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. (more…)