Ken Burns UNUM

- Hi, it's Ken Burns with another Unum Chat.

I'm just so thrilled to and excited to be in conversation with Krista Tippett about Leonardo da Vinci.

You know, Krista, we've just completed a two part four hour film on the Life and Work, one of our great artists and thinkers, Leonardo da Vinci.

It's our first non-American topic.

So I thought for a long time that we were sort of fish out of water, but there was something so compelling about him.

If we, if we human beings supposedly use only 10% of our brain, I was meeting somebody who was using maybe 75%, and it was me to be bigger than ourselves.

And, and you've thought about the, a lot about the importance of humanism and the connection between humanism and spiritualism.

You know, this is a moment, the, the beginning of the enlightenment, particularly in Florence, in in art, where we're still centering God in a way.

The paintings that he's painting are the, the annunciation or the, you know, the adoration or the Last supper, all of the things we do.

But we're now beginning to also say that there's a human dimension.

So he's curious of Mary knowing that she is through all times, supposed to birth the son of God who will die.

- Mary, of course, was the most common subject in medieval and Renaissance art.

Here Mary is Leonardo's focus, Mary's right hand, which is on the back of John the Baptist, is very tense.

The fingers are pressing into John's back, but the thumb is over his shoulder.

And what she's doing is holding him back.

Mary, in the popular theology that Leonardo and everyone at the time knew already understood her son must one day die.

And here he shows her preventing the prophet of her own son's future death from drawing near to Christ Christ.

The child at her left accepts this future death indeed, his heritage on the Baptist, and his blessing him, she's lowering her left hand toward his head, but her hand can never reach her child's head because there's a figure, an angel kneeling behind her son, and the angel is pointing toward John the Baptist.

Mary, as human mother knows, her son must die, but cannot accept that.

And so God sends his angel to prevent Mary's instinctive, natural, maternal instinct from avoiding the future passion.

It is absolutely the most complex Madonna image of the entire Renaissance.

Its complexity lies in a probing effort to understand a deep mystery, which is how in a woman prepared from all eternity to bear the son of God, humanity still fully expresses itself.

- So there's something wonderful that Leonardo ushers in which is not saying we're throwing the baby out with the bath water, but we are able to merge this inherited and perhaps now kind of calcified religious tradition that's been going on for almost 1500 years with this new thing, this new centering of the human being within the cosmos.

The, you know, whether it's the Vitruvian man squaring the circle, whether it's understanding as he did so many things, not just on an artistic level, but on a scientific level.

He's the greatest scientific thinker of his time, and yet we think of him as a great painter who, by the way, has fewer than 20 paintings, half of which aren't finished.

So this is, it's, you know, it's, it's just an amazing thing.

And coming in contact with him, all I wanna say is it makes me want to be a better person.

It makes me want to use more of my brain.

It makes me wish that I was questioning more deeply these very fundamental questions of the moment.

Not just who am I and what's my purpose here, but how does that leaf unfold?

What is that butterfly doing?

How does that bird elevate?

What, what's going on?

All the questions he was asking all the time.

So I just, how does Leonardo fit into this question about the, not the tension, but the combination of humanism and spiritualism.

They are of course not exclusive.

They are one and the same thing - For me, Leonardo is just such a, an embodiment of a, a tradition of, I would say wholeness, a more whole human scientific and spiritual enterprise.

That is, that is the lineage of, of modern science as it came to us.

But that has been lost.

And I, I, I believe that we're kind of coming full circle.

I don't think it's accidental that this is the film, the subject that you've chosen now.

Right.

Because I think we are, you know, we in hindsight put people in categories that they did compartments that they didn't belong to.

You know, Gerta, who we think of as a writer, believed he would be remembered as a, as a person who studied color and light.

He believed he would be remembered for his science.

And yet, you know, I love, there's a, there's a line of, you know, he just, I think his, what you see in him, as you see in Leonardo, is this beautiful merger where each discipline becomes larger and richer.

Right?

So he said of color, color is the deeds and sufferings of light.

So saying, speaking a scientific truth, which we now can, can, can talk about in, in, in very serious scientific language, in poetic words, which bring it home to us in our, to our human bodies in a different way, right?

Genetics is the, the great person of the great founder of genetics is Mendel, who was a monk who was tending pea plants in his monastic garden.

I mean, you know, Isaac Newton is writing expositions on the New Testament while he's enlightening us about gravity.

Leonardo was just an embodiment of a huge piece of our story that is, you know, is so thrilling to recover, you know, and I don't even, you know, the, the word scientist was coined to be a corollary to the word artist.

It it was only coined in the, in 1834.

But we have so separated these things, and of course, the arts, just by nature come from the spiritual part of us, right.

You know, when I first started covering religion and, you know, entered in my own way the sphere of journalism about religion, I, I, I, I realized that, that when journalists, one of the things that goes wrong and, and this has, this has this has run through our whole society, that journalists interview you, religious figures, like as politicians.

And in fact, a lot of the religious figures who become famous act like politicians.

In fact, this part of us is creative.

It's creative.

And that's how I interview, that's how I draw out religious ideas, voices, lives.

And, and in, in its creativity, it is in kinship as it has been in the person of some, somebody like Leonardo and so many other people.

- It's so funny to see people making an enemy of the humanities in support of spiritualism, when of course the humanities is in fact embracing all of that.

And one of the people that started our tol story reading group in the name of his now deceased son, has created a humanities institute at Saint Anselm College.

So it's it to him, there's, you know, it's as he as, as their slogan goes, humanity, it's for everyone, you know?

Yeah.

That we're, we're about that.

And, and I, I think that's a, that's a wonderful thing to, to remember.

There's Leonardo saw no distinction where our tendency to, in silo people, to trap them in something is just for our own labeling convenience.

When in fact, the myriad beauty of the world is in the diversity of one silo.

Right.

And we're all in it, scientists and sinner and saint, all in the same silo.

- Yeah.

And I, I do find actually this sphere of investigating and that the, the, the interplay between the natural world and science and the, you know, hu our humanity and the humanities to be one of the beautiful things about the 21st century is that these things are, it's not just that they're coming back together, they've always belonged together, but we created these artificial separations and silos and, you know, the word ecosystem kind of entered our, our vocabulary about a hundred years ago.

And I think it, it was Arthur Tansley who, who was also what we call now we call a Renaissance man.

Right?

That's what all these people were, they were, they were just, I would say it's just about whole thinking, whole living, whole creativity.

And I, I do believe that as we understand not just the workings of the natural world, you know, something like the field of biomimicry, which takes nature as a teacher, we understand the functioning of ecosystems and force.

We understand that our own bodies are, have more microbial cells than human cells.

We understand, you know, there are things like the science of awe, right?

And so, you know, I think Einstein said that, that at the heart of science and religion and the arts is this capacity for wonder and this, this tendency to, to, to stand in awe.

And we are actually in this time in our species where we're, where we have beautiful scientists, social, social psychologists, neuroscientists, who are understanding awe as a force in human life, as something that actually protects us, immunologically that that connects us at a bodily level when we're in crowds of people, you know, fun.

Humboldt, another one of these renaissance people.

He, he, he was the one who, who first used that word, cosmos in English, his book Cosmos.

What he meant by that, what he was pointing out was down us down here.

The way we've used this word, cosmos recently in the space age, I suppose, was about space out there.

But it's, it's about, it's in here and it is this miraculous physicality.

And, and that is, that is absolutely what, and I think, you know, I think Leonardo probably used that word miraculous.

And you know, now that would be one of these words that might be suspect.

I mean, certainly in the academy would be suspect, but what we're talking about is the reality of mystery.

The incredible complexity, the marvelous complexity.

And, and, and standing in awe before that and investigating it is work that, that our spiritual selves, our scientific selves, our humane selves that we, that we do in concert.

- Well, I am in awe of you, Krista, you are a wonder, and I I you brought up Gerta and so I, I just have to say, I believe his last words were more light.

You can take it both ways, right?

- I love that something - Was dimming or he was looking over the horizon and he was seeing it.

- Maybe he could see that he was get to gonna get to do more studies of light in, in the world beyond.

- That's, that's ha ha hearing your talking about that.

I, I've convinced myself that that must be what it is.

But thank you so much for participating in our Unum chat.

- These are such delightful things to discuss.

Thank you for doing this work.