The break down of mediaeval culture (Titus Burckhardt)

"The view of life on which mediaeval culture rested, and which Dante has outlined as if by way of a final summing-up, recognised hierarchy as the highest law, in virtue of which all that has existence derives tier upon tier from Eternal Being, so that each component thing in existence finds its own principle in the fact it represents an image of something higher. In the light of Christianity this law derives from the doctrine of the incarnation of God´s eternal and divine Word, for were it not that man is the distant image of God, God would never have taken on the human form of man. 

Hierarchy is the Unity revealing itself in multiplicity through a differentiation which yet does not divide, being of a qualitative nature, so that each separate element, according to that particular character and rank that belongs to it, still remains an expression of the total order. In like manner light, broken up by a prism, scatters its manifold colours yet remains, despite all this store of wealth, a perfect and undivided whole.

When therefore this grading of reality breaks down, inasmuch as each separate element strives to become the whole, not only does each drop out of place in the eternal order of things, but also it forfeits its special and inimitable character and is no longer its own self.

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A somewhat similiar change was in progress in the realm of science (as by art): for the first time learning and research began to be cultivated which no longer had any direct connection with the integral nature of the humen soul. Up till now a rightly exercised knowledge of science was held to bestow a real wisdom on its posessor. The various  liberal sciences - which where formerly characteristically named the "liberal arts"- were supposed to confer a deeper knowledge of the intrinsic oneness of the world, built as a divine cathedral. Thus, all inherited knowledge had, up till now, posessed  a spiritual backround susceptible of being comprehended only intuitively. This conception, however, began to be overlaid by a certain intellectual routine just at the time when Renaissence was awakening. Now science was to be released; scientific research was to be promoted for its own sake and art to be cultivated for the sake of art. Hirtherto it was something unheard-of  that science should no longer pursue a spiritual purpose, one that kept in view man in his wholeness, as an immortal being reaching even beyond death. The immediate result of this change of outlook was a moral disruption..."

(Titus Burckhardt, "Siena")