Welcome to the second of twelve lectures in the subject Introduction to Biblical Cosmology. Below you will find the YouTube video of the lecture as well as the podcast link if you prefer to listen.
In this second lecture in Introduction to Biblical Cosmology, we will be exploring the development of the modern worldview as a critique of the medieval worldview developed during Late Antiquity. The origins of the trends that later came to define modernity, such as rationalism, humanism, and skepticism, will be the focus of our study.
Medieval cosmology, broadly speaking, rested upon the Neoplatonic Great Chain of Being; a hierarchical order governed by God the Creator at the summit with ranks of angelic beings, humans, animals and plants, and infernal demons underneath. Although the foundations of this worldview were laid during the period of Rome’s collapse in Western Europe during Late Antiquity, it was not fully developed and standardised until the High Middle Ages of the 13th century.
Tension between faith and reason was a theme throughout the medieval period. Men such as Peter Abelard in the 11th century sought to reconcile this tension by arguing that reason better enabled the comprehension of God, thus laying the groundwork for the rationalist rebellion against the church centuries later during the Enlightenment. The use of reason to critique the prevailing medieval worldview was ultimately extended to the critique of any knowledge, belief, or custom seen as traditional, customary, or irrational. I am arguing in this lecture that this system of critique defines the modern worldview and has extended to every culture around the world.
The Crisis of the Late Middle Ages that began in the early 14th century marked the beginning of the end for the medieval worldview. The Great Famine of 1315-1317, the Black Death of the 1340s, and ultimately the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 shattered confidence in the worldview that underpinned authority and knowledge during the Middle Ages. This destabilisation went along with the rise of merchant capitalism, banking, the universities, and humanist philosophy, shifting power away from the clerical elites who had maintained the legacy of Roman civilisation since the 5th century. The development of printing aided in the spread of the new ideas and the rise of a new financial elite enabled patronage for the new forms of art, literature, philosophy, and science. The discovery of the New World provided the geographical destablisation of medieval cosmology, and astronomical discoveries provided the celestial equivalent.
These trends came together with the modern way of thinking based on materialism, rationalist critique, and the disconnection of lived physical reality from metaphysical faith. Modernity as reasoned critique has remained its stable feature in the centuries since, and has spread from Western Europe around the world since. Modernity did not develop as a critique of the Biblical worldview, however; it was a critique of the framework developed by intellectuals during the collapse of Western Rome. This framework will be the focus of our next lecture. See you then.