Philosophy of History

Abstract

Readers of western religious thought cannot avoid being aware of the intimate connection between history and religion. Augustine’s monumental work, The City of God, interpreted the history of humankind as a linear progression under the direction of the providence of God. This theological interpretation of the sense and direction of history dominated western thought until the time of the Renaissance when there emerged more secular and philosophical interpretations of history. Giambattista Vico, an eighteenth century historian and philosopher, is often cited as the key figure in the rise of the philosophy of history. History was for him a matter of human action and as such was understood to be accessible to the historian who can reconstruct in his own mind the past activities of human agents. Vico had a place for providence but, says Karl Löwith, critics were correct in thinking that in the work of Vico, “providence has become as natural, secular, and historical as if it did not exist at all. For in Vico’s ‘demonstration’ of providence nothing remains of the transcendent and miraculous operation which characterizes the faith in providence from Augustine to Bossuet. With Vico it is reduced to an ultimate frame of reference, the content and substance of which are nothing else than the universal and permanent order of the historical course itself.”1