Page 158 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

periodization, conceptions of 1459

his epic poem Metamorphoses, giving it much wider cir- Nazareth, a final period of liberation from the law and
culation in Europe’s late classical and medieval periods. from sin. Accordingly, the Christian calendar, which in
Ironically, the view of history as linear rather than the modern colonial and postcolonial eras has come to
cyclic and the notion of history as possessing a trajectory dominate global communication, begins with the birth
or goal that has come to dominate the modern world of Jesus.
would emerge not from the great civilizations of China, If for Jews the turning points of history occurred in the
India, Greece, or Rome, but from a Palestinian backwa- covenant with Abraham and its renewal with Moses on
ter of the eastern Mediterranean, from the Jewish people Mount Sinai, and for Christians in the birth of Jesus (the
and their Christian and Islamic heirs. History, the Jewish first year in the common western calendar first developed
prophets came to believe, was teleological, that is, had a by Dionysius Exiguus [c. 500–c. 560 CE] in the sixth cen-
goal, toward which Yahweh directed them through the tury CE), for Moslems the turning point of history is the
events of history; sacred kingship would be restored to Hegira (migration) of Muhammad (c. 570–632 CE) from
Israel in the person of an anointed, a messiah.The final Medina to Mecca in 622 CE, the first month of the first
messianic age would be a time of earthly peace and well- year in the Islamic calendar. Islam views Muhammad as
being, a kind of return to the Garden of Eden before the last and the greatest of the prophets among those of
Adam and Eve’s fall. In the interim, Hebrew Scriptures the People of the Book (the followers, successively, of
narrated implied stages: from Adam to Abraham, from Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad); thus the third Islamic
Abraham to Moses, from Moses to the Babylonian exile. age is, in one sense, the last age.
One of the Scriptures emerging after the exile, the apoc-
alyptic book of Daniel (second century BCE), proposes an Medieval, Renaissance, and
additional and more recent series of historical stages as Early Modern Periods
well as stages yet to come. Through symbolic language Historiography in the European Middle Ages, the
and images (for example, Jewish history compressed Renaissance, and the early modern period solidified the
into seventy weeks, or eastern imperial history config- notion of history as possessing a goal with intermediary
ured as parts of a statue made successively of gold, silver, stages along its progress toward that goal and introduced
iron, and clay), the text imagines the sequential fall of a variety of schemes detailing the epochs of time.Accord-
empires hostile to the Jews and the rise of the messiah. ing to Collingwood (1946), western Christian concepts
Conceived in this Jewish matrix, early Christianity of historical time are necessarily universalist (that is,
accepted the linear messianic view of history. For Chris- applying to all humans, not just to Christians), provi-
tians, the messianic age had begun with God’s incarna- dentialist (directed by divine forces outside of human
tion in Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. At the same time, control), apocalyptic (having a goal that ends history),
Christians awaited the return of Christ at a future time and periodized (advancing through discrete stages or
when the messianic reign of God, a millennium of peace epochs), features that even later western secular histori-
and prosperity, would occur in full. The little-read pro- ography would in some measure preserve. Christian his-
logue to the Gospel of Matthew, an invented “genealogy” toriographers, moreover, accepted the biblical accounts
of Jesus of Nazareth, neatly divides salvation history into as historically true.
three stages: fourteen generations from Abraham to King In his theological reflection on history, The City of
David, fourteen generations from David to the Baby- God, St. Augustine (354–430 CE) rejected classical cycli-
lonian exile, and fourteen generations from the exile to cal views of human time and articulated the uniquely
Jesus, the messiah. In the Letter to the Romans, St. Paul providentialist and apocalyptic Christian view of history,
demarcated three stages of this history: from Adam to which he divided into seven stages according to the anal-
Moses, a time of sin without law; from Moses to the time ogy of the six days of creation and the seventh day of rest
of Jesus, the period of the law; from the time of Jesus of or the six periods between the opening of the first seal