Gripla - 20.12.2009, Page 106

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or both. But Jóhann and his colleagues have laid down an intriguing chal­
lenge, which holds great promise for future scholarly experimentation.
It is often said that “heroic societies” are static places where reflection
has no place—where social structure and morality are one and the same, as
in eisenstadt’s definition of the stable empire (vilhjálmur Árnason 1991,
164, citing Alasdair MacIntyre). Perhaps early Iceland can be seen as an
exceptional case study: a heroic society in the process of emerging from
that static condition, spreading out over four centuries, and recorded in
singular fashion by a contemporary literature of self­reflection. As Sigurður
nordal pointed out long ago, the retrospective orientation of later sagas
can be seen as an occasion for cultural renewal, as has been the pattern in
other cultures (1942, Part III). In Icelandic prose and poetry, the distinctive
quality of this reflection may reside in its restraint in embracing a stricter,
theological form of transcendence, in favor of a more humanistic, imma­
nent form (vésteinn ólason 1998, 137). this evolutionary phase may have
lasted for a brilliant moment, before its visions of authority adapted more
fully to the Christian dichotomy of sacred and temporal.
As suggested earlier, our own post-Enlightenment concerns with
authority and legitimacy may find special resonance in the early Icelandic
experience, if we see it as preoccupied less by theological imperatives than
by humanistic interests in peace and honor. A recent study by intellectual
historian Mark Lilla notes that most civilizations in history have been
organized on the more extreme premises of “political theology,” which
bases the correct order of society on transcendent revelation. Our own
liberal culture, according to Lilla, has struggled to reconcile our continuing
need for authority with the demise of its theological underpinnings, start­
ing with Hobbes. We honor our liberation from sacred transcendence, but
we yearn for stories and myths that reconcile us to the rigors of that free­
dom:
We are still like children when it comes to thinking about modern
political life, whose experimental nature we prefer not to contem­
plate. Instead, we tell ourselves stories about how our big world
came to be and why it is destined to persist. These are legends
about the course of history, full of grand terms to describe the
process supposedly at work—modernization, secularization,
democratization, the ‘disenchantment of the world,’ ‘history as the