부르크하르트의 종교문제와 역사관

Burckhardt, Religion and Historiography

Jacob Burckhardt was a masterful historian of crises and transitional periods. Two of his major works, The Age of Constantine the Great(1852) and The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy(l860) Burckhadt deals with the transition from late pagan antiquity to the early Christian Middle Ages in his Constantine, and in his Renaissance he deals with the transition from the late Middle Ages to the beginnings of secular modernity. I shall argue that there is a strong relationship between Burckhadt s own historical experience in the early and mid-nineteenth century and his choice of subject and mode of analysis in these two monumental works. Burckhardt recognized the 19th century as the age of crisis and he thought that new historical view and a method of study were needed to overcome the crisis. Burckhardt did not see his Crisis and transitional period as isolated phenomena: rather he came to view his religion situation as paradigmatic of a much larger secularizing process rooted in the main currents of modern history. Not only did he speak of his newly calling , but he even referred to historical studies as a personal remedy or spiritual cure . In the final analysis Burckhardt s idea can be traced neither to his truly vast erudition nor to the studious data gathering of a detached historian in search of objectivity. Rather, one must look to the particular poetics of his individual experience, to the inspired vision of a former theology student and an apostate pastor s son.