Peter Harrison's Gifford Lectures (cont.)

I've been indulging myself and have now watched all but the last of Prof. Harrison's lectures.

I recommend them all, but the fifth and penultimate one was perhaps the most interesting.  In it, he brings together many of the threads in the story he's been weaving, and begins to draw out some of the implications. 

There's a lot in this fifth lecture, and I'm not going to try to summarize it all.  But there were two points I found particularly striking. 

With the move from inner to outer, from religio and scientia to religion and science, the idea of "progress" no longer means the moral progress of an individual, achieved in one lifetime.  Instead, it is the accumulation of propositional knowledge by generations of people, i.e., something achieved over several lifetimes.  

Harrison explains how the Reformation and Scientific Revolution were conceived as a purification and restoration of Christianity, by removing what were seen as pagan elements.  This reformist attitude led them, for example, to abandon the allegorical method of Biblical interpretation and natural philosophy, which found symbolic meaning in objects of the natural world.   Among other things, this led to an exclusively literal interpretation of the Biblical injunction to establish Man's dominion over nature, in place of the allegorical interpretation which saw the wild animals as symbols of Man's own inner appetites which he must tame in order to achieve spiritual growth.