At the time men hardly felt that they were passing into a new age of civilization, nor did the culture of the Renaissance immediately produce any open or general intellectual rebellion against orthodox beliefs.  The world was gradually assuming an aspect decidedly unfriendly to the teaching of mediaeval orthodoxy; but there was no explosion of hostility; it was not till the seventeenth century that war between religion and authority was systematically waged.  The humanists were not hostile to theological authority or to the claims of religious dogma; but they had discovered a purely human curiosity about this world and it absorbed their interest.  They idolized pagan literature which abounded in poisonous germs; the secular side of education became all-important; religion and theology were kept in a separate compartment.  Some speculative minds, which were sensitive to the contradiction, might seek to reconcile the old religion with new ideas; but the general tendency of thinkers in the Renaissance period was to keep the two worlds distinct, and to practise outward conformity to the creed without any real intellectual submission.

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I may illustrate this double-facedness of the Renaissance by Montaigne (second half of sixteenth century).  His Essays make for rationalism, but contain frequent professions of orthodox Catholicism, in which he was perfectly sincere.  There is no attempt to reconcile the two points of view; in fact, he takes the sceptical position that there is no bridge between reason and religion.  The human intellect is incapable in the domain of theology, and religion must be placed aloft, out of reach and beyond the interference of reason; to be humbly accepted.  But while he humbly accepted it, on sceptical grounds which would have induced him to accept Mohammadanism if he had been born in Cairo, his soul was not in its dominion.  It was the philosophers and wise men of antiquity, Cicero, and Seneca, and Plutarch, who moulded and possessed his mind.  It is to them, and not to the consolations of Christianity, that he turns when he discusses the problem of death.  The religious wars in France which he witnessed and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day (1572) were calculated to confirm him in his scepticism.  His attitude to persecution is expressed in the remark that “it is setting a high value on one’s opinions to roast men on account of them.”

The logical results of Montaigne’s scepticism

[75] were made visible by his friend Charron, who published a book On Wisdom in 1601.  Here it is taught that true morality is not founded on religion, and the author surveys the history of Christianity to show the evils which it had produced.  He says of immortality that it is the most generally received doctrine, the most usefully believed, and the most weakly established by human reasons; but he modified this and some other passages in a second edition.  A contemporary Jesuit placed Charron in the catalogue