WAS ‘CLASSIC MODERNITY’ AUGUSTINIAN?
WAS ‘CLASSIC MODERNITY’ AUGUSTINIAN?

Summary/Abstract: Donald Greene’s debates on Augustan and Augustinian cultural identity in the late 1960s wrought a useful alley into Intellectual History, History of Ideas and Modernity Studies. Articulated as demythologization in the face of mythopoeic potency, his demonstration drew critical attention on the necessity to plum historical depth more thoroughly and come with persuasive conclusion only after minute discernment. Projected against the modernity discourse, this sheds new light on the melioristic project of West Civ., places the debate in wider contexts, and makes useful the mention of other names in support of the ideatic kernel of the matter. Amongst them are David Nokes, Frank O’Gorman, Clifford Siskin and William Warner. These are intellectual offspring of the glorious Vivian de Sola Pinto, Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg. With this conceptual baggae, the present paper attempts a view of ‘Classic Modernity’ aka the Enlightenment as part of the ‘Long Modernity' project, following a track proposed in previous academic contributions (Irimia 2007, 2010, 2014) and refers the discussion to English empiricism and continental values, with the benefit of doubt, that essential modern value.

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