Some New Greek World?

Peter Harrison's Some New World narrates the way that naturalism came to be used as a boundary marker for what became contemporary science. In this narration, Harrison relies on a strand of scholarship, from Henri de Lubac to Charles Taylor, that sees the very distinction between natural and supernatural as an exceptional feature of Western post-Enlightenment thought and culture. The presumption of that strand of scholarship is that all non-Western, pre-Enlightenment cultures function without this distinction. Its temptation is towards a kind of primitivism that paints all premodern and non-Western cultures with a broad brush and, often, simply as the inverse of their modern Western counterparts. This paper examines the Greek Fathers as a contrast case to this tendency. Through a closer look at the role of Greek sources in the historiography of the natural-supernatural distinction and of the work of Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus, I argue that the distinction is important in Greek Christian thought. That distinction, however, never becomes the kind of distinction that would undergird definitions of 'science' in the nineteenth century: Maximus and John never consider nature as abstracted from divine help, they never build a static two-tier ontology, and they never consider what is natural to be comprehensible. In other words, although the distinction is integral to their thought, it is used in a way that differs from the kind of distinction that will undergird definitions of 'science' in the nineteenth century. This result should caution us against assuming that all premodern and non-Western thought worlds can be theorized as mirror images of the contemporary secular academy.