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shaped the stupidity of the era. Truth no longer was found in the Bible but in the impressionable mind of the individual as it interacted withthe world, imposed a pattern of thought on knowledge and synthesized it into something satisfying. Nor was a commonly accepted guiding moral schema to be found, as ethics came to be shaped by the impulsive, artistic/subjective spirit of the period.
This spirit was accompanied by new attitudes which developed as people overcame the medieval fiction that natural man was inherently sinful and ergo dependent upon the Church for both leadership and redemption. The new hope for enjoying a good life here on earth was accompanied by a rebirth of an intellectual interest in understanding the universe. With the facade of piety gone, people resurrected the ancient values of classical Greece, studied the natural world around them and expanded their geographical horizons. As these new, broadening attitudes toward learning about life developed, the tone of the age clearly became that of confused conflict. Whereas Medieval man had been confronted with conflicting opposites, a balance had been found between virtue and vice, treachery and honor, brutality and piety even if behavior commonly contradicted Church ideology. By way of contrast, Renaissance man lived in a multidimensional world with no fixed standards. To the simple Christian answers to the problems of life were added many more, most of which clashed with Christianity and each other. Discoveries from the past conflicted with traditions just as discoveries from other continents conflicted with set notions about the nature of the world and people. Unfortunately, in the 1400's, some of these conflicts took the bloody form of religious wars and workers' revolts. These evinced a new attitude quite different from the accepting apathy of serfs and peasants in Egypt and India or the hopeless resignation common among slaves and plebes of the Roman Empire. Although cruelly suppressed during this era, this attitude lives on today as an unexpected result of Christianity. While the Church never intended to promote humanism or spread a doctrine of social equality, as it nevertheless did so, an activist idea sprang up and took root along with an incongruous sense of freedom and responsibility wherever priests introduced people to the teachings of Jesus. On the other hand, while Christianity had these unintended effects (and provided theological themes for artists and writers), it failed to provide dependable, intelligible, ethical standards for social behavior.
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