Paganism and the Reformation

In the middle ages, people lived in the Colosseum while its walls crumbled around them. When I first learned that, I wondered how anyone, of any age and place, could see the magnificence that is the Colosseum and decide that it was a great place to stable animals. 

The other day, in a conversation with a classmate, we discussed a little perspective that helped me to understand: In the middle ages, Christianity was in full swing and in full power. The Romans with their pagan temples were generally frowned upon and the people of that time seemed to not put much in store by preserving their history. Better to stamp out the old and focus on living the true religion. Where the church could, they converted old Pagan temples to cathedrals, such as they did with the Pantheon.

What finally allowed all that to change? How did the people’s phobia of all things pagan finally subside? Well, in the Renaissance, intellectuals and artists sought inspiration by looking to the ideals of the Romans and Greeks. For the first time in a long time, people were acknowledging the strengths of those pagan societies and seeking to learn from them instead of rejecting them outright. This resulted in one of the highest periods of intellectual and artistic growth among human civilization in centuries. We even saw a change in values that may have allowed the reformation to occur.

During and after the renaissance, people were finally willing to question the church, in part, I would argue, because the renaissance made it okay to think that pagans did stuff worth emulating. This would have loosened the hold of the Catholic church by just a degree—just enough to let people start wondering if everything the church did was correct. This paved the way for more questioning and eventually, criticism, out of which the reformation was born.

So, in a way, we can thank the renaissance and its acceptance of different cultures for the reformation.