Abstract
A modest version of American history would make more room for the mystery of God's providence; develop a greater capacity to see tragedy in the nation's past and present; refuse to accept its own partial history as key to the meaning of the whole; reject democratic ideology as an ersatz theology of history; and not assume that Western civilization has reached its highest and final form in American institutions. Voegelin's concept of the authoritative present brings intellectual coherence to habits of mind that helped shape the American identity in the late eighteenth century, spiritual pathologies to which even a staunch anti-Jacobin Federalist like Timothy Dwight was susceptible.