Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
what man has been and what he is today,” is not to understand the past but
rather to “instruct us about the means we should employ to make certain
and rapid the further progress that his nature allows him still to hope for.”
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In one sense, this might be said to be historiography aspiring to become
science. Scientific theories have predictive power, and so if history could
genuinely gain such theoretical standing it might have some share in this.
This undoubtedly was what Condorcet thought he was doing. But because
he also belonged to a culture long accustomed to making similar supposi-
tions on revelatory grounds, he could not help but do more than this.
Periodization
This supposition that the advent of science was history's apocalypse is borne
out in particular by the periodizations that follow once Condorcet has set
forth this premise. Were we to take seriously his claim that his subdivisions
of the past derive from a scientific theory of history, we would expect treat-
ments that were more faithful to the historical record. But usual scientific
concerns about evidentiary fidelity are superseded by what is demanded
once it is supposed that history's immanent purpose was the advent of sci-
ence. If it was “nature's wish” to achieve scientific enlightenment, then the
prescientific world would need to be interpreted, not in accordance with
the testimony of past witnesses, but in light of the theory of history revealed
in the scientific apocalypse of the present. A corollary to this can be found
in the different historical interpretation that Christianity brought to the
period of Jewish history inaugurated by the delivery of God's law to Moses
on Mount Sinai. While Christians continued to attribute a similar moral
value to the law, it no longer had the same constitutive significance that it
had for Jews since its meaning was now subservient to a more significant
apocalypse. Thus for Paul the Mosaic epoch became a period of preparation
during which the law had acted as “custodian until Christ came” (Gal 3:24).
The law's meaning was no longer found in its content (thus the effectual
suspension of its various dietary and ritual prescriptions) so much as in
what it pointed to, namely the satisfaction of its demands in the sacrifice
of Christ. The revelation of Christ similarly redefined the period of the
prophets. Their more immediate contextual role as God's messengers to an
ever-errant Israel was not rejected; rather, the reference point of interpreta-
tion had changed. All prophecy in the historical consciousness of Christi-
anity is in some sense messianic prophecy, so that the age beginning with
Samuel now found its end in the New Testament in the character of John
