HISTORY AND IMMORTALITY
IS
This chronological reform is presented
in
the textbooks as a mere
technical improvement, needed for scholarly purposes to facilitate
the exact fixing of dates in ancient history without referring to a
maze of different time-reckonings. In more recent times, Hegel in–
spired an interpretation which sees in the modem calendar a truly
Christian chronology because the birth of Christ now seems to have
become the turning point of world history. (See for example, the
interesting book
Christ and Time,
by Oscar Cullmann.)
Neither of these explanations is satisfactory. Calendar reforms
for scholarly purposes have occurred many times in the past without
being accepted in everyday life, precisely because they were invented
for scholarly convenience only, and did not correspond to any changed
time-concept in society at large. The decisive thing in our calendar
is
not that the birth of Christ now appears as the turning point of
world history, for it had been recognized as such and with greater
force many centuries before without any similar effect upon our
chronology, but rather that now for the first time the history of
mankind reaches back into an infinite past to which we can add
at will and into which we can inquire further as it stretches ahead
into an infinite future. This twofold infinity of past and future
eliminates
all
notions of beginning and end, establishing mankind
in a potential earthly immortality. What at first glance looks like
a Christianization of world history in fact eliminates all religious
time-speculations from secular history. So far as secular history is
concerned we live in a process which knows no beginning and no
end and which thus does not permit us to entertain eschatological
expectations. Nothing could be more alien to Christian thought than
this
concept of an· earthly immortality of mankind.
The great impact of the notion of history upon the conscious–
ness
of the modem age came relatively late, not before the last third
of the eighteenth century, finding with relative quickness its climactic
consummation in Hegel's philosophy. The central concept of Hegelian
metaphysics is history. This alone places it in the sharpest possible
opposition to all previous metaphysics, which, since Plato, had
looked for truth and the revelation of eternal Being everywhere except
in the realm of human affairs-ta
ton anthrop·on pragmata-Qf
which Plato speaks with such contempt precisely because no per-
