historical stages, later discredited; but that was not because they incorporated elements of the Christian worldview into their systems but because they mistakenly assumed that modern scholarship had to compete with Christianity on its own ground. Attempting to work out theories that rivaled Christian cosmology in their comprehensive scope, nineteenth‐ century thinkers encumbered the idea of progress with an unnecessary load of world-historical significance. Now that this speculative freight has dropped away, Blumenberg thinks, we can see more clearly what distinguishes the modern conception of history from the Christian conception : the assertion that the principle of historical change comes from within history and not from on high and that man can achieve a better life "by the exertion of his own powers" instead of counting on divine grace.

Just why these considerations should establish the "legitimacy of the modern age" is not clear, but at least they help to distinguish it from earlier ages. The "secularization thesis" has too long obscured differences between the idea of providence and the modern idea of progress. The case for the antiquity of a belief in progress reveals its weakness most clearly just when it is pressed most energetically, as in the work of Nisbet, who claims to find a highly developed theory of progress not only in the Christian fathers but even in classical authors like Seneca and Lucretius. Nisbet assumes that Roman and Christian philosophers shared our high opinion of material comforts. But although they admired the ingenuity that produced those comforts, they believed that moral wisdom lay in the limitation rather than in the multiplication of needs and desires. The modern conception of progress depends on a positive assessment of the proliferation of wants. Ancient authors, however, saw no moral or social value in the transformation of luxuries into necessities. In Augustine's City of God, to be sure, we find in book 22 eloquent praise of fecundity, plenitude, and invention—Nisbet calls it his own "pièce de résistance." But the flavor of the passage is best conveyed by Augustine's observation that human skill and intelligence reveal themselves even in the "brilliant wit shown by philosophers and heretics in defending their very errors and falsehoods." Man's impressive achievements "console" him, Augustine says, for his fallen state—for the "life of misery, [the] kind of hell on earth" described so graphically in the chapter immediately preceding the one Nisbet quotes at length. But these achievements do not assure salvation. Augustine discusses them in a passage that also praises the supera

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