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emerging out of the Enlightenment, as Eric Voegelin observes, the “
corpus
mysticum Christi
has given way to the
corpus mysticum humanitatis
.” The mean-
ing of history on this “intramundane level” was being constructed as “an
analogue to Christian meaning so closely that we can trace the parallelism
step by step.”
2
As Reinhold Niebuhr has put this, despite much talk about
nature and reason, the dominant note in modern culture continued to be
the faith in history it had inherited from previous generations.
The conception of redemptive history informs the most diverse forms
of modern culture. . . . Though there are minor dissonances the whole
chorus of modern culture learned to sing the new song of hope in a
remarkable harmony. The redemption of mankind by whatever means,
was assured for the future. It was, in fact, assured by the future.
3
In the end it was much easier for Western cultures to close down churches
than to extinguish the desires that had built them, and these same desires
had also been responsible for fashioning the architecture in which science
found its home in society.
The continued evolution of this pattern in the positivist messages of
Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and his onetime disciple August Comte
(1798-1857) that I turn to now will bring us to the doorstep of evolution-
ism. As one of the most influential offshoots of the Enlightenment, the
positivist movement was still mainly concerned with the larger problem of
building a new European civilization. But as a rhetorical resource that later
came to be closely associated with the scientific worldview, it is recogniz-
ably, if not the immediate ancestor of evolutionism, at least its evolution-
ary cousin. As such it represents a symbol system even more conducive to
scientific patronage than the one erected in the Enlightenment. The crucial
development within classical positivism that makes it a key stopping point
in this evolutionary journey was its effort to envision a
history of science that
was also a science of history
. Saint-Simon and Comte continued to stand with
Condorcet in holding that the structure of history could be decoded in the
evolution of modern science, but they also went one step further by actively
claiming that they had brought the knowledge of these historical structures
within the compass of scientific analysis. Condorcet had also asserted that
science, as the epitome of progress, was the inevitable outcome of an ever-
expanding human consciousness set free from brutality and superstition as
humanity increasingly came into contact with nature and reason. He had
also asserted that history could be theorized as science but without ever
really saying how. It was left to the positivists to make this effort explicit
