In the second half of the nineteenth century, an awareness of an impending crisis spread through the world of classical studies - just as it did in other disciplines. Criticism focused on a scholarship that threatened to fall apart and produce only imitators. The watchword ‘‘historicism’’ appeared with increasing frequency in contemporary discussions; and soon the phrase ‘‘crisis of historicism’’ became popular (Rebenich 2000a). Critics denounced the relativism of values that had come to characterize historically oriented inquiries - which they accused of being out of touch with everyday life - and condemned the sterile objectiveness of antiquated research. Under the influence of Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), as well as of earlier conceptions, scholars argued over the problematic correlation of scholarship and life. They questioned the legitimacy of a classical scholarship that concentrated on positivist results and whose historical relativism undermined any normative understanding of antiquity.
Intellectual dissidents now searched for new concepts and explanations, which prompted the reconstruction of the history of early Christianity and Late Antiquity.
Jacob Burckhardt opted for a historical understanding of the past and rejected theological explanations. He explained the triumph of Christianity in Late Antiquity as the result of developments within paganism. In his first work, Die Zeit Constantins des Grossen, published in 1853, he described the Roman emperor as ‘‘a brilliant man, whose ambition and thirst for power afforded him no rest’’; a calculating politician, in other words, in respect of whom ‘‘there could be no talk of Christianity and paganism, conscious religiousness and an absence of religion.’’ ‘‘Such a person,’’ Burckhardt declared, ‘‘is essentially unreligious, even if he should imagine himself as standing at the center of a church community.’’
Friedrich Nietzsche attacked those of his colleagues who attempted to understand the present by studying the past but effectively destroyed in this process all historical norms. He distanced himself from the relativizing examinations of Late Antiquity and boldly blamed the Christians for the fall of Rome. In the fourth part of Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885), he wrote,
It was once - methinks year one of our blessed Lord - Drunk without wine, the Sybil thus deplored,
‘‘How ill things go! Decline! Decline!
Ne’er sank the world so low!
Rome now hath turned harlot and harlot-stew,
Rome’s Caesar beast, and God - has turned Jew!’’
In his Antichrist, published in 1894, he described Christianity as the ‘‘vampire’’ of the Roman Empire. Christians, ‘‘these holy anarchists,’’ had destroyed the empire, ‘‘until no stone was left standing on top of another - until even the Germanic peoples and other boors were able to take it under their control.’’ In this way, he had rejected all those who, like Hegel (1770-1831), regarded Christians and Germanic peoples as the pioneers of progress.
World History
