QUESTIONING A PENAL VIEW OF HISTORY

Abstract

If, as St. Augustine suggests, the poematic conception of time as distentio animi that we find in the famous passage from book XI of Confessions (I will sing a song that I have learned by heart... / dicturus sum canticum, quod novi) can be amplified and applied to the entire history of the sons of men, as Augustine himself immediately suggests to us — “[... ] And what happens in the canticle in its entirety, happens in each of its parts and in each of its syllables; it also happens in a longer action, of which, perhaps, that canticle is a small part; it also happens in the life of man, in its entirety, of which all his actions are parts; this very thing happens in all the generations of mankind, of which all the lives of men are a part.” — such a change and widening of scale has serious consequences as far as the constitution of a Theology of History is concerned.