For the first time in some years
now we found ourselves passably sentient, on our feet, glass in hand, ready to
join in the singing of “Auld Lang Syne” as the chimes of midnight announced the birth of the
New Year. The setting was the grand
ballroom of a grand hotel in Charleston.
It was the finale of a sumptuous meal and of the even greater
intellectual and spiritual feast of wit and wisdom that was the Renaissance
Weekend briefly anticipated in my essay three weeks ago. We then went promptly to bed, facing as we
did a fairly early return flight to Newark but a few hours later. The experience of the Renaissance Weekend was
for us a new one. In trying to
characterize the event I could not improve on the public description offered by its own elegant website, and I shall not try to do so. I can say, however, that I left it—as so
often I left certain ceremonial events during my long years of university
teaching—inspired by the awesome human potential of our country, and especially
of its youth. There are all kinds of
“bubbles” that I need to burst forth from, one of them being the bubble of
pessimism.
Perhaps you will indulge me in a
little bloggerly free association? Four
hundred years ago there appeared a remarkable book written in the German
language but with a macaronic or bilingual title: Fama Fraternitatis dess löblichen Ordens des Rosenkreutzes. This means, roughly, “A Divulgation of the
Brotherhood of the Praiseworthy Order of the Rose-Cross,” the modest mission of
which fraternity (also stated on the title page) was nothing less than “A
Comprehensive and General Reformation of the Whole Wide World.” It is often called the “Rosicrucian
Manifesto.” Though it pretended to be
the announcement of an organization already founded, it was actually a kind of
protreptic or pep-talk for learned men of good will who might be interested in
seeking out like-minded peers. The real
message of the announcement was “If you build it, they will come.” We have good reason to believe that, though
published anonymously, its author was a Protestant theologian named Johann
Valentin Andreae. Carefully sidestepping
the alluring tar-pit of occultism and weirdness that is the popular history of
Rosicrucianism, one can see in this book an invitation to a cultural and moral
elite to join in a grand ecumenical, international, and “multicultural” project
of social amelioration of the kind imagined in fiction a few years later by
Francis Bacon in his New Atlantis
(1624) and pursued as reality in such learned academies as the British Royal
Society or in some Masonic lodges of the Enlightenment.
Cosmopolitanism denies neither the
reality nor the value of specific commitment to the tribe, the nation, the
place, or even the cult. It certainly
does not quell firmly held views or spirited controversy. It does, however, hold up a broader vision
of human universality. European
intellectuals of the Eighteenth Century were distributed among a diversity
of political states, of social organizations, and of religious and philosophical
schools, yet they could find a broader unity in what they beautifully called
the “Republic of Letters”. The Republic
of Letters was in our terms “virtual”—not a nation-state with geographical
borders walled or unwalled, but a frame of mind and a set of shared
aspirations. The letters, to be sure, were real enough. The Republic could not have come into being
without the printing press, which, though not fundamentally changed in
technological principal from the age of Gutenberg, was now vastly more present
and productive. The encyclopedic ambition
to read all the important current literature on a subject was not yet absurdly
pretentious. Nor were the ramparts
between “sciences” and “humanities” yet fearsome and forbidding. Citizens of the Republic were the learned, or
what the French called lettrés. Letters in the more familiar sense of
epistles or missives were no less important.
The Enlightenment was the great Age of Letter Writing. Space on my bookshelves must be competed for,
but I shall never “downsize” at the expense of the multi-volume collected
letters of Madame de Sévigny, Voltaire, or Horace Walpole.
Just recently there was much
journalistic comment on the role of social media in the “Arab Spring”, as
though this were some new phenomenon.
Have we forgotten the role of the correspondence societies in the French
and American Revolutions? Exchange of
correspondence is a fine way to share and test ideas; but nothing matches
face-to-face conversations and debates.
Citizens of the Republic of Letters lacked jet travel and the “frequent
flyer” programs that encourage it. The
Renaissance Weekend, on the other hand, could exploit exactly those
advantages. And though I saw no powdered
wigs or silken knee-breeches, our clunky flip-top phones were enough to keep
Joan and me feeling sufficiently archaeological. In the current American political and
cultural moment, which is severely testing our unity, our civility, and what
might be called our core social competence, a deep draught of rebirth was
exactly what the New Year called for.
