Without Christianity the Renaissance would have been
impossible. Without the Gospel, without St. Paul, the peoples who had
traversed the Middle Ages would have understood neither Plato nor
Aristotle. A purely rationalist tradition is as impossible as a
tradition purely religious. It is frequently disputed whether the
Reformation was born as the child of the Renaissance or as a protest
against it, and both propositions may be said to be true, for the son is
always born as a protest against the father. It is also said that it was
the revived Greek classics that led men like Erasmus back to St. Paul
and to primitive Christianity, which is the most irrational form of
Christianity; but it may be retorted that it was St. Paul, that it was
the Christian irrationality underlying his Catholic theology, that led
them back to the classics. "Christianity is what it has come to be," it
has been said, "only through its alliance with antiquity, while with the
Copts and Ethiopians it is but a kind of buffoonery. Islam developed
under the influence of Persian and Greek culture, and under that of the
Turks it has been transformed into a destructive barbarism."[31]
We have emerged from the Middle Ages, from the medieval faith as ardent
as it was at heart despairing, and not without its inward and abysmal
incertitudes, and we have entered upon the age of rationalism, likewise
not without its incertitudes.
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