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Renaissance humanism in general and the Protestant Reformation in particular. Heres
how the story goes. During the High Middle Ages, scholastic theology had achieved a
glorious philosophical and cultural hegemony which served as the glue which held
Christendom together. At the center of this hegemony lay the philosophy of Aristotle, as
interpreted by St. Thomas, with its inherently teleological structure. This teleology gave
the universe, and particularly human beings, a sense of place and interpretive scheme for
understanding the world, a great chain of being into which everything fit. This
epistemology was known as the Via Antiqua (old path) (read also here scholasticism and
Aristotelian reason) and under its pedagogical gaze Christendom flourished and all was
right with the world. With trusty guides such as Aristotle, St. Thomas, Duns Scotus, and
Peter Lombard, one could glory in a culture produced by and for the Church. This
epistemology offered a very tidy unified field of knowledge.
But one day, a philosophical disruption ruined Christendoms cultural and
philosophical paradise when the scholastic theologian William of Occam (cue the villain
music here) began questioning the medieval philosophical synthesis, and suggested a
different course. This perspective was subsequently dubbed the Via Moderna or
nominalism. Occam dissented from Thomism and basically claimed that St. Thomas had
actually gotten Aristotle wrong. One need not, Occam allowed, divine some inherent
teleological structure to the physical world in order to understand it. Rather, one could
go to the particular things themselves and learn how that thing, in fact, worked. As a
result, early modern thinkers like Francis Bacon, influenced by Occam, eventually said
that if you wanted to understand what made a frog tick, you need not figure out where the
frog fit in a universal scale of perfection where the frog fit in the great chain of being