Part 5
Abstract: Modern intellectuals, especially those who base their world view upon science, pride themselves on being totally separate from the sphere of religion. They believe their view of the world to be based on empirical data and built up with reason alone, leaving them entirely distinct from all religion. This pride is unfounded. In fact their approach and conclusions are grounded in one of the major old- time religions, namely, paganism.
Many of the ideas, and probably all of the intellectual skills, that characterize the modern secular world were once integral parts of a way of life one of whose prominent features was the worship of idols. All of the Western world is built upon the foundation of paganism. Although paganism and Christianity were open rivals for hundreds of years, eventually they seemed to have made their peace. The truth is that the conflict moved underground, and paganism eventually triumphed so thoroughly that important characteristics of the ancient religious world are no longer familiar or even understood.
* * *
The Revival of the Classics known as the Renaissance
The example of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75), the Italian author of the Decameron and one of the early figures of the Renaissance, is very instructive for what it says about the Christian preservation of the Greek classics as well as the changed attitude in the Renaissance. Boccaccio visited the library of the Benedictine monks at Monte Cassino and found that it was "a room without a door, with grass growing on the window sills, and the manuscripts covered with dust, torn and mutilated." (The Enlightenment, An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism (volume 1), by Peter Gay, W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1977., p.262) In tears, he asked one of the monks how the manuscripts came to be mutilated, and was told that the monks would tear off strips of parchment and sell them to make a little money. Just about all that is extant today from Tacitus (a Roman emperor who died in 276) is what Boccaccio found in (and probably stole from) the library of Monte Cassino.
It was already Petrarch (1304-74), another early Italian humanist, who was one of the first to criticize the millennium preceding his time as an age of darkness and saw his time as the beginning of a renewed interest in learning. The pagan classics were dusted off and studied. Literature and the arts were taken up after centuries of silence. More importantly, the pagan attitudes and values began to take hold.
The Attitude of the Renaissance Humanists Towards the Greek and Roman Authors
The Renaissance humanists all saw themselves as committed Christians, but they thirstily studied all that they could find of the pagan authors. For several hundred years, the main effort of research was to find hitherto unknown ancient manuscripts and to study them for new knowledge, insight and understanding.
It was those humanists themselves who called their time a period of rebirth. They felt that the ancient authors brought them light and learning.
The conflict between the paganism of the classics and the Christianity of the humanists was still felt, as it had been a millennium before, but it was not seen as a deep or even irreconcilable hostility the way it was in the early days of the Church. The humanists of the Renaissance were deeply religious, even though their work laid the foundations for what would later become a wholesale attack on Christianity in the Enlightenment of the 18th century.
The humanists of the Renaissance were thrilled with the ancient works that they discovered, but they were disturbed by the explicitly pagan ritual and religious elements in them. However, they no longer saw this issue as something that divided them deeply from the pagan literature, as the early Christians had seen it about a thousand years previously. They were prepared to continue to study the Greek and Roman authors and simply pass over those parts they found objectionable. In some cases they produced new versions of classic works that were changed to make them acceptable. One famous example is an adaptation of Ovid's works that was known as "Ovide Moralise" which, as that name suggests, aimed to make Ovid more acceptable to the Christian sensitivities of the Renaissance.
It seemed that there was no longer any reason to fear paganism as competition of Christianity. Paganism was in fact no longer a social force. There were no longer, in the West, any practitioners of the pagan religions. More than this, no one reading the classic works even took the religion seriously any more. Socially, religiously and politically, paganism appeared to present no rival to Christianity.
Unable to see beyond these very material dimensions, Christianity felt no threat from the revival of classical learning. Those reviving the learning even professed—and felt—full allegiance to Christianity. Even though certain elements in the pagan literature conflicted with Christian morality, it seemed sufficient that those were objected to or ignored or changed.
However, all this was on the surface. The more critical challenge to Christianity that lay within was like an underwater whirlpool that can barely be seen on the surface: the opposing tides of piety and pagan critical thinking swirled around beneath the surface, in men's minds and in the geist of the ages, remaining hidden for centuries until they burst forth, and the powerful pull of paganism eventually sucked all into its maw.
Moreover, whatever analytical and intellectual tools were available to Christian thinkers were themselves derived or inherited directly from classical thought. This might have made it virtually impossible for them to detect the conflict, and certainly tended to mask it. They had no critical perspective from which to evaluate their critical apparatus itself and, perhaps more importantly, they would probably feel no need to consider it critically.
To a large extent, it is the pagan critical apparatus itself, as well as its assumptions and presuppositions, that undermines piety, but Christian scholars and thinkers were not awake to this possibility and knew nothing about the struggle taking place, and it may thus have been almost an impossibility for them to do anything about it. Yet recall that a thousand years previously, the conflict was felt more acutely, and the early Church fathers could never reconcile it satisfactorily.
The result was that Western intellectuals eagerly embraced the pagan learning. They studied it and absorbed it. It soon came to form the core of the standard education curriculum. Education came to mean studying the classic Latin works and also the Greek authors, and it was that body of work that formed educated men's minds for almost the next thousand years.
End of Part 5
Part 4
