it, essentially unconverted and hostile, whatever name it may have
been christened with; and we may expect the spirit of the world to
find expression, not only in overt opposition to the supernaturalistic
system, but also in the surviving or supervening worldliness of the
faithful. Such an insidious revulsion of the natural man against a
religion he does not openly discard is what, in modern Christendom, we
call the Renaissance. No less than the Revolution (which is the later
open rebellion against the same traditions) the Renaissance is
radically inimical to Christianity. To say that Christianity survives,
even if weakened or disestablished, is to say that the Renaissance and
the Revolution are still incomplete, Far from being past events they
are living programmes. The ideal of the Renaissance is to restore
pagan standards in polite learning, in philosophy, in sentiment, and
in morals. It is to abandon and exactly reverse one's baptismal vows.
Instead of forsaking this wicked world, the men of the Renaissance
accept, love, and cultivate the world, with all its pomp and vanities;
they believe in the blamelessness of natural life and in its
perfectibility; or they cling at least to a noble ambition to perfect
it and a glorious ability to enjoy it. Instead of renouncing the
flesh, they feed, refine, and adorn it; their arts glorify its beauty
and its passions. And far from renouncing the devil--if we understand
by the devil the proud assertion on the part of the finite of its
autonomy, autonomy of the intellect in science, autonomy of the heart
and will in morals--the men of the Renaissance are possessed by the
devil altogether. 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