SACRALIZING THE SECULAR
The Renaissance of Origins of Modernity
Stephen A. McKnight
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989
160 pp., $25.00
In 1918 at the close of the great bloodbath in Europe, Max Weber lamented the inexorable subjection of the world to rational calculation, quantification, efficiency, and bureaucratic manipulation, the thorough "disenchantment" of nature stripped of sacredness and gods by observational and reductionist pursuits of meaning, and the disappearance of comprehensive value and belief systems, which together, Weber disclosed, had mounted a triumph so complete that they were the incontestable marks of "modernity." Central to Weber's appraisal was his belief that this development ineluctably elevated the social importance of instrumental knowledge or science and rendered traditional religion publicly inconsequential. To Weber's grand and architectonic pronouncements, historians, literary critics, and social scientists have added more characteristics to the definition of modernity so that presently it is an unwieldy and intellectually variegated description of the political, social, and economic circumstances of the contemporary world including our ways of thinking, sentiments, and customs in comparison with how Western man behaved and thought at some arbitrary reference point in the "pre-modern" past.
A Formidable Task
Only the foolishly adventurous theoretician or intrepid academician would dare reduce "modernity" to comprehensible dimensions. Stephen McKnight, professor of history at the University of Florida, has bravely undertaken the task. He argues that a configuration of an "intense epochal consciousness of a decisive break" with the past, a conviction of an "epistemological breakthrough" which separates an enlightened age from its preceding "dark age," and a determination that subsequent "theoretical and instrumental knowledge" will make man "autonomous and self-determining" is a "fundamental component in Western thought and experience," associated with modernity from 1300 to the present.
McKnight is convinced that recent Renaissance studies and investigations in the history of science demonstrate that pseudo-science and esoteric religion, or "prisca theologia" (Ancient Wisdom), as well as empirical and mathematical techniques of investigating and explaining nature were inextricably bound together to form an important segment of the intellectual matrix of the early modern period so that there was no clear-cut and decisive epistemological break between conventional modern science and premodern modes of inquiry. Furthermore, McKnight notes, Ancient Wisdom planted in Renaissance thought the idea of man as a "terrestrial god" who could escape Fate and chart his own future, and posited magic as the epitome of "natural philosophy." McKnight also proposes to show that these two concepts were the basis of Renaissance Neoplatonic anthropology and were present in the utopian speculations of Francis Bacon, Auguste Comte, and Karl Marx. This will revise "the prevalent view of modernity as an essentially secular age," liberated from religion and metaphysics, inasmuch as it will make clear that Hermeticism and other Renaissance occult learning molded the "views of man and knowledge that are at the core of modern epochal
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