Gornahoor places the fateful junction of Western intellectual history at Francis Bacon. It was Bacon’s head-on assault against metaphysical knowledge (“useless knowledge” that is not power) which signaled Western intention to abandon the medieval project wholesale. Although at various times and places, other movements had been made, Bacon’s New Atlantis was more completely “modern” and also more suited to corrupt its age. Bacon (for instance) uses “Magic” to refer to applied science & technology, while “Knowledge” becomes essentially what we mean today as “Science”. Blake’s “dark, Satanic mills” were seen, prophecied, & invoked by Bacon, and in their present form. Other “seers” had conjured up similar forms, but Bacon was seminally specific. Bacon’s project (for instance) is innately inherent in William of Ockham’s denial of universals. Richard Weaver writes:
Surely we are justified in saying of our time: If you seek the monument to our folly, look about you. In our own day we have seen cities obliterated and ancient faiths stricken. We may well ask, in the words of Matthew, whether we are not faced with “great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world.” We have for many years moved with a brash confidence that man had achieved a position of independence which rendered the ancient restraints needless. Now, in the first half of the twentieth century, at the height of modern progress, we behold unprecedented outbreaks of hatred and violence; we have seen whole nations desolated by war and turned into penal camps by their conquerors; we find half of mankind looking upon the other half as criminal. Everywhere occur symptoms of mass psychosis. Most portentous of all, there appear diverging bases of value, so that our single planetary globe is mocked by worlds of different understanding. These signs of disintegration arouse fear, and fear leads to desperate unilateral efforts toward survival, which only forward the process.
Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.
One may be accused here of oversimplifying the historical process, but I take the view that the conscious policies of men and governments are not mere rationalizations of what has been brought about by unaccountable forces. They are rather deductions from our most basic ideas of human destiny, and they have a great, though not unobstructed, power to determine out course.
For this reason I turn to William of Occam as the best representative of a change which came over man’s conception of reality at this historic juncture. It was William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence. His triumph tended to leave universal terms mere names serving our convenience. The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of humankind. The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses. With this change in the affirmation of what is real,, the whole orientation of culture takes a turn, and we are on the road to modern empiricism.
Conservatives quote Weaver all the time, but nobody takes this seminal passage seriously (or indeed, seems to have read him attentively at all). George Heart in Dogmatic Faith & Gnostic Vivifying Knowledge actually suggests that Aquinas represents a “first compromise” by way of Aristotle’s influence. Although Hylomorphism is a far cry from modern empiricism, it was a first step:
Although Albertus Magnus himself started to work at amending Aristotle’s most conspicuous aberrations, he could never bring his work to completion, and he left the rest of that impossible task to his disciple Thomas Aquinas. We say “impossible” because we fully know now that Plato and his unfaithful disciple who betrayed his teachings after having spent 20 years in the Academy could never be reconciled. Origen was right when he said that Aristotle was simply a traitor.
Heart thinks that Aquinas betrayed Aristotle to attempt to synthesize Plato & his wayward student, but others were not so discriminating; Catholics should not forget that in 1210, the Church found it necessary to issue a condemnation of indiscriminate use of Aristotle, Averroes, and Avicenna. The threat from combining things that ought not to be combined was “sterile heterogeneity”, such as can be found in St. Anselm (1033-1109).
As GK Chesterton noted, the big task (exoterically) of our present generation is to conduct committees of correspondence in order to lay the groundwork for understanding what was lost, and why. A scope for action is very limited, but this is to simply put us in the same position as those who created the avenues of decay all those centuries ago – we will be forced to rethink: a man in prison has time for reflection, at last.
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