Joachim of Flora: Culmination of Christian Philosophy of History / Origination of Modern Philosophy of History

Abstract

Between the Eighteenth and Thirteenth Centuries there was no original and characteristically European historical thinking (Heer, 1953, p. 80). Lessing formulated sharply the gulf carved out by the Eighteenth Century between truths of reason and truths of fact: the former are necessary, timeless-eternal, the latter contingent, temporal, and historical in nature.¹ But the same Lessing wrote the Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race), published in part in 1777 and completed in 1780, which marks a turning point in the thought of the Enlightenment. The Education contains the first sign of a serious challenge to the Enlightenment, that is, to the bifurcation between reason and history. Its interest far transcends its intrinsic merit by translating revolutionary concepts from the Twelfth Century into the Nineteenth, in the work of Schelling and Hegel.