Why was the church during the Renaissance resistant to change?

Answer 1

The Renaissance was a long period that was dominated by a passion for returning to pre-Christian philosophies, languages, and thought. The early Humanists rejected the Scholastics and their whole school of though. They rejected Aristotle's idea that man was a "rational animal", the humanists venerated the imagination as highly as the analytic faculty, emphasizing rhetoric - the art of persuasion and poetry to move the heart rejecting the Scholastics "sterile attempts at definition". Thus the humanists adopted Plato and learned Greek, they re-examined the Scriptures through methods of literary analysis: the precise meaning of words, metaphors, and other poetic qualities. Although most of the first humanists remained believing Catholics, the movement inevitably led away from Christianity, and the scholastics were very suspicious of the entire movement from the beginning. This deifying of ancient pagan culture and philosophy weakened the logic of Christianity eventually giving rise to the protestant heresy and nearly simultaneously to secularism which rejected God in toto, much less Christianity. This was the thinking that turned the great Age of Faith into the Dark Ages as people turned against the Church and Christ rejected the immense faith and learning of the great Catholic scholars of that period.