HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

32 MICHAEL I. ALLENAugustine underscored, embraced a different span of time. 51 Augustineredeployed this scheme in the later, historically minded books of hisCity of God, and there, as elsewhere, he emphasized the vanity ofstriving in the Sixth Age “to know the times which the Father hasset” for the Seventh (cf. Acts 1:7). 52 Believers, he argued, lived alreadyin the symbolical “millennium” of God’s earthly kingdom by virtueof their spiritual resurrection from sin and acknowledgement of theSaviour. 53 Their need, or at least one need, was to apply themselvesto the promise of heavenly fulfillment, undistracted by times knownonly to God. Augustine thus worked to channel eschatological aspirationinto a patient yet demanding present. The scheme of the Ageshelped to disarm reductive chronology and kept the ultimate goalof time plainly in view. Augustine concluded his City of God with acapsule account of the Six Ages of the world and the subsequentunfolding of Man’s Sabbath of Rest into the Lord’s Day, the unendingEighth Age of the corporeal resurrection. 54 That concise statement,if not Augustine’s richest exposition, showed the practicalbackground and reach of what became a key instrument of universalhistorical organization.Isidore and BedeUnlike Eusebius-Jerome or Orosius, Augustine’s historically mindedreflections offered no real purchase for continuation as such. Theconceptualizations of the Two Cities and the Six Ages each presentedtheir respective visionary completeness, which could be more51Augustine, De Genesi contra Manichaeos I.33–43, PL 34, cols. 34, cols. 190–94.Cf. Schmidt (1956), 292–97.52Cf. Augustine, De ciuitate Dei XVI.43, and XVIII.53, ed. Dombart and Kalb,48:550, 652–53.53Ibid. XX.7–9, ed. Dombart and Kalb, 48:708–19.54Ibid. XXII.30, ed. Dombart and Kalb, 48:862–66, esp. 865–66. Augustinehere changes one important point vis-à-vis the earlier treatment of the Ages sketchedabove. The Commentary on Genesis against the Manichees I.40 emphasizes, with Eusebius-Jerome, Christ’s preaching as the dawn of the Sixth Age: “Mane autem fit ex praedicationeeuangelii per Dominum”, PL 34, col. 192. The conclusion of the City ofGod shifts the pivot to the Nativity (“ad Christi carnalem natiuitatem”), in a wayreminiscent of Orosius. There were, however, other currents of theological discussionon the Incarnation that may have influenced the shift, on which see Barnes(1982).