V. Stupidity Reborn

The Renaissance was an expansion of the Western cognitive world beyond the limits of the medieval mind. Deism was replaced by humanism as God was replaced by man at the center of thought. Christian theology, which had so restricted intellectual development to ways to prepare people for the next life in heaven, gave way to a general appreciation of this life here and now as people self-consciously gloried in and legitimatized the world of the senses. Whereas the range of mental activity had been artificially constrained to Church ends by theologians during the Middle Ages, the born again Western mind now embraced all dimensions of life with a conspicuous lack of foresight, planning or purpose. If there was a new schema for this new age, it was so broad as to provide no guidance at all to people openly plunging into the secular world with shameless abandon.

In the thirteenth century, the overall power of and faith in the schema of the medieval Church began to decline. This was a result of the self-defeating methods employed by the medieval Popes to enhance their immediate, short-term secular powers at the expense of their basic spiritual authority. With the Church increasingly absorbed in the exercise of power rather than the cultivation of morality, it might even have led the way to the intellectual Renaissance had it not been stuck with Christian theology as the ultimate source of authoritative explanations and rationalizations for everything.

In fact and despite itself, the Church at first actively encouraged the new humanism with a commitment to learning which promoted the development of the modern mind at the expense of piety and orthodoxy. This trend was begun by Pope Nicholas V (1447-1455), who, as the first humanist Pope, was a bit too broad-minded for the good of the Church. He bestowed papal offices on scholars whose learning he respected regardless of other considerations—like the nature of their conclusions, but while this was a boon to humanists, it shocked the devout. Such shocks notwithstanding, the Church suffered more from the belligerent policies and immorality of Popes who cultivated wars and indulged in power politics than from those who cultivated talent and indulged in arts and letters.

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