The Birth of the Past

Part Two. Christianity

KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK Part Two KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK Christianity Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. —T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” 78 Can’t Get Here from There B etween antiquity’s profusion of pasts and modernity’s single, unitary past lies an unbridgeable divide, though we fail to see it as such. Looking back from our side of the divide, we naturally assume that earlier notions contribute to later ones, that some feature or features of classical thought evolved, perhaps in combination with other elements, to produce what we regard as “the” past. We thus have convenient recourse to the commonplace about Western civilization as the coming together of two traditions—the GrecoRoman and the Judeo-Christian—whose mixture combined the Hellenic spirit of empirical inquiry into events with the Hebraic sense of God’s purposive action in the world, yielding the basis for our distinctively Western historical sensibility . This commonplace is of great utility for conceptualizing an entity so unwieldy as a civilization, but it is nonetheless an artifact of our modern conception of the past, which is indelibly marked by an idea of anachronism. Perceiving the past as fundamentally different from the present, we naturally seek to explain how one could have evolved into the other, in a process that assumes continuity rather than discontinuity. Yet—at the risk of sounding clever—this urge to connect past to present discloses an anachronism at the very heart of our sense of anachronism! Despite its utility, the above commonplace about Western civilization obscures the processes at work in the formation of our idea of the past. The more closely one scrutinizes these processes, the more improbable the commonplace explanation becomes, if only for lack of common ground among the multiple pasts of classical antiquity, let alone between them and the Hebrew sense of God’s action in the world. In our recitation of the commonplace, we created that ground by sleight of hand, positing an empirical urge to understand events that evolves, under Hebraic influence, into a directional conception of history—as if one thing combines with another to yield a third. But there was no single conception of past time in classical antiquity, despite the Hellenic invention of history as Christianity 79 a literary genre. At base there were two different kinds of past—linear and episodic—and the linear one was as varied as the phenomena it described. Thus classical historical accounts flip repeatedly between the linear and the episodic— and within the linear from one measure of time to another—bewildering and exasperating modern readers. The irreducible multiplicity of these pasts argues against their direct combination with the Hebrew sense of God’s action in the world. So how did we get here from there? The short answer is, We didn’t. An intellectual leap from these myriad pasts to a unitary past would have been impossible . We fail to see this from our side of the divide because we readily assume that myriad pasts are simply multiple takes on the same object—“the” past— whose existence as a category of thought we take for granted. But this category didn’t exist on the other side of the divide, so the ancient mind could conceive neither the leap nor the need for it—which brings us back to the question of how this category of thought originated in the first place. If it did not spring forth fully formed, it must have begun as something else, something unrelated to those concerns we regard as “historical.” Indeed, the first signs of a new way of thinking lie in the conscious rejection of classical sensibilities, which had to be cleared away before the past as a category of thought could even begin to emerge. Aurelius Augustinus, bishop of Hippo—more commonly known as St. Augustine—played the decisive role in this process, though we would look in vain throughout his writings for any sign of the modern attitude toward the past. One of the foremost products of the classical culture of his day, Augustine turned away from that tradition, toward a new conception of human existence that enabled him to perceive it...