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Church's errant wanderings, but with reason's exile into priestcraft in classi-
cal antiquity. By positing this early onset for reason's abandonment of nature
for metaphysical speculation, he could account for the failure of ancient
Greek rationalism to found the scientific revolution it should have brought
about. Condorcet makes this periodization seem plausible by interpreting
the martyrdom of Socrates as the key manifestation of this fateful turn.
“The death of Socrates is an important event in human history,” he writes,
because, as the “first crime that marked the beginning of the war between
philosophy and superstition,” it also brought the very principle of historical
evil into focus. As a vignette that captured in this negative fashion his theory
of historical development, it would also “occupy one of the most important
places in the picture that it still remains for us to trace.” 54 It accounted for
the struggles against superstition yet to come because, much like the various
biblical episodes of rebellion that Bacon had alluded to in his New Atlantis , it
revealed a principle of historical evil that was perennially relevant because it
reflected (as a kind of inverse image) the eternal principle of progress.
Once we understand the persuasive role played by Condorcet's histori-
cal displacement, we can also begin to understand why his explanation of
Socrates' demise has such a weak historical grounding. Condorcet's expla-
nation of Socrates' condemnation also works to constitute the past as a dark
age, and, by contrast, to make the present one an age of light. His modern
theory of history required a decisive break with the past, a periodization
that would be true to the historical principle set out in his Esquisse . Now
that the ways of reason had fully come into the human consciousness, the
evils of the past were destined to fade away, but a progressive apocalypse,
no less than a providential one, must also explain why the revelations of
the present have made possible what the past could not. Bacon achieved
this by bringing the story of science into alignment with the new Protestant
periodization that had made the epoch of Catholicism a dark age and that
of the reformers an age of light. The rediscovery of God's word was usher-
ing in the final millennium, and the kindred progress of science, as the
ordained reader of the topic of nature, was advancing toward paradise along
the same road. Condorcet's Esquisse is a version of the same story. Socrates,
though one of reason's faithful in the past age, could not advance the cause
of science because its power had been seized by a priestly caste that was pow-
erful enough to mask its revelatory truth behind a façade of superstition.
But things were different now. The philosopher's modern counterparts had
fully made the ways of reason known, and now it was impossible for the old
alliance of superstition and tyranny to obscure it again.
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