HISTORY AND IMMORTALITY
21
solute mortality could be unbearable to men. However, looking back
upon the development of the modern age up to the beginning of
our own, the modern world, we see that centuries passed before we
became accustomed to the notion of absolute mortality, so that the
thought of it no longer bothers us and the old alternative between
an individual immortal life in a mortal world and a mortal life in
an immortal world has ceased to be meaningful. In this respect, how–
ever, as in many others, we differ from all previous ages. Our con–
cept of history, though essentially a concept of the modern age, owes
its existence to that transition period when religious confidence in
immortal life had lost its influence upon the secular and the new
indifference toward the question of immortality had not yet been
born.
If
we leave aside the new indifference and stay within the
limits of the traditional alternative bestowing immortality either upon
life or upon the world, then it is obvious that
athanatidzein,
immor–
talizing, as .an activity of mortal men can be meaningful only if there
is no guarantee of life in the hereafter. At that moment, however,
it becomes almost a necessity as long as there is any concern with
immortality whatsoever. It was therefore in the course of its search for
a strictly secular realm of enduring permanence that the modem
age discovered the potential immortality of mankinc.i. This is what
is manifestly expressed in our calendar; it is the actual content of
our concept of history. History, stretching into the twofold infinity
of past and future, can guarantee immortality on earth in much
the same way as the Greek
polis
or the Roman republic had guaran–
teed that human life and human deeds, insofar as they disclosed some–
thing essential and something great, would receive a strictly human
and
earthly permanence in this world. The great advantage of this
concept has been that the twofold infinity of the historical process
makes the very notion of an end virtually inconceivable, whereas its
great disadvantage, compared with ancient political theory, seems to be
that permanence is entrusted to a flowing process, as distinguished
from a stable structure. At the same time the immortalizing process
has become independent of cities, states, and nations; it encompasses
the whole of mankind whose history Hegel was consequently able
to see as one uninterrupted development of the Spirit. Mankind ceases
to be only a species of nature and what distinguishes man from the
