The Abandonment of Eschatology. In the ideal-
ization of eschatology under the influence of Greek
thought and in its modern secularization there remains,
despite the overwhelming role of the idea of evolution,
some trace of the influence of biblical thought: the
course of history is viewed as goal-directed, and history
is therefore viewed as meaningful.
Nonetheless, over the last 200 years there has been,
to an increasing extent in some intellectual movements,
an abandonment of every form of eschatology. History
has lost the structure of a goal-directed process; inquiry
into the meaning of history has become meaningless.
This abandonment of eschatology in general is to be
ascribed in the first place to the scientific mode of
thought derived from British empiricism (Bacon,
Hobbes, Locke, Hume) which, through its views on
the death of the world by entropy, by cosmic collision,
and the possibility of atomic disintegration, have sup-
plied only a meager alternative to traditional escha-
tology. With this must be associated, after the rise of
historical consciousness and the collapse of the opti-
mistic Enlightenment belief in progress, a form of
historical relativism which accepts only discrete caus-
ally connected historical events, but rejects any mean-
ingful pattern in the totality of history, all philosophies
of history, and all eschatological beliefs (J. Burckhardt,
F. Nietzsche). Historical interest can thus be focussed
solely on the past and on the modest inquiry: “How
things actually were” (positivistic historiography). Or
history is understood—mainly aesthetically—as an
expression of a unified intellectual and spiritual life (W.
Dilthey). When this relativism was converted, as not
infrequently was the case, into pessimism viewing his-
tory as hastening toward catastrophe (e.g., O. Spengler,
Decline of the West, 1918-22; Eng. trans., 1926-28)
there was a revival of the cyclical thought of pagan
antiquity (as adopted by Nietzsche in his doctrine of
the Eternal Return) rather than of the eschatological
consciousness of the Bible.
