SUMMARY OF RICHARD TARNAS BOOK THE PASSION OF

THE WESTERN MIND: UNDERSTANDING THE IDEAS

THAT HAVE SHAPED OUR WORLD
INTRODUCTION
The world is said to have been built on ideas, that which has so far
shaped our conception of it. The Western mode of thinking and doing
things has evolved through the ages bringing it to where it now stands.
The book ‘Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that
have Shaped our World’ by Richard Tarnas aims at producing a
chronological narratives of how ideas and thought have evolved in the
Western world through time especially in the history of philosophy
and how also these thought and ideas have changed the world and it’s
still undergoing some transformation. Tarnas approaches this history
from a chronological dimension beginning with the ancient Greek
period down to contemporary time. He believes it is the task of every
generation to examine the ideas that have helped shaped its
understanding of it.
I. THE GREEK WORLD VIEW
The foundation of Greek philosophical thinking was the quest to
understand the nature of the cosmos up until the time of the Athenian,
the Greek tended to view the world through archetypal forms but a
more profound refection about this archetype transformed into an
intellectual dimension.
The Greeks believed that the universe was ordered by a plurality of
timeless essences which underlay concrete reality giving it form and
meaning. That is things were always in cosmic opposites (e.g. male
and female, good and evil e.t.c.) bringing us to the idea of constant
flux and that there could yet be distinguished specific immutable
structure or essences that could be enduring and believed to possess
an independent reality of their own. It was on this that Plato based his
metaphysics and theory of knowledge. Plato’s perspective now
happens to be the starting point and foundation for the evolution of
the western mind.
The Archetypal Forms
Platonism as it’s commonly understood revolves around the cardinal
doctrine of ideas or forms. Plato’s conception of form is not actually
conceptual abstract thoughts created by the mind but their derivates in
concrete reality. Reality possesses a quality and degree of being. For
example, to say something is beautiful means that thing possesses a
quality of beauty in it. In other words, the/that object of beauty
participates in the absolute form of beauty. Some critics of Plato have
said they can only see things as they exist not as they are (they can
perceive particulars and not ideas) but Plato says a person has to have
gotten the notion of idea/forms before actually knowing that which is
particular.
Idea and God
Plato’s use of gods and ideas are a bit ambiguous as he tends to use
them either interchangeably, metaphorically or literarily. At some
point, he presents them as mythical figures and at other as epitomes of
ideas. The use of archetypes here are also not farfetched. For example,
Eros as used in Plato’s work symposium expresses itself at the
physical level of sexual instinct while at other times; it is considered
as the philosopher’s passion for intellectual beauty and wisdom and
then becomes the ultimate source of all beauty. It could then be said
that all Plato tried to do was to resolve the tension between classical
Greek minds notion of myth and reason.
The Evolution of the Greek Mind from Homer to Plato
The Mythic Vision
Greek thoughts were not devoid of religion and myths as they played
an important role in their background and approach to the universe.
The idea that gods played an important role in the life of the human
person was brought to the fore by Greek poet and writers as they
intended to explain the human conditions based on their ideas and
understanding of the gods. Their understanding and notions of the
gods was also born out human behavior as perceived by them thereby
attributing these features to the gods. Myths for them therefore were a
process for interpreting nature and the processes of life as it also
helped them in shaping their culture.
The Birth of Philosophy
The Greek vision from myth as a source of explanation was gradually
shifting as early as the Sixth Century B.C. in the large and prosperous
Ionian city of Miletus situated in the Eastern part of the Greek world
on the coast of Asia Minor. The shift also might have been as a result
of conflicting mythologies, growing civilization, the Greek polis
social organization based on laws rather than arbitrary act could be
said to have influenced Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes to
seek to want to know what it is that made the universe tick despite its
constant changing motions and the primordial substance from which it
was made as there was a plurality in their understanding of this
natural phenomenon.
There was the need to explain the cosmos by means of observation
and reason rather than by mythological component. Nature should be
explained in terms of nature itself and not something beyond it.
Natural empiricism was born and human intelligence grew stronger
while the sovereign powers of the gods grew weaker. Parmenides of
Elea also approached the problem of the universe just as his
predecessors but used language and logic because for him, “what is
is” and “what is not is not.” This revolutionary thinking therefore
brought logic to the fore as a necessary tool for the investigation of
reality. Anaxagoras, Empedocles and the atomist tried to reconcile the
positions of the naturalist and the rationalist by creating a pluralistic
system. Empedocles posited that the four elements – fire, water, air
and earth – which were eternal moved together and apart by the
primary forces of love and strife while Anaxagoras posited that the
universe was constituted by an infinite number of minute,
qualitatively different seeds which he considered to be the mind
(Nous). The atomist, Leucippus and Democritus who constructed a
complex explanation of all phenomena in a purely materialistic term
posited that the universe is made up of infinite numbers of atoms
which move in a boundless void and their random collision varying
combination produced the visible world. Human knowledge for them
is simply gotten from the impact of material atoms on the sense
meaning that things happen by chance. Pythagoras created a synthesis
between religion (myth) and reason. He founded a school and was
more interested in the in the forms of phenomena. Their commitment
to cultic secrecy made most of their work to be largely unknown.
They charted an independent philosophical course structured on myth
and mystery religion while advancing scientific discoveries of
immense consequence for later Western thought.
But the more Greek developed intellectually, the more doubt sets in.
Thus quoting Xenophanes “The gods did not reveal, from the
beginning, all things to us; but in the course of time, through seeking,
man find that which is the better …”
The Greek Enlightenment
The Athenians were at the peak of intellectual and cultural
development in Greece as Athens became the center of the Greek
world. Philosophers at this time had already created a delicate balance
between mythological traditions and the modern secular rationalism.
There was also the gradual and continuous shift towards a more
humanistic endeavor such as the movement from Aristocracy to
Egalitarianism, savagery to civilized culture, old religious belief to
uninhabited human reason and endeavor.
The Sophist emerged during the later part of the Fifth Century B.C.
and were itinerant teachers. Concerning knowledge, they claim it is
subjective and not objective that all a person can know is the content
of his/her mind rather than things outside the mind. On the idea of
god, they posit that we cannot know if they exist or what form they
take because of the shortness of human life while Critias further
believes that the gods were an invention of humans to instill fear in
them in other that those who would have acted in a evil manner would
be constrained or restrained. So for them, the world was best viewed
apart from religious prejudices.
The sophist mediated the shift from mythology to rationality. They
championed a methodological approach to the human person and
society thereby bringing about the Greek classical system of education
and training which included gymnastics, grammar, rhetoric, poetry,
music, mathematics, geography, natural history, astronomy and the
physical sciences, history of society and ethics, and philosophy which
for them would be standard for producing a well rounded and
educated citizen.
The sophist view soon developed into a systematic doubt of human
beliefs, the relativity and plasticity of human values and custom, and
other issues of the time also added to its challenge. It now seems that
the use of human reason had kind of fallen in on itself and everywhere
the system seemed to be collapsing and knowledge of rationality
seemed to be failing.
Socrates
Socrates entered the philosophical arena at a time when the climate
was highly charged as there was tension between ancient Olympian
traditions and the vigorous new intellectualism. Upon the end of his
life, he had left the Greek mind radically transformed, establishing not
only a new method and ideas for the pursuit if truth, but also, in his
own person an enduring model and inspiration for all subsequent
philosophy. Despite his influence, little is known about Socrates as
what we have of him is what is known through Plato. Socrates can be
considered as a person imbued with passion for intellectual honesty
and moral integrity though his life tends to be full of paradoxical
contrast; he was above all a man consumed by the passion for truth.
Socrates was more interested in ethics and logic as he found physics
and cosmology confusing because for him, they were not morally
useful and were riddled with inconsistent theories. He believed that
education should lead us to live a good life and therefore set for
himself the task of finding a way to knowledge that transcend mere
opinion, to inform a morality the transcend mere convention.
On the discourse of the soul, Socrates says a better understanding of
the soul and one’s self would lead to happiness because happiness is
not the product of physical or external circumstances of wealth,
power, reputation, but of living a good life that is good for the soul. In
essence, the key to human happiness is the development of a rational
moral character. Socrates developed a dialectical form of argument
that became fundamental to the character and evolution of the
Western mind which is reasoning through rigorous dialogue as a
method of investigation intended to expose false belief and elicit truth.
His methodology was not universally accepted because it was
considered unsettling.
The Platonic Hero
Socrates’ philosophy can be considered as an expression of his
personality as he was portrayed by Plato’s dialogue Phaedo,
Symposium and The republic which is based on good understanding
of the self. These works also shows that the human mind can discover
and know timeless universals through the supreme discipline of
philosophy. In a sense, the Socrates of Plato is a combination of both
mythic deities and the development of human intellect to arrive at
truth. The human intellect coupled with divine faculty now becomes a
prerogative of both the great and humble.
Socrates and Plato’s search for clarity, order and meaning had gone a
full circle bringing about an intellectual restoration. Thus Plato gave a
new significance to the old archetypal vision of the ancient Greek
sensibility.

Socrates is taken as the paradigmatic figure of Greek philosophy but

is difficult to separate his thought from that of Plato as it was in Plato
that Socrates thought fully came to be known and developed. Socrates
methodology became the foundation for Plato’s broader enunciation
of the major outlines and problems for subsequent Western
philosophy in all its diverse areas. Socrates was not just used as a
mouth piece by Plato to complete his own independent ideas but his
relationship to Socrates appears complicated. Socrates duty as an
intellectual mid-wife could perhaps have found its final and fullest
fruit of fulfillment in Platonic philosophy.

The Philosophers Quest and the Universal Mind

The philosopher is literally “a lover of wisdom” and so approaches
intellectual task as a romantic quest of universal significance. For
Plato, knowledge is implicit in being but forgotten and it is the goal of
philosophy to free the soul from this deluded condition and it is the
task of the philosopher to “recollect” the transcendent ideas and the
true causes of all things. This we find in The Republic where he made
an allusion to his allegory of the cave in which he illustrated the
difference between authentic knowledge of reality and the illusion of
appearance.
Education is in the service of the soul and the divine and it is a
process through which truth is not introduced into the mind from
outside but it is ‘led’ out from within. Education under the guidance
of Plato made use of both metaphysical and spiritual dimensions.
Philosophical illumination is the reawakening of the soul’s happy
intimacy with transcendent ideas that is inherent in all things. At this
point, the mind becomes a necessity because irrationality was
associated with matter while rationality was associated with the mind.
Hence the belief that the universe possesses and is governed
according to a comprehensive regulating intelligence and that this
same intelligence, is reflected in the human mind.
The Problem of the Planet
In earlier times, ancient observers noticed the difference between the
celestial and terrestrial realm. The former seemed ordered while the
latter seemed filled with inconsistency and change and even the
former has control/influence over the latter. The divine nature of the
universe had a way of affecting the human person as they began
studying the celestial bodies for omen and using it to regulate time
and other things. The universe is not just a soulless domain of moving
stones and dirt but contains the very source of world order and for this
reason Plato considered astronomy to be of importance to the
philosopher.

The root word for planet is “planete” meaning “wanderers” and the
Greeks believed that not all the celestial bodies moved with the same
regularity. So Plato tried to solve this problem by creating a
hypothesis that the planets did move in an orderly manner
notwithstanding the seeming contradictions but also enjoined future
philosophers to find out the cause of this motion. All platonic
philosophy can be summed up as ‘saving the phenomena’ i.e. trying to
discover the eternal behind the temporal.

The legacy Plato passed on to Aristotle who later formed his own
distinct philosophy was that knowledge could be acquired through
intuitive leaps or careful logical analysis.
Aristotle and the Greek Balance
Aristotle developed a language and logic, and a foundation and
structure without which the Western thought could not have
developed as they did. There are no unequivocal judgments as to
which thought’s are Aristotle’s because he interpreted Plato.
Aristotle’s believed that true reality was the perceptible world of
concrete objects, not an imperceptible world of eternal ideas and
introduced the notion of categories (primary substance) and replaced
Plato’s ideas with universals. Substance for Aristotle is an intelligible
structure embedded in matter and it is that which makes up an object
as it conforms to reality and not ideas. For Aristotle, knowledge of the
natural world is gotten first through perception of concrete particulars
in which regular patterns can be recognized and general principles
formulated. Aristotle realigned Plato’s archetypal perspective from a
transcendent focus to an immanent one. So the Greek sense of
confidence in the power of human reason to comprehend the world
rationally, a confidence that began with Thales, now found in
Aristotle its fullest expression and climax.

Aristotle’s universe possessed a remarkable logical consistency

throughout its complex and multifaceted structure as motion could be
explained in terms of their purpose or end. Greek cosmology achieved
it most systematic development in Aristotle. Aristotle in his now
extant work De Philosophical defined the role of a philosopher as
having to move from the material course of things to discover the
intelligible essence of the universe and the purpose behind all change.

Aristotle’s philosophy can be classified as naturalistic and empiricist

as the world of nature was of primary importance to him. His ethics
was based on doing the good and not just having knowledge of it.
Plato is considered the master, but it was Aristotle’s philosophical
temperament that would come to define the dominant orientation of
the Western mind. In Aristotle and Plato, we find a certain balance
and tension between empirical analysis and spiritual intuition as
depicted in Raphael’s renaissance master piece ‘the school of Athens’
The Dual Legacy
The achievement of the Greek classical thought can be summarized as
an attempt to know as they were the first to see the world as a
question to be answered and their attempts gave birth to the tradition
of critical thought and a quest to pursue it which in turn gave birth to
Western mind set. The Greek conception of reality did influence the
Western thought from antiquity through renaissance and scientific
revolution. Their legacy is dualistic in nature as they bequeathed to
the Western mind a secular skepticism and the metaphysical idealism.
II. THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE CLASSICAL ERA
Alexander the Great conquered the vast empire of his world during
the fourth century B.C. having been tutored by Aristotle, Alexander
disseminated the Greek culture and language all over the vast world
he conquered. His early death and a long period of dynastic struggle
and shifting sovereignties made Rome the centre of a new empire.
Despite the conquest by the Romans, Greek culture still reigned
supreme over the educated classes and was rapidly absorbed by the
Romans. The Romans specialized in the realm of law, political
administration, and military strategy while the Greeks reigned in the
realms of philosophy, literature, art and education. Even though the
Greeks were taken captive, they also took the victors captive.
Cross Currents of Hellenistic Matrix
The Decline and Preservation of the Greek Mind
The Greek encounter with other culture brought about a gradual
disintegration to its once held position and the social instability
brought about the demise of Greek thought. Aristotle and Plato were
still being studied but there was a shift in the nature and function of
philosophy as there was a gradual separation of science from
philosophy and philosophy was beginning to a dogmatic tone.
Stoicism was a development of central element of Socratic and
Heraclitan philosophy transposed to the less circumscribed and more
ecumenical Hellenistic period. Its rival philosophy was Epicureanism
which was more concerned with human pleasure and the refusal to be
burden the self with quest for moral value. Happiness was the bane of
Epicurean philosophy.
Skepticism was represented by thinkers such as Phyrro of Elis and
Sextus Empiricus who held that no truth could be known to be certain
that only the philosophical stance was the complete suspension of
judgment. What they were implying was that the people who believed
that they could know reality were subject to constant frustration and
unhappiness in life. The skeptics neither affirmed nor denied the
possibility of knowledge, but say that the human person should be
open-minded and wait to see what happens.
Despite all the varying philosophies, the Hellenistic spirit still felt it
lacked a kind of satisfaction as there was still the hunger for an
enlivening spirit. It could then be said that the pre-Alexandrian Greece
had come apart, its potency spent in the process of diffusion.
The Hellenistic era still has some credit that accrues to it despite the
seeming collapse as it was at this time that the classical works from
Homer to Aristotle was compiled and edited to form a canon of
masterworks. Also the Bible was compiled and edited and canonized.
Education became systematized and widespread and the Greek
paideia (educational system) flourished. Thus the earlier Hellenic
achievement was scholastically consolidated, geographically extended
and vitally sustained for the remainder of the classical era.
Astronomy
The original contribution of the Hellenistic period was in the field of
natural sciences were we have the following personalities; Euclid the
geometer, Apollonius the geometer – astronomer, Archimedes the
mathematical physicist, Hipparchus the astronomer, Strabo the
geographer, Galen the physician and Ptolemy the geographer –
astronomer; all who produced scientific advances and codifications
that would remain paradigmatic for many centuries.
The various postulations and arguments concerning the nature of the
Earth and other cosmological/astronomical debates went ahead but the
Ptolemaic – Aristotelian universe which was synthesized in turn
became the fundamental world conception informing the Western
mind for most of the subsequent fifteen centuries.
Astrology
Astronomy developed from its ties to astrology which employed those
technical advances to improve its own predictive powers. This in turn
led to a widespread demand for astrological insights which further
evolved and gained social significance, the two disciplines forming
essentially one profession from the classical era through Renaissance.
Thus the accumulated elements of classical astrological theory were
brought by Ptolemy into a unified synthesis, in which he catalogued
the meanings of the planets, their position and geometrical aspects and
their various effects on human affairs.
Astrological understanding was interpreted in different ways by the
different groups, each according to its own world view. But whatever
the particular interpretation, the planetary movements possessed an
intelligible significance for human life exercised an immense
influence on the cultural ethos of the classical era.
Neoplatonism
This was a field of thought that tried to bridge the gap between the
Hellenistic schism and the rational philosophies and mystery
religions. It was started in the Mid-Fourth Century B. C. after the
death of Plato when some philosophers developed his thought by
focusing on and amplifying it’s metaphysical and religious aspect.
Neoplatonism is an integration of certain Platonic and Aristotelian
philosophy. Its culmination found itself in Plotinus work where in the
supreme one produces the other (divine intellect or Nous/mind) which
in turn also produced the world soul i.e. one, intellect and soul. These
three hypostases are not literal entities but rather distinct spiritual
dispositions. What Plotinus is saying is that, all things emanates from
the one through the intellect and the world soul and that because the
human imagination is at its highest, can also participate in that primal
divinity, thereby move towards spiritual emancipation. The main
concept that emerged from Neoplatonism is teleological dynamism,
hierarchy, emanation and a spiritual mysticism.
Rome
In Rome, classical civilization was beginning to flower as a result of
the military expansion and libertarian ethos. The Romans succeeded
in conquering the whole of Mediterranean basin and a large part of
Europe. Roman culture also contributed its own quarter to the
classical civilization. This we find in the preservation and
development of Greek concepts and thoughts system and an
evaluation in almost all aspect of life.
The Roman cultural splendor was an imitation, inspired by Greece’s
glory and its magnitude alone could not indefinitely sustain the
Hellenic spirit. Due to all this, Rome civilization as gradually coming
to an end precisely because of the following factors – oppressive and
rapacious government, overambitious general, constant barbarian
incursions, an aristocracy grown decadent and effete, religious cross
current undermining the imperial authority and military ethos, drastic
sustained
III. THE CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW
Tarnas’ task here was an inquiry into how the Christian belief system
came to affect and influence the western worldview and how this
worldview still goes on to affect and influence philosophical and
scientific evolution.
What we know of Jesus of Nazareth he says, cannot now be
ascertained because Jesus never wrote but what we have come to
know of him is what has been written by the descendant of Jesus’
immediate followers. These writings were later compiled; edited and
added to the Hebrew Scriptures which later became the Bible and it
was from this that the Church gained its authority and the parameter
of the evolving Christian worldview came from. This section tends to
focus more on the Christian tradition and how it ruled the formation
and development of the world as at the time it emerged.
Judaic Monotheism and the Divinization of History
Theology and history were inextricably conjoined in the Hebrew
vision. Acts of God, and the events of human experience constituted
one reality, and the biblical narrative of the Hebrew past was intended
rather to reveal its divine logic than to reconstruct an exact historical
record. The Hebrew’s were just like every other nation in the ancient
world, they believed they were a chosen people by God and that they
were a unique people. The Hebrews traced their origin from creation
through to the time of their having to make a covenant with God.
They also associated the human fate with the decision of God. They
believed that if they live righteously, they would inherit the promise
land and become a light to all mankind. It was this faith, this hope in
the future, this unique historical impulse carried forward by the
prophets and compellingly recorded in the poetry and prose of the
bible that had sustained the Jewish people for two millennia.

Jesus of Nazareth began his ministry in Jewish cultural ambiance in

which expectation of a messiah and an apocalyptic denouement of
history has reached extreme proportion. But it was in his death by
crucifixion and the fervent belief in his resurrection that the Christian
faith came to be recognized and a new understanding of God and
humanity came to be established. The Judeo-Christian community
came to be formed as God was seen not as a tribal or polis deity
among man but the one true Supreme God. As this message was
proclaimed far and wide in the Roman Empire, what was born of
Israel was Christianity.
Classical Elements and the Platonic Inheritance
Christianity spread at an astonishing rate from its tiny Galilean
nucleus to eventually encompass the Western world. It was through
the effort of Paul, who effectively turned Christianity towards its
universal mission. The Judaic religion was mostly a nationalist and
separatist in character as Christian Jews opposed the inclusion of non-
Jews into the community of faith. While James and Peter for some
time required that non-Jews observe the traditional Jewish rules, it
was Paul who amidst opposition asserted that the new Christian
freedom and hope for salvation was already universally present for
Gentiles without the Judaic laws as well as Jews within it. It was
Paul’s universalism that prevailed over Judaic exclusivism, with large
repercussion for the classical world.
The crushing of the messianic political revolutionary movement led
by the zealot party, the capture of Jerusalem by the Roman troops and
the destruction of the Jewish Temple (70 A.D) brought about a
dispersal of the Christian community and the closest link of the
Christian religion to Judaism was severed. From this point thereafter,
Christianity was more Hellenistic than a Palestinian phenomenon. So
Christianity was therefore decisively molded by its contact with the
Greco-Roman culture. It was forced to contend with pagan intellectual
system which it later absorbed and used as a paradigm to explain the
Christian faith which would in turn lead to the transformation of both
the Hellenistic thought pattern and the new found Christian faith.
As earlier mentioned, the Christian faith was faced and challenged by
already existing Greco-Roman culture, the educated class of early
Christians rapidly saw the need to integrate the sophisticated
philosophical tradition with their religious faith which was for their
own satisfaction and help the Greco-Roman in understanding the
Christian mystery. Hence there was a Christianization of platonic
principles and philosophy which metamorphosed into a systematic
theology, and although that theology was Judeo-Christian in
substance, its metaphysical structure was largely platonic such as was
advanced by the major theologians of the early church – Justin martyr,
Clement of Alexandria, Origen and finally by Augustine.
It would be noted that Hellenistic thought system and the Judeo-
Christian perception of the world was married creating a hybrid of
intellectual culture that not only shaped the Judeo-Christian
worldview but certainly affected and influenced the Western mind by
its integration of Platonism and Neoplatonic belief and thought system
with Christianity: “And the logos became flesh and dwelt among us.”
The Conversion of the Pagan Mind
Jewish culture had become influenced by the Hellenism in the
Hellenistic period and this influence in turn played a role in the
transforming and contributing to the Christian worldview. Augustine
agreed with Plato’s philosophy and therefore made certain
modification in its use to explain Christianity.
Clement of Alexandria a Christian apologist reasoned with the pagan
intellectuals of Alexandria by explaining to them that the world was
not a mythological phenomenon full of gods and daimones but was
rather a natural world providentially governed by the one Supreme
self-subsistent God. The Christian faith assimilated the mysteries
extended to the various pagan deities as well as the Greco-Roman
world and consciously or unconsciously absorbed them into the
Christian hierarchy.

The Christian approach to truth was substantially different from

classical philosophy. They believed that reason alone was enough to
capture divine and cosmic truth but that faith was needed for
attainment of the revealed truth. Here faith was the primary means
and reason a distant second for comprehending the deeper meaning of
things. So for Augustine, ‘I have faith in order to understand.’
The rise of Christianity and already decadent state of science in the
late Roman era received little encouragement for new development.
The Christian worldview was that the heavens were the abode of God
and his angels and it is from there that He would return at the second
coming and since the world as a whole was understood simply and
preeminently as God’s creation, there was no need for scientifically
wanting to penetrate nature’s logic as it was only known to God and
what man could know of it was revealed in the bible. Hence truth was
therefore approached primarily not through self-determined
intellectual inquiry, but through scripture and prayer and faith in the
teaching of the church.

Both Paul and Augustine testified to the supremacy and

overwhelming power of God’s will which they experienced at their
conversions. God was for them the exclusive source of all good and
man’s salvation and the epitome of God’s love for humankind is
found in the person of Jesus Christ. Christianity thus bequeathed to its
members the universality of salvation and the equality of all persons
in the sight of God – which was later to become a decisive trait for the
formation of the Western character. A new sense of all human life was
taught by Christianity and brought to the pagan world which later
influenced the mass culture than the Greek philosophical ethics had.
Christianity also turned out to be the guide post for intellectual
research and philosophical inquiry was seen by early church as less
vital spiritual development.
The church became institutionalized as it became the guardian of the
final truth and the highest court of appeal in any matter of ambiguity
as it sought to safeguard the faith. The shadow side of the church was
that it became intolerant as it finally gained a hold at the end of the
classical era and opposed any teaching it considered pagan. It was the
pluralism of classical era that gave way to an emphatically monolithic
system – one God, one church, one truth.
Contraries within the Christian Vision
Two significantly different suspect of the Christian worldview can be
identified thus; the emphasis of Christianity as an already existent
spiritual revolution that was now progressively transforming and
liberating both the individual soul and the world in the dawning light
of God’s revealed love. The second, being the focus in the present
alienation of man and the world from God. These two sides were both
defined by Paul and Augustine, though these views appear separate
but are somewhat indissoluble but Tarnas decided to treat them
separately for a better understanding.
The first, Christ the divine had entered the world and that the
redemption of humanity and nature was dawning, Christianity was the
fulfillment of the yearning found in the Judaic religion. Jesus Christ’s
life had made living meaningful but repentance was not a prerequisite
in this view as it was a consequence of the experience of the dawning.
The Christian experience was an inner transformation based in an
awakening to what was already being born within the individual and
within the world.
The second pole of the Christian vision perceived Christ’s redemptive
action as a dramatic battle between good and evil, and that Christ
redemption of mankind is based on a tacit watchfulness and a
heightened moral rectitude which in turn is depends upon Christ’s
second coming. This creates a kind of anticipatory structure in the
Christian vision. This tone of religious vision was reinforced by the
church in her historical and theological evolution of the second
coming and its delay.
This dualistic understanding emphasized mankind’s inherent
unworthiness and consequent inability to experience the potency of
Christ’s redemption in this life, except in a proleptic manner through
the church. The church tended to hamper on sin and guilt and the
danger or even the likelihood of damnation. The image of God
portrayed was that of a judge now embodied in Christ and the church
playing the judicial role in the community of the faithful. The image
further projected was a resultant effect of human guilt rather than the
removal of that guilt.
The two poles of the Christian vision might not be unrelated as the
distinction suggest but to further comprehend this divergent views, a
look into how the Christian church evolved both in its self-conception
and history, and the pressure of those events, personalities and
movements which governed the evolution would be important.
Exultant Christianity
In certain passages of the Paul’s letter and John’s gospel we find out
that Jesus’ coming has created a bridge between the human and divine
in some sense. The coming of Christ was a break as well as
fulfillment of, the Judaic tradition. Christ’s coming was perceived in
the context of universal rebirth and redemption. Hence the early
Christians set out to spread the ‘good news’ of humanity’s salvation.
Redemption was also viewed as an absolute and positive fulfillment
of human and of all human suffering that Adam’s original sin
paradoxically celebrated as “O felix culpa” (“O blessed sin” or “O
happy fault”) in the Easter liturgy. So human weakness became the
occasion of God’s strength and human suffering became the necessary
prelude to unbounded happiness.
This primitive Christian proclamation of redemption was at once
mystical, cosmic, and historical. On the one hand, it was an
experience of Christ in the human soul and on the other hand, the
entire world was being transformed and restored to its divine glory. In
this light, human history was seen not in the endless circle of
deterioration but in the matrix of humanity’s deification. Hope then
became the central theme in Christianity as it was in this attitude that
the human person would be able to overcome trials and terror as it
looked forward to the fulfillment of a glorious future. The seed is said
to have been sown into humanity but its progress would be slow but
active as it moves towards perfection for not only was man to be
fulfilled in God but God in man. For God has chosen man as the
vessel of his image, in which his divine essence could be most fully
incarnate.
In essence, man was a noble participant in God’s creative unfolding
despite his alienation from God, man still had a role to play in
repairing its divine image. So, pains, sufferings and devastation could
be seen as part of the great art of bringing Christ forth into the world
and the evolution of the new humanity that would be fulfilled in the
future.
Dualistic Christianity
The exultant element in Christianity that salvation lays in the future
was not to be misinterpreted license for moral decadence. Here we see
Paul trying to warn the early Christians not to become irresponsible
but rather they should still work towards the redemption and salvation
that lay in the future. Even though personal redemption is deemed
present, there was still the collective redemption to be realized and
this could only be achieved if the community of believer builds up a
community of love and moral purity worthy of God’s glorious future.
In essence, there should be a balance between personal salvation and
community salvation.
Thus Paul taught a partial dualism in the present to affirm a greater
cosmic unity in the future, lest a premature claim or redemption now
preclude the greater salvation of the world later. Though the three
Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) also supported this
religious vision, the Johannine Gospel tended to contrast this as its
own emphasis was on Christ’s spiritual glory already spread through
the present age. The Synoptic Gospel therefore encouraged hope that
the sufferings undergone is for a time as salvation is near.
Paradoxically, this dualism was enhanced and given a different
significance in the Johannine Gospel as John tried to show that the
salvation at the end of history was already being actualized in the
wake of the resurrection. But the Gnostics and the Neoplatonist
stream within the Christian theology supported and amplified the
mystical and ontological dualism. The larger mainstream Christian
tradition which had anticipated the second coming as the necessary
solution accepts that the mediating role would be fulfilled by the
ongoing sacramental church.
It was this general trend that encouraged the other side of the
Christian vision, the character of which in the long-run would
significantly redefine primitive Christian message. Since the second
coming did not happen as expected especially after Augustine,
salvation was seen in less dramatic historical and collective terms but
more as church-mediated process that could occur only through the
institutional sacrament, and could be fulfilled only when the soul left
behind the physical world and entered celestial state. The struggle
over evil became paramount thus making the authoritative activity of
God and the church mandatory. This made Christian traditions in the
West lose its exultant unitary conception only to become static,
circumscribed, and dualistic. The “immanence” of God’s kingdom
was now contained in the church. Yet the church was perceived as
defensively against the world in which it existed, or rather with which
it was forced to coexist.
This was a worldview that was different during the time of the early
Christians as theirs was characterized by a sense of immanent
dynamism that constituted ‘newness.’ But the church at a point in
time considered itself the conduit through which salvation can be
attained and faithful Christians devoted their efforts to preparing to be
taken up by Christ into heaven were imperfection would be left
behind and the fact that only a few elect would be saved while
majority of corrupt mankind would meet perdition. This therefore
rendered the idea of human deification either meaningless or
blasphemous because God’s action alone was spiritually potent,
human pretension to heroism of the ancient Greek type could be
viewed only as reprehensible vain glory. Hence dualism becomes
absolute because of the schism in the universe between God and man,
and between the present life in this world and a future life in the
spiritual world and only the church could bridge the gap.

This dualistic view and notion could also be found in the Jewish faith
were in it is believed that it was man’s fall that brought about the
cosmic fall rather than vice-versa. They also saw God as a jealous and
stern judge and it was only man’s plea for a merciful judgment that
mitigated the full brunt of God’s wrath against those he perceived as
disobedient. Tension was central to the Judaic religious experience for
despite significant exceptions, the Hebrew God generally disclosed
himself as one who does not compromise but his plan of salvation for
man was resolved historically and man’s total submission was
required. Thus the divine command for unswerving obedience tended
to outweigh the divine out pouring of reconciliatory love.
This love was nonetheless experienced as a numinous presence
drawing forward the Jewish nation to fulfillment in its various and
constantly evolving forms. This in turn did not remove the fact that
God was vengeful to anyone who disobeyed the law and
commandment but that God was by nature merciful and judgmental.
Paul, John and Augustine expressed a peculiar mixture of the mystical
and juridical in their writings, and the Christian religion of which they
were principal shapers reflected those divergent tendencies. Thus the
Christian hope and faith coexist with Christian guilt and fear.
Further Contraries and the Augustinian Legacy
Matter and Spirit
The inner conflict in Christianity was especially prominent in its
attitudes towards the physical world and the physical body, became an
ambivalence that Christianity never entirely resolved. The central
miracle of the Christian faith is the incarnation and the resurrection
which became the foundation for the belief in the soul’s immortality
and even the redemption of the body and nature itself.
The Christian redemptive understanding gave new meaning to the
original Hebrew view of man as created body and soul in the image of
God, conception parallel to the later Neoplatonic idea of man as a
microcosm of the divine but with Judaism, body and soul was seen as
an integrated unit of vital power. Christ’s incarnation into and
redemption of the world was seen not just as exclusive spiritual event
but as unparalleled development within temporal materiality and
world history. In this view, nature was regarded as God’s noble
handiwork and the present locus of his self-revelation, and was thus
worthy of reverence and understanding. But there exist an opposing
view; nature in later Christianity was perceived as corrupt and finite
and it needed to be overcome. Only man was capable of salvation and
in man, only his soul was redeemable. This implies that man’s soul
was in direct conflict with nature and was endangered by the potential
entrapment of carnal pleasure and the material world. Neoplatonist
Christian theologians helped influence the shift of the notion of the
natural world and the redemption of the whole man from early Judeo-
Christian view. While the platonic element in Christianity overcame
the divine-human dualism by conceiving of man as directly
participating in the divine archetype; it simultaneously encouraged a
different dualism between body and spirit. Platonism encouraged in
Christianity a view of the body as soul’s prison. Platonism gave an
emphatic philosophical justification to the potential spirit-matter
dualism in Christianity.
The heresies that arose during the medieval era brought about the
theological development that was needed to counter them but these
heresies aided in the further development of the Christian dogmas.
The cultural situation of the time and the understanding that the world
was ruled by Satan and the Christian trust in a world ruled by
providence was juxtaposed with the Christian fear of the world. There
was also the stressed need for spiritual purity so celibacy was seen as
the ideal state and marriage a necessary allowance for cupidity so that
sex can be kept within defined boundaries but communal and
charitable forms of love were instead emphasized.
The need to keep holy and blameless in anticipation of Christ’s
imminent coming was the foremost imperative for early Christians.
This Paul defined in his writings and teachings, and he also made a
distinction between “flesh” and “body” the former as unredeemed
nature while the later connotes the whole man. He offered a positive
evaluation of the “body” while he employed the “flesh” to refer to
man’s moral weakness. Sin was not so much mere carnality as it was
the perverse elevation over God of that which, good in itself in proper
measure, was rightly subordinate to God.
Paul’s distinction between flesh-body was often ambiguous both in
his doctrinal statements and in his practical ethics. It was Paul’s
assumed support that characterized many Christian view of the
physical, biological, and the instinctual as inherently prone to
demonic and responsible for man’s fall and continued corruption.
Paul’s flesh-spirit polarity also created some tensions compounded by
other parts of the New Testament which laid the seed for an anti-
physical dualism in Christianity that platonic, Gnostic and Manichean
influences would later amplify.
Augustine
Augustine had a great effect on Christianity in the West and
combining the peculiarities of his own character and biography to
define an attitude towards nature and this world, towards human
history, and towards man’s redemption that would largely mold the
character of medieval Western Christianity. This he also achieved
through the medium of his extra-ordinary compelling writings.
Augustine on his notion of grace makes it known based on his
personal experience at conversion that God alone could grant grace to
the human person and was also convinced about the supremacy of
God’s will and goodness. In discussing love, he explains that love of
God can only thrive if the human person conquers the love of self and
the flesh. He further states that it was the love of the flesh that brought
about the fall of man and subsequent evil in the world. This brings us
back to his thought on grace, that it is only through Christ’s grace and
with the resurrection of the body would all traces of sin be removed
and man’s soul be free from the curse of his fallen nature.
Though Augustine had denied that man had any role to play his own
salvation and was for that reason damned, because God had already
selected only a few. The official Christian doctrine would not always
accept Augustine’s more extreme formulations of predestination or
his nearly complete denial of any active human role in the process of
salvation, the subsequent Christians view of man’s moral corruption
and imprisonment was largely congruent with Augustine.
Augustine’s view on human nature was influenced by his evaluation
of secular history. He saw little possibility for any genuine historical
progress in this world because of the seeming prevalence of evil and
sin and taught that: all true progress was necessarily spiritual and
transcended this world and its negative fate. In other words, divine
providence and spiritual salvation were the ultimate factors in human
existence and that secular history with its passing values and general
negative progress had no significance.
The penetration of Christianity by Neoplatonism both augmented and
explained the mystical and interior element of the Christian
revelation. Augustine’s scenario of two cities battling till the last
judgment throughout creation’s history reflected the Judaic ethical
vision of God’s purposefulness in history. This doctrine did influence
subsequent Western history affirming the autonomy of the church vis-
à-vis the secular state. In other essential aspect of Augustine’s thought
and evolving Christian world view, it was the Judaic sensibility that
dominated.
Law and Grace
The Mosaic Law was for the Jews, their pillar of existential solidity,
that which morally ordered their lives and retained them in good
relation to God. Early Christians believed that there is a contrasting
view about the law; the law was made for man and was fulfilled in the
love of God. By contrast, Paul declared, man could be genuinely
justified only by faith in Christ, through whose saving act all believers
could know the freedom of God’s grace. The law leaves man divided
against himself and instead of being in “slavery” under the law, the
Christian believer was free, because by Christ’s grace he participated
in Christ’s freedom.
Paul before his conversion was a fervent defender of the law been a
Pharisee but after his conversion, he taught that the law impotent
compared with the power of Christ’s love and the presence of the
spirit working within the human person. Faith in Christ’s grace rather
than scrupulous conformity to ethical precepts was man’s surest path
to salvation. For Paul, the law was no longer the binding authority,
because the true end of the law and Christ.
The Gospels concern with interpersonal ethics was a dominant
element in the Christian outlook, but its character seemed open to
both interpretations (moral restriction and divinely graced freedom).
On one hand, Jesus’ teaching was often extremely uncompromising
and judgmental while on the other hand, Jesus’ emphasis was
repeatedly on compassion over self-righteousness and on the inner
spirit over the external letter of the law. Here there was more
emphasis on the commandment of love over law. This new Christian
revelation of God’s graciousness was also open to antithetical
interpretations. The Pauline and Augustinian emphasis on divine
grace kind of denied man’s role in his salvation that it was only God’s
saving power that could be effective.
Since the church and its sacred institutes were the divinely established
vehicle of God’s grace, the church became the custodian of man’s
salvation and man was required to live according to its sanctions lest
he be damned. Thus the characteristic tone of the medieval church
often seemed more reminiscent of the older Judaic concept of God’s
law, than of the new unitary image of God’s grace. But yet the church
placed – the threat of excommunication, its meticulous distinctions
between different categories of sin, its mandatory beliefs and
sacraments – such elaborate safe guards to preserve a genuine
Christian morality and to guide the church’s charges into eternal life.
Athens and Jerusalem
The question of purity and integrity of the Christian belief and how
these should be preserved was another source of concern for the
church. Christianity took from Judaism and Hellenism the inclination
towards exclusive and doctrinal purity, and also sought and found a
divine philosophy in the works of diverse pagan thinkers especially
Plato. Paul taught that Christianity should be careful about pagan
ideas, should be avoided and at other times suggested a liberal
approach and tacit infusion of such thought.
Later Christian theologians in the classical era were often imbued
with Greek philosophy before converting to Christianity and thus their
learning influenced their new found faith. But even at that, some still
thought that Christianity shouldn’t have anything to do with what it
classified as pagan culture and thought system. So we have the
famous dictum of Tertula “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem.”
The variant theological and religious innovations – Gnostics,
Montanism, Donatism, Pelagianism, Arianism – were especially
abhorrent to church authority because they controverted matters close
to the heart of Christianity, and were therefore viewed as heretical,
perilous and requiring effective condemnation. Augustine thus
stressed the need for restraining or negating other thought patterns and
his enduring influence on major church figures like Pope Gregory the
Great allowed for other systems to be tolerated, encouraged and or out
rightly rejected.
The Holy Spirit and its Vicissitude
The extraordinary doctrine of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the
Christian Trinity with God the Father and Christ the Son was another
source of tension. Jesus stated in the New Testament before He died
that God would send the Holy Spirit to remain with them to continue
and complete his redemptive task. This promise comes to be fulfilled
with the ‘descent of the Holy Spirit’ on the apostles at Pentecost who
were gathered in an upper room in Jerusalem. It was reported that a
numinous visitation of great intensity accompanied by a sound “like
the rush of a mighty wind filling the house” with “tongues of fire”
appearing above each disciples. Immediately afterwards, the Apostles
were inspired and began preaching ecstatically to the multitudes. The
Pentecost experience later served as the basis for the church’s doctrine
of the Holy Spirit.
This doctrine conceived of the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of truth and
wisdom as well as the divine principle of life manifest in both
material creation and spiritual rebirth. The Holy Spirit can be
recognized from two aspects; the first, the Holy spirit as the divine
source of inspiration that had spoken through the Hebrew prophets.
The second, the Holy Spirit as the progenitor of Christ within Mary
his mother, and as being present at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry
when he was baptized by John the Baptist. Through the continuing
influx of the Holy Spirit, a progressive incarnation of God into
humanity was being affected, renewing and propelling the divine birth
of Christ into the continuing Christian community.
The Holy Spirit was seen as the basis for the church itself, expressing
itself in all aspect of the life of the church because its presence
brought with it divine authority and numinosity to the churches’
believing community. The understanding of the Holy Spirit soon
brought about conflict in the church as it was described as like a wind
that blows “where it wills” thereby showing that it cannot be tamed or
controlled. The fall out of this was that there were varying phenomena
that were attributed to the Holy Spirit which in turn lend itself to a
blasphemous manifestation and would contravene the supreme
uniqueness of Christ’s redemptive act.
In view of these tendencies towards the disruptive and heretical, and
mindful of the need to preserve an orderly structure of belief and
ritual, the church came to adopt a generally negative response to self
proclaimed outburst of the Holy Spirit. The charismatic and irrational
expressions of the Holy Spirit were increasingly discouraged in favor
of more ordered rational manifestations, institutional authority and
doctrinal orthodoxy. The relation of the Holy Spirit to the Father and
Son was not precisely defined in the New Testament. In the long run,
the Holy Spirit was conceived rather in more general impersonal
terms as a mysterious and numinous power, whose intensity seemed
to have radically diminished as time grew more distant from the
generation of the first Apostles, and whose continuing presence,
activity, and authority were lodged chiefly in the institutional church.
Rome and Catholicism
The Judaic influence on Christianity in the West was further amplified
and medicated by the influence of Rome. The church’s own
understanding of humanity’s relationship to God was that of a judicial
one strictly defined by moral law that was partly derived from Roman
law, which the Catholic Church based in Rome inherited and
integrated. Sin was a criminal violation of a legal relationship
established by God between himself and man and this idea was
derived from the Roman legal theory and practice founded in
justification.
The Christian church realizing its mission as spiritual guide and
understanding this responsibility required an unusually durable form
to ensure its survival and influence in the late classical world. As the
Christian religion evolved in the West, its Judaic foundation
assimilated the Roman juridical and authoritarian qualities of the
Roman imperial culture, and much of the Roman church’s distinctive
character was molded in those terms: a powerful hierarchy, a complex
juridical structure governing ethics and spirituality, the binding
spiritual authority of the priest and bishops, the demand of obedience
from church members and its effective enforcement, formalized
rituals and many other things. Yet within such a firm comprehensive
structure, Christian doctrine was preserved, the Christian faith
disseminated, and a Christian society maintained throughout medieval
Europe. As the Roman Empire became Christian, Christianity became
Roman.
Constantine’s decision to move the capital of the Roman Empire to
the East (Byzantine renamed Constantinople) also had immense
consequences for the West as the West collapsed due to barbarian
migrations, political and cultural vacuum occurred in much of Europe.
The church became the only institution capable of sustaining some
semblance of social order and civilized culture in the West, and the
Bishop of Rome who was the spiritual head of the imperial
metropolis, gradually absorbed many of the distinctions and roles
played previously by the Roman Emperor. In the course of the first
millennium, the Western church not only concentrated its powers in
the Roman Bishop but also gradually asserted it independence from
the Eastern churches in the Byzantium and allied there with the still-
reigning Eastern Emperor.
In these circumstances, Christianity in the West experienced a unique
historical opportunity. The Roman Church became not just the
Empire’s religious counterpart, but its historical successor. As the
middle ages progressed and the church gradually consolidated its
authority in Rome, the Roman Catholic Church definitively emerged
as the one, true, universally authoritative institution ordained by God
to bring salvation to mankind.
The Virgin Mary and the Mother Church
The New Testament gave relatively little information about Mary, the
Mother of Jesus and little explicit support for any substantial role she
might have in the church’s future. In the later classical period and the
Middle Ages the cult of Mary as the numinous Mother of God
spontaneously arose and asserted itself a dominant element in the
popular Christian vision. The Old and New Testament were almost
patriarchal in their monotheism, but those pagans who were converted
to Christianity in the post-Constantinian empire brought with them a
deeply ingrained tradition of the Great Mother Goddess was infused
into Christian piety which significantly expanded the church’s
veneration of Mary. So from the pagan mythological ground sprung
an intensified devotion to Mary, whose role and character, however
were developed within a specifically Christian understanding.
Given the scriptural background alone, the elevation of Mary to such
an elevated role in Christianity was an unexpected development. But
with her recognition by the faithful as virginal Mother of God, and
with theologians portrayal of her as vessel for the incarnation of the
divine Logos, Mary was soon venerated in the early church as the
mediator between humanity and Christ and even as “coredemptrix”
with Christ. Mary stood as supreme exemplar for all those virtues so
characteristic of the Christian ethos – purity, chasteness, tenderness an
modesty, simplicity, meekness, immaculate blessedness, inner beauty,
moral innocence, unselfish devotion, surrender to divine will.
The recognition of the virgin Mother made Christian pantheon more
congenial to the classical world’s sensibility and served as an
effective link between Christianity and the pagan nature religions of
rebirth. But where earlier matriarchal goddesses presided over nature,
the Virgin Mary’s role was in the context of human history. It was of
the greatest importance to early theologians that the human Mary’s
maternal relation to Christ guaranteed Christ’s authentic humanity
against some Gnostic claims that Christ was exclusively a
superhuman divine being.
At times the popular veneration of Mary seemed from the church’s
view point to exceed the bounds of theological justifiability. The
problem was resolved through the identification of the Virgin Mary
with the church. As Mary was the first believer in Christ upon her
acceptance the divine annunciation of his birth, and the first human to
receive Christ within her, she represented the prototype of the entire
church community. In relation to Mary’s virginity, the church was
viewed as the “bride of Christ,” to be united in sacred marriage with
Christ when humanity would receive the full divine influx at the end
of time. Mary’s maternal quality was identified with the church, so the
“Holy Mother Church” became not only the embodiment of Christian
humanity but also the nourishing matrix within which all Christians
could be encompassed, protected and guided. It could be said that the
unitive element of Christianity – the veneration of Mary and the
maternal numinosity onto the church – was most successfully
sustained in the collective Christian psyche.
A Summing Up
The primitive Christian revelation took on various cultural and
intellectual inflections which Christianity brought into an often
contradictory but singularly durable synthesis. A summary of the
character of the Christian vision in the West from the later classical
period through the early Middle Ages and the overall effect of
Christianity on the Greco-roman mind could be stated as follows;
• The establishment of monotheistic hierarchy in the
cosmos and the negation of polytheism in the pagan religion
though not eliminating the metaphysics of archetypal forms.
• The reinforcement of Platonism’s spirit-matter dualism
by infusing it with the doctrine of original sin, by largely
severing from nature any immanent divinity though leaving the
world an aura of supernatural significance; and by radically
polarizing good and evil.
• The introduction of a new sense of historical
dynamism, a divine redemptive logic in history that was linear
rather than cyclical; yet gradually relocating this redemptive
force in the ongoing institutional church, thereby implicitly
restoring a more static understanding of history.
• The absorption and transformation of the pagan mother
goddess mythology into a historicized Christian theology and
into a continuing historical and social reality in the form of the
Mother Church.
• The diminution of the value of observing, analyzing, or
understanding the natural world thus deemphasizes the rational
and empirical faculties in favor of all human faculties
 encompassed by the demand of Christian faith and subordinated
to the will of God.
• The renouncement of the human capacity for
independent or spiritual penetration of the world’s meaning in
deference to the absolute authority of the church and Holy
Scripture for the final definition of truth.

The medieval Christians of the West felt their religiosity was

threatened by the rising developments and sought to constrain such
group by appealing to the understanding of the people of their time
why they had to see the natural world and flesh as evil that had to be
subdued, so mortification of the flesh became a spiritual imperative.
The medieval Christians believed that human reason and
intellectuality could derail the human person from attaining eternity
and the church at that time decided to be the custodian of knowledge
and also control its development.
The Christian world view even in its medieval form was not as simple
or one-sided as one might think. There were tensions which allowed
for development and growth – a kind of duality of impulses; optimism
and pessimism – which also created an inextricable synthesis. The
church’s action was due to its perceived mission as guardian,
protector and spiritual director. So the faults of the mundane church
were merely an inevitable side effect of the imperfect human attempt
to carry out a divine plan, the scope of which was inconceivably great.
The medieval west (Greek) was not without its geniuses, even if in the
earlier centuries they were few and only occasionally influential. It
would be rash to say their dearth was due to Christianity forgetting the
fact of other historical factors of the time. Having a retrospective view
of the Roman Catholic Church at the height of its glory in the high
Middle Ages, its achievements can hardly fail to elicit a certain
admiration for the magnitude of the church’s success in establishing a
universal matrix and fulfilling its earthly mission.
Projecting a modern secular standard of judgment on the worldview
of an earlier era, we would say that the basic tenets of faith for the
medieval Christians were not mere abstract beliefs compelled by
ecclesiastical authority but rather the very substance of their
experience because the medieval experience of a specifically
Christian reality was tangible and self-evident as, the archaic Greek
experience of mythological reality or the modern experience of an
impersonal material objective reality fully distinct from a subjective
psyche. Indeed it was the profound contraries within the Christian
vision itself that would constantly subvert the Christian mind’s
tendency towards monolithic dogmatism, thereby ensuring not only its
great historical dynamism, but also eventually, its radical self
transformation.
IV. THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE MEDIEVAL ERA
The task in this chapter is to follow the complex evolution of the
Western mind from the medieval Christian world view to the modern
secular world view.
The achievements of classical civilization and the Roman Empire
were soon forgotten due to barbarian migrations which aided the
destruction of the West’s system of civil authority, eliminated any
higher cultural life, and the Islamic expansions. The intellectually
conscious Christians of the middle ages knew themselves to be living
in the dim after math of a golden age of culture and learning. But it is
the monasteries and Christian cloisters that provided a protected
enclosure within which higher pursuit was safely sustained and
protected.
The recovery of ancient text and their meaning became the task of
Christian’s fathers and scholars who tried to ensure that these texts
were not rejected in their entirety but could be reinterpreted and
comprehended within the framework of Christian truth, and it was on
this basis that the early medieval monks continued some semblance of
scholarship. Boethius, a Christian aristocratic statesman and
philosopher in the dying hours of ancient Rome, attempted to preserve
the classical intellectual heritage for posterity and partially succeeded,
and So did Charlemagne.
Throughout the first half of the Middle ages it was difficult
understanding and reinterpreting the already highly developed thought
of classical era and the monks were more taken up with their quest to
understand the holy scriptures and spirituality that much attention was
not given to other works as they believed that comprehending the
truth of the sacred scriptures alone was sufficient for human reason
was sanctioned. But at the midpoint of the medieval period, with
Europe finally attaining a measure of political security after centuries
of invasion and disorganization, cultural activity in the West began to
quicken on many fronts and a more profound sense of history and
historical dynamism was awakened, expressed not only in the new
Chroniclers’ accounts of contemporary political events, but also in the
theologians’ new awareness of Christianity’s evolutionary progress
overtime.
The Scholastic Awakening
The Catholic Church’s attitude towards secular learning and pagan
wisdom changed As Western culture underwent a transformation.
Characteristic of this change in intellectual climate was the
development of a school in early twelfth-century Paris at the
Augustinian abbey of Saint Victor. From this commitment to learning
arose the composition of the great medieval Summae, encyclopedic
treatises aimed at comprehending the whole of reality. This same
education conception became the basis for the development of
universities through Europe.
The west’s increasing interest in the natural world and in the human
mind’s capacity to understand that world, thus found congenial
institutional and cultural support for its new enterprise, the stage was
set for a radical shift in the philosophical underpinning of the
Christian outlook. That shift was sparked in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries with the West’s rediscovery of a large corpus of Aristotle’s
writings, preserved by the Moslems and Byzantines and now
translated into Latin. The arrival of the Aristotelian texts in Europe
thus found a distinctly receptive audience, and Aristotle was soon
referred to as “the Philosopher” which would later spell a serious
consequence.
Under auspices of the Church, the universities were evolving into a
remarkable centre for learning, as learning developed, the scholars’,
attitude toward Christian belief became less unthinking and more self-
reflective, and as Anselm stated: it seems to me a case of negligence
if, after becoming firm in our faith, we do not strive to understand
what we believe. The principal occupation of the medieval period has
been the merging of reason and faith, so as to enable Christian dogma
be explained and defended with the aid of rational analysis.
Philosophy then became the handmaid of theology, and reasons the
interpreter of faith. Then tension arose between Greek and Christian,
reason and faith, nature and spirit. And the scholastics who prepared
the way in the late medieval universities had no way of knowing that
there would be a convulsion that would bring about the scientific
Revolution that changed the Western world view.
The Quest of Thomas Aquinas
Aquinas spent his time trying to integrate the now conflicting views
about truth and knowledge – faith and reason – as exemplified in the
tensions that had arisen. Aquinas developed Christian theological
traditions that affirmed the Creator’s providential intelligence and the
resulting order and beauty within the created world. Aquinas went
further to assert that nature itself could provide a deeper appreciation
of divine wisdom, he held that the recognition of nature’s order
enhanced human understanding of God’s creativity and in no way
lessened divine omnipotence. He was also convinced that human
reason and freedom were valuable on their own account. Hence
human reason could function within faith and yet according to its own
principle. At the heart of his vision was the belief that to subtract
reason and faith from man’s capacities would be to presume to lessen
the infinite capacity of God himself and his creative omnipotence.

Aquinas’s appreciation of human nature extended to human body an

appreciation that affected his epistemological orientation. He believed
that in man, spirit and nature were distinguishable, but they were
aspect of a homogenous whole as different from traditional
Augustinian theology. So Aquinas’s epistemology stressed more
deeply the value and necessity of this-world experience for human
knowledge. For Aquinas, God was only the supreme form drawing
nature forth, but was also the very ground of nature’s existence.
Aquinas thus gave to God alone what Plato gave to ideas in general,
but by so doing gave increased reality to the empirical creation. For
Aquinas God created and give being to the world not by necessary
emanation but by free act of personal love. And the creature
participated not merely in the One as a distant semi-real emanation,
but in “be-ing” (esse) as a fully real individual entity created by God.
In Aquinas’s view, man could strive to know things as they are
because both things and man’s knowledge of them was determined by
and, like man himself, expressive of the same absolute being – God.
Thus for Aquinas, the human effort to know was endowed with
profound religious significance: the way of truth was the way of the
Holy Spirit.
Aquinas made an extra-ordinary impact on Western thought and it lay
in his conviction that the judicious exercise of man’s empirical and
rational intelligence, which has been developed and empowered by
the Greeks, could now marvelously serve the Christian cause. God
was the sustaining cause of all that exists, the ultimate unconditioned
condition for the being of all things. Thus Aquinas gave to
Aristotelian thought a new religious significance. Aquinas thus
embraced the new learning and committed himself to the herculean
task of comprehensively uniting the Greek and Christian world view
as if he had recognized an implicit unity in the two streams and then
set about drawing it out by sheer force of intellect.
Further Development in the High Middle-Ages
The Rising Tide of Secular Thought
Aquinas task of merging reason and faith was not shared by everyone.
Siger of Brabant and his colleagues asserted that if philosophical
reason and religious faith were in contradiction, then the realm of
reason and science must in some sense be outside the sphere of
theology. Faced with an outbreak of intellectual independence in the
universities, ecclesiastical authorities condemned new philosophical
thoughts. The truths of Christian faith were supernatural, and needed
to be safeguarded against the insinuations of a naturalistic rationalism.
The Church’s prohibition did not stop new philosophical thinking. But
the church’s acceptance of that work, the Aristotelian corpus was
elevated virtually to the status of Christian dogma.
Astrology and Dante
Ptolemy’s works on astronomy became the most sophisticated work
about the scientific account of the natural perception of the Earth as
fixed with the heaven moving round it. This gave astrology a pride of
place during the medieval era. Aquinas objection to astrology was
based on the negation of free-will that it taught but Aquinas did
maintain the belief in free-will and divine grace while acknowledging
the Greek conception on the celestial powers.
Astrology, conjoined with astronomy, rose again to high status as a
comprehensive science, capable of disclosing the universal laws of
nature. The planetary spheres formed successive heavens surrounding
the Earth and affecting human existence. Following Aquinas in spirit
and time and having been inspired by the scientific wisdom of
Aristotle, Dante realized in his epic poem La Divina Commedia what
was in effect the moral, religious and cosmologically paradigm of the
medieval era. In Dante’s vision, as in the medieval vision generally,
the heavens were both numinous and humanly meaningful. Dante
filled out this general conception by poetically uniting the specific
elements of Christian theology with the equally specific elements of
classical astronomy. In the mind of Dante and his contemporaries,
astronomy and theology were inextricably conjoined and the cultural
ramifications of this cosmological synthesis were profound.
The Secularization of the Church and the Rise of Lay Mysticism
The Church having consolidated its authority in Europe after the tenth
century and delving into matters of the state and now financially
buoyant in the high Middle Ages, its Christian world view was still
beyond question even though its status seemed controversial.
Christianity had become powerful but compromised. In the meantime,
the secular monarchies of the European nation-states had gradually
gained power and cohesion, creating a situation in which the papal
claim to universal authority was inevitably leading toward serious
conflict. The import of this was acceleration in lay mystical fervors
and intellectuality with emphasis on internal communion with God
than on the need for an institutionalized Church and sacraments.
Of greater immediate import was the growing divergence between the
ideal of Christian spirituality and the reality of the institutional
church. All of these widely experienced dichotomies suggested a
potential break from the traditional structure of the medieval church
and with the emphasis on about a personal relationship with God, the
Church’s forms and regulations became devalued which made the
Church’s spiritual mission open to question.
Critical Scholasticism and Ockham’s Razor
Two cultural streams now existed namely; the new lay mysticism,
which moved toward religious autonomy, and the scholastic stream
that continued its remarkable development of the western intellect
under Aristotle’s tutelage Even though the Church had accepted
Aristotle’s work new scientific thinkers divested it of the church’s
garment and studied it on its own terms. In particular, their probing
were creating an intellectual climate that not only encouraged a more
empirical, mechanistic and quantitative view of nature but would in
time affect the conception of the nature of the cosmos and lead to a
new shift in this regard. Aristotle’s methodology which was applied
brought about the overthrow of the synthesis that the scholastics had
worked so hard to develop. In retrospect, Aquinas’s summa had been
one of the final steps of the medieval mind towards full intellectuality.

This new autonomy was portentously asserted in the fourteenth

century in the paradoxical figure of William of Ockham, a man at
once strangely modern and yet altogether medieval. The central
principle of Ockham’s thought, and the most consequential, was his
denial of the reality of universals outside of the human mind and
human language. Human concepts possessed no metaphysical
foundation beyond concrete particulars, and there existed no
necessary correspondence between words and things thereby, giving a
new force and vitality to the philosophical position of nominalism.
Hence, according to Ockham, universals exist only in the human mind
not in reality they are concepts abstracted by the mind on the basis of
its empirical observations of more or less similar individuals.
For Ockham, the determinism and necessary causes of Greek
philosophy and science, which Aquinas sought to integrate with
Christian faith, placed arbitrary limited on God’s infinitely free
creation, and this Ockham vigorously opposed. Ockham therefore
attacked the earlier scholastics’ speculative theological rationalism as
inappropriate to logic and science and dangerous to religion. In a
sense, Ockham both opposed and fulfilled the secularistic movement
of the previous century. Ockham’s way of philosophy was known as
the via moderna, in contrast to Aquinas and Scotus’s via antiqua. The
traditional scholastic enterprise, committed to merging faith and
reason, was coming to an end. Ockham’s vision prefigured the path
subsequently taken by the Western mind and here in lay the
embryonic foundations for coming changes in the western world view
to be wrought by the Reformation, Scientific Revolution and the
Enlightenment.

The medieval vision that had been attained through the altogether
different spirit of Aquinas and Dante were the force that propelled
new intellectual developments. Paradoxically, the culture of this new
era would receive its major impulse from classical humanism, belles
lettres and a revived Plato.
The Rebirth of Classical Humanism
Petrarch
For centuries, medieval schoolmen had been gradually rediscovering
and integrating the ancient works, but now Petrarch radically shifted
the focus and tone of that integration. Petrarch set about the task of
finding and absorbing the great work of ancient culture. Thus Petrarch
began the reeducation of Europe. While Dante’s sensibility had in a
sense culminated and summed up the medieval era, Petrarch’s looked
forward to and impelled a future age bringing a rebirth of culture,
creativity, and human greatness. Not that Petrarch was unspiritual or
even unorthodox; in the end, his Christianity was as devout and firmly
rooted as his classicism. What was new in the late middle ages was
not of spirituality in Petrarch, but rather the overall character of his
approach to human life.
The Return of Plato
Inspired by Petrarch’s call, large numbers of scholars took up the
search for the lost manuscripts of antiquity. The West’s sudden access
to these writings precipitated a platonic revival not unlike the earlier
rediscovery of Aristotle. The platonic tradition provided the
Humanists with a philosophical basis highly compatible with their
own intellectual habits and aspirations. In Platonism and
Neoplatonism the Humanists discovered a non-Christian spiritual
tradition possessing a religious and ethical profundity seemingly
comparable to that of Christianity itself. With man now attaining, in
the light of the revivified classical past, a new consciousness of has
noble role in the universe, a new sense of history arose as well. Man
had freedom, mutability and the power of self-transformation.
Humanism now evoked the imaginative intelligence of the platonic
tradition, all of these developments directed in their different ways
toward reestablishing man’s relation to the divine. For with the
rediscovery of such a sophisticated and viable yet non-Christian
spiritual tradition, the absolute uniqueness of the Christian revelation
was relativized and the Church’s spiritual authority implicitly
undermined. It is no surprise, then, that the Papal commission
condemned several of Pico’s propositions, or that the Pope for bade
the international public assembly Pico had planned. Yet the
Protestants would simultaneously build on those same Humanists’
criticisms of the church and demands for spiritual and institutional
reform.
At the Threshold
In the course of the long medieval era, a potent maturation had
occurred within the Christian matrix on every front – philosophical,
psychological, religious, scientific, political, and artistic. Scholarship
and learning progressed, both in and out of the universities. Human
experience in the West was reaching new levels of sophistication,
complexity, and expansiveness. A new and growing independence of
spirit was everywhere apparent, expressed in often divergent but
always expanding directions. Slowly, painfully, but wondrously and
with ineluctable force, the Western mind was opening to a new
universe.
V. THE MODERN WORLD VIEW
The modern world view is made up of a complex and intermingled
cultural interpretation namely; the Renaissance, the Reformation and
the Scientific Revolution.
The Renaissance
This period heralded a drastic change in the way the human person
viewed the world and nature’s secret could now be penetrated and
reflected upon. The human life and endeavors achieved a more
complex form during this period and the development of human
consciousness and culture had now been reborn. The renaissance
period emerged against the backdrop of a series of crises and conflict
that was besieging Europe and the world, so it would be a mistaken
judgment to think that the renaissance was all light and splendor
though it was amidst crises that “rebirth” took place.
Four major inventions played a pivotal role in the making of the new
era they are: the magnetic compass, which permitted the navigational
feats that opened the globe to European exploration; the gun powder,
which contributed to the end of the feudal order and the ascent of
nationalism; the mechanical clock, which helped in the regulation of
how the human person related to time, nature and work, and also
separating and freeing the human structure of activities from the
dominance of natures rhythm; and the printing press, which
produced a tremendous increase in learning and eroded the monopoly
on learning long held by the clergy. All these and many more shaped
the West’s horizon and brought about changes and expansion in
unprecedented ways.
Italian states began to evolve as the papacy began to weaken making
the Italian-city states the forerunners of modern states. Secularism
became the order of the day and the Catholic Church still became a
force to be reckoned with during this time. Renaissance era was a
synthesis of religiosity and secularism which flourished inextricably
of each other. It was its arts that best expressed these eras’ contraries
and later propelled scientific advancement which foreshadowed the
scientific revolution.
There was a quantum leap in the cultural evolution of the West as the
Renaissance was a direct outgrowth of the rich culture of the high
middle ages and historians of the Renaissance has define the past in a
tripartite structure – ancient, medieval, modern – thus making a sharp
distinction these eras with the renaissance acting as the vanguard for
the new age.
The renaissance period had some of the following personalities on its
stage; Columbus, Copernicus, Luther, Castiglione, Raphael, Durer,
Michelangelo, Giorgione, Machiavelli, Cesare Borgia, Zwingli,
Pizarro, Magellan and others. During this period, the nation of Spain
was formed via a marriage between Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabelle
of castile, the Tudors succeeded to the throne of England, Leonardo
and Verrocchio began their artist career, Ficino wrote Theological
Platonica and published his first complete work of Plato in the west,
Erasmus received his early humanist education in Holland and Pico
della Mirandolla composed the manifesto of renaissance humanism,
the oration of the dignity of man. Amidst the high drama and painful
convulsions, modern man was born in the renaissance “trailing cloud
of glory.’
The Reformation
The unity of Western Christendom was shattered after a rebellion that
was sparked by the Augustinian monk Martin Luther, which heralded
the protestant reformation. The proximate cause was the papacy’s
attempt to raise money for some of its project through the sales of
indulgences which in turn compromised the sacrament of penance and
other socio-politico-cultural problem. The fundamental cause also was
the spirit of rebellion, self-determining individualism which had
developed to a critical point where a potently critical stand could be
sustained against the Roman Catholic Church.
Luther got disillusioned with the church and his new found faith in the
redeeming power of God as revealed in the bible was enough and so
began the process of reformation. Erasmus tried to reform the church
from within but the church’s hierarchy was absorbed in other matters
to be sensitive and respond to the ensuing problem. He was named a
heretic for refusing to recant and been backed by rebellious German
princes and knights, his case attained an international dimension. On
the long run, the Roman Catholic Church was undermined by this and
the protestant spirit prevailed in half of Europe thereby breaking the
old order.

Luther and Calvin ended up reinstating the more strictly defined,

morally rigorous and ontological dualistic Augustinian. The Catholic
Church finally awakened with the council of Trent in the mid-sixth
century to reform itself from within and still restated the basics of
Christian beliefs. Europe was thus divided having Catholics in the
south and Protestants in the north. All the reformers wanted were an
individual autonomy for Christians to relate to God directly and not
through the mediation of an institutionalized church. Luther’s reforms
went beyond his expectation and desire but in the end, it was more of
a larger cultural transformation that took place in the Western mind
and spirit.

Another paradox of the reformation was that it opened the Western

culture to religious skepticism as Luther’s reform gave room for the
formulation and relativity of individual religious truth. Since the bond
between faith and reason no longer existed, the consequence of this
for Luther was that the Western mind became apprehensive of the
natural world. The biblical injunction that man should subdue the
earth was not seen only as a religious duty but also took on a secular
momentum which aided science as the worth of the human self and
autonomy increased in the modern era. Secularism also triumphed
because the notion of truth by the Catholic and Protestant differs; for
the former, it was tradition and sacred scripture while for the latter, it
was the sacred scripture alone.
The practicality of science brought about tension between religious
truth and scientific truth which allowed the modern mind of the west
to shift its “faith to science.” The subjectivity of truth once again
made man the measure of all things thereby paving the way from
pietism to Kantian critical philosophy and romantic philosophical
idealism to finally philosophical pragmatism and existentialism of the
late modern era.

The reformation brought about the disintegration of Europe as

loyalties shifted and the effect of which political power moved away
from the church as every leader decided what religion their territories
would embrace. Protestantism thus became associated with the cause
for political freedom. Holy matrimony became an ideal form of
vocation as against solely religious life and its control was taken away
from the Catholic Church thereby becoming secular and something
that could be easily entered and more easily dissolved. Since work
was considered as holy, it kind of led to an accumulation of wealth
since puritans demanded renunciation of self and frivolous spending.
This in turn paved the way for capitalism; thus the religious zeal
yielded to economic vigor, which pressed forward on its own.

A counter-reformation was launched by the Catholic Church to check

the ever rising spread of Protestantism and this was spearheaded by
the Jesuit (a Roman Catholic Religious Order) and their strategy was
the education of not only Catholics but all persons and the teaching of
all humanistic programs thereby developing a scholarly “soldier of
Christ.” This was replicated by Protestant leaders also. Education thus
became source of cultural unity which Christianity once was.
Scientific Revolution which triumphed in the Western mind was born
out of the chaos that arose from the seemingly self-destruction that
split Christianity as new divisions emerged and battled each other
throughout Europe with unbridled fury.
The Scientific Revolution
Copernicus
The scientific Revolution was both the final expression of the
Renaissance and its definitive contribution to the modern world view.
Copernicus was born in Poland and educated in Italy; thus lived
during the height of the renaissance. Being an astronomer and a
mathematician, Copernicus sought a new solution to the age-old
problem of the movement of the planet. Copernicus came up with his
own thesis after study and reflecting on the works of his predecessors
in this regard. He posited a heliocentric system as opposed to the
geocentric system already in place. He did set down the first version
of his work in a short manuscript the ‘commentariolus’ in 1514. Two
decades after his new system was approved by the Pope and a formal
request to publish the work was made. In 1543 on the last day of his
life, a copy of the published work was brought to him. Little was it
known that during the several decades, an unprecedented revolution in
the Western world view had been initiated. It was actually the
religious implication of this new cosmology that quickly provoked the
most intense attack.
The Religious Reaction
Opposition to Copernicus did not start from the Catholic Church
because Copernicus was a canon and in good standing with the
church. It was the reformers who started the attack blaming the
Catholic Church for tolerating and even encouraging secular thinking
thereby allowing Christianity and the literal truth of the bible to be
contaminated. The literary interpretation of a passage from the
Psalms, “the world is established, that it cannot be moved” by Calvin
stoked the antagonism against the Copernican hypothesis. The
Catholic Church at first hand had no problem with Galileo’ s work but
during the reformation while the Church was struggling to survive,
decided to clamp down on all persons teaching and holding the
Copernican view because they felt it had a dire consequence on the
Christian mind even more than Luther and Calvin put together. So
with the Copernican theory, Catholicism’s long held tension between
reason and faith had finally snapped.
Kepler
Kepler tried to solve the problem also posed by the Copernican
heliocentric theory. He believed in the power of numbers and
geometrical forms and so tried to better understand the Copernican
theory. Kepler views Copernicus as having initiated something greater
than the heliocentric theory was presently capable of expressing. He
also inherited a vast body of unprecedently accurate astronomical
observations calculated by Tycho de Bruhe (the imperial
mathematician and astrologer to the Holy Roman Emperor) and spent
a decade to fit them to actually explain the movement of the planetary
body. Kepler at last discovered that the observations and works of
Euclid and Apollonius matched orbit shaped as ellipse and he
however in the end arrived at a better understanding and explanation
for the movement of the planetary body.
Kepler’s work finally did help make mathematics now an established
instrument not just astronomical predictions but as an intrinsic
element of astronomical reality as he agrees with the Pythagoreans
claim for mathematics as the key to cosmic understanding has now
been validated thereby revealing the previously hidden grandeur of
God’s creation.
Galileo
Kepler’s breakthrough would have brought the Copernican revolution
in the scientific world to have certainly succeeded through sheer
mathematical and predictive superiority but coincidentally, in 1906
Galileo turned his recently constructed telescope to the heavens and
saw empirically for the first time the phenomenon of the Copernican
theory. This led many to believe this theory and gave room to a fresh
examination of empirical phenomenon with a critical eye thereby
opening Western mind to the new celestial world just as new
terrestrial world was been opened by the global explorers.
The Catholic Church might not have reacted the way she did but her
situation at that time forced her to wanting to clamp down on all new
theories that seemed contradictory to the scriptures and the reformers
also aided in this clamp down. This move did not augur well for the
Catholic Church as her influence among the European intelligentsia
was drastically cut. Galileo’s findings coupled with the Copernican
revolution created a schism between science and religion which took a
step further to the actualization of intellectual independence outside
religion thereby establishing a new principle and opening new
territory.
The Forging of Newtonian Cosmology
Although Kepler and Galileo had succeeded in explaining the
heliocentric theory, they were yet to give an all encompassing
conceptual scheme to their theory for the old cosmology was
shattered; a new one was yet to be forged. Kepler taking a cue from
William Gilbert suggested that the sun had a magnetic nature of its
own (anima motrix) which attracts other planetary body and helps
keep them in orbit and motion as well. Kepler inadvertently laid the
foundation for an emerging cosmology.
Galileo in his own case still pursued the mechanical-mathematical
mode of analysis which led him to develop a new method for science
where in observation alone was not to be the key but a development of
a host of technical instrument to achieve the desired goal-bringing in
practicality and not just mere verbal argument and discourse. His
methodology and new categories ended up demolishing the spurious
dogma of academic physics. The first to be debunked was the notion
of motion. Contrary to earlier held belief that two objects of different
sizes can never fall at the same time and speed was refuted by Galileo
stating that motion was independent of weight or compositions of
bodies. This further led to his explanation of why the Earth though in
orbit is stationary. For its movement is based on collective inertia
thereby making its motions imperceptible.
Question concerning the celestial movement was now brought to the
fore. Galileo had missed the significance of Kepler’s planetary laws
but still used his notion of inertia to explain the movement of the
celestial body but could not explain Kepler’s ellipses. This still made
the Copernican universe to be plagued by a fundamental enigma.
The influx of ancient Greek philosophy of the atomist was now used
and applied to explain the notion of motion. The implication arising
from this was that the atomist notion of the universe replaced the
Aristotelian cosmology and this was championed by Bruno and
enunciated by Nicholas of Cusa. Atomism contributed in no fewer
quotas to the development of cosmology as it was its principles that
influenced Galileo and later adopted by Descartes to provide a
systematic physical explanation for the Copernican universe.
Descartes succeeded in stating that the random movement of atoms
was still subject to a law that they did not just move out of purpose
but to achieve a purpose. He then sets out to establish this through
inductive deduction. Descartes applied the theories of inertia and
corpuscular collision to explain motion thereby clearing away the
residue of Aristotelian physics from the heavens but still could not
explain why the planetary bodies still moved in a continuous closed
curve around the sun which inadvertently became the dilemma of the
new cosmology. Thus two new questions emerged: why did the Earth
and other planets continually fall towards the sun? And given a
moving non-centralist Earth, why did terrestrial objects fall to the
earth at all? Robert Hooke answered by saying that a single attractive
force governed both planetary motions and falling bodies but it was to
Isaac Newton the final stage of the Copernican revolution would be
complete.
Newton synthesized Descartes’ mechanistic philosophy, Kepler’s law
of planetary motion and Galileo’s laws of terrestrial motion into one
comprehensive theory. Newton’s theories were the laws of motion
and the universal theory of gravity. His work and method now became
the paradigm of scientific practice. The Newtonian-Cartesian
cosmology was now established as the foundation for a new world
view and it also seemed reasonable to assume that after God created
this intricate and orderly universe, He further removed Himself and
allowed it to run on its own according these perfect and immutable
laws. Thus the Scientific Revolution – and, the birth of modern era –
was now complete.
The philosophical Revolution
Philosophy acquired a new identity and structure as it entered into its
third great epoch in the history of western mind. It finally transferred
its allegiance from religion to science.
Bacon
Francis Bacon saw in the natural sciences that it could bring the
human person a material redemption to accompany his spiritual
progress towards the Christian millennium. For Bacon, since there
was a new world discovered by global explorers, there also has to be a
new way and pattern of thinking i.e. a new way of acquiring
knowledge. He suggested that the acquisition of knowledge had to be
devoid of prejudices and that empirical methods be used. Bacon was
neither a systematic philosopher nor a rigorous practicing scientist. He
was rather, a potent intermediary whose rhetorical power and
visionary ideal persuaded future generations to fulfill his
revolutionary program: the scientific conquest of nature for man’s
welfare and God’s glory.
Descartes
Descartes it was who established a philosophical foundation for the
new science. There was also a growing skepticism as there was a
collapse of fundamental institutions and cultural traditions which
made the possibility of certain knowledge to gain a relative status
among European intelligentsia and the French essayist Montaigne
added his voice to the ongoing discourse. If knowledge becomes
relative then nothing can be known for certain. Descartes task
therefore was a search for an irrefutable knowledge and to do this, he
sought to begin by doubting previously held beliefs and then began a
painstaking task of sorting them. Descartes by using this method
ushered person into a new era of practical knowledge, wisdom and
well-being.
Skepticism and mathematics thus combined to produce the Cartesian
revolution in philosophy. The realization that the “I” is conscious of
doubt shows the thinking subject exist leading to his famous aphorism
“cogito, ergo sum” – “I think, therefore I am.” The implication of this
is that there is the self and there is the object – res cogitan and res
extensa. This then leads us to Descartes dualism, soul is understood as
the mind and the human awareness that of the thinker. All this in a
way shows the existence of a perfect being that causes all things
which he considers as God.
For Descartes, mathematics was the most powerful tool for
understanding the universe as it was also available to the natural light
of human reason. Here then, reason coupled with the methods of
science became the practical tool for philosophy, for man can now
have a direct understanding of the forces of nature so they could be
turned to the human persons purpose. Human reason establishes its
own existence out of experiential necessity then God’s existence out
of logical necessity and thence the God – guaranteed reality of the
objective world and its rational order. Thus Descartes enthroned
human reason as the supreme authority in the matters of knowledge.
Descartes succeeded therefore in emancipating the material world
from its long association with religious belief freeing science to
develop its analysis of that world in terms uncontaminated by spiritual
and human qualities and unconstrained by theological dogma. It was
therefore upon Descartes synthesis that paradigmatic character of the
modern mind was founded.

Thus Bacon and Descartes proclaimed the twin epistemological basis

of the modern mind which is empiricism and rationalism. After
Newton, science reigned as the authoritative definer of the universe
and philosophy defined itself in relation to science – predominantly
supportive, occasionally critical and provocative, sometimes.
Foundations of the Modern World View
The modern world had it bases in the three distinct and dialectically
related forms of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Scientific
Revolution which also ended the hegemony of the Catholic Church in
Europe and established a more secular world where science became
the West’s new faith.
When the battle for supremacy amongst the religions failed to resolve
itself, science suddenly became the human person’s liberator. At this
point, there was a shift from religion and myth to the empirically
verifiable facts of science which now happened to be the new world
outlook as human reason gained the day. The human person now
perceived the cosmos of entirely new proportion, structure and
existential meaning.
The triumph of science was not only relevant to its realm but also had
an influence on the society as a new form based on self-evident
principles of liberty and rationality came into play. The method of
science became applicable to society and there arose the need for a
reform. This in turn led to a political revolution; John Locke and the
French philosophes of the Enlightenment after took the lesson of
Newton and extended them to human realm.
The following are the major tenets of the modern world view;
• The notion of a God who created and governed the
universe the universe shifted to one that was governed and
regulated by physical and mathematical terms. Religion in a
sense was replaced by science.
• The tension between subjective and personal human
consciousness versus an objective and impersonal world.
• Human reason and empirical observation replaced
theological doctrine and scriptural revelation as the principal
means for comprehending the universe.
• The modern outlook of the universe was one in which
the human mind could participate in and also possessed intrinsic
order as against the Greek outlook.
• The modern cosmos was comprehensible through the
use of human rational and empirical faculties alone. Knowledge
the universe was now primarily a matter of scientific method
whose result is not for spiritual liberation but in intellectual
mastery and material improvement.
• The classical era had a geocentric, finite and
hierarchical understanding of cosmology which was
Christianized in the medieval era but in the modern era there was
a shift to the heliocentric understanding which in essence severed
astronomy from astrology. All divine attributes were similarly
recognized as the primitive superstition and wishful thinking
were removed from scientific discourse.
• The scientific methodology permeated all sphere of
human endeavor and somewhat became the standard for
measurement.
 • Human reason and intellectual ability became the order
of the day while the purpose of knowledge for the medieval
Christian was to better obey God’s will, its purpose for the
modern man was to better align nature to man’s will. Religion
was shelved and the human person explored without the
censorship of any institutionally hierarchical power.

It would be necessary to examine more precisely the extra-ordinary

dialectic that took place as the dominant modern world view just
described formed itself out of its major predecessor.

Ancients and Moderns

Classical Greek thought had provided Renaissance Europe with most
of the theoretical equipment it required to produce the Scientific
Revolution. Yet the character and direction of the modern mind were
such that the modern mind increasingly disavowed the ancient as
scientific or philosophical authorities and depreciated their world
view as primitive and unworthy of serious consideration. The
intellectual dynamics provoking this discontinuity were complex and
often contradictory.
The heated debate between the orthodox scholastic Aristotelian
physics and the heterodox revival of Pythagorean – platonic
mathematical mysticism was the impelling motive for the sixteenth
and seventeenth century European scientist to engage in detailed
observation and measurement of natural phenomenon. Even though at
a point in time, Aristotle’s works were disposed in effigy but
maintained in spirit, Plato was vindicated but negated in spirit; his
works and those of others ancients were the foundation on which the
new era was built.
The power of mathematics was vindicated by the natural science but
created some puzzlement amongst thoughtful philosophers of science
as to why it always worked. It was noticed that mathematical pattern
was simply “in the nature of things.” The laws of nature, although
perhaps timeless, now stood on their own material foundation,
dissociated from any divine cause. Thus “the irony of fate built the
mechanical philosophy of the eighteenth century and the materialistic
philosophy of the nineteenth out of the mystical mathematical theory
of the seventeenth.”
A further irony lay in the modern defeat of classical giants – Aristotle
and Plato – at the hands of the ancient minority traditions – from
Leucippus to Sextus Empiricus – that were almost trampled,
overshadowed and extinguished by the philosophical triumvirate of
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and by the dominant Aristotelian
Ptolemaic cosmology. The modern mind after extracting what it
considered to be valuable from the ancient classical era still felt it was
intellectually superior to it, still saw their woks as naïve and
scientifically erroneous.
Astrology was instrumental to the scientific revolution even though it
was at this time that its ties with astronomy were severed. Astronomy
enjoyed its most rapid development precisely during that period when
astrology was most widely accepted and it therefore becomes difficult
for modern historians of science to look for a demarcation between
the scientific and esoteric as astrology inspired many Renaissance
thinkers.
Scientific Revolution was collaboration between science and esoteric
traditions which was the norm of the Renaissance and in turn gave
birth to the modern science. The modernity of the scientific
Revolution can then be considered ambiguous but the new universe
that emerged from this period was not so ambiguous though it left
room for the reality of other esoteric principles, it in turn created new
problems for astrology as it became apparent to others. Astrology
after been the classical “queen of the sciences” and the guide of
Emperors and kings for the better part of the millennia was no longer
credible.
Modern mind gradually out grew the Renaissance’s fascination with
ancient myth as an autonomous dimension of existence. For modern
science had cleansed the universe of all human and spiritual properties
previously projected upon it. Only the impersonal employment of
man’s critical and empirically based rational intellect could attain an
objective understanding of nature.
The modern mind would always be indebted to the classical culture as
it continues to draw inspiration from this period even when it seems to
have surpassed that era. Yet the ancient Greek mind still pervaded the
modern in his often unconscious assumption concerning the rational
intelligibility of the world and man’s capacity to reveal it. Greece
lived on.

The Triumph of Secularism

Science and Religion: The Early Concord
The Catholic Church did support the growth of intellectuality from the
beginning of the Middle Ages because it provided in its monasteries
the only refuge in the West within which the achievement of classical
culture could be preserved and their spirit continued. If the Church
had not been supportive in this regard probably modern intellectuality
might never have arisen.
Emerging there in was the increasing recognition of the physical
world in the high middle ages there arose a corresponding recognition
of the positive role a scientific understanding could play in the
appreciation of God’s wondrous creation. It was the contributions of
the scholastics in their exhaustive examination and criticism of Greek
ideas that allowed modern science from Copernicus and Galileo
onward to begin forging its new paradigm. Modern rationalism,
naturalism, and empiricism all had scholastic roots but the
scholasticism encountered by the sixteenth and seventeenth century
natural philosophers was a senescent structure of pedagogical
dogmatism that no longer appealed to the new spirit of the age and
had to be overthrown lest the brave infant science be fatally
smothered. From then on science and philosophy was rid of religion.
Despite the unambiguous secular character of the modern science that
crystallized out of the Scientific Revolution, the original scientific
revolutionaries themselves continued their work in relation to
religious illumination as they perceived their intellectual breakthrough
as foundational contributions to a sacred mission. As their scientific
discoveries were considered as triumphant spiritual awakening as we
find in their exclamations or works;
Newton: “O God, I think thy thought after thee”; Copernicus in the
“De Revolutionibus”: “science more divine than human”; Kepler
wrote: “priest of the Most High God with respect to the book of
nature” is what he called astronomers and saw his role as “the honor
of guarding, with my discovery, the door of God’s temple”; Galileo in
the “Siderus Nuncius” spoke of his telescopic discoveries as made
possible by God’s grace of enlightening his mind.
And with Newton’s achievements, the divine birth was considered
complete. The major pioneers of the Scientific Revolution – Newton,
Galileo, Descartes – still believed God was relevant as He was for
them a source of illumination no matter the direction their work took
them, they were a religious people.
Compromise and Conflict
Tensions were already beginning to be displayed between modern
science and Christianity because the creationist ontology that
underpinned the new paradigm was not totally congruent with
traditional Christian conceptions of the cosmos. Natural phenomenon,
miracles and arbitrary interventions into human affairs now lost
significance and import. Yet Christian belief and principles could
scarcely be negated altogether thus reason and faith came to be seen
as pertaining to different realms and was thus used by scientist and
philosophers either together or separately to suit their own purpose.
Science and religion were simultaneously vital yet discrepant as there
was now division in the cultural view at this time. The reason for this
was the subjection of sacred scriptures to an intense investigation and
academic scholarship, also the subjection of some phenomena that
were narrated in the sacred scripture had its similarities to some
archaic mythical legendary concoctions. So under the spotlight of the
modern demand for public, empirical scientific corroboration of all
stamen of belief, the essence of Christianity withered. What now
concerned the scientist was not the ‘why’ of any phenomena but the
‘how’ which could then be measured and tested.
Since teleological and spiritual causes could not be subjected to test,
the character and modus operandi of the Judeo-Christian deity ill
fitted the real world discovered by science as the process of salvation
was now seen as a matter of personal relationship between God and
man. The “leap of faith” not the self-evidence of the created world or
the objective authority of the scriptures, constituted the principal base
for religious belief.
Even though Christianity now assumed a new and far less
encompassing intellectual role, the Christian moral teaching and
ethical precepts was quite relevant and was closely been followed still
and upheld even by agnostics and atheist but the Christian revelation
as a whole could not be taken seriously as there was an increasing
doubt about her metaphysical and religious claims.
In the eyes of some scientist and philosophers, science contained
some religious meaning or was open to some religious interpretations
or could serve as an opening to a religious appreciation of the
universe while for some, the entire scenario of cosmic evolution
seemed explicable as a direct consequence of chance and necessity the
random interplay of natural laws. In the light of this, any apparent
religious implications had to be judged as poetic but scientifically
unjustifiable extrapolations from available evidence. God was an
“unnecessary hypothesis.”
Philosophy, Politics, Psychology
Philosophy underwent some development during these centuries and
gradually took on the cloak of secularization. Religion continued to
hold its own amongst philosophers but was already being transformed
by the character of the scientific mind. Voltaire argued in favor of
“rational religion” or a “natural religion” as against the traditional
biblical Christianity since what was been sought was the requirement
for a universal cause.
The need to affirm God’s existence now took a rational course as
most philosophers of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment
believed that the knowledge of God could be got through reason and
not faith as in the case of Descartes and Locke while Hume and Kant
said reason could not be definitely sustained. The inevitable and
proper outcome of both empiricism and critical philosophy was to
eliminate any theological substrate from modern philosophy since no
justifiable assertions about God, the soul’s immortality and freedom
could transcend concrete experience.
At the same time, the bolder thinkers of French Enlightenment
increasingly tended towards skepticism and atheistic materialism as
the most intellectually justifiable consequence of the scientific
discoveries. Such thinkers include Diderot, chief editor of the
encyclopedia; La Mattrie, the physician; Baron d’ Holbach, the
physicist. Atheism was necessary to destroy the chimeras of religious
fantasy that endangered the human race. Man needed to be brought
back to nature, experience and reason.
The secular progression of the Enlightenment reached its logical
conclusion in the nineteenth century as Comte, Mill, Feuerbach,
Marx, Haeckel, Spencer, Huxley, and in somewhat different spirit,
Nietzsche all sounded the death knell of traditional religion. For them,
God was man’s own creation which in turn necessarily dwindled with
man’s modern maturation. By the late nineteenth century, the
philosophical relationship between Christian belief and human
rationality had grown ever more attenuated with few exceptions, that
relation was effectively absent.
The following non-epistemological factors – political, social,
economic, psychological – were also pressing towards the
secularization of the modern mind and its disintegration from
religious belief. In the area of politics, power was centered on the
Feudal Lords and the Church’s hierarchical structure and by the
eighteenth century, that association had become mutually
disadvantageous. The French philosophes – Voltaire, Diderot
Condorcet – and their successor among the French revolutionaries
viewed the Church as an obstacle to the process of civilization
because of its vast wealth and allegiance to the regime.
Yet the Swiss born Jean-Jacque Rousseau saw things differently. For
him, the celebration of reason also negates the actual nature of the
human person because embodied in a person is the ability to feel,
intuition and spiritual hunger which transcends all abstract formulae.
Though he does not believe in the organized churches and clergy
because even Christianity notoriously disagrees on what was the
exclusively correct form of worship. He therefore advocates ‘theism’
of the heart – reverent awe before the cosmos, the joy of meditative
solitude, the direct intuition of the moral conscience, and the natural
spontaneity of human compassion. Rousseau used the combination of
the religiosity of the orthodox Christians and the rationality of the
reformist to arrive at his conclusion but he inadvertently gave a new
impulse and dimension to how religion came to be viewed in the
Enlightenment era which initiated a spiritual current in Western
culture that would first lead to Romanticism and eventually to the
existentialism of later age.
Karl Marx in the nineteenth century subjected organized religion and
religious impulse to a socio-political critique. He believes religion
serves only the needs of the ruling class and does not aid the poor in
its plight. He then advocates that for the society to develop, the human
person must rid itself of religious delusions. Liberalist advocated that
organized religion’s influence on political and intellectual life be
reduced and argued for a pluralism accommodating the broadest
freedom of belief consonant in with social order. Religion became
tolerated but metamorphosed into religious indifference as it was no
longer mandatory in Western society to be a Christian, and
coincidentally with this new freedom, few persons found Christian
belief system intrinsically compelling or satisfying and the
contemporary age seemed to be offered more cogent programs and
activity than the traditional religions.
The Christian churches also contributed to their own decline; for the
Roman Catholic Church, its counter-reformation response to
protestant heresy and its unresponsiveness to any changes necessitated
by the evolution of the modern era. The protestant churches sole
reliability on the literal interpretation of the scriptures also left its
members susceptible to the scientific discoveries that were antithetical
to the sacred scriptures and the influence of the modern age.
Christianity now experienced itself not only as a divided church but as
a shrinking one, dwindling away before the ever-widening and ever-
deepening onslaught of secularism. All religions seemed to have one
thing in common, a fading precious truth than dispute. Nevertheless,
the Judeo-Christian tradition sustained itself as many families still
continued to nurture their children in the tenets and images of their
inherited faith. The Catholic Church began to open itself to modernity
and churches in general moved to embrace wider congregations by
making their structures and doctrines more relevant to the challenges
of modern existence.
Friedrich Nietzsche pronounced “the death of God” because for him,
the death of God signified not just the recognition of a religious
illusion but that of an entire civilization’s world view that for too long
had held man back from daring, liberating embrace of life’s totality.
With Freud, religion became evaluated by the psychological
disposition of the human person. In the light of this, Judeo-Christian
God came to be seen as a psychological projection based on the
child’s naïve view of its libidinal restrictive and seemingly
omnipotent parents. But psychologically mature individual could
recognize the projection for what it was, and dispense with it. Sexual
experience played a role in the devaluation of traditional religion,
while some try to subdue or restrain their passions; some taught
abstinence which did not go down well with many and further
alienated them from the Church.
The unwholesome practices of the Church brought about its complete
demise in the Western mind as not even its long schooling of Western
mind in Christian values could save it.
The Modern Character
The movement from Christianity to the secular world view did not lie
solely on the combination of factors hitherto discussed for they could
have been negotiated as some still remained devout Christians.
Secularism rather reflected a more general shift of character in the
western psyche, a shift visible in the various specific factors but
transcending and subsuming them in its own global logic. By the
nineteenth century, this new impulse had achieved maturity. Thus
Christianity no longer suited the prevailing mood of the time. Science
gave man a new faith and it was this particularly psychological
climate that made progressive sequence of philosophical and scientific
advances undercut religion’s role in the modern world view.
The modern world view was one that looked into its present and
future while the ancient and medieval looked into its past. This was
what placed the modern culture in a class beyond its predecessors.
Where the past authority was typically associated with a transcendent
principle, the modern awareness was becoming that authority,
subsuming that power, making the transcendent manifest in itself.
Medieval theism and ancient cosmism had given way to modern
humanism.

Hidden Continuities
The West had “lost its faith” and found a new one in science and man,
there still exist the subtle traces and element of Christianity in the
modern world view even though it is less conscious of this – Christian
ethical values, scholastic – developed faith in human reason, the
command in Genesis that man exercise dominion over nature – and
other elements. The most pervasive and specifically Judeo-Christian
component tacitly returned in the modern world was the belief in
man’s linear historical progress towards fulfillment. That is the human
person had a teleological existence. The original Judeo-Christian
eschatological expectation has here been transformed into a secular
faith.
A social utopia advanced and merged into futurology as the Christian
element in and rational for the coming utopia (second coming of
Christ and the kingdom of heaven) dwindled and disappeared, though
the expectation and striving still remained. “Planning” replaced
“hoping” as human reason and technology demonstrated their
miraculous efficacy. Human progress was so central to the modern
world view that biblical faith in humanity’s spiritual evolution and
future consummation was notably in the decline while secularism
attained its fulfillment. But regardless of how Christianity was
viewed, the modern man believed it was inevitably approaching the
entrance into a better world and that man was being progressively
improved and perfected through his own efforts. Man’s will not God’s
will, was the acknowledged source of the worlds betterment and
humanity’s advancing liberation.
VI. THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE MODERN ERA
The revolutions that took place during the Renaissance brought about
an unprecedented change in the Western mind and the task here is to
attempt to understand the nature of that intricate dialectic.
The Changing Image of the Human from Copernicus through
Freud
The idea that man was the centre of the earth had already been
displaced by Copernicus’ heliocentric nature of the cosmos and each
succeeding step in the scientific revolution and its aftermath added
new dimension to the Copernican effect, further propelling liberation
while intensifying that displacement. With the works of Galileo,
Descartes, and Newton science seems to be doing everything it can to
demystify nature and creation in the process relegating religion to the
backwaters and this we find also in the work of Darwin. As science
may have revealed a cold, impersonal world, but it was the true one
nonetheless and one could not go backward.
With the world no longer a divine creation, certain spiritual nobility
seemed to have departed from it, an impoverishment that also
necessarily touched man, its erstwhile crown. Freud’s use of Darwin’s
perspective further came to bear on the human psyche. The
psychologically aware individual now knew himself to be, like all
members of modern civilization, condemned to internal division,
repression, neurosis, and alienation. Between Marx and Freud, with
Darwin between them, modern intelligentsia increasingly, perceived
man’s cultural values, psychological motivations, and conscious
awareness as historically relative phenomena derived from
unconscious political, economic, and instinctual impulses of an
entirely naturalistic quality.
The phenomena of chemistry could be reduced to principles of
physics, those of biology to Chemistry and Physics, and, for many
scientists. Hence, consciousness itself became a mere epiphenomenon
of matter, a secretion of the brain, a function of electrochemical
circuitry serving biological imperatives. Thus it was the irony of
modern intellectual progress that man’s genius discovered successive
principles of determinism that steadily attenuated belief in his own
rational and volitional freedom while eliminating his sense of being
anything more than a peripheral and transient accident of material
evolution.
The Self-Critique of the Modern Mind
As science progressed, so also did modern philosophy and as modern
man was vast extending his effective knowledge of the world, his
critical epistemology inexorably revealed the disquieting limits
beyond which his knowledge could not claim to penetrate.
From Locke to Hume
The new science’s success in explicating the natural world affected
the efforts of philosophy in two ways: first, by locating the basis of
human knowledge in the human mind and its encounter with the
natural world; and second, by directing philosophy’s attention to
analysis of the mind that was capable of such cognitive success.
There is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses
was John Locke’s notion of the senses. His analysis therefore was that
all knowledge of the World must rest finally on man’s sensory
experience meaning the mind possesses innate powers and not innate
ideas. So the British empiricist demand that sensory experience be the
ultimate source of knowledge of the world set itself in opposition to
the continental rationalist orientation, epitomized in Descartes and
variously elaborated by Spinoza and Leibniz, which held that the
mind alone, through its recognition of clear, distinct, and self evident
truths, could achieve certain knowledge. Locke tended towards the
doctrine of representation which was found untenable.
Bishop Berkeley’s analysis, of all human experience as phenomenal,
limited to appearances in the mind, now reduced all sense data to
mental contents as against Locke who reduced all mental content to an
ultimate basis in sensation. So for Berkeley, from a rigorously
philosophical point of view, “to be” does not means “to be a material
substance”; rather, “to be” means “to be perceived by a mind” (esse
est percipi). Yet Berkeley held that the individual mind does not
subjectively determine its experience of the world, as if the later were
a fantasy susceptible to any person’s whim of the moment.
David Hume following Berkeley drove the empiricist epistemological
critique to its final extreme. Hume in his own analysis, made a
distinction between sensory impressions and ideas: sensory
impressions are the basis of any knowledge, and they come with a
force and liveliness that make them unique. Ideas are faint copies of
those impressions. The mind cannot really know what causes the
sensations, for it never experiences “cause” as a sensation. Cause
must be recognized as merely the accident of a repeated conjunction
of events in the mind. It is the reification of a psychological
expectation, apparently affirmed by experience but never genuinely
substantiated.
Part of Hume’s intention was to refute the metaphysical claims of
philosophical rationalism and its deductive logic. Thus for Hume,
metaphysics was just an exalted form of mythology, of no relevance
to the real world. But another and, for the modern mind, more
disturbing consequence of Hume’s critical analysis was its apparent
undermining of empirical science itself, for the latter’s logical
foundation, induction, was now recognized as unjustifiable. With
Hume, the long-developing empiricist stress on sense perceptions,
from Aristotle and Aquinas to Ockham, Bacon, and Locke, was
brought to its logical conclusion. Thus did Hume’s articulate
philosophy’s paradigmatic skeptical argument, stimulate Immanuel
Kant to develop the central philosophical position of the modern era.
Kant
Immanuel Kant now seemed to be face with an impossibly intellectual
challenge: on the one hand, to reconcile the claims of science to
certain and genuine knowledge of the world with the claim of
philosophy that experience could never give rise to such knowledge;
on the other hand to reconcile the claim of religion that man was
morally free with the claim of science that nature was entirely
determined by necessary law. According to Kant, Hume woke him
from his dogmatic slumber and the burden for him was to ascertain
who was correct, Hume or Newton? If Newton had attained certain
knowledge, and yet Hume had demonstrated the impossibility of such
knowledge, how could Newton have succeeded, how was certain
knowledge possible in a phenomenal universe? His solution was to
satisfy Skepticism and science - and in so doing to resolve modern
epistemology’s fundamental dichotomy between empiricism and
Rationalism.
For Kant, Man does not receive all his knowledge from experience,
but his knowledge in a sense already introduces itself into his
experience in the process of cognition. One cannot know something
about the World simply by thinking; nor can one do so simply by
sensing, or even by sensing and then thinking about the sensations.
The two modes must be interpenetrating and simultaneous. Hence
neither pure empiricism nor pure rationalism constituted a viable
epistemological strategy. The task of the philosopher was therefore
radically redefined and philosophy’s true task was to investigate the
formal structure of the mind, for only there would it find the true
origin and foundation for certain knowledge.

The consequence of Kant’s Copernican revolution was that he had

rejoined the knower to the known but not the knower to any objective
reality, to the object in itself. Knower and the known were united as it
were, in a solipsistic prison. In Kant’s view the attempt by
philosophers and theologians to rationalize religion, to give the tenets
of faith a foundation by pure reason, had succeeded only in producing
a scandal of conflict, casuistry, skepticism. Science could claim
certain knowledge of appearance, but it could no longer arrogantly
claim knowledge over all of reality, and precisely this, allowed Kant
to reconcile scientific determinism with religious belief and morality.
For science could not legitimately rule out the possibility that God
exists, one must nevertheless believe he exists in order to act morally.
In the wake of Kant’s Copernican revolution, science, religion, and
philosophy all had to find their own bases for affirmation, for none
could claim a priori access to the universe’s intrinsic nature.
The Decline of Metaphysics
The course of modern philosophy unfolded under the impact of
Kant’s epochal distinctions. Kant had held that mind supplied the
form taken by experience, but that the content of experience is given
empirically by an external world. The other available metaphysical
option was therefore some form of dualism reflecting the Cartesian
and Kantian positions, one that more adequately represented the
common modern experience of disjunction, between the objective
physical universe and subjective human awareness. From Hume and
Kant through Darwin, Marx Freud and beyond, an unsettling
conclusion was becoming inescapable: Human thought was
determined, structured, and very probably distorted by a multitude of
overlapping factors – innate but non-absolute mental categories, habit,
history, culture, social class, biology, language, imagination, emotion,
the personal unconscious, the collective unconscious. In the end, the
human cannot be relied upon as an accurate judge of reality. The
original Cartesian certainly, that which served as foundation for the
modern confidence in human reason, was no longer defensible.
Henceforth, philosophy concerned itself largely with the clarification
of epistemological problems, with the analysis of language, with the
philosophy of science, or with phenomenological and existential
analysis of human experience.
The Crisis of Modern Science
With both philosophy and religion in such problematic condition, it
was science alone that seemed to rescue the modern mind from
pervasive uncertainty. Religion and metaphysics continued their long,
slow decline, but sciences ongoing - indeed, accelerating - progress
could not be doubted. By the end of the third decade of the twentieth
century, virtually every major postulate of the earlier scientific
conception had been controverted. So many things that were proven to
be true have now been countered as false. The challenge to previous
scientific assumptions was deep and multiple. The solid Newtonian
atoms were now discovered to be largely empty. Modern man was
forced to question his inherited classical Greek faith that the world
was ordered in a manner clearly by accessible to the human
intelligence.

When relativity theory and quantum mechanics undid the absolute

certainty of the Newtonian paradigm, science demonstrated, the
validity of Kant’s skepticism concerning the human minds capacity
for certain knowledge of the world in itself. But with twentieth
century physics, the bottom fell out of Kant’s last certainty. The
fundamental Kantian a priori’s - space, time, substance, causality -
were no longer applicable to all phenomena. The scientific knowledge
that seemed after Newton to be universal and absolute had to be
recognized after Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg as limited and
provisional. In the combined wake of eighteenth century philosophy
and twentieth century science, the modern mind was left free of
absolutes, but also disconcertingly free of any solid ground. Drawing
on the insights of Hume and Kant, Popper noted that science can
never produce knowledge that is certain, nor even probable. Man
observes the universe as a stranger, making imaginative guesses about
its structure and workings. Kuhn pointed out that the actual practice
scientists seldom conformed to Popper’s ideal of systematic self-
criticism by means of attempted falsification of existing theories.
Instead, science typically proceeded by seeking confirmations of the
prevailing paradigm - gathering facts in the light of that theory,
performing experiments on its basis, extending its range of
applicability, further articulating its structure, attempting to clarify
residual problems. Thus the history of science is not one of linear
rational progress moving towards ever more accurate and complete
knowledge of an objective truth, but is one of radical shifts of vision
in which a multitude of non-rational and non-empirical factors play
crucial roles.
Whereas popper had attempted to temper Hume’s Skepticism by
demonstrating the rationality of choosing the most rigorously tested
conjectures Kuhn’s analysis served to restore that skepticism. And the
post Newtonian world order was neither intuitively accessible nor
internally coherent.

Yet for all this, science’s cognitive status would still have retained its
unquestioned preeminence for the modern mind. By the mid twentieth
century, modern science’s brave new world had started to become
subjected to wide and vigorous criticisms: Technology was taking
over and dehumanizing man, and striping him of all as traditional
values and structures were crumbling. The world in which man lived
was becoming as impersonal as the cosmos of his science. All these
developments had reached an early and ominous proleptic climax
when natural science and political history conspired to produce the
atomic bomb, the same science that had dramatically lessened the
hazards and burdens of human survival now presented to human
survival its gravest menace. The great succession of science’s
triumphs and cumulative progress was now shadowed by a new sense
of science’s limits, its dangers, and its culpability.
The scientific enterprise, which in its earlier stages had presented a
cultural predicament -philosophical, religious, social, psychological -
had now provoked a biological emergency. The optimistic belief that
the world’s dilemmas could be solved simply by scientific advance
and social engineering had been confounded. The West was again
losing its faith, this time not in religion but in science and the
autonomous human reason. Science was still valued, in many respects
still revered. But it had lost its untainted image as humanity’s
liberator. Scientific knowledge was stupendously effective, but those
effects suggested that much knowledge from a limited perspective
could be a very dangerous thing.
Romanticism and Its Fate
The Two Cultures
From the complex matrix of the Renaissance had issued forth two
distinct stream of culture characteristic of the Western mind. One
emerged in the scientific Revolution and Enlightenment and stressed
rationality, empirical science, and skeptical secularism. The other
shared common roots in the Renaissance and classical Greco-Roman
culture. It stressed those aspects of human experience suppressed by
the enlightenments overriding spirit of rationalism. They had
commonalities and difference: Both tended to be “humanist” in their
high estimate of man’s powers and their concern with man’s
perspective on the universe. Whereas the enlightenment
temperament’s high valuation of man rested on his unequaled rational
intellect and its power to comprehend and exploit the laws of nature,
the Romantic value man rather for his imaginative and spiritual
aspirations, his emotional depths, his artistic creativity and powers of
individual self-expression and self-creation. Equally notable was the
difference in their attitudes towards the phenomena of human
awareness.
The search for a unifying order and meaning remained central for the
Romantics, but in that task the limits of human knowledge were
radically expanded beyond those imposed by the Enlightenment and a
larger range of human faculties were considered necessary for genuine
cognition such as imagination and feelings.
While the rational scientific mind viewed tradition in more skeptical
terms, valuable only to the extent of providing continuity and
structure for the growth of knowledge, the Romantic, although no less
rebellious in character and often considerably more so, found in
tradition something more mysterious – a repository of collective
wisdom, the accrued insights of a people’s soul, a living, changing
force with its own autonomy and evolutionary dynamism.
As time passed, what had been the medieval dichotomy which was
followed by the early modern dichotomy now became a more general
schism between scientific rationalism on the one hand and the
multifaceted Romantic humanistic culture on the other hand, with the
latter now including a diversity of religious and philosophical
perspectives loosely allied with the literary and artistic tradition.
The Divided World View
Because both temperaments were deeply and simultaneously
expressive of Western attitudes and yet were largely incompatible, a
complex bifurcation of the Western outlook resulted. While
Romanticism continued to inspire the West’s “inner” culture – Its arts
and literature, its religious and metaphysical, vision, its moral ideals –
science dictated the “outer” cosmology: the character of nature, man’s
place in the universe, and the limits of his real knowledge.
As a consequence of this dualism, modern man’s experience of the
natural world and his relation to it underwent a paradoxical inversion
as the modern period evolved with the Romantic and scientific
streams virtually mirroring each other in the reverse. In a sense, the
two culture’s, the sensibilities were present in varying proportion in
every reflective individual of the modern West. Modern man was a
divided animal, inexplicably self-aware in an indifferent universe.
Attempted Synthesis: From Goethe and Hegel to Jung
There were those who sought to encompass that schism by bridging
the scientific and humanistic imperatives in both method and theory.
According to Goethe, only by bringing observation and imaginative
intuition into intimate interaction could man penetrate nature’s
appearances and discover its essences. In his vision, nature permeates
everything; including the human mind and imagination Hegel’s
overriding impulse was in comprehend all dimensions of existence as
dialectically integrated in one unitary whole. Through a continuing
dialectical process of opposition and synthesis, the world is always in
the process of completing itself. Truth is thus paradoxical, yet for
Hegel, the human mind in its highest development was fully capable
of comprehending such truth. For Hegel, the world is the history of
the divine’s unfolding, a constant process of becoming, an immense
drama in which the universe reveals itself to itself and achieves its
freedom.
In the twentieth century, metaphysically inclined scientists such as
Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and Pierre Teihard declaring
sought to conjoin the scientific picture of evolution with philosophical
and religious conceptions of an underlying spiritual reality along lines
similar to Hegel. But with Jung, the Romantic heritance became more
explicit as friend’s discoveries and concepts were expanded and
deepened. The discovery of the collective unconscious and its
archetypes radically extended psychology’s range of interest and
insight the epistemological value of depth psychology lay rather in its
capacity to reveal those unconscious structural factors, the archetypes,
which appeared to govern all mental, functioning and hence all human
perspectives on the world.
Existentialism and Nihilism
As the twentieth century advanced, modern consciousness found itself
caught up in an intensely contradictory process of simultaneous
expansion and contraction. Just as man had become a meaningless
speck in the modern universe, so had individual persons become
insignificant ciphers in modern states, to be manipulated or coerced
by the millions. Nowhere was the problematic modern condition more
precisely embodied than in the phenomenon of existentialism, a mood
and philosophy expressed in the writings of Heidegger, Sartre and
Camus, among others, but ultimately reflecting a pervasive spiritual
crisis in modern culture. The existentialists addressed the most
fundamental, naked concerns of human existence - suffering and
death, loneliness and dread, guilt, conflict, spiritual emptiness and
ontological insecurity, the void of absolute values or universal
contexts, the sense of cosmic absurdity, the frailty of human reason,
the tragic impasse of the human condition. Man was condemned to be
free. As solution some proffered living an authentic life in the midst
of the challenges, others proffered revolt, and some faith in God.
The Postmodern Mind
By all accounts, the central prophet of the post modern mind was
Friedrich Nietzsche, with his radical perspectivism and his powerful,
poignantly ambivalent anticipation of the emerging nihilism in
Western culture. Like Nietzsche, the post modern intellectual situation
is profoundly complex and ambiguous – perhaps this is its very
essence. What is called post modern varies, but the post modern mind
may be viewed as an open-ended, indeterminate set of attitudes that
has been shaped by a great diversity of intellectual and cultural
currents, ranging from pragmatism, Existentialism, Marxism, and
Psychoanalysis to Feminism, hermeneutics’, deconstruction, and
post-empiricist philosophy of science.
The critical search for truth is constrained to be tolerant of ambiguity
and pluralism, and its outcome will necessarily be knowledge that is
relative and fallible rather than absolute or certain. Hence the quest
for knowledge must be endless self – revising. The inherent human
capacity for concept and symbol formation is recognized as a
fundamental and necessary element in the human understanding,
anticipation, and creation of reality. All human understanding is
interpretation, and no interpretation is final. All human knowledge is
mediated by signs and symbols of uncertain provenance, constituted
by his historically and culturally variable predispositions, and
influenced by often unconscious human interests. Hence the nature of
truth and reality in science no less than in philosophy, religion, or art,
is radically ambiguous as individual subjectivity plays an important
role in this regard. Hence, human knowledge is the historically
contingent product of linguistic and social practices of particular local
communities of interpreters, with no assured “ever-closer” relation to
an independent a historical reality.
The history of human thought is a history of idiosyncratic
metaphorical schemes, ambiguous interpretive vocabularies having no
ground beyond what is already saturated by their own metaphorical
and interpretative categories. This is the unstable paradox that
permeates the postmodern mind.

With so many previously established assumptions having been called

into question, there remains few, if any a priori structures on the
possible, and many perspective from the past that have reemerged
with new relevance. Contemporary religion has been revitalized as
well by its own plurality. Science too, continues to retain allegiance
for the unrivaled pragmatic power of its conceptions and the
penetrating rigor of its method. The intellectual question that looms
over our time is whether the current state of profound metaphysical
and epistemological irresolution is something that will continue
indefinitely.
At the Millennium
As the twentieth century draws to a close, a widespread sense of
urgency is tangible on many levels, as if the end of an aeon is indeed
approaching. And Tarnas says “Our moment in history is indeed a
pregnant one. As a civilization and as a species we have come to a
moment of truth, with the future of the human spirit, and the future of
the planet hanging in balance if ever boldness, depth, and clarity of
vision were called for, from many, it is now.”
VII. EPILOGUE
The Post – Copernican Double Bind
The Copernican revolution when viewed from a narrow sense can be
understood simply as a specific paradigm shift in modern astronomy
initiated by Copernicus, established by Kepler and Galileo and
completed by Newton. While from a wider and significant
perspective, the Copernican shift can be seen as a metaphor for the
entire modern view: the deconstruction of the naïve understanding,
the objective world was unconsciously determined by the condition of
the subject, the consequent liberation from the ancient and medieval
cosmic womb, the displacement of man from the cosmic centre of
things and the disenchantment of the natural world. The Copernican
revolution was more of an epochal shift of the modern age. It was a
primordial event, world-destroying and world-constituting.
The application of philosophy to the new cosmological context of
Copernicus, starting with doubt and ending in the cogito by Descartes
and which culminated in Kant was the intellectual advancement to
philosophy and epistemology that can attributed to the Copernican
revolution.
Kant drew out the epistemological consequence of the Cartesian
cogito by drawing the attention to the crucial fact that all human
knowledge is interpretive and that the human mind cannot mirror
nature of the objective world for it has already been structured by the
subjects own organization.
The Copernican revolution brought subsequent evolution to the
modern mind and its tenet has been sustained, extended and pressed to
its extreme. Kant’s schism served as a pivot from the modern to post
modern. For his recognition of the subjectivity of the human mind in
ordering reality has been extended and deepened by a host of
subsequent development in all facets of human endeavor and his
insight cuts both ways for on the one hand, it tends to place the world
beyond the human mind while on the other hand, it recognizes that the
modern scientific cognition is not necessarily the whole story. Rather,
that the world is the only kind of story that for the past three centuries
the Western mind has considered intellectually justifiable. The pivot
of the modern predicament is epistemological, and it is here that we
should look for an opening.
Knowledge and the Unconscious
Nietzsche summed up the Eighteenth century critical philosophy by
saying that there are no facts only interpretation. This was further
developed by Freud in his psychoanalysis when he stated that the
apparent reality of the objective world was being unconsciously
determined by the condition of the subject. Freud’s insight brought to
the fore the systematic exploration of the seat of all human experience
and cognition, the human psyche. It was Jung who grasped the critical
philosophical consequences of depth psychology and stated that it was
“the mother of modern psychology.” He pushed the Kantian and
Freudian perspective all the way and discovered the universal
archetypes in all their power and rich complexity as the fundamental
determining structure of human experience thereby unveiling the
collective unconscious on a more comprehensive and self-aware level.
Stanislav Grof further developed Freud’s work but the unexpected
upshot of his work was to ratify Jung’s archetypal perspective on a
new level. The implication of his work can be viewed in the following
terms; physical, psychological, religious and philosophical level. The
epistemological implication of this multi-level experiential sequence
is the fundamental subject – object dichotomy that has governed and
defined modern consciousness which appears to be rooted in a
specific archetypal condition associated with the unresolved trauma of
human birth, in which an original consciousness of undifferentiated
organismic unity with the mother, a participation with nature, has
been out grown, disrupted and lost. What we have here is the
profound sense of ontological and epistemological separation between
the self and world.
This fundamental sense of separation is then structured into the
legitimized interpretive principles of the modern mind. Hillman
emphasized this by saying “the evidence we gather in support of a
hypothesis and the rhetoric we use to argue it are already part of the
archetypal constellation we are in … the ‘objective’ idea we find in
the pattern of data is also the ‘subjective’ idea by means of which we
see the data.” The irony of this is that, just when the modern mind
believes it has purified itself of anthropomorphic projections and
construed the world as mechanistic, and unconscious and impersonal,
it is then that the world is completely a selective construct of the
human mind.
Thus the modern condition begins as a promethean movement and
evolved into an intolerable double bind lading to a kind of
deconstructive frenzy. A situation that was fundamentally
unintelligible is now recognized as a necessary element in a larger
context of profound intelligibility. The dialectic is fulfilled, the
alienation redeemed. The rupture from being is healed. The world is
rediscovered in its primordial enchantment. The autonomous
individual self has been forged and is now reunited with the ground of
its being.
The Evolution of World View
Different epistemological perspective began to emerge just as the
enlightenment reached its philosophical climax in Kant. First visible
was Goethe with his study of natural forms which developed in new
directions by Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, and Emerson, and
articulated within the past century by Rudolf Steiner. Each thinker
gave his own distinct emphasis to the developing perspective, but
common to all was a fundamental conviction that the relation of the
human mind to the world was ultimately no dualistic but participatory.
This conception did not oppose the Kantian epistemology but rather
went beyond it and in a way acknowledged the validity of Kant’s
critical insight, but held the concept of participation are subjective
principles that are in fact an expression of the world’s own being, and
that the human mind is ultimately the organ of the world’s own
process of self-revelation. That is nature becomes intelligible to itself
through the human mind.
In this perspective, nature pervades everything and the human mind in
all its fullness is itself an expression of nature’s essential being. This
gives room to imagination as it also becomes an essential tool. The
human imagination is itself part of the world’s intrinsic truth; without
it the world is in some sense incomplete.
If we take the participatory epistemology, and if combined with
Grof’s discovery of the perinatal sequence, we would arrive at a
surprising conclusion: namely that the Cartesian-Kantian paradigm
reflects much deeper archetypal process impelled by forces beyond
the merely human. And if this is true, several long-standing
philosophical paradoxes may be cleared up.
The works of Popper, Kuhn and Feyeraband has left philosophers of
science with two notoriously fundamental dilemmas – one by Popper,
the other by Kuhn and Feyeraband. For Popper it was the question of
luck while Kuhn it was the question of the differing modes of
interpretation and Feyeraband own question was how and why do we
judge the superiority of a paradigm over another?
Tarnas answers the question by saying that a paradigm emerges in the
history of science. One paradigm is considered superior, precisely
when that paradigm resonates with the current archetypal state of the
collective psyche and when this paradigm begins to experience
limitations or gets into crisis, a genius puts forth another that becomes
relevant to that situation and time and also inadvertently becomes
superior to the previous one(s). This is the dynamics that marks the
progress in the pursuit of knowledge and is also the case with human
thought, and the emergence of new philosophical paradigms is never
simply the result of improved logical reasoning from the observed
data but a reflection of the emergence of a global experiential gestalt
that informs that philosophers vision taking into consideration every
context that surrounds the philosopher.
One could then say that every new worldview’s appearance rest on the
underlying archetypal dynamics of the larger culture. From the
foregoing, we can recognize a multiplicity of these archetypal
sequences, with each scientific revolution, each change of worldview
culminating in our eyes. In this light, we can better understand the
great epistemological journey of the western mind from the birth of
philosophy out of mythological consciousness in ancient Greece,
through the classical, medieval and modern eras, to our own post
modern age.
Bringing it all Back Home
The history of the Western mind rightly from the start to finish is
simply dominated by men. This does not mean that women were less
intelligible but the western intellectual traditions had been produced
and canonized almost entirely by men, and informed mainly by male
perspective. The western mind in its evolution had repressed its
feminine aspect thereby creating a denial of this aspect of nature and
thus, the Western mind has been pounded on this progressive denial.
This separation calls forth a longing for a reunion with that which has
been lost but now, there is the tremendous emergence of the feminine
in our culture: visible not only in the rise of feminism, growing
empowerment of women and other areas but in the increasing sense of
unity with the planet and all forms of nature on it and in deepening
recognition of the value of partnership, pluralism and the interplay of
perspectives. As Jung prophesied, an epochal shift is taking place in
the cotemporary psyche, reconciliation between the two great
polarities, a union of opposites: a sacred marriage between the long-
dominant but non alienated masculine and the long-suppressed but not
ascending feminine.
This dramatic development is not just compensation. The teleos of
inner direction and goal, of the Western mind has been to reconnect
with the cosmos in a mature participation mystique, to surrender itself
freely and unconsciously in the embrace of a larger unity that
preserves human autonomy while transcending human alienation. But
for re-integration of the repressed feminine to be achieved, the
Western mind must be willing to open itself to a reality the nature of
which could shatter its most established belief about itself and about
the world. The feminine side then becomes not that which must be
controlled, denied, exploited, but rather fully acknowledged,
respected, and responded to for itself. It is recognized: not the
objectified ‘other’ but rather source, goal and immanent presence.
For Tarnas, he believes that the western mind has been slowly
preparing itself to meet for its entire existence. He considers that
much of the conflict and confusion of our own era reflects the fact that
this evolutionary drama may now be reaching its climatic stages. For
our time is struggling to bring forth something fundamentally new in
human history. Perhaps the end of “man” himself is at hand. But man
is not a goal. Man is something that must be overcome – and fulfilled,
in the embrace of the feminine.