History of the Ideas of Progress

...He clearly favors the first, and finds that the second view declines into totalitarianism...

...Offering graduate and undergraduate degrees in theology, pastoral studies and religious education...

...The infancy account and Jesus's public ministry are clearer to us in their meaning than to those who first experienced them because we see them with hindsight, through the lens of the passion and resurrection...

...He has edited several studies, including Saul Bel- low's Fiction and The Achievement of Wil- liam Styron...

...For medieval "progressives" Nisbet finds his strongest case in the marginal movement of Joachimism...

...monopolization and misuse of resources by the West precisely in order to clear the way for a renewal of hope on the new basis of distributive justice and sustaina- ble harmony with the environment...

...The fact that he can find nothing to support his case in mainstream scholastics such as Aquinas should alert us to the problems of his interpretation...

...The first view sanctions the contemporary status quo, and has little stake in significant future change, while the second view projects a vision of the future through subversion of the status quo...

...IRVING MALIN teaches at CCNY...

...In classical literature one finds 0aany versions of the idea of gradual evolution of the arts of civilization from primitive barbarism...

...ROSEMARY RADFORD RUETHER is a member of the faculty at Garrett-Evangelical Theolog- ical in Illinois...

...John's University in Collegeville, ~linnesota...

...Although these poems do contain spots of hope and belief, their organizing principle -is the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of transcendence in a world as violent and morally ramshackle as our own...

...It is true that Augustine follows a Jewish apocalyptic pattern of seven millennia of HI~TORY OF THE IDEA OF PROGRESS Robert Nisbet Basic Books, $16.95., 370 pp...

...In the terrible muddlement of our time in which the social and political orders commit .so much wild and unthinkable cruelty, the martyr's "words are quiet but not too quiet./We hear too late or not too late...

...In Christianity the vision of the future millennium on earth, deriyed from Jewish thought, ~s a con- tinual source of a hol~e for the future, based not on observation of facts, but on faith in the redeeming power of God~ For Nisbet, the normative idea of progress is a fusion of these two...

...He cites Puritan apocalypticists, such as the Fifth Loyola of Chicago Tor Theological Studies A vigorous major university in a vibrant urban center...

...Nisbet fails, however, to distinguish between a classical view of progress in civilization that comes up to one's own time., but does not presuppose a strong vision of a better future, and a Judaeo- Christian apocalypticism which is pat- terned on a dialectic of judgment upon past and present historical evil that re- I'eases some new redeemed future through divine intervention and trans-formation...

...They are involved in political movements (whether or not they desire such comCommonweal: 606...

...Classical thought was fled to a cyclical pattern and located the Golden Age in the past...

...Tenebrae," 6) Hill is not neatly satisfied by his skepti- cism...

...Although Mojtabai writes about three strikingly odd individuals--the Ameri- can poet, Melus...

...From...

...Indeed, one suspects that the rejection of this criticism is the prime inspiration of this work...

...It never occurs to Nisbet that ecologists might be criticizing an unjust REVIEWERS GREGORY BAUM teaches at the Center of Ecumenical Studies, St...

...JOE HOLLAND is On the staff of The Center of Concern in Wastu'ngton, D.C...

...Then both the progress in scientific thought Commotnve~: 604 world history which he sees as driven to successively higher stages through the conflict of the two principles of pride and sacrificial love...

...the Christian-Hindu statesman, Nirmal Roy...

...A central theme in this modest volume on eschatology (found in a different form in Raymond Brown's The Birth of the Mes- siah) is that the first understanding of eschatological promise (Abraham, in-fancy account, public ministry, resurrec- tion) are only first approximations, un- specified and misty, which are re-thought and given precision in the light of later experience...

...Their private frustrations and limited joys symbolize social conditions...

...KILIAN McDONNELL O.S.B., i$ a professor of theology in the graduate school of St...

...Nisbet is on shaky ground in claiming Augustine for his theory of progress...

...Nisbet sees modern progressives such as Condorcet, Comte, Hegel and Marx as secular millennialists...

...And in "The Laurel Axe," referring to his own En~gland, he says., "It stands, as though at ease with its own world,/the mannerly extortions, languid praise,/all that devotion long since bought and sold...

...Nisbet finds little progressive thought in the Renaissance and regards Puritan millennialism as the launching pad for future hope in modem society...

...Nisbet's work is handicapped by the fact that he provides no footnotes or page citations for his numerous quotations and references...

...The first he calls progress as (individualist) freedom, and the second progress as (state) power...

...No future millennium is to be expected beyond this...

...In the satiric poem, "'A Short History of British India (III),'" he points out that thanks to the England of his ancestors, "India's a peacock-shrine next to a shop/selling mangola, sitars, lucky charms,/heavenly Buddhas smiling in their sleep...

...Christianity provides a vi- sion of ongoing future perfection...

...And later, evoking the Queen of Heaven, he tells her in his controlled but impassioned voice, "Our solitudes drift/by your sol- itudes, the seven/dead stars in your sky...

...But he seems to have little explanation for how racist and repressive regimes could have arisen within the individualist doctrine of progress or how to avoid such developments in a future revival of the doctrine...

...Disillusioned by the dualism implied in the immortality of the soul, and dis- tressed by the spiritual physics necessary to sustain the final resurrection of our bodies, Macquarrie approaches the prob- lem of individual destiny by borrowing from process theology and Einstein's theory of relativity to elaborate an approach to the future life where our past is gathered up, healed and inserted into the experience of God who is both outside of and dominates our space-time continuum...

...It is from them that the Reformation inherits the idea that medieval Christendom and the ecclesiastical hierarchy were the Anti-Christ, hardly an idea that fits with Nisbet's concept of progress...

...In a "note to the reader' A. G. Moj- tabai informs us: "While writing this book, I was haunted by an image--an image of parallel lines unfolding, nowhere converging...

...The usual line is that neither classical culture nor Christian theology supported the idea of progress...

...Augustine is the source of anti-millennial thought in the Christian tradition, shaped by his continual opposi- tion to the chiliast Donatist movement...

...It ~ has been said that process thought can have no eschatology...

...At the time when the West has lost its faith in itself, Nisbet sees hope for the future being preempted by third world socialism...

...To this I would add 61an...

...Without opting for an apocalyptic eschatology, some account should be taken of this impatience which Paul expressed in cosmic terms when he spoke of creation waiting in eager long- ing, groaning in/a'avail, for the final reve- lation of the redemption of our bodies, and expressed in personal terms when he spoke of desiring to be dissolved and be with Christ...

...It is precisely the fusion of classical and Christian thought that is the basis of the idea of progress...

...Unless this 61anis preserved one tends to get an outline without urgency and one ends up with that warm deism which David Tracy mentions...

...To some extent this is based on the broad and continuous experience of Christians who claim to know in their lives the presence of the living God manifested in the risen Christ...

...GARY ZEBRUN is a poet and critic whose work has appeared in Commonweal, The Sewanee Review, The American Scholar and the New York Times...

...Theological Studies Loyola University of Chicago 6525 North Sheridan Road, Chicago, Illinois 60626 Telephone: 312/274-3000 Extensions 437 or 451 We are an equal oppo,"tun W educ,'~tor employer 24 October 1980:605 Monarchy Men, again failing to note their negativity toward current Christian history...

...m um • ,m m For further information contact...

...Nisbet sees this view lying under the surface in all I~inds of unsuspected places in patris- tic and medieval thought...

...Continuing the Jesuit tradition of excellence in teaching, research and community service...

...In modern thought Nisbet sees two main trends...

...Only then did the shock of the World Wars and the decline of Western power lead to new movements of histori- cal pessimism...

...The world, through the arts, sciences and technology, evolves in a continual step-by-step man- ner toward increasing prosperity and civilization...

...KILIAN McDONNELL A STOPPING PLACE, by A. G. Mojtabai, Simon & Schuster, $10.95, 345 pp...

...Rosemary Radford Ruether N ISBET'S book aims at a major revision of the standard views of the sources of the idea of progress in Western culture...

...This realization of total hope is more than the persistence of what God remembers...

...Christianity thought the world was al- most at...

...Bonhoeffer, pacing in his skylit cell "restores the broken themes of praise,/encourages our bor- rowed days,/by logic of his sacrifice...

...Eschatology sees clearest backwards before it sees darkly forward...

...Hill's poetry, instead, reProgress as freedom, progress as power minds one of the dark night of the soul that St...

...Sharing Chicago's rich cultural and educational resources...

...Moreover, he fails to distinguish between the more orthodox teachings of Joachim of Fiore himself, who did not challenge the Augustinian view that the Christian era is the final era of humanity, and heretical Joachimism which looks for a third age of the Spirit in history beyond the Christian dispensation...

...But since he provides no references, it is impossible to check his sources...

...In Brief CHRISTIAN HOPE, by John Macquarrie, Seabury, $7.95, 131 pp...

...In the poem, "Two Chorale-Preludes" on melodies by Paul Celan, Hill says, "There is a land called Lost/at peace inside our heads...

...Her novel deals with the "parallel lines" of three charac- ters who never really "converge"--they pursue different, crooked paths, hoping to find salvation through art, politics, and self-assertion, but they cannot reach "a stopping place" where they achieve complete peace of mind...

...But, for Augustine, this CHOOSEhistory culminates in the coming of Christ, and the final millennium of his- tory is the thousand-year reign of the church...

...Hill addresses his poem, "Christmas Trees," to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who, before his martyrdom, cried out against the "'easy" faith of so many Europeans and Americans...

...Heretical Joachites follow the apocalyptic pattern of rejection of contemporary society as fallen and evil...

...his uhbelief is a source of suffer- ing, an adversity that has brought forth remarkable religious poems by a man whose intensity and technical difficulty" remind one of the great English writer of sublime poems, William Blake...

...over the ancients and the evident trans- formation of life made possible by the application of science to work through technology (something that never hap- pened in classical antiquity) allowed the idea of progress to take hold and become dominant up through the first World War...

...For them the Fifth Monarchy of Christ arrives in history through a divine annihilation of the evil "Fourth Monarchy" (an idea derived from the book of Daniel...

...Not so, as William Beardslee has demonstrated...

...the despairing American wife of an Iranian, Kate Nazar--they are presented as part of a larger scheme, an almost fatalistic plan...

...Having observed and shared in the hypocrisies of his fellow Christians, Hill has come to believe that "Theoiogy makes good bedside reading...

...Macquarrie understands the resurrec- tion as the central mystery by which Christianity stands or falls, which he conceives mythologically, meaning Jesus fulfilled the essential possibilities of human existence and now lives on a new level of existence...

...And Tenebrae is recurrently elegaic, mourning the loss not only of human kindness and love', but of the power of light itself...

...John Macquarrie one expects and gets incisiveness, breadth of view, control of the sources, and provocation...

...Thus, although he cites an enormous mass of references, one gets the impression that he is actually dependent on limited reading of them and on secondary sources...

...And with this revelation, he is thrown into his crisis of faith, a time during which, This is the ash-pit of the lily-fire, this is the questioning at the long tables, thi's is true marriage of the self-in: self, this is a raging solitude o.f desire, this is the chorus of obscene consent, this is a single voice of purest praise...

...instead the reign of the church prepares us for a heaven be- yond history...

...The main burden of his message is that the idea of progress is the creative core of Western faith and we must find some way to revive this faith against its modern detractors...

...tVlichael's College, Toronto...

...Unfortunately, Nisbet regards the ecological movement which criticizes affluent individualistic progressivism as the great threat to Western faith in itself...

...Nis- bet's failure to read the signs of the times aright at this point makes his whole plea for a revival of the idea of progress rather vain, as though one could, by an act of will, revive faith in an idea without acknowledging the real causes for the loss of this faith...

...Only when these twin heritages of Western culture lost their hold in the t 7th century through secular s~:ignce and philosophy was the way cleared for the idea of progress...

...Nisbet says this isn't so...

...an end and looked forward to salvation beyond history rather than within history...

...Thus his references to Joachimism seem to derive from the work of Marjorie Reeves, whose clear distinction between Joachim himself and heretical Joachites he has failed to understand...

...Quite rightly Macquarfie says there is no viable eschatology which omits judgment and renewal...

...In pre-modern and in modern thought one finds one of these patterns.or the other, but seldom the combination of the two that Nisbet proclaims...

...John of the Cross experienced...

...These lines represent no mere plunge into the self-pitying solipsism of so much poetry of de~;pair throughout the 60s and 70s...

...Hill knows that man himself is par- tially, if not solely, responsible for the darkness and lament that surrounds him...