ABSTRACT
The rise of city-states and national monarchies, the break up of the old feudal structures, contributed to the increasing failure of the Roman Catholic Church to maintain a stable and unifying framework for the organisation of spiritual and material life. Against the perceived flatness and levelling of materialist atheism, the 'nova effect', an explosion of spiritualism exemplified the return of quasi-religion within the multitude of spiritual forms that grew up between orthodoxy and atheism, as the buffered self remained vulnerable, lacking real gravity and substance without transcendence. Thus the entire might of the Catholic magisterium involving 'the Crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organised, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason but rather for the difficult defence of reason'. Life is now seen as a gift, having the character of the Good, but retaining a relation, a link to the inaccessible, the sacred mystery.
