I've probably spent more time on Virgil's Aeneid these past few months than on any other single topic here. So what does Virgil’s Aeneid have to do with postmodern theory? Well, everything. There is a part of postmodern thinking which says that the great "stories to live by" are, well, not all that great, and certainly not to live by. The Aeneid sets itself out against the suspicion of metanarratives. It is one of the great metanarratives of culture. It is an architectural blueprint for Augustan expansion in the Mediterranean, north Africa, Asia Minor, northern Europe, and into the Middle East and beyond. And as such its influence is not merely “western”, in the limited sense of the term. It is a vision of human community, a vision which as powerful enough to sustain not only the embodiment of Roman ideals in the classical world, but even to help inform the vision of medieval Christianity and Renaissance humanism.
What Virgil reminds us of is the second half of the concept of a "story to live by". In fact, I suspect he would say that there is not only the "concept", but the practice. It is a story "to live by." It must be worked out in the physical world. Greek idealism is not sufficient; there must be a practice, in order for it to be a real story "to live by".
One of the great problems of the (post) Reformation era in the west is the fracturing of “church” in a formal sense. I might suggest that much of North American protestant individualism is itself a cousin of post modern rejection of metanarrative. (It is also the reason why “yet another group” is not really the answer the problem, but then that was why I spent so many posts on Cyprian of Carthage.) It is not the rejection of the larger idea of a universal “story to live by”; the First Bible Faith Apostolic Church of Yourtown will always have copies of the story to read. It is rather the rejection of a universal place in which to hear it. That universal place is the “Church”. It is the rejection of the Church as catholic, and as the place in which the story needs to be heard. It is the rejection of meta-community, which then lends credence to the idea of rejecting the meta narrative by which that community lived. Of course it is not overt in all cases, and it is not covert in other cases. The "bible believing church" will never say they reject the scriptures. By the same token, individualism in Christian community can reject the meta-community in which the story is meant to be read, and heard, and interpreted and lived. On the other hand there is the overt rejection of Scripture as a "given" metanarrative (eg Spong et al.) in some parts of the Anglican world. This is again a cousin to the more fundamentalist strains in Christianity: the principle of individual autonomy is supreme. Freedom (whatever that means) from something imposed or "given" from an authority other than the self, rules the day. I think that an extreme form of liberalism which has come out of an "independant fundamentalist" background has not really shifted its priniciples all that much. The "independant" part is still the controlling factor. Which is why, in my experience (the arbiter of all judgment), many people who come out of the one seem to so easily embrace the other: the controlling factor is still a form of independence from the universal place (church) in which the story is heard.
Continue on with your day.
ps merry Orthodox Christmas


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