History of progress versus religious experience — from the Christian to secular historiographic concepts

Abstract

This article analyzes relations between religious experience and the problem of progress. The Christian concept of historiography that appeared in Antiquity was imbued with the sense of fulfilment given by the sacred history. It also contradicted the secular interpretation of history as anticipated by Greeks. The sense of history was understood differently in the official doctrine of the church. Obviously, it must have been so with respect to interpretations given by heretics or sects. Something else, in turn, appeared in the sense of history as meant in the Modern Era. The article substantiates the assumption that both the secular and New Era understanding of Progress is rooted in Christianity. In the Middle Age religious community, man believed in the Destiny, which, however, changed in the times of the Reformation, when the progress of secularization commenced and the individual became a creator of history. History maintained its sense and direction but became to be dependent on humans. It has been shown that the evolution was a progress that started from the religious meaning of history and advanced to the stage at which the progress was analyzed by philosophers on the secular basis (Walter, Hegel or Marks), and ended with the period in which the progress ceases to be just a theory and becomes our life reality.