ABSTRACT
Accounting for the passage of time and disposing of the past for the Enlightenment yielded historical thinking. The passage of time is read as linear, cumulative, and purposive; secular rationality substitutes for the teleology of revealed religion. The paradigmatic conception of marking time differs so radically from our own that reading Scripture in the way, for nearly the whole of its reception, it has been read proves exceedingly difficult. Just as the dance is the physicalization of music, and memory is the immediate realization of history, so they lived dream is the embodiment of paradigm. Enlightenment history's distinction between past and present is not the only indicator of historical modes of organizing experience. The Enlightenment optimistically saw in events unfolding on their own, in a secular world, the possibility of finding order in chaos. The Judaic and Christian thinkers never imagined that, unguided by revelation, any mind could perceive order out of the chaos of the world.
