At the Ash Wednesday Mass, I mentioned in the homily about my experience as chaplain at a Catholic high school, where a student brought me a copy of a most interesting article on the Renaissance given out in an English class, an article that purported to be historical, but really is a bit of anti-Catholic propaganda.   While extolling the Renaissance as that time when men, “opening their eyes for the first time on a world of wonder, [they]… enjoyed what we may term the first transcendent springtime of the modern world” – I leave it to you to figure out what on earth a “first transcendent springtime” is – the author then casts, with amazing naivety, a scornful eye on the Middle Ages: 
 

  During the Middle Ages man had lived enveloped in a cowl.  He had not seen the beauty of the world, or had seen it only to cross himself, and turn aside and tell his beads and pray.  Like St. Bernard traveling along the shores of Lake Leman, and noticing neither the azure of the waters nor the luxuriance of the vines, nor the radiance of the mountains with their robe of sun and snow, but bending a thought-burdened forehead over the neck of his mule – even like this monk, humanity has passed, a careful pilgrim, intent on the terrors of sin, death, and judgment, along the highways of the world, and had not known that they were sight-worthy, or that life is a blessing.  Beauty is a snare, pleasure a sin, the world a fleeting show, man fallen and lost, death the only certainty, judgment inevitable, hell everlasting, heaven hard to win, ignorance is acceptable to God as proof of faith and submission, abstinence and mortification are the only safe rules of life – these were the fixed ideas of the ascetic medieval Church.  The Renaissance shattered and destroyed them, rending the thick veil which they had drawn between the mind of man and the outer world, and flashing the light of reality upon the darkened places of his own nature.  For the mystic teaching of the Church was substituted culture in the classical humanities; a new ideal was established, whereby man strove to make himself the monarch of the globe on which it is his privilege as well as destiny to live.  The Renaissance was the liberation of humanity from a dungeon, the double discovery of the outer and the inner world.

    To purge the Christian faith from false conceptions, to liberate the conscience from the tyranny of priests, and to interpret religion to the reason, has been the work of the last centuries; nor is this work as yet by any means accomplished.  On the one side, Descartes and Bacon and Spinoza and Locke are sons of the Renaissance, champions of newfound philosophical freedom; on the other side, Luther is a son of the Renaissance, the herald of newfound religious freedom.  The whole movement of the Reformation is a phase in the accelerated action of the modern mind, which at its commencement we call the Renaissance. 
 

       As in every instance of such sweeping propaganda, so here:  it is difficult to know where to begin in seeking to correct so much falsehood.  One who actually knows the history of the Middle Ages – instead of just repeating time-worn anti-Catholic polemic – has to ask the author of this article how it is that, say, St. Francis of Assisi fits into this caricature of the medieval world, he who wrote numerous songs in praise of the beauty of creation?  (And, too, let’s remember, this Saint was not atypical in his understanding of the created order’s beauty.)  And then there’s the whopper about interpreting “religion to the reason,” as if this project had not been going on all through the centuries of the Middle Ages… you know, St. Thomas Aquinas and company, the founding of universities devoted to this project, and, with their founding, the almost-too-exuberant exaltation of human reason, which Luther, the so-called “son of the Renaissance” – something he hated – labeled as “that whore.”  As for religious freedom being unleashed by the “Reformation,” again, the real historian has to wonder what world this author is talking about:  in every place in Europe where Protestantism took hold, it did so only by the power of the state, a power often used to force down the throats of Catholics variants of Luther’s new religion.  Eamon Duffy, in his critically acclaimed The Stripping of the Altars, recounts the horrors visited upon the English by the state’s enforcing Henry VIII’s usurpation of the authority of the Church.  Nor does the author seem to know that the whole phenomenon of the Renaissance was, in the main, a very Catholic thing, and that the beautiful art that it produced was largely in celebration of the Catholic faith (so much art, too, both Medieval and of the Renaissance, that would be brutally destroyed by mobs of rioting Protestants in places of their supremacy, especially in England).  Thankfully, this is a thing of the past, and Catholics and Protestants have beat our swords into plowshares and seek to work together as much as we can; but the truth of history still needs to be told.

      The truth about these things needs to be told, because falsehood about the Church’s past and the practice of her life has infiltrated the minds of many a Catholic.  The faith has never been afraid of beauty, has never considered pleasure per se to be sin, has always defended the power of human reason, and has ever taught that life in this world is indeed a blessing.  Only in the light of those truths about our Faith is the discipline of Lent seen for what it really is:  not a turning away from the beauty of God’s world, not a denigration of the human body and natural appetites, but rather the giving up of certain goods – truly good things – in order to concentrate on that which is higher, nobler, permanent (because eternal) – ultimately God.  Lenten penance is the recognition that the many gifts from God are not equal to the Giver Himself, but are marvelous tokens of His grace and goodness and glory.  We set some of them aside so as to more earnestly know the Giver, so as to liberate ourselves, by God’s grace, from thinking that created things can give us the beatitude that can only come with a closeness to God.  Lent reminds us that as good and blessed as this life on earth is, it still is but a pilgrimage and a real adventure, full of meaning – something like the forty-year journey of the people of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land, something, too, like the experience of our Lord in His forty days of fasting and prayer when He was tempted by the evil one, a reminder then to us that this pilgrimage we are on must stay on track.  And part of that “track” is the walking the sorrowful way with Jesus, tasting a bit of His passion undergone for us, and so becoming all the more grateful and therefore able to feast mightily at Easter.