07 — The Cultural Consequences

The third and most sweeping layer of Farrell’s argument: that the dialectic lodged in the Augustinian doctrine of God worked itself out through history — first as scholasticism (theology as dialectical system, culminating in Aquinas and Florence), then as the Reformation (a civil war within Augustinism), and finally as secularization (the dialectic consuming its own theological content). Presented here as Farrell’s thesis, with the historiographical objections flagged throughout.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (modern theological literature; historiography) — Farrell’s thesis, not Church dogma

Overview

This is where GHD reaches furthest and rests on the least. The confessional core — that the Filioque and absolute divine simplicity are errors — is behind us; this section is pure theological history, the claim that one Trinitarian premise generates the whole cultural trajectory of the West. The section expounds that claim faithfully and at its most interesting (the Reformation-as-intra-Augustinian-war reading has real bite), while stating plainly the objections it must face: radical mono-causality across half a millennium, selectivity, unfalsifiability, and internal counter-evidence such as the Byzantine reception of Aquinas (Plested) and the pro-Nicene commonality of Augustine and the Greeks (Ayres, Barnes). The reader is equipped to hold what survives and to decline what overreaches.

Files in This Section

  • Scholasticism and the Dialectic — theology reconstituted as dialectical system; Aquinas and the Council of Florence; what is sound (the essence-first, systematizing character of Latin scholasticism) and where the mono-causal derivation overreaches.
  • The Reformation as an Augustinian Civil War — and Secularization — the Reformation as a conflict within Augustinism, and secularization as the dialectic consuming itself; the least verifiable layer, with the historiographical objections stated in full.

See Also