Abstrakt
The transition from paganism to Christianity engendered a significant change in the structure of temporal ideas among the inhabitants of Europe. Christianity conceives of historical time as a continuous line of events leading from the creation of the world through the brief decisive action of Christ on earth to the end of the world in the Last Judgment.
Thus, Christianity approximates time and imbues it with a linear, vectorial character. This understanding of time has an eschatological character, and it relates to certain ideas about the end of the world and history.
Religious eschatology has influenced European thought for a long time, inspiring the philosophy of history. However, since the Renaissance, secularizing tendencies have become evident in this way of thinking.
These culminated in the Enlightenment, which replaced the perspective of salvation with the idea of progress. Besides eschatological thinking, the atmosphere in which the theory of progress was shaped was also influenced by utopian ideas, which to one degree or another, also had religious roots; suffice it to consider the monastic environment that was very inspiring for the creators of utopias.
However, what already began to appear by the eighteenth century were anticlerical utopias, which removed the monastic inspiration into the background, and in the further development of utopian thought, ideas of a secularized nature prevailed.