They worship nothing and acknowledge authority in
nothing save in their own spirit. No opposition could be more radical
and complete than that between the Renaissance and the anti-worldly
religion of the gospel.
"I see a vision," Nietzsche says somewhere, "so full of meaning, yet
so wonderfully strange--Caesar Borgia become pope! Do you understand?
Ah, that would verily have been the triumph for which I am longing
to-day. Then Christianity would have been done for." And Nietzsche
goes on to accuse Luther of having spoiled this lovely possibility,
which was about to be realised, by frightening the papacy out of its
mellow paganism into something like a restoration of the old acrid
Christianity. A dream of this sort, even if less melodramatic than
Nietzsche's, has visited the mind of many a neo-Catholic or
neo-pagan. If the humanistic tendencies of the Renaissance could have
worked on unimpeded, might not a revolution from above, a gradual
rationalisation, have transformed the church? Its dogma might have
been insensibly understood to be nothing but myth, its miracles
nothing but legend, its sacraments mere symbols, its Bible pure
literature, its liturgy just poetry, its hierarchy an administrative
convenience, its ethics an historical accident, and its whole function
simply to lend a warm mystical aureole to human culture and ignorance.
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