14
PARTISAN REVIEW
Augustine's attitude toward secular history is essentially no dif–
ferent from that of the Romans, albeit the emphasis is inverted:
history remains a storehouse of examples and the location of events
in time within the secular course of history remains without impor–
tance. Secular history repeats itself, .and the only story in which
unique and unrepeatable events take place ends with the birth and
death of Christ. Thereafter secular powers rise and fall as in the
past and will rise and fall until the world's end, but no fundamentally
new truth will ever again be revealed. In all truly Christian philosophy
man is a "pilgrim on earth" and this fact alone separates it from our
own historical consciousness. To the Christian, as to the Roman, the
significance of secular events lay in their having the character of
examples likely to repeat themselves, so that action could follow
certain standardized patterns. (This, incidentally, is also very far
removed from the Greek notion of the heroic deed, related by poets
and historians, which serves as a kind of yardstick measuring one·s
own capacities for greatness. The difference between the faithful
following of a recognized example and the attempt to measure oneself
against it is the difference between Roman-Christian morality .and
what has been called the Greek agonal spirit, which did not know
any "moral" considerations but only an
aei aristeuein,
an unceasing
effort always to be the best of .all.) For us, on the other hand,
history stands and falls on the assumption that the process in its very
secularity tells a story of its own and that, strictly speaking, repetitions
cannot occur.
Even more alien to the modern concept of history is the Christian
notion that mankind has a beginning and .an end, that the world
was created in time and will ultimately perish like all things tem–
poral. Historical consciousness did not arise when the creation of
the world was taken as the starting point for chronological enumera–
tion, by the Jews in the Middle Ages; nor did it .arise in the sixth
century when Dionysus Exiguus began counting time from the birth
of Christ. We know of similar schemes of chronology in Oriental
civilization, and the Christian chronology imitated the Roman prac–
tice of counting time from the year of the foundation of Rome. In
stark contrast stands the modern calendar, introduced only at the
end of the eighteenth century, that takes the birth of Christ as a
turning point from which to count time both backward and forward.
