Heritage of the Middle Ages

The underlying element on the debate whether there is continuity/discontinuity between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and/or the Modern Age was mainly the identification of medieval philosophy with a process of development in the West that culminated in Scholastics. This identification is no longer possible today, both because of the plurality of cultures in which medieval philosophy flourished and because of the multiplicity of the philosophical positions found even within the Latin West. Thus, the diverse philosophic panorama in the 14th and 15th c., once considered a clear sign of the decline of Scholasticism, is now considered a broad framework for all the various and complex struggles for change, promoted by the increasing availability of sources and by the renewal of philosophic problems typical of the 12th c. From this point of view, we can draw the same conclusion for medieval philosophy as Marcia Colish has drawn for medieval culture in general: namely that ‘the ability to preserve itself, the fascination or the renown usefulness of medieval culture for post-medieval Europeans varied from field to field,’ but we can also say the central lesson of the Middle Ages is that it ‘is possible to keep an organic link with tradition while critically using it.’ This aspect characterized in the Middle Ages, as it does even today, the teaching done in the universities, an institution which represents—though having changed in form—the most consistent and lasting institutional heritage of the Middle Ages. If we attempted a detailed summary of the relationship between medieval and modern philosophy, we can find continuity inside the process of transformation in that which Adam Funkenstein defines the ‘theological roots of modern science.’ Problems such as the omnipotence of God and His presence in the world, having emerged from the environment of Scholastic theology and studied by the greatest philosophers of the Middle Ages, were still present, though in different ways and functions, in the writings of the great philosophers and scientists of the modern age: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Newton. In addition, we find continuity in Hermetical thought and in the possibilities of transforming nature, both of which are passed down to Renaissance writers and to the occult tradition (from the Rosicrucian Order to Masonry and contemporary occultism), which accompanies modernity and constitutes its ‘dark side’. The durability of an element more marginal—the interest for Ramon Lull’s combinatory art—assumed an important role in the understanding of a relevant part of modern thought, 17th c. encyclopedism; while the mendicant orders continued to cultivate the heritage of their medieval ‘champions.’ On the other hand, instead of continuity, we see a repeated reawakening of interest for the most original philosophic arguments in medieval Latin, and above all the ontological proof for God’s existence by Anselm of Canterbury; while in the logica modernorum, historians of logic recognize one of the most original and fundamental developments for the discipline, which seems to proceed by fits and starts and whose scholars dialogue with one another across the centuries, as is demonstrated by the interest of many contemporary logicians for medieval logical research. Finally, it should not be omitted, as Alain De Libera has noted, the fact that it was during the Middle Ages that the first (and until now the one and only) significant cultural exchange with the Islamic world took place, a dialogue which gave rise to the transformations of European culture starting from the 12th c. Avoiding the risk of over-idealizing the epoch that saw also the crusades, it is necessary to acknowledge that we have to almost completely pass over modern age to find in our history a multifaceted dialogue with the cultures of ‘the others.’