I have had in graduate school a very scholastic education and this has led me to an interesting question to think about: Were the intellectual developments during the Middle Ages (this includes the Dark Ages) continued by the Renaissance (i.e. the continuity thesis) or in direct opposition to it (i.e. the conflict thesis)? I honestly don’t know what position is more correct.

Yes, Aristotle was wrong about the earth being in the center of the universe but he was right about there being a first cause to the universe’s origins. Aquinas and contemporaries of his didn’t know that the sun was in the center of the universe but they put an emphasis on man as a spiritual being in nature; Aristotelian natural philosophy discusses this as well but without an emphasis on a spiritual essence of man (Plato was much more focused on this but his epistemology is wrong). On the other hand, the “Copernican Revolution” of the discovery of man not being in the center of the universe (although some Greeks knew this way before Copernicus or Galileo) could not have been found in the Middle Ages to my knowledge; it begs us to think that man is alone in the world because we just aren’t in the center of everything anymore. The feelings of aloneness and anxiety would pave the way for many 19th century thinkers like the Existentialist’s and Hegelian’s and 20th century thinkers such as the Analytics and Logical Positivists.

To quote Hans Blumenberg in The Genesis of the Copernican World:

“The fact that a powerful stream of ancient, especially Stoic, ele­ments of admiration of the cosmos flowed into the early Christian literature first becomes intelligible when one recognizes their function of repelling Gnosticism. Maintaining the Creation as the work of a true and good God against the suspicion that it derived from a demiurge and had a demonic function represses the original biblical fear of the heavenly bodies' being turned into idols and also the idea, which was no less authentic to theology, of man’s foreignness in this world. That is the basis of the fact, that the theology of the Creation begins seriously to compete with that of the Redemption-a process that left its imprint on the entire Middle Ages…”

He continues:

“Only the African, Arnobius, who walked on the edge of the abyss of heresy, presented man's natural situation in the world-in his apolo­getic work, composed at the beginning of the fourth century-as one of not being surprised by the world. For that purpose, Arnobius went back, once again, to the outline of the (initially Platonic, then Aristo­telian) allegory of the cave, and opposed to it an antithetical variant. His thought experiment imagines, in the interior of the Earth, a habitable room, which is shielded from the change of the seasons and from the sounds of nature, illuminated only by a constant twi­light, and isolated by an entrance that is obstructed by a labyrinth. In this unstocked experimental space of thought a human child grows up who is wordlessly fed, tended, and watched over by a naked nurse, and whose entire rearing is aimed at not allowing needs and agitations to arise, and thus at preserving the unneedy poverty of the human prehistory depicted by Lucretius in his 'history of culture.' The question toward which everything is directed and in which the con­frontation with both the Platonic and the Aristotelian cave allegories culminates is the question of the effect of emerging from the cave. At an arbitrarily chosen age-the later it is, the more instructive [the experiment]-this person is brought out of his isolation, confronted with the outside world, and brought together with other people. How will he behave, what will he say, if he is expected to testify about himself and about where he comes from? He will, so Arnobius con­firms, meet every demand for comprehension stupidly and with indifference, and will let the world be, without fear and without amazement.”

What the Middle Ages did seem to provide intellectually was a revival in the study of the world around and man’s place in it (as least building a foundation for understanding our place in it) while also simultaneously constricting man from further knowledge. Aquinas himself was condemned in 1277 for his work along with Plato and Aristotle years before in 1270. Regardless, there seems in my own study to be a connection somewhere between the intellectualism of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance but I don’t know if I can exactly call this a continuation of tradition.