Must We Divide History Into Periods?

Jacques Le Goff, Malcolm DeBevoise

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231540407
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia social

We have long thought of the Renaissance as a luminous era that marked a decisive break with the past, but the idea of the Renaissance as a distinct period arose only during the nineteenth century. Though the view of the Middle Ages as a dark age of unreason has softened somewhat, we still locate the advent of modern rationality in the Italian thought and culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Jacques Le Goff pleads for a strikingly different view. In this, his last book, he argues persuasively that many of the innovations we associate with the Renaissance have medieval roots, and that many of the most deplorable aspects of medieval society continued to flourish during the Renaissance. We should instead view Western civilization as undergoing several "renaissances" following the fall of Rome, over the course of a long Middle Ages that lasted until the mid-eighteenth century.

While it is indeed necessary to divide history into periods, Le Goff maintains, the meaningful continuities of human development only become clear when historians adopt a long perspective. Genuine revolutions—the shifts that signal the end of one period and the beginning of the next—are much rarer than we think.

1

Early Periodizations

Long before it had been accepted in historical writing and research, the notion of a period was routinely used for the purpose of organizing the past. This was mainly true in the works of religious authors, who used it to divide time into smaller units in accordance with theological doctrine or with reference to figures of sacred literature. Because my aim is to show how periodization influenced social and intellectual life in Europe, I shall limit myself to mentioning the systems that were adopted there. Other civilizations, the Maya, for example, adopted different systems.

A remarkable volume of essays edited by Patrick Boucheron,¹ inquiring into the roots of the modern phenomenon of globalization, examines the course of events throughout the world in the fifteenth century without, however, seeking to interpret them in terms of a particular historical scheme. Among the many recent attempts to reconsider the long-term historical periodization created and imposed by the West, with the aim of establishing either a single periodization for the world as a whole or a series of periodizations, special notice should be taken of the synchronic comparison of the world’s principal civilizations, from 1000 BCE until the present day, with which Philippe Norel concludes his pioneering global economic history.²

The Judeo-Christian tradition presents two basic models of periodization, each based on a symbolic number: four, the number of the seasons; and six, the number of the ages of life. Here one observes not only a parallelism but also a reciprocal influence between the individual chronology of the ages of life and the universal chronology of the ages of the world.³

The first model of periodization is found in the Old Testament book of Daniel. In a vision the prophet sees four beasts, the incarnation of four successive kingdoms that together constitute the complete time of the world, from its creation until its end. The beasts, kings of these four kingdoms, are destroyed in their turn. The fourth king will have sought to change times and the law, and he blasphemes against the Most High, opposing His designs. But then there will come, with the clouds of heaven, a son of man on whom the Ancient of Days has conferred dominion, glory and kingdom, and all the peoples, nations, and languages will serve him. His dominion, everlasting, will neither pass away nor be destroyed.⁴

As Krzysztof Pomian has pointed out, it was not until the twelfth century that the periodization found in Daniel gained favor among chroniclers and theologians.⁵ They then advanced the idea of a translatio imperii, according to which the Holy Roman Empire was heir to the last of Daniel’s four kingdoms. In the sixteenth century Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560) divided universal history into four monarchies. A similar periodization, likewise derived from Daniel, was proposed at about the same time in a work by the German historian Johannes Sleidanus (c. 1506–56), Three Books of the Four Sovereign Empires (1557), the four empires being Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome.

The other Judeo-Christian model of periodization, whose influence was contemporaneous with that of Daniel, is due to Saint Augustine, the great source of medieval Christianity. In the ninth book of The City of God (413–27) Augustine distinguishes six periods: the first running from Adam to Noah, the second from Noah to Abraham, the third from Abraham to David, the fourth from David to the Babylonian captivity, the fifth from the Babylonian captivity to the birth of Christ, the sixth from the birth of Christ until the end of time.

Daniel and Augustine both looked to the cycles of nature for inspiration: Daniel’s four kingdoms correspond to the four seasons; Augustine’s six periods refer, on the one hand, to the six days of creation and, on the other, to the six ages of life: infancy (infantia), childhood (pueritia), adolescence (adolescentia), youth (juventus), maturity (gravitas), and old age (senectus). Both ascribed symbolic significance to their periodizations as well. This is not surprising. In thinking about the distant past we can scarcely suppose that any way of grouping events is somehow neutral, or objective, or unaffected by a very personal experience of time and by what was eventually to be called—the result of a long gestation, lasting centuries—history.⁶

Daniel, telling the Persian king Nebuchadnezzar of the succession of four periods, says that each kingdom represents a time of decline by comparison with the preceding one, until the advent of the kingdom created by God in sending a “son of man”⁷ (whom the Fathers of the Church recognized as Jesus) to lead the world and humanity into eternity. This periodization therefore combines the idea of decadence, born of original sin, and faith in everlasting life, which—Daniel does not say this, but he implies as much—will be eternal joy for the elect and eternal sorrow for the damned.

Augustine, for his part, places greater emphasis on a progressive degeneration, by analogy with the course of human life and its culmination in old age. His periodization served to reinforce the chronological pessimism that reigned in many monasteries during the early Middle Ages. The idea of decline gained impetus as Greek and Latin gradually ceased to be taught, and the literature written in them began to be forgotten. Already in the first centuries of the medieval era the expression mundus senescit (the world grows old) had become common. Indeed, the theory of the aging of the world worked to prevent the idea of progress from emerging until the eighteenth century.

Yet Augustine’s interpretation did not exclude the possibility that life on Earth might yet improve. The sixth age, between the incarnation of Jesus and the Last Judgment, holds out the prospect of redemption with regard to the past and of hope with regard to the future: although man had been corrupted through original sin in the first age, and then himself corrupted the world in succeeding ages, he was nonetheless created in God’s image. Throughout the Middle Ages, Augustine was seen as heralding a blessed time of renewal, both of the world and of humanity, which later was to be called a rebirth, or renaissance.

Efforts to organize time were crucially affected in the sixth century of the Christian era when a Scythian monk, living in Rome, called Dennis the Small (Dionysius Exiguus) made a fundamental distinction between what happened before and after the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Later calculations by New Testament scholars indicated that Dennis was mistaken about the exact date of Jesus’s birth. But whether Jesus was born four or five years earlier than he had supposed matters little for our purposes. The main thing is that since the eighth century or so in the West, and now everywhere in the world as the result of a resolution adopted by the United Nations, all of human history has been divided into two epochs, one prior to the birth of Christ, the other subsequent to it. It is true that this amounts to imposing a Western periodization on other civilizations. But I am convinced that the importance for humanity of establishing a single standard for measuring historical time outweighs the doubts and misgivings that an edict of this sort will inevitably arouse.

A number of great medieval thinkers helped to propagate the Augustinian theory of the six ages of man. Three in particular stand out: Isidore of Seville (c. 570–636), the celebrated author of the Etymologies, whose Chronicon was to exert a lasting influence on the course of periodization; the English monk and theologian known as the Venerable Bede (673–735), whose De temporum ratione (On the Reckoning of Time) concludes with a universal chronicle of humankind up to 725; and the Dominican friar Vincent de Beauvais (c. 1190–1260), who worked at Royaumont and dedicated to King Louis IX of France a vast encyclopedia in three volumes, the final one of which, Speculum historiale (Mirror of History), applied Augustine’s periodization.

Other conceptions of time, which is to say other religious periodizations, were current in the Middle Ages as well. I shall mention only one, probably the most important of all considering the renown both of the work in which it was elaborated, the Legenda aurea (Golden Legend), and of its author, the Dominican chronicler and cleric Jacobus de Voragine (c. 1230–98). In an earlier book I tried to show that the Legenda was not, as has long been supposed, a hagiographic work.⁸ It was meant instead to describe and explain successive periods of the time that had been created and given by God to man, the central moment of which was the birth of Christ.

Jacobus defines this human time with reference to two principles, the “sanctoral” and the “pastoral.” Whereas the sanctoral rests on the lives of 153 saints (the same number as the fish that were miraculously caught in the New Testament account),⁹ the pastoral is bound up with the liturgy and the evolving relationship between God and man to which it testifies. For Jacobus human history is the time God gave to Adam and Eve, which they defiled through original sin. This lapse was partly redeemed by the birth and death of Christ incarnate, and led on, following his crucifixion, to the end of the world and the Last Judgment.

From this there resulted a division of human time into four periods. The first is the time of “deviation,” a turning away from the right path that extended from Adam to Moses. The next age, from Moses until the birth of Christ, is the time of “renewal.” The Incarnation ushers in a third period, brief but essential, the time of “reconciliation” measured by the fifty days between Easter and Pentecost. The current age is the time of “pilgrimage,” during which man’s conduct will determine whether, at the Last Judgment, he is to be assigned to heaven or to hell.

More surprising than Jacobus’s division of the history of the world into four periods is the one devised by Voltaire in Le siècle de Louis XIV (1751): “Every age has produced heroes and politicians; all nations have experienced revolutions, and all histories are nearly alike to those who seek only to furnish their memories with facts; but whosoever thinks, or, what is still more rare, whosoever has taste, will find but four ages in the history of the world. These four happy ages are those in which the arts were carried to perfection, and which, by serving as the era of the greatness of the human mind, are examples for posterity.”¹⁰

Voltaire used the term siècle not in the sense of a period of one hundred years, which was relatively new in his time, having appeared at the end of the sixteenth century, though it soon became more widely adopted in the seventeenth. He used it instead to refer to an epoch that represented a kind of apogee, or peak, of human achievement. The first of these four ages for Voltaire is ancient Greece—the time of Phillip, Alexander, Pericles, Demosthenes, Aristotle, Plato, and so on. The second is the age of Caesar and Augustus, illustrated by the great Roman authors who were their contemporaries. The third is “that which followed the taking of Constantinople by Mahomet II”¹¹ and manifested itself mainly in Italy. The fourth is the age of Louis XIV. Voltaire, noting the advances that had then taken place not only in respect of human reason and philosophy but also “in our arts, our genius, our manners, and even in our government,” reckons it to be “perhaps that which approaches the nearest to perfection of all the four.”¹²

This periodization, while it admirably illuminates four remarkable ages of human history, nonetheless has the defect, to our way of thinking at least, of leaving other epochs in darkness. And it is exactly this darkness in which the Middle Ages are to be found. Voltaire himself therefore sees them as a dark age—without, however, distinguishing it from the Renaissance or from modern times. His approach nonetheless has the virtue for our purposes of recognizing the importance of the second half of the fifteenth century in Italy.

The influence of the two chief medieval periodizations, the four kingdoms of Daniel and the six ages of Saint Augustine, continued to be felt in varying degrees until the eighteenth century. But the Middle Ages also witnessed the advent of a new way of thinking about time, which began to take shape in the fourteenth century.

2

The Late Appearance of the Middle Ages

Certainly since the time of Dennis the Small, men and women in the lands of Christendom, or at least those who belonged to clerical and lay elites, believed that humanity had entered a new era with the appearance of Christ and, above all, with the conversion to Christianity of the emperor Constantine in the early fourth century. Yet there existed no official periodization of the past, no recognized chronological break apart from the fact of Jesus’s birth. A concern with periodization did not emerge until quite late, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, near the end of the historical era that was the first to be more or less precisely defined: the Middle Ages.

Curiously, even though the concepts of “ancient” and “modern” were already familiar during this period, corresponding roughly to “pagan” and “Christian,” the preceding period, antiquity, had not yet been marked off as a separate epoch. The very word antiquity, from the Latin antiquitas, still signified the condition of aging, of growing old—a sign that the Augustinian conception of humankind, as having finally reached its old age, existed prior to the Christian era.

Beginning in the fourteenth century, and especially in the fifteenth, a small but growing number of poets and writers, Italian for the most part, had the sense that they were working in a new atmosphere and that they were themselves both the cause and the consequence of this change in culture. They therefore thought to identify, in a pejorative way, the period they had been fortunate enough to leave behind. Plainly it had commenced with the end of the Roman Empire, an epoch that they regarded as embodying an ideal of art and culture and that bore the imprint of great authors who were scarcely known to them: Homer, Plato (only Aristotle h...