A brief history of the western idea of progress – part two
ancient Rome and the early Catholic Church
"Hope has two beautiful daughters: anger and courage." - St. Augustine
As we traipse through the western intellectual history of the idea of progress we can turn now, as most surveys do, from the Greeks to the Romans and early Catholic church, beginning with a pioneering work of the natural sciences,
Lucretius’ (99 - 55 BC) On the Nature of Things. In Book V he lays out tropes familiar to progress like urbanization, state formation, domestication of animals, formal division of land, open sea ships and navigation, inter-state treaties, poetry, written language, “tillage, walls, laws, arms, roads, dress, and all such like things, all the prizes, all the elegancies too of life without exception, poems, pictures, and the chiseling of fine-wrought statues, all these things practice together with the acquired knowledge of the untiring mind taught men by slow degrees as they advanced on the way step by step.”
Lucretius highlighted the importance of education to progress. “And more and more every day men who excelled in intellect and were of vigorous understanding would kindly show them how to exchange their former way of living for new methods.” Like Epicurus, Lucretius also laid out a methodology important to progress: reason. “For this reason our age cannot look back to what has gone before save where reason points out any traces.”
Seneca (4 BC – 65 AD) too, in his Quaestiones Naturales, highlights the importance of the human mind when he wrote that “mental acumen and prolonged study will bring to light what is now hidden…the time will come when our successors will wonder how we could have been ignorant of things so obvious.” In his Moral Letters to Lucilius, Seneca goes through the typical catalogue of progress: multi-story architecture, intensification of urbanization, domestication of fish in preserves, luxury, mechanical tools, metallurgy but he diverges from his earlier philosophers in saying that these things were
“invented by some man whose mind was nimble and keen, but not great or exalted; and the same holds true of any other discovery which can only be made by means of a bent body and of a mind whose gaze is upon the ground.”
Seneca also sees this as process that will go on indefinitely.
“Much remains to do; much will remain; and no one born after thousands of centuries will be deprived of the chance of adding something in addition.”
Like so many of the thinkers already cited, Seneca noted the fundamental importance of education to progress, as well as the ends of education.
“Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve. The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach.”
Again following the usual typology of western intellectual history we can move from the Romans to the influence of Christianity. Much is made of Marxism of as a teleology, as so many theories of progress are. This emerged earliest and most clearly in St. Augustine’s (354 - 430) The City of God (early 5th century AD). It wasn’t fate or fortune, it was providence, God’s plan for history - but it required human activity to come about, “a struggle toward perfection through forces immanent in humanity.” Again, education is central.
“The education of the human race, represented by the people of God, has advanced, like that of an individual, through certain epochs, or, as it were, ages, so that it might gradually rise from earthly to heavenly things, and from the visible to the invisible.”
St. Augustine offered a seven stage periodization of progress from the simplicity of Eden to the complexity of paradise of heaven on earth prior to the final judgement. Book XXII, section 24 of his City of God (early 5th century AD) is worth quoting at length for its prognostication of modernity.
“It is He, then, who has given to the human soul a mind, in which reason and understanding lie as it were asleep during infancy, and as if they were not, destined, however, to be awakened and exercised as years increase, so as to become capable of knowledge and of receiving instruction, fit to understand what is true and to love what is good. It is by this capacity the soul drinks in wisdom, and becomes endowed with those virtues by which, in prudence, fortitude, temperance, and righteousness, it makes war upon error and the other inborn vices, and conquers them by fixing its desires upon no other object than the supreme and unchangeable Good. And even though this be not uniformly the result, yet who can competently utter or even conceive the grandeur of this work of the Almighty, and the unspeakable boon He has conferred upon our rational nature, by giving us even the capacity of such attainment? For over and above those arts which are called virtues, and which teach us how we may spend our life well, and attain to endless happiness,—arts which are given to the children of the promise and the kingdom by the sole grace of God which is in Christ,—has not the genius of man invented and applied countless astonishing arts, partly the result of necessity, partly the result of exuberant invention, so that this vigor of mind, which is so active in the discovery not merely of superfluous but even of dangerous and destructive things, betokens an inexhaustible wealth in the nature which can invent, learn, or employ such arts? What wonderful—one might say stupefying—advances has human industry made in the arts of weaving and building, of agriculture and navigation! With what endless variety are designs in pottery, painting, and sculpture produced, and with what skill executed! What wonderful spectacles are exhibited in the theatres, which those who have not seen them cannot credit! How skillful the contrivances for catching, killing, or taming wild beasts! And for the injury of men, also, how many kinds of poisons, weapons, engines of destruction, have been invented, while for the preservation or restoration of health the appliances and remedies are infinite! To provoke appetite and please the palate, what a variety of seasonings have been concocted! To express and gain entrance for thoughts, what a multitude and variety of signs there are, among which speaking and writing hold the first place! what ornaments has eloquence at command to delight the mind! what wealth of song is there to captivate the ear! how many musical instruments and strains of harmony have been devised! What skill has been attained in measures and numbers! with what sagacity have the movements and connections of the stars been discovered! Who could tell the thought that has been spent upon nature, even though, despairing of recounting it in detail, he endeavored only to give a general view of it? In fine, even the defense of errors and misapprehensions, which has illustrated the genius of heretics and philosophers, cannot be sufficiently declared. For at present it is the nature of the human mind which adorns this mortal life which we are extolling, and not the faith and the way of truth which lead to immortality.”
Centuries after Augustine, Joachim of Fiore (1135 – 1202), took up this notion of stages, in his case sets of threes, the great holy number of the western mind, each corresponding to different figures of the Trinity. Joachim of Fiore was a singular figure. A royal court functionary who disavowed worldly pursuits after a trip to the holy land. He became a hermit for years, then a wandering preacher, then a member of a monastery without taking the vows of monkhood. He later became a celebrated abbot and founder of Catholic orders. Celebrated by popes, as a writer he was a creative and visionary interpreter of the bible. To many cautious churchmen, his teachings were heretical. The others, the man was visionary yet orthodox. The visual iconography through which he expressed his arcane speculations created a mutant work of genius (discovered in 1937), Liber figurarum.
“First, the Age of the Father or of Law; second, the Age of the Son, or of the Gospel; and third, still ahead, a thousand-year Age of Spirit.” This final stage would begin approximately during his time, possibly accelerated and prepared for by the crusades, and would yield “absolute peace, tranquility, freedom, and contentment.” His interest in the crusades made him a counselor to kings, especially Richard the Lion-Hearted of England who met him in Sicily en route to Third Crusade of 1189–1192 . Joachim’s prognostications represent yet another definitive moment in the institutionalization of the church. They perhaps also make him an idiosyncratic godfather of hermeneutics, obsessed as he was with interpreting the hidden meanings of the bible. Christianity was no longer the religion of Jesus but a religion about Jesus.
The divine providence immanent in the unfolding of history may have been placed there by god but it required human activity to actualize itself and human activity could be perfected by education. God gave man reason which enables societies to progress as individuals do, in knowledge and skill as they age to fulfill his plan of a linear historical progression composed of developmental stages, inevitable, utopian, and millenarian. This is the structure of thought that, when secularized during the Enlightenment, began to acquire the contours of the modern western idea of progress.
Walter Klaason elaborated on Joachim’s tripartite scheme with another sets of triplets: “knowledge, wisdom, complete understanding; servitude of slaves, service of sons, complete freedom; plagues, action, contemplation; fear, faith, love; starlight, dawn, full daylight.”