Modernity and antiquity

Modernity and antiquity February 23, 2006

Kumar suggests that “some of the principal hall-marks of modernity” are already evident in the Christian notions of time and history. Both Christianity and modernity separate time from nature, and humanize time; time is seen by both as “linear and irreversible”; both see history as an Aristotelian drama with beginning, middle, and end; both look to the future rather than toward the past (Christianity, he nicely says, “reverses chronology and views the story backwards, from its end point”); both create expectations about a future fulfillment and “set up a permanent tension between the present and the future.”


For much of the medieval period, however, Christian writers made little use of the notions about time that were implicit in their faith: “For more than a millennium, in fact, ‘modernity’ [ie, the Christian era] 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 in the Christian philosophy of history.” Thus, Honorius Augustoduensis said that “Earthly time is the shadow of eternity,” a mere “series of variations on the ground-theme of the immutable and enduring time of the Scriptures. Times change but the faith is unchanging.” Lombard expressed this in his claim that “Christ will be born, is being born and has been born.” Kumar quotes a 12th-century poem: “Whatever changes, loses its value.”

According to AJ Gurevich, the term modernus took a beating, taking on a derogatory meaning: “anything new, unhallowed by time and tradition, was viewed with suspicion . . . Value belonged exclusively to what was old . . . . Antiquitas is synonymous with such concepts as auctoritas (authority), gravitas (dignity), majestas (greatness). In the medieval world, originality of thought counted for nothing and plagiarism was not considered a sin.” William of Conches said “The ancients were much superior to our moderni .”

Even the Renaissance did not break with this negative view of the present in relation to the ancient past. The Renaissance looked toward a future, but one “largely conceived in terms of the past.” With the recovery of ancient literatures and forms, the Renaissance Humanists also revived pagan conceptions of cyclical history. The newness of the Renaissance is not the newness of a movement down a line; it is the newness of a turn of a wheel.

Only at the end of the 17th century did the Christian conception of time “precipitate” modernity as we know it, and by that time the Christian conception of time had been stripped of many of its distinctively Christian features. Moderns triumphed in the late 17th-century war of ancients and moderns. Bacon celebrated the invention of printing, gunpowder, and the compass, suggesting that “these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world.” Antiquity is no longer the giant on whose shoulders modern dwarves stand; rather, antiquity is “the young state of the world,” and the present age is the youngest of all. The idea that humanity as a whole followed the maturation of the individual was employed to defend the superiority of the modern. Yet, Bacon did not believe in unending and linear progress, and neither did his contemporaries. They were aware instead of the “vicissitudes of things.”

The originally Christian notion of “modernity” finally came into its own in the eighteenth century, though almost wholly secular in content. Modernity came to mean “a complete break with past times, a fresh start on the basis of radically new principles. It also meant the entry into an infinitely expanded future time, a time for unprecedented new developments in the evolution of humanity.” So conceived, modernity “takes on messianic status. The past is meaningless except as preparation for the present.” With the French Revolution, the notion of “revolution” shifted from a turn of the wheel to something wholly new. Modernity came to be seen as “a time that is constantly forming and reforming before our eyes.”


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