Renaissance and reformation

The Italian Renaissance contained within it all the positive forces to which we owe modern culture: liberation of thought, disrespect for authorities, victory of education over the arrogance of ancestry, enthusiasm for science and the scientific past of mankind, unfettering of the individual, a passion for truthfulness and an aversion to appearance and mere effect (which passion blazed forth in a whole host of artistic characters who, in an access of moral rectitude, demanded of themselves perfection in their work and nothing but perfection); indeed, the Renaissance possessed positive forces which have up to now never reappeared in our modern culture with such power as they had then. All its blemishes and vices notwithstanding, it was the golden age of this millennium. In contrast to it there stands the German Reformation: an energetic protest by retarded spirits who had by no means had enough of the world-outlook of the Middle Ages and greeted the signs of its dissolution, the extraordinary transformation of the religious life into something shallow and merely external, not with rejoicing, as would have been appropriate, but with profound ill-humour. With their stiff-necked northern forcefulness they reversed the direction in which men were going, with a violence appropriate to a state of siege they compelled the Counter-reformation, that is to say a catholic christianity of self-defence, and, just as they delayed the complete awakening and hegemony of the sciences for two or three hundred years, so they perhaps rendered the complete growing-together of the spirit of antiquity and the modern spirit impossible for ever. The great task of the Renaissance could not be brought to completion, the protestation of German nature grown retarded (for in the Middle Ages it had had sufficient sense to cross over the Alps again and again for the sake of its salvation) prevented it. It was an extraordinary chance political constellation that preserved Luther and lent force to that protestation: for the Emperor protected him so as to employ his innovation as an instrument of pressure against the Pope, while the Pope likewise secretely befriended him so as to employ the Protestant princes of the Holy Roman Empire as a coun terweight to the Emperor. Without this curious combination of motives Luther would have been burned like Huss - and the Enlightenment perhaps have dawned somewhat sooner than it did and with a fairer lustre than we can now even imagine.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900