The Medieval Period: Positive and Negative Impacts to Western Culture

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The Medieval Period: Positive and Negative Impacts to Western Culture
Introduction: The Medieval Period and the Western Culture
The Medieval Period spanned the centuries after the total collapse of the Western Roman Empire until the Renaissance Age and includes the Dark Ages and the Crusades. In this paper will be particularly looking at the Medieval Period or the Middle Ages and its influences to the Western culture. Specifically, the paper seeks to answer the following questions: what artistic, political, technological, economic, social, philosophical, religious, and military developments were shaped by the Western culture during this period? How did it change the world and who controls the developments (gatekeepers) that ensued thereafter?
Philosophy in the Medieval Period
Oftentimes, scholars, mostly historians, are why study the Middle Ages? During this period, the Western civilization has become increasingly influenced by the rising tide of Christianity. There are a number of reasons for its increasing dominance over matters of social concerns but most notably, the fall of the Western Roman Empire was marked with unprecedented social unrest and the Church took the authority to maintain stability and the continuity of Western civilization. Indeed, this period seemed so remote and markedly different from the 20th century. Christopher Dyer (2) argued that “we owe majority of our villages and towns, boundaries, roads and institutions to the middle ages… Our world is based on foundations laid before 1520, and we need to know about that phase of our development.”
Most scholars tend to describe the Medieval Period as the “Age of Faith” while the 17th century to the present as the “Age of Reason.” But Carl Becker argued that medieval philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas and modern philosophers like Voltaire do have something in common that is, “the profound conviction that their beliefs could be reasonably demonstrated” (In Grant 6). The emerging Western civilization was marked by the incipient attitudes toward reason and rationality. However, by Western civilization, Edward Grant (8) referred to the “new society that emerged from the transformation of the Roman Empire in Western Europe during the turbulent centuries of the barbarian invasions – from approximately the sixth to tenth centuries.”
Philosophy of the Middle Ages was dominated by the Christian Aristotelianism– debated over most notably by St. Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham (King 83). Briefly, such philosophy concerned itself in explaining the representationality of mental representations. The arguments revolve around the capability of the mind to discern the existence of something by virtue of mental representation and, mutatis mutandis, that of God through mental representation.
Economy, Politics and Culture of the Medieval Period
The dominance of Christianity in the realm of philosophy, which by the standards of that period was not as ridiculous as it seems in the advent of the modern period, is closely associated with the dominance of the Church in economy and politics of the Middle Ages. According to Dyer (2), the economic history of the middle ages began during the massive clearances of land in the third millennium BC. Furthermore,
It might be tempting to start with Roman Britain, when cities and lines of communication of lasting importance were established. The barbarian invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries offer another convenient point to begin, when English-speaking settlers arrived, and embryonic states and the Christian church developed” (Dyer 2).<...