Faith & Spirit Quote by Walter Pater

Pater’s sentence performs a genteel bit of intellectual provocation: it treats the Renaissance not as a clean “rebirth” of antiquity but as a deliberate, risky negotiation between competing loyalties. The key word is “attempt,” which quietly demotes the grand narrative of harmonious synthesis. These scholars aren’t serenely blending two compatible systems; they’re trying, experimentally, to square a moral and institutional order (Christianity) with a rival cultural prestige (ancient Greece) whose gods, ethics, and aesthetics don’t naturally submit to baptism.

The phrasing also smuggles in Pater’s signature agenda as a Victorian critic. Writing in an England still suspicious of pagan “Hellenism,” he frames Greek religion as something serious enough to require reconciliation, not merely a museum of myths. That grants antiquity a living pressure: an alternative vocabulary for beauty, desire, and the good life. In Pater’s hands, “notice” sounds modest, but it’s a demand that any serious history must linger on the moment Europe flirts with a different spiritual center of gravity.

Contextually, he’s pointing to Ficino and the Florentine Platonists, the humanists who tried to read Plato as a kind of pre-Christian prophet and to translate Greek metaphysics into Christian terms. The subtext is that the Renaissance’s creative charge comes from tension, not purity: when a culture has to justify its pleasures and its ideas, it generates new art, new philosophy, new ways of being modern. Pater isn’t just cataloging scholarship; he’s defending the Renaissance as a laboratory where belief learns to accommodate complexity.