The Essential Augustine (continued)
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 221 great event that cannot be repeated: "Christ died but once for our sins; now that He is risen from the dead, He will die no more." (City of God, XII, 13, 2.) This Christian teaching on the uniqueness of the redemption freed men's minds and wills from Greek determinism and fatalism. It also gave mankind a positive goal beyond time and temporal events. It expanded human horizons beyond limitations of race, cultural differences, and diversities of political institutions.
Human events become significant when viewed in the light of divine Providence. God is the focal point of explanation here, as elsewhere in Augustine's thought. Even within Augustinianism there are at least two different interpretations of the climax of history. Some scholars (see Paul Henry) think that the high point is the Incarnation; all later events are, then, anticlimactic. The drama has reached its peak; now we have but to finish the last act. Other writers shift the emphasis to the end of time; they see human history as a gradual progress toward.a not yet attained but ultimate condition of mankind. This view is eschatological. It has become popular through the writings of Teilhard de Chardin.
(See Tresmontant, C., Pére Teilhard de Chardin, His Thought [Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1959].) Both interpretations find some support in Augustine.
The selections in this last chapter could all have been taken from the City of God, for it contains most of the elements of this remarkable approach to history. Instead, the texts below represent a variety of writings in which time and eternity are treated. The long quotation from the Confessions, | on the nature of time, is one of the most famous passages in all patristic literature.
BELIEF AND HISTORICAL EVENTS*
There are three kinds of objects of belief. One kind 48. consists of those that are always believed and never understood: such is history in every case, running through the course of temporal and human events. Second, there are those objects which, as soon as they are believed, are understood: such are all human uses of reason, in the field of numbers or in any of the academic studies. Third are those objects that are first believed and later on understood: such are those items that cannot be understood about divine matters except by the clean of heart, a condition
* Eighty-three Different Questions, q. 48; trans. V.J.B.