[MD] Ideas and Gods

[Matt Kundert]

Jon said:
And Matt, changelessness, or the eternal is one of those 
archetypes of modernism I was speaking of, derived from 
God's nature.

And the with our new paradigm in science and the rest of 
culture what we have is absolute changlessness being 
abandoned, and explained away in terms of an absolute 
change. This is what moq does, it absolutizes change. Even 
if change is supposed to freeze as sq, it is only relative, 
not eternal. The absolute principle here is Change. This, 
Matt, again is one of the archetypes of this age-change-and 
it is traceable back from physics to philosophy to theology, 
as was the case with the paradigm of modernism.

Matt:
I still find talking about "archetypes" clumsy, but I take 
your point that "change," which the Greeks began struggling 
with conceptually after the birth of a literate culture began 
pushing over the oral one, is a more central feature of 
European cultures since, say, the 19th century.

However, I take that to be a good thing.  And, following 
the work of people like Hans Blumenburg in The Legitimacy 
of the Modern Age and Bernard Yack in The Longing for 
Total Revolution, I take several forms of life and 
conceptual difficulty to be distinctly modern, as similar as 
they may seem to problems in ancient Greece or medieval 
Rome.  Their work counteracts the flattening of historical 
change that intellectual historians like Eric Voeglin and 
Karl Lowith enact when they reduce modern dilemmas to 
(largely) theological ones.

Progress, or secularization, is not simply the Christian view 
of history sans God.  That's usually what is eventually 
suggested, and that without God "modern progress" is fake 
and bad.  I think there have been many significant, if 
occasionally subtle, changes that throw up new problems 
that require new solutions, and old problems that simply 
fade away.

Matt
 		 	   		  
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