stood," according to John Pocock; "the temporal flux evaded men's conceptual control," and history unfolded "under the dominion of an inscrutable power, which manifested itself as providence to men of faith and as fortune" to the faithless.

Whatever the conceptual deficiencies in this way of understanding history, at least it did not expose the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the delusion that man can control history for his own purposes or build a new kind of social order that will withstand the corrosive effects of time. Those historians who find the seeds of progressive ideology in the linear conception of time, advanced by Christians in opposition to the cyclical conception of antiquity, overlook what the idea of providence had in common with the idea of fortune. No doubt Karl Löwith went too far in the other direction when he claimed that "in the reality of that agitated sea which we call 'history,' it makes little difference whether man feels himself in the hands of God's inscrutable will or in the hands of chance or fate." It does make a difference, one that was already implicit in the contrast between Augustine's unconcern with political matters and Machiavelli's insistence that it is political life alone that enables men to achieve lasting glory and thus to outwit fortune. But Machiavelli's view of fortune did not lack respect, even a certain reverence. He confessed that he was "partly inclined to share the opinion" that "there is no remedy whatever" against fortune. Only the reflection that "our freedom" would be "altogether extinguished" by such an attitude led him to think that although "fortune is the ruler of half our actions," she "allows the other half or thereabouts to be governed by us." He was not so impressed by the example of Rome or the prospects for its revival that he fell into the equivalent of our modern mistake in exempting our own civilization, seemingly immortal in its wealth and its command of the accumulated fruits of scientific knowledge, from the cycle of growth and decay.

The concept of virtue stood in something of the same relation to fortune, in the civic tradition descending from Machiavelli and ultimately from classical stoicism, that the Christian concept of grace stood in relation to providence. Virtue, like grace, enabled men to live undespairingly with the knowledge of finitude, the poignant contrast between the absolute and the contingent. Virtue imposed form on the disorderly flux of temporal events by underwriting a civic order the moral example of which would outlive its allotted span of time. Since the civic ideal defined

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