The End of the Middle Ages

okay so in chapter one of integral humanism um he wants to start and this is really the point of this week's lesson uh meriten wants to start with this kind of historical overview from a personalist standpoint basically summarizing how we got from the end of the Middle Ages to where we are now in modernity and the various steps that that took so in chapter one uh we go back to Medieval Christendom and what maritan explains you can see this at the top of page 158 he does State very clearly that the medieval Christian mind did

understand man as a person uh and I think this is a really important passage at the top he says that um for the medievals for the Christians a person is a universe of spiritual nature endowed with freedom of choice and constituting to this extent a whole which is independent in face of the world neither nature nor the state can lay hold on this universe without its permission and God himself who is an ax within acts therein a particular manner and with a particularly Exquisite delicacy which shows the value he sets on it he respects its

freedom at the heart of which he nevertheless lives he solicits it he never forces it now uh let's keep going on from here too so that that's one key thing to keep in mind so this this sense that the person is this kind of universe unto themselves that's a key personalist notion but here's the caveat so again talking about medieval thought so for medieval thought man is not simply a natural being he is a dislocated being wounded by the devil who wounds him with concupiscence by God who wounds him with love on the one hand

he Bears the heritage of original sin he is born divested of the gifts of Grace and not doubtless substantially corrupted but wounded in his nature on the other hand he is made for a supernatural end to see God as God sees himself he is made to attain to the very life of God he is traversed by the solicitations of actual Grace and if he does not oppose to God his power of refusal he bears with him within him even here below the properly Divine Life of sanctifying Grace and its gifts okay so now let me

read the last part here to close that aspect off because this is a very important page to really explain uh I think in a really good summary the view of the human person from again this kind of personalized standpoint looking back at the Middle Ages and and how it would have been understood then all right let us say that these primarily theological knowledges sufficed for the Middle Ages they enveloped a very powerful psychology but not in the modern sense of the word for it was from the point of view of God that all things were

regarded then the natural mysteries of man were not scrutinized for themselves by a scientific and experimental knowledge in short the Middle Ages were just the opposite of a reflex age a sort of fear or metaphysical modesty and also a predominant concern to see things and to contemplate being and to take the measures of the world kept the Gaze of medieval man turned away from himself this characteristic we shall find everywhere okay so I really wanted to go through that Chunk on 158 there's a lot to unpack there but what I want you to recognize is

the critique that maritan jp2 and other to Mystic personalists will have to where the Middle Ages will never be that they didn't understand the human person properly but only that because of let's say um this coming of age of Christianity in Europe and these Beginnings in theology um they were really they had let's say bigger concerns than the human person now what would be a bigger concern well God of course God and God's creation and just really wanting to keep their eyes fixed on understanding God that's what they really felt like they needed to figure

out first and so all of these kind of intellectual energies in philosophy are going to be directed in that in that manner and it's only until the end of the Middle Ages where let's say uh the culture gets to a point where they feel more secure in this regard um that they start to pull back a bit now um there is a problem though that comes up that uh because of this lack in the Middle Ages of that kind of self reflection and that importance of the human person and let's say that kind of metaphysical

humility or metaphysical modesty one problem that can come up and that did come up toward the end of the Middle Ages is if you only keep your eyes fixed on God and if you only keep your eye on the life after this one then it can be tempting and it's easy to see how this could happen that you would lose a sense of the good in this life and in human nature itself and in the human person you would stop valuing that so much um and even avoid valuing it at all as an exercise of

piety in the extreme okay and so what ends up happening toward the end of the Middle Ages and here we're talking about let's say around the the 13 well not 13 but more 1400s this is when you start to see um the rise of what's first called Christian humanism and uh kind of leading into the Renaissance um what you what you start to see is well why did that happen well that that is a reaction to this sense that developed at the end of the Middle Ages in culture where uh man is essentially nothing compared

to God and that's true but you can see how there there are two ways really to think about this right you can think about this with a proper sense of humility but also understanding that yes while man is infinitely small next to God the infinite nevertheless God in his mercy and love became incarnate and made us in His image so while we may be infinitely small in comparison to him there is still nonetheless human dignity and love from God such that uh even if if we're only concerned with just loving God and and not ourselves

we still have to love ourselves because God loves us right so let's say that's that's a good way of taking it that's the way that Augustine takes it that's the way that it's taken for most of the Middle Ages in the proper sense but there is a sense of Despair that you could get uh and a sense of exhaustion that you can get thinking in this way that will then lead to Despair and frustration where if you keep emphasizing that man is nothing then you could understand that taking away hope and viewing that under a

light of despair and so at that point now talking about the end of the Middle Ages the reaction will be well hold on let's try to recover a sense of human greatness and this is part of why uh with the Renaissance well how did this come about what animates that why go back to the pagans because the pagans had a sense of human greatness and heroism I mean think about Homer's epics and Virgil think about that so that's what we want to recover that kind of natural sense of human dignity and greatness and aspiration that

can be lost if we only focus on God to the ultimate exclusion of the human person that's the concern and that's why of course Christian humanism would be the first reaction because it wants to say well no we're not abandoning Christianity and uh we are extolling human virtue and the human good but properly grounded within this Christian uh context and Foundation that we all know to be true that we retain is true okay so uh that's where it starts but with that problem two paths then emerge so it kind of begins like that in this

mitigated form but it keeps developing and so you have two things happen uh on the one hand you have um with protestantism so this is a problem of Grace and freedom that mariten talks about so with protestantism you have Grace without freedom so they dig in they realize that they're nothing in the face of God but they dig in and their resolution of it is to just bite the bullet to say yes we are indeed nothing without God so much so that we are not free uh the only good that we can achieve is exclusively

through God's grace because we are so wounded by sin that we can only um we can only act with depravity and sin we're bound we're enchant in that way but uh it's only by grace that we're set free and so it's not even our decision we have no responsibility there it's it's all God's action and that's all that you can aspire to is this hope in God that you will be saved Okay so that's one angle the other angle flips this on its head and you could think about this theologically as a kind of pelagian

moment where you have freedom without Grace and so this is what uh unfortunately while humanism starts in this Direction with Christian humanism that will fall by the wayside and give way in modern culture to arise in a more atheistic humanism and it's going down that route of freedom without Grace where it's not about Grace anymore we're not going to talk about Grace it's all on human freedom and that the human being is capable of attaining the good and so on and that thinking about Grace and God is actually that's actually what's holding us back not

sin but uh this idea of God and religion and so on that's what that's where it will go okay so those are the two paths that come up with this modern split so once these two paths arise the the path of uh this kind of total depravity in protestantism and predestination this Grace without Freedom that as well as uh this atheistic humanism where it's all about human freedom and the human good and we're not gonna We're not gonna talk about God anymore because that holds us back that's when you get the break from the medieval

order that's also where you get the separation of faith and reason so for the Protestant uh for them it's all faith that is given by Grace but it's not there's no rational component anymore because we're too mired and sin to be able to do anything about that for the other route for freedom without Grace for the atheist humanist um then there's no faith right faith is what's holding us back there's only reason and we just have to extol reason so uh that's that precisely is the break with uh the Middle Ages and it affects our

our vision of the human person too as far as human limitations human dignity uh both of these paths do and both essentially set up these detours where we're set on we start on on wrong paths here that only get more confusing as uh time moves forward and we can see its effects now Okay so just to end that part with uh chapter two um What maritan notes is that you have uh against theocentric humanism which he wants to return to so theocentric puts God in the middle you have the rise of anthropocentric humanism so that's

the atheist humanism that I was talking about where the human being is put at the center of reality and we're not going to deal with God anymore now as far as how this ended up um meriton says basically that there are three stages three moments of modernity and we're living in the third one right now so the first moment uh was really more that kind of Christian humanist movement uh and even Descartes was still a Christian I mean he still thought that what he was doing he thought that he was creating a bulletproof philosophical system

that would uh disprove atheism once and for all so you still have a Christian element there and even Francis Bacon um he thought that he was doing religion a favor by saying you know let's not talk about let's not talk about that anymore and just let's just accept whatever the church tells us and instead of having theological debates we'll just debate more practical matters and and we can advance science that way and as far as faith and morals are concerned let's just we'll just have the church tell us what to believe there and not worry

about it anymore so that's your first movement uh nevertheless uh the door that that first moment open is this kind of endless ambition for human reason to be able to discover everything by its own power and you get that both with bacon and Descartes and uh what that opens the door to then will be this second moment where God becomes more of an idea this kind of God of the gaps within the system and what human beings will focus on instead is rather than talking about the Transcendent or the supernatural let's only talk about technology

and science and material prospects and material progress overall let's just work for that that's basically where what uh bacon leaves us with Francis Bacon now here's what happens though and doesn't take long for this to occur but what begins with this kind of unbridled sense of optimism in the Modern Age ends with despair as we start to realize that we're it seems like we're more determined without God than we thought that we would be that we're we're like these cogs in this machine of the physical Universe of atoms bumping into each other and just material

cause and effect and by neglecting God and the Transcendent we also then lose the Transcendent with ourselves and just become another Cog in this material universe and so then uh what ends up happening too philosophically is that skepticism begins to win the day such that we arrive to this third movement this third moment where uh God is this outdated obstacle and the The Next Step really is realizing then that well if with God out of the picture everything is permissible um as you know dosievsky expressed in the brothers karamatsov right uh so without God all

things are permissible and we get to be the ones who determine what the truth is then because God isn't the one who does it for us anymore so we have to essentially be what we attributed to God in the past um but it's uh the the cost though is there's nothing Beyond ourselves we have to do all the work and uh the despair sets in when we realize that well if that's the case and there's really no meaning beyond our own individual existence in this moment and there's nothing past our death really um but because

everything is determined so subjectively we can't even go back to the days of pagan heroism where you could say that well even if the Pagan didn't believe in some kind of afterlife he did at least believe that there were these static values that weren't up to him that everybody would recognize and that's why his heroic actions would live on because he could do something that is let's say objectively good but in this modern Moment In This Modern Age we've lost that kind of sense of objectivity so there is no objective good anymore and if that's

the case then there's really nothing that can survive because values are always going to be in flux they're always going to change and the only thing that you have left is not reason anymore but just an arbitrary will and the power to carry it out so whoever is the most powerful is the one who will win out in the end and that's basically where we are now that's where we're stuck in modern times now and there's not really anything that you can there's no further step there we're reaching this kind of dead end of modern

thought so the only way past that wall is with something entirely new that truly transcends modernity and that's what maritan is going for here as well as jp2 with domestic personalism just completely flip uh the Paradigm and move truly move Beyond modernity uh with something that is all together new