The Seventeenth Century – The Age of Genius

At the turn of the seventeenth century, Bruno was burnt at the stake for expanding Copernicus’ heliocentric theory and proposing that the universe was infinite with multiple stars and galaxies all around. In the span of one hundred years, kings were no longer seen as divine ambassadors of God, science progressed organically culminating in Newton’s Laws of Motion and the ideas around the supremacy of citizens began to take root which later culminated in the French and American Revolutions of the subsequent century. When Darwin expounded his theory of evolution in the 1850s, the earth’s fate as a minor rock in the vast universe with billions of galaxies was sealed and God’s role in the creation of man became even more doubtful. All of these earth-shattering shifts began in the seventeenth century. The case for it being the turning point in the evolution of ideas is further bolstered by listing out the luminaries who lived during the century:

In literature: Cervantes, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Milton, Dryden, Pepys, Racine, Molière, Corneille, Cyrano de Bergerac, , La Fontaine, ; in philosophy Descartes, Bacon, Grotius, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Malebranche, Bayle; in science Mersenne, Pascal, Galileo, Huygens, Kepler, van Leeuwenhoek, Hooke, Wren, Boyle, Roche, Newton, in art – Poussin, Caravaggio, Rubens, El Greco, Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer, Hobbema. And this is not an exhaustive list.

What is even more astonishing is that the century also saw the Thirty Years War which ended only in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia and left most of the continent in disarray. Something like the rise of Europe in the post WWII era happened then.

AC Grayling in ‘The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind’ makes an amusing comparison between the English audience who watched in horror when the King was killed in Macbeth in 1606 and the same English audience casually chopping off the head of Charles V 43 years later.

In 1606 Macbeth was staged for the first time. Shakespeare was able to rely on the beliefs of his audience in the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall, where the premiere took place, to portray the killing of a king as subversive of nature’s order, to such an extent that horses ate each other and owls fell upon falcons in mid-air and killed them. In 1649, a single generation later, a king was publicly killed, executed in Whitehall in London before a great crowd.

Perhaps some of the same audience at the first staging of Macbeth were present at the beheading of Charles I. The idea of the sacred nature of kingship as premised in Macbeth had been rejected, by the time of the Civil War, in favour of new ideas about the nature and exercise of political authority.

The English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, Descartes’ skepticism, Spinoza’s God, Hobbes’ and Locke’s political theorizing, all pushed the world decisively to the world as we know it today!

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