Herein consists its originality, since it unites in a coherent system two distinct intellectual traditions which had hitherto proved irreconcilable. The Hellenic world possessed a theory of society and a political philosophy, but had never arrived at a philosophy of history. The Greek mind tended towards cosmological rather than historical speculation. In the Greek view of things, Time had little significance or value. It was the bare “number of movement,” an unintelligible element which intruded itself into reality in consequence of the impermanence and instability of sensible things. Consequently it could possess no ultimate or spiritual meaning. It is intelligible only in so far as it is regular—that is to say, tending to a recurrent identity. And this element of recurrence and divine existences whose movement imparts to this lower world all that it has of order and intelligibility.
Consequently, in so far as human history consists of unique and individual events it is unworthy of science and philosophy. Its value is to be found only in that aspect of it which is independent of time—in the ideal character of the hero, the ideal wisdom of the sage, and the ideal order of the good commonwealth. The only spiritual meaning that history possesses is to be found in the examples that it gives moral virtue or political wisdom or their opposites. Like Greek art, Greek history created a series of classical types which were transmitted as a permanent possession to later antiquity. Certainly Greece had its philosophical historians, such as Thucydides and above all, Polybius, but to them also the power which governs history is an external necessity—Nemesis or Tyche—which lessens rather than increases the intrinsic importance of human affairs.
The Christian, on the other hand, possessed no philosophy of society or politics, but has a theory of history. The time element, in his view of the world, was all-important. The idea, so shocking to the Hellenic mind or to that of the modern rationalist, that God intervenes in history and that a small and uncultured Semitic people had been made the vehicle of an absolute divine purpose, was to him the very centre and basis of his faith. Instead of the theogonies and mythologies which were the characteristic forms of expression in the Greek and oriental religion, Christianity from the first based its teaching on a sacred history.
Moreover, this history was not merely a record of past events; it was conceived as the revelation of a divine plan which embraced all ages and peoples. As the Hebrew prophets has already taught that the changes of secular history, the rise and fall of kingdoms and nations, were designed to serve God’s ultimate purpose in the salvation of Israel and the establishment of His Kingdom, so the New Testament teaches that the whole Jewish dispensation was itself a stage in the divine plan, and that the barrier between Jew and Gentile was now to be removed so that the humanity might be united in an organic spiritual unity. The coming of Christ is the turning-point of history and the fulfilment of the cosmic purpose. Henceforward mankind had entered on a new phase. The old things had passed away and all things were become new.
~Christopher Dawson: From St. Augustine and the City of God. (1930)
