How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World

Funny, I thought God created the world.

Reading Heretics and Heroes, the sixth volume (ISBN 9780385499578) of Thomas Cahill's The Hinges of History series, was almost like reading the author's Odyssey in comparison to the previous volume Mysteries of the Middle Ages, his Iliad. I once read that if you're ever asked which of Homer's great epics you prefer, some will take that as a mini-personality inventory. The Iliad's something you need the determination to read through, and the Odyssey you're better off leafing through until you find something you like. The Iliad's for homebodies (a month and a half spent in Troy and on its surrounding beaches) and the Odyssey's for travelers, in body and mind.

(That works for me, because I really haven't done a lot of bodily traveling in my forty-three years. No further west than Seattle, no further south and east than Miami, no further north than Bottineau, North Dakota, where I did get to stand one foot in Canada and one in the United States.) But ask me what's going on -- or at least what's reported -- in much of the rest of the world, and I'd like to think I have a good bead on things. Because the more history you read and assimilate, or at least that I've read and assimilated, the more you begin to see patterns. But as my son Jeffrey said last night after we finished his twenty minutes of reading at home, books are full of twists.

And so is our history. From an early 14th century Italian poet [Petrarch] being able to coin the term "Dark Ages" for the time roughly from the fall of Rome in the West to ... his own time (how modest) and make it stick to an artist of the late 15th and early 16th centuries [Botticelli] who was buried at the feet of his model to a contemporary explorer [Columbus] whose journey to a great Western continent led to the exploitation of the near-naked persons already living there (which was actually the basis for Spanish discrimination against them, because they believed "clothes make the man") to a former monk who was so meticulous he even recorded his bowel movements [Luther]!

Had I not saved my account on Heretics and Heroes (and I've only scratched the surface of the book with its subtitle introducing this entry) until today, this would have been a real Donne deal. Let me explain. Today is the commemorative day in the Lutheran church for John Donne, and other than hearing his "Meditation 17" adapted to one of Camp Metigoshe's songs ("no one is an island") I had no idea why. One theme of Donne's metaphysical poetry was true religion -- with the passage of that "religious freedom" bill in Indiana last week, I wonder what people think that is! Certainly not what's encapsulated in James 1:27, and for that matter most of the rest of Scripture.

When John Donne was my age (1615 - 1572 = 43) he became an Anglican priest and six years later became the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London and served for the remaining sixteen years of his life (to 1631) in ministry. I really must check out some of his sermons, of which 160 still exist. If you can see the picture I included with this piece, it's an image Donne had commissioned of him in his death shroud, how he imagined he would appear when Jesus Christ raised him from the dead, as most followers of Him believe will happen. Shortly. But now we're nearly four centuries after Donne died, and history's latest gang of fanatics is setting prophetic windmills on overdrive.

But hey, God's got this. After all, He created the whole shebang.

David