HOW FAR BACK DO WE GO AND WHO DECIDES THAT?

(h/t E. R. Dodds)

One problem I have with conservatism is how do we know we have gone far back enough in time to a supposedly purer state, whether religious or secular.   Classical conservatives like Burke and Hayek urge us to revere the past and I wonder if they would therefore have objected to the Protestant Reformation?  And given the need for reformation, who is to say that  Calvin and Luther were correct in their interpretations of proper Christian doctrine?  On the latter point, I think one should note the thought of St. Gregory of Nyssa ((b. c. 335, Caesarea, in Cappadocia, Asia Minor [now Kayseri, Turkey]—d. c. 394.) Gregory's theology had a very interesting component, Apocatastasis (Greek, apokatastasis; Latin, restitutio in pristinum statum, restoration to the original condition). This is the definition from the Catholic Encyclopedia:

It first occurs in his [Gregory] "De animâ et resurrectione" (P.G., XLVI, cols. 100, 101) where, in speaking of the punishment by fire assigned to souls after death, he compares it to the process whereby gold is refined in a furnace, through being separated from the dross with which it is alloyed . The punishment by fire is not, therefore, an end in itself, but is ameliorative; the very reason of its infliction is to separate the good from the evil in the soul. The process, moreover, is a painful one; the sharpness and duration of the pain are in proportion to the evil of which each soul is guilty; the flame lasts so long as there is any evil left to destroy. A time, then, will come, when all evil shall cease to be since it has no existence of its own apart from the free will, in which it inheres; when every free will shall be turned to God, shall be in God, and evil shall have no more wherein to exist.

This doctrine seems to have been first promulgated by Origen (185 AD-284 AD), so it also fulfills the conservatives desire to preserve the past.