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History is the measure of changes from particular eras and Epochs.

The “Hegelian Dialectic”

How does this apply to our course?

We have to establish the basis of Medieval Society in order to understand the change that was the Renaissance and the Reformation.

Late Medieval Society and the Great Chain of Being

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Hegelian Dialectic: All history is change; cyclical

Thesis – The present society; status quo; zeitgeist

Antithesis – A challenge to the thesis

Synthesis – The resultant change as Thesis and Antithesis “merge”

And, as the Synthesis becomes more stable, it becomes the new…

Thesis: and the cycle continues again…

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All societies, by their very nature, are structured.

Medieval Society was, at its core, Christian. What does that mean?

Christianity was dominant in all of Western Europe, and that meant that all facets of society: (political, social and economic) were to mirror the order and control established by God.

St. Augustine proposed in his City of God/City of Man that what is on earth cannot mirror the structure and control in Heaven.

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What I would like to do is to juxtapose the primary beliefs of two of the greatest thinkers of the Early and late medieval period: St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.

As we look at their primary beliefs and philosophies, we want to consider if we can see the beginning of the thread that will be critical to out course:

The rise of what we will call a “Protestant” belief system, and how it opposed the more traditional and popular Roman Catholic system.

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St. Augustine

God is external

Transcendent

Faith is individual

Lead to the “Protestant Thread”

Spirit of Capitalism

Aquinas

God is Internal

Immanent

Communal

Catholicism

Peace and Justice

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St. Augustine

Assessment: God is external and beyond the grasp of mortal man.

Faith is individual issue, not one that can be systematized and regulated.

This will lead us to a Protestant “thought process”,

Capitalism as opposed to an Economic System hamstrung by the Catholic Church.

Aquinas

Assessment: God is internal and present everywhere, and the issue of faith must be a communal one.

This communal atmosphere is carefully regulated by the Catholic Church.

Communal, not individual faith.

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St. Augustine What is divine is beyond man

It is External to Humanity

Heaven is where the divine lay

God’s value is beyond Man’s Comprehension, what he thinks or believes

Hence, faith is individualistic

You can’t turn to others, only to God

Thomas Aquinas

It is divine, but pantheistic – God is everywhere

It is internal, in all of Humanity

Faith is inextricably linked to community, structure and Power

Hence, we see the justification of the Catholic Hierarchy

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St. Augustine

Assessment: Divinity is beyond man’s comprehension.

Heaven is Where the divine is, not here on earth…

Your faith is yours, and cannot be “pursued” or attained.

Aquinas

Assessment: God is everywhere and is in everybody

Faith is communal, linked to community

The structure and power of the Roman Catholic Church is an extension of God’s power, and must be obeyed…

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St. Augustine

The divine transcends Human understanding: Salvation is an individual matter

Predestination = individual piety

Strive have a personal relationship to God

It is not communally driven or mandated

Thomas Aquinas

Authority is Noble: Higher is better

Great Chain

Men are subject to the Papacy

Authority ultimately is Sacred

State dominates secular affairs, but is subordinate to the papacy

Church leads men to salvation

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St. Augustine Assessment:

Your salvation is an individual matter, and cannot be “managed”

You have a personal relationship with God, and it is not communally driven.

Predestination means that your salvation is not managed by your actions.

Aquinas

Assessment:

Authority is nobility and piety. The Great Chain of being is manifest everywhere

Authority, the Papacy, is God on earth.

The State/King is an extension of this authority

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St. Augustine The City of God cannot ever be

represented on Earth.

Most significantly, Augustine’s City of God makes the clear distinction between the Holy City of God, and the secular city of Man.

They are clearly divided, and reflect the true sense of Augustine that does not see God everywhere, but only in that place where we cannot see him

Thomas Aquinas

Man has citizenship in both this and the other worldly kingdom

Man committed original sin…requiring God’s son…creating a storehouse of grace

God foresees Man’s fate, but choice still exists.

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St. Augustine Assessment: There are no

bureaucratic representations of heaven on earth, nor can there be a structure on Earth that can do the same things that God can.

 The City of God was founded through the creation of Angels, who populate it.

 The City of Man was founded through the rebellion of Satan.

Thomas Aquinas

Assessment: We see in the growing secular construct of the medieval church a belief in the necessity of the bureaucracy

Man must be lead, and the growing veneration of saints, good works and eventually indulgences supports the need for guidance toward salvation.

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St. Augustine What we come to know as

Protestantism will argue against the very basic notion that Man can participate in their own salvation.

Hence, trying to represent a version of the City of God on earth, from the Vatican down to the lowliest Christian pilgrim is a degradation of the power and mystery of God.

Thomas Aquinas

The Roman Catholic Church will adhere to the necessity for intercession in man’s lives.

The mystery and majesty of the church will be, for the Reformed and “Magisterial” Protestants a corruption of the very basic notion that Salvation is a gift from God, not an earned state of being.

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St. Augustine

Most significantly, Augustine’s “City of God” makes the clear distinction between the Holy City of God, and the secular city of Man.

Hence, there are no bureaucratic representations of heaven on earth, nor can there be a structure on Earth that can do the same things that God can.

Thomas Aquinas

People cannot exercise Sovereign Power, in the same way they cannot be in charge of their own salvation

Sovereignty comes from God, and is invested in the people

Just as the Prince can invest, or take the power away, he is equally subject of the Pope.

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St. Augustine The City of God was founded

through the creation of Angels, who populate it.

The City of Man was founded through the rebellion of Satan.

And, most importantly, the City of God is not identical to the City of man, and the Catholic Church, though it may have elements of the City of God, is in no way a substitute for it.

Thomas Aquinas

Man cannot reject the teaching of God simply because their ideas are beyond his comprehension

 If it contradicts man’s natural knowledge, so be it.

Hence, man must subjugate himself to the guidance of the church.

Confess, and your sins will be forgiven.

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The universe was based on the Ptolemaic System, which means that God put earth at the center, and the planets and stars were in fixed positions, and the movement so the spheres was orchestrated in circular, uniform perfection.

The hierarchy of the universe, from the center outward, was mirrored by a hierarchy here on earth.

All life was to mirror the harmony of the heavens, and anything that deviated from the “fixed” nature of the “Great Chain” disturbed God’s plan.

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God

Angels

Man

Animals

Plants

Stones

This is the hierarchy of the Universe.

It is immutable, and hence earth has to be structured on this model, because God created the heavens and the earth.

Each link has an inner hierarchy, dictating higher and lower Angels or animals.

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The core of the Great Chain was that everything in the Universe had a place, and that place was determined by the amount of spirit vs. matter that an individual thing had.

Spirit being the degree/quality that an object had that would bring it closer to God.

Matter was the sheer substance of the object.

Obviously, this would place the stone at the opposite spectrum of the angel, because the stone was all matter, and the angel was nearly all spirit.

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Since order was considered to be a model of divinity, then disorder, being out of one’s place, any challenge to the established order, was not only “unnatural” but also seen to be sinful.

So, the chain is a series of levels, linked together, that were hierarchical patterns and strata which were inviolate; each link was a microcosm of the larger chain.

What does that mean?

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Let’s take a look at the basic structure of the Great Chain again:

God

Angels

Man

Animals

Plants

Stones

Aside from the “God” level, there are gradations, strata, levels in each of the individual categories.

For example, Angels were actually nine separate categories, from highest, those literally closest to God, and the angels, the lowest, closest to Man.

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SERAPHIM – (Top of the Chain) sometimes called "the burning ones" because they are closest to God and radiate Pure Light.

These are the Angels who constantly singing God's praise, and whose duty it is to regulate the heavens. (Lucifer is said to have been one of the Seraphim who had outshone all the others until he became the head of the fallen angels).

ANGELS – (Bottom of the Chain) the Celestial Beings closest to humans. They act as intermediaries between the Almighty and humanity. Often called our "Guardian Angels."

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So, if we look at the “Angel” link in the Great Chain, we see that it is connected to the link or level above, (the angels that are closest to God), and it serves as a link below, in that the highest order or level of Man reflects some of the qualities of the least angel.

All levels of the chain then, have the same qualities: they have a hierarchy all their own, and the highest level on the chain below is closest to the lowest level on the chain above.

Think also that this means that mans is between Angels and Animals: have you never considered how we can portray man as having qualities of both?

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Remember, this is a chain, and it is not a ladder.

What this means is that there is no chance of being a “social climber”

You cannot “break free” from the chain/links.

After all, a rock will never become a bird.

Think on a larger scale what that means:

The prevailing belief was that society was most orderly, most holy when it adhered to the structure and hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being

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What that means is that the recognition of power and order is directly connected with the belief, faith, that God is almighty in his realm like the King should be, below of course the Pope, the “God” in his realm.

How does a person, an average everyday resident of a small town, or a peasant, understand the Great Chain?

Simply put, the chain existed everywhere, and consequences of straying away from order and stability were real and painful.

And, it is not the peoples place to understand as much as it is to blindly accept it.

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First and foremost, the Chain was preached to you every Sunday. It was reinforced almost everywhere you looked.

Attendance in church was mandatory, and your whole identity was based on being a Christian, a sinner; hence understanding your whole life was to be spent staying in your place and achieving a higher place once you died and went to heaven.

You were not an individual, but part of a large whole, one that was mysterious and relied on your faith, not your reason.

Do not question, but believe!

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Every facet of society was based on the most common form of control and that was Paternalism – control by the most powerful male in any situation.

After all, God the FATHER ruled the universe.

Hence, each little part of the Chain was based on top-down management, and bottom-up obedience.

That entailed, in almost every case, that a man be in charge of other men, women, and children.

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If you were one of the “lower orders” then you were expected to be obedient, respectful and deferential to those that were your “betters.”

Challenges to order and control were, literally, unholy.

We all remember the story of Lucifer, the “Angel of Light”, and what happened to him when he challenged God in heaven.

Hence, the idea of revolution was, literally, an impossibility.

After all, the most important revolutions were those in the heavens, and we know that they are controlled by God himself.

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So, we see a society where reason dominated the emotions, just as the King ruled his subjects, the parent controlled his children, and the Pope controlled all of Christendom.

Trying to go above your station in life would always bring punishment and disaster, and we can look to Eve, and her inability to be content with her place in Eden as the best example of trying to be something that you were not.

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This meant that all power, economic, social and political was also inherited; it was something that you were born to, just as you were born a peasant or a woman.

Power could be created, invented or acquired by personal gain.

There was no concept of social mobility, or a democratic society where people participated in the governing of a nation.

A parent did not ask his children how they would like to raised, just as God did not ask his faithful how they wished to worship him.

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So, to review, Europe was a region that was dominated Kingdoms, Principalities that were hereditary; power and position were inherited, and protected by the legal system.

Nobles were simply more important because they were “higher up the chain.”

The Roman Catholic Church was the central figure of stability and control and the papacy was superior to any earthly monarch.

All of society was based on the Great Chain of Being

The questions becomes, what changes take place that threaten the stability and continuity of the Great Chain, and how do these impact European society?

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Let’s list some of the larger categories of change, those movement and issues that would represent a threat to the stability of Western Europe, and would rattle, if you will, the links in the“Great Chain of Being.”

Remember that the crucial issue in our course is being able to recognize the three stage cycle of history as described by Hegel: The Dialectic…

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Thesis – The way society is structured. The Political, Social and Economic systems that exist.

Antithesis – A Challenge to the established order

Synthesis – the mix, the hybrid of both the synthesis and the challenge to it, the Antithesis. This leads to, eventually, change becoming stability, which creates…

Thesis

The cycle continues…

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Challenges to the stability of the Great Chain of Being

Renaissance Humanism

The Rise of the Centrally Governed State

The Discovery of the New World

The Protestant Reformation

The Scientific Revolution

For each of the above, we need to consider the following:

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What, exactly, is this movement or change

What are the component parts that help us to define it

For example, how does a movement like Renaissance Humanism represent a challenge to the great Chain of being

Finally, we have to consider what was created, what “new version” of society existed that would represent a blending of the old and the new.

This represents a crucial point: the Chain will not be broken apart right away, nor will it be able to resist the agents of change.

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Hence, we will learn the valuable lesson in Western European History, and that is we rarely/never see the wholesale “destruction” of the beliefs, structures and systems of a particular period, and the subsequent “starting over” of a new era.

Like waves crashing on the shore, eras will blend together, and a new period will have both the “old” and the “new”

Let’s examine the concept of Humanism, and specifically the document by Pico della Mirandola as a humanist interpretation of the place of Man in society.

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Combining a great deal of scholarship for the sake of expediency, we can look at Humanism as that intellectual, artistic and in some cases civic movement that began to re-asses, and some might argue re-value the role, the place, of mankind in late medieval society.

Go back to the great chain, and remember that Man was God’s creation, and had an exalted place; one that, especially given man’s Fall, was one of relegation, obedience and subservience.

Man was the highest of all creatures, but there was no real conception of his essence, his purpose outside of the church.

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If Humanism is a harkening back to the scholars, poets sculptors and historians of the ancients, if it was a reinstallation of the value of man in society, then there had to be some conflict with the pre-scribed order and structure of the Great Chain.

After all, reviving the very concept of the citizen, as the ancient Romans saw it, was a re-assessment of man’s place in society.

If mankind can learn, outside of the strictures and theological and philosophical confines of the catholic Church, wasn't that changing man’s place in the world?

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As the great minds of antiquity (a decidedly pagan time by the way) were revived, and the very nature of literature began to change, so to was the conception of man and his place changing as well.

Petrarch wrote in both Latin and Italian, and his poetry and pose was rife with human drama.

Both Chaucer, and later Boccaccio, wrote extensively about all manner of common themes and stories.

Cervantes, in Don Quixote, not only invents the novel as a form, but satirizes the chivalric code, and vestiges of medieval feudal warfare.

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We will examine the Great Italian author of statecraft Machiavelli with a selection from the discourses later, but suffice it to say The Prince is a humanist treatise most importantly because it approaches statecraft from a purely rational and pragmatic standpoint.

There is nothing divine about the steps necessary to wrest the Italian peninsula from the grasp of foreign invaders, and Machiavelli leans heavily on the lessons and mistakes of Antiquity to call for a new, more efficient, and certainly ruthless Prince to rule.

This is no“City of God”, and his Prince is not confined by morality or the papacy.

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If Humanism is a break, if you will, from the status quo of Man who is relegated to his place in society, a subject to both the power of Church and King, possessed only with the desire to gain entrance into heaven, then is there a way to demonstrate this new way of looking at mankind?

Pico de Mirandola’s “On the Dignity of Man.”

Lets look:

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Key points to consider at the outset:

Humanists did not dispense with God, religion or their faith.

Humanists were concerned with doing away with the dry an irrelevant philosophical constructs of medieval Scholasticism, where learning had no impact on man’s development, and was separate from the workings of everyday society.

Man was still God’s creation, but why couldn't he pursue his God given talents on earth, even if it meant “breaking away” from the great Chain of Being.

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What Mirandola will do is to re-examine man’s place in the Great Chain, and propose that there is a mobility, a possibility of a change of place that does not challenge the hierarchy of the Church, but rather exalts man’s gifts.

By utilizing reason and intellect, man glorifies, he does not denigrate, the creator.

This is a religious treatise as much as it is a Humanist one.

Here we see the hybrid nature of man, evolving if you will from the Medieval “ooze” toward the shores of Renaissance Europe.

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Mirandola concedes that a man is indeed a creation of God, and the Chain of Being, in all of its degrees and strata, exists.

It will become man within this chain, that he will have a contention with.

He recognizes that man is master of all the lower creatures, and that he is in fact below the angels.

We certainly must have admiration for the angels, but does that mean we have to admire than more than ourselves?

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Man is the most fortunate being, and that is the heart of the matter for Mirandola.

God did create the heavens and the earth.

He structured the heavens according to his plan, and all moves in that vein. This obviously is not a“Copernican” or “Newtonian” view of the heavens

Lets look at where man has been placed.

Why would God place his ultimate creation in the center of it all if he simply expected mankind to be a supplicant, someone who simply knew his place, and nothing else?

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Since man was created with nothing of his own, he would have to rely on his wits, his reason, his desire, his spirit to create himself.

That is a big idea!!!

“God's love would not permit that he whose duty it was to praise God's creation should be forced to condemn himself as a creation of God.”

Hence, Mirandola pushes the idea that, contrary to the scholastic ideal and the Great Chain of Being, God actually wants us, on earth, to better ourselves, to become who we are!

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“To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.“

The animal is born with all that it will ever be, they cannot become anything other than what they are as god has made them

This was obviously long before the concept of Evolution.

Similarly, angels are fully formed for all of eternity.

It is only mankind that can form his destiny.

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Man is then in another realm, as it were.

He possesses “seeds” as Mirandola tells us, and these seeds are sown however man decides.

These seeds can take us to the ground or to the heavens, but the key is that they do “take us” somewhere based on how we utilize, nurture and harvest.

For Mirandola, man’s position is one that must be taken care of, and should not be squandered.

That does reflect the still pervasive belief in the power of god, and the recognition that this gift has been given to man, he has not created it.