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The Attack on the Renaissance in Theology Today*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2019
Extract
Ever since the Renaissance first invented itself some six hundred years ago, there has been no agreement as to what it is. Its definitions have been as many and varied as the legions of scholars who have dealt with it, and the more that is learned about the Renaissance, the less certainty there is as to its extent, nature, purposes, and results. I need not rehearse the labyrinthine story of the idea of the Renaissance; the study of studies of the Renaissance has become a scholarly field in itself; and Professor Ferguson has written the history of the idea of the Renaissance with just the proper mixture of authority, wonderment, and exasperation which it deserves.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1955
Footnotes
*
Read at the Newberry Library Conference on Renaissance Studies 16 April 1955.
References
1 Ferguson, Wallace K., The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Boston, 1948).Google Scholar
2 There is no point in documenting this generalization; it is either explicit or taken for granted in the works of the theologians who will be treated below, and it extends even to the unorthodox but religious cults, for example, the followers of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky ( Bennett, J. G., The Crisis in Human Affairs, London, 1948 Google Scholar).
3 Hulme, T. E., Speculations, ed. Read, Herbert (New York, 1924), p. 12.Google Scholar
4 Maritain, Jacques, The Degrees of Knowledge (New York, 1938), p. 1.Google Scholar
5 Berdyaev, Nicolas, Towards a New Epoch, tr. Clarke, Oliver F. (London, 1949), pp. 16–17.Google Scholar The attack on Renaissance and seventeenth-century science will be treated below; the Enlightenment, Marxism, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and existentialism are criticised by Berdyaev, , ibid., pp. 20–22 Google Scholar; Kant by Berdyaev, in Spinka, Matthew, Nicolas Berdyaev: Captive of Freedom (Philadelphia, 1950), p. 73 Google Scholar; the Enlightenment by Baillie, John, Invitation to Pilgrimage (New York, 1945), pp. 74–75 Google Scholar; Marxism and what he terms liberalized Protestantism by Northrop Frye in an essay, “Trends in Modern Culture,” contributed to The Heritage of Western Culture, ed. Randolph C. Chalmers (Toronto, 1952), pp. 102-17, a collection of, essays sponsored by the United Church of Canada; the Enlightenment, Marxism, Darwinism, Kant, Hegel, and romanticism by Hopper, Stanley R., The Crisis of Faith (London, 1947)Google Scholar, passim; deism and romanticism by Peter Wust in “Crisis in the West,” tr. Watkin, E. I. in Essays in Order, ed. Dawson, Christopher and Burns, T. F. (New York, 1931), pp. 112-13Google Scholar; the most sustained attack on rationalism, romanticism, mechanism, Darwinism, and what he calls the irrationalism of modern thought is by Sheen, Fulton J., Philosophy of Religion (Dublin, 1952), pp. 3–133.Google Scholar
8 The Spirit of Catholicism, tr. Dom Justin McCann (New York, 1954) pp. 33-34.
7 “Humanisme médiéval et Renaissance,” in Les Idées et les Lettres (Paris, 1932), p. 192, tr. Ferguson, W. K., op. cit., p. 382.Google Scholar
8 Berdyaev, Nicolas, The End of our Time (London, 1933); p. 54.Google Scholar Cf. de la Bedoyere, Michael, Christian Crisis (New York, 1942), pp. 110-11.Google Scholar
9 Op. cit., p. 64. Cf. Dawson, Christopher, “Christianity and the New Age,” in Essays in Order, pp. 160-61Google Scholar, and the German Evangelical Hans Zehrer, Man in the World (London, 1952), p. 68.
10 Dawson, Christopher, op. cit., p. 160 Google Scholar; Niebuhr, Reinhold, Faith and History (New York, 1949), p. 8.Google Scholar
11 Op. cit., pp. 51-56.
12 The Fate of Man in the Modern World, tr. Donald A. Lowrie (London, 1935), p. 29.
13 The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York, 1946), I, 61.
14 The Realm of Spirit and the Realm of Caesar, tr. Donald A. Lowrie (New York, 1952), pp. 52-53.
15 Baillie, John, op. cit., p. 26.Google Scholar
16 “The Contribution of the Renaissance and the Reformation”, in The Heritage of Western Culture, p. 86.
17 The Nature and Destiny of Man, ii, 170-71; cf. II, 169-80.
18 Ibid., II, 203; cf. ii, 184-204.
19 Op. cit., p. 86.
20 Ibid., pp. 66-67.
21 Ibid., p. 30.
22 Alexander, H. B., God and Man's Destiny (New York, 1936), pp. 8–9 Google Scholar; Brunner, Emil, Man in Revolt, tr. Wyon, Olive (Philadelphia, 1947), p. 59 Google Scholar; The Theology of Paul Tillich, ed. Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretall (New York, 1952), p. 53; Buber, Martin, “Religion and Ethics,” tr. Kamenka, Eugene and Friedman, Maurice S. in Eclipse of God (New York, 1952), pp. 141-42Google Scholar; Zehrer, Hans, op. cit., pp. 210-68Google Scholar; Gilson, Étienne, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York, 1948), pp. 120-21.Google Scholar
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24 Maritain, Jacques, “Religion and Culture,” tr. Scanlon, J. F., in Essays in Order, op. cit., p. 24.Google Scholar
25 True Humanism, tr. M. R. Adamson (London, 1950), p. 20.
26 Philosophy of Nature, tr. Imelda C. Byrne (New York, 1951), p. 53.
27 Three Reformers (New York, 1936), pp. 57 ff.; the summary is by Hopper.
28 The Dream of Descartes, tr. Mabelle L. Anderson (London, 1946), p. 147.
29 Wust, Peter, “Crisis in the West”, in Essays in Order, p. 112.Google Scholar
30 The Nature and Destiny of Man, I, 68.
31 Agape and Eros, tr. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia, 1953), p. 669.
32 Ibid., p. 671.
33 von Hügel, Friedrich, Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion, Second Series (London, 1951), pp. 262-63.Google Scholar This point of view has found expression in certain influential intellectual Catholic lay circles, as, for example, in Barbara Ward's most recent book, Faith and Freedom. In his review of the book in The New York Times of November 8, 1954, Orville Prescott writes: “Miss Ward is a Roman Catholic who believes that the downward turn in the graph of Western civilization came … in the sixteenth century with the division of Christendom, the secularization of living, the rise of despotic governments and the exaltation of wealth so that avarice and cupidity ceased to be regarded as vices.”
34 The Nature and Destiny of Man, II, 221, 277.
35 Op. cit., p. 360.
36 Faith and History, op. cit., p. 2.
37 Ibid., p. 101.
38 The Nature and Destiny of Man, op. cit., II, 32.
39 Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (New York, 1953), pp. 21-22.
40 Ibid., p. 23.
41 “Crisis in the West,” in Essays in Order, p. 112.
42 Catholic Art and Culture (London, 1947), p. 75.
43 Ibid., pp. 139-40.
44 See, for example, Coulton's criticism of Maritain's scholarship, “The Historical Background of Maritain's Humanism”, JHI, v (1944), pp. 415-33.
45 Bush, Douglas, The Renaissance and English Humanism (University of Toronto Press, 1939), p. 68 Google Scholar. See Ferguson, W. K., op. cit., pp. 342-58 and 380-82Google Scholar, for other examples.