The Renaissance Spirit Exposed
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The Renaissance (c. 1450-1600) is one of the most beautiful if not misleading names in the history of world culture. Beautiful because it suggests an awakening of intellectual awareness. Misleading because it implies a sudden rebirth of learning and art after the presumed death of the Middle Ages.
History moves continuously rather than by leaps and bounds. The Renaissance was the next phase of a cultural process that, under the leadership of the the Church, the universities and the courts, had begun long before what is considered to be the beginning of the Renaissance.
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What the Renaissance does is to mark the passing of European society from an exclusive religious orientation to a more secular orientation. From an age of unquestioning faith and mysticism to an age of belief in reason and scientific inquiry. The focus of human destiny was seen to be life on earth rather than life in the hereafter. There was a new reliance on the evidence of the senses rather than on authority and tradition.
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Implied during the Renaissance was a new confidence in people's ability to solve their problems and to rationally order their world. This awakening found its symbols in the cultures of Roman and Greek antiquity. The Renaissance society discovered the summit of human wisdom not only in the Church fathers and its saints, but also Homer, Virgil and the ancient philosophers.
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