This post is part of a series that will explore what prominent thinkers can teach us about today’s public multiversity, the modern university with its many colleges, departments, and other administrative units that play multiple functions and roles in our society.
The modern "solution" involves a radical subversion of the medieval scenario. The "two-fold end" of man testified by medieval thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas does not mark a departure from St. Augustine, but a confirmation that there is fundamentally only one wisdom and one truth (contra certain Latin Averroists). Medieval theology does not involve a cage imposed ex machina, but a sphere of intelligibility (acquiring authority in its being revealed) vindicating natural reason, or signally natural reason's sacred/hidden destiny (St. Bonaventure's "reductio artium ad theologiam" discloses, rather than detract from freedom). Natural reason is rejected by the early prophets of the modern world in favour of a *mechanistic* reason that is not grounded in mystery, but in the absurd. The mystery of a divine coincidence between reason and authority/law is replaced by the fake/symbolic authority of autonomous reason, or by materialism making up its own laws to keep chaos at bay. Hence the "post-philosophical" situation we face, today. A far cry from the pre-philosophical barbarism Aquinas &co. respond to. Cf. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jbQDTwrT6Y0
The modern "solution" involves a radical subversion of the medieval scenario. The "two-fold end" of man testified by medieval thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas does not mark a departure from St. Augustine, but a confirmation that there is fundamentally only one wisdom and one truth (contra certain Latin Averroists). Medieval theology does not involve a cage imposed ex machina, but a sphere of intelligibility (acquiring authority in its being revealed) vindicating natural reason, or signally natural reason's sacred/hidden destiny (St. Bonaventure's "reductio artium ad theologiam" discloses, rather than detract from freedom). Natural reason is rejected by the early prophets of the modern world in favour of a *mechanistic* reason that is not grounded in mystery, but in the absurd. The mystery of a divine coincidence between reason and authority/law is replaced by the fake/symbolic authority of autonomous reason, or by materialism making up its own laws to keep chaos at bay. Hence the "post-philosophical" situation we face, today. A far cry from the pre-philosophical barbarism Aquinas &co. respond to. Cf. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jbQDTwrT6Y0