El Cid’s previous post “Philosophies of History” concluded (read the whole thing for the entire context):
Modern man burst forth from the constraints of a foreordained existence in a flurry of discovery and creative fervor. In doing so, he left the old certainties behind: the rhythm of life tied to the land and the seasons, his place in a community and moral confidence, even God himself. Obviously, the solution would be a synthesis of the two. The certainty and structure of the circular combined with the freedom and progress of the linear.For something so radically new and sane, one must necessarily look back to the old. We must journey back to the time when men first put a concerted effort into ameliorating material drudgery while paying fealty to those old certain things. What we need is not a philosophy of history, but a theology of history. We need St. Bonaventure.
There is alot of meat in here. From a Christian perspective, THE historical event is one that, in fact, transcends history. Modern man’s redemption through the Cross takes place linearly after the death of Christ, but in a sense of history that is more classical than modern, Christ’s death and resurrection is ongoing (and fully reoccurs in each celebration of the Mass). As I think El Cid was pointing out, Christians are historically aware in several manners akin to the classical world (for instance, all mankind inherits the Original Sin of our parents, just like the entire mess in the Oresteia goes all the way back to their progenitor Tantalus, who cooked his son for the gods), but the Christian also understands that man is now redeemed; history in its most important sense for a Christian is the relationship between himself and God, which does go back to Eden, but is entirely immediate, hinging on the here and now of a man’s moral decisions. So as El Cid notes, philosophies of history are secondary to a theology of history.
In the comments on the post, I linked to a coincidentally pertinent post by Peter Lawler on the Postmodern Conservative, who wrote (again, you should really read the whole piece):
The natural world may not be experienced as the secure home of most human beings, but it is the home of the mind. And so those who live most rationally or most according to the longing of the mind can be most at home in the cosmos. That’s why we’re mostly deeply not historical but natural beings. History–being a temporal or ephemeral record of contingent events–is not an altogether serious concern. History or historical action doesn’t really win freedom for any of us from natural necessity, and it can’t change eternity or what really is.
Fabius and El Cid both objected (see the comments), but today Dr. Lawler posted a continuation of this paper which, I think, clarifies his point:
The Christians rejected the Greek view of what a human being is–the natural being who makes history. For the Christians, the human being is not merely a part of nature or his political community, but a whole free being with a unique and irreplaceable personal destiny. Even the LOGOS that governs the world is personal. LOGOS must be animated by the eros or love that’s only present in persons and is, in fact, most deeply personal….
To be a person is to be rational and loving and creative, and so human work–human creativity–is dignified for the Christians as it never was for the Greek and Roman philosophers. That’s not to say that the creativity of sinful human persons could ever free them from dependence on the Creator to whom they owe their very being. And the unique and irreplaceable character of every human creature doesn’t need to be secured by human work.
The Christian criticisms of the classical philosophy on behalf of the free, rational, loving, social, and creative person–the being who’s not merely part of some larger whole–paved the way for modern thought and for the emergence of History with a capital H. Certainly the modern thinkers thought that the Christians understood who we are in certain key ways better than, say, Plato and Aristotle. They take the side of creativity over eternity in describing who–as opposed to what–we are. They think that each person is justified in regarding himself or herself as unique and irreplaceable and in employing his creativity or inventiveness to fend off nonbeing or death as long as possible. Each person or individual exists for himself or as not merely a part; the modern thinkers agree with the Christians that individuals are necessarily alienated or emotionally detached from the claims of any political community and even the family. They disagree, of course, on the real existence of the personal, relational God, and so they disagree that personal identity is, most deeply, relational or social.
The importance of the personal needs to be emphasized (unless one is speaking with a protestant…), and it gets back to our original discussion of philosophies of history. Hegel’s philosophy is impersonal in its historical sweep of thesis and antithesis towards utopia, but he too would grant that individual action within those theses is necessary. Marx needed Lenin as the actor and implementer within the historical motion. But that is not the sense of action that concerns a Christian when he looks at history, because the individual has an individual end that is of paramount importance. So too, as Dr. Lawler emphasizes and as El Cid did when pointing towards St. Bonaventure, that individual end is relational; it relates to the Word. And this is not to belittle ‘history with the capital H,’ because as Newman maintains in The Idea of a University, Theology is the queen of the sciences, the center of the wheel from which the spokes proceed.
The modern failure in understanding history, as far as I can see, is that when emphasizing the individual while losing the individual end, one is left with the all important Cartesian “I am” which ignores history entirely (he didn’t, and couldn’t, conclude “I thought, therefore I was”). The present individual, for the modern thinker, is the only individual. But a Christian understanding necessarily incorporates the historical (the Incarnation, Crucifiction, Resurrection all being historical events that transcend, or perhaps, supercede History) in the importance of the present relation to God.
As a final thought, several of these ideas are interestingly presented in Donne’s poem “The Anniversarie”. I will just give you the first stanza, but read the rest if you are interested:
ALL kings, and all their favourites,
All glory of honours, beauties, wits,
The sun it self, which makes time, as they pass,
Is elder by a year now than it was
When thou and I first one another saw.
All other things to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay ;
This no to-morrow hath, nor yesterday ;
Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.
A Christian understanding of history perhaps closely mirrors the lover Donne’s: all physical things do draw inexorably towards death, but the Christian individual is not really that worried about it, for caritas is far more important.
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