In his Teaching Company tapes on Chaucer, Seth Lehrer claims that the medievals lacked a conception of historical change, and that one of the key cultural effects of the Renaissance was to introduce the idea that things change.
This at least needs to be qualified, if not rejected, for two reasons. First, Christianity has a base-line commitment to historical change, as Augustine and many other church fathers recognized. Jesus came not to renew the Law but to bring in a New Law or a new covenant, and that New Law came with its own customs, signs, rites. There is a “translation” inherent in the move from OC to NC, and this did not go unnoticed by patristic and medieval writers.
Second, though it’s true that mutability is a Renaissance obsession, the medievals were also aware of this phenomenon.
Thesis: Christianity actually introduced the notion of historical change into the classical world, and to the extent that Christianity resisted change it was infected by the staticism of classical philosophy. Now, if I can only find a decade or so of free time to construct an argument for that thesis . . . .
Peter Leithart
Peter J. Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute. He is the author of numerous books on theology, literature, and culture, including Theopolitan, Defending Constantine, and Baptized Body.
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