Welcome to the third of twelve lectures in this undergraduate-level subject Introduction to Biblical Cosmology. Below you will find the YouTube video for the first lecture and underneath that a link to the podcast version if you prefer to listen.
In the last lecture, we investigated the development of the modern worldview as a critique of medieval thinking. This lecture takes us back a millennium prior, and will explore the cosmological worldview developed in Europe in response to the collapse of Roman political order.
The primary argument in this lecture is that, despite what is usually believed, the medieval worldview was not Biblical, changed significantly over time, and was not received directly from antiquity. It was a construct created during the collapse of classical Graeco-Roman civilisation during the fifth century AD. As the Roman world disappeared, church intellectuals created what became the medieval worldview as a spiritualised form of centralising order. As the worldview was based on Late Antique Christian concepts, the Catholic and Orthodox churches became the repository of the shared cosmological worldview.
The three elements that combined to create the medieval worldview were Greek metaphysics, the Roman system of order, and Christian theological concepts. Neoplatonic philosophy provided the foundation for the ordered and rational cosmos of the Middle Ages that continued into the Early Modern Period, drawing upon the work of Plato and Aristotle. Augustine in particular sought to provide a means by which Christianity could persist as the unifying civilisational force after the collapse of Roman government, using the vernacular of Christian theological concepts to provide the framework for his City of God theory.
By the 11th century, the tension between faith and reason in Europe prompted intellectuals to begin to identify reason as the primary means by which God could be known. The rise of reason continued into the Early Modern Period, by which time reason had come to be applied as a critique against Christian faith itself. This pattern has continued into modernity.
In the next lecture, we will continue moving backward in time and will look at the cosmological transition that occurred at the end of the ancient period. The replacement of the ancient cosmological worldview that stretched back millennia with a philosophical system developed by intellectuals provided the basis for the critique of reason that emerged a millennium later. See you then.