LewRockwell
It was in the font of pagandom, then, that Western Christendom was rebaptized. A withered culture of paradise went into the font, and a vigorous but radically changed culture of utopia sprang forth.
The Age of Utopia: Christendom from the Renaissance to the Russian Revolution, by John Strickland
Strickland offers that the Renaissance (rebirth) was not a rebirth of the ancient pagandom of Rome, but of a Western Christendom that, in his view, had fallen into an anthropological pessimism and cosmological contempt since the time of the Great Schism.
While it was not ancient Rome, with its infanticide and sexual degradation, it also was not the paradisiacal Christendom that continued in the East. It was a Christendom of humanism, the humanism born with Petrarch.
