pensamiento critico y practica poetica en donald davie - Universidad ...

La teología es ‘an intricately structured intellectual edifice” (ECH, 131),
racional “even if we think its initial postulates untenable” (ECH, 131), si bien
concede que “this is not altogether a structure of human reason, inasmuch as it
rests on truths or axioms held to be revealecí’ (ECH, 157>. El siglo dieciocho,
inglés, para Davie, es el siglo de la Ilustración cristiana. En él “dissent was a
vector or a vehicle of the Enlightenment (though in ways that force us to rethink
justwhatthe ‘Enlightenment’ was’ (ED, 141>.
Esto nos lleva al segundo factor que Davie destaca en su canonización
del siglo XVIII: la ortodoxia politice (monárquica) del dissent. Para ello critica la
idealización del puritanismo del siglo XVII: ‘centainly Ihe Puritanism of Bunyan
and John Knox was ‘grand’; it was also bigoted, ferocious and uncharitable”
(ED, 12) e insiste en que ‘an enthusiasm for... seventeenth-century Puritanism
in general, is likely to disqualify us from valuíng eíghteenth-century dissent at
the rate that is deserves” (ED, 13). Para Davie:
Our Left-wing historians and opinion-makers have an obvious interesí in
extolling Ihe cromwellian republle and the intransigent or radical dissent which
brought that republ¡c into being and sustained it, as also in censuring the
dissent which, once the cromwellien interregnum was over, sought an
accommodation w¡th the restored monarchy, Stuart in the firsí place and
Hanoverian later.