I'm sure I am. One of the basic realities of human nature is that it is impossible to escape bias. The closest we can come is to be aware of our biases and to try to remind ourselves of them.
The most biased people in the world, are those who think they are not biased.
This has actually become my biggest pet peeve when talking to many Protestants. The extremely common attitude that they just take their view of scripture as simply what scripture means. There is no question of bias or interpretation. They are just right and everything they believe comes right from the Bible.
The break down of late antiquity was real, caused by plague, endemic war, leading to mass migration and resulting collapse of Roman administrative and economic infrastructure. However the change in philosophy and worldview was nothing remotely like the change that happens going from Medieval to Modern.
It is true that many of the sources of classical knowledge were lost, particularly Aristotle, but not all. The Medieval mind was still extremely heavily based on the surviving Platonic documents, even though some of these were only fragments that were preserved in commentary from other authors etc.
If you want a good overview of this, I would recommend C.S. Lewis' book The Discarded Image. It is based off of the lectures that he gave to his Medieval Literature students preparing them to read medieval literature by giving them a crash course in Medieval thought, cosmology, and worldview.
I don't mean to say that the Medievals were exactly like the Ancients. There obviously was development and change. The Medieval Mind was not exactly the same as the Ancient Mind, but there was a basic continuity of thought and belief. They had the same fundamental beliefs about the world and the nature of reality, and those formed the basis of everything else.
The Aristotelian works were rediscovered in the 13th century through contact with the Islamic world, particularly Averroes in Spain. This produced an immediate reaction in the Scholastic community (the Christian universities of Europe). This reaction included not only those who wanted to redefine Christianity based on Aristotle, but also a strain of Islamic influence that creeps in as well.
Thomas Aquinas basically refuted those scholars who were too heavily influenced by Averroes and he reconciled Aristotle and Plato with Christian doctrine, producing what is, to this day, viewed by many as almost definitive Catholic thought. this isn't quite right because Catholic thought is much broader and multifaceted, but absolutely Thomas was and is a central figure in Catholic thought.
The destruction of medieval thought began within a generation of Thomas Aquinas' death. By the mid to late 1300's William of Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, and their fellows introduced the ideas that would pave the way of Modernism, and destroy medieval and ancient thought.
One of the changes that usually goes unnoticed in this process was the change in how language was taught at the universities. Prior to this time Metaphysics had been the dominant branch of philosophy and language was taught based on metaphysical thought. The idea being that words are properly related to things, that words are almost incarnational. The thing is present in the word. This relates to Platonic/Aristotelian/Thomistic concepts of how the Forms are present in the intellect etc.
Around this time, Logic began to supplant Metaphysics as the dominant or foundational discipline in philosophy, especially at Oxford. This began to change how language was taught. Instead of thinking that words are directly tied to things, words began to be viewed as essentially logical tokens which were either validly used or invalidly used.
This, together with Nominalism, which lead to words being viewed as only labels that are applied to things only by human convention degraded our whole concept of language and though mostly overlooked, was absolutely foundational to the change of thought that happened.
The influence of Islam also showed up in the rise of Voluntarism. Basically resulting in the view that God's sovereignty means that his decisions, including what is good and what is evil, are totally arbitrary, simply resulting from whatever God happened to choose.
William of Ockham, for instance taught that God could have made murder good, and could have made martyrdom sinful. He could have made us hate a virtue instead of love, and could have ordered us to hate him. This idea, in particular radically changed views on how salvation worked.
It would probably not be correct to say that most of these ideas had never existed before, but they had never been the mainstream before for certain. They radically changed how the world was viewed. Keep in mind that this was in the 1300's Before the Renaissance really got rolling and certainly before the switchover to modernity. But they laid the foundation. They essentially destroyed what went before.
For example, Luther considered himself to be a devoted student of William of Ockham and even referred to Ockham as his master.
Nominalism and Voluntarism alone were earth-shattering. But you also have the origin of the modern conflict between science and religion. Both William and Marsilius promoted the idea of duplex veritas "two truths". They argued that there could be religious truths of faith, which contradicted the truths of natural philosophy known by reason and observation, and that both could be believed simultaneously.
This was the beginning which would eventually lead to the secularist dismissal of the supernatural as "superstition".
The renaissance was a further nail in the coffin, because of its obsession with elegance and style over substance. As you mention the scholars of the renaissance, fell in love with the Latin style of Cicero and the other classical era writers. They loved the poetics, etc. Nothing wrong with that of course, but it lead them to mock and dismiss the intellectual work of the medieval scholars simply because the Latin was clunky and inelegant. In education they tended to replace philosophy with poetics and the like.
By the time you get to the 1500's you have large movements going on in the Universities of Europe that don't resemble orthodox Catholicism at all.
For example, most people don't realize that the doctrine of salvation that Luther reacted against, wasn't even what the Church taught. It was a new idea, born out of Voluntarism and the Via Moderna, which was being taught in the universities, and had particular control over the university where Luther was educated.
This view taught that it was impossible for man to bride the gap between God and man due to sin. So, because God could arbitrarily do whatever he wanted, they taught that God had put in place an economy of salvation that required man to "do his best" and then God would make up the difference, because man could never do enough.
This places all the emphasis on Man's action. It also puts you in an impossible quandary because any person really ever say "I did my best". Could you have prayed 1 minute more? Could you have given one more penny to charity? and so on. This is why Luther struggled so badly with scrupulosity and feared so much for his salvation.
His eventual break with this doctrine produced an overreaction that caused a break with the Church. Luther also, following his master Ockham also rejected Aristotle and Plato, which put him at odds with a variety of things, most importantly the Eucharist.
there would never have been a Luther, without Nominalism, Voluntarism, Duplex Veritas, Caesero-Papism, etc. These had nothing to do with the Bible, except in the sense that they influence how you understand it.
I would admit that I overstated the case deliberately for effect. I grew up Protestant, and my subsequent study showed me that I was basically lied to. Not literally, in that the people who taught me didn't realize that what they were teaching was unntrue. However, it is accurate to say that he Protestant version of these events is heavily augmented by myth. The way protestants tell it is not accurate.
In reality both sides were arguing from scripture. The point I am attempting to get across, admittedly using some exaggeration is that the common notion that the Protestants just returned to the Bible and the Catholic teachings were all just accretions that ignored and contradicted the Bible is false.
There were, of course, legitimate complaints against the Church at the time. Even the Catholics of the time admitted this.
One of the things that ultimately was most influential in my returning to the Catholic Church was that I saw how much sense Catholic Teaching made biblically. It fit so much better with and made so much more sense of the Bible. One of the reason I had begun to look towards leaving my church tradition that I grew up in was because I began to run into questions about things that I was reading in the bible that no one could answer and that just made no sense in the context of our doctrines. I began to see things that our doctrines just dismissed and ignored, that Catholic teaching made sense of.
As a result I am passionate about the fact that Catholic teaching IS biblical and is biblically accurate. Thus it has become a pet peeve that I constantly get the attitude from Protestants that Catholicism is just unbiblical and Catholics don't believe the bible and don't know the bible and if they did they'd just become Protestant.
I do tend to hold a similar view myself, originally stated by John Newman "To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant". It is one thing to know historical facts and timelines. It is another to begin to put yourself into the thought and mind of historical cultures and try to see the world through their eyes. I am convinced that Protestantism can only exist because of our modern, and now post-modern worldview.
This is beside the point of the political conversation here, but one of the problems with Protestantism is that it makes ever person their own Pope. Catholics have one Pope. Protestants have a hundred million. My point being, why is Wycliffe or Hus right about what the Bible says? When I was a Protestant I literally spent years arguing with other Protestants and all of us were convinced that we had the correct understanding of scripture?
I have a high view of reason, but your own reason is not sufficient to understand scripture. Perhaps ironically the Bible itself showed me this. If you go through and look in the New Testament at all the cases where it says that OT prophecies were fulfilled and how they were fulfilled, I am 100% convinced that no human intellect would EVER have come up with those interpretations or properly understood those scriptures.
I was also raised Charismatic, so of course we believed that the Holy Spirit would give us understanding, and speak to us individually, etc. The problem there was that in my own church, which was tiny, we routinely had people conflicting, claiming that the Holy Spirit had told them completely opposite things... so who is the Spirit speaking to? any of them?
The Biblical answer to this conundrum is that the Church is imbued with authority to interpret, to teach, and to judge in such matters and the Holy Spirit leads the Church.
Regarding this history you point out and its bearing on my previous argument. I'm sure the Reformers were influenced by Hus and Wycliffe. But using Luther as an example... did he read Hus's letter before, or after he was taught at university? Was that letter formative on his entire worldview for years? or did it come after his worldview had already been formed?
I would submit that it is just as possible that he only agreed with Hus, because he had already had the foundation laid in his worldview.
But this, ultimately is exactly what I'm getting at. Protestants like to think that the Reformers were just drawing from forerunners like Wycliffe and Hus. In reality the ideas of William of Ockham and Marsilius of Padua had greater influence and more far reaching effects.
This is they mythology of the Reformation.
Of course, it is foolish to think that anything in history has one and only one cause. People and ideas are complex, there almost always many factors involved.
I think I just showed that this notion is more true than you previously admitted.
CONTINIUED in another post, because I got too long winded...
