Angels in the Architecture "The Emerging Divide"

The Emerging Divide is really an excellent essay on the most basic, most fundamental, most lasting divide that has ever existed: the Antithesis between the City of God and the City of Man. Taking his cue from Athanasius and Augustine (the latter’s famous City of God should be required reading in high school medieval courses), Jones paints a picture of modernity as one which has totally ignored and forgotten that an antithesis to anything is anywhere. He draws us firmly back to the fact that God draws an antithesis from the moment that sin entered the world and it will be with us, and will war against us, until Christ returns triumphant at the end of history.
Jones spends a good deal of time in apologetic for the medieval mind. He argues that they really were antithetical thinkers, even though modern history tends to present them as synthesizers of pagan and Hellenistic thought. He admits that there were some poor choices made by the medieval like Aquinas, but points to the fact that at least they understood to draw the line between Aristotle and Plato and that they had pretty darn good reasons for doing so. Plato was so anti-material that they felt Aristotle would be much better. They were wrong on many accounts, but at least they drew a line. Most modern Christians, Jones says, “fail to draw any line at all, synthesizing their thought with anything pagan that hops along” (55).
In the world of synthesis, we are masters. We are particularly masters of synthesizing with science. Science, Jones says, is the “Enlightenment idol” which has “gripped and throttled orthodoxy for two centuries” (55). The amusing thing is that science is so bad at what it does in the long term that if anyone bothered to consider the track record of science, the results would be laughable.

If we think in terms of centuries and millennia, few other disciplines turn inside-out so flippantly and quickly as the natural sciences. (55)

A more mature mind, Jones argues, would not be quite so hasty to call a thing knowledge. While I think he is stretching things a bit to suggest that nothing was called more than a firm belief until it had stood for two thousand years, he is certainly right that we do not give things time to steep and simmer before dragging them out and showing them off. I am always amused by the pharmaceutical industry and the commercials they dream up. What really (and sadly) amazes me though is how three months later the drug was being recalled because it causes people to grow extra ears inside their stomach and other such hideous things. If the pharmaceutical companies had waited a good ten years and conducted real tests we wouldn’t be in this mess, but then they would have lost all those profits. Yes, folks; science is run by profit as well.
The antithesis is really the most important thing to keep in mind while reading this book. What antithesis did the medieval draw? What antithesis do we moderns draw?