Ever Ancient, Ever New

As the Thomist philosopher Charles DeKoninck once wrote in an obscure and unpublished lecture On Philosophy of History, history does not progress in a purely linear way, nor in a merely cyclical way, nor even in a merely successive process of disconnected moments and events. Rejecting what he termed the univocal and equivocal theories of history, he settled on the truly Thomistic understanding: an anological theory of history, according to which history progresses in such a way that each epoch is at the same time more like and more unlike the preceding epochs — neither linear nor circular, but an ever-expanding spiral encompassing both sameness and difference:

If all is absolutely predetermined, then there is no history proper. On the other hand, if all is absolutely novel, then all is pure chance. To remain within reason, we must hold that historical situations must be both different and similar. That is precisely the definition of what we call analoga: partim eadem et partim diversa. Not that there is a part which is identical, and then a superadded part which is different. The old is virtually assumed in the new. . . . The expansion of history is not merely additional, as in the progression of numbers: what is added is new, and the old is contained in the novel, not distinctly, but virtually. . . In the course of history this analogy becomes more and more profound. That is there is more resemblance…