories reached would be one hundred. Did Boccaccio, as has sometimes been suspected, really wish to counterpose one hundred episodes of human comedy to the one hundred cantos of the Divine Comedy? Did he in fact embark on an intellectual adventure that centuries later came to be known as secularization – and did he perceive the risks of this endeavor so clearly that he thus interrupted the stream of narration on those days of passion, Friday and Saturday, in order to soften the contrast between the spirit of sacred stories and the principles of his earthly therapy? This would explain why the narrative framework of The Decameron comprises fourteen days in the country, with ten days of narrative, after which the young people dissolve their therapy group, return to Florence, and re-immerse themselves in the life of a society on the mend.
Boccaccio’s sober perspective on the Florentine plague allowed him to see clearly the catastrophe’s social and metaphysical implications: the epidemic tore apart the symbolic fabric that had previously held together the life of the Christian faithful. The world of pious legends, as Jacobus de Voragine had compiled them at the end of the thirteenth century in his Golden Legend, suddenly seemed as slight as dream-gossamer that had withered into dust. Familiarity with the Bible and Christian fables was quite evidently no match for the collapse of the real – as we have seen, praying was just as ineffective as fleeing, retreating inside to keep the infectious storm at bay was no more helpful than letting oneself go. The symbolic order as a whole teetered on the brink of collapse, the pillars of rational hope tumbled down, all at once we were confronted by a dim God, a God to whom one could no longer meaningfully pray, since in his nebulous wrath he had resolved to annihilate half of Europe’s population within a single year. The Gulf Stream of religious illusion, which had to this point regulated the climate in our latitudes, came to a standstill, and anyone who was interested in promoting half-tolerable ways of life had to look around for alternative sources of inspiration to stimulate the will to live.
This very stimulus was precisely what was expected from the novellas that the young men and women were narrating to each other, in their civilized cloister on the hill in front of the agonizing city. Their apparent innocuousness belies the seriousness of taking total responsibility for the continuation and advancement of life. The poetry of the plague demands that we say La vita è bella, even if catastrophe-monks would not like to hear it. In one of the darkest hours in human history, in which even the gospel could no longer break through the onslaught of bad news, novellas take on a para-evangelical role. They disseminate the good news that, despite everything, there is always an art of life in the world that promises a new beginning – starting with a philosophical affirmation of the right to life (la conservazione della nostra vita) that is conveyed by a vital wisdom found in the inspiring examples we set for each other. Such wisdom culminates in a zest for life that is then propagated in the free and easy, uninhibited fellowship of societies. This is what the beautiful Pampinea has in mind, when she speaks of the ben vivere d’ogni mortale,3 a formulation from ancient philosophy given a new resonance. On the hill above Florence, the earliest human right was articulated – the right to news reports that are better than what is actually happening, the right to stories that show us that we should never quit exercising our intelligence. It is the human right to poetry for creatures who require regeneration. Whoever demands to not hear news that is exasperating invokes this right.
We now understand that Boccaccio, who appealed to women shackled by domestic duties and menaced by melancholy, was actually speaking to future European generations. For him, novellare signifies an activity that will be essential to the European custom of life-giving stories. Their narration and retelling formed an alternate warming stream that has since proved to be crucial for our regeneration and reanimation. From the fourteenth century onward, this stream has continuously flowed through our civilization. If this continent has been devastated by recurrent plagues up to the present day, both literally and metaphorically, the warming stream that was then but a trickle now flows freely and, depending on the situation, can help determine the symbolic, aesthetic, and moral climate of Europeans and the cultures they have spawned.
A second distinctively European faith can be discerned in this stream, a faith that twentieth-century philosophy suggested we call “hope.” It could also be called the will to culture. It expresses itself as a trust in reason that renounces proofs of God’s existence, as long as stories and news reports can be found that prove that human beings need not remain impotent and foolish, without rights, if only they are properly encouraged. Every story told in this spirit is a gospel en miniature, a bit of good news from an open world in which human beings retain their claim to happiness with cleverness, cunning, and presence of mind. What is needed after the plague is not so much venerable formulas and rites, but glad tidings that report of discrete successes by those seeking happiness. These micro-gospels help survivors again lift their gaze to the earthly horizon. The Boccaccioprinciple, as I would like to call it, makes this alliance against the threat of being pulled down in the mire explicit. Its practitioners not only brace themselves against the “dissolute temptations of regression and death,” which later arose from a certain strain of German Romanticism, they tend even more to oppose discouragement in general, which is always already more than half the battle.
Boccaccio presumably did not know the circumstances under which the plague was able to arrive in Florence: it first spread to the Mediterranean, after the Tartars shot plague-infested corpses over the walls with heavy catapults while besieging the Genoese trade settlement in Kaffa in 1346. After the epidemic had subsided in Europe and trade resumed, a severe plague then erupted as lethal pathogens were introduced into Florence along with the commercial goods from Kaffa.
Our excursion into the fourteenth century can end on this note. We now understand that the Renaissance is much more than a stylistic change in the arts or an increase of interest in ancient authors. Renaissance is essentially an endeavor to sabotage resignation. Civilization after the plague is always on its mind. Its goal is overall regeneration. It leads to a concentration of skill against formlessness and of knowledge against confusion. It involves a revolutionary transformation of culture, which amounts to nothing less than a centuries-long plot whose avowed goal is to strike a blow against stupidity and to take the wind out of despair’s sails – especially the despair associated with a submissive sympathy for disaster.
Admittedly, the Renaissance’s significance can only be appreciated after the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century has kindled a second light – and the enlightenment has with good reason been called an endeavor to sabotage fate. The Enlightenment, for its part, can only be judged on its own merits after a third light has allowed us to see what can be carried over from its plans and brought into tenable civilizing projects, and what have merely been dreams of reason and ideological flashes in the pan. This light is shed on the logical space of the world system from the moment when human beings are compelled to realize how their own activity affects the climate – which does not happen on a mass scale until the last third of the twentieth century. At this point, it does not take much to see that human praxis, at every level of technology and the use of symbols, always also has eco-systemic and immune-systemic implications, which are not merely something to be wary of in the future, but must be managed and organized. I am arguing that we conceive the unity of the modern era as the educational context of globalization, in which we are not only faced with plague after plague, but also shipment after shipment, discovery after discovery, invention after invention, artwork after artwork, theorem after theorem, vaccination after vaccination, experiment after experiment, novella after novella.
Since 1348, Europeans have known that commercial cities are sites of infection. They are dangerous areas that include both welcome and unwelcome contact with others. Their inhabitants have to take a terrifying tutorial whose lesson is that wealth and infection are traveling companions. They must study the difference between revitalization and poisoning from the bottom up. One could almost say that, from this point on, Europe was transformed into an experimental space in which the unity and difference between what is life-saving and what is lethal is put to the test. In this sense, Boccaccio’s Florentines were the first to learn the rules for playing the game of globalization. An urban society that does everything to obtain goods and to circulate them, without first clearly recognizing its own role, also makes travel arrangements for those unwelcome passengers that since the nineteenth century have been known as microbes – among which are not a few visitors that merit the title of mortifero to the highest degree. Since then, the distinction between welcome and unwelcome imports has been one of the most important tasks of civilizing acumen. In terms of lethal imports, Europeans discover what were later called side effects – the secondary effects of actions in particular and in general.4
It is indicative of the intelligence of Italian city-state administrations that they responded to the discovery of the dangerous alliance between plague and commodities by establishing quarantine stations at a remove from the commercial harbor. The quarantine island of Lazaretto Nuovo in Venice, which is still well known today, allowed that capable commercial city to reduce its death toll by a quarter in comparison with less-protected cities, from the fifteenth century on. Yet it was compelled to suffer a severe epidemic for fifteen to twenty years as the price of an unavoidable tribute to cosmopolitanism. Even in 1756 – when Goethe was already seven years old – approximately 10,000 people were sent into quarantine on the island, during one of the last severe epidemics. Death in Venice was for a while more of a business risk than an artistic choice. Yet, since the fifteenth century, cities in lagoons have been sought out so that we might consciously and deliberately expose ourselves to the invigorating agents that were to be found there at that time: new forms of knowledge, which require the wealth of metropolises, and of the arts, whose splendor is conveyed to the world. Thus it is no wonder if Jakob Fugger, known afterwards as “the Rich,” was sent to Venice at the age of 19 not long before he was to go to monastic school, in the year 1478, the same year in which his older brother Markus succumbed to an obscure epidemic in Rome. He proceeded on his mission without concern for the fact that two other brothers of his, Hans and Andreas, had already perished from strange fevers in Venice, surely a bad omen. What the Tedeschi were able to learn in this city was the new written art of accounting and the new risky art of credit, which in any case made the trip worthwhile, if one survived it.
In these easygoing times where it was easy to lose one’s life, it was unnecessary to visit Italy to directly experience the risks of the modern age: Jakob’s fourth brother, Peter Fugger, also older than him, died at a young age in Nuremberg around this same time. The Frankish city turned out to be a place where the plague set up shop for a season. In 1494, the young Albrecht Dürer fled from Nuremberg while the plague ravaged the town, but because he had already been exposed to beneficial infections from the past century, agents that stimulate the desire for skill, artistic perfection, and sensational achievements, it is no wonder that even Dürer chose to head to Venice. He is probably not the last of those who came with vague hopes and departed ready for anything.
Having said this, I would like to argue for the following thesis: at the beginning of the modern era in Europe, which at the same time heralds the age of globalization, a structural transformation of belief occurs, through which modern activism supplants medieval passivism – despite every maneuver of the passivist party, today better known by its denominational name, Catholicism. Renaissance human beings did not yet know anything of the late-modern heresy in which the human being wishes to view itself as an autonomous subject. To them, the human being was and remained a creature subject to influence – not to say a plaything for supernatural powers, a medium through which various transpersonal factors operate. At the same time, they begin to realize that whoever allows himself to be played with also puts himself at stake. And as we learn from the philosophy of freedom in the twentieth century: everything hinges on making something out of that which has made us, thus among the first agents of the modern age the implicit maxim is formulated: it is up to us to play with what plays with us. In a similar vein, Shakespeare could say in As You Like It that all the world’s a stage and men and women but players on it. However, so that contemporaries on this stage would get the right idea, globographers set to work, Waldseemüller, Apian, Mercator Senior and Junior, and all the rest. Imitation of nature in those days meant the depiction of the Earth as a clearly structured sphere. It is symbolically fortuitous that the world’s greatest playwright wanted to show what happens when human beings play with that which plays with them, on a stage ironically called Globe Theatre.
We here touch on the deeper source of a term that has become common today, that of “global players.” Since Columbus’ voyage in 1492, there has been an intellectual avant-garde in Europe who understand that it is the Earth itself that wishes to play with us. Ever since its spherical shape was definitively established, human beings have had to inhabit a ball and play catch with it. This paradoxical task is not evident to everyone, and even today there are people who do not want to believe what the rules of the game have been since Columbus – they cannot see the ball coming, and they refuse to either catch or to throw it. But if the globe itself plays with us, we must play with the globe nollens vollens. In the spring of the fateful year 1492 the young Martin Behaim, returning from business in Lisbon, constructed his famous globe in Nuremberg, the first in Europe, to make clear to his countrymen that, if all the world is a stage, then in future the boards of this stage will be the planks of a seaworthy ship. Seafaring is now our fate. Only the seaworthy soul can still keep up with the demands of the modern age. Now the cry is raised: board the ships, you philosophers, and to sea, you believers! The ocean is the first internet, shipbuilding is its age comprehended in thought.
As we can easily see, these observations concern technologies just as much as mentalities. They thus have significant theological consequences. We are faced with nothing less than a shuffling of positions within the holy Trinity. The Middle Ages, not wishing to end, were devoted to an exalted Imitation of Christ, exemplified in the devotional book by Thomas à Kempis. In contrast, the modern age, wishing to begin, lapsed into thoughts that one could to some extent imitate even the Father. Whoever beholds the Son has a clear example of the power of the capacity for suffering – and since suffering is never over for human beings, anyone who is looking for help can find a master of suffering who will provide endless encouragement for one’s own practice. In contrast, whoever orients him- or herself to the Father is watching a creator at work, and then it is enough to realize that creation, for its part, is never at an end, and to appeal to human beings with a new principle of mastery.
Such a principle aims at nothing less than the participation of creatures in creation. Now the ascent of the human spirit from pious impotence to a more hands-on shared creativity becomes the order of the day, becomes indeed the order of the epoch. Generally, this imitatio Patris is cloaked by a platitude that advocates the imitation of nature. The naive might like to believe that registering finished natural objects is what is meant, objects that the eyes then sensuously recognize. Those in the know, however, see that it is something much greater, namely that it is a matter of the generative power of latent nature, which is to be imitated insofar as it is the womb of all things. To invent now means to proceed beyond nature by means of nature. Ever since the principle of creativity took root in our civilization, the thought of a second nature has become technologically and aesthetically acute: this thought is no longer merely concerned with the cultural practices that are transmitted to us in flesh and blood, but constitutes a second creation. Whoever speaks the word “creativity” and actually knows what they are talking about means a civilizing cycle of innovation that will be accompanied by unforeseeable perspectives. If we were asked how we would date ourselves in the history of things, we would have to answer truthfully that, from this point forward, we have lived in an age in which the womb and production converge. We revise nature, we stand at the beginning of the second week of Creation, on the Monday of the human being.
Even the third member of the Trinity is subject to an equally subversive transformation. There is closer examination of the Spirit, of which it is said that it blows where it wishes. The wind directions of inspiration are studied, as the wind patterns over the Atlantic were studied, before we might venture so far that coasts were no longer visible. Indeed, a system of enthusiasm-currents is now discovered, governed by quite peculiar meteorological laws – in future, we will no longer be able to ignore such currents in our enterprises. We have now come to understand that the Spirit not only blows where it wishes, but blows where it can, and it can blow best where the human capacity for art, which for the most part can be learned, encounters chance, which wishes to be apprehended in passing – in fortune’s blink of an eye, which only looks at you for a second to examine whether you are able to return its gaze. Over the course of this inquiry, the hidden Trinity of the Renaissance takes shape: it will henceforth consist of the Father, Son, and Fortuna.
Perhaps the best way to explain Renaissance culture’s internal propulsive drive is to think of it as a change of meaning for that Roman goddess who, in the early days of the Empire, kept watch over the military campaigns of emperors and the victories of gladiators. The Middle Ages inherently aimed to disabuse human beings of their belief in Fortuna – with its all-too-human wavering between magic and fatalism. Instead of such faith, human beings were to be oriented to the values of a stable and just heaven. Hence the chronic insulting of Fortuna as a fickle and unjust mistress who derisively leads her admirers around in circles. According to medieval authorities, only fools would wish to ride on her carousel. At the beginning of the modern age, however, the winds change course, and we now see beautiful goddesses maintaining an equilibrium in their cosmic spheres, equipped with one of the oldest symbols of the merchant’s fortune, the wind-swelled sail – as one sees in the Punta della Dogana in Venice, where the nude woman exposes her rear end to the doges in St. Mark’s Square for reasons that are not entirely clear. We are now in the age in which Machiavelli can teach that Fortuna is a woman who likes to be handled roughly,5 which is why she is fond of favoring the one who grabs her forcefully enough at the right moment.
The fact that wealth is still known today in Europe as “fortunes” (in French and English) is one of the lasting results of modern Fortuna-theology – such fortunes do not refer to a fixed family inheritance at all, but recent wealth that has effervescently accumulated, acquired in its owner’s lifetime and by its owner’s efforts at the fortune-goddess’s gambling table. Fortunatus, titular hero of a widely published German chapbook that first appeared in Augsburg in 1509, is one of her most popular supporters. This chapbook provides an answer to the question of how the novella north of the Alps was doing. Jakob the Rich liked to ironically skim through it and shake his head from time to time. We immediately see how a bit of fairy-tale morality is here smuggled in: we are supposed to believe that the hero, a young man from Cyprus who was lost and in distress, encountered the maiden Fortune in a forest clearing in Thuringia. It is an ancient custom of ours to encourage people to believe that all you need to do is get lost in the right forest at the right time, and then the treasures of the world will be yours. Six virtues are granted to the young woman from the “influence of heaven,” so she says, from which her protégé may choose between: wisdom, wealth, strength, health, beauty, and a long life – and in opting for wealth, he points out that even life in this country, scarcely 15 years after Columbus’ voyage, prefers to hustle down here in a world that has been extended and opened up, rather than to keep trying to enter the beyond through self-denial’s eye of the needle.
In light of these speculative suggestions, we can now more clearly state the significance of the Renaissance belief that human beings exist in a field of influences held permanently in tension. Fortuna is the president, as it were, who stands before the modern parliament of influences. Under her presidency, ways of life develop that need to cleverly handle uncertainties if they are to survive. They are thoroughly based on the axiom that the human being is neither free nor unfree. In an absolute sense, human beings are neither masters nor servants, they are neither omnipotent nor impotent, they continually oscillate between forces that help and ones that harm. The human being is always the third party in fate’s coalition, and always remains caught in a net of powers and tendencies – and pulls itself out of its entanglement more or less energetically, thread by thread, in order to weave its own garment from what had ensnared it.
Insights such as these sound very familiar to present-day humans, since after the remission of the Enlightenment delirium in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we have become increasingly accustomed to the idea that we are not masters and owners of the world, after all, neither as individuals nor collectively. When everything goes as it is supposed to, we are mainly users of confusing devices that extend the scope of our action and that oddly enough often function as we wish and expect them to, even if they do not always function this way. Hardly anyone today can still imagine surveying the world as a whole from a sovereign vantage point – we are satisfied if we have instruments that allow us to navigate in conditions of poor visibility and in stormy seas. We have set aside the great maps of the history of philosophy and enrolled in a course on Chaos theory. All of this leads to us feel that Renaissance human beings were our immediate predecessors. In fact, they were the first to understand that human beings can learn to negotiate with their own stars. Thus one should not misconstrue the early modern fascination with astrology as a sign of increasing passive fatalism. It rather very much bears witness to the emergent sense of a kind of thought in which we must recognize constellations in order to intervene in them with our own maneuvers. Thus it could justifiably be said that stars have their own tendencies, but do not compel us. We know that this is actually true, because this is precisely the case with conjunctures of fortune and business.
At this point, we can now return to the idea of the novella. It should be clear by now that we are no longer merely concerned with a new literary genre among others. The novella’s eclipsing of legends certainly represents a victory of the interesting over the edifying, the triumph of curiosity over piety. But this is only part of the story. The novella is actually the mother of the news. As the new Monday is a human creation, so is the human being’s Tuesday devoted to the publishing of novellas. These publications do not merely report on the small triumphs of everyday intelligence over circumstances. Rather, they view the entire world that is to be discovered and cultivated as a source of revitalization from which enlightened recipients will never cease drawing creative inspiration. The modern world is a workshop for lightening up. Whoever reports on it, or publishes reports on it, is connected to a gospels-generator that gives off sparks of innovation – assuming that the world does us the favor of confirming the archetypical prejudice that we harbor as participants in modernization: that the new is simultaneously the good, that what is newer is better, and that what is newest is best.
Of course, the world only does us this favor at remarkable moments, which is why modern human beings must get used to the fact that good and bad news arrives on our doorstep without having been sorted out. This even applies to the novella of novellas, the news of the discovery of the new world, which after 1507 was known as “America,” due to a cartographer’s error. Columbus’ ships had hardly returned to Spain in March 1493 before a severe epidemic of syphilis broke out among the soldiers who besieged Naples shortly thereafter, including some members of Columbus’ voyage. After the decimated army had disbanded, the epidemic overwhelmed all of Europe until the end of the century. Albrecht Dürer carved the first precise depiction of a syphilitic on a wooden engraving from the year 1496. The bad news was that a (virtually) new plague had entered the world – the good news was that the art of depiction was not going to stop, even for syphilis. Whoever lives in the modern age had to wait for more good news: from 1910 on, the horrors of syphilis were alleviated by Paul Ehrlich’s Salvarsan, and from 1942 on, Alexander Fleming’s penicillin was developed for controllable use.
The play of good news and bad news,6 which travel on the same freighter and are broadcast on the same frequency, has defined modern life ever since. Anyone who releases news reports must know that he or she creates a human climate with them. Our moods are produced on the catapults of information. The true news report, daughter of the novella, is a message that has the right to be disseminated, insofar as it represents the unity of information and animation. Novellas will no longer be proclaimed from the pulpits – they are disseminated through their own networks and owing to their intrinsic qualities.
It is no accident that the sixteenth-century Reformation succeeded after the invention of a printing press with movable type. The dissemination of the gospel into various vernaculars is the prototype of benign symbolic epidemics, whose proliferation becomes the responsibility of enterprising humans themselves. Yet now the Bible itself can be seen in a different light. Was the New Testament not the novella of the suffering son of God, which provided support to others who were suffering? As soon as we realize that creation is not over, and feel the mood that corresponds to this realization, do we not then obviously infer that the editing of works and texts that are necessary for human salvation cannot be concluded? After and alongside the venerable Old Testament and the salvific New Testament, must not a third, Newer Testament be written that would discuss the events of the second week – all the wonders of ongoing creation and the adventures of burgeoning arts? Does it not then seem even more astonishing if new publishers, who know how to trigger epidemics of the wonderful with tiny letters of lead, began to look for stimulating materials where they were to be found, under the circumstances – in the stories of human beings who experienced something remarkable and worthy of thought as they negotiated with their own stars?
We can venture a definition for all this: Renaissance is the Newer Testament’s age of editing. Its manifest symptom is the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, which was only apparently decided in the latter’s favor. As we now understand, it is impossible to conclude this quarrel on its own terms. In reality, a second quarrel is at issue – that between partisans of what is here called the Newer Testament and those who profess older revelations. Traditional accounts of the relation between reason and faith fail to adequately explain this friction – and however much we would like to welcome Benedict XVI’s Regensburg address on the rationality of faith, owing to its conciliatory overtones and its reasonableness, it is nevertheless beside the point.
The persistent Renaissance, which defines the modern era’s implicit calendar, develops into a network of infectious stories, animations that deserve to be repeated, and expansive endeavors that are articulated by the age of globalization’s knowledge of the world. This testament – forever informal and open – is composed of a host of micro-gospels set against a dark background. With their turbulent streaming, these micro-gospels announce that new intelligences and animating energies, new artificialities are in the world, so as to bring human beings under their influence. The first providers of this network were royal, bourgeois, and academic libraries, which housed everything that could be known and disseminated. Their readers formed a new nation of the faith, who essentially wished to become a new nation of the novella, a nation of knowledge, a people engaged in endeavors. They founded the Republic of Better Knowledge, whose legacy we have inherited. What is more, these knowledgeable predecessors of ours never nurtured the illusion that they were autonomous subjects. All of their knowledge began with the realization that human life meant existing in streams [Flüsse] and under influences [Einflüssen].
As we have noted, the figure of the player who even negotiates with the influences to which he or she is supposed to readily and willingly succumb could only emerge in this climate. The figure of the publisher who invests his own financial resources into the business of influence, by publishing novellas and news reports, is one of the first manifestations of such playfulness. Publishers thereby use their own financial resources to increase playfulness and channel their readers’ wishes toward participation in worldly miracles. The vital figure of the artist who creates marvels and new natures now emerges. These marvelous prodigies are supposed to shine like the stars of a second heaven into contemporary life and into the lives of future generations. After preludes that stretch back to the thirteenth century, the figures of the wholesale merchant and the banker then emerge, whose significance primarily consists in the fact that they hone influence into a precise technique. Anyone investing in commodities has to recognize that they are merely hypotheses on which influences might captivate potential shoppers. Anyone providing credit must bear in mind that gold is nothing more than an abstract and universal influential energy, which circulates through human calculations and wishes, converting them into concrete and discrete influence.
These patterns all merge into the figure of the enterprising prince, who embodies the modern age’s human ideal, uomo universale. His combination of power and intellect bears witness to the possibility of new possibilities. He allows us to anticipate what a complete life would look like. Lorenzo de Medici, who was already dubbed Magnifico by his contemporaries, exemplifies such a player whose moves raise the game to a higher level. He did this by making his own existence into a forum where intelligences and talents of all kinds could meet. He talks to intellectuals and engages in the business of his time, establishing himself as medium, as host, as matchmaker, and as a patron of the arts (we would today call such a person a networker) who would like to construct a playing field on which the best can play with what plays with them.