Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2

of this partial failure in the contradictory conceptions
formed by South and North of a problem which was at root one. Both
Renaissance and Reformation had their origin in the revival of learning,
or rather in that humanistic enthusiasm which was its vital essence. But
the race-differences involved in these two movements were so
irreconcilable, the objects pursued were so divergent, that Renaissance
and Reformation came into the conflict of chemical combination,
producing a ferment out of which the intellectual unity of Europe has
not as yet clearly emerged. The Latin race, having created a new
learning and a new culture, found itself at strife with the Teutonic
race, which at the same period developed new religious conceptions and
new political energies.

The Church supplied a battle-field for these hostilities. The
Renaissance was by no means favorable to the principles of Catholic
orthodoxy; and the Italians showed themselves to be Christians by
convention and tradition rather than by conviction in the fifteenth
century. Yet Italy was well content to let the corrupt hierarchy of
Papal Rome subsist, provided Rome maintained the attitude which Leo X.
had adopted toward the liberal spirit of the Classical Revival. The
Reformation, on the other hand, was openly antagonistic to the Catholic
Church. Protestantism repudiated the toleration professed by skeptical
philosophers and indulgent free-thinkers in the South, while it repelled
those refined persons by theological fervor and moral indignation which
they could not comprehend. Thus the Italian and the German children of
humanism failed to make common cause against Catholicism, with which the
former felt no sympathy and which the latter vehemently attacked.
Meanwhile the Church awoke to a sense of her peril. The Papacy was still
a force of the first magnitude; and it only required a vigorous effort
to place it once more in an attitude of domination and resistance. This
effort it made by reforming the ecclesiastical hierarchy, defining

John Addington Symonds (October 5, 1840 - April 19, 1893) was an English poet and literary critic. He was an early advocate of the validity of male love which included for him pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships, and which he would refer to as lamour de limpossible.

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