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 hierarchical aspect of the Medieval paradigm was called “the Great Chain of Being.” Arthur Lovejoy wrote a book of intellectual history with that title in which he explored how this hierarchy of nested purposes provided a way of understanding the universe and humanity’s place within it which persisted over more than a dozen centuries, with only minor mutations.
It posits a scalanaturae or “nature’s ladder.” From bottom to top it goes: minerals, animals, humans, angles, and God at the top. Within minerals, for example, there was a hierarchy and within animals there was a hierarchy and so on.
Every being in all creation had a proper place in the hierarchy synonymous with its proper function and role in the whole. It was like an ante-diluvian Marie Kondo: a place for everything and everything in its place.
Each level of entities was ranked in terms of its participation in the divine perfection of God. God has the properties, for example, of existence, life, will, reason, immortality, omniscience, omnipotence, and ominbenevolence. Angels have the properties of existence, life, will, reason, and immorality, while lacking what makes God alone all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. Humans have existence, life, will and reason, but lack immortality and the rest. Animals have existence, life and will, lacking reason and immortality and the rest. Plants have existence and life but no will, no reason etc. While, at the very bottom, minerals lack reason, will and life, etc., and possess only existence.
From bottom to top, the beings in the chain increase with value as we go up. And from top to bottom, the higher beings have a kind of authority, a kind of power over, and a kind of divine sanction to make use of, the beings below. For example, the plants were superior to the minerals and were understood to possess divine sanction to pull their sustenance from the minerals in the ground below them.
Angels were ranked. The list included Seraphim at the top, then Cherubim and Archangels down below. Animals were ranked. Vertebrates as a kind were ranked higher than invertebrates. The highest animal was the chimpanzee.
Ranking among humans was simple in the Middle Ages. There were only 3 classes—peasants, clergy, lords—and the King at the top. Like plants’ divine sanction to exert power over and to treat minerals as a means to an end, and like humanity’s divine sanction to use as we saw fit all minerals, all plants, and all animals, the King had power over the lords, clergy, and peasants. King James I said, “Kings are God’s lieutenants on earth.” The French word “lieutenant” derives from the words lieu or “place” and tener “to hold.” Thus, the King was a placeholder for God on Earth.
Any threats to the hierarchy—any insubordination, any attempted usurpation of the King, and even any peasant’s mere quotidian laziness—were thus a blasphemy against God and His divine sanction of the Great Chain of Being. It may sound stultifying to our modern ears; its immobility and unfreedom offends our sensibilities. But the interconnectedness and the teleological nature of the hierarchy worked both ways. A King was justified when he forced the peasants to work the lords’ fields; just as any animal was justified in eating a lower animal or any plant. But it also went the other way: a peasant extracted considerable meaning knowing that his labor and his place in the hierarchy served the stability of the whole—the whole, which was, after all, God’s plan.
When the feudalism occasioned by the Great Chain of Being was overturned by the French Revolution—itself a part of the Enlightenment and an explicit attempt to make the structure of society more rational and fair—humanity gained a great deal of freedom but it also lost access to a sense of ready-to-hand meaning of life.