The Cosmos as Conduit: Contuition into the Higher Middle Ages

I suggest, perhaps to my peril, that the above quotation has amounted to a rallying cry for various philosopher-scientists—as indeed one will describe those discussed herein—across a long and potentially dangerous period of time, and that the culmination of that newly-illumined period was the engendering of a ‘scientific’ tradition in the Latin West that may have grown into the systematic methodological naturalism many call ‘science’ today. Contemporary arguments surrounding the conceptual constitution of our study of the natural world is, however, far beyond the parameters of this chapter. Instead, one must make do with this chapter’s attempt to demonstrate how predominately Neo-Platonic thinkers simultaneously explicated the material world’s and humanity’s potentiality. Many of these thinkers, to slightly augment the scope of Willemien Otten’s Chartrian investigation ‘[had a] … desire to reveal the world as organically tied to its Maker [and that] provides the spark, so to speak, which sets the minds of these authors ablaze.’