While the Great Schism of the papacy played out following the Avignon period, the glories and excesses of the Renaissance were being realized. Painters, sculptors, artists, and poets—by blending paganism and Christianity—sought to capture the essence of Greek and Roman splendor as expressed through art and literature. Amidst the creative explosion, the popes sought to elevate Rome to new heights and restore her former glory.

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Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.

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Part 23: The Renaissance

In the midst of the pre-Reformation movement was the European Renaissance—also called the Italian Renaissance—which covered the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, and ushered in the modern era. In this cultural period, politics incorporated the custom of diplomacy, while science relied more on observation and induction, where conclusions were drawn from a part to a whole, or from particulars to generals. This was also a period of education reform, and in the arts, particularly oil painting, natural realism was the new aim, therefore new techniques were developed to achieve it. Accomplished artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo soon emerged and helped define the Renaissance.

While the period has its origin in fourteenth-century Florence, it soon spread to other Italian city-states, such as Genoa, Milan, Venice, Bologna, and Rome, among many others. Later, the culture flooded into western Europe. Of course, there was no true nation of Italy at the time, nor an Italian language; those would come centuries later, along with the recognized territorial boundaries featured on modern maps of the peninsula. So, in referring to Italy, I do so merely to frame a historic region and period for the contemporary mind. That said, the Renaissance witnessed the revival of antiquity, wherein Latin manuscripts were copied and circulated. And, after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, exiles from Byzantium fled to Italy and filled the country with classical Greek literature. This literary awakening eventually spread to Europe as well. Scholars began to focus on humanism, which is what we call the humanities today—otherwise known as liberal arts. The term humanism has been used to encompass a spate of activities and ideas, but during the Renaissance, it had two important, harmonious meanings:

“First, there is social (sometimes called civic) humanism, which describes the outlook of the upper middle class in the Italian cities during the Renaissance.”

Writes Norman F. Cantor in The Civilization of the Middle Ages.

“The upper bourgeoisie, glorying in its new political power, expressed its independence by placing great emphasis on human autonomy and on the value and grandeur of the city-state. The new class imitated the French aristocracy of the thirteenth century, taking up the aristocratic education, style, and courtly life that they considered suitable to their own emancipation and to their equality with the northern aristocrats. Social humanism inspired a passionate civic patriotism, a belief that all urban resources should be applied to the defense and beautification of the republican commune.
“The second major aspect of humanism was the intellectual movement, based on Platonic philosophy, which emphasized the primacy of human values and individual creativity over feudal and ecclesiastical traditions and institutions. Humanist philosophers believed that the human mind was capable of deciding for itself without relying on traditional authority. In both its social and intellectual aspects, humanism drew strength and inspiration from the Greek and Roman classics, which taught the value of the city-state and its self-governing urban elite and upheld the critical powers of the individual human mind.”

Humanists in Italy focused on the study of Scripture using their newfound philosophy, which they mingled with notions from secular classical literature. Many humanists were dedicated Christians, yet, like the Neoplatonists and Gnostics before them, Christian humanists of the Renaissance sought to infuse their religion with pagan philosophy and mysticism. Despite these leanings, Rome—seat of the mother church—was in fact the spiritual and intellectual center for these humanists. More to the point, several popes were humanists as well, hence their full support of the arts during the Renaissance.

Humanism at the time did not merely denote the philosophy and intellectual bent of the Italian nobility, where the sole focus was the humanities as it is today; humanism also emphasized the so-called “genius of man,” and in fact praised the ability of the human mind, which was considered to be “extraordinary.” This kind of man-worship was at the heart of humanism, while its proponents looked back to the literature, language, and values of ancient Rome and Greece, as these were viewed as the twin epitomes of man’s great achievements.

What shaped the Italian Renaissance was fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian culture itself. The wealth of the Italian elite and the structure of society in the city-states, with their unique political systems, saw to the development of the Renaissance as a full-blown cultural movement, rather than a passing expression of ideas and art from a scant few. Europe would look to Italy as the forerunner of cultural rebirth as it emerged from the feudal despotism of the middle ages. Italy was able to do this via its vast wealth, together with the political structure of its powerful city-states. Unlike the antiquated feudal economy that was tied to land …

“By the latter part of the thirteenth century, Italy had a money economy based on trade and finance.”

Writes Norman F. Cantor.

“The late thirteenth and early f...