Published in the Anglican Theological Review in October 1946, Emil Kauder’s article examines the foundations of cyclical history: what makes civilizations comparable, and what recurring patterns can establish. Its two sections move from the conditions of historical understanding to the development and exhaustion of religious inheritance, then address freedom and progress. Kauder locates civilizations’ common structure in human action and “myth,” the inherited spiritual meanings that give action continuity and direction.
Only the philosophers and historians at the beginning of the 20th century, especially in Germany, tried to close the field of history for any analogies, claiming that historical phenomena are unique and individual.
Against this exclusion of analogy, Kauder argues that understanding a remote historical document already requires relating another society to the historian’s experience. Comparison belongs to historical understanding itself, but its legitimacy neither erases individuality nor makes every feature reproducible.
That does not imply that every bit of an historical object is comparable.
The methodological task is to distinguish constitutive similarities from accidental resemblances. Kauder seeks features necessary to social existence, rather than exhaustive correspondences between societies. Human action supplies the first basis: institutions and practices change continuously, even when historical distance obscures intermediate transformations.
Law, fashions, customs, the social structure, language, public opinion, and also the spiritual attitude change from day to day, yet so slowly that we can only realize it by interrupted observations spread over longer periods of time.
Action also exhibits direction through persistent problems, collective ideals, and cultural achievements. Direction, however, cannot be equated with successful planning. Intentions and outcomes diverge, and individual purposes cannot explain coherence across generations. Although Kauder accepts Vico’s providential interpretation, he first seeks an explanation within human action.
That explanation lies in convictions transmitted through education, institutions, and religious tradition. Following Vico, Kauder calls this inheritance “myth,” emphasizing its imaginative and emotional force rather than identifying it with formal theology. Myth remains operative throughout a civilization’s existence, including within apparently secular doctrines. Marxism retains apocalyptic expectations, democracy draws upon the Christian valuation of the person, and pacifism carries forward biblical prophecy and Gospel teaching. Later generations develop possibilities implicit in inherited narratives: transmission supplies continuity, while the elaboration of symbols and ideals supplies direction.
Section II identifies Vico’s “ideal history” with the development and decay of myth. Empirical history encompasses a civilization’s particular events; ideal history isolates the recurrent spiritual process underlying them. Imaginative belief develops into dogmatic theology, critical philosophy, and finally skepticism. Intellectual clarification progressively consumes its inherited material, undermining the convictions that originally sustained inquiry. As ideals lose authority, collective willingness to create, sacrifice, and defend a civilization also weakens.
Historical analogies should therefore identify comparable developmental stages rather than accumulate superficial likenesses. Vico’s comparison of Homer and Dante matters because both give poetic form to myth. By contrast, Kauder rejects making Plato’s sequence of political constitutions universally binding merely because similar sequences appear in classical and Christian history. Comparison establishes tendencies and possibilities, not strict laws specifying invariant successions.
A tension remains between contingent historical sequences and the asserted mortality of civilizations through myth’s disintegration. Kauder’s treatment of freedom preserves both claims. Inherited myth establishes broad directions, while individuals retain creative latitude in particular circumstances. Political action may improve conditions without arresting ultimate decline. The boundary between freedom and necessity remains unresolved; theological grace introduces another perspective without simply eliminating necessity.
The conclusion qualifies progress rather than denying it. Cyclical history permits pessimistic and providential interpretations, while the transmission of myths can preserve achievements beyond civilizational collapse. Yet inheritance entails losses and prolonged decline, without guaranteeing that successors will surpass their predecessors. Kauder’s methodological restraint thus supports an ethical conclusion: historical understanding should foster composure before achievement and catastrophe, not confidence in inevitable improvement.
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