i——
When Professor Wu was lecturing, he said that the progressive view of history is the secularized version of the history of salvation, but I didn’t quite understand it.
Could some expert help explain it?? I’d be extremely grateful 🙂
Gǔ Huà——
Ancient people’s views of history rarely involved linear progress; more often they took all kinds of cyclical forms—either saying that history was declining ever more deeply (for example, from a Golden Age to an Iron Age), or saying that history would be an endless cycle (as in Heraclitus’s “Great Year”). In the East, cyclical theories were even more common. In short, the progressive view of history is a product of modern times and only became widespread with the Enlightenment. So if we trace its source, Christianity’s view of history was the most important linear conception of history before the Enlightenment. Only in the Christian view of history is history neither a cycle nor a gradual decline: history begins with “Creation,” then proceeds to Noah and Abraham, all in a one-way development; Christ’s descent into the world and ascension happen only once; the world after Christ’s coming is of course not a repetition of what came before; and finally, waiting at the end of history is the Last Judgment. Some sects even believe that at the end of history Christ will come again to establish a thousand-year kingdom on earth (the so-called millennium), before finally returning to the heavenly kingdom. So the Christian view of history is a one-way, progressive history with both a beginning and an end; this is also reflected in its calendar system, in which the Christian era counts linearly from the year of Christ’s birth, unlike ancient peoples who often adopted cyclical calendars (for example, China’s Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches). Thus Christianity’s distinctive view of history is closely related to the progressive view of history. Historically, all the early progress theorists of the Enlightenment were in a Christian context.
P——
Professor Wu Guosheng has a book, The Concept of Time, which is pretty good and may be helpful for your question.
It was reissued last November; you should be able to find it in a bookstore.
i——
Thanks to both of you [… omitted …] 🙂
But does the progressive view of history since the Enlightenment not presuppose an end point? I wonder if that’s a difference from the history of salvation?
P——
[… omitted …]
I also want to ask this question:
Marx’s view of history should also count as a kind of progressive view of history, so then when communist society is reached, how should history continue to develop?
Gǔ Huà——
Of course there are many differences. But the meaning of an end point still often seeps into the progressive view of history. For example, various utopian ideals, including Kant’s “perpetual peace” and many others, are sometimes also broadly called “millenarianism.” They imagine history developing to a certain stage and reaching a perfect blissful realm, where social order becomes fully rational, democracy and freedom are realized, suffering is eliminated, distribution is according to need, and so on. In short, the ideal of a “thousand-year empire” or a “heavenly kingdom” still often emerges in the modern progressive view of history; if you pay attention, you can discover many traces of it.
In fact, there is also a quite classic book related to this, World History and Salvation History, which is worth reading. “… The entire historical process described in the Communist Manifesto reflects the universal schema of Jewish-Christian interpretation of history, namely, that history is a salvation history determined by divine providence and moving toward a meaningful ultimate goal.”
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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