Theological Origins of Modernity

296 notes to pages xi–4
5. Th is is true even of most postmodern critics who turn this modern story back
against itself.
6. Hans Blumenberg, Th e Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1989); Amos Funkenstein, Th eology and the Scientifi c Imagination from the
Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1986).
introduction
1. Sugurus Abbas S. Dionysii, Vita Ludovici, ed. Henri Waquet (Paris: Belle Lettres,
1929), 230.
2. Aristophanes, for example, distinguishes the “old” style of Aeschylus from the
“new” style of Euripides and the sophists in his Frogs. Th is topos was adopted by
Callimachus in the third century and then by many diff erent Roman authors in
their discussions of art and aesthetics. Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius distinguished
old and new kinds of historical writing, but they never used these distinctions to
name historical periods. See G. Gordon, “Medium aevum and the Middle Ages,”
Society for Pure English Tracts 19 (1925): 3–28; and Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and
History: Th e Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. W. R. Trask (New York: Harper,
1959).
3. Daniel 2:17–45. Th is idea goes back at least to Hesiod and seems to be associated
with the cycle of the seasons and the idea of the rebirth of a golden age. Th is connection,
however, should not be overemphasized.
4. From our perspective, it is diffi cult to see how this notion could have survived
the fall of Rome, but from the medieval point of view, the Eastern Empire had
never fallen and the Western Empire had been reestablished by Charlemagne.
Moreover, while some early Christian thinkers drew a clear distinction between
their own time and that of pagan Rome, medieval Christianity generally did not
recognize this break. As Reinhart Koselleck has shown, as late as 1529 Christians
still treated Alexander the Great’s victory at Issus as a current event. Koselleck,
“Modernity and the Planes of Historicity,” Economy and Society 10, no. 2 (May
1981): 166–67. While there were vast diff erences between the medieval and ancient
worlds, medieval Christians did not recognize them. Th ey lacked concrete
knowledge of the ancient world, and Roman Christianity itself had gone to great
lengths to conceal the profound transformation it was bringing about. Still, the
most important reason that medieval Christianity did not recognize these diff erences
was that in comparison with the purifi ed world to come both their world
and the world of the pagans were all-too-similar worlds of sin.
5. For a brief discussion of Joachim of Fiore, see Norman Cohn, Th e Pursuit of the
Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 108–26. For a fuller discussion
see Matthais Riedl, Joachim von Fiore: Denker der vollendeten Menschheit
(Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004).
6. On this point see Th eodore E. Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark
Ages,’” Speculum 17, no. 2 (April 1942): 226–42.