Who was the first to make a pact with the devil?

Malcolm Bull

• Modernity and Identity edited by Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman
  Blackwell, 448 pp, £45.00, January 1992, ISBN 0 631 17585 7
• Fundamentalisms Observed edited by Martin Marty and Scott Appleby
  Chicago, 872 pp, $40.00, November 1991, ISBN 0 226 50877 3
• The Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial by Margaret Rose
  Cambridge, 317 pp, £35.00, July 1991, ISBN 0 521 40131 3
• Under God: Religion and American Politics by Garry Wills
  Simon and Schuster, 445 pp, £17.99, February 1992, ISBN 0 671 65705 4

Although the modern has been with us since the end of antiquity, it has, at least until recently, always avoided becoming antique. As early as the 17th century, some were arguing that by virtue of longevity, the moderns must already be more ancient than the ancients themselves; but unlike the true ancients, who remained trapped in undying senility, the moderns seemed to have the secret of eternal youth, and for another three centuries they grew younger as their predecessors aged. Of course, such blessings are mixed, and the modern was fated to anonymity: being merely the veil of a present awaiting its apocalypse, modernity served to conceal identity and not to claim it, and the ‘modern’ would always eventually be revealed as something else the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque. The pattern might have been expected to continue indefinitely, and yet it has not, for with the appearance of the oxymoronic prefix ‘post-’, modernity has been exiled from the future and consigned, perhaps irrevocably, to history. In return, modernity has gained the right to use its own name, and so the modern, like the man in the iron mask, is now remembered for, and not through, its disguise.