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Hans Jonas writes in an essay on technological and scientific advance that one of the key cultural shifts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a, well, new understanding of "new," and a corresponding revision of traditional ways of thinking about history:
"A sign of this spreading mood is the currency of the word 'new,' which from the sixteenth century on we encounter all over Europe (and much earlier in Italy) as a commendatory epithet. That 'novelty' is a recommendation is by no means the rule in the history of cultures; in fact, it was itself a signal and perhaps unique novelty. In the Graeco-Roman world, for instance, which of all former ages is most akin to modernity in so many respects, the highest recommendation for a view, a maxim, a truth was its reputed antiquity . . . novelty was no recommendation, and its appearance was generally shunned."
Up to the 16th and 17th centuries, "it was natural to believe that in looking back into the past we look into a perspective of greater age and maturity. We late-comers are the heirs of more inspired times, the recipients of a wisdom so much 'older' than ourselves. A strangely persuasive, perspectival illusion was at work in this belief: What comes to us from the remote past has acquired the superiority of great age by the fact that it has been transmitted for so long, and the age of the thing transmitted is somehow transferred to the source that produced it. It was a curiously startling discovery of the obvious when the sixteenth and seventeenth century moderns contended that we moderns are the older ones; that mankind in times past was younger, thus more prone to errors of childhood; that greater maturity was on our side, and that we, taught and disenchanted by the errors of the past, are better fitted to tackle the questions of nature and man."
It would be interesting to see how the apocalyptic interests of the Reformation (recently highlighted by several historians) and the development of postmillennialism fit into this history.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, August 24, 2006 at 02:33 PM
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