ABSTRACT
The main concern of human history is the formation of the faculty of detachment and discernment. The later part of human history deals with the genesis and completion of the faculty to transcend. In the primeval system of participation, man was on the level of animals, plants, rocks and stars. He could even assume their appearance, and they, his. A new era begins with the secularization of the world of man, a process originating in the disintegration of Christian unity and completed in the period known as the Renaissance which covers at least three centuries but was actually under way for a much longer time. The intellectual movement of Scholastic speculation undermined Christian dogma and resulted in the liberation of reason and in the founding of modern philosophy and science. Communications and interrelations had been established between the Christian world and the world of Islam, where a parallel philosophical movement had developed.
