Therefore all wise people in history have really been aiming toward the same thing–one truth, one source. Wisdom, being wise and good at judgment, helps you tell true from false and right from wrong, and what is true and right will always agree with and point toward God. To follow their logic chain you must begin–as they did–by positing that Christianity is true, and there is a single monotheistic God who is the source of all goodness, virtue, and knowledge. But the humanists still tried hard to make them all agree, much as the scholastics and Peter Abelard had, since the ancients were ALL wonderful and ALL brilliant and ALL right, right? Even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff? Hence Renaissance Syncretism, attempts by philosophers like Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola to take all the authors of antiquity, and Aquinas and a few others in the mix, and show how they were all really saying the same thing, in a roundabout, hidden, glorious, elusive, poetic, we-can-make-like-Abelard-and-make-it-all-make-sense way.īefore you dismiss these syncretic experiments as silly, or as slavish toadying, there is a logic to it if you can zoom out from modern pluralistic thinking for a minute and look at what Renaissance intellectuals had to work with. If we were charting a solar system before, now we’re charting a galaxy. Now we discover that Epicurus says there’s no afterlife and the universe is made of atoms Stoics say the universe is one giant contiguous object without motion or individual existence Plato says there’s reincarnation (What? The Plato we used to have didn’t say that!) and Aristotle totally doesn’t say what we thought he said, it turns out the Organon was a terrible translation (Sorry, Boethius, you did your best, and we love you, but it was a terrible translation.) Suddenly the palette of questions is much broader, and the degree to which people disagree has opened exponentially wider.
But the breadth of answers is not that big, and the question itself presumes that everyone involved already believes 90% the same thing.Įnter Petrarch, “Let’s read the classics! They’ll make us great like the Romans!” Begin 250 years of working really hard to find, copy, correct, translate, edit, print and proliferate every syllable surviving from antiquity.
#VALHALLA HILLS MILITARY CAMP TOO FAR FROM TOOLMAKER PLUS#
A good example of a really fractious fight is the question of, within your generally Aristotelian tripartite rational immortal soul, which of the two decision-making principles is more powerful, the Intellect or the Will? It’s a big and important question – without it we will starve to death like Buridan’s ass, and be unable to decide whether to send our second sons to Franciscan or a Dominican monasteries, plus we need it to understand how Original Sin, Grace and salvation work. In the later Middle Ages, within the philosophical world, the breadth of disagreement within scholarship, how different the far extreme theories were on any given topic, was rather circumscribed.
This may seem like a strange choice, but I can either do a general overview, or get sidetracked discussing individual philosophers, theologians and commentators and their uses of skepticism for another five posts. My own period I will treat the most briefly in this survey. (Best to begin with Part 1 and Part 2 of and Part 3 this series.) Doubt in the Renaissance and Reformation “My copy doesn’t say whether it’s Will or Intellect.