Rome was not built in a day. This truism of conventional wisdom preserves an important historiographic insight: the foci of history such as the building of a city state, the rule of a king, the rise or fall of an empire, the appearance of a way of life, the use of a language, the origins or causes of wars, the development of a school of thought, or the refinement and acceptance of a technology, or the evolution of a religion--all of these things are not chronologically monadic occurrences. They do not take place in a day or week or year.
It is only for convenience and for the sake of highlighting history that we encapsulate historical process into discrete events: the founding of a city, the death of an emperor, the fall of an empire. Yet, except in cases of violent termination of physical structures or in the death of an individual, historical events cannot be contained in brief chronologies and in each case, including the sacking of cities or the death of leaders, the significance of the historical event extends both before and beyond its discrete chronology.
Rome was neither built in a day nor destroyed in a week, year, or century. Important features of fundamental Roman institutions survive, albeit in new contexts and often only as fragments, into the Twentieth Century. Principles of Roman law as well as limited features of Roman political and social order have been perpetuated in the Christian church and in the institutions of the Western nations. In one sense the violent destruction of the city of Rome liberated essential Roman life forms from terminally decadent local expression and set such forms loose for appropriation and preservation in new, emergent cultural centers. And there is a profound sense in which the most creative influences of the Christian faith did not appear in the thousand-year span of Christendom but rather in fueling the secular movements of Modernity which would partially fulfill the great vision of Christendom while at the same time destroying the institutional credibility of its culture.
Cultures and civilizations, however, are much harder to destroy than cities, and the interpretation of such complex social forms brings to the fore the necessity of understanding them as historical processes rather than as events. Cultures and civilizations evolve and erode: even when they sustain or are afflicted with rapid social change, the course of change tends to be protracted over decades, if not centuries. Christendom did not begin with Aquinas nor did it end in 1543 with De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium. Modernity did not begin the next day.
Historical periods, phases of culture and epochs of civilization are interpretive tools which we use to make sense of discerned patterns of meaning. These interpretive tools are rooted in our essentially and persistently human capacity to transcend experience by giving it a meaning; they are also rooted in the tensive somatic coefficient of our psyche. We understand the world of experience through the medium of an incarnate sensibility which primordially orders our experience into an ongoing, unified vector of past-present-future. The forms and categories of understanding have an irreducible temporality which results from an epistemic perspective that is derived from the reality of our being-through-time.
History is, for us, a vast field of presences in which the succession of monadic events cease, through our incarnation of them, to be monadic events and become for us meaningful monadic events: history. But this field of presence of events merges with the field of presence that appears from the horizon of our own somatic encounter of the world. In our somatic entry into the field of presence of events, being and time become being-and-time-for-us, and the neutral chronology of monadic succession becomes history even as, in the sensory field of presence, sensation becomes perception.
Nothing for us completely begins or ends. Despite the rhetoric of a new beginning, our enterprises, like our perceptions, temporally overlap not only the moments of our individual biographies but also the successive forms of our societies. Religions, governments, universities, legal systems, arts, and sciences are internally structured by many antecedents and consequences which antedate and extend beyond the chronological limits by which we conveniently delimit them.
The roots of Christendom are older than Christianity; the roots of modernity are older than Christendom. Christendom survives into and beyond modernity as Zoroastrianism survives beyond its own epoch into the historical eras of Christianity and Islam. None of these begins or ends on a day or in a single year. Imposition of rigid chronological limits distorts the lived experience reflected in the institutions and fractures the historical reality by severing it from the vector of before-during-after.
We can and, of course, do name periods, phases, epochs, eras. Such tokens are more than subjective reactions or taxonomic conveniences. We can speak with precision and accuracy of Christendom, Modernity, the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment. Such hermeneutic concepts are essential to our discernment of the meaning of our historical experience; they are the interpretive forms of our understanding. We must, however, protect the utility of these concepts as well as their validity as the temporal vectors of our experience by avoiding the temptation to treat them as reified structures denoting absolute beginnings and endings.
See: Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension Heidegger, Being and Time Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception Erich Frank, Philosophical Understanding and Religious Truth