moderni<\/em> (\u2018men of today\u2019) also became common, especially after the tenth century\u201d (91).<\/p>\nThe contrast of \u201cancient\u201d and \u201cmodern\u201d wasn\u2019t an accident of medieval culture. It was rooted in basic Christian convictions: \u201cThe ancient world was pagan, the modern world Christian. That is to say, the former had been shrouded in darkness, the latter transformed by the appearance of God among men in the form of his son, Jesus Christ. With Christ, the whole meaning of human history was changed \u2013 or rather, we should say, history was for the first time given a meaning\u201d (91).<\/p>\n
By proclaiming the fullness of times, and the in-breaking of the kingdom, the gospel disrupted \u201cthe naturalistic conception of the ancient world, whereby time was seen in the mirror of the cyclical change of the seasons, or the ceaseless\u00a0alternation of day and night, or the generational cycles of birth, death, and new birth. In such a perspective, human time was regular and repetitive. It partook of the cyclical character of all created matter. There was change but no novelty\u201d (91-2).<\/p>\n
Time is a moving image of changeless eternity, and so for ancient historians (in the words of RG Collingwood) \u201cevents are important chiefly for the light they throw on eternal and substantial entities of which they are mere accidents\u201d (quoted, 92).<\/p>\n
The Incarnation, however, was \u201csomething absolutely new\u201d that split time \u201ctime \u2018before Christ\u2019 and time \u2018after Christ.'\u201d This caesura in time was, paradoxically, the ground of time\u2019s unity: \u201cPast, present and future were linked in a meaningful sequence; Christ\u2019s appearance had revealed the secret of history concealed from the ancients. The events narrated in the Bible, from the creation to the Incarnation, and its promise and prophecy of a future consummation in the Second Coming and the Last Judgement, tells a story of sin and redemption which occurs in time\u201d (92).<\/p>\n
A time focused on the incarnation is a time focused on humanity. Time isn\u2019t an impersonal something that over-masters man. Rather history is \u201chuman time, historical time. Humanity is lifted above all the other orders of creation and made the vehicle of the divine purpose. Human history has, and must have, a different principle from natural history. All creation is God\u2019s creation, and subject to his will. But he has freely chosen to send his son among men, and so injected into human history a value indescribably higher than any in the non-human world\u201d (92).<\/p>\n
Besides, Christianity, drawing from the Hebrew Scriptures, has a future-oriented, eschatological understanding of time: \u201cThe whole of history is seen from the point of view of its final end or consummation; all else is preparation, or waiting. The connection between past, present and future is not simply chronological but more importantly teleological. It is the final redemption of humanity, through Christ\u2019s agency, that makes sense of the human story, with all its vicissitudes and apparent obscurities\u201d (92-3).<\/p>\n
Even the past is re-cast in the light of the future: \u201cThe past, as a tract of time, gets its meaning only retrospectively, through its contribution to the future. The past is not neutral, but neither does it have any value in and for itself. History, said Augustine, unfolds itself in \u2018the shadow of the future'\u201d (93).<\/p>\n
Kumar remarks on the analogies between this Christian understanding of time and that of modernity. Already in Christianity, \u201cwe have time taken out of the natural sphere and thoroughly humanized (even though under divine guidance). It is portrayed as linear and irreversible, unlike the cycles and recurrences of ancient thought. Christianity tells a story with a beginning (the creation and the Fall), a middle (Christ\u2019s first coming), and an end (Christ\u2019s second coming) \u2013 and it insists on that necessary order of events. At the same time in its understanding of the story it reverses chronology and views the story backwards, from its end point. It is future-oriented. It fills the present with a sense of expectation, setting up a permanent tension between the present and the future. It views the past merely as prologue to a present on its way to fulfilling the promise of the future. These are . . . some of the principal hall-marks of modernity\u201d (93).<\/p>\n
The seeds were there, but they didn\u2019t germinate in the medieval period: \u201calthough the Middle Ages invented modernus<\/em> and modernitas<\/em> they made remarkably little of them. So far as their attitude to their own time were concerned, their \u2018modernity\u2019 differed little from the time conceptions of the ancients. For more than a millennium, in fact, \u2018modernity\u2019 displayed towards both the present and the future an indifference, bordering on contempt, that is in startling contrast to the radical reorientation towards time implicit\u00a0in the Christian philosophy of history. It was not until the end of the seventeenth century that this concept of history precipitated the idea of modernity as we understand it today \u2013 and then only by jettisoning the framework of religion that had made the conception possible in the first place\u201d (93-4).<\/p>\nOnly after<\/em> the Reformation, and indeed only at the beginning of the Enlightenment, did Christian \u201cmodernity\u201d come into its own.<\/p>\n(I\u2019ve written about Kumar\u2019s book here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cModern\u201d is an invention of the Christian Middle Ages. According to Krishan Kumar (From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society), \u201cModernus, from modo (\u2018recently\u2019, \u2018just now\u2019) was a late Latin coinage on the model of hodiernus (from hodie, \u2018today\u2019). It was first used, as an antonym to antiquus, in the late fifth century AD. Later such terms […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":19607,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[113,653,138],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle-ages","category-modernity","category-time"],"yoast_head":"\n
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