The Lord of History, by Msgr. Eugene Kevane. ©2003 The Miriam Press. All Rights Reserved

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VI. The Philosophy of History in Christian Philosophy

The categories “Ancient,” “Medieval” and “Modern,” then, stand revealed as nothing but philosophical constructs. Historical succession seen in their context falls short of an objectively valid understanding of the order of things human in time. The grandiose and exotic nineteenth century philosophies of history of Hegel, Comte and Marx, elaborated in terms of these categories, have been so discredited intellectually that authors tend to apologize for the very use of the phrase.100 Is a philosophy of history possible? Can philosophy as such know the meaning and direction of history?

The Nature of Modernity

The analysis which leads toward the answer has a negative and then a positive aspect. Negatively, perhaps the best insight into the matter is provided by Eric Voegelin, a truly post-modern thinker, on the nature of Modernity. He sees it as a diversion of the Christian understanding of the end of history into a position within history, as if the meaning and direction of history were the construction of the kingdom of God within history. Augustine and Ambrose never meant this when they saw temporal society functioning suo modo within the Church and political rulers performing their specific offices as members of the Church.101

“Joachim of Flora,” writes Voegelin, “broke with the Augustinian conception of a Christian society when he applied the symbol of the Trinity to the course of history.... In his trinitarian eschatology Joachim created the aggregate of symbols which govern the self-interpretation of modern political society to this day.... The first of these symbols is the conception of history as a sequence of three ages, of which the third age is intelligibly the final Third Realm.... As variations of this symbol are recognizable the humanistic and encyclopedist periodization of history into ancient, medieval and modern history; Turgot’s and Comte’s theory of a sequence of theological, metaphysical and scientific phases; Hegel’s dialectic of the three stages of freedom and self-reflective spiritual fulfillment; the Marxian dialectic of the three states of primitive communism, class society, and final Communism; and, finally, the National Socialist symbol of the Third Realm....”102

At the heart of Voegelin’s analysis in his perception of Modernity as a rebirth of the ancient Gnosticism in its misconception regarding the nature and power of philosophical thought, its relationship to religious truth, and in particular its overconfident attitude toward the ability of natural reason to know the order of history as such. Thus Modern Philosophy, with its characteristic Voltairean, Hegelian and Marxist concept of the philosophy of history, is a function of the Gnostic replacement of religious faith by philosophical faith.

“The attempt at immanentizing the meaning of existence,” Voegelin points out, “is fundamentally an attempt at bringing our knowledge of transcendence into a firmer grip than the cognitio fidei, the cognition of faith, will afford, and the Gnostic experiences offer this firmer grip insofar as they are an expansion of the soul to the point where God is drawn into the existence of man.”103 And again: “The totalitarianism of our time must be understood as journey’s end of the Gnostic search for a civil theology.”104

History Not an Essence

Voegelin’s analysis reaches its climax in his forthright rejection of the Gnostic attempt to grasp an eidos of history. The Gnostic attempt to construct categories of historical understanding out of mere philosophy as such is its characteristic abuse of reason.

“The Gnostic fallacy,” he writes, “destroys the oldest wisdom of mankind...: what comes into being will have an end, and the mystery of this stream of being is impenetrable. These are the two great principles governing existence. The Gnostic speculation on the eidos of history, however, not only ignores these principles but perverts them into their opposite.”105 Thus “Gnosticism...creates a dream world which itself is a social force of the first importance in motivating attitudes and actions of Gnostic masses and their representatives.”106

History, in other words, when one understands the word to mean the formal object of a discipline called the philosophy of history, is not an “essence,” not a “substance.” It does not have a “nature” which empirical sciences can observe and categorize, and which philosophical reflection can define. It is rather an order by which such essences and natures succeed each other in time. But this order, ordo in Augustine’s precise sense, is not itself an eidos, an essence.

“From the Joachitic immanentization,” Voegelin writes, “a theoretical problem arises which occurs neither in classic antiquity nor in orthodox Christianity, that is, the problem of an eidos in history.... There is no eidos of history because the eschatological supernature is not a nature in the philosophical, immanent case. The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy. Things are not things, nor do they have essences, by arbitrary declaration. The course of history as a whole is no object of experience; history has no eidos, because the course of history extends into the unknown future. The meaning of history, thus, is an illusion; and this illusory eidos is created by treating a symbol of faith as if it were a proposition concerning an object of immanent experience.”107

Sifting Voegelin’s principle from his terminology on the eschaton as “a symbol of faith,” a valuable insight emerges regarding the origin of the view of history characteristic of Modernity. The great “philosophies of history” which it begets from Voltaire across the years to 1914 are the result of projections from Modern Philosophy, as such, onto the matter of history, creating in it, as it were, a form of understanding of the ordo, the meaning of the succession in time of its largest human entities. This, however, is exactly what philosophical reason cannot do, no matter what aid it gets from the other six Liberal Arts: for the formal object it seeks to understand, the ordo succesionis as such, is beyond their facts and its grasp. Voegelin is correct: Gnostic Modernity is an aberration in philosophy, one which effects the pathological substitution of an illusion, a dream world, for the contours of reality which men can see if, turning from subjective constructs of reason wrongly used, they give ear to the word which has come to this planet through the prophets.

Augustine’s Analysis

It is becoming clear that post-modern thinking is beginning to use once again the abiding insights of Christian Philosophy as such, in its metaphysical openness to God, the Creator of participated existences and the Administrator of the order of succession of these created beings in time.108

It is Augustine himself who stated positively this basic position of the Christian philosophy of history which Voegelin recovers. For the Bishop of Hippo rejects the Gnostic aberration in philosophy with its proud self-assurance regarding the ability of reason to discern the origin, meaning, direction and goal of history.

“These persons,” Augustine writes, “promise themselves cleansing by their own righteousness for this reason, because some of them have been able to penetrate with the eye of the mind beyond the whole creature, and to touch, though it be in ever so small a part, the light of unchangeable truth; a thing which they deride many Christians for being not yet able to do, who, in the meantime, live by faith alone.... These people also blame us for believing in the resurrection of the flesh, and rather wish us to believe themselves concerning these things. As though, because they have been able to understand the high and unchangeable substance by which the things are made, for this reason they had a claim to be consulted concerning the connected order of the ages, de contexto saeculorum ordine. For pray, because they dispute most truly, and persuade us by most certain proofs, that all things temporal are made after a science that is eternal, are they therefore able to see clearly in the matter of this science itself, or to collect from it, how many kinds of animals there are, what are the seeds of each in their beginnings, what measure in their increase, what numbers run through their conceptions, births, ages, settings; what motions in desiring things according to their nature, and in avoiding the contrary? Have they not sought out all these things, not through that unchangeable wisdom, but through the actual history of places and times, or have trusted the written experience of others? Wherefore it is the less to be wondered at, that they have utterly failed in searching out the succession of more lengthened ages, and in finding any goal of that course, down which, as though down a river, the human race is sailing, and the transition thence of each to its own proper end. For these are subjects which historians could not describe, inasmuch as they are far in the future, and have been experienced and related by no one. Nor have those philosophers, who have profited better than others in that high and eternal science, been able to grasp such subjects with the understanding; otherwise they would not be inquiring as they could into the past things of the kind, such as are in the province of the historians, but rather would foreknow also things future; and those who are able to do this are called by them soothsayers, but by us prophets.”109

This remarkable passage clarifies the nature of philosophy of history as a branch of Christian Philosophy. It will not profess to know the meaning and direction of history as a formal object of its own, cultivated by itself. It will recognize the limitation of the empirical sciences, history included: they can help to know what has existed or happened, and what is in contemporary experience. But the succession of beings and events, the ordo temporum with its direction and meaning, especially its future goal, lies beyond their grasp. The more it cultivates the central branch of philosophy, furthermore, “that high and eternal science” called metaphysics, the better it recognizes its inherent limitation. It can know the principles of existence which govern the being of the things which the empirical sciences study, and it can rise to Him who gives these things their participated being and its mode: but it cannot know that ordo temporum, the meaning and direction of their succession in time.

Who then can? Only He who administers His creation.110

The philosophy of history in Christian Philosophy, open to the Creator as it is, can cultivate ears to hear, in case the Supreme Being, Creator and Lord of history, has seen fit to reveal to mankind information on the plan. He is developing in His creation and the contours of its origin, process and goal. It can reflect upon the Hebrew Fact, it can experience and explain the meaning of the Catholic Fact, it can accept and study these Facts as given in reality and offered to the reflection of the human thinker. But it cannot conjure up of itself, even when it is Metaphysics cultivated rightly, a rational insight into this meaning and direction, projecting it out from itself as Philosophy upon the data described by the historians, and constructing thus a philosophy of history as Gnostic Modernity has thought it could do.

The first thing that Christian Philosophy does is to recognize that it is not a Gnosticism in the Philosophy of History. Hence, as Augustine indicates, it turns to the Prophets with ears to hear, and develops its structure as a branch of philosophy by ministering to an ever better understanding of the word coming from on High through them.

The Prophetic Word

“It makes the greatest possible difference,” Augustine continues, taking up the question of the Prophets, “whether things future are conjectured by experience of things past..., or whether they are either foreannounced to certain men, or are heard by them and again transmitted to other men, by means of holy angels, to whom God shows these things by His Word and His Wisdom, wherein both things future and things past consist; ...[so that] the minds of certain men...behold the immovable causes of things future in that very highest pinnacle of the universe itself.”111

These “certain men,” of course, are the Hebrew Prophets.

“Therefore,” Augustine concludes, “neither concerning the successions of ages nor concerning the resurrection of the dead, ought we to consult those philosophers.”112

For they build philosophies of history out of their subjective selves as mere constructs, like spiders spinning webs. It is far different in Christian Philosophy, open as it is to the announcement from on High regarding the origin, meaning and goal of history:

“as these things actually were manifested to our fathers, who were gifted with true piety, and who by foretelling them, obtaining credence either by present signs, or by events close at hand, which turned out as they had foretold, earned authority to be believed respecting things remotely future, even to the end of the world.”113

St. Augustine in his De civitate Dei gives the same answer to the fundamental question of the inner nature of the philosophy of history.

“At present,” he writes, “we are certain that we possess these three things [the three philosophical certitudes: that I am, that I know I am, and that I love my known existence], not by the testimony of others but by our own consciousness of their presence in our interior and unerring vision. Nevertheless, since we cannot know of ourselves how long they will last or whether they will never cease and what will result from our good or bad use of them, we seek for other witnesses, if we have not already found them. Not now, but later, I shall carefully discuss the reasons why we should have unhesitating trust in these witnesses.”114

Wherever human beings turn, they find themselves

“among the things which He created and has conserved so wonderfully..., things which belong to particular species and follow and observe their own order...”115

This is temporal creation. Science and philosophy know it validly in its essences, in the forms, natures and operations, which it manifests. But “how long they will last,” or “what will result from our good or bad use of them,” what the meaning of their succession is, whether it has a goal, whether it will end, and if so, how: all this is the “philosophy of history” and it is beyond the range of natural philosophical knowledge. The meaning of the ordo succesionis must be learned another way, from witnesses. What witnesses? Men who somehow speak for the Creator, participating somehow in His knowledge. For He alone is in a position to know the length and the direction, the origin, the meaning and the goal, of the succession of beings in time.

It is the hallmark of Gnostic Modernity that it desired to create for itself the order of things and hence the meaning and direction of history. Man shall know history because he makes it himself. He will not be content, let alone enraptured, with a meaning he finds placed there by the Lord of history, speaking His Eternal Word. This is the taproot of the subjective process-philosophers of the Modern Age, dreaming great boastful “philosophies of history,” Comtean dreams, Hegelian dreams, Marxist dreams, which deaden the mind to the voice of witnesses.

The Lord of History

The plan of the Lord of history in creating, the meaning of the temporal succession, the direction and the goal of time, — all these are one: and they exist in creation because of the Word in whom God in making heaven and earth made the succession of human generations called history. In the fullness of time, this same Divine Logos was made flesh, and dwelt among us. He is the chief and the greatest of the witnesses. Before Him came the witnesses called the Prophets. Since His coming mankind has the witness of the Magisterium of His Roman Catholic Church.

Thus the answer emerges to the questions regarding the nature of the philosophy of history as a branch of Christian Philosophy. The ultimate causes and meaning of the temporal succession are not knowable by natural reason. Bowing its head, philosophy listens for some Word from Him who holds history in His creating power, and hence is the Lord of history.116

The philosophy of history in Christian Philosophy, then, is basically this recognition that the ordo temporum is not an essence and hence cannot be known by the conventional tools of merely human empirical or philosophical knowledge. It is the secret of Him who is the Lord of history, the Creator of all its essences, substances and natures, and the Administrator of their mutually-interwoven succession in time.

Hence the first principle of philosophy of history as a branch of Christian Philosophy is to cultivate an ear to hear some word from Him whom the core-discipline, metaphysics, already has recognized as the intelligent Creator of the universe.

When Augustine turns to the Prophets, he is not leaving the philosophy of history behind; rather he is thinking as a philosopher of history in the most accurate and profound sense of the phrase. And in doing so he is recognizing the special affinity which the philosophy of history bears to theology. This is the heart of the relationship between reason and faith, furthermore, and the specific means whereby philosophy can “supplement...theology in the revealing with ever increasing clarity the Mystery of Christ, which affects the whole course of human history.”117

The Christian Philosophy of History

When it foregoes a positive and substantive philosophical knowledge of the ordo temporum, its own formal object, when it rejects the Gnosticism of the Modern Age, the Christian philosophy of history draws close to the general approach of post-modern thinking: philosophy performs a critical function rather than a substantive one.118 But this critical function, thanks to the power of Christian metaphysics, open to the almightiness and intelligence of the Creator, and thanks to its ability to se and to reflect upon the Hebrew Fact and its Christian counterpart and fulfillment, helps to develop an understanding of the meaning and direction of history which is a unique combination of the empirically given with the light coming from the higher order of faith in the Word of God.

In the Christian philosophy of history, certain constants will be recognized in operation throughout, analogous to the constants of creation in the space-time continuum. These will be chiefly God and the human soul: Deus Pater omnipotens, Deus totus ubique simul, Deus tam Pater, and each soul with its time on the machina transitura of history deciding and choosing before the hidden face of its Maker, making itself one of His Elect, or refusing to do so.119

Christian Philosophy, furthermore, helps in the reading of the Scriptures in the literary genre in which they were written, recognizing the historicity of the historical books. For it is liberated at last from the rationalist prejudice peculiar to Modernity as such and in the new post-modern climate stands free to recognize that the Almighty, present to each moment of the space-time continuum, is at one and the same time the Creator of the universe and the Lord of history. In the light of these adequate concepts of God and Man, the Scriptural readings on the Wisdom and Providence of God become fully intelligible, and with them the heritage of Christian teaching on the fact and mode of Divine Providence both in general and in its specific character as Salvation History.

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