Herbert Butterfield on Renaissance

“Most of the basic ideas in the Renaissance view of history are still clearly present in the controversies in the latter half of the seventeenth century; but the famous quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns—the controversy in the course of which a more modern view of progress was hammered out—is already visible at the time of the Renaissance.”

“The men of the Renaissance were in a peculiar situation... What they saw behind them... were the peaks of classical antiquity... the summit of human reason... since lost. ...[T]hey were governed by... this ancient outlook which at one level represented a static view and at another level involved a theory of decadence. under a system that might be described as cyclic. This antique-modern view... found explicit statement... in the writings of Machiavelli. ...Within any city or state or civilization... the natural operation of time was to produce internal corruption... a process of decandence. [I]n a parallel manner... bodies would decompose and the finest fabrics in nature would suffer putrefaction. ...[T]he current science chimed in... for in both realms... compound bodies had a natural tendency to disintegrate. ...[A]t the Renaissance it was almost less possible to believe in what we call progress than it had been in the middle ages.”