The Great Chain of Being and Nested Teleology

Part 4 of 10 on the history of philosophy

The medieval mind was untroubled by the question, “What is the meaning of life?” because of teleology. Teleological explanation enjoyed an unchallenged dominance in the general cognitive paradigm during that period. As the entry for “the Meaning of Life” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “The Christian-dominated Medieval period did not produce thinkers who asked in any radical way about the meaning of life, because everyone already had a perfectly good answer, the one provided by the Christian story.”

An individual living in the Middle Ages did not feel any lack with respect to what we now think of as “the meaning of life.” If questions of the kind we think about occurred to them, untroubling answers were ready to hand. 

It was teleology that put meat on the bones of a medieval person’s meaning. The pervasive, felt legitimacy of teleological explanations combined with a divinely sanctioned hierarchy, wherein everyone and everything had its proper role or purpose. This hie…