It takes time for belief systems to be lived out and their inadequacy revealed for all to see. The intellectual energy released in the attempt to fuse Aristotle and Christianity characterized the intellectual life for a significant portion of the Medieval Age. The incompatibility of Aristotelianism and Christianity was officially noted in 1276, but the untangling and disengaging of Christian thought from Aristotle required more time in which skeptical attacks on Aristotle’s epistemology and metaphysics made known the need for a foundation on which to build anew. Out of this skeptical backdrop the Modern age emerged with thinkers like Descartes and Hobbes seeking to provide a new basis for thinking about what is certain and how the world works. Religious conflicts that retained medieval characteristics were set aside in favor of a division between private beliefs about what cannot be agreed on and public goods required by all.
Nevertheless, Modernity also lived itself out in time for all to see. Like Aristotelianism, it claimed to have provided a foundation for knowledge and a description about the world. Its denouement came in the same way, through skeptical attacks concerning the sufficiency of this foundation. Like the medieval world, the modern world drew to a close in a series of costly and deadly wars. In the aftermath, there is general agreement that the postcolonial, globalized world is a postmodern world, but little agreement about what would constitute a new foundation for rebuilding. It is the skeptical time between the death of one age and the beginning of another.
Leave a Reply