ABSTRACT
During the Middle Ages, Europe was relatively isolated. Landlocked for the most part – Europeans did not travel much by sea – it was organized into feudal fiefdoms, linked by related languages and by the Christian faith. A meaningful life lived within the Christian tradition depended on how well the self lived up to Christian values. From the eighteenth century, the quest for meaning gradually turned away from religious delivery systems, as "man" himself became the object. The search was less to find God than to discover who people were and why they seemed so problematic. Western civilization had always lived according to imperatives, especially those derived from the Christian path of self-sacrifice and devotion through faith, and from the humanism evolving from the Renaissance, in which symbolic portrayals of people's inner worlds promised corrections of human foibles. The West continued to promote humanist ideals, predicated on a belief in the progressive development of humankind.
