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Updated: June 17, 2025
While the world around her was being swayed more and more by theological beliefs and controversies, Elizabeth was absolutely untouched by them. She was a child of the Italian Renascence rather than of the New Learning of Colet or Erasmus, and her attitude towards the enthusiasm of her time was that of Lorenzo de' Medici towards Savonarola.
As a pagan, he is a consistent enemy of Christianity. As an aristocrat, he is a bitter opponent of democracy. He proclaims that Anti-Christ has appeared in his own person. He hails the advent of the Superman. First, he is a pagan, a pagan of Greece, or, rather, a pagan of the Renascence, and, as a pagan, he considers Christianity the real enemy. Christianity denies life; Nietzsche asserts it.
It was the cortege of the olden solemnities, the cross and sword, the Swiss Guard in full uniform, the valets in scarlet simars, the Knights of the Cape and the Sword in Renascence costumes, the Canons in rochets of lace, the superiors of the religious communities, the apostolic prothonotaries, the archbishops, and bishops, all the pontifical prelates in violet silk, the cardinals, each wearing the cappa magna and draped in purple, walking solemnly two by two with long intervals between each pair.
Then, beginning in the eighteen-twenties, and developing rapidly after 1830, came a change, a change so startling as to warrant the term of "the Renascence of New England." No single cause is sufficient to account for this "new birth." It is a good illustration of that law of "tension and release," which the late Professor Shaler liked to demonstrate in all organic life.
Then comes Hildebrand, Pope Gregory the Seventh, friend of the Great Countess, humbler of the Emperor, a restorer of things, the Julius Cæsar of the Church, and from his day there is stability again, as Urban the Second follows, like an Augustus; Nicholas the Fifth, the next great Pontiff, comes in with the Renascence.
Great the Hohenzollern King certainly was, but his greatness is that of a Condottiere of the Italian Renascence, of a Catharine de’ Medici. It is the greatness of a personality who is endowed, no doubt, with magnificent gifts, but who has prostituted all those gifts to the baser usages. It is passing strange how every writer remains silent about the ugly and repellent side of Frederick.
The renascence of poetry can be interpreted as a revulsion against the prevailing prosiness; the amateur theatre is equally a protest against the inanity and conventionality of the commercial stage; while the Community Chorus movement is an evidence of a desire to escape a narrow professionalism in music.
Life is not long enough for the study of the minute details of the mediaeval period in addition to ancient and modern history. What is needed for the mass of thinking young men is something which shall show what the work was which was accomplished between the fall of Rome and the new beginnings of civilization at the Renascence and the Reformation.
Neither can the administrative machinery, as it exists, be taken for granted; unless it shows those powers of adaptation and growth which show it to be alive and not dead, it too must be scrapped and rejected; new wine is fatal to old skins. Education must regain once more what she possessed at the time of the Renascence the power of direction; she must be mistress of her fate.
And life will then again prove the conqueror; there will come the renascence of life, honored and worshipped, the religion of life so long crushed beneath the hateful nightmare of Roman Catholicism, from which on divers occasions the nations have sought to free themselves by violence, and which they will drive away at last on the now near day when cult and power, and sovereign beauty shall be vested in the fruitful earth and the fruitful spouse.
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