Since long time past manhood has wondered about the most inner significance of our presence on the earth.
I imagine our primitives ancestors, still wrapped in their beast’s furs, asking themselves the meaning of the stars in the sky, some brighter , some farer, some fading away, like falling down; or they might be thinking why the rising and the setting down of the sun, the pouring rain, the flashing of the lightening, preceding the boasting thunder; and the mystery of flying , the fascination of dreams, the secrets in the silence, the magic of a new life coming out from feminine bodies.
They started worshipping the sun, the waters, the eagle, or the great mother because of these unanswered questions. May be the first spark of this craving of knowledge has started around the fire, old men telling stories to be remembered by the young of the tribe.
The quintessence of hundred thousand years of this human research can be found now in the great religious books of humanity: the Indian Vedas and Upanishads; the Tibetan Book of Death; the Wisdom Books of the Holy Bible; or even in the mysterious books of esotericism.
You might believe or not believe in God (I personally do); and we can discuss for thousands of years Which One is the Only God (but I know there is only One God, anyway); some can call God the Cosmic Essence of the Universe and some others can crush the Unity of God in to a Pantheon of Gods (like ancient roman and Greek did and like Indians still do); you can even keep on worshipping idles and totems (as matter of fact money and lust are not but the modern gods of contemporary times); but if have spent your life without searching a reason to be born, then your life has passed you by uselessly.
Through centuries and millennia men have even abused of the power of knowledge, misusing magic formulas for cheating poor people, frightening them with the shadows of God (God Himself cannot scare anyone, because He can only love); the Books themselves were instruments of power: those capable to read them on them the sacred truths could exercise a great power on those ignoring the meaning of the signs traced on their lines.
This special issue of Arspoeticamagazine deals with the matter of knowledge in the beginning of the seventeenth century.
Angelo Ruggeri shows in a selection of works, how Milton, Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei, Torquato Tasso and other great minds of this century, have handle and dealt with such a sensitive subject and why the established power counteracted their thoughts.
In the same century, I set my novel “The Perfect Watchmaker's Handbook” (at the momento available on Amazon's stores in Italian language with the title of "Il Manuale del perfetto orologiaio"), where four main writers and their friends of the Academia of Lamole, in Tuscany, are compelled to hide away from Holy Inquisition because they have decided to translate in to vulgar language the Sacred Scripture against the Pope Clemente VIII’s 1596 Decree, who wanted the Holy Bible still to be published only in Latin ancient language (incomprehensible to most people).
Still remains a great question: up to where can manhood push his thirst of knowledge? Is it right to go beyond anyway? Is it correct to restraint the longing of manhood to break all the frontiers of knowledge? And who is titled to check scientist, poets and all the men who feel free to research the truth anyway and anywhere? Such questions are still of topical actuality and is not in the intentions of our magazine to dare to give any answers to them. I can personally only say that when I was much younger than today, my answer would be simply aimed to deny any chance of control or censorship.
But now I’m not so sure anymore.
