science, religion, metaphor, and history 115Concepts also vary along a spectrum from concrete to abstract and from
simple to complex: compare the relatively concrete “beech tree” with the rela-
tively abstract “Christianity,” “Marxism,” “science,” and “religion.” Concepts
are inextricably bound up with words: both can develop through time. The
prime contemporary example of the difficult connections between words and
concepts is “democracy,” a word that has a wide spectrum and a concept so
blurry as almost to lack meaning.
It is sometimes assumed that there is a close correlation between word
and fact. When one attempts to discern “facts” about abstract concepts, one
encounters tenuous shapes. One changes the shape by one’s own approach.
Much hash has been made of the uncertainty principle by nonscientists; here
I refer to history, not physics: every historian changes the past by writing or
speaking about it. “Murder” is an example. Does “murder” have an immutable
essence? Or does it have no meaning at all because it lacks a clear external
referent? Or does it mean exactly what the laws of our particular state or our
particular religion at this particular time say? Is capital punishment murder?
Is feticide murder? Is killing in war murder? Is infanticide murder? They have
all been considered so. For that reason an effort at a history of whatever every-
one has meant by the term is manifestly impossible. The most interesting
concepts are those that have a long tradition, a tradition showing both the
underlying strength of the concept and its developments and modifications.
The history of concepts serves a purpose for culture similar to that served
by memory for an individual. We cannot be a person without memory, and we
cannot be a culture without the history of concepts. The history of concepts is
the best method for understanding any human idea because it integrates the
development of the concept in areas as diverse as philosophy, psychology, re-
ligion, mythology, art, and folklore. It denies nothing except the currently fash-
ionable delusion that when people in other societies talk about ideas that are
real to them what they “really” mean are things that seem “real” to our con-
temporary mode of perceiving reality. It is an odd conceit that although people
(whether contemporary al-Qaeda or medieval Londoners) believe that they are
thinking about religion, what they are really thinking about is what contem-
porary social scientists decide is “real”: power. This pervasive delusion is
“chronocentrism,” a variety of bad old ethnocentrism quite insulting to its
subjects.
The great Christian bishop Augustine (354–451) did more to construct a
cosmos integrating religion and science than anyone before Dante.^9 Augustine
strongly encouraged natural philosophy. God creates the cosmos; in Greek, he
“makes” it. Greekpoiein,“to make,” means to create not only in a physical
sense, but also in a metaphorical sense. A “poet” is a “maker” as much as an
engineer is. (Old Englishmakarmeans “maker” or creator of a poem, an object,
or a universe.) Since God made everything, everything has meaning and pur-
pose, including time. We have access to two great Books of Revelation: one is