II

It will be worth our while at the beginning of our study to review in

outline this development of the idea of progress, that we may better

understand the reasons for its emergence and may more truly estimate its

revolutionary effects. In the ancient world the Greeks, with all their

far-flung speculations, never hit upon the idea of progress. To be sure,

clear intimations, scattered here and there in Greek literature, indicate

faith that man in the past had improved his lot. Aeschylus saw men

lifted from their hazardous lives in sunless caves by the intervention of

Prometheus and his sacrificial teaching of the arts of peace; Euripides

contrasted the primitive barbarism in which man began with the civilized

estate which in Greece he had achieved--but this perceived advance never

was erected into a progressive idea of human life as a whole. Rather,

the original barbarism, from which the arts of civilization had for a

little lifted men, was itself a degeneration from a previous ideal

estate, and human history as a whole was a cyclic and repetitious story

of never-ending rise and fall. Plato's philosophy of history was

typical: the course of cosmic life is divided into cycles, each

seventy-two thousand solar years in length; during the first half of each

cycle, when creation newly comes from the hands of Deity, mankind's

estate is happily ideal, but then decay begins and each cycle's latter

half sinks from bad to worse until Deity once more must take a hand and

make all things new again. Indeed, so far from reaching the idea of

progress, the ancient Greeks at the very center of their thinking were

incapacitated for such an achievement by their suspiciousness of change.

They were artists and to them the perfect was finished, like the

Parthenon, and therefore was incapable of being improved by change.

Change, so far from meaning, as it does with us, the possibility of

betterment, meant with them the certainty of decay; no changes upon earth

in the long run were good; all change was the sure sign that the period

of degeneration had set in from which only divine intervention could

redeem mankind. Paul on Mars Hill quoted the Greek poet Aratus

concerning the sonship of all mankind to God, but Aratus's philosophy of

history is not so pleasantly quotable:

"How base a progeny sprang from golden sires!

And viler shall they be whom ye beget." [1]

Such, in general, was the non-progressive outlook of the ancient Greeks.

Nor did the Romans hit upon the idea of progress in any form remotely

approaching our modern meaning. The casual reader, to be sure, will find

occasional flares of expectancy about the future or of pride in the

advance of the past which at first suggest progressive interpretations of

history. So Seneca, rejoicing because he thought he knew the explanation

of the moon's eclipses, wrote: "The days will come when those things

which now lie hidden time and human diligence will bring to light. . . .

The days will come when our posterity will marvel that we were ignorant

of truths so obvious." [2] So, too, the Epicureans, like the Greek

tragedians before them, believed that human knowledge and effort had

lifted mankind out of primitive barbarism and Lucretius described how man

by the development of agriculture and navigation, the building of cities

and the establishment of laws, the manufacture of physical conveniences

and the creation of artistic beauty, had risen, "gradually progressing,"

to his present height.[3] Such hopeful changes in the past, however, were

not the prophecies of continuous advance; they were but incidental

fluctuations in a historic process which knew no progress as a whole.

Even the Stoics saw in history only a recurrent rise and fall in endless

repetition so that all apparent change for good or evil was but the

influx or the ebbing of the tide in an essentially unchanging sea. The

words of Marcus Aurelius are typical: "The periodic movements of the

universe are the same, up and down from age to age"; "He who has seen

present things has seen all, both everything which has taken place from

all eternity and everything which will be for time without end; for all

are of one kin and of one form"; "He who is forty years old, if he has

any understanding at all, has, by virtue of the uniformity that prevails,

seen all things which have been and all that will be." [4]

When with these Greek and Roman ideas the Hebrew-Christian influences

blended, no conception of progress in the modern sense was added by the

Church's contribution. To be sure, the Christians' uncompromising faith

in personality as the object of divine redemption and their vigorous hope

about the future of God's people in the next world, if not in this,

calcined some elements in the classical tradition. Belief in cycles,

endlessly repeating themselves through cosmic ages, went by the board.

This earth became the theatre of a unique experiment made once for all;

in place of the ebb and flow of tides in a changeless sea, mankind's

story became a drama moving toward a climactic denouement that would

shake heaven and earth together in a divine cataclysm. But this

consummation of all history was not a goal progressively to be achieved;

it was a divine invasion of the world expectantly to be awaited, when the

victorious Christ would return and the Day of Judgment dawn.

The development of this apocalyptic phrasing of hope has been traced too

often to require long rehearsal here. If the Greeks were essentially

philosophers and welcomed congenially ideas like endless cosmic cycles,

the Hebrews were essentially practical and dramatic in their thinking and

they welcomed a picture of God's victory capable of being visualized by

the imagination. At first their national hopes had been set on the

restoration of the Davidic kingdom; then the Davidic king himself had

grown in their imagination until, as Messiah in a proper sense, he

gathered to himself supernal attributes; then, as a child of their

desperate national circumstances, the hope was born of their Messiah's

sudden coming on the clouds of heaven for their help. Between the

Testaments this expectation expanded and robed itself with pomp and

glory, so that when the Christians came they found awaiting them a

phrasing of hope which they accepted to body forth their certainty of

God's coming sovereignty over all the earth. This expectation of coming

triumph was not progressive; it was cataclysmic. It did not offer the

prospect of great gains to be worked for over long periods of time; it

offered a divine invasion of history immediately at hand. It was

pictured, not in terms of human betterment to be achieved, but of divine

action to be awaited. The victory would suddenly come like the flood in

Noah's day, like the lightning flashing from one end of the heaven to the

other, like a thief in the night.

To be sure, this eager expectation of a heavenly kingdom immediately to

arrive on earth soon grew dim among the Christians, and the reasons are

obvious. For one thing, the Church herself, moving out from days of

hardship to days of preferment and prosperity, began to allure with her

inviting prospects of growing power the enthusiasms and hopes of the

people, until not the suddenly appearing kingdom from the heavens, but

the expanding Church on earth became the center of Christian interest.

For another thing, Christ meant more to Christians than the inaugurator

of a postponed kingdom which, long awaited with ardent expectation, still

did not arrive; Christ was the giver of eternal life now. More and more

the emphasis shifted from what Christ would do for his people when he

came upon the clouds of heaven to what he was doing for them through his

spiritual presence with them. Even in the Fourth Gospel one finds this

good news that Christ had already come again in the hearts of his people

insisted on in evident contrast with the apocalyptic hope literally

conceived. For another thing, dramatic hopes of a sudden invasion of the

world are always the offspring of desperate conditions. Only when people

are hard put to it do they want history catastrophically stopped in the

midst of its course. The Book of Daniel must be explained by the

tyrannies of Antiochus Epiphanes, the Book of Revelation by the

persecutions of Domitian, the present recrudescence of pre-millennialism

by the tragedy of the Great War. But when the persecution of the Church

by the State gave way to the running of the State by the Church; when to

be a Christian was no longer a road to the lions but the sine qua non of

preferment and power; when the souls under the altar ceased crying, "How

long, O Master, the holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our

blood on them that dwell on the earth?" then the apocalyptic hopes grew

dim and the old desire for a kingdom immediately to come was subdued to

an expectation, no longer imperative and urgent, that sometime the course

of history would stop on Judgment Day.

In all these Greek and Roman, Hebrew and Christian contributions, which

flowed together and then flowed out into the medieval age, there was no

suggestion of a modern idea of progress, and in the medieval age itself

there was nothing to create a fresh phrasing of expectancy. Men were

aware of the darkness of the days that had fallen on the earth; even when

they began to rouse themselves from their lethargy, their thoughts of

greatness did not reach forward toward a golden age ahead but harked back

"To the glory that was Greece

And the grandeur that was Rome,"

and their intellectual life, instead of being an adventurous search for

new truth, was a laborious endeavour to stabilize the truth already

formulated in the great days of the early Church. Indeed, the Church's

specific contribution of a vividly imagined faith in a future world, as

the goal of the most absorbing hopes and fears of men, tended rather to

confirm than to dissipate the static conception of earthly life and

history. With an urgency that the ancient world had never known the

Christian world believed in immortality and visualized the circumstances

of the life to come so concretely that in a medieval catechism the lurid

colour of the setting sun was ascribed to the supposition that "he

looketh down upon hell." [5] Nothing in this life had any importance

save as it prepared the souls of men for life to come. Even Roger Bacon,

his mind flashing like a beacon from below the sky-line of the modern

world, was sure that all man's knowledge of nature was useful only in

preparing his soul to await the coming of Antichrist and the Day of

Judgment. There was no idea of progress, then, in the medieval age.

Human life and history were static and the only change to be anticipated

was the climactic event

"When earth breaks up and heaven expands."