From Two Books to One - Rhetorical Darwinism - page 118

by a divine plan rather than by the merely human interests of powerful indi-
viduals or nations—then any appropriate perspective on history must like-
wise be universal . Since providence has given history a transcendent basis and
thus no center within itself, historical perspectives cannot privilege the point
of view of any one culture or society. All people and all societies will seem to
move along a common trajectory. Since the meaning of history comes from
without, it can only be made intelligible from an apocalyptic standpoint, from
the transcendent perspective that has made its way into the historical con-
sciousness through various defining revelatory events. New revelations make
previously hidden features of this transcendent plan known, and for this
reason Christian histories are also periodized . Successive revelations divide
time into distinct epochs, each qualitatively set off from a previous period by
some new prophetic disclosure that has reconfigured the understanding of
providence. The Christian division of history into old and new covenants,
which turns upon the revelation of the incarnation, is the most familiar
and definitive manifestation of this principle, but the millenarian turn that
we examined in the last chapter is the biblical model most pertinent to our
understanding of a modernist history such as Condorcet's. Christian peri-
odizations, such as Bacon's, sanction the novelty of new epochs, but they
also represent the fruition of something manifest in the previous epochs
they supersede. In interpreting the modernism on display in the Esquisse , I
will argue that it was this conserving tendency in the millenarianism that
Condorcet borrowed from the Christian model that enabled him to posit a
seemingly secular history without actually abandoning those sacred mean-
ings that formerly integrated life in the Christian epoch.
These four features of Christian history are evident in Bacon's New
Atlantis . When Bacon brought the emergence of science into accord with
the Bible's drama of sin and redemption, he was interpreting its advent in
accordance with the providential supposition that a destined salvation is
the backdrop against which human history must be understood. As applied
to natural revelation, this meant that science could only be harmonized
with Christian history by having some share in the church's redemptive
work. Bacon's similar concern with science's priestly election and separa-
tion from worldly affairs manifested both its apocalyptic (revelatory) and
universal qualities. Once scientific discovery was recognized as manifesting
the gospel, it necessarily had a universal scope as well. Since revelation was
God's work, it transcended the particulars of national or personal interest
and thus had application to the whole of humanity that God was working
to redeem. Bacon needed to appeal to the concept of periodization in order