Modern Age - Spring 2017 - 166

Modern Age

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Spring 2017

Discerning what position Lilla wants his readers to hold is a frustrating task. Almost every noted critic of modern life, he thinks,
falls into the trap of believing we missed a "Road Not Taken"
and thus wound up with a flawed and mistaken result instead.
Lilla thinks the "social-psychological work" that books such as
MacIntyre's After Virtue or Gregory's The Unintended Reformation
perform turns them into "mytho-histories" whose consequences
are uniformly bad because they distort our perception of political possibility. Yet it is difficult to see why Augustine could be
held up as a simple counterpoint to thinkers such as MacIntyre
and Gregory (or Voegelin for that matter) who openly acknowledge their debts to Augustine. So, too, The City of God Against the
Pagans addressed a situation that was plainly catastrophic, by
first shifting the blame away from the new Christian religion onto
the failed hopes Romans placed in the pagan gods. Augustine
wrote dozens of highly polemical works against intellectual currents such as Pelagianism and Donatism. "But what help is it to
imagine that" the Roman gods failed, Lilla might ask, "as if civilizations pass through discrete periods defined by a single 'project'?"
Mytho-histories, as Lilla calls them, "do nothing but feed a more
insidious dream: that political action might help us find our way
back to the Road Not Taken." Instead he recommends what he
calls the "lesson of Saint Augustine": "we are destined to pave our
road as we go." Yet the difference between these two paths is far
from clear. By classifying the pairing of criticism and intellectual
history as nostalgic mytho-history, Lilla begs the question of why
we must always treat present circumstances as a fait accompli.
Dismissing commonplaces on the impact of the Reformation
or the Enlightenment as mythical is also a strange move. That
the philosophers of the Enlightenment sought to transform the
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Modern Age - Spring 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Spring 2017

Contents
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