Why the Scandal?

When the ancient past, once so intimately bound to the present, becomes fundamentally alien, it can then, as with any such estrangement, arouse longing, repulsion, or cool indifference. The last option, however, has limited viability at a moment when the separation is so raw that it inevitably provokes passion. The time of the quarrel was such a moment. The Renaissance identification with an idealized antiquity (partly undermined though it was by the humanists' own critical investigations) could not yet be casually discarded. The attachment to the classical past was thus more likely to turn to sour distaste than to a dispassionate and rational evaluation.

Political science · Historical Philosophy and Science · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies