/lit/ - Literature

>>22010134
>This idea includes three principles: "First, the belief that history follows a continuous, necessary, and orderly course; second, the belief that this course is the effect of a regularly operating causal law; and third, the belief that the course of change has brought and will continue to bring improvement in the condition of mankind."

>The first two of these principles were always implied in the Christian belief that every single event and consequently also the course of historical events as a whole take place under God's will and in accordance with the plan of Divine Providence.

>But it remained for Eusebius to add the third principle, the optimistic belief in continuous improvement, and thus to develop a full-fledged Christian idea of progress.

>Eusebius' idea was taken up by some of the most prominent theologians of the fourth and early fifth centuries, both in the eastern and the western parts of the Church. This is shown by the interpretations which John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, Cyril of Alexandria and Theodoret of Cyprus gave in their various commentaries on Psalm 72 and Isaiah (2, 4), and we may add, on the passage in Psalm 46 (v. 9), which reads: " He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth." Like Eusebius all the writers just mentioned explained these passages in terms of the Pax Romana and its earthly achievements..."

Such a triumphant view is rightly tempered by Augustine's theory of history in The City of God.

Of course we also have the later work of GWF Hegel for clarification of this concept. Unfortunately, he is famously hard to read. Worse still, there has been a cottage industry of different groups, Neo-Marxists, modern progressive secular liberals, fascists, etc. all trying to lay claim to Hegel's legacy. This, the claim that there is "no God," in Hegel, or that he doesn't merely borrow from Spinoza but is a Spinozist. Critiques of this view, which are well supported, are generally banished to the theology section, hence "Hegel's Conception of God," from SUNY press and "Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit," stay off reading lists despite widespread praise.

One could read a whole host of commentaries on Hegel and be amazed to learn that he not only wrote on the Philosophy of Religion, but that his notes on the topic dwarf any other subject.