Idő és fejlődés - az idő mint fejlődés: William Robertson felvilágosult prédikációja
Time and Progress – Time As Progress. An Enlightened Sermon by William Robertson

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the thesis, advanced by Reinhart Koselleck in Futures Past, of the “temporalization of history” as interpreted in terms of the changing perception of the “compression” (or “acceleration”) of time that supposedly precedes the onset of the “future”, against a 1755 sermon by the eighteenth-century Scottish ecclesiastical leader and historian William Robertson. The framework of analysis is offered by a version of the model of the “multiplicity of enlightenments” and that of the “conservative Enlightenment” employed most forcefully by John Pocock, but also by other scholars. Looking at previous and contemporary schemes of historical time, it is demonstrated that Robertson, drawing on intellectual sources ranging from Arminian theology through philosophical history to stadial or conjectural history, worked with a synergetic view of historical agency in which human actions may be seen as expressions of divine providence, while at the same time God’s providence may be conceived as offering so many opportunities for the exercise of human will. But it is also important to recognize that he was capable of doing so because he allowed the patterns of socio-cultural and economic progress, discovered in the eighteenth century, to play a dynamic role in advancing the cause of Christian salvation, especially by “compressing time” at critical junctures of history. In Koselleckian terms: true to his character as a protagonist in Pocock’s “conservative Enlightenment”, Robertson’s notion of the acceleration of history was not quite divorced from the apocalyptic hope attached to the ever shortening periods preceding the last judgment, while at the same time clearly displaying aspects of a notion of historical hope.

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