The Renaissance and Challenges to Church Authority

The Renaissance

• The Renaissance is dated from 1450 to 1600 and means "rebirth" or "renewal".
• It was a period of open-minded inquiry, similar to early Greek philosophy, and marked a shift from a God-centered to a human-centered Europe.

Challenges to Church Authority

• The Renaissance era saw a breakdown of church authority, with the challenging of church dogma, such as the number of heavenly bodies in the solar system and the Earth's position in the universe.
• The questioning of church dogma led to its gradual replacement with direct observation of nature without theological considerations.

Factors Contributing to the Renaissance

• The acceptance of reason and the examination of nature as ways of knowing God, as sanctioned by the church, contributed to the Renaissance.
• Humanist philosophy, which recaptured the spirit of open inquiry reflected in the Greeks, and stressed the human potential to act upon the world and change it for the better.
• Exploration and contact with other peoples, such as Marco Polo's travels and Christopher Columbus' discovery of the New World, weakened the authority of the church.
• Johannes Gutenberg's development of metal movable type and modern printing techniques facilitated the exchange of ideas and spread of knowledge.

Renaissance Humanism

• Renaissance humanism denotes an intense interest in human beings, as if they were discovering themselves for the first time.
• Four major themes of Renaissance humanism are:
  • Individualism
  • Personal religion
  • Intense interest in the past
  • Anti-Aristotelianism

Influence of the East

• Many key discoveries that shaped the Renaissance were first made in the East, such as Islamic science, which was far ahead of Western science at the time.
• The West borrowed numerals, math, timekeeping, navigational devices, papermaking, printing, and explosives from the Islamic world and China.