During the exhibition preview, much was made of the artist's
fully contemporary approach to painting, and it's hard to argue this point.
In this cultural
approach to the doctrine of man, Niebuhr found that all
contemporary non-Christian views of life fail because they do not
fully take into account man's freedom on the one hand or his involvement in nature on the other.
The doctrine (widely held until recently) that «matter» itself is
fully real (rather than an abstraction, derived from intellectual analysis of concrete really - existing things, as Aristotle held), and that such self - subsistent «matter» is intrinsically inert (as opposed to self - organizing), arguably reached its full flower in the late Renaissance.18 Part of
contemporary divergence between theistic and naturalistic
approaches may be understood to arise from overly complete internalization (by both naturalists and theists) of the cosmology that emerged from the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century — the cosmology in which «matter» was full real, but intrinsically inert.