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Symposium Discussion
| Article
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10592 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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2 / 1986 |
3,099 Words |
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Thomas Molnar, Antonio de Nicolas, Robert Schadler, George Panichas, Mangalam Srinivasan, Lawrence Criner
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Thomas Molnar: I have two questions.
Antonio de Nicolas: Against whom?
Molnar: Not against, but not with, either.
de Nicolas: (Laughter). Ah, you see, and/or, there goes the loss of distributive love. Where is the logic?
Molnar: One concerns what you just said about this reinventing of the imagination and the sacred. I think that you made the mistake that you have just attacked. These things don't come about by reaching, by suddenly deciding around the table that the world has gone wrong, that modernity has destroyed tradition and that therefore what we have to do is to devise a new way of getting the tradition back.
I don't think that that is how it works. I've been accused lately of having become a Hegelian. I accept. Maybe I have become something of a Hegelian (although I think that my observations fit Christianity better than the Hegelian system). Man is not all-powerful. Man is basically just what the tradition has always said: man occupies a very small place in the big cosmos, in which place he is more of the sufferer. He passively accepts certain forces more than he shapes them. And I believe that he would be very happy to be not the creator of the universe or the re-creator of the universe but was just to occupy a very modest place.
Far greater forces are shaping us and our destinies, our civilizations, than are available for our manipulation. I come back to this idea that without cosmology changing (and we have strictly speaking no influence over that), we also will not change.
I have found there has been a great break, whether or not this break comes in the fourteenth century as many people have suggested. The fourteenth century is the century of nominalism. It is the century when the church itself becomes weak for various reasons--historical, political, and theological reasons. It is the epoch of scholasticism, decrepit scholasticism, which allowed Occam to be a leading philosopher and which then led to other things--the Reformation, Renaissance, and so on.
Therefore, whether we date the break from the fourteenth century or any other century (and indeed there are as many locations for
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