The period of greatest artistic achievement and scientific progress in the
history of the world was the Italian Renaissance. During that time lived
the
greatest artists and scientists in history of mankind. The masterpieces
produced during Italian Renaissance - Sistine Chapel, Mona Lisa, David,
and the
architecture of Venice and Florence - stand today as the monuments to
human
ingenuity, taste, intelligence and achievement. People from around the
world
still go by millions a year to view these masterpieces and seek
inspiration
from them to produce their own work at home.

Renaissance owed its intellectual foundation to the work of Ficino, a
priest-musician-doctor who pioneered in Western civilization the concept
of
dignity of man. Coming out of the brutish, nasty and oppressive Middle
Ages, a
period of time in which humility and obedience was tantamount and anything
else
was punishable by burning at a stake, Ficino built a philosophy that
justified
and gave merit to intellect, beauty and talent. Pursuant which philosophy
the
people of Renaissance achieved tremendous progress in science and art -
products of
faculties that the Middle Ages had damned and that his conception
liberated for
beneficial use.

Ficino wrote songs and gave lectures about love. He saw the entire
creation as
being animated by flows of love. Similarly, he saw love as the act of
seeing
the eternal in human form - i.e., seeing the true, angelic, form of the
human
being. Rather than seeing love as a madness, he saw it instead as a
clairvoyance of sorts, as an act of seeing the beloved in her true divine
form
and, through loving her, loving also the Creator. In this he articulated
the
noble conception of love; love that is as consistent with godliness as it
is
with blossoming of the soul - a love in which the human emotion of
romantic
passion is merged with divine inspiration to produce a celebration of the
beloved and, through her, of God.

Ficino placed importance on visual arts. To him, visual arts represent a
glimpse of the divine world - a way to connect the viewer to the spiritual
and
make it apparent to him. Seeing eyesight as a valid faculty for
transmission of
knowledge and information, Ficino saw the visual artist as a messenger of
divine truth - a messenger in a medium that is visual and as such is
apparent
to the eye.

It stands to reason that at this time in American history, there is a need
for
a
bit of Ficino. Through political correctness - a Communist aberration
that
misused America's egalitarian founding principles to attack beauty in all
its
forms - and postmodernism that seeks to destroy the Western civilization
outright, life in America has been robbed of dignity. In one decade of
political correctness, the population has grown twice as obese, costing
the
nation $117 billion a year. Commercial art, from Eminem to gangster rap,
peddles abuse, violence, ugliness, nastiness and degradation. Women are
encouraged to file false date rape and sexual harassment allegations and
to be
psychologically abusive to men. And the main religion of the place is
Christian
fundamentalism - a religion that seeks to negate all the good that the
world
has achieved since the Middle Ages.

It is time for some Ficino in America. It is time to recognize that beauty
matters; that San Francisco is a prouder legacy to America than St. Louis;
that
how what we leave behind ourselves looks matters, and that in a country of
250
million people with per capita GDP of $40000 per person there is room for
cultivating artistic talent and using it to enhance the environments in
which
we live. It is time to change the values from social assimilation to
building a
civilization - a civilization in which there is human dignity; a
civilization
that celebrates human being and celebrates God, in forms visual, verbal,
social, relational and every other. It is time to stop seeking atavistic
explanations for love in sociology and Freudian psychology and see the
ones
that are inspired - in admiration, in upward glance, in valuing the person
above anything else on earth. And it is time to stop seeing ourselves as a
feudalist global village and see ourselves instead as a shining city on a
hill,
a city dedicated to leaving behind an architectural, literary and
scientific
legacy that is inspired and makes the future generations proud that we
preceded
them.