4. Early Christianity. The earliest Christians
seemed to have little place for mundane history; in
a sense they were too otherworldly, too intent on the
spiritual life. They thought that the end of the world
was near; and, even when the end did not come, they
felt that Christ had won the decisive battle—nothing
else that might happen in history could really matter.
They held to what we call the Old Testament, however,
and, though the gospel was preached to the Gentiles,
the continuity with the ancient Hebrew religion was
maintained. The Old Testament committed them to
history in a sense; however, they did not attach them-
selves to the mundane side of the narrative—they
abstracted from the Scriptures a skeleton of supra-
natural “salvation-history,” a story that culminated in
the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. This could easily
be an obstruction to any interest in what we ordinarily
mean by history; especially as the mundane events in
the Old Testament narrative could be given a figurative
or symbolic significance.
It would have been difficult to maintain this situation
for a long period, especially as people were bound to
enquire about the life of Jesus in the world. As time
went on, it became important to assert his humanity
as well as his divinity, and the fact that Christianity
did not involve mythical figures or demiurges, but one
who had been a real historical personage, became no
doubt part of its strength. With the passage of time,
there were decisions of the Church in Jerusalem to be
remembered, martyrs to be commemorated, stories to
be told about the missionary work in the Roman
Empire. In the controversies with the pagans it became
necessary to answer the charge that Christianity was
only a recent innovation—it had to be explained why
it maintained the continuity with historical Judaism
and, this being the case, why it broke with contem-
porary Judaism. It came to be held that Christianity
was a return to the religion of primitive humanity and
that this latter had everywhere fallen into corruption,
Moses himself securing later only a partial restoration.
Moses had preserved the worship of Yahweh, but the
Jews were still recalcitrant and needed the straitjacket
of the Law. When the Church had to answer the noble
pagans, and some of its own converts were unable to
forsake their devotion to Plato, it came to be held that
the Greeks—though more corrupted by polytheism
than the Jews—had themselves possessed gleams of
light. The total result was that Christianity was hence-
forth regarded as the heir of both Greek philosophy
and the Old Testament. The wisdom of the ancient
Hebrews was older, Homer not so early as Moses, while
Plato and Pythagoras were younger than some of the
prophets, and Plato himself even being indebted in
certain ways to the earlier prophets. Furthermore, the
language of the ancient Hebrews was taken to be the
oldest of all, anterior to the confusion of tongues,
indeed the language of God himself.
In this way a Christian interpretation of large-scale
mundane history was gradually developed; but, before
these ideas had been reached, churchmen had had to
tackle the elaborate enterprise of comparing the widely
differing chronological systems of the ancient world,
synchronizing events in one region with events in
another. Some time not far from A.D. 221 Julius
Africanus produced an important pioneering work in
this field, which had the further effect of involving the
scholar in universal history. The book of Genesis, with
its account of the primitive state of the human race,
the division into nations and languages, and the origin
of the arts and crafts, encouraged the whole notion
of a history of mankind. Till the early eighteenth cen-
tury, it still provided the material for the opening
chapter of such a work. Political history is generally
the narrative of one's own state and people; but reli-
gious and quasi-religious ideas encourage meditation
upon the destiny of mankind as a whole, and Christi-
anity was to give a great impetus to universal history,
though this had already emerged, particularly in a Stoic
context, amongst the Greeks and Romans. Jewish
apocalyptic literature had begun to periodize history,
and had seen the rise of colossal empires as in a way
a judgment of God—in a way the beginning of the
end. It had caught from abroad the theory of the Four
Monarchies or World Empires; and this, as formulated
in the book of Daniel, governed the periodizing of
universal history until the seventeenth and even the
eighteenth century. But for a time, while the Church
was settling down for a more protracted life in the
world, millenarian speculation was more interesting to
believers than the story of what had happened in the
past. In the Epistle of Barnabas, which may have
appeared between 70 and 130 A.D., it was suggested
that since the Creation took six days, a day was as a
thousand years to God, and the world was likely to
have a life of 6000 years, Christ was regarded as having
been born between 5000 and 5500 years after the
Creation so that the end of the world still seemed
reasonably near.
The world was then envisaged as remarkably small,
and the stars as forming part of the scenic background.
Amongst the Jews there existed the belief that
Jerusalem stood at the very center of the map. In
Aristotelian physics, the noblest things of all—fire and
air—tended to rise above everything else, and the
heavenly bodies were made of an especially ethereal
kind of matter. For both Christians and non-Christians,
the air was full of active spirits, some of them wicked
demons. There were converts who held their Christi-
anity rather as they had previously held their pagan
beliefs, regarding God as the successful worker of
magic.
The historical consciousness as it emerges in
Eusebius, who wrote before and after 300 A.D., was
adapted to this toy-universe that still expected only
a short life-span. This consciousness was stimulated by
the stirring events of the time, and the feeling that
things were now coming to a climax. For Eusebius,
Christ appears in “the fulness of time” (itself an inter-
esting historical concept); also he arrives appropriately
when the Jews happen to have no king of their own
line. In addition to this, both the Mosaic dispensation
and the philosophy of Greece had been provisional in
character, only a “preparation” for the gospel; and
since the days of Irenaeus, ca. A.D. 180, it had been
realized that time had a part to play in God's plan,
an “educational” function perhaps. The junction of
these two strands of Hebrew and Greek history, and,
in addition to these, the Incarnation itself, coincided
with the establishment of the Roman Empire, divinely
ordained to bring the peace, and the easy communi-
cations which were required for the spread of the
Gospel. Christ by his victory thwarted the evil demons
who were henceforward doomed to fight a hopeless
rearguard action. Indeed, from this time, the very
pagans were regarded as having softened their man-
ners. From this point in his historical work, Eusebius
stands as virtually the founder of what we call ecclesi-
astical history—trying to trace the successors of bishops
in their sees, to commemorate the martyrs and describe
the various heresies, though even he can use strong
language about the evils in the Church. The culmina-
tion of everything is the conversion of Constantine,
who achieves supreme worldly success through mira-
cles, and appears as something like a wonder-child
himself.
A century later, Saint Augustine has seen the evils
that can flourish even after the empire has become
Christian. He has to meet the charge that the desertion
of the ancient gods has been punished by barbarian
invasions and disaster in Rome. He surveys the whole
human drama and asks fundamental questions: How
did the world begin? What is the nature of time? He
also asks questions which are closer to earth, closer
to history: Where did civilization begin and why were
the early Romans so successful? He says that God
bestows empire and military success—like the sunshine
and the rain—on the good and the wicked indifferently.
Otherwise men might be induced to become Christian
for the purpose of achieving worldly success. Further-
more, it was the Christian God—not at all the pagan
deities—who had brought Rome to greatness, giving
mundane virtues their appropriate mundane reward,
though in the eyes of eternity these virtues could be
analyzed into something else and would appear also
as terrible sins. Augustine not only recognizes the
existence of profane history but comes near to treating
it as an autonomous realm. The despoiling of Rome
was the result of the customs of war. The destruction
of Carthage robbed Rome of its great fear, and this
led to a moral relaxation. The Roman conquests had
become too vast—her empire was beginning to break
under its own weight. Even the peace which the
empire established did not cancel the wickedness of
the wars that had made it possible; and Rome, in spite
of all that is owed to it, is only a second Babylon.
Augustine seems to prefer small states, if only they
could be turned into a family of states; but in his heart
he knows how difficult this is—he realizes that it was
the turbulence of the neighboring peoples which had
provoked the Roman attacks upon them. In regard to
sacred history, salvation-history—in regard to the
Incarnation, for example—he sees events as conforming
to a divine plan; but, in respect of mundane history,
he has more flexible ideas than Eusebius—a greater
readiness to study ordinary causation—and he does not
envisage Providence as working mechanically to a
blueprint.
In the City of God we see him arguing his way out
of a cyclic view of history, for he cannot allow that
everything that happens will go on repeating itself
throughout endless time—this would turn the Incarna-
tion into a puppet-show. Yet he had previously been
tempted by a cyclic view of history, and perhaps it
was really the pull of the Old Testament that saved
him from it.
He confided to his disciple Orosius the task of dem-
onstrating in detail that Rome and the world had
suffered great evils before the appearance of the
Christian religion. And Orosius achieved a certain
degree of relativity, showing that the rise of Rome had
involved disasters for many peoples, and wondering
why the greatest miseries of past ages do not seem to
produce in us anything like the pain that we suffer
from being stung by a fly at the present day. Coming
from Spain, he asked the Romans to imagine what they
would have felt like if they had been the defeated
Carthaginians. He was prepared to think that the bar-
barians of his time might someday establish an order
and a culture that would become as acceptable to the
people involved as the Roman empire had been. He
differed from Augustine in his excessive providentialism
and he was too content to think that God rewarded
piety with worldly success. He imagined that not only
the barbarities of the pagans, but the cataclysms in
nature—the ferocity of Mount Etna—had been miti-
gated by the very fact that the Incarnation had oc-
curred. His treatise became one of the most influential
books in world-history; and the Middle Ages, when
they thought they were following Saint Augustine,
were really following Orosius' view of Providence,
which was more easy for them to understand. It was
Orosius who provided the model for an interpretation
of world-history that lasted well into early modern
times.
