THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES
B) Providence, Fortune and Virtue
IT IS A DIALECTICAL PARADOX that while the Christian doctrine of salvation ultimately made the historical vision possible, for centuries it operated to deny that possibility. The Greek and Roman intellects saw little reason to expect anything very new to happen in the human future, and doctrines of cyclical recurrence or the supremacy of chance (tyche or fortuna) arose and interpenetrated—though we must beware of exaggerating or simplifying their importance—to express this lack of expectation, which sometimes occasioned world-weariness and angst.1 Within these empty-seeming schemes, however, there was room for much acute study of political and military happenings, and the actions of men did not lose interest—rather, perhaps, the reverse—when it was thought that they would some day, in the ordinary or the cosmological course of things, be repeated. The advent of the savior monotheisms, however, reorganized and transformed time by making it an aspect of events whose significance was in eternity. God had covenanted with men, and the covenant would some day be fulfilled; man had been created, he had fallen, God had begun action intended to bring about his redemption, and this process would at a point in time to come be carried to its final completion. All these propositions denoted temporal events; the past or the future tense must be used in stating them; and yet the significance of every one of them was extra-historical in that it denoted a change in the relations between men and that which was outside time altogether. Time was organized around the actions which an eternal agent performed within it; these actions formed a sequence whose meaning appeared in time and gave time meaning; but since the meaning of the actions lay outside time, it followed that time acquired meaning from its relation to the eternal. It might even seem that man entered time at his departure from Eden, and that the sequence of acts which constituted sacred history were intended to bring time ultimately to an end and consummate its meaning at the moment of transcending and terminating its existence. History, in short, acquired meaning through subordination to eschatology.
The patristic intellect thus came very often to see the individual life as involved in two separately visible time sequences. On the one hand was that formed by the actions and events that had separated men from God and were now leading to their reunion; most of these had occurred at moments in the past, theoretically and often specifically datable in terms of the chronologies of recorded human history, but some were of course expected by believers at moments in the future which could not be reliably dated and which it might not even be legitimate to seek to date. This raised the problem of the eschatological present, of the religious life which was to be led in the interval of expecting the fulfillment of the program of redemption; and once it was accepted that this present might cover many lifetimes and generations, the interval was necessarily filled by the other time-sequence visible to human perceptions. This was what the patristic vocabulary termed the saeculum2 and the modern intellect prefers to call history; human time organized around happenings in the social world, which the Greco-Roman mind saw overwhelmingly as political and military, and the mind of late antiquity, not surprisingly, largely in terms of the rise and fall of empires. The question must now arise of how, or whether, these two independently perceived sequences (or histories “sacred” and “secular”) might be related to each other. To civic intelligences—and the Christian minds of late antiquity were very civic—intensely involved in what befell their urban, provincial, and imperial societies, it must seem that happenings in this realm were in some way bound up with God’s intentions for the redemption of men; and indeed, in the perpetual struggle to keep a world-renouncing asceticism distinct from a world-denying dualism, it might be dangerous to deny that God was somehow present and concerned in the happenings of secular history and directing them to soterial ends. The saeculum was in the drama of salvation; might it not also be of it?
Furthermore, there were—and had been at least from the times when the books of Daniel and Revelations were accepted into the Christian canon—schemes of prophecy, in the sense of utterances acknowledged as inspired and foretelling events which might not yet have occurred; and in these the eschatological completion of the program of redemption and the end of time itself were described in terms suggesting the catastrophe of cities and empires in a drama of human history. It was therefore neither impossible nor illegitimate to believe that “secular” history had indeed been the subject of prophecy, and that the prophet or interpreter of prophecy might “read” secular events in such a way as to discern the program of redemption in them, and them as part of that program. But the construction of a prophetic key to history was not historiography in any autonomous sense of the term. Insofar as it consisted of the reading and application of prophetic books like the two just mentioned, the language it employed was heavily oracular and symbolic, and the working out of associations and identifications between the events described in prophecy and the events experienced and perceived in the saeculum necessitated the construction of a number of secondary vocabularies of symbolization. These proved capable of relating a number of secondary sequences to the prophetic sequences, and the latter consequently ascended from the status of symbol to that of type: the primordial arcane reality capable of being repeatedly typified in a number of independently existing sequences. In this way eschatology retained its primacy over history. Not only was the latter intelligible only as a pattern of the process of redemption, but the latter was capable of being patterned over and over again—the drama capable of being rehearsed many times—in sequences some of which were not those of secular history at all, but of the individual soul’s pilgrimage or of abstract nonhistorical occurrences, while historical events themselves might stand in a typical, not a historical, relation to each other. The language of prophecy, in short, constantly tended to retreat from the narrative prose of history into the poetry of a cosmic symbolism; the same patterns were repeated on many levels, instead of unique events succeeding one another in unrepeatable sequences, and the intellect that could deal with the particular only by relating it to the universal took fresh hold in this medium as in that of philosophy.3
Nevertheless, the historical event or phenomenon could be related to the eschatological without losing its historical uniqueness, if it could be directly related to the final, unrepeatable and hence unique redemption of all mankind; but it was this procedure which the patristic intellect, in the person of Augustine, was to reject decisively and relegate to the underworld of heterodoxy. The language of Daniel and Revelations, it was discovered, could be used in more than one way to denote structures of membership to which the Christian might belong and which he might visualize as playing a role in eschatological drama. Triumphant Christians in the reigns of Constantine or Theodosius might see the Christian empire and its church as constituting a prophesied act of God in history and as pointing directly to some eschatological fulfillment; but militant puritans in Africa saw the need to maintain a church free of compromise with secular authority so clearly that they insisted that salvation was to be had only in a Christian association independent of both empire and its ecclesiastical collaborators.4 Salvation was in society and history, but in a history vet to come and to be perfected only at the end of time; meanwhile the false church and the secular empire that maintained and falsified it were to be identified among the hostile and diabolic agencies with which the symbolism of the prophetic books abounded. In this apocalyptic separatism—the creation out of eschatology of a counterhistory expected in a future—we have that millennialism or millenarism which Christians in all ages have used to express their rebellions against established churches wielding secular power or being wielded by it.
The response of Augustine—and the tradition which followed him—was to renounce both the imperial and the sectarian versions of apocalypticism and to effect a radical divorce between eschatology and history. The Christian’s relation to the finality of redemption consisted in his membership of the civitas Dei, a society in communion with God and consequently existing, with him, rather out of time than in occasional descents into it; and since no civitas terrena could ever be identical with the civitas Dei, salvation was to be found in membership neither of a Christian empire fulfilling God’s will in the course of visible history, nor of an apocalyptic antichurch expecting to be the vehicle of his will at history’s end. No doubt there would come an end of the redemptive process in time and the Christian might hope to be raised to be of a company of saints on that day; but his salvation was not to be the outcome of a historical process, or of his participation in a pattern of life conceptualized as involving such a process. Civil society and its history indeed existed and were necessary; but they were radically imperfect even to their own ends—the ends of human justice—and certainly did not suffice to redeem man in his relation to God.5 The acts of redemption were performed by God in time and could be seen as constituting a sacred history; but they were not necessarily performed through or upon the structures of civil society, and consequently man’s redemption could not be the result of secular history, or of the apocalyptic antihistory of an antisociety which had fallen into the error of supposing that it was society and history which needed to be redeemed. But if salvation was for individuals, and individual lives did not span the whole of history, the ends of time were not all located at the end of time. The eschatological vision became, in the Augustinian perspective, a vision of something in part extra-historical. It might seem that the individual’s salvation or damnation took place at the hour of his death, the moment of his departure from time into eternity; the historical eschaton, to be expected at the end of time, was rather the resurrection of his body, to complete his joy or suffering in the condition to which he had been adjudged. In Dante, writing after nine centuries of Augustine’s influence, it appears that the damnation and perhaps also the salvation, in which the spirits are beheld, are not yet perfected since the resurrection of the body and the end of time are still to come.6 Purgation may be completed—as Statius moves on to paradise—before that moment comes.
This separation of salvation and society, redemption and history, soul and body, sundered but did not abolish the problem of the eschatological present. It became a problem to account for the state of the soul between the death and resurrection of the body, but a radical heresy to solve this problem by doctrines of mortalism or psvcho-pannychism, which asserted that the being or the experience of the soul were suspended during the remainder of secular time; for this denied the extra-temporal nature of membership in the civitas Dei and consequently of that civitas itself.7 Within the saeculum, there remained the problem of assigning meaning to the social and historical events experienced by individuals throughout the remembered past and henceforth to the end of time. If these could not be known as possessing any specific eschatological significance, there was no other way of assigning meaning to them; the saeculum was nothing other than the dimension of man’s fall—his cumulative if not progressive damnation—and the only historical events that had meaning within it were those designed to reverse the consequences of which it consisted. If redemption was not to be seen as operating through social and historical events, these were not to be seen as possessing either sacred or rational significance in the light of which they could be explained. Yet the saeculum must not be dismissed as simply meaningless. The events of the redemptive process took place in the same time-series—all that was lacking was the means of relating sacred and secular events—and no part of the Christian universe, not even hell itself, could be seen as without meaning. It could not be denied that God was present and active in secular history; all that was denied was that we could identify secular events with the fulfillment of his purposes. It could not therefore be denied that secular history was directed by God to our ultimate redemption; it could only be denied that we could know, or should seek to know, how this was being done. Since, in the Augustinian perspective, history has not been the subject of prophecy, the problem of living in the historical present is the problem of living with an unrevealed eschatology.
Yet Christian men continued, in one way and another, to be Romans: civic beings, intensely concerned with the events of political history, the civil and military happenings which befell them and of which they from time to time asked God the meaning. Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae is of course the classic of this branch of literature; it states, in one of the most-read books of Western history, so many of the key themes of the present study that it can usefully be analyzed once again, and the question how far its author’s thought was fully Christianized may be passed over in view of the centuries of Christian readership it enjoyed. A Roman aristocrat in the service of a Gothic king, Boethius fell from power, was imprisoned, and in due course put to death; it was presumably during imprisonment that he wrote the work which complains against, and reconciles him to, a fate perhaps worse than he anticipated. The De Consolatione is not a work of political philosophy, but it is the philosophy of a political man. Boethius is complaining against the loss of a power he believes he has used for good and the oppressions unjustly inflicted on him by others misusing power. He therefore speaks for all who felt—as it was not un-Augustinian to feel—that men must act in the sphere of the civitas terrena even though they must act without illusions; and there are passages which state the ancient ethic commanding a man of virtue to act so that his actions may be the occasion of virtue in others, and which indicate that there are virtues which rust and decay unless expressed in action.8 But to act in politics is to expose oneself to the insecurities of human power systems, to enter a world of mutability and peripeteia whose history is the dimension of political insecurity; and it is of the utmost significance to our subject that the name which Boethius gives to this dimension is Fortune. Fortuna—the Latin had become in large part assimilated to the Greek tyche—was a word of complex meanings, and in opposing virtue to fortune Boethius was appealing to a long-standing tradition of discourse, which, however, he proceeded to set in a Christian context. In the senatorial ethos of republican and imperial Rome,9 fortuna had rather the meaning of luck than of chance: a man might be lucky (felix or faustus) in the sense that there was something about his personality that seemed to command favorable circumstances; but the element of chance was acknowledged in the recognition that luck could not be counted upon, and that circumstances could be neither predicted nor controlled. The baraka, mana, or charisma (to use terms from other cultures) of the successful actor thus consisted both in the quality of personality that commanded good fortune and in the quality that dealt effectively and nobly with whatever fortune might send; and the Roman term for this complex characteristic was virtus. Virtue and fortune—to Anglicize them—were regularly paired as opposites, and the heroic fortitude that withstood ill fortune passed into the active capacity that remolded circumstances to the actor’s advantage and thence into the charismatic felicitas that mysteriously commanded good fortune. This opposition was frequently expressed in the image of a sexual relation: a masculine active intelligence was seeking to dominate a feminine passive unpredictability which would submissively reward him for his strength or vindictively betray him for his weakness. Virtus could therefore carry many of the connotations of virility, with which it is etymologically linked; vir means man.
A term which was originally, and largely remained, part of the ethos of a political and military ruling class, virtus became assimilated to the Greek aretē and shared its conceptual development. From the meaning of “civic excellence”—some quality respected by other citizens and productive of leadership and authority over them—aretē had been refined, by Socrates and Plato, to mean that moral goodness which alone qualified a man for civic capacity, which could even exist without it and render it unnecessary, and which, at the highest levels of Platonic thinking, rendered existence and the universe intelligible and satisfactory. Aretē and virtus alike came to mean, first, the power by which an individual or group acted effectively in a civic context; next, the essential property which made a personality or element what it was; third, the moral goodness which made a man, in city or cosmos, what he ought to be. This diversity of meanings was carried by “virtue” and its equivalents in various languages down to the end of Old Western thinking; the word is of obvious importance in any book organized around the figure of Machiavelli.
Boethius, whose thought is so strikingly Platonic and neo-Platonist as to render the quality, if not the fact, of his Christianity debatable, opposes virtus to fortuna in a way which both brings out the diverse Roman, Platonic, and Christian connotations of virtus and transmits the use of fortuna and the virtus-fortuna polarity to subsequent centuries of Augustinian Christianity. That is, as a person in his own dialogue he complains10 that his senatorial virtus, which led him to engage in politics in the hope of doing good, has exposed him to the insecurities of the power struggle, symbolized as fortuna. But his complaint is theodical rather than political; he does not ask the reasons for his failure as a politician, but inquires how God, who is perfect virtue, has permitted virtus to become fortuna’s prey. Augustine would have replied simply that men must expect injustice if they insist upon acting in the fallen city; Boethius, more engaged politically and more Platonic in his thinking, is in search of a perspective from which it can be understood how the heavenly city permits the earthly to exist. But in employing fortuna to symbolize the insecurities of the saeculum, he is carrying out a powerful synthesis of languages which will perpetuate the Roman and political conception of virtus in the very act of rendering it questionable. A benign female figure, Philosophy, now appears and sets about consoling Boethius. Her intention is to explain away Fortune by endowing him with an understanding of history as part of God’s purposes, so that the virtus he acquires to resist Fortune’s malignity will be philosophical and contemplative rather than political and active; but it is in the Athenian tradition that the political is not eliminated by the simple substitution of contemplation for action. To follow Boethius’s problem we must bring out some of the significances inherent in the figure so central to his thought.
Fortune is, first of all, the circumstantial insecurity of political life. Her symbol is the wheel, by which men are raised to power and fame and then suddenly cast down by changes they cannot predict or control. It is engagement in the affairs of the civitas terrena which commits us to the pursuit of power and so to the insecurities of fortuna; but if happenings in the world of power-centered human relationships are of all things the least predictable and those we most desire to predict, the political symbol of fortuna is thus able to stand for Plato’s phenomenal world, the image created by our senses and appetites, in which we see only particular things succeeding one another and are ignorant of the timeless principles which give them reality. Plato did not make use of the symbol of tyche in the Republic, but in Boethius’s use of fortuna we see it to be part of the profoundly political nature of the Western vision that the phenomenal world of sense-illusion is also the political world of the interpersonal city. Time, furthermore, is the dimension of them both: as things seem to succeed one another because we do not see the timeless reality to which they belong, so the turnings of the wheel are felt to our bitter insecurity because we act in the civitas terrena, not the civitas Dei. It is now Philosophy’s task to convince Boethius that saeculum and fortuna—the unpredictabilities of power in a world of politics—are aspects of phenomenal and historical unreality, but that a perspective exists from which all is seen to be real.
She does this by setting up the doctrine later known as that of the nunc-stans or eternal now.11 To God who is eternal all moments in time are simultaneously visible; the entire secular pattern is discerned, and decreed, as a whole and problems of succession and prediction do not exist. The historical world is visible in simplicity, unity, and perfection and is directed by God’s will and intelligence (which are one) toward the redemption of men, which he can see in its accomplishment. It follows—the central assertion of the De Consolatione—that “all fortune is good fortune,”12 or rather that Fortune is swallowed up in the twin concepts of Providence and Fate. Providence is that perfection of the divine vision in which God sees to (or, to human intellects, foresees) all circumstantial things; Fate is the perfection of the pattern in which he decrees and perceives them.13 What we sense as fortuna is our imperfect experience of the perfection of history. In a later but closely related rhetoric, it became more usual to speak of Providence as the inscrutable course of things directed to our redemption by an intelligence we could not share, and by a further figure as that aspect of the divine intelligence which directed particulars and phenomena while perceiving universals and ideas; and in this rhetoric Fortune could be dealt with by equating her with Providence. A highly Boethian moment in the Divine Comedy is that14 in which Dante and Virgil come upon a battle between spendthrifts and misers in hell, and Virgil explains that both parties are guilty of having contemned the opposite goods brought them by Fortune, a heavenly being who distributes the things of this world in ways inaccessible to human knowledge and is herself, being blessed, inaccessible to human complaints; and to complain against the ways of God is, we already know, to have begun losing il ben dell’intelletto, as the damned have lost it altogether.15 The Providence equated by Boethius with Fate denoted God’s timeless perception as it was to God himself; but it became more usual to speak of Providence as Dante here speaks of Fortune, indicating God’s knowledge made apparent to us as foreknowledge, an intellect which we must call inscrutable because it directed what we must know as a succession of particulars in time. This there was no way of knowing from within time; God knew it from the nunc-stans, but it was our business to believe that he knew it, as we could not until time should have an end. The spendthrifts and misers had failed in faith; what Dante here called Fortune could be and usually was termed Providence—Boethius’s Fortune seen with the eye of faith that knew her to be good. In a contrary sense, the Fortune of the pagans, the malignant and irrational goddess of the wheel, denoted Providence as seen and experienced by those whom faith had not made whole.
But Boethius in the dialogue is in time, which is why he is subject to Fortune; and Philosophy affords him the intellectual certainty that the nunc-stans exists, not the capacity to share its vision. It follows that philosophy is not separate from faith, although Boethius does not develop the concept of a Christian faith in the sense of a personal devotion to his Redeemer. Philosophy is not bringing him a share in the divine vision, but consolation and resignation to his fortune in the certainty that God ordains it to be good and knows it as he cannot know it; and faith is the appropriate name for this spiritual condition. Philosophy and faith, then, are to replace (or reconstitute) virtus as the response to fortuna; where a pagan and civic virtue found in Fortune the raw material for glorious deeds in war and statesmanship, and fame after death, the Boethian Christian regards it as a test, the occasion which demands and should evoke a life redeemed by philosophic faith and freed from the bitterness of death. If he acts in the secular world, it will be to ensure that his is not “a fugitive and cloistered virtue,” to give his faith greater perfection by exposing it to the trials of Fortune. Such, for centuries afterwards, was a proper meaning of the term “Christian virtue,” although to Aquinas the virtutes were matters of moral practice and moral habit.16
It might seem that faith and the vita contemplativa had replaced politics and the vita activa at the core of the moral life, and there is of course a very great deal of truth in this; though it has to be kept in mind that contemplation is an activity,17 and the activity most appropriate to life in the civitas Dei, that city whose end is knowledge of and communion with God. But the relationships between pagan and Christian virtue, and between virtue and knowledge, are more complex still. Applying an Aristotelian teleology to Roman ideas of virtus, it could be held that in acting upon his world through war and statecraft, the practitioner of civic virtue was acting on himself; he was performing his proper business as a citizen and was making himself through action what Aristotle had said man was and should be by nature: a political animal. In this context the relation of virtus to fortuna became as the relation of form to matter. Civic action, carried out by virtus—the quality of being a man (vir)—seized upon the unshaped circumstance thrown up by fortune and shaped it, shaped Fortune herself, into the completed form of what human life should be: citizenship and the city it was lived in. Virtus might be thought of as the formative principle that shaped the end, or as the very end itself. The Augustinian Christian finds his end in the civitas Dei and in no earthly city—though the fact that unity with God is still thought of in the image of a civitas shows that it is still the political definition of man’s nature that has to be transcended—and the virtus by which he finds it is now the Boethian blend of philosophy and faith, through which he comes to be what by nature he is: a creature formed to know God and to glorify him forever. But Boethian philosophy is still opposed to fortuna, the darker side of societal life, and fortuna still assails men with circumstance which it is their proper business to shape into human life as it ought to be; their faith integrates suffering into the pattern of the redeemed life.18 At the same time, the redemptive spirit consists as much in intellect—philosophy—as in belief; and the philosophy of the nunc-stans offers means of perceiving the phenomenal and temporal world—now equated with Fortune’s domain—in such a light that its transitory and time-bound particulars become intelligible through knowledge of the purposes, ends and universal entities for which they were formed. Men become what they ought to be through certainty of that God who has shaped the world toward what it ought to be. It was when the civitas Dei became an eternal community of intellects that the political definition of man’s nature seemed finally to have been transcended.
That time was not yet, and might not be till the end of time. While men inhabited time-bound bodies, philosophy could only convince them of the existence of a divine vision, and faith must support them as long as they could not share it. But faith, in this definition, was reposed in the assurance of a timeless vision in which phenomenal things were perceived in the light of the ends to which they were formed; and at the same time faith helped shape men to their end, which was to share in this vision. Since man could achieve his true end only through redemption from the consequences of his Fall, this formatio must be thought of as a reformatio, a recovery of his true nature which had been lost by Adam; an Aristotelian reformation is a recovery of, or return to, form. But in the Augustinian tradition it was most sharply stated that man’s redemption was not possible through philosophy alone, or even through a combination of philosophy and faith; it could come about only through an act of God’s grace, which philosophy, faith, and virtuous practice might solicit but could never command, and might not even be thought of as meriting. The Aristotelian teleology had thus to be reconciled with the concept of grace—of those acts of God’s love which were in the strict sense gratuitous—and if man could recover his true form, which included the perception of things in the light of their true forms, only through grace, it was also necessary that the original creation of things in their natures, essences, or ends, by a God who was that of the Bible and not of Aristotle, be thought of as an act or acts of grace and gratuitous love. Grace thus appeared at the beginning and end of a circular motion of creation and redemption; it created things in their true natures and restored to their natures those creatures which had lapsed from them. Through a Christian virtus the individual did what he could to bring himself toward his reformatio by grace; but the effects of the Fall were such that there must be discontinuity between virtue and grace, even if one held with Aquinas that gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit. In redemption one would behold things “face to face,”19 in the true essences to which grace had shaped them, which one could not do even in the movement toward redemption—which, again, only grace had made possible.
But if fortuna was the matter of history, then secular history was merely inert matter to be used in a process of reformatio; it had no form, and in that sense no end, of its own. Boethius can be situated wholly within the Augustinian tradition; he regards the sequence of events in the sociopolitical world as a series of challenges to faith and philosophy, which the individual overcomes and integrates in the pattern of his redeemed life as a citizen of the heavenly city. All fortune is good fortune only in the sense that every circumstance can be so used; there is meaning and pattern to it—what Boethius terms Fate—only in the sense that God can see the totality of history as the sum of individual redemptions. The sequence of events in the saeculum is not to be generalized into a sequence of redemptive meaning. Yet it remained doubtful how far the grand operation by which Augustine had divorced the redemptive process from the rise and fall of empires had been efficacious. The acts designed to bring about redemption had been performed by God in time, in an aevum hard to separate from that of the saeculum; they were dated by reference to the events of secular history—as in the creed it was daily recalled that Christ had “suffered under Pontius Pilate”; and in the incorrigibly political thinking of Western men it was hard not to see some, perhaps mysterious, significance in such facts as that Daniel had prophesied to the rulers of Babylon, that the Apostle of Patmos at least seemed to be alluding to earthly empires, and that the great institutions of Christian society appeared to have something to do with the conversion of the emperor Constantine. Augustine’s separation of history from eschatology had rested in the last analysis upon his denial that life in civil society had much to offer to the salvation of the soul. Once the possibility was entertained again that kingdoms and commonwealths, governed by Christians under Christian laws, might achieve a measure of earthly justice, practice of which, at a level sufficiently public to involve one’s membership in some kind of civitas terrena, might be positively related to one’s redemption through grace, the events of public history—the life of the civitas extended through time—must be seen as more than mere fortuna; or rather, a public fortuna must be shown as subject to the operations of grace. The revival of the Aristotelian doctrine that political association was natural to man therefore logically entailed the reunion of political history with eschatology.
In the post-Augustinian world of Boethius political history had appeared as mere Fortune, convertible into Providence only through the eye of faith which knew that the individual’s fortunes might become the stuff of his redemption. History (to employ the modern term) had thus only a private meaning. But if the events of public history were to play any kind of redemptive role, the concept of providence must be expanded—as at any moment it could be—to include that of prophecy. The events of prophetic history were, like the creation and the ultimate redemption, the work of grace and gratuitous love; but here grace was seen, not in the creation or reformation of essential being, but in the performance of acts which, being unique and unrepeated, must be in time and, being in time, must be inaccessible to the philosophic intellect. That which performed them must be thought of as providence, since it performed purposive acts which constituted a series of occurrences in time and whose reasons were therefore beyond us; but in performing the acts of prophetic history, it at the same time revealed, by verbal or other means, some part of their significance to men. In accepting these divine messages to be true, men displayed faith of a somewhat different order from that we have so far been considering. Instead of intellectually affirming the existence of a divine intelligence whose perspectives could be described but not shared, faith now acknowledged that certain words or signs had been uttered, certain acts performed, at certain moments in time, and that these had been the acts of God, who had in them revealed certain truths to man. Because to acknowledge this was to make affirmations of historical fact, it was not the work of the philosophic intellect; and when the messages of revelation consisted of statements of what had happened, as that God had been born a man, or promises of acts yet to come, as that he would return at the end of time, they too exceeded the province of philosophy. (It is this dimension of belief that we miss in Boethius.) The faith reposed in prophecy could be thought of as acceptance of authority, and both the authoritative statements themselves and many of the messages which they uttered constituted points in time, in the sequence of prophetic history. And the authoritative utterances were public, not private; they had been made to societies of men—Israel, the church—and had helped to institutionalize them and give them a history. It was this which rendered them important in any attempt to revive political eschatology. Prophecy was the public action of providence; it united the fortune which was converted into providence by faith with the fortune that was the historical dimension of secular societies. In prophetic time one did not merely affirm the timelessness of the nunc-stans; one affirmed the imminence of the eschaton. Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt; vigilemus.
Prophetic history, then, served as a means of politicizing grace and re-sacralizing politics. The work of Augustine could be undone at any time that it was found possible to identify moments in the history of civil societies with moments in the eschatological scenario to be derived from the various prophetic books. There remained, of course, the difficulty that prophecy did not, by its nature, deal directly with the problem of the eschatological present; the scenario did not provide for everything which should happen between “now” and the final eschaton, but took as its proper business the depiction of those scenes which should precede the end. And if one had resort to the complexities of typology and suggested that secular history—not to mention other realms of experience—would prefigure the apocalyptic occurrences at many times and in many places, one might find oneself back in a world of timeless archetypes and universals, in which secular history would return to the foot of the ladder of correspondences, as lacking any autonomous significance. If the life of civil society, lived forward in time as a succession of unrepeatable experiences, was to find its meaning in the context of sacred history, it would have to be suggested that in the tract of civil history to be explained, prophecy itself was approaching its unique and unrepeatable end. Clearly, to claim that Florence or England and its history were on the point of becoming the theater of Christ’s return and God’s final judgments was to expose oneself to charges of extreme hubris and blasphemy, as well as to make predictions peculiarly liable to falsification; but the claim was so frequently made that it cannot be dismissed as a mere aberration. In these paragraphs we are concerned to construct a framework in which its recurrence may become intelligible.
Perhaps the best way to explain the frequency of political apocalyptic is to treat it as an index to the ideological tensions between church and secular society to be found in the later Christian centuries. The papal church rested upon the Augustinian divorce between eschatology and history; it denied redemptive significance to the structure and history of any secular society, while claiming itself to act and exercise authority as a bridge between civitas Dei and saeculum, a kind of institutionalization of the nunc-stans. So monolithic were these claims that any secular commonwealth or kingdom desiring to assert its autonomy was almost obliged to assert that it possessed redemptive significance and so that redemption was to be attained through its secular and historical operations. The church for its part was so heavily committed to denial of the redemptive character of history that it was peculiarly vulnerable to revivals of the prophetic element in Christianity which asserted the historical character of redemption. Medieval heretics therefore almost invariably had recourse to apocalyptic, if with no other motive than to assert that redemption was to be found in the fulfillment of prophecy and not in the institutional operations of the timelessly based church; and in the prophetic languages they reactivated, secular rulers found the symbolism needed to give their operations redemptive significance. Princes and heretics were, within limits, natural allies; they shared a disposition to undermine the Augustinian monolith by displacing the nunc-stans in favor of the eschaton, the civitas Dei in favor of Christ’s return to his saints at the end of history. Persons in both categories therefore made use of the two main streams of heterodox apocalyptic which ran through the later middle ages, meeting and mingling but remaining analytically distinguishable: the millenarian tradition which relied on the Book of Revelations to expect an overturning of all forms of worldly rule and a reign upon earth of Christ and his saints, located within the end of historic time; and the tradition handed down from Joachim of Fiore through the Spiritual Franciscans, which declared that after an Age of the Father in which God had ruled through the covenant with Israel, and an Age of the Son in which Christ ruled through his mystical body the church, there would come an Age of the Spirit in which God would be manifest in all men so chosen, as now he was incarnate in Christ alone.20
It is obvious that both these schemes had revolutionary potentialities, in that they envisaged a rule by illuminated saints not bound by earlier laws and dispensations, whether secular or prophetic; and it happened from time to time that a prince found his heretical allies turning these weapons against his own authority. Nevertheless, the attractions of the prophetic scheme to any prince in conflict with the church were great, and subsequent history suggests that the princes and republics who embraced this ideology were wise in their generation. In the short view, religious individualists, anxious to exile the church from worldly affairs and reconstitute it as a purely spiritual communion, were often glad to subject themselves wholly to the prince of this world in the belief that he could not touch their inner spirituality. In the long view, it is possible to trace the mutation of the expected millennium or Third Age into that indefinite secular future which distinguishes the modern from the premodern sense of history.21 Apocalyptic, in fact, was a powerful instrument of secularization, a means of drawing the redemptive process back into that dimension of social time from which Augustine had sought to separate it, and of depicting it as the extension or the transformation of existing secular processes. This is why, in studying the period with which this book is concerned, we shall have to bear in mind that political eschatology was a weapon to be employed on behalf of the ruling institutions of secular society as well as one for chiliastic insurgents against those rulers, and that the saint’s relation to society was never free from ambiguity.22
There is a sense, then, in which apocalyptic helped to open the path toward modern secular historiography; but for the purposes of the present moment in the analysis, which is concerned with the poverty of the modes of historical explanation available in the political thought of late medieval man, what requires to be emphasized is that the main question raised by the appeal to apocalyptic was whether secular political experience was capable of an eschatological dimension, or whether it was not. If it was so capable, emergent crises in secular experience could be rendered intelligible by identification with moments, persons or symbols in one or other of the available eschatological scenarios; if not, not; and that was all the question at issue. We have not yet reached a point which it can be imagined how apocalyptic might contribute, even indirectly, to the enlargement of the modes of explaining the succession of one particular occurrence in secular politics, and so in secular history, to another. We have simply added one more mode of dealing with the secular occurrence to those with which we were previously familiar. The emergency or occurrence we are imagining might be dealt with by the devices of experience and prudence, integrated in usage and custom or responded to by means of statute or policy decision. It might be dealt with by means of faith, integrated in the patterns of the redeemed Christian life of the believing individual who had suffered it as fortune and reconstituted it through the eye of faith as providence. The Christian believer might, somewhat intensifying the activity of his political responses, enlarge his concept of providence to include prophecy, and deal with the emergency by attributing to it an eschatological significance. Lastly—an alternative not much considered hitherto—he might, at the cost of considerable diminution in the vivacity of his faith, treat the emergency simply as the work of Fortune, either because he did not deserve or because he did not believe that Providence was at work on his behalf. The occurrence would then be without essential meaning, the sequence or time-dimension of such occurrences a mere spinning of the wheel. Fortune thus came to symbolize the irrationality of history, the medieval sense of the absurd: history as it must seem to those who lacked faith, history as it must be if God and his providence did not exist. When medieval minds despaired, this symbolism appeared: the crystal spheres revolved perfectly in the heavens, but within the orbit of the moon the consequences of the Fall caused the irrational circularities of Fortune to spin eccentrically23 and unchecked, and all history was summed up in the figure of Hecuba lying beneath the wheel.24
Experience, prudence, and the arcana imperii; fortune + faith = providence; providence — faith = fortune; providence + prophecy = revealed eschatology; virtue and grace. These formulae constitute the model so far established of an intellectual equipment which lacked means of explicating the succession of particulars in social and political time, so that all responses to such particular occurrences must be found somewhat between the poles of experience and grace. We proceed to test the model by using it to explain the intellectual innovations which occurred when a conscious republicanism imposed, upon minds limited by such an equipment, the added burden of sustaining in time a political structure intensely conscious of its own fragility and instability. How that challenge came to be imposed is the theme of the next chapter.
1 See n. 3 to ch. 1, above. On fortuna as a goddess and the object of an actual cult, see John Ferguson, The Religions of the Roman Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970).
2 Throughout this chapter I am indebted to R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge University Press, 1970).
3 One result could be that the linear sequences of prophecy in the strict sense became merged with cyclical sequences reflecting the repetitions of types. See, e.g., John W. O’Malley, Giles of Viterbo on Church and Reform; A Study in Renaissance Thought (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968).
4 Markus, op.cit., ch. 2, “Tempora Christiana: Augustine’s Historical Experience,” and pp. 110f. See also W.H.C. Frend, The Donatist Church (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1952).
5 Markus, chs. 3 and 4, “Civitas Terrena: the Secularisation of Roman History” and “Ordinata est res publica: the Foundations of Political Authority.”
6 Inferno, VI, 100-111; X, 94-108; Paradiso, XIV, 10-18, 37-66.
7 S. H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1962); Pocock, “Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes,” in Politics, Language and Time, ch. 5.
8 De Consolatione Philosophiae, I, iv; II, vii; IV, ii.
9 D. C. Earl, The Moral and Political Tradition of Rome (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967); Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, Galaxy Books, 1957).
10 De Consolatione, I, iv.
11 Ibid., III, xii; IV, vi; V, iii-vi.
12 IV, vii.
13 IV, vi.
14 Inferno, VII, 25-99.
15 Ibid., III, 18.
16 Summa, 1z-2ae, question 55 (Blackfriars ed., vol. 23, 1969).
17 Aristotle, Politics, p. 289 (1325b).
18 De Consolatione, II, viii; IV, vii.
19 I Corinthians: 13.
20 Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (2d ed., New York: Harper and Row, 1961); Gordon Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 2 vols., 1967); Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachism (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969).
21 Ernest Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949).
22 William M. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603-1660 (London: Macmillan, 1969), has been one of those pointing out that the merits of Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium should not permit us to think of millennialism as exclusively an insurgent phenomenon; see also William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963). Michael Walzer’s The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965) is a classic study of the saint as alienated from both the ecclesiastical and the social orders; it has, however, become a commonplace of criticism that the two modes of alienation were not necessarily concurrent and that the saint’s involvement in secular society was greater and more productive of tensions than Walzer seemed to allow. See below, pp. 336-39
23 On the title page of Robert Recorde’s The Castle of Knowledge (London, 1556; the first English work of Copernican astronomy), Knowledge appears poising the Sphere of Destiny on an upright staff, Ignorance driving the Wheel of Fortune by a rod attached to the center by a crank-handle. The following verses appear:
Though spitefull Fortune turned her wheele
To staye the Sphere of Vranye,
Yet dooth this Sphere resist that wheele,
And fleeyth all fortunes villanye.
Though earthe do honour Fortunes balle,
And bytells blynde hyr wheele aduaunce,
The heauens to fortune are not thralle,
These Spheres surmount al fortunes chance.
The sphere’s accompanying symbol is the sun, the wheel’s the moon. The irregular patches on the moon’s face, no less than her after all regular waxing and waning, seem to have gained her the reputation of inconstancy and imperfection. The matter is discussed by Beatrice in Paradiso, II, 49-148. For fortune symbolism in general see H. R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927).
24 Fortunae rota volvitur
descendo minoratus
alter in altum tollitur
nimis exaltatus.
Rex sedet in vertice
caveat ruinam
nam sub axe legimus
Hecubam reginam.
Carmina Burana, LXXVII (ed. J. A. Schmeller, Breslau, 1904). (The images of Hecuba and the wheel recur in the Player King’s speech in Hamlet, II, 2.) Cf. the other “Fortune” songs (I, LXXV, LXXVIa) and the drawing of the Wheel prefixed to the whole collection.