...Augustine was the first thinker to propose a comprehensive linear philosophy of history. It begins with God’s creation of the universe and ends with the return of Jesus and Judgment Day. These ideas shaped Western Culture for a millennium. Even the greatest scientist in history, Isaac Newton, dedicated large amounts of his prodigious intellect studying the Book of Daniel trying to determine, when will Jesus return?
The rise of secular philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not expunge the end of history idea from intellectual history. Like so many other Christian ideas, they were cloaked in new nomenclature, but the fundamental essence remained intact. Enlightenment philosophers, like all of us, could not completely escape their intellectual heritage. The spiritual morphed into the material, but this is analogous to a snake shedding its skin: all differences are superficial. Closer examination reveals continuation, not distinction. Among secularists, an anthro-centered world challenged, and to some degree replaced the theo-centered world promoted since the dawn of civilization, but these new prophets still adopted the Judeo-Christian notion that history moves in a linear fashion, complete with an end-point. Now, man orchestrates historical events, not God.
These new end of history prophets preached human perfection and paradise, yet they were bereft of any sort of divine origins. ...The perfect no longer existed in the afterlife that had been banished by the Enlightenment, now for secularists it could only be created in this lifetime.
...Hegel influenced two of the most significant end of history theorists in the second half of the nineteenth century, Augustine Comte and Karl Marx. Their rigid materialism denied the existence of any sort of geist in the universe, but they maintained a linear, progressive interpretation of history, complete with an end point....