MDDM World-as-text

[jbor]

And I certainly think that these similarities between the medieval worldview
and postmodernism are something which Pynchon is alluding to in the
'Luddite' essay, when he talks about the 18th C. nostalgia for the Gothic,
and "magic", and the "Age of Miracles".

[...]

The craze for Gothic fiction after 'The Castle of Otranto' was grounded, I
suspect, in deep and religious yearnings for that earlier mythical time
which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways more and less
literal, folks in the 18th century believed that once upon a time all kinds
of things had been possible which were no longer so. Giants, dragons,
spells. The laws of nature had not been so strictly formulated back then.
What had once been true working magic had, by the Age of Reason, degenerated
into mere machinery. Blake's dark Satanic mills represented an old magic
that, like Satan, had fallen from grace. As religion was being more and more
secularized into Deism and nonbelief, the abiding human hunger for evidence
of God and afterlife, for salvation - bodily resurrection, if possible -
remained. 

[...]

http://parallel.park.uga.edu/~arburke/texts/luddite.html

The difference is, of course, that postmodernism doesn't fall back on faith
in a Christian God as the ultimate or pre-eminent "truth". There is no such
thing as the "final cause" outside human experience/belief/perception, or,
more accurately, there is a recognition that different individuals and
different cultures have different belief systems and different conceptions
of what that "final cause" is, or even of whether there is such a thing as a
"final cause" (ontology). It's a healthy thing, I think, to challenge the
assumption that the Christian story of the world is the "true" story,
Christianity having been responsible for "ev'ry Crusade, Inquisition,
Sectarian War, the millions of lives, the seas of blood" (_M&D_ 75-6), as
Pynchon's Ethelmer notes.

best


Paul wrote:

> 
> Brought out in the J. Bottum article (which Otto pointed us to) was the fact
> that in the Medieval Christian world getting beyond the text,  to knowledge of
> the thing itself as they would have it, wasn't the problem  it is today
> because
> they had something called the final cause, the final cause being God.
> 
> Bottum says several times that knowledge is impossible without God. He has
> several quite clever ways of putting it so as to allign the premoderns with
> the
> postmoderns.  For example,  "only for a brief period in the history of the
> West--the period of modern times--did anyone seriously suppose that the human
> beings could hold knowledge without God.
> (true perhaps but, as Bottum not only admits but rather emphasizes, no reason
> in itself to believe)
> 
> There does at any rate  seem to be a Christian analog to the postmodern
> insight
> that there is nothing beyond the text. The postmoderns of course focus on
> linguistic ideas rather than Aristotelian concepts of causality.
> 
> None of this changes anything. Modernity happened and postmodernity did too.
> 
> P.
> 
> 
>