Harry Levin

The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance

It holds up an anarchic vision of justice among men, peace among peoples, and love between the sexes. Love, its most affirmative value, is largely defined by the accumulating hatreds of the other ages. It is not to be equated with marriage; indeed there were no women in the original myth. The constant yearning for peace is the echo of a revulsion from war, which has determined the state of affairs more often than not. In much the same way, justice is negatively set forth as the absence of prior or subsequent injustice. All the evils of society are blamed upon the aggressions of property. Our ultimate forefathers were able to do without it, and of course without labor or trade, because of the garden-like fruitfulness of their natural environment. The shibboleth describing their way of life, 'in common,' is continuously balanced against the acquisitive catchwords, 'mine' and 'thine.'

Christianity rationalized Adam's eviction from the earthly paradise with the doctrine of felix culpa; it was a blessing in disguise, since man was given an occupation; he could work out, in the literal sense, his salvation thereafter. For the loss of the golden age no compensations were seen. The Utopian dream of prospective leisure, made possible by the development of technology, seems to have found its fulfilment in the nightmares of science fiction. At all events, the ur-myth led straight hack from an urban locale to a state of nature, pastoral if not utterly primitivistic, trammeled with few institutions and no inventions. What then, freed from all cares and responsibilities, did men live for? For happiness, to be sure, but where did they seek it? Not in any religious sublimation-More draws the contrast strikingly in his Utopia—but in the sensory values of this world. If there is a single unifying concept which runs through the corpus of texts about the golden age, it is pleasure—pleasure unabashed, as Tasso is at pains to specify. Each of the many different versions, with some regional variance, seems to take place against the same setting: a pleasance or pleasant landscape, the locus amoenus. Such images were projections of ideas, skeptical and naturalistic in purport, fostering an emphasis on free will, an ethic of hedonism, a cult of beauty. This is why the golden age was so pertinent a myth for the Renaissance, as Americo Castro has pointed out.

'The lament for a golden age is only a lament for golden men,' wrote Thoreau in his journal. In either case, it remains a lament, and its mode has been prevailingly elegiac. However, there have been occasions when elegy was transformed into carnival, most spectacularly at the courts and in the cities of the Renaissance. The humanistic revival of learning conjoined with the unprecedented efflorescence of the arts to act out the fancy that the golden age had returned. Though artists duly tried to paint the myth, they did not make as much of it as could have been expected. For reasons we shall be noting, it is essentially a literary subject, and there were few men of letters in whose works we could not find some sort of allusion to it. But, though it nourished on patronage and on the rhetoric of dedications and thanks, there were doubts at a more serious level; there were those who, adopting a more traditional stance, lamented the fate of living in the iron age. After all, the mythical golden age would have been the absolute antithesis of the Renaissance in several important respects. The former distrusted elaboration and facored simplicity. It looked upon art, with considerable suspicion, as an upstart antagonistic to nature. Most ironically, it had little use for knowledge. Other myths, and notably that of Prometheus, gave more adequate reflection to those intellectual curiosities which ushered in modern science.

In their monumental edition of Ben Jonson, C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson declare that 'the most palpable flaw in the traditional conception of the Golden Age' was 'its blank incapacity of growth.' This is a surprisingly myopic pronouncement, in view of the capacity chat conception has shown for adaptation to changes and innovations. No discovery can have made more impact on the European consciousness than the exploration of the Americas. At this crucial point, as we shall see, the old myth was transposed from a chronological to a geographical sphere. The voyagers reported on the natives of the western hemisphere in language which created a new myth, that of the noble savage, launched by Montaigne and assigned to so strategic a role in the ideology of Rousseau.