Paradigms are historical orientations. If we say that the Renaissance is the basic definition of our present culture, then revolution becomes the defining ideal of the culture, since the Renaissance began in humanism, which, while it lacked the concept of revolution, was a self-perceived insurrectionary movement. We create the concept of revolution in our retrospective view of the Renaissance and the movements it produced: not only realism and naturalism in the arts, but objectivity itself as the basis of science; not only humanism as a fully countering curriculum to a God-centered scholasticism, but the Reformation as well; and not only the development of the modern nation-state but the evolutionary seeds for the ideals of political equality. But revolution as a paradigm or ideal is ultimately self-defeating. That is, revolution for its own sake finally denies all substance.
            When we look back at the Medieval, what we see and reject, generally, is the dogmatization not only of the truly creative and developmental process of the era, but also of the vital synthesis of one of the more extraordinarily synthetic cultures in history. That is, we see the reification, the attempt to transform an unusually powerful but fluid moment in history into an arbitrarily permanent state. We can say that much of the cultural production of the time militated for this attempt, since both the aesthetics and the intellectual understanding involved inherently formalizing abstractions. And precisely the volatility of the political situation called for a rationalization that insisted on the eternal nature and sources of the immediate political structure. So we look back and see these artifices and reactive moments and treat them as the essence of Medieval culture. Part of it, of course, is the intensity of the theocentric nature of the culture. Perhaps, in the abstract, we could accept the God focus and more or less ignore it if the reactionary forces of the Medieval had not used God – and the God-given ‘permanence’ of the Medieval world-view – as a kind of bludgeon against the Renaissance. That, and the fact that an essentially pagan and simplistic spirituality permeated the culture, placing miracle and spiritual phenomena over against the rational and analytical.
            But this is our retrospective view. When we are dealing with human and cultural actuality, we can always look at the weakest or worst, and criticize. The issue is global. In the case of the High Middle Ages, we have a brilliant and prosperous pan-European culture. The force of the culture is reflected in masterpieces in the literary and plastic arts. In spite of the formalizing abstractions for the human figure, we have a range of presentation in many respects as wide as that of the Renaissance, both in painting and sculpture. And the painters evince a power of composition, a sense of motif and a surrealistic understanding for both that rivals and sometimes exceeds that of the Renaissance masters. We have the first writers in the regional languages and dialects, and many masters among them. And the record of the ‘folk’ traditions retains an equally large number of master works. And, of course, the intellectual culture was linguistically unified under the aegis of ‘church Latin’. Nowadays, we not uncommonly hear pejorative reference to ‘clerks’, since knowledge of Latin was generally a sign of church education, and therefore theoretically of dedication to the church. But in an era when the church controlled a significant portion of the wealth and offered access to a professional or semi-professional status, the personality of the ‘clerk’ cannot be limited. But, in terms of the legitimately literate, the unified culture allowed for the powerful development of theology itself and, within the frame of theology, an evolutionary cultural philosophy.
            All of these cultural developments ground the Renaissance, as much as the Renaissance humanists see themselves as subversive or insurrectionary within the ambient culture.

             But it’s not simply that the Medieval supplied the substance or matter on which the Renaissance eventually stood. The synthetic power of a self-generated culture was also a necessary condition. This is not to say that there were not constructive or positive elements in the Renaissance. Obviously, both realism and objectivity are ‘positives’ in themselves. But while objectivity stands at the root of the structures of science, and while realism releases a torrent of creative possibilities in arts, neither has necessarily proven ‘constructive’ in any absolute sense culturally. Science is still at least as commonly dangerous to the culture as nurturing. While it has undoubtedly made individual life more secure, during peacetime, almost all of the technical advances toward the ‘unification’ of society remain largely abstract from the perspective of cultural value. Communication, transportation and travel, of themselves, are not necessarily ‘values’. Value is the substance, not the vehicle.
            So what we have is not necessarily a unified culture, but the appearance of a unified culture. We could say the same of the politics. The founding documents of political equality are written as much in terms of ‘anti’ as ‘pro’. We still teach Locke’s argument against the divine right of kings as introductory to history and political science. And the ‘positive’ aspect involves the protection of ‘liberty’. But the U.S. Constitution is the natural outcome, a document defining a unified governing structure based theoretically on the proposition that it minimizes the interference in personal liberties, a brief formal statement of those guarantees being appended in the first ten amendments. But where is the core issue that validates liberty, if we cannot establish some ultimate teleological value of the individual?

             So here is the core or nub of the issue. Humanism brings us down to the individual person as the corollary value, the essential center that can stand against the purely God-centered cultural teleology that justified the synthesis of the Medieval. It is easy enough to see the flaw in the Medieval, since, in part, it ends in the ultimate expression of the corporate over the individual, namely the terrorism and torture of the Inquisition. But without a corresponding teleology of the individual, humanism simply becomes reductionist, and finally post-modernist, a sophisticated and professional assertion of nihilism.