Time and History

Abstract

Our present Western conception of history as an immanent and continuous process in chronological, or secular, time is of modern origin. It came into being in the wake of increasing secularization and the concomitant rise of scientific inquiry; and it was preceded by mythological and theological conceptions which discounted the significance of chronological time for an understanding of the past. Think of the indifference to chronological accuracy among the Greeks of the classical period; of the recourse to Tyche in the Hellenistic age when the Mediterranean peoples were thrown into open space where Reason seemed powerless; and of the general predilection, based on nature religion, for a cyclical theory of history in the Graeco-Roman pagan world. Nor did the ancient Jews consider history a linear process; rather, their past appeared to them as a series of partly supernatural transactions, with God's wrath or forgiveness constantly intervening in the course of secular events. And where would He lead his chosen people and through them humanity? The hoped-for redemption, envisioned by the apocalypses of later Judaism, marked not so much a new historical epoch as the divinely decreed end of human history. Early Christian eschatology engulfed chronology also. But since the parousia failed to come, the Church, while retaining the belief in ultimate resurrection, established herself in the world, with the result that she had to reconcile with each other two divergent times: a vertical time pointing heavenward and a horizontal, or chronological, time framing the succession of innerworldly happenings. Medieval chronicles, with their incoherent mixture of elements from both salvation history and mundane history, nicely reflect this attempt simultaneously to move within secular time and away from it. Incidentally, one does well to remember what Malinowski says of his Trobriands that their reliance on magic does not prevent them from approaching many issues in a rational, all but scientific spirit.' By the same