https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=arfpixWRK68
In your talk with John Vervecky, you said that the meaning crisis started at the 12th century. Could you elaborate on this? And so, well, I think that would be way too much to go into with you guys. But what I’m going to do is I’ll give you a link to an article that I wrote which talks about the problem of the 12th century, late 12th century, of Donskotis and also of William of Ockham and kind of how they represent these two extremes of nominalism and what’s called, what’s, how do you pronounce it? Equi, equivocity, I think that’s how you pronounce it, the idea of, the idea. So the two extremes that happened in the 12th century, the beginning of the two extremes, basically are that to make God only transcendent, right? So William of Ockham wanted to make God only transcendent so that he became arbitrary and he could do whatever he wanted and then he was just this arbitrary God, you know, that had no relationship with the world, you know, and so that’s a very disturbing way to see it and then Donskotis talked about the idea that the qualities of God are equivocal to our qualities. And so when we say that God is good, God is good in the same way that we are good but just a lot more, so God is like, if you’re a little good, God is like all the good, you know, but it’s the same good and both of those, so that, what that does is that it puts God inside the world, it makes God, really makes God that kind of invisible, an invisible bearded guy on a cloud, you know, and so those two extremes, both of those are wrong, right? We need to see God as both infinitely transcendent and infinitely immanent in the world. Both those at the same time are what create a true image of God as infinite and you find that in, even in Aquinas, you still have that, you still have this beautiful relationship between the idea that God is absolutely transcendent, absolutely immanent and can only be approached through a form of analogy between the world and God but always knowing that that analogy falls short of the infinite, okay? So I hope that answers that question. These types of technical questions, I don’t like because I feel like when I answer them, I feel like a lot of people will think that I’m just spouting word salad and gibberish. I try to avoid to use technical theological terms. All right. You also see certain things happen in the 12th century that are wild, like you see the King of France try to take precedence over the spiritual authority of the Bishop of Rome. Like you see him try to kind of, to humiliate him, to kind of take onto himself maybe even the power that the Pope has, you know, if you look at the arrest and the execution of the Templars, you know, by the King of France, you can see that there’s this weird desire to kind of usurp spiritual authority, you know, and I think that that is also, that’s a place where you start to see like this competition between the political realm and the spiritual realm and you start to see the political world start to take over and, you know, it’s going to open up the space for at some point Luther, you know, getting the support of princes in order to lead political revolutions, you know, and so, yeah, so, I mean, I think that that’s what happened. That’s what started to happen in the 12th century. And, you know, and I think that there’s also the plague that played a huge role also in kind of breaking things down.