HISTORY AND IMMORTALITY
13
events related in chronological narrative. He states explicitly (in
De
doctrina Christiana,
2, 28, 44) that "although the past institutions of
men are related in historical narrative, history itself is not to be
counted among human institutions."
This similarity between the Christian and the modern concept
of history is deceptive, however. It rests on a comparison with the
cyclical history-speculations of late antiquity and overlooks the
clas–
sical history-concepts of Greece and Rome. The comparison
is
sup–
ported by the fact that Augustine himself, when he refuted pagan
time-speculations, was primarily concerned with the cyclical time–
theories of his own era which, indeed, no Christian could accept
because of the absolute uniqueness of Christ's life and death on
earth: "Once Christ died for our sins; and rising from the dead, he
dieth no more," Augustine says in
De Civitate Dei
(XII 13 ) . What
modern interpreters are liable to forget is that Augustine claimed this
uniqueness of event, which sounds so familiar to our ears, for this one
event only-the supreme event in human history, when eternity, as it
were, broke into the course of earthly mortality; he never claimed such
uniqueness, as we do, for ordinary secular events. The simple fact
that the problem of history arose in Christian thought only with
Augustine should make us doubt its Christian origin, and this all
the more as it arose, in terms of Augustine's own philosophy and
theology, because of an accident. The fall of Rome, occurring in
his lifetime, was interpreted by Christians and pagans alike as a
decisive event, and it was to the refutation of this belief that Augus–
tine devoted thirteen years of his life. The point, as he saw it, was
that no purely secular event could or should ever be of central
import to man. His lack of interest in what we call history was so
great that he devoted only one book of the
Civitate Dei
to secular
events; and in commissioning his friend and pupil, Orosius, to write
a "world history" he had no more in mind than a "true compilation
of the evils of the world."
1
1 See Theodor Momrnsen, "St. Augustine and the Christian Idea of Prog–
ress," in
journal of the History of Ideas,
June 1951. A close reading shows a
striking discrepancy between the content of this excellent article and the thesis
expressed in its title. The best defense of the Christian origin of the concept of
history is found in Ch.N. Cochrane,
Christianity and Classical Culture.
He holds
that ancient historiography came to an end because it had fail ed to establish
"a principle of historical intelligibility" and that Augustine solved this problem
by substituting "the
logos
of Christ for that of classicism as a principle of
understanding."
