Nothing Was Moribund, Nothing Was Dark: Time and Its Narratives in the Early Modern Period

In 999, people across Europe gave away goods and land to prepare for the millennium; in 1999, people across much of the world stockpiled canned soup and fresh water to prepare for Y2K. Popular magazines and more than a few scholarly journals succumbed to the mania for summative judgments of the last hundred or thousand years and published essays that either explained humankind's fascination with end-game scenarios or speculated about the century to come. One has only to thumb through these endless discussions that claim an old (industrialized) world is out and, with e-commerce, we have begun already anew to realize that humanity has not become less credulous during the last thousand years. If anything, our fascination with twentieth-century eschatology reinforced the suspicion that those zeros at the century's end are emblematic of a host of anxieties about time, decay, and the ends of history. To scholars steeped in the decennialization of calendarical and conceptual time, century-long periods seem fundamental to our very notions of disciplinary thinking, if not of history itself. In the humanities, course descriptions are filled with demarcations by decade and century, and general terms for historical periods--notably modernity--expand and contract to reinforce the values and assumptions of irreversible time. In an important sense, ideas of progress and millennial thinking are dialectically bound: human time and its periods have beginnings, middles, and ends, and these demarcations point toward a sense of human agency in directing events within given allotments of time, even as time itself sweeps irrevocably forward. If, as Michel Serres suggests, we freeze time in order to conceive of geometry--that is, the spatial and hierarchical models that supposedly transcend mutability--we are also carried toward an end which paradoxically we both bring about and are powerless to resist. (1) The u rge to stockpile Evian reflects an underlying dichotomy: the fear that we might be wasting time, not using it wisely or productively enough, and the recognitions--comic, tragic, or farcical--that time wastes us. As the essays by Lisa Zunshine, Christopher Reid, and George E. Haggertyin this special issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation make clear, millennial thinking can assume a variety of forms, and the narratives that seek to recapture or redefine notions of time testify to the contentiousness of modern conceptions of history, progress, and revolution. For many scholars, the concepts of Renaissance and Enlightenment are tied crucially to notions of linear, progressive, and irreversible time--the advent, in short, of a Newtonian or clockwork universe in which divine authority and the manufacture of timepieces were effectively indistinguishable. (2) In these narratives, whether in the eighteenth century or the twentieth, time is always on the side of a self-reflexive modernity that takes as its origin the redefinition of progress--from a circuit to a vector--associated with the Scientific Revolution. Such notions assume that time is always in the process of a transforming what is incipient into what has been, and the clockwork politics of regulation, mathematicized productivity, and abstract econometrics were contested even as they were articulated. (3) The concept of irreversible time attributed to Isaac Newton by Donald Wilcox, among others, is only half of the dialectic. (4) As many historians have come to recognize, Newton's conception of historical time is at once cyclical and millenarian, his mathematical abstraction of time in the Principia carefully encoded within a grand narrative of voluntarist theology. Much of his time was devoted to his unfinished- and unfinishable--manuscript, Theologiae Gentilis Origines Philosophi cae (the Theological Origins of Gentile Philosophy) and to his ruminations on prophetic time in his efforts to calculate, after years of pouring through endless commentaries on the Books of Daniel and Revelation, when the world would end. …