" [Before Descartes] the cosmic order was seen as the embodiment of the
Ideas. The physical world around us takes the shape it does in order to body
forth an order of Ideas. This can be taken itself as an ultimate in explanation,
as it is by Plato, as ordered for the Good; or it can be integrated into Christian
theology, and the Ideas understood as the thoughts of God. But in either case,
the order is seen to be what it is because it exhibits Reason, Goodness; in
the theological variant, the Wisdom of God. There is, in a sense, a double
teleology. First, the things which surround us take the form they do in order
to exemplify ideas or archetypes. The Renaissance doctrines of "correspondences"
belong to this level. The notion that the king in the realm corresponds to
the lion among animals, or the eagle among birds, and so on, gets its sense
from the notion that the same Ideas must manifest themselves in all domains.
On the second level, the ensemble of Ideas itself takes the form that it does
in order to exhibit some perfection. On the Platonic-influenced conception
which had been handed down through neo-Platonism and the pseudo-Dionysius,
and which was dominant in medieval and early modern Europe, these perfections
included those of reason. In other words, what we would consider today as
the perfections of description or representation, of an order of perspicuous
presentation, were considered perfections of being."
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, p.160.