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PARTISAN REVIEW
tained and disclosed its share of "general" meaning within the con–
fines of its individual shape, and did not need a developing and
engulfing process to become significant. Herodotus wanted "to say
what is" (
legein ta eonta)
because saying and writing stabilizes the
futile and perishable; yet he never would have doubted that each
thing that is or was carries its meaning within itself and needs only
the word to make it manifest
(logois deloun,
"to make manifest
through words"). The flux of his narrative is sufficiently loose to leave
room for many stories, but there is nothing in this flux indicative
that the general bestows meaning and significance on the particular.
For this shift of emphasis it is immaterial whether Greek poetry
and historiography saw the meaning of the event in some surpassing
greatness justifying its remembrance by posterity, or whether the
Romans conceived of history as a storehouse of examples taken from
actual political behavior, demonstrating what tradition, the authority
of ancestors, demanded from each generation and what the past had
accumulated for the benefit of the present. Our notion of historical
process overrules both concepts, bestowing upon mere time-sequence
an importance and dignity it never had before.
Because of this modern emphasis upon time and time-sequence,
it has often been maintained that the origin of our historical con–
sciousness lies in the Hebrew-Christian tradition, with its rectilinear
time-concept and its idea of a divine providence giving to the whole
of man's historical time the unity of a plan of salvation-an idea
which indeed stands as much in contrast to the insistence on individual
events and occurrences of classical antiquity as to the cyclical time–
speculations of late antiquity. A great deal of evidence has been
cited in support of the thesis that the modern historical consciousness
has a Christian religious origin and came into being through a secu–
larization of originally theological categories. Only our religious tradi–
tion, it is said, knows of a beginning and, in the Christian version, an
end of the world; if human life on earth follows a divine plan of
salvation, then its mere sequence must harbor a significance inde–
pendent of and transcending all single occurrences. Therefore, the
argument runs, a "well-defined outline of world history" did not
appear prior to Christianity and the first philosophy of history is
presented in Augustine's
Civitate Dei.
And it is true that in Augustine
we find the notion that History itself, namely that which has mean–
ing and makes sense, can be separated from the single historical
