Modern Views of the Origins of the Idea of Progress

Author(s): W. Warren Wagar

Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1967), pp. 55-70
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2708480
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 MODERN VIEWS OF THE ORIGINS
OF THE IDEA OF PROGRESS

BY W. WARREN WAGAR

In common with other scholars in the Geisteswissenschaften,

historians of ideas tend to reflect the prevailing values of their own
era. One obvious example of this tendency may be found in the
abundant scholarly literature on the history of the idea of progress,
and above all in the recent shift of opinion from the older view that
the idea of progressis a peculiarlymodernnotion to the now orthodox
belief that it is merely a "bastardoffspring"of the Christianworld-
outlook.
Clearly, the two views are not in all respects mutually exclusive.
Much also depends on what one means by the idea of progress.
Progressin the morally neutral sense of "forwardmovement" or in
the popular sense of advances in technology, need not concern us
here. But if progress is taken to mean the gradual betterment of
humanity, the difficulty arises that historians vary almost as pro-
foundly in their ideas of what constitutes human betterment as the
philosophersof history whose thought they have studied. Only the
broadest sort of definition, such as the one offered by Lovejoy and
Boas in their Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, will cover
all the ground involved. In the discussion which follows, then, the
idea of progress is the view that "the course of things since the
beginning-in spite of possible minor deviations and the occasional
occurrenceof backwatersin the streamof history-has been character-
ized by a gradualprogressiveincrease,or a wider diffusion,of good-
ness, or happiness, or enlightenment, or of all of these."1 At the
1Arthur 0. Lovejoy and George Boas, eds., Primitivism and Related Ideas in
Antiquity (Baltimore, 1935), "Prolegomenato the History of Primitivism,"3. The
same writersalso identify a "theoryof successiveprogressand decline,"which holds
that progresshas occurred,but that the upward movement of history has already
ended,or is ending,or will eventuallyend, to be followedby decline.Ibid., 4. Where
declineis thought to have set in long ago, a theory of successiveprogressand decline
is often confusedwith chronologicalprimitivism.By the same token, where decline
is thought to be recent or scheduledfor some future epoch, such a theory is easily
mistaken for the idea of continuousprogress.Many alleged discoveriesof the idea
of progress in antiquity or the Renaissance fall into this error, and even such
championsof the progressivefaith in recentgenerationsas HerbertSpenceractually
belong in the camp of the theorists of successiveprogressand decline.
55

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56 W. WARREN WAGAR

heart of every theory of progresslies a conception of the ultimate

good, and progressis thought to occur in proportionas the ultimate
good triumphsin history.
Most XIXth-century social prophets and scholars conceived of
the idea of progress as a product of the modern spirit. Following
Turgot,Kant, and Hegel, they agreedthat man had advancedsteadily
since the earliest times; but he had not become aware of progressas
the grand design of history until the XVIIth or XVIIIth centuries.
The magisterialpronouncementsof Comtein the Coursde philosophie
positive found wide acceptance. The ancients, he wrote, looked on
order and progressas antithetical principles,and chose order.As for
Christianity,it "certainlybore a part in originatingthe sentiment of
social progressby proclaimingthe superiorityof the new law to the
old."But "the theologicalpolity, proceedingupon an immutabletype,
which was realized only in the past, must have become radically
incompatiblewith ideas of continuousprogression,and manifests, on
the contrary, a thoroughly retrogradecharacter."The metaphysical
era in the history of the human spirit, with its sterile dogmatism,had
also failed to enunciate a clear concept of progress.Only with the
failure of the theologicaland metaphysicaloutlooks could the idea of
progresstake "any general possessionof the public mind." The laws
of progresscould be developed "by the positive philosophy alone."2
Sociology, the highest science, had only just now-in Comte's own
time and partly as a result of his own labors-begun to apply positive
methods to the study of man as a social animal; the law of the three
stages, the law of progress,was its fundamentalorganizingprinciple,
first sketched out by Turgot and Condorcet,and perfectedby Comte
himself. It could not have appearedbefore modern times.3
Comte's philosophy of history gave him no choice but to insist
on the modernityof the idea of progress,but many other prominent
thinkersof the century arrivedat much the same view independently.
Charles Renouvier, a profound opponent of positivism and deter-
ministic theories of history in general, traced the modern faith in
progressonly as far back as Leibniz. "The belief in general and in-
definite progress .. . is, in the eyes of every perceptive critic free of
the prejudicesof our century, something out of all congruencewith
Christianideas."From earliest times Christianityhad fixed its vision
2Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, freely translated
and condensedby Harriet Martineau (New York, 1854), II, 3 and 46-47.
3 Cf. the similarviews of Comte'scontemporary,PierreLeroux,in De l'Humanite
(Paris, 1840), I, 138ff.

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 MODERN VIEWS OF THE IDEA OF PROGRESS 57

on another world; the modern faith envisaged improvementonly in

time and on earth.
In a seminal essay written in 1892, FerdinandBrunetiere,another
great French savant outside the positivist circle, detected vague an-
ticipations of the idea of progressin antiquity. One could find hints
of the idea in Genesis, among the ancient Indians, in the philosophy
of Epicurus, in early Christianity.Jesus proposeda kind of spiritual
progressin declaringthe superiorityof his revelationto all its prede-
cessors. But none of these were true ideas of progress. "Glimpsed
by some, even roughly sketched out by others, [the idea of progress]
had no philosophical existence until the eighteenth century. Men
caught a glimpse, rather than formed a conception, of it. It floated
in the air without anyone having tried to take possession of it." 6
The turning point came with the Battle of the Books in the late
XVIIth century, after which the idea passed into general currency
during the Enlightenment.
A line of argumentsimilar to Brunetiere'swas pursuedby Robert
Flint in his still frequently cited studies of the history of philosophy
of history. Since philosophy of history dealt in large measure with
laws of progressor evolution, little could have been done in the field
"until the idea of progresswas firmly and clearly apprehended."But
Flint found no such apprehensionin ancient medieval thought; it
followed that philosophy of history could have had little chance to
develop until moderntimes, which was, in fact, the case. The Greeks
and Romans had toyed with the notion of progress,but they had
also conceivedof history in other ways, "althoughin none profoundly
or consistently."It was not otherwise with Christianthought. Early
Christianity had put forward the idea of the spiritual education of
humanityby God,but, as formulatedby Augustine,the Christianview
of history represented"the kingdomof the devil as not less enduring
and more populous than that of God, so that the ultimate goal of
history is for the majority of human souls one of eternal sin and
suffering."In appearanceAugustine's theory affirmedthe unity and
progressof humanity, but to some degree it implicitly denied both.
With their "aboundingignorance"and "anarchy,"the Middle Ages
had also been unfavorablein Flint's judgment to the developmentof
any idea of progress,despite the bold conceptionsof such relatively
4 Charles Renouvier, Philosophieanalytique de l'histoire
(Paris, 1896-97), III,
359. See also Renouvier'sIntroductiona la philosophieanalytiquede l'histoire,rev.
ed. (Paris, 1896), 555.
5 FerdinandBrunetiere,Etudes critiquessur 1'histoirede la litterature
frangaise,
5e Serie (Paris, 1911), 186.

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58 W. WARREN WAGAR

isolated figures as Roger Bacon and Joachim of Floris. It was only

with the Renaissance"that the idea of progresscould enter into the
stage of development in which its significancein all departmentsof
science and existence has graduallycome to be recognised."6
Curiously enough, the two most ambitious efforts to write the
history of the idea of progressbefore Bury, took an apparentlydiffer-
ent tack, arguingthat the idea had enjoyed a long and venerablehis-
tory, and had flourished in some form in all the major Western
cultures.But in both instances,the author'spurposewas more to show
the relative modernityof certain currentsof pre-modernthought than
to demonstrate,as scholars nowadays are wont to do, the extent to
which modernideas descend,often "illegitimately,"from older ideas.
The earlierof these studies was the workof the Belgian sociologist
GuillaumeDe Greef,himself an apostle of progressdeeply in the debt
of Comte, although he had to oppose the Master on this particular
point. He began by attacking "the superficialobservation that one
encounters in nearly all the writings of those who have concerned
themselveswith the question,"the observationthat the idea of prog-
ress belongs only to the last few centuries. The first scientific ideas
of progress, to be sure, were the work of Turgot, Condorcet, and
Comte. But their thought grew in turn out of such fundamentalcon-
ceptions as the Golden Age, organic evolution, the continuity and
regularityof the cosmos, and Jesus' prophecyof the gradualcoming
of the Kingdom of Heaven, all conceptionswhich had arisen in an-
tiquity. Like progressitself, the idea of progresshad passed through
a numberof well-definedstages, each one indispensableto those that
followed. At no point in ancient or medieval times had the idea of
progresssucceededin fully emancipatingitself from the superstition,
pessimism,and tendency to otherworldlinesswhich hamperedall pre-
modernthought, but it constantly struggledfor existence,growingby
degreesfrom the first faint conceptionsof future life in the prehistoric
mind to the full-blown scientific laws of XIXth-century sociology.7
A still more elaborateeffort to push the idea of progressback into
antiquity was made by Jules Delvaille in his encyclopedicEssai sur
l'histoire de V'ideede progresjusqu'a la fin du XVIIIP siecle, which
remains today the longest book on the subject, though certainly not
the best. Bury learned much from it, even if he dissented crucially
6 Robert
Flint, History of the Philosophyof History (New York, 1894), 88, 90,
158, and 104.
7 GuillaumeDe Greef, Le Transformisme social: Essai sur le progreset le regrhs
des societes (Paris, 1895). The account of the history of the idea of progressmay
be found on pp. 8-306.

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 MODERN VIEWS OF THE IDEA OF PROGRESS 59

on the point here at issue. WhereasDe Greef had discoveredonly the

germ or embryo of the modern conception of progress in ancient
thought, Delvaille seemed to find the thing itself. The proclamation
of the Messiah in propheticJudaism was nothing less than "faith in
progress"; the Epicurean theory of progress was a rough draft of
Condorcet'sEsquisse; and so forth.8Jesus, Augustine, Joachim, and
Roger Bacon received special attention among Christian thinkers.
Even more clearly than in the case of De Greef, however, Delvaille's
purposewas to point out the pleasantly surprisingnew-fashionedness
of antiquity and not the old-fashionednessof modernity.9
But the majority of scholars down to the appearanceof Bury's
magnum opus in 1920 continued to emphasize the relative novelty
of the progressivefaith. Ernst Troeltsch noted the unwitting contri-
bution of the Reformersto the modern belief in progressin his lec-
tures on Protestantism and Progress, but made quite clear that the
belief itself "was an accompanyingphenomenonof the struggle for
freedomin the period of Illuminism."10Arthur J. Todd in Theories
of Social Progresssaw the faith in progressas a child of modernsci-
ence. "Both the word and the idea . . . are relatively new." 1 Even
Dean Inge in his famous 1920 Romanes lecture ruled out any organic
connection between classical or Christian thought and the belief in
progress.Classical theory of history was fundamentallycyclical, and
Christians,Roman and medieval alike, had set their hopes on another
world, quite content to see man's career on earth end in their own
time. The doctrineof progresshad XVIIth-century roots and became
8 Jules Delvaille, Essai sur l'histoirede l'idee de progresjusqu'ala fin du XVIIIe
siecle (Paris, 1910), 16 and 75.
9An interesting parallel might be drawn with some of the theologiansof the
"Social Gospel,"who discoveredthe modern idea of progress almost intact in the
teachings of Jesus. See, for example, Walter Rauschenbusch,Christianityand the
Social Crisis (New York, 1908), chs. 1-3. In a very differentvein, scholarsmore
recently have called attention to the "party of progress"which grew up within the
Churchin the IVth century, and whose leaders includedthe historianEusebius,St.
Ambrose,and the poet Prudentius.See E. K. Rand, Foundersof the Middle Ages
(Cambridge,Mass., 1928), 13-22; and Theodor E. Mommsen,"St. Augustineand
the ChristianIdea of Progress,"JHI, XII (1951), 356-69. Mommsensuggeststhat
Augustinewrote The City of God in large part to refute the argumentsof these
too-worldlyChristians,who saw the progressof imperial Rome as proof of God's
satisfactionwith mankindand with Holy Church. Cf. Arthur O. Lovejoy's discus-
sion of the progressivismof Tertullianin "'Nature' as Norm in Tertullian,"Essays
in the History of Ideas (Baltimore,1948), 318-22 and 338.
o0Ernst Troeltsch, Protestantismand Progress (London, 1912), 25.
11Arthur J. Todd, Theoriesof Social Progress (New York, 1918), 93.

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60 W. WARREN WAGAR

widespread,Inge wrote, only in the latter part of the XVIIIth cen-

tury.12
It was certainlyBury's book, however,that did the most to estab-
lish the idea of progressas a uniquely modernfaith. He began by de-
fining his terms so narrowly that it would have been difficult for a
thinker of his outlook to arrive at any other conclusion regarding
the origins of the idea of progress."This idea means that civilisation
has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction." In
Bury's definition, the forwardmotion of civilization also had to be
thought of as gradualand as destined to continue indefinitely,and it
had to be "the necessaryoutcomeof the psychicaland social nature of
man; it must not be at the mercy of any external will; otherwise
there would be no guaranteeof its continuanceand its issue, and the
idea of Progresswould lapse into the idea of Providence."l3So de-
fined, the idea of progresshad had no existence beforemodern times.
Classical thought insisted on the unchangeabilityof human nature
and of the ideal world; the historical process was almost invariably
thought of as cyclical and in any case no fundamentalchange in the
order of reality was involved. Christianthinkers for their part sub-
jected everything to the will of divine providenceand took no real
interest in the prospect of terrestrialimprovement.Christianity did
breakthe grip of cyclicalconceptionsof history on the human imagin-
ation, and in this sense preparedthe way for the theory of progress,
but before the possible emergence of anything like a true idea of
progress,three other developmentshad to take place: the authority
of the ancients had to be challenged and thought liberated from its
yoke; the value of secular life had to be frankly acknowledged;and
science had to be put on sure foundationsby Descartes' demonstra-
tion of the invariabilityof the laws of nature. All of this happenedin
the XVIth and XVIIth centuries. By the early XVIIIth century,
Western civilizationwas ready for its first theory of generalprogress,
enunciatedby the Abbe de Saint-Pierre.14
Bury's severely limited definition of the idea of progressgave to
his work less historical scope than it might otherwise have had, but
his skill in demolishingthe too optimistic interpretationsof classical
historical thought of some of his precursorsshould not be under-
estimated,and if his treatmentof Christianthinkersseems ratherless
convincing, and groundedin less careful research, it is still worth
12W. R. Inge, The Idea of Progress (Oxford, 1920), 3-7.
13 J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (New York, 1932), 3-5. (1st ed., London,
1920). 14Ibid., 1-36 and 65-66. For St.-Pierre,see ch. 6.

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 MODERN VIEWS OF THE IDEA OF PROGRESS 61

serious consideration.One thing is clear. His book became almost

immediately the undisputed classic in its field, comparablein influ-
ence to Burckhardt'sCivilizationof the Renaissancein Italy in Ren-
aissance studies. A whole generation of intellectual historians was
nourishedon Bury, not only because he had produceda brilliant his-
tory of an important tradition in thought, but also because he was
one of the first scholarswriting in English to make generous use of
the basic concepts and methods of intellectual history. The standard
works on the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment of the
1920'sand 1930'susually refer to him; most agree with him that the
idea of progress was quintessentially a modern faith, fathered by
modern science.15An orthodox position had clearly crystallized. It
was a position which, in the main, looked favorably on the modern
world and the modern spirit, especially as contrastedwith the spirit
of the Middle Ages. Most of its exponents were also themselves ad-
herents of the faith in progress,even if they objected, as did Renou-
vier, to certain forms taken by that faith.'1 The same generalizations
apply to those, like De Greef and Delvaille, who preferredto find sig-
nificant anticipationsof the modern spirit in earlier ages.
But in the last twenty or thirty years, a new orthodoxposition has
emerged which makes Bury suddenly seem old-fashioned and even
quaint in the eyes of many scholars.In part, the developmentof this
new orthodoxymust be ascribedto purely internal developmentsin
15
See, e.g., KingsleyMartin, FrenchLiberal Thoughtin the Eighteenth Century
(London,1929), 277-81; and PreservedSmith, A History of Modern Culture (New
York, 1930-34), II, 228-29. "No psychologicalcontrast between the older and the
more recent thought is of greater consequencethan is the contrast between the
backward-lookingand the forward-lookingmind. The ancients regardedprimitive
times as the last age of gold; the medievals esteemed almost all previous periods
as happier than their own. The humanistof the Renaissancelonged for a return to
the age of Augustusand the Reformersought to restorethe purity of the apostolic
era. But, beginningin the seventeenthcentury,men began to look forwardand not
back, to the future and not to the past, for the era of perfection.The reason for
this is simply the triumph of science."Smith, ibid. See also Vincent Brome, The
Problem of Progress (London, 1963), ch. 1, for a recent example of Bury's
continuinginfluenceoutside academiccircles.
16Bury was enough influencedby the relativistic implicationsof historicismto
suggest that the faith in progresswould some day be replacedby another ruling
idea, just as progressitself had taken the place of providence.But in so doing, he
contradictedhimself by retaining a progressiveinterpretationof the development
of human thought: "In other words, does not Progressitself suggest that its value
as a doctrine is only relative, correspondingto a certain not very advancedstage
of civilization; just as Providence,in its day, was an idea of relative value, cor-
respondingto a stage somewhatless advanced?"The Idea of Progress,352.

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62 W. WARREN WAGAR

historiography:the natural tendency of youngergenerationsof schol-

ars to challenge the settled convictions of older generations,and in
particularthat powerfulmovement in recent historiographicalthink-
ing which takes for its motto, "It happened later than you think,
and even then it was little more than old wine in new bottles." We
learn that the Renaissanceand Reformationwere not really modern,
the Scientific and Industrial and French Revolutions were not really
revolutionary,the middle classes were not ascendantin British poli-
tics until the XXth century, and the spirit of the Enlightenmentwas
only the spirit of the Middle Ages fitted out with a new vocabulary.
By the same token, Marx was only a reincarnatedHebrew prophet,
Freud a teacher of the ancient truth of original sin (or alternatively,
a child of the Enlightenment), and Einstein a "classical"physicist
in the tradition of Aristotle and Newton. But the new orthodoxyon
the problemof the origins of the idea of progressstrikes more funda-
mentally at the old orthodoxythan would a mere change in historio-
graphical fashions. It reflects the actual collapse of the progressive
faith which has taken place by degreesover the past fifty years and
the new seriousnesswith which religion, and the great traditions of
religious thought, are being taken by intellectuals, who see in those
traditionsa radical answerto the spiritual problemsof modernman.
The new orthodoxy,much of it the result of the impressive work of
Christian scholars,rejects not only the assumption that the idea of
progressis a uniquely modern faith. It also implicitly or explicitly
rejects the idea of progressitself, along with most of the other so-
called modernarticlesof faith with which it was closely associatedin
the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries: belief in the essential goodness
and self-sufficiencyof man and faith in the powerof science to banish
sufferingand bring about the "evanescenceof evil."
Some of the first and best blows were struckby Carl Beckerin his
Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. Although
anything but an apologistfor Christianity,Beckerwrote his Heavenly
City, as Leo Gershoy points out, in a mood of disillusionment.He
had come to the bleak conclusionthat the XVIIIth-century religion
of humanity "was as little-or as much-tenable as the orthodox
Christianity which it had supplanted."17 It was not only as little
tenable; it sprang, as one could determine from an authentically
geisteswissenschaftlicheinvestigation into its spiritual sources, from
the same thought-world.Becker devoted his fourth chapter, "The
Uses of Posterity," to an extensive comparisonof the Christian and
17Leo Gershoy in Raymond 0. Rockwood, ed., Carl Becker's Heavenly City
Revisited (Ithaca, N.Y., 1958), 197.

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 MODERN VIEWS OF THE IDEA OF PROGRESS 63

Enlightenment views of human destiny. The philosophes had had

no choice, he suggested, but to find a dream just as intoxicating as
the Christiandreamwhich they could not accept. If they were to win
the common man, in particular,they had to match the Christians
promise for promise. "Without a new heaven to replace the old, a
new way of salvation,of attaining perfection,the religionof humanity
would appeal in vain to the common run of men."18 In place of a
heaven outside of time, the philosophes offered the idea of the per-
fectibility of man on earth. In place of providenceand the atonement,
they offered the concertedefforts of mankind itself. In place of the
judgment of God, they offered the opinion of posterity. The same
feelings, the same hopes, the same yearnings were called forth as in
the apparently discreditedfaith of the Middle Ages, for the simple
reason that the philosopheswere not far removed in spirit and pur-
pose from their medieval forerunners.Beckerput his case rathermore
succinctlyin his article on progressin the Encyclopaediaof the Social
Sciences. The modern idea of progress,he wrote, grew out of the
Judeo-Christian tradition of messianic intervention and salvation
under the stimulus of the hopes raisedby modernscience. "As formu-
lated by the philosophes,the doctrine of progresswas but a modifi-
cation, however important, of the Christiandoctrine of redemption;
what was new in it was faith in the goodnessof man and the efficacy
of consciousreason to create an earthly utopia."19
In perspective,Becker'sargumentappears as a sort of prolegom-
enon to the massive assault on the idea of progress and on Bury's
interpretation of its origins which was launched by a number of
Christiantheologiansand devout lay scholarsespecially in the years
just after World War II, and which has resultedin the establishment
of what I have called the new orthodoxposition on the originsof the
progressive faith. Becker was not alone in heralding this assault.
Even before The Heavenly City, ChristopherDawson, for example,
had made much the same case for the origins of the idea of progress
in his Progress and Religion, going even further to maintain that
such spiritualvitality as the idea possessedit drew directly from "the
Christian teleological conception of life."20 But Dawson's observa-
tions, like Becker's, could do little more than reopen the question
18 Carl
Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-CenturyPhilosophers
(New Haven, Conn., 1932), 129.
19
Becker, "Progress,"Encyclopaediaof the Social Sciences,XII (1934), 497.
20 C. Dawson, Progressand
Religion (London,1929), ch. 8, "The Secularization
of Western Culture and the Rise of the Religion of Progress,"esp. 190-91; also
John Macmurray,The Clue to History (London, 1938), 113-15.

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64 W. WARREN WAGAR

answeredwith such apparent authority by Bury. Neither book had

mounted anything like a full-scale attack.
The postwar attack has been the work primarilyof five thinkers,
all of them in the front rank, and all worthy opponents of Bury:
Karl Lowith in Meaning in History, Reinhold Niebuhr in Faith and
History, John Baillie in The Belief in Progress,Eric Voegelin in The
New Science of Politics, and Emil Brunner in Eternal Hope. Other
books by these and other scholarsmight also be cited, but these five
give a full statement of the new thinking. The themes more or less
common to all of them are easily summarized.All agree that the
modern idea of progresscannot be understoodor its history written
without the most searchinginquiry into the mind of antiquity and
the Middle Ages. When such an inquiry is made, it discloses an or-
ganic connection between pre-modern and modern conceptions of
history, but not, of course,the sort of progressivedevelopmenttraced
by De Greef.The place of progressivedevelopmentis taken by strug-
gle and corruption: the struggle between the pagan and Christian
outlooks, followed by the corruptionor perversionof the latter into
the modern idea of progress,usually with the fateful assistance of
Christian perfectionists in the late Middle Ages and Reformation.
As Jacques Barzundisposesof Darwin, Marx, and Wagnerby claim-
ing to prove that all three were not only wrong and wicked but also
highly unoriginal, so the new orthodoxy attempts to demolish the
idea of progressby exposingat the same time its errorsand its illegiti-
mate origins.
The first plank in the platform of the new orthodoxyis an insist-
ence upon the radicallyahistoricalworld-viewof classicalcivilization.
Classical thought held that all historical processeswere cyclical; on
the other hand, since essential reality was immune to temporalvicis-
situdes, history had only the most relative and limited significance.
In Niebuhr's words, "The classical culture, elaborated by Plato,
Aristotle and the Stoics, is a western and intellectual version of a
universaltype of ahistoricalspirituality . . . For classicalculture the
world of change and becomingwas intelligible and real insofar as it
participated in the changeless world through a cycle of changeless
recurrence."21 The characteristicattitude of classical man was that
of the Stoics: resignation,fatalism, non-resistance.The world could
be understood,but it could not be fundamentallychanged.22
21ReinholdNiebuhr, Faith and History (New York, 1949), 16 and 38.
22
Cf. John Baillie, The Belief in Progress (London,1950), 42-57; Emil Brunner,
Eternal Hope (Philadelphia,1954), 15-16 and 46-47; Karl Lowith, Meaning in
History (Chicago, 1949), 199-200; Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics
(Chicago, 1952), 118-19, and Orderand History (Baton Rouge, La., 1956-57), II,
49-52.

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 MODERN VIEWS OF THE IDEA OF PROGRESS 65

Against this conception of time and history early Christianity

struggledfiercely, drawing on its Jewish heritage, and in due course
its opponentsmet with total defeat. Augustine'swriting of The City
of God was but one event in that struggle, though perhapsthe most
decisive. Christianity offered the pagans a hopeful and meaningful
conception of history. Weary and despondent, they snatched at it
eagerly, and so the spiritual life of mankind was radically trans-
formed. "For the first time in the history of humanity,"writes Emil
Brunner, "throughthe instrumentality of Israel, and then through
the Christianheirs of the Israelite religion of revelation,it happened
that the attention of man was directed towards the future."23 Time
was now thought of as linear, as non-reversible,proceedingfrom the
events in Genesis to the axial moment of Christ's crucifixionand
resurrectionand from that point on to the final consummationat
the end of the time-line and of time itself. "It was the Christianfaith
and not modernculture which overwhelmedthe classicalworld. Long
before the modernsense of a dynamic and creative history made the
classical scheme of meaning dubious, the Christian faith challenged
and overwhelmed it." 24
From these two points, which most contemporaryscholarswould
probably find eminently acceptable, the proponents of the new or-
thodoxy advanceto the assumptionthat the modernidea of progress,
formulated as it was by Christiansand ex-Christiansin a Christian
civilization, is only a renderingin secular concepts of the Christian
epic, a direct importation of the teachings of the Church on the
subject of sacred history into a post-Christian ideology explaining
profane history. The importation is in the nature of a rape. The
results are illegitimate, since they pervertthe meaning of the original
Christian teaching and spring from the unholy union of Christian
doctrine with modernWestern hubris.At least this is Brunner'sway
of putting the matter. Progressivism,he says, "is the bastard off-
spring of an optimistic anthropologyand Christian eschatology."It
could have arisenonly in a Christiansociety. "Belief in progresswas
only possible in ChristianWestern Europe, but only because in pro-
23
Brunner, 25.
2 Niebuhr, 65. Cf. Baillie, 57-84; Lowith, 160-90; Niebuhr, 20-29, 46-54, and
102-50; and Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 107-10. This severe contrast
between the classical and Christianideas of history is a commonplaceof recent
scholarship.See, e.g., C. N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (New
York, 1944), 243-45 and 483-85; R. G. Collingwood,The Idea of History (Oxford,
1946), 46-49; Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Con-
ception of Time and History (Philadelphia,1950), esp. 51-60; Erich Frank, Phil-
osophical Understandingand Religious Truth (New York, 1945), 67-70; Paul
Tillich, The Interpretationof History (New York, 1936), 243-48; and Voegelin,
Orderand History, II, 22-23.

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66 W. WARREN WAGAR

portion as Christianfaith declined the former arose as its distortion

and substitute, its parasite. For it lived on the very powers which it
destroyed." 26
John Baillie delivers a similar indictment in The Belief in Prog-
ress. The idea of progressarose only in Western civilization because
it "couldnot have grown up elsewherethan on groundpreparedfor
it by the ChristianGospel.So far, therefore,as it may be considered
to be false, the doctrine of progress is a Christian heresy. Like all
heresies it is essentially a lopsided growth. It is the development of
one aspect of the received truth to the neglect of other aspects."He
goes on to attack Bury for not bringing out the "extent to which
the idea of progress is itself a derivation, legitimate or not, from
Christianconceptions,"and praisesBeckerfor arguingthat the belief
in progress was "essentially a redisposition of the Christian ideas
which it seeks to displace."26Karl Lowith, showing the intimate
connection between all modern philosophy of history and Christian
thought, finds that the belief in progressis "a sort of religion,derived
from the Christianfaith in a future goal, though substituting an in-
definite and immanent eschaton for a definite and transcendentone."
It is "as Christianby derivationas it is anti-Christianby implication
and . . . definitely foreign to the thought of the ancients. ... The
eschatologicalinterpretationof secular history in terms of judgment
and salvation never entered the minds of ancient historians.It is the
remote and yet intense result of Christian hope and Jewish expec-
tation."27 In studying modern prophets, Lowith has no trouble re-
vealing the man of Jewish or Christian faith under the veneer of
atheistic rhetoric.Marx was "a Jew of Old Testament stature," and
the idealistic basis of his message was "the old Jewish messianism
and prophetism . .. and Jewish insistence on absolute righteousness."
Insofar as he preachedhope, and looked obsessively into the future,
even Nietzsche was little more than a heretic, "not so much 'the last
disciple of Dionysos' as the first radical apostate of Christ."28 Along
the same lines, we have Voegelin's thesis of modernity as the "re-
divinization"of man and society, and Niebuhr's assertion that the
modern idea of progress puts history in place of Christ as man's
redeemer.2
25Brunner, Christianity and Civilization (New York, 1948-49), I, 55; and
Eternal Hope, 10. Brunneralso recapitulateshis argumentin his Dogmatics (Phila-
delphia, 1950-62), III, 355-61.
26Baillie, 95, 106, and 113; see also 186-87.
27Lowith, 114 and 61. 28 Ibid., 44 and 222.
29
Voegelin,The New Science of Politics, 107-10 and 128-32; Niebuhr, viii and
1-2. Niebuhr (209-13) offersmuch the same explanationof Marx as L6with. In all
fairness, it should be added that Niebuhr's formula for the origins of the idea of

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 MODERN VIEWS OF THE IDEA OF PROGRESS 67

Finally, most of our writers attach special significanceto certain

medieval heresies and movements in the Protestant Reformation as
agencies for the transmissionof Christiandoctrineto the apostles of
the idea of progress during and after the Enlightenment. Voegelin
directs most of his fire at Joachim of Floris, who becomes in his
treatment the arch-villain of modern history. Joachim's idea of the
three ages of history, correspondingto the three personsof the Trin-
ity, broke decisively with the Augustinian doctrine of the two cities
and injected into the stream of Western thought the poisonousfaith
in man's perfectibility on earth which was later more fully imma-
nentized, which is to say secularized,by the philosophesof the En-
lightenment. Joachitic eschatology must be interpreted as a revival
of Gnosticism, and modern civilization is spiritually governed by
three secularized products of Joachim's Gnostic dream world: the
Enlightenment idea of progress,utopianism, and revolutionaryper-
fectionism, of which the clearest modern example is Marxism. The
line of descent from Joachim'sthird and coming age of human per-
fection to Comte's age of Positivism, the Marxist vision of the class-
less society, and the Nazi idea of the Third Reich, could not be more
clear. The Joachitic poison had worked potently, for example, in all
the many perfectionist sects of the later Middle Ages and the Ref-
ormation. Voegelin devotes a whole chapter to one such case: the
Puritan programfor "Gnosticrevolution,"which strongly influenced
the later course of modern thought in its turn.30In all of this, Voe-
gelin closely follows the case against Joachim in Lowith's Meaning
in History; and related passagesmay be found in Brunnerand Nie-
buhr. Lowith finds it "one of the great paradoxesin the history of
Christianity that the most authentic imitation of Christ, that of
St. Francis,mergedinto a revolutionaryinterpretationof the 'Eternal
Gospel' [Joachim's] which led, by many detours and perversions,to
a progressiveinterpretationof history which expected the eschaton
not only in history but eventually also from it." 31
progress is somewhat more complex than those of the other writers quoted. In
additionto the obvious Judeo-Christianingredient,he also suggestsa major obliga-
tion to the classicalidea of "rationalintelligibility,"applied by moder man to the
interpretationof history. The idea of progressis, then, a combinationof the classi-
cal fondnessfor simple rational explanation,Christiansoteriologyand eschatology,
and the uniquely modernidea of historicaldevelopment (14-16, 29-30, 37-38, and
65-69).
80Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 110-21 (on Joachim), and 113-61
(on the Puritans).
31Lowith, 144; also ch. 8 and Appendix I, "Modern Transfigurationsof
Joachism."Cf. Brunner,Eternal Hope, 70-76; and Niebuhr, 2 and 200-09. Baillie
(191 f.n.) prefers to regard Joachim as a rather crude anticipation of his own
particularvariety of Christianprogressivism.

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68 W. WARREN WAGAR

The new orthodoxyhas, needless to add, found support in many

other quarters. Rudolf Bultmann, while maintaining in effect that
even the medieval Catholic interpretation of history partook of
heresy, and that Christiansmust look for the eschaton only in every
present moment of their lives, subscribesfully to the theory that the
idea of progresswas a secularizedform of traditional Christian es-
chatologicaldoctrine.32Ernest Lee Tuveson'sbrilliant monographon
XVIIth-century English millenarianphilosophiesof history, Millen-
nium and Utopia, studies the religiousbackgroundof the idea of prog-
ress and argues that while Descartes and Newton may take credit
for modern naturalism,modern man's progressiveinterpretation of
history stemmed from theology. The XVIIIth-century faith in prog-
ress "resultedin part from the transformationof a religious idea-
the great millennial expectation."33 CharlesFrankeland R. V. Samp-
son have both pointed out the organic link between the spirit and
methods of medieval philosophy and that aspect of the progressive
faith which descendsfrom Descartes.34Frank Manuel urges that the
Enlightenmentdoctrineof progresswas "bornin the bosom of Chris-
tianity," dramaticallyillustrated by the fact that Turgot's famous
lectures on the subject at the Sorbonnewere intended as exercisesin
Christian apologetics. The faith in progress was a species of "the-
odicy."35
Nor have the proponentsof the new orthodoxygone entirely un-
challenged. A few progressivistshave protested, notably-in quite
another context-Frankel himself, and also Morris Ginsberg. But
Ginsberg'sprotest is rather feeble, asking only that greater stress be
laid once again on the importanceof modernscience,rationalism,and
liberalism in the origins of the progressivefaith; and Frankel con-
fines himself to a refutation of Niebuhr'schargethat the philosophes
Rudolf Bultmann,History and Eschatology (Edinburgh,1957), ch. 5.
32
33 Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millenniumand Utopia: A Study in the Backgroundof
the Idea of Progress (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1949), x.
3 Charles Frankel, The Faith of Reason: The Idea of Progress in the French
Enlightenment(New York, 1948), 13-29 and 153-58; R. V. Sampson,Progressin
the Age of Reason (Cambridge,Mass., 1956), 13-29.
35Frank E. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (Cambridge,Mass., 1962), 45-51.
Although in his latest book he warns against pushing the origins of the idea of
progresstoo far back into the past, this would seem to be a protest against the
Delvaille-De Greef school of thought, and not against the essential insights of the
new orthodoxy.Manuel is even dubiousof Bury's contentionthat the idea of prog-
ress had arrived in the XVIIth century; the "full-blown"theory of all-inclusive,
inevitable,infinite progressdid not in his reckoningmake its appearanceuntil the
early XIXth century and Comte. Manuel, Shapes of PhilosophicalHistory (Stan-
ford, Calif., 1965), 68-69.

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 MODERN VIEWS OF THE IDEA OF PROGRESS 69

shared any of the sweeping optimism of Christian soteriology.36No

really effective counterattackhas been made, and the new orthodoxy
gains ground every year. Perhaps it deserves to. But clearly the
motives of many of the scholarsinvolved are open to suspicion.Have
they written, if this is possible, out of a pure desire to understand
the origins of the idea of progress,or are they engaged in eloquent
partisan polemics? Contemporaryman's disillusionment with the
progressivefaith, which attains sometimes the proportionsof fury,
inevitably colors any attempt to write the history of that faith. Its
still surviving devotees are put on the defensive, which results per-
haps in equally distorted judgments.
But certain caveats are worth uttering. The intellectual historian
must be wary of seeing necessary causal links where none exists.
Carefulstudy of the actual historicalflow of influence,whereverfeas-
ible, is always preferableto hypothesis and conjecture.37In particu-
lar, the intellectual historian should resist the temptation, with all
the scholarly excitement about "symbol and myth," to leap to the
conclusionthat the borrowingof symbols from earlierperiods neces-
sarily also involves the borrowingof the ideational substancebehind
those symbols, or even proves a deep spiritual influence. He should
not assume dogmaticallythat all ideas must evolve from other, older
ideas, that spontaneousgenerationis impossible,or that non-intellec-
tual factorscannot be decisive in originatingnew modes and currents
of thought.
The intellectual historian must also be careful to avoid defining
his concepts ahistorically. There is not one true, monolithic, gold-
plated Idea of Progress,which emergesat a particularpoint in time,
and against which all other so-calledideas of progressmust be meas-
36Morris Ginsberg,"The Idea of
Progress:A Revaluation,"Essays in Sociology
and Social Philosophy (New York, 1957-61), III, 5-6; Frankel, The Case for
Modern Man (New York, 1956), 101-08. Peter Gay suggests that the philosophes
had no "theory"of progressat all; better to think of them as tough-mindedStoics
who occasionallydared to believe that man could improve his lot if he worked at
it hard enough. Like Manuel, he apparently prefers to postpone the arrival of a
thoroughgoingtheory of progress until the early XIXth century. See Gay, The
Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment(New York, 1964), 270-
73. Gay has also written a pungent critical reassessmentof the Becker thesis, but
he fails to discuss Becker's contention that the idea of progress was only a
secularizationof the Christian hope. Gay, "Carl Becker's Heavenly City," in
Rockwood,Carl Becker'sHeavenly City Revisited, 27-51, reprintedas ch. 7 in The
Party of Humanity. Cf. Henry Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French
Enlightenment(Cambridge,Mass., 1958).
7 A formidable model for this sort of study is W. M. Simon's meticulous
investigation of the influence of Comte, European Positivism in the Nineteenth
Century (Ithaca, N.Y., 1963).

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70 W. WARREN WAGAR

ured. Some of the difficultyin the historiographicaldebate over the

origins of the idea of progressis certainly rooted in the too abstract
and narrow definitions of that idea which scholars have demanded.
There are, rather, many ideas of progress and where the lines are
to be drawn and how the various types are to be discriminatedhis-
torically is exceedinglydifficult to determine. In tracing origins one
might expect, for example, to find more direct links between Chris-
tianity and the ideas of progressin German thought from Kant to
Hegel, than between Christianityand XVIIIth-century French ideas
of progress.38
One further suggestion is, perhaps, not entirely out of order. Let
us suppose that future scholarsdo find it impossible to documentin
convincing detail the influence of specifically Judeo-Christianideas
on the modern prophets of progress.A case may well be made, all
over again, for the more or less independentoriginsof the progressive
faith, and it may be arguedthat any civilizationcapableof producing
a Galileo, a Descartes, a Newton, and a Locke would in due course
have also brought forth an idea of progress, with or without the
Judeo-Christianheritage. The fact will remain that only Western
civilization produceda Galileo, a Descartes, a Newton, and a Locke.
Underlying their thought, and the thought of Christianity, and the
thought of the classical era, certain characteristicallyWestern atti-
tudes of mind may persist through all the vicissitudes of history in
some form or other, and mark off the West from the civilization of
the Orient. To identify with some precision these Urgestalten of
Westernthought might in time make a significantcontributionto our
understandingof how the Western mind in its modern phase of de-
velopment arrived,under the appropriatehistorical stimuli, at ideas
of progress.At least one may confidently predict that despite the
self-assuranceof the new orthodoxy, the question will remain open.
The last wordshave not been spoken.
University of New Mexico.
88 Baillie's strategy of defining"layers"in the progressivetradition is a useful
start in the right direction.

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