Progress as Eschatology
The Columbiad is organized around a vision of the future in which reason, liberty, and education produce a world of perpetual peace and expanding human flourishing. This is an eschatological claim: a claim about the ultimate destination of history and the means by which that destination will be reached.
What Barlow has done — what the Enlightenment broadly did — is take the structure of Christian hope and replace its content. The millennium remains, but the agent of that millennium is no longer God but reason; the means is no longer grace but education; the obstacle is no longer sin but ignorance.
What the Vision of Columbus Reveals
The framing device of the poem — Columbus in prison, shown a compensating vision of future greatness — is a secular version of the prophetic vision: the sufferer consoled by a revelation of what is to come. But the consolation Barlow offers is entirely horizontal: future human achievement, not divine presence or resurrection.
This is the characteristic move of secular progressivism: to console present suffering with future progress. The problem is that the people who are suffering now are not the people who will enjoy the progress later.
The Seed of the Woman
Genesis 3:15 promises a resolution to the conflict between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent — but the resolution it promises is not the gradual improvement of human civilization through reason and education. It is a decisive, costly, personal act: the crushing of the serpent’s head by the seed of the woman, at the cost of a bruised heel.
Barlow’s secular millennium has no mechanism for dealing with the serpent. Two centuries of subsequent history have not confirmed the Enlightenment’s assumption. What they have confirmed is that the biblical diagnosis of the human problem is more accurate: the obstacle to human flourishing is not ignorance but sin, and sin requires redemption, not education.
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