St. Boniface House

I’ve finally been able to pick up my copy of Peter Leithart’s Deep Comedy and I am enjoying it immensely.  The first chapter outlines the different threads of the pagan view of the course of history as a cyclical series of four (or five) ages.  Each age is named after a metal, and in the succession of ages the names are of metals that are increasingly less valuable (gold, silver, bronze, iron–some accounts of this myth include an “Age of Heroes” between bronze and iron). Accordingly, each age is a diminished version of the one preceeding it.  Leithart’s argument is that the ancient pagan view of history was entirely pessimistic.  In fact, the most optimistic perspective to be found in the classical mythology is that presented by Virgil, who “comes closer than any in the classical world…to a conception of an eschatological resolution to history” (pg. 12).  But even Virgil cannot do better than to see history return to the “golden age”, and thus the most hopeful view the ancient world has to offer cannot approximate the glorious advance of history from Eden to the New Jerusalem, from garden to garden-city.

One thing that was particularly interesting about Leithart’s reading of the classical pagans on the four or five ages of history was what they viewed as the characteristics of “the golden age”.  The perfect world is one without any culture whatsoever.  “[M]en of the golden age were completely innocent of culture, including agri-culture, as well as of social and political institutions and of economic activities.  For [Ovid and Hesiod], culture is a product of the process of degeneration, a ‘fall’ from nature” (pg. 7). In the golden age men were completely natural, they gathered their food, and otherwise they did not cause any sort of stain on “nature”.  If there is any hope for the future at all, it is to be found in the extent that we can return to this “all-natural” state.  The world is good only if man does not alter it in any way.  This view is not limited to ancient pagans, of course.  Modern environmentalist types, even Christian ones, have fallen prey to this kind of thinking.  Whether the relationship between modern environmentalists and pagan mythologists is genealogical or a case of shared presuppositions leading to similar conclusions is another question.  No doubt the extent to which one’s tradition has been subverted by Greek philosophy has some bearing on the issue.  Nevertheless, this kind of thinking is thoroughly pagan. 

A rejection of the hippie “we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden” mentality does not entail that such a thing as “Christian Environmentalism” is impossible, nor does it imply carte blanche for any kind of industrialism whatsoever.  It does mean that we are called to exercise dominion in such a way that we imitate the Triune God’s creativeness in transforming the world from glory unto glory, in the creation of a culture glorifying to the Lord.  Perhaps I’ll write more about that as I proceed in Dr. Leithart’s book.