IV
The modern consciousness of history is a consciousness of crisis, and all modern philosophy of history is in the last analysis a philosophy of crisis.
Modern man’s epochal experience of history is grounded in the experience of infinitely new and overwhelming possibilities which cannot be mastered by the customary methods of his traditions. They are new possibilities for good or for evil, for progress or for irrevocable disaster. Yet these new possibilities of a new future are always experienced in the first instance as the crisis and collapse of the hitherto known and familiar possibilities with their traditional institutions and ways of life and methods of coping with it. History overflows the banks of tradition, as it were. The dams of tradition and order everywhere begin to burst. They are no longer a match for the new experiences of history and can therefore no longer present themselves as self-evident. They become antiquated, or can be conservatively maintained only with great difficulty. They no longer possess for man the old, unquestioned obviousness of institutionalized modes of conduct. Hence they become the object of reflection and criticism, and man is thrust out into a world that is unprotected, frightening and uncertain. He finds himself in a crisis in which his existence is at stake and he is under the pressure of a vital decision. Thus it is in terms of crisis that history becomes perceptible to him, and historical criticism of his traditions is the offspring of this consciousness of crisis.
All reflection on ‘history’ by historians, sociologists and philosophers of history on the continent of Europe in the nineteenth century has behind it the earthquake of the French revolution and before it the incalculable consequences of that event. In this revolution the edifice of the old institutions collapsed, and its metaphysical stabilization with it. In it the things which were taken for granted and commonly accepted in the cultural and spiritual realm, and which made it possible to live a protected life, were lost. With it there came an awareness of the totally historic character of life as the total criticalness of man’s world. ‘Crisis’ has ever since become the theme of historical research and the basic concept of reflection on the philosophy of history. Hegel applied the new concept of ‘crisis’ together with its new experimental content to the whole of the past. He knew that ‘thus the movement and unrest continues. This is the conflict, the difficulty, the problem which confronts history and which it has in future to solve.’ Ranke thought it possible to achieve a conservative mastery of this revolutionary crisis by restoring the balance between the great powers of Europe, and believed in reconciliation with the old traditions. Jakob Burckhardt sought amid the anxiety for the future of the West in its continuing crises the ‘standard by which to measure the rapidity and strength of the particular movement in which we live’. Johann Gustav Droysen asked what is the ‘direction of the flowing movement’ in which all things are engaged from the viewpoint of history. The ‘call’ of the nineteenth century for the study of history and the absolutely vital necessity of that call, dates from the French revolution. ‘History’ has ever since been experienced as a permanent state of crisis, or as permanent, irresistible and unrestrainable revolution. Historians and philosophers of history, whether conservative or revolutionary, have therefore concentrated on the spiritual, political and social mastering of this continual crisis. Historical science and the philosophy of history have been compelled to make ‘history’ comprehensible, in order to make it possible to control the chaos, the catastrophes and the crises, and therewith history as such. The place of a world-orientation in terms of cosmology and metaphysics has since been taken by an orientation of the present in terms of the philosophy of history. It was precisely the collapse of historic continuity that gave rise to that apotheosis of ‘history’ which led to the religion of history in the messianic movements of the nineteenth century.
Now the sense for history, the interest in history and the necessity to understand history always arise in critical times of unrest, in which new possibilities that were hitherto unknown and unsuspected begin to dawn on the horizon. If we are to understand the new present and to be able to live in it, then we must concern ourselves with the past, whether to bring the new experiences into harmony with the traditions of the past or to rid ourselves of the burden of the past and become free for the new present. The experience of such crises has been in the background of the great thinkers on history ever since Augustine’s City of God. Since the French revolution, however, history has been understood entirely in terms of crisis. The latter can no longer be restricted to the political or the social field, but has the tendency to become total and to make every realm of life uncertain. The crisis becomes one of universal world history and affects the whole existence of man and his world. That is why the interpretations of this crisis are likewise of a total and totalitarian kind. It has therefore become absolutely necessary to consider in terms of world history all the realms of life which are involved in this crisis of history—and this is still necessary even when it is evident that all such interpretations in terms of universal history have so far broken down in face of this crisis, because they have not provided a synoptic view of the crisis, but have themselves been an immanent part of it and have therefore only furthered it and served to extend it. Every crisis throws up the question of the historic future. For when the whole existing situation is in a state of crisis, it becomes obvious that the future can no longer arise automatically out of the past, that it can no longer be the natural repetition and continuation of the past, but that something new must be found in it. This means that for the present a decision has to be made which finds no precedent in the past and for which traditional custom no longer provides any rule. On this decision depends the form of the future, and this decision derives its form from a vision of the future which is hoped for or feared, to be sought or to be avoided. This, however, means that the decision which is forced upon the present must arise from our dream of the future. Criticism of the existing situation makes the existing situation a thing of the past and frees us to face the crisis of present decision. From the standpoint of history such criticism is always bound up with the utopian outlook which examines the possibilities and tendencies of things to come, anticipates them, and incorporates them in the present decision. As the criticism is born of the crisis, so also are the utopian ideas. This connection between utopia and criticism can be seen particularly clearly in the century which paved the way for the crisis. Everywhere in the eighteenth century the criticism of absolutism, the criticism of churches and orthodoxies that have become historical institutions, the criticism of a class-ridden society, is combined with powerful utopian ideas of the nation of mankind, of the kingdom of God and of the new natural state of man, and is exercised in the service of these ideas. In its feeling for the philosophy of history the Enlightenment emphatically no longer combines its criticism, as earlier movements in history had done, with a retrospective dream, with regeneration, reform, renaissance or reformation of the corrupt present, but with the category of the new—new age, new world, novum organon, scienza nuova, progress, final age. The criticism of the present is no longer exercised in the name of the origin and in the name of the need to restore the original golden age, but in the name of a future that has never yet been. Since 1789 the land of ‘utopia’ no longer lies somewhere beyond the seas, but by means of the belief in history and the idea of progress it is shifted to the future which is possible and is to be expected or desired. The utopian dream has thus become a part of the philosophy of history and moved into the realm of practical philosophy. For the first time, history is subjected to the influence of an apocalyptic millenarianism and an apocalyptic enthusiasm of spirit, for which the end is other than the origin, and the goal greater than the beginning, and the future more than all the past. A criticism that has roots of this kind, however, precipitates a crisis which sets all that has been hitherto, and all that is, ‘under the shadow’ of collapse. The coming of this crisis can no longer mean only the collapse of the ancien régime, can no longer imply only the fin de siècle, but sets at stake everything that man’s being means for him in home, state, world and nature. Thus the identification of this crisis which began with the French revolution and—closely related to it—the industrial revolution, everywhere employs apocalyptic pictures. This kind of world history means the world judgment. This kind of freedom confronts mankind with the ‘fury of disappearing’. For revolutionary thinkers this crisis brings the kingdom of God or the kingdom of freedom and humanity palpably near. In this sense a political messianism seizes the new possibilities. For conservative thinkers like de Bonald, de Maistre, and later de Tocqueville and Jakob Burckhardt, this crisis sounds the trumpet of the Last Judgment. Both take this crisis as the prelude to the final battle.
For Saint-Simon ‘revolution’ meant ‘crisis’. ‘L’espèce humaine’, he wrote in 1813, ‘se trouve engagée dans une des plus fortes crises qu’elle ait essuyée depuis l’origine de son existence.’ This concept of crisis also emerges as early as Rousseau, but in Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte it is new. ‘It means revolution, but by penetrating beyond the political foreground of the latter, it opens a view of historic and social reality in its totality. In other words, when Saint-Simon speaks of crisis, he means—and is the first to mean—history in a completely modern sense.’ The aim of comprehending the revolution historically, politically and sociologically is for Saint-Simon and Comte: ‘Terminer la révolution’. ‘It is time to complete the vast intellectual operation begun by Bacon, Descartes and Galileo.… This is the way to put an end to the revolutionary crisis which is tormenting the civilized nations of the world.’ Once the circumstances, laws and origins of revolution can be thoroughly understood, then it becomes calculable and also avoidable. By means of ‘social physics’ the revolutionary upheavals in society become calculable and their laws are understood, just as the phenomena of nature are by modern natural science. Comte’s ‘philosophic positive’ acquires from this background a thoroughly messianic tenor. Scientific knowledge of the world and of history will supplant the now useless epoch of metaphysics and the still older epoch of theology. World phenomena are calculable because of the laws of their interconnection. Scientific and socio-technical civilization will become the third and last world epoch. The crises become controllable, wars avoidable. The age of eternal peace is coming, in which the really sovereign knowledge is in the hands of the sociologists. In this age there will still be endless progress in the perfecting of science and technology, but there will be no more radical alternatives and no revolutionary changes. And now, if revolution is ‘crisis’ and crisis means ‘history’, then the ‘ending of revolution’ by means of historical science and the ‘ending of crisis’ by means of sociology means no less than a comprehensive ‘ending of history’ through scientific knowledge of it and through its technical controllability. The ‘end of history’ thereby acquires palpable, because creatable and attainable, nearness. The ‘loss of history’ (Alfred Heuss), the ‘farewell to history’ (Alfred Weber), the immanent ‘perfectibility of history’ (Hans Freyer) through scientific enlightenment and technical manipulation, become inevitable. The enigmatic chaos of history comes to an end where it is abrogated by knowledge of history and by its controllability.
The ‘science’ of history, too, which arises in the shadow of revolution and the permanently smouldering crisis, acquires a positivistic, apocalyptic sense. Again and again in the nineteenth century we are told that the science of history liberates us from history. ‘The historical consciousness shatters the last fetters which philosophy and natural science were unable to break. Man is now completely free’ (Dilthey). ‘A historical phenomenon, once fully and completely known and resolved into a problem of epistemology, is for the man who knows it dead.… History conceived as pure science, and become sovereign, would be a sort of winding up and settlement of the life of mankind’ (Nietzsche). ‘For the historic examination of any construction of human thought always serves to liberate us from it’ (W. Herrmann). Historical science thus becomes an instrument for the mastering of history. It confers on man freedom from history. History as science thereby acquires a tendency to do away with history as remembrance. This kind of historicism as a ‘science of crisis’, and in that sense the remedy against crises, has thus the tendency to destroy the interest in history and the feeling for it. The result of the historicizing and rationalizing of history is then to abolish history and leave human social life bereft of all historic character. In this sense scientific historicism stands in the service of the mystico-messianic idea of the ‘end of history’ and is itself a factor in the ‘ending of history’.
This motif of the historical probing and investigation of historic phenomena is understandable against the background of total crisis that comes into view with the French revolution. Yet it is equally understandable that in the age of historical perfection, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the question was raised as to the price of mastering the crisis in this way. Nietzsche’s book Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben, 1874, leaves us with the question of that ‘unhistorical’ element of ‘atmosphere’ or ‘horizon’ within which alone life goes on. The historical outlook leaves the future without roots, because it destroys our illusions and robs things of the atmosphere in which alone they can live and in which alone they acquire potentialities. ‘All living things need to have an atmosphere, a mysterious nimbus, around them; if we rob them of this covering, if we condemn a religion, an art, a genius to be like a star circling without any atmosphere, then we ought not to be surprised at its quickly drying up and becoming hard and unfruitful. This is simply true of all great things, “which never yet succeeded without a certain amount of illusion”.’ The question now arises as to the historic character of history, which the historian obscures in his search for facts and laws. If the revolutionary crises in human society are ended by positivistic investigation of the facts, then it is a question whether that does not also mean the ending and petrifying of the liveness of human life and the movements of the world process. It is a question whether the ending of the historic crisis which is achieved in this way is not itself a highly critical undertaking. For while an ‘ending of history in history’ does solve the crises in the observable realm, yet the undertaking as a whole is itself exposed to a much more tremendous crisis. Whatever crises may arise within the scientific, technical world, they can be rationalized. But the scientific, technical universe itself becomes an inestimable, irrational force, of which we can no longer have a comprehensive view because we are no longer able to look beyond it to a possibly different future. Thus it becomes an important question whether the concept of history which identifies ‘history’ with ‘crisis’ is adequate, and whether the science of history which resolves history into knowledge does justice to the historic character of history and to the—possibly—historic character of its own knowledge.
Ever since the fundamental methodical approach to man’s experience of the world by Petrus Ramus and René Descartes and its success in the natural sciences, every effort has been directed towards applying a methodical treatment also to the experiences of history and to the process of acquiring knowledge of history. The question of the historical method therefore applies not only to the technical ways in which the historian works, but also, and more comprehensively, to the peculiarity of historical knowledge and the scientific character of historical research. Without ‘method’ no assured knowledge can be attained. Historical methodology therefore embraces principles for historical research and principles for the critical control of their results. Since the natural sciences in the nineteenth century had not been content to collect and collate experimental results but had gone on to construct an exact and verifiable system of the laws of nature, and since exact ‘science’ in general meant ‘natural’ science, it was necessary to raise the question as to the scientific character of historical research and as to the general laws of the course of history. Although the peculiar character of the methods of the human sciences has been emphasized since the end of the nineteenth century by W. Dilthey, yet certain minimum requirements from the concept of science associated with natural science have been introduced also into the science of history:
(a) The science of history is not art, fiction or legend, but the concept of truth which underlies it is that of a verifiable truth of fact. The statements of historical science must be able to prove their historical correctness by reference to sources that can be verified by anyone at any time, and thus by reference to verifiable events. History is not ‘legends and acts’ (Bertram) but, in so far as it seeks assured knowledge, it depends on the verifiable agreement between statement and fact.
(b) The historical correctness of our knowledge of history, however, presupposes that our insights are controllable. The fact that they are bound to the sources and to the criticism of the sources means that they are bound to the controllability of their statements by reference to the reality of which the historian speaks and which he seeks to know.
(c) This controllability, however, presupposes that historical objects can in principle be reconstructed. Historical knowledge is dependable only when it can be verified at any time by anyone who will make the methodical effort. But if it is to be verifiable, it must always be possible to reconstruct the materials and the authoritatively documented events. This reconstructability of the facts thus becomes the methodological mark of the facts as facts. This is what distinguishes the science of history from legend and lively remembrance, from statements of experience and encounter.
(d) Historical science, too, works with definite hypotheses, plans, approaches and outlooks, by means of which the events are illumined and perceived as events. But now, whereas the constructions of natural science use experiment to extort an answer from nature and to let us see and understand it, historical objects are always already bound up with interpretations and outlooks in which the knowledge of them is transmitted. The historian’s first task must therefore be to read the witnesses of history as ‘sources’, and to date, localize and trace back to the ‘historical facts’ the objects which are mediated by manifold processes of interpretation, bias and touching up. The historical facts thus ascertained become the starting point for subjecting the witnesses, interpretations and traditions to the criticism of the historical consciousness. Thus the historical method is in the first instance applied critically to the traditions and the historical sources. This sort of destructive criticism of the traditions of an event, however, is itself always bound up with the historian’s own power of picturing and imagining how things may ‘in fact’ have been, and is thus always combined with reconstruction. Such reconstructions of the actual course of events, in turn, are for their part also drafts, hypotheses and standpoints which must be verified by reference to the sources. Hence historical criticism has always a link with historical imagination, whether that of the sources or our own. This means that historical criticism is always bound up with historical heuristics.
The methodical treatment of the experience of history must ‘objectify’ historic reality. The historical approach must regard past history in that historical detachment in which it can be objectively examined. It has to establish historic reality and must therefore presuppose that this reality is established fact, no longer subject to change. This, understandably enough, becomes more difficult the more it is a question of ‘contemporary history’. For here the object is not firmly established but is still in a state of flux. Here the historical observer does not stand over against history, but in the midst of the events, and exerts an influence on these events themselves by means of his historical diagnosis. At bottom, all history is ‘contemporary history’. The historian’s object is thus engaged in a twofold movement which ‘derives first from the process character of all past life, and secondly from the continual change in the man who contemplates history and is himself subject to historic development’. For this reason the old saying is true, that ‘history has constantly to be rewritten’. The historic character of the historical observer is the point at which there constantly takes place the decisive process of the translating of ‘present’ into ‘object’, of historic present into historical object, of a history that is in a state of flux and open to the influence of our own knowledge and decision into the retrospective contemplation of a history that has come to a standstill. The historical, objectifying relation to past history is therefore itself one that is highly historic and that makes history.
The historical method does not only work with destructive criticism of past pictures of history, in order to investigate the ‘bare’ facts, but must itself approach the source material with its own problems and plans. While historical criticism in the name of fact does attack the interpretations of fact in the sources, yet the facts themselves cannot possibly be known and stated without other interpretations. In the science of history, the facts are not the first datum, but the last product of a process of abstraction that moves from the traditional interpretations to what is today generally and unquestioningly taken to be ‘objectivity’. ‘Fact’ is the substratum interpretatively mediated by the sources and traditions. The natural scientist in his experiments must isolate his object, eliminate factors which do not enter into the question and disregard other problems, if he is to attain to unequivocal results. This is very difficult in the case of historical objects, because here we have always to do with highly complicated structures whose isolation destroys the fact of their being so multifariously conditioned. Thus historical science, according as it isolates a single fact from its manifold context and reduces its questions to one problem only, must take care at the same time to move on again from the isolated and individual facts to the wider context and from the one angle of approach to the complex of other problems. Thus the individual fact can be known and evaluated only along with the general, and the general only along with the individual. The positivistic separation of fact and meaning is not one which is possible in principle, and can be asserted only when our own interpretation of what we call ‘fact’ remains naive, uncritical and unconscious. When Max Weber asserts that rational science ‘disenchants’ the world, and that the full understanding of the facts ceases where the value-judgment begins, then that is true where the value-judgment is subsequently appended in order to introduce values into a world that rests on other facts, but not where the value judgment is already included within the field of judgment in which the illumination of the facts itself takes place—and within that field it is always already given.
When historical science moves on from isolated, individual facts to more general statements embracing historic processes, then there arises the problem of the forming of historical concepts. It is necessary to make use of concepts of a generalizing and typifying kind. These concepts acquire their binding force from the standpoint and perspective of the moment, and therefore cannot claim to reflect the historic processes as such, but are heuristic modes of contemplating historic processes, and means of explaining and understanding them. They require to be confirmed by the object, and are therefore constantly open to question.
One such means is the ‘historical law’. An event becomes explicable when its causes can be seen. This connection between cause and effect, however, presupposes that the plane of being on which cause and effect are connected is the same. History must then be social history or political history or cultural history, i.e. the substance of the history must be determined, if we are to be able to present a chain of cause and effect of this kind. This, however, can be demonstrated only in things of uniform character and in repetitions and in definite processes in history which have a definite, automatic character. Apart from these, historic processes are so complex that, for one thing, we cannot discover all the conditions which cause them, but always only a selection of them. Single causes can be asserted in history only by discarding or disregarding other connections. And in the second place, historical causality lacks the characteristic of reversibility. We can certainly argue from effects to causes, but hardly ever from causes to effects. Hence the really historic factor lies in the concept of possibility rather than in that of necessity: we never find all the possibilities turned into unequivocal necessities. Thus the concept of causality too, can have only heuristic significance.
Another conceptual means of grasping connections is the discovering of ‘tendencies’. This concept has been familiar in German historical writing since Ranke. But it is applied also in the historico-dialectical materialism of Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch. It means that the stringency of the causality of natural science is renounced and the transition in historic movements is described not as a transition from causa to effectus, but from possibility to reality. What stands between possibilities and realized realities is not a causal necessity, but tendency, impulse, inclination, trend, specific leanings towards something, which can become real in certain historic constellations. Ernst Topitsch thinks this expression obscures ‘the tricky problem of the relationship between act, value and independent evolution’. R. Wittram thinks this expression can be completely void of any relation to an objective teleology and can mean only an ‘impulse’ within the working of a concrete historical event. For G. Lukács and E. Bloch, ‘tendency’ means something that mediates between the real, objective possibilities and the subjective decisions, and to that extent places the historical ‘facts’ within the stream of the historical process and sets the subjective decisions of the historical observer within this same process. Then, however, the intention in employing the heuristic medium of exploring ‘tendencies’ is surely to discover a directional trend on the part of history which is teleological as a whole.
E. Rothacker has recommended as a means towards the grasping of historical complexes the concept of ‘style’. ‘What is called “historical thinking” in the emphatic and passionate use of the term has indeed its primary aim not in the establishing of facts, but in grasping as congenially as may be the appearances of the immanent logos, the styles in which these facts arrange themselves.’ This concept, to be sure, has its roots in the history of art and is appropriate to an aesthetic view of things. When transferred to historic complexes, however, it means the anthropological and sociological connection of acts and events with their ‘environment’ in the experiences of the moment and in the current views of life. What is meant is the ‘style of living’, the façon de vivre, the façon d’agir. Just as animals have their specific kind of ‘environment’ of vitally necessary openness towards the world, so also men live in a cultural ‘environment’ consisting of modes of experience, customs of living, institutions and expectations of life, in which they perceive history and act historically. In his search for facts the historian shatters this horizon of interpretation and experience that belongs to the history of any given moment, whereas the truth is, that the facts and acts became ‘historic’ only in their particular contemporary ‘environment’ in the world of language, law, Weltanschauung, views of life, religious ideas and economic forms.
In much the same way the concept of ‘structure’ attempts to grasp the social institutions in which history was accepted and mastered at a given moment, by seeing them as the world of the orders and expressions of life that exercised their influence on history. This framework of ideas leads on to the history of ‘forms’. Form-critical historiography is likewise sociologically oriented in enquiring into the institutional grounding of statements in the life of historic groups and societies, and in examining not so much the individual statement as once made, but rather the ‘Sitz im Leben’ provided for the statements by religion law, culture, politics and art.
Lastly, the concept of the ‘understanding of existence’ is also a heuristic medium of this kind. Here the phenomena of past history are interpreted and brought to consciousness on the basis of the possibilities of man’s understandings of existence. The heuristic model consists in ‘situation’ and ‘decision’, in challenge and response, and past history shows how history was experienced and responsibility received by the human subject and how possibilities of existence were thereby discovered, grasped or destroyed. The historian is then not so much interested in the events themselves and their causal or tendentious connections with other events, but rather in the historic character of the several existences that have been, and in the possibilities of human existence.
Thus the range of historical concepts extends from the ‘facts’ to the possibilities of existence, from ‘objectivity’—in the sense of the exact natural sciences—to the unmistakable uniqueness of human subjectivity and spontaneity. We have here selected only a few typical examples. ‘All general historical concepts have a certain fluidity,’ as R. Wittram rightly observes. They are heuristic concepts whose applicability has repeatedly to be checked in detail. The flexibility, however, in which they resist fixed metaphysical systematizing and logical unequivocalness, has its ground not only in the limited historic perspective of the observer who uses them in order to shed light on an enigmatic reality. It has its ground also in the fact that unequivocal and eternally established reality is not yet there to be conceived. The concept of ‘nation’, or ‘class’, or ‘culture’ etc., is not a standing category in which we can ascertain the history of the nation, the history of the class struggle, or the history of culture, but the real meaning of ‘nation’, ‘class’, ‘church’ etc., is itself in a state of historic flux, historically disputed and therefore engaged in historic transformation. If the basic idea of historicism is that the essence of a thing is to be grasped from its historic development, and that the result of the historical process is decided only within the historical process itself, then the ‘land of the realized, absolute concept’ is not to be reached by way of abstraction from the particular to the general, nor yet by way of a comprehensive review of the past, but then this land is the as yet undiscovered fore-land of history, which can be reached from within history only in the form of fragmentary anticipations. It is not due merely to the defective range of the human mind that history remains dark to it, but this is due to history itself, which has not yet reached its end and therefore cannot yet be resolved into historical knowledge, or only in a proleptic, fragmentary way.
The question of historical heuristics leads of itself to the problem of the philosophy of history. ‘In criticism, history of itself becomes philosophy of history’ (F. C. Baur). But how can a philosophy of history be possible in the Greek sense of knowledge and of science? If ‘the essence of history is change’ (J. Burckhardt), yet ‘change’ is the direct opposite of ‘essence’. ‘Philosophy of history’ therefore appeared to J. Burckhardt to be a centaur, a contradiction in terms, ‘for history co-ordinates, and hence is unphilosophical, while philosophy subordinates, and hence is unhistorical.’ Nevertheless all the general historical concepts by means of which we endeavour to understand historic complexes are bound up with definite approaches to the illuminating of reality and are therefore part and parcel of a philosophical knowledge of the world as history. If the general endeavour of human reason is towards the abolition of chance, as Wilhelm von Humboldt has said, then this endeavour is intensified in that philosophy of history which sees the experience of history as the experience of crisis and of permanent revolution. The ‘nightmare of history’ loses its nightmare character where it is comprehended. It is comprehended, however, where sense, an immanent logos, can be found in the chaotic movements of history, where necessity and dependence can be discovered in the contingent. Then history is ‘comprehended’, and where history is ‘comprehended’ in this way, there it ceases to be ‘history’.
Let us take a look at this—often unconscious—transition from historical heuristics to philosophy of history in one or two specific historians.
(a) Even Ranke was constantly in search of a ‘general bond’ of history. Ranke as a historian is usually commended for turning his back on the a priori constructions in the speculations of German Idealism on world history, in order to address himself to the objects of history themselves in their vast abundance as these are empirically accessible to historical science. Nevertheless Ranke, too, is bound to definite speculative presuppositions in his historiography. Thus in his Deutsche Geschichte im Zeit-alter der Reformation he observes: ‘We may perhaps say that the ages succeed each other precisely in order that what is not possible to any of them individually may happen in all, in order that the whole fulness of the spiritual life breathed into the human race by the deity should come to light in the course of the centuries.’ According to this, spiritual life has been ‘breathed into’ mankind by the deity, and that too in its ‘whole fulness’ as the deity itself is infinite, and can therefore come ‘to light’ in the ages of history only in successive stages. It is true that the laws according to which it gradually emerges are obscure to us, greater and more mysterious than we think, yet it is nevertheless possible to have an inkling of the divine order of things, for this ‘divine order’ is ‘identical with the succession of the ages’. Hence Ranke describes it by the use of historical concepts like ‘tendencies’ and ‘forces’. ‘Here are forces, and spiritual forces at that, life-producing, creative forces, themselves life, here are moral energies which we see developing.… They flourish, take possession of the world, assume outward expression in the greatest variety of forms, attack, restrict and overpower each other: in their interrelation and succession, in their life, their passing away or their reanimation, which then embraces ever greater fulness, deeper significance, wider compass, lies the mystery of world history.’ The basic philosophical picture underlying this interpretation of the ‘mystery of world history’ is manifestly the neoplatonic, panentheistic picture of the age of Goethe. The ‘idea’, ‘God’, the ‘sun’ or the ‘source’, does not contain within it for Ranke any dialectical principle that is immanent to it, as for Hegel, but it emanates, while itself always remaining extra-worldly in its unchanging, unchangeable being. Its emanations become manifest in the stream of historic phenomena and movements, in the interplay and succession of forces and tendencies, of moral energies and epochs. Each of these stands in an immediate relationship to the highest idea. Hence every epoch is ‘immediately related to God, and its value does not at all depend on what emerges from it, but lies in its own existence, in its own self’, as it is put in the Berchtesgadener Vorträge. ‘The ideas which form the ground of human conditions never contain perfectly within them the divine and eternal source from which they spring.’ And yet according to Ranke the ‘inner necessity of the succession’ must not by any means be overlooked. To be sure, no final goal can be stipulated for world history. ‘To stipulate a definite goal for it (world history) would be to darken the future and fail to recognize the limitless sweep of the movement of world history.’ Nevertheless there does exist for Ranke a goal. The goal of the developments and entanglements of history is, that the ‘whole fulness’ of the spirit breathed into mankind, the infinite multiplicity which is provided for in the one divine idea, should come to light in the succession of the epochs. It is not that the idea will at last stand realized and revealed, but the totality of world history, of which there can here be no comprehensive view, will reveal, as a sum of the partial manifestations of the idea, the fulness of the divine being. ‘For Ranke, development consists in the succession of a series of forms of manifestation of the one idea, all of equal standing, which have their value in themselves and whose infinite fulness, taken all together, would supply the revelation of the whole.’ This is world history in terms of ‘teleology without a telos’, as G. Masur has called Ranke’s view of history and historiography. Thus for Ranke history is a process, but its meaning is not contained in the end result. God appears in history, but does not resolve himself into it. The historian’s task is to reconstruct the life of the past—and indeed to reconstruct it in that harmony which is already given in the facts of history as a whole.
Thus Ranke had a ‘vision of the whole’, a basic view belonging to the philosophy of history and a faith belonging to the theology of history. He shares this with the age of Goethe. Yet he was modest and discreet enough not to construct history according to this conception and not to dismiss the inexplicable with the remark that it is really not good for the facts (Hegel). He brings his ‘idea’ on the scene only at particular turning points in history and—though this indeed is decisive—in the constructing of his historical concepts.
(b) In a similar way Ferdinand Christian Baur, thanks to whom historical criticism and historical thinking have become imperative for Protestant theology, attempted to comprehend history as a universal whole. For him, historical criticism leads of necessity to the question of the ‘real truth of history’. ‘What higher task can history have at all than the ever more profound examination of the historic complex of all the phenomena that form its given object?… But for that reason its endeavours are very naturally also directed towards one end: by every means at its command, both by the examination of individual phenomena, and also by the classifying of individual phenomena under the higher viewpoints from which they first receive their firm place in the whole, it seeks also to penetrate what still confronts it as a solid, closed mass, in order to resolve it and make it fluid, and to draw it into the general stream of historic development in which, in the infinite concatenation of causes and effects, one thing is always the presupposition of the other, everything together upholds and maintains itself, and the only thing that would have to remain for ever uncomprehended is that which could claim in advance to stand in the midst of history outside the context of history.’ If, however, the ‘context of history’ is understood in this way, then on grounds of the philosophy of history—not of historiography—‘miracle’ or ‘overspringing’ must be eliminated. For ‘in the end the only view which can be maintained is the one which brings unity, coherence and rational consistency into our Weltanschauung, into our view of the gospel history, into our consciousness as a whole’. ‘It is always in the context of the whole, in which it can be ascribed its specific place, that a historical truth first receives its firmness and stability.’ Thus for F. C. Baur, historical criticism inevitably leads on to historical speculation, for historical criticism cannot and must not lead to atomizing the facts, as in the Enlightenment, but for Baur it must in effect mean an understanding of the individual in the whole. ‘ “Critical historical” means that no single feature is made absolute or negated, but each is understood as a transitional link in the chain of immanent historic progress and thus of the total self-realization of the revelation of the spirit or the idea.’ This historical criticism is only the reverse side of historical speculation. But what becomes of ‘history’ when historical speculation subjects it to a total vision of this kind?
1. History becomes a ‘given object confronting us’.
2. The individual ‘events’ of history are understood as historic ‘appearances’ of a comprehensive whole.
3. Historic ‘moments’ are taken as ‘elements’ in the movements of a total complex of history.
4. The complex of history is given ‘rational consistency’ as ‘an infinite concatenation of causes and effects’.
5. ‘History’ becomes a summary term for reality in its totality—for the self-contained movement of a universal whole in which ‘everything together upholds and maintains itself’.
6. History thus becomes the field of the manifestation of a spiritual whole. It becomes the ‘eternally clear mirror in which the spirit regards itself, contemplates its own image’. In history the spirit realizes and manifests itself. In the science of history it is received back again. Thus the speculative view of history as the world of the manifestation of the spirit is in complete accord with the principle of the subjectivity of the spirit that becomes conscious of itself in historical reflection. The critical historical method, historical speculation on history as a whole, and the re-subjectifying of the spirit in the knowledge of history go together and mutually condition each other.
Here, however, there arises the question whether a critical historical method and a historical speculation of this kind still understands ‘history’ as being ‘historic’ at all, or whether in this process of knowing and comprehending history the historic character of history is not resolved into a non-historic Greek logos. History is turned into a self-supporting cosmos. The riddle of history is solved by means of Platonic philosophy, Hegelian dialectic and pantheistic ideas. History becomes the totality of the changing, self-transforming epiphanies of the eternal present. It is not possible to see how this can be a way of ‘using the ruthless application of historical criticism to repeat in a changed situation the Reformers’ decision for “sola fide” ’.
(c) For Johann Gustav Droysen, the ‘realm of the historical method’ is ‘the cosmos of the moral world’. To see this moral world in its development and growth, in its successive movements, is to see it as history. This already shows at the start what Droysen takes to be the substance whose historic manifestations are to be historically examined. His ‘cosmos of the moral world’ is expounded in a world history of moral teleology. The place of the principle of causality is taken by the principle of moral entelechy. The mystery of the movements of history is illumined in the light of their goals. ‘From observing the progress in the movement of the moral world, from recognizing its direction, from seeing goal after goal fulfilled and revealed, the contemplation of history argues to a goal of goals, in which the movement is perfected, in which all that moves and motivates this world of men and makes it hasten restlessly on becomes rest, perfection, eternal present.’ ‘All development and growth is movement towards a goal which seeks to attain its fulfilment in the movement.’ ‘The highest goal, which unconditionally conditions all others, motivates them all, embraces them all, explains them all, the goal of goals is not to be empirically discovered.’ ‘Beginning and end are hidden from the finite eye. But its scrutiny can discover the direction in which the movement flows. Bound though it is to the narrow limits of here and now, it beholds the whence and the whither.’ Thus ‘the self-certainty of our personal being, the pressure of our moral obligations and desires, the longing for perfection, unity, eternity’ adds ‘to the other “proofs” of the existence of God the one that for us proves most’. The certainty thus acquired of a highest goal of goals that gives meaning to things, is what Droysen calls a ‘theodicy of history’, without which history would lapse into the meaninglessness of a cyclic movement that merely repeats itself. Thus for ‘history’ Droysen holds fast to the belief in God’s wise ordering of the world, which embraces the whole human race; and ‘in taking this faith, “that is an undoubting confidence of things not seen”, and striving to spell it out in terms of knowledge … therein and therein alone does it know itself to be a science’.
In Droysen the relation between history and philosophy of history is especially interesting. The movements of history are movements within the framework of the ‘cosmos’ of the moral world. The place of the causal cosmos of the natural sciences, however, is taken by a teleological cosmos which has its culminating point of metaphysical unity in the highest final goal, the goal of all goals. This is manifestly the entelechy-cosmos of Aristotelian metaphysics. The latter is combined with the postulates of Kant’s practical reason, with the need to presuppose belief in ‘God and a future world’. The eschatology of Christian hope is transposed into the teleology of the moral reason. The eschaton is turned into the telos of all tele—rest, perfection, one flock and one shepherd, one nation of mankind, one full royal freedom of moral man, a new heaven and a new earth, return of the whole creation to God. Neoplatonic logos speculation and the Hegelian dialectic of the coming to itself of absolute Spirit supply the further description of this eschaton/telos.
Here, too, the riddle of history is resolved. The man who is engaged in moral action knows himself on the way to the final solution. Our last quotation, however, shows plainly that the question as to the meaning or meaninglessness of history is decided in a ‘pre-scientific’ way, as R. Wittram observes, yet not in an unscientific pre-scientificness but, as Droysen says, in the foundations and motive causes of the science of history—namely, in that believing hope in the as yet unseen future which presses for knowledge and which calls for the historical science that ‘strives after’ knowledge. This would mean that the range of the historic consciousness, of historic remembrance and historic knowledge is always as wide as the extent to which the historic consciousness of mission, in hope for the future and assurance of faith, anticipates an eschaton of ultimate goals and aims. The historical consciousness of history has the possibilities and limitations of its perception prescribed by a historic consciousness of mission which accepts the future in responsibly embracing its aims and goals. If this missionary consciousness is formulated in moral terms, as in Droysen, then the realm of the historical method becomes the cosmos of the moral world. It is significant that for this moral teleology Droysen can, to be sure, take over the biblical promises of the new humanity, the liberty of the children of God, the perfection of all historic, finite movements in the ‘eternal present’, but not the cardinal point of Christian eschatology—the resurrection of the dead.
(d) For Wilhelm Dilthey, history is a human science and the human sciences rest on the relationship between life, expression and understanding. ‘The summary expression for all that meets us in experience and understanding is life as a complex embracing the human race.’ Everywhere in history we find expressions of life, conditions of life, objectifications of the one, unfathomable life. ‘Each individual expression of life represents in this realm of objective spirit (viz., in the sense of the objectification of life) something common to all.’ All expressions of life stand in a sphere of community, and are understandable only in such a sphere. The ‘basic fact’ of man’s world is ‘life’, and the ‘essence of history’ is therefore to be seen in the idea of the ‘objectification of life’. ‘It is life of all kinds in the most varied relationships that constitutes history. History is merely life, seen from the standpoint of the whole of mankind as forming one complex.’ Over against Hegel’s starting point in the ‘absolute Spirit’ Dilthey sets the ‘reality of life’: ‘In life the totality of the psychic complex is at work.’ Hence he understands ‘objective spirit’ not from the standpoint of ‘reason’, but as a live unity of expressions of life and objectifications of life. The historic ‘chain of effects’ accordingly does not consist for him in the causal chain of nature, but in the structure of the life of the soul which produces values and realizes aims. The life that springs from unfathomable sources becomes intelligible to us in the endless historic objectifications of that life, so far as we ourselves have part in it. The understanding of historic expressions of life presupposes the grounding of our own life in the unfathomable stream of life, and stands in mutual interaction therewith. We understand what we experience, and can experience what we understand. ‘We are first of all historic beings, before we are observers of history, and only because we are the former do we become the latter.’ Thus mental science or the science of life, as it grows in understanding, broadens the horizon of the things that are common to all life, and draws near to the unfathomable, infinite whole that is history. The recognition of the finitude and relativity of all historic manifestations of life does not then lead us to relativism, but sets us free for the unfathomably creative activity of life itself. ‘This tangle of torturing, enrapturing questions, of intellectual delights and the pains of insufficiency and contradiction-this is the enigma that is life, the unique, dark frightening object of all philosophy … the face of life itself, … this sphinx with the body of an animal and the face of a man.’ True as it is that history is here taken up into the sphere of a philosophy of life and regarded as the fulness of the finite objectifications and manifestations of infinite life, yet it is equally true that for Dilthey this can also be combined with a goal: ‘Man’s capacity for development, the expectation of future, higher forms of human life—that is the mighty wind that drives us on.’
Here, too, historic ‘events’ are interpreted in terms of a primary substance that is the inexhaustible source of history—in this case ‘life’—and in the light of the unfathomable life process they become ‘objectifications’ of something. All events, ideas and movements in history have at bottom something in common, which manifests itself in them all and makes it possible to understand them and accept them as an enrichment of our own life. The ‘riddle of history’ is not rationally solved. History is not subjected to a general formula of mathematics. But the riddle of history is identified as the riddle of life, whose solutions are manifested in fragmentary, finite, supersedable form in the relations and objectifications of life. Life, unfathomable as it is, is perennial. The relations and objectifications of life change. History becomes intelligible when it is related to an underlying foundation, to some eternally springing, eternally driving source, to the hypokeimenon of ‘life’. Then ‘history’ is the history of life, and in so far as ‘life’ is mind, the science of history is a human science. Its knowledge and understanding of past history is a knowledge and self-understanding of the similar in the different. Here, too, history becomes a totality and, in the immensurable whole of this totality, ‘life’ becomes epiphanous.
(e) Martin Heidegger sets out from the view of history contained in Dilthey’s philosophy of life. Yet for him the ‘basic weakness’ of thus seeing history in terms of the philosophy of life lies in the fact that ‘life’ itself has not been taken as an ontological problem. For him, ‘life’ is ‘essentially accessible only in Dasein’. By ‘Dasein’ is meant exclusively the being of man or—later—that in which man finds and has being. This means that for him the place of ‘unfathomable life’ is taken by Dasein as disclosed to a phenomenological analysis. History has its roots no longer in the creative unfathomability of life, but in the historic character, or ‘historicality’, of Dasein. ‘Historicality, as a determining character, is prior to what is called “history” (events of world history). Historicality stands for the state of Being that is constitutive for Dasein’s “happening” as such; and only on the basis of such “happening” is anything like “world history” possible or can anything belong historically to world history. This means that the origin and the essence of history are to be sought in the finitude, temporality and historical character of the existence of man. Dasein is finite, for it extends between birth and death. To the temporal extension of Dasein belongs death. ‘Authentic Being-towards-death—that is to say, the finitude of temporality—is the hidden basis of Dasein’s historicality.’ Human Dasein is ‘Being-towards-death’ as the inevitable possibility of existence. ‘Only Being-free for death gives Dasein its goal outright and pushes existence into its finitude. Once one has grasped the finitude of one’s existence, it snatches one back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to one … and brings Dasein into the simplicity of its fate.’
If the essence of history is seen in the ‘historicality’ of Dasein as such in terms of this analysis, then that means turning our backs on the multiplicity of things and events, and no longer examining the course of history and its reality as such, but asking what essentially makes it possible. ‘In the existential analysis we cannot, in principle, discuss what Dasein factically resolves in any particular case.’ The analysis supplies only a formal structural context which provides the conditions for the various several events.
What is the view of history that comes of thus grounding history in the fundamental ‘historicality’ of Dasein? Like Dilthey, when in terms of the philosophy of life he interpreted history as a mental science and a science of life, so also Heidegger’s existentialist interpretation of history as a science is aimed at demonstrating its ontological derivation from the historic character of Dasein itself, and seeks to construct the idea of history from the ‘historicality’ of Dasein. This, however, is to lay down not only the historic character of the historical subject, but also a new description of the historical object. Heidegger makes a very precise distinction between what is ‘primarily historic’ and what is ‘secondarily historic’.
The historian’s primary and authentic object lies not in the individual occurrence, or in ‘laws’ which govern the sequence of events, but in ‘the possibility which has been factically existent.… The central theme of historiology is the possibility of existence which has-been-there.’ Thus in the science of history, ‘historicality’ in the authentic sense of the term ‘understands history as the “recurrence” of the possible, and knows that a possibility will recur only if existence is open for it fatefully, in a moment of vision, in resolute repetition’. This means that historical science becomes a return to the possibility (that was), a repetition of the possibility and a re-echoing of the possibility. Historical science ‘will disclose the quiet force of the possible with all the greater penetration the more simply and the more concretely having-been-in-the-world is understood in terms of its possibility, and “only” presented as such’. ‘Repeating is handing down explicitly—that is to say, going back into the possibilities of the Dasein that has-been-there. The authentic repetition of a possibility of existence that has been—the possibility that Dasein may choose its hero—is grounded existentialistically in anticipatory resoluteness.’ Thus the historian will examine past history in search of its underlying understandings of existence, and from the understandings of existence he will extract the possibilities of Dasein and present them as possibilities for today’s ability to exist—in order that Dasein may choose its hero. Thus historical science once more becomes ‘tradition’—viz., handing down of possibilities of existence that have been.
The secondarily historic, on the other hand, has its roots in the inauthentic historicality of Dasein. In its flight from death it loses itself in general terms of ‘they’ and of world history, and is dissipated in the multiplicity of all that occurs from day to day. It understands Being without further differentiation in the sense of mere presence-at-hand and becomes historically blind to the possibilities. It therefore retains and receives only the ‘actual’ that is left over from the world history that has been, ‘the leavings, and the information about them that is present-at-hand’. It ‘evades choice’. ‘Loaded down with the legacy of a “past” which has become unrecognizable, it seeks the modern.’ To that extent historical study of this kind seeks to estrange Dasein from its authentic historicality.
It was Heidegger’s distinction between authentic and in-authentic study of history which first gave rise to that dualism that splits man’s relation to history into objectifying contemplation and immediate encounter, into factual positivism and existentialist interpretation of the past possibilities of existence, in order then ‘to interpret the movements of history as possible ways of understanding human existence, thus demonstrating their relevance today’.
But now, it transpires that when real history is grounded in the formal structure of the historicality of Dasein, this tends to obscure the fact that the movements, individualities and complexes of history have really happened. Historical relativism, to be sure, is surmounted when the possibility of history is ontologically grounded in the historicality of Dasein. This historicality is itself not subject to history, but comes of Dasein’s eternally being given thematic and problematical character by death. But this also means losing sight of history as such. ‘The intended surmounting of historism becomes an unintended surmounting of history.’ What happens here in the name of ‘historicality’ and in the work of existentialist interpretation of history is again the annihilation of history. The riddle of history is the historicality of Dasein, and man knows himself in his historicality to be the solution. In his ‘resoluteness’ he cuts the Gordian knot. But to surmount historicism in this way is to lose history itself.
(f) To sum up the results of this brief review of the philosophy of history that emerges from historical heuristics, we find that the definition, comprehension and understanding of history inevitably brings about at the same time an abrogation, a negation and annihilation of history. When the primary question is that of the origin, substance and essence of history, then the concrete movements, changes, crises and revolutions which constitute history are related to some factor that does not change, always exists and has equal validity at all times. The science and philosophy of history are here striving to combine the Greek logos with our modern experiences of reality, and our modern experiences of crisis with the Greek logos.
It has often been rightly emphasized that ‘history’ was fundamentally foreign to Greek thought. Greek thought was primarily in search of the ever existent, the unchanging, ever true, ever good and ever beautiful. ‘History’, however, is that which rises and passes, unstable and transient, and as such shows no signs of anything that is perpetual and abiding. For that reason it was not possible to discover in the accidental pragmata of history any logos of eternal, true Being. It was not possible to ‘know’ history, and at bottom there was in history nothing worth knowing either. This idea of logos and knowledge, of truth and essence, plainly has its ground in the religion of ancient Greek belief in the gods and the cosmos. Thucydides, the historian of the Peloponnesian war, shows profound insights into the nature of men and forces and their typical features, but he, too, searches for what is abiding and unchanging in this war. ‘He is a man void of hope, and therefore void of wide perspectives. He portrays a self-contained picture of ‘a history’, but does not ask about ‘history’. He lacks the sense for change and newness, because there can be no divine sense in the changing and the suddenly new. What makes divine sense would require to have the dignity of being constant and abiding.
On the other hand it has been emphasized that the concept of history is a creation of Hebrew prophecy. ‘For the Greek mind, historical science is synonymous with knowledge as such. Thus for the Greeks history is and remains related merely to the past. The prophet on the other hand is a seer. His seer’s eye fashioned the concept of history as the being of the future.… Time becomes future …, and the future is the primary content of this reflection on history. In place of a golden age in the mythological past, the eschatological future puts a true historical existence on earth.’ This has its ground in the fact that for Jews and Christians history means history of salvation and history of the divine promise. The ‘divine’ is not seen as that which is ever existent in constant and abiding orders and self-repeating structures, but is expected in the future from the God of the promises. The changes of history are not ‘the changing’, as measured in terms of the abiding, but they contain the possible, as measured in terms of the promise of God. ‘History’ is not a chaos into which the observer must bring divine order and eternal logos, but history is here perceived and sought in the categories of the new and the promised. The place of dispassionate observation and contemplation or review is therefore taken by passionate expectation and by participation in forward-moving mission. The place of the question as to the abiding essence and eternal origin of times past is taken by the historic question of the future and of the preparations for it and intimations of it in the past. The real category of history is no longer the past and the transient, but the future. The perception and interpretation of past history is then no longer archaeological, but futuristic and eschatological. Accounts of history then belong to the genus of prophecy—prophecy that looks back, but intends the future. If the meaning of history is expected from the future and conceived in terms of the mission of the present, then history is neither a tangle of necessities and laws nor a tumbling-ground for meaningless caprice. Future as mission shows the relation of today’s tasks and decisions to what is really possible, points to open possibilities in the real and to tendencies that have to be grasped in the possible.
If, as we said at the beginning, modern historical study and the modern philosophy of history is ‘philosophy of crisis’, the very designation of ‘history’ as ‘crisis’ really already implies the use of the Greek logos for a ‘philosophy’ of history. For the word ‘crisis’ measures the uncomprehended new event by the standard of the traditional order of human life, which now finds itself in a crisis, is threatened by it, and must therefore be rescued, preserved or renewed. The expression ‘crisis’ is always related to ‘order’. The ‘crisis’ calls the order in question and can therefore be mastered only by means of a new order. It then remains unnoticed that this event, which is perceived as a ‘crisis’, contains on the other hand also the ‘new’. Philosophy of history as a philosophy of crisis has therefore constantly a conservative character. Historical science as an anti-crisis science therefore fell back on the Greek logos with all its cosmological implications, and on the Roman concept of ordo with all its political and juridical implications. If, however, the new factor is perceived in the crisis, and history is not regarded as a crisis of the existing order but is expected in the category of the future, then the horizon of illumination and expectation will have to be totally different. Philosophy of history as a philosophy of crisis has the aim of annihilating history. An eschatology of history, however, which revolves around the concepts of the new and the future, of mission and the front line of the present, would be in a position to take history as history, to remember and expect it as history, and thus not to annihilate history but to keep it open.
It was the theological evaluation of ‘time’ resulting from the expectation of the arrival of the promised future of God in terms of Jewish and Christian messianic thought, that first opened the Greek mind for the problem of history and for the philosophic idea of a purposeful, irreversible and unrepeatable process of history. ‘Just as space with its closed bounds and its fulness of forms is the sphere of truth for the Greeks, so that of Israel is the open, formless stream of time. In the former case we have the circle of the cosmos returning upon itself, in the latter the straight line of creation pressing on to infinity; in the former the world of seeing and contemplating, in the latter that of hearing and learning; in the former image and resemblance, in the latter decision and action.… In space is presence and remembrance, in time danger and hope.… Over against the spatial goal of perfection stands the goal of redemption to be attained in time.’ The combining of both spheres of truth and both ways of thinking in the manifold encounters between Jewish and Christian messianic ideas and Greek thought in the course of the history of Christianity brought about the decisive transition in Greek thinking from the static to the dynamic, from substance to function, from the eternal present of Being to the open possibilities of the future, from the metaphysical glorification of the cosmos to the sense of mission that transforms the world. The transition which arose from such encounters can be particularly clearly seen in the philosophy of history in the nineteenth century. If in the last chapter we saw modern historiography and modern philosophy of history in the light of the Greek logos and noticed in them a subliminal annihilation of history, yet they can also be read from the standpoint of historic eschatology.
Since the time of Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (‘Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind’), Kant’s Ideen zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht (‘Ideas on a Universal History, with a Cosmopolitan Intent’), Schiller’s Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte? (‘What is Universal History and to what End is it studied?’), and finally Hegel’s Philosophy of History, all historians and thinkers on history have possessed a sense of mission, a belief in a history that is meaningful and a faith in the great task of mankind. Whether this goal is governed by the ‘vision of eternal peace’ in the cosmopolitan state or, as in national histories, by the ‘mission of Prussia’ (Treitschke), the ‘mission of France’ (Jules Michelet) or the mission of Panslavism, everywhere a secular messianism becomes the dominating philosophical and political idea in the view of history. Historiography and philosophy of history become necessary where the foreground is occupied by the mission of a nation, or by world redemption or the doctrine of a revolution that is now due or the doctrine of a vitally necessary restoration. The messianic outlook becomes political and motivates men’s thoughts on history. This in itself has already brought a fundamentally new element into the view of history in modern times as compared with Greek historiography.
It also means, further, that modern views of history can no longer renounce the governing idea of a universal history or world history. Speculations on world history and discussions about history as a whole, and about the whole as history, first became possible as a result of Christianity’s sense of mission, and have therefore not ceased to be possible even where Christianity is no longer the centre of this mission.
Finally, it can be said that only where a knowledge of mission supplies the sense of a future and a purpose, and only so long as that is so, and only where this knowledge finds its goal in a universal horizon that embraces the whole world, and only so long as that is so, is there room for the concept of growth in time, of the uniqueness of events and of a meaningful future that is to be expected and sought—in a word, for a historic concept of history. That is why the Dutch historian Jan Huizinga can say that the future is the real category of historic thinking. And that is why Ernst Bloch is right when he insists that ‘the nerve of the true historical concept is and remains the new’.
The concept of history that is marked by future expectations, a sense of mission and the category of the new can, of course, also make history obscure. It depends on the nature of the future that is expected in each particular case, and on the source from which the mission emerges and the object at which it aims. Yet ‘history’ here remains the epitome of possible danger and possible salvation. ‘History’ does not become, in the sense of the Greek logos, the epitome of reality in its totality or of the universe. To understand and embrace history in the front-line of the present in terms of hope and forward-moving mission can therefore be dangerous as well as salutary in its effects. For where this way of perceiving history is concerned, Hölderlin’s saying is true: ‘Where there is danger, the salutary also grows’—as is also its reverse: where the salutary grows, there danger grows also (E. Bloch). The would-be rescue for the sake of which everything else is abandoned, and which then fails, plunges everything into infinite danger of forsakenness and meaninglessness. To expect and seek a deliverance which does not embrace all that is and all that is not yet, has disastrous results when everything is staked upon it. To abandon ourselves and all existing reality to the unstable seas of history always has point only when there is a prospect of new land. If these prospects prove to be illusions, then our loss is doubled. If there are no prospects at all, then history, too, becomes pointless. But if the experience of reality as history has once arisen and the breakthrough to history has once taken place, then there can be no return to non-historic faith in the ever existing and eternally abiding cosmos. The understanding of history, of its possibilities for good and evil, of its direction and its meaning, lies in the field of hope and can be acquired only there.
If from this standpoint we take another look at modern historiography and modern philosophy of history, then we shall notice that the real problem in their concepts of history is not the problem of the particular and the general, not the problem of the idea and its appearances, and so on, but the question of the relation of history to the ‘end of history’. Kant remarked in his philosophy of history that philosophy, too, can have its ‘millenarianism’. His remark draws our attention to the fact that every understanding of history on the basis of an already existing and ascertained totality of the idea or of the primary substance or of life, and every resolution of history into knowledge, is in search of the ‘end of history’, and that the aporia of the philosophy of history is to be seen in its having to seek this ‘end of history’ in history. Modern philosophy of history has in fact the character of a philosophic, enlightened millenarianism: the ‘ending of history in history’ is, as in the old religious millenarianism, its goal. It has, further, the character of eschatological spirit mysticism. Joachim di Fiore’s historico-theological idea of a third empire of the spirit has haunted and inspired the nineteenth-century view of history since Lessing. History is the ‘developing God’, as it was said in the age of Goethe from Herder on. Knowledge of history therefore imparts a share in the God who is becoming spirit. The idea that a third age of the—scientific—spirit will clear up the crises of history and in this way resolve enigmatic history into understood history, constituted for Lessing and Kant, for Comte and Hegel and their followers, the hidden basis for a new orientation of the world, and one that was fundamentally no longer ‘metaphysical’, but ‘historical’. Thus wherever the philosophy of history lays down an ‘essence of history’, its statements, although formulated in the sense of Greek cosmology, have an eschatological character involving the ‘end of history’. All the ‘general bonds’ or trends which historiography finds in history have therefore an eschatological tenor.
But if ‘history’ becomes a new concept for the ‘universe’ or for ‘reality in its totality’, then this is to coin a new concept of the cosmos and no longer take a ‘historic’ view of history. If reality is engaged in history, then that means precisely that it has not yet become a rounded whole. The ‘whole world’ would be the sound world, the perfect world, which bears its truth within itself and can demonstrate it of itself. Only as long as the world is not yet sound and whole, only as long as it is open towards its truth and does not yet possess it, can we speak of ‘history’. Only as long as reality itself is involved in the difference between existence and essence, only as long as human nature is experienced in terms of the difference between consciousness and being, is there such a thing as history and is there any need for knowledge of the future, for a sense of mission and for present decision.
But what does knowledge of history mean in that case, and what is then the point of historiography?
Efforts towards a knowledge of history which take seriously this historic character of history will begin with Friedrich Nietzsche’s protest against historism in the name of life. ‘All living things can be healthy, strong and fruitful only within a surrounding horizon.’ Historism, an excess of which stifles life, has its ground according to Nietzsche in the mediaeval memento mori and in the ‘hopelessness which Christianity cherishes in its heart towards all coming ages of earthly existence’. The historical outlook, ‘when it reigns unrestrainedly and draws all its conclusions, leaves the future without roots, because it destroys our illusions and robs existing things of the atmosphere in which alone they can live’. For ‘life’ means having a horizon, and to have a horizon means to be borne by hope into the realm of the future and the possible. This is the ‘plastic power of life’ which is undermined by the historical outlook and an excess of the historical outlook. If, however, it is really in the name of Nietzsche’s ‘memento vivere’ that we would take up and consider past history, then this ‘life’ would have to be a match for the ‘death’ which has made past history irretrievably past. The understanding of ‘life’ on the basis of which Nietzsche enquires into the ‘historical outlook’s advantages and disadvantages for life’ cannot assert itself against the death that makes all things historic, or can do so only by dint of forgetting and of appealing to ‘life’s youth’. For this reason his protest against historism is no match for the latter and its consequences. The historian’s impression is correct: ‘To me the great historic events of the past always seem like frozen cataracts—pictures that have stiffened in the cold of vanished life and keep us at a distance.… We shiver with cold as we contemplate the greatness of—fallen empires, perished cultures, burnt-out passions, dead minds.… When we take these things seriously, then we can have a feeling that we historians are engaged in a curious business: we dwell in the cities of the dead, encompass shadows, censure the departed.’ Only the question remains, why we do it and why we do not rather flee the shadowy realm of the past. Underlying all history, in the sense of an attempt at scientific knowledge, is what has been called ‘history as memory’. It is true that our faculty of remembering matters of history is always selective. Remembering and forgetting are interwoven in each other. It is true that our faculty of remembering matters of history is conditioned by the imagination. The thing we remember changes its colours in the image of memory. Where these memories of history are concerned, ‘history as a science’ has a twofold consequence: history as a science may well turn the ‘memory’ into a known, historic fact by destroying it, but from its own standpoint it cannot possibly reverse the process and by its own means create new memories, unless it were to cancel itself (A. Heuss). In regard to ‘history as memory’, however, and to the extent that it is present as such, historical science has a task of criticism and purification. It has the ‘task of combatting innocent forgetfulness and guilty legend’ (H. Heimpel). In this sense R. Wittram has called guilt the ‘secret motor which keeps the movement going, mostly hidden, always at work, the real perpetuum mobile of world history’. Memories of the kind that are experienced as ‘guilt’ ‘force themselves upon us’. They compel the present to define its position towards them, for in everything that is remembered as guilt there lurks something which is not yet over and done with, whose implications are not yet grasped, whose significance is not yet plain. When what has been, or has happened, is seen as ‘guilt’, then the present enters into proceedings which have not yet found their end and their solution. The past becomes determinative for the burdens and tasks of the present. To such proceedings Hegel’s remark does not apply: ‘As the idea of the world it (philosophy) appears only after reality has finished the process of its formation and completed itself.… When philosophy paints one of life’s figures as grey as grey can be, then that figure has grown old and the greyness cannot be a means of rejuvenating it but only of recognizing it.’ Once processes in history and particular figures in life have become old, then a detached historical consideration of them is possible—only, then it is no longer necessary. Processes of this kind that are complete in themselves completely lack anything to stimulate the onset of memory. If, on the other hand, history is not yet at an end and the individual figures in its life are not yet completed, then to behold it with the eyes of Minerva’s owl is not possible, but then, on the contrary, to perceive the open possibilities, the tendencies and directions in this process of things is necessary. For then it is not a case of frozen cataracts of dead facts, but of an open fieri, of something that is in process of becoming, in an open process of decisions and hopes. Then the science of history will not be able merely to present historical ‘findings’, but will have to be conscious of the fact that in all its presentations it also ‘finds’ and in all its ascertainings it also ‘as-certains’. To this extent the science of history stands in the service of life and of the—as yet unfounded—righteousness of life in the past.
This is true not only in regard to ‘history as memory’ of guilt, but also in regard to death, which is always the hardest, and therefore also the most certain fact of past history. It is not merely guilt, but ultimately death that makes the past irretrievably past. What was, does not return. What is dead, is dead. Now if history were the history of death, then historical science would be the history of death as grasped by man, and as such would be death to all living memory. Then, however, it would again remain an open question what is the real motive of the interest in history, if all history were history of death, if history did, to be sure, include much that is in flux and in process of development, and yet the dead remained dead. Then there would at this point be no fieri, but only a fact—and a bare, uninterpretable fact at that. It would be the end of the interest in history and of its usefulness for life, for death would here be found to constitute a perpetual and eternal factor in the shape of an annihilating nothingness. But now, the peculiar thing is, that the historian can and must deal with the dead. ‘The dead are dead; but we awake them, we have dealings with them—“eye to eye”, as Ranke put it; they demand the truth from us.’ This business of dealing with the history of the dead must therefore be motivated by something that reaches beyond death and makes death, too, a passing thing—otherwise historical science would have no motive and would fall to pieces in face of death. Walter Benjamin in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ has declared: ‘The gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past belongs only to the historian who is convinced that even the dead are not secure against the enemy if he wins.… The Messiah comes not only as Redeemer; he comes also as the Conqueror of Antichrist.’ This, however, would mean that hope of the resurrection of the dead, and fear of Antichrist or annihilating nothingness, is alone able to awake hopes in the field of past history, and so to keep history in remembrance and thus, finally, to make history as a science a live possibility. In this sense Otto Weber, too, rightly declares: ‘ “History” as an intended object of research, or as the realm in which the present situation originated, is always a process that represents in a manner of speaking a re-awakening of the dead. Those who study history (wer Geschichte “treibt”) “make” of the “history of death” a “history of life”.’ The historian’s re-awakening of the dead, even if, and precisely because, it takes place only ‘in a manner of speaking’, means anticipating eschatology and projecting upon history the last act of history. The ‘reason in history’ has a messianic light and shows things with all their flaws laid bare and ready for redemption—or else it has no light that historically illuminates history.
How, in this light, can history be experienced and known?
It will no longer be possible to regard the past only archaeologically and take it merely as the origin of the particular present. The past will have to be examined in regard to its own future. All history is full of possibilities—possibilities that have been profited by and not profited by, seized and blocked. In this perspective it appears full of interrupted possibilities, lost beginnings, arrested onsets upon the future. Past ages will thus have to be understood from the standpoint of their hopes. They were not the background of the now existing present, but were themselves the present and the front-line towards the future. It is the open future that gives us a common front with earlier ages and a certain contemporaneity, which makes it possible to enter into discussion with them, to criticize and accept them. That is why past positions in history and the traces of vanished hopes can be taken up once more and awakened to new life. The dialectic of past happening and present understanding is always motivated by anticipations of the future and by the question of what makes the future possible. Future is then found in the past and possibilities in what has been. The unfinished and promising character of past ages is borne in mind. The dualism of which we have spoken, in which the positivist historian strives to discover the facts of the past while the existentialist interpreter endeavours to find the existential possibilities in past existence, fails to recognize how closely fact and possibility are interwoven in history, how much new possibilities of existence depend on historic events and how full historic events are of possibilities. Only in the process of reconciliation between originally undivided subject-object constellations, when men’s decisions are a response to really given possibilities and new real possibilities give rise to new decisions, do future prospects and ordered ends emerge. This is a thing historical positivism cannot see, because its own horizon is taken to be final and therefore cannot be subjected to questioning in recognition of other horizons. It is a thing an existentialist interpretation can bring out only in the realm of man’s existence as in quest of itself, but not in the universal realm of all being as open to the future.
What happens in this context to the historian’s universal concepts, as employed by the historical method which must always also generalize? The philosophical presupposition for a knowledge of history cannot then lie in a metaphysic of being, of the idea, of unfathomable life, or of God. As long as our reality has not yet ‘completed’ itself and not yet become a rounded whole, a metaphysic of the historical universe in the sense of the Greek logos is impossible. All the historian’s universal concepts therefore prove to be elastic concepts which themselves belong to history and make history. But the fact that they are not inherently absolute does not mean that they are adequately designated by the term ‘relative’. The place of a universal metaphysic of history is taken by a mission aimed at the universal which is future and not yet present. The universal concepts, themselves belonging to history, which are used by historians in an effort to grasp what man is, what the world is, and so on, arise only supposedly and only wrongly from abstraction. In actual fact they contain the note of prophecy and of mission towards the future land of the ‘realized generic concept’. They always contain a futuristically anticipated eschatology. In their abstractness the truth which the general concepts seek to grasp is manifested in a manner which is—literally—pro-visional in view of the openness of reality. The universals in the metaphysic of history are neither real nor merely verbal, but constitute tendencies in the potential. They mark provisionalities in the fore-land of the mission in history. They are therefore not relative in the sense of historical relativism, but they are surpassable in the sense that the process of history itself is open. What ‘world’ history is, is decided by what is desired, hoped for and re-pre-sented as the one, future world. What the history of ‘mankind’ is, is decided by what mankind one day should be and will be. Both are directly related to present mission. Thus there exist only histories on the way to world history, but there is not yet a world history. The lines on which these histories are on their way towards world history are all maintained by the consciousness of having a mission towards world history.
Jakob Burckhardt has said of the historian’s business: ‘Actually, we should have to live in a constant intuition of the world as a whole. Only, this would require a superhuman intelligence, superior to the temporally successive and spatially limited and yet at the same time engaged in constant contemplation of it and complete sympathy with it.’ He was not thereby declaring the contemplation of world history to be senseless, but rather indicating the dialectical position of man towards history. Man neither stands above history, so that he could survey the world as a whole, nor does he stand wholly within history, so that he would have no need to ask about the totality and goal of history and this very question would be pointless. Always he stands both within history and also above history. He experiences history in the modus of being and in the modus of having. He is historic and he has history. He must be able to detach himself from history as an investigator and spectator, in order to experience it in the modus of having. He must identify himself with it as a hearer and actor, in order to experience it in the modus of being. He can neither abrogate himself in his survey of history and turn into nothing but an enormous eyeglass, nor can he enter into history without thought and reflection and turn into nothing but a minute decision. He stands both in history and above it and must conduct his life and his thinking in this dialectical and ex-centric position. He is like a swimmer moving in the stream of history—or it may be, against the stream—but with his head out of the water in order to get his bearings and above all to acquire a goal and a future. The concepts and ideas which he can form about historic complexes are therefore historic in a twofold sense: they are acquired in the process of history, and they reach ahead towards future, possible land, to that extent keeping the movement of history on the move. They are concepts which are conditioned by history, but which also condition history. They are moved and mobile concepts of movement. They seek not to bear the train of history, but to carry the torch before it. For that reason they have necessarily the character of pre-supposition, of postulate, of draft and of anticipation. And for that reason they are not so much generic concepts for the subsuming of known reality as rather dynamic functional concepts whose aim is the future transformation of reality.
Among the presuppositions of a rational Christian theology, hermeneutic reflections on the principles of the understanding of biblical texts have today replaced the old proofs of God which once, as theologia naturalis, constituted the prolegomena for what Christianity says of God. This, however, is not by any means the end of these proofs of God which demonstrated the existence and nature of God, as well as the universal necessity of raising the question of God, from a reality known or accessible to all men. On the contrary, they recur in all their conceivable forms in the hermeneutic reflections in which the anterior understanding and the terms of reference for the exposition and preaching of the biblical witness to God and his actions are formulated today. G. Ebeling rightly observes: ‘The understanding of what the word “God” means has its place within the sphere of radical questionableness.’ It is therefore the business of a comprehensive analysis of reality to take account of that radical questionableness of reality which provides the general presupposition for the special, Christian questions and statements in theology. In the radical questionableness of reality there appears the problem of transcendence, or simply the question of of God, in face of which the Christian affirmation of God must prove and authenticate itself. This has much in common with the enterprise of the classical proofs of God, even if it is here no longer the existence and nature of God that is demonstrated, but the necessity of raising the question of God. What the name ‘God’ means, can be intelligibly shown only when it is related to a radical, and therefore necessary, questionableness of reality. ‘God’ is what we are asking about in and with this questionableness of reality.
The traditional proofs of God can be divided into three major groups: 1. the proofs of God from the world, from the cosmos or the history of reality, 2. the proofs of God from human existence, from the soul or from the self-consciousness of man’s necessary ability and obligation to be a self, 3. the proofs of God from ‘God’, the proofs of the existence of God, or of the quest of God, from the concept or name of God. ‘God’ can be sought and understood as what we are asking about in the questionableness of reality as a whole, or in the question of the unity, the origin and the wholeness of reality. ‘God’ can be understood as what we are asking about in what every man can himself experience as the questionableness of human existence as distinct from the things of the world. ‘God’ can be understood as what is to be sought and asked about in addressing ourselves to the concept, the name or the self-revelation of God. Rational Christian theology can be cosmo-theology or historico-theology, can be ethico-theology or existential theology and can be onto-theology. These are to begin with the three possibilities in terms of which it can make itself and its business intelligible. These three possibilities have their corresponding results in the principles of hermeneutics, of exegesis, and of the scientific treatment which that involves in our dealings with history and with the historic witness of the Bible. These three possibilities present themselves also for the formulating of the universal theological concepts by means of which the God of the Bible can be understood, proved and proclaimed as the God of all men.
(a) We begin with the proof of God from existence, since it is so generally employed in hermeneutics today that it is hardly consciously recognized any more as a ‘proof of God’. When G. Ebeling says that the radical questionableness ‘seems to arise at a totally different point from where the usual so-called proofs of God placed it’, namely, ‘not with the question of the primum movens or such like, but with the problems relating to personal being’, then this alternative merely shows how strong the tendency is today to understand by the ‘proofs of God’ only the theoretic reason’s cosmological proofs of God, and then to confine oneself to the proof of God from existence—an extended and deepened form of Kant’s moral proof of God. The proof of God from the existence proper to every man is to the effect that ‘God’ is what is asked about in the questionableness of human existence, limited as it is by death and therefore finite, resting on decisions and therefore historic. The affirmation of the existence of God accordingly cannot be understood as a universal, theoretical and objective truth, but only as an ‘expression of our existence itself’. For it is obviously not feasible ‘to think of God as a principle of the world in the light of which the world and with it also our existence would become intelligible’. God can be grasped only when men grasp their own existence. The existence of man, however, is historic, i.e. the historic character of man’s being is what makes him able to be. Thus God can be grasped only where man chooses himself as his own possibility. Both things happen together in the one act of faith. The question which causes man to ask about God and causes him in asking to know very well who God is, is the question which in his historic existence he himself is. ‘If his existence were not motivated (whether consciously or unconsciously) by the enquiry about God in the sense of the Augustinian “Tu nos fecisti ad Te, et cor nostrum inquietum est, donec requiescat in Te” (“Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in thee”), then neither would he know God as God in any manifestation of him.’ This phenomenon is revelation’s point of reference. In it lies the anterior understanding, the universal theologia naturalis with which every man has to do and by reference to which alone God’s revelation can show itself to be the revelation of God.
The basic principles of hermeneutics automatically result from this. ‘In the light of this insight we shall in each instance interpret the historical source as a genuine historic phenomenon, i.e. in the light of the presupposition that in each instance a possibility of human existence is grasped and expressed in it.’ The sense of historical science, or exegesis as the case may be, can then no longer lie in reconstructing a piece of the past and assigning it a place in the great complex of relationships that is called history (= world history). The sense of historical science or exegesis then lies in an existentialist interpretation which examines the texts in search of their understanding of existence and interprets the biblical texts in the light of the dominating question of God, of God’s revelation, and that means of the truth of human existence as a present possibility of existence. The principles of an understanding exposition result from the presupposed hermeneutic structure of human existence itself. If the motivating question about God is identical with man’s question as to the authenticity of his own existence, then the existentialist interpretation can present itself as a true historic and true theological interpretation of the biblical texts. It finds the point of its enquiry in the question as to the understanding of human existence expressed in scripture, because the ground for this question has been supplied to it by the proof of God from existence.
To this the critic must object that man’s self-knowledge cannot by any means be arrived at today in antithesis to knowledge of the world, that the historic character of human existence cannot by any means be arrived at without an understanding of the situation in world history, but invariably both can only be arrived at together. Instead of the antithesis between world and self there is in reality always a correlation. For this reason the historic character of a past understanding of existence can be understood only in the context of the ‘great complex of relationships’ that is called history or world history. The questionability of human existence always stands in a context in which it is conditioned by the questionability of historic reality as a whole. The proof of God from existence has always an eye to the proof of God from the world. An understanding of God can therefore be acquired only in the correlation between understanding of self and understanding of the world, between understanding of history and of ‘historicality’—otherwise the intended divinity of God would not be universal.
The historic character of believing existence does not by any means already constitute the authenticity of human existence itself, but it is the way to, the witness of, and the mission towards, that authenticity and truth of human nature which lies in the future, is accordingly still outstanding, and is at stake in the mission of Christian faith. The interpretation of all history in the light of the perpetual historic character of human existence does, to be sure, surmount a specific form of positivist historism, but like the latter it also brings the disappearance of the real movements, differences and prospects in history.
Augustine’s ‘restless heart’ is not a universal human presupposition for the Christian understanding of God, but is a mark of the pilgrim people of God and a goal of the Christian mission to all men. It is only in the light of the biblical understanding of God that human existence experiences itself as being moved by the question of God.
(b) The proof of God from the world has had no further influence on theology since Kant’s critique. Yet, if the reality of the world as a whole is understood in a new way no longer as a cosmos but as universal history, it can be classed alongside the proof of God from existence and can likewise become a source for the stating of hermeneutic principles. ‘God’ is here experienced on the basis of the world. ‘God’ is here what is asked about in the question of the one origin, the unity and wholeness of all reality. With the question of the unity and wholeness of reality, the question of God is also given. If, on the other hand, there is no support for the idea of God, then there is no support for the question of the wholeness of reality either. Thus God can be spoken of only in the context of the perception of the unity of all reality. But now, this unity of reality can no longer be understood as a cosmos in the sense of Greek monotheism, since in Greek cosmic faith the accidental events of history were meaningless and therefore remained of no account. But if reality in its totality of continuity and contingency is understood as history, then the structures of the biblical idea of God become visible. The idea of God in the witnesses of the divine history in Israel and Christianity makes it necessary to understand reality as a whole as history. This means, first, that ‘world history’ becomes the most comprehensive horizon for what Christianity says of God. It means, secondly, that such a comprehensive understanding of reality in its totality, since it is itself historic, can only be formulated in each several instance in the context of the present experience of reality as a whole. It is therefore itself historically open and provisional in view of that end of history in which the wholeness of reality will come to light.
For hermeneutics, this results in the principle that the texts which come to us from history are not to be examined merely in regard to the possibilities of existence in the several existences that have been, but have to be read in terms of their historical place and their historical time, in terms of their own historical connections before and after. The connection between then and now does not result from the perpetual finitude and historicality of human existence, but from the context of universal history which links the past with the present. The temporal, historical difference between then and now is not bridged by tracing past and present possibilities back to human existence as such, but is preserved, and yet at the same time also bridged, by the context of events that joins them both together. ‘That is to say, the text can be understood only in the context of the comprehensive history which joins the past with the present—and indeed not merely with the present that today exists, but with the future horizon of present possibilities, because the meaning of the present becomes clear only in the light of the future.’ ‘Only a conception of the course of history which does in fact join the past situation with the present and with its future horizon can provide the comprehensive horizon in which the limited present horizon of the expositor and the historical horizon of the text blend together. ‘Then’ and ‘now’ are united while still preserving their peculiarity and their difference, when they ‘become elements in the unity of a context of history which embraces them both’. Since this comprehensive context of history can be expressed in the midst of history only in terms of a finite, provisional and therefore revisable perspective, it remains fragmentary in view of the open future.
Here it is considered necessary to give expression to ‘God’ in the totality of reality, and yet at the same time it is admitted to be impossible to comprehend an as yet unfinished and therefore historic reality as a ‘totality’. It would therefore be better to abandon the intentions of the cosmological proof of God. As long as the reality of the world and of man in it is not yet ‘whole’, but its totality is historically at stake, there can be no proof of God from it. The ‘comprehensive context of history’ which joins ‘then’ and ‘now’, the historical horizon and the present future horizon, is not the context of an interelated chain of events, but is a context of the history of mission and promise. The horizons do not already ‘blend together’ in the question as to the connection between the events of then and now, but only in the question of the intended future then and now. It is because the inadequate present raises the question of the future that past intentions, hopes and visions of the future are called to mind. In reformations and revolutions past positions towards the future are taken up. It is not only a case of the future of the present but, if this future is to be universal and eschatological, always a case also of the future of the past and the future of the dead. It is not that a ‘context of history’ merely ‘unveils’ the truth of all reality, but the compiling of history ‘leads’, and intends to lead, to the truth of reality. The future horizon about which the present asks cannot be understood as a horizon within which to interpret the hitherto existing reality of the world in world history hitherto, but only as a horizon of promise and mission towards a new, future reality, in which everything attains to truth, to rest and to authenticity. The ‘sense of the present’, which is disclosed only in the light of the future, does not lie in assigning the present its place in the course of history hitherto, but its ‘sense’ lies in its promise and its task, its break-away from the reality that has been and is, to a new reality. The wholeness and unity of reality which is sought in terms of universal history does not result from the simple course of the world process which, one day at the last, will make reality a rounded whole, but the ‘wholeness’ and ‘unity’ of reality must, as compared with all existing reality, be a new reality in which all things become new and whole. The saved world which will prove God’s divinity is one our thoughts and hopes do not yet reach at the point where we have thought history to its end, but only where God ‘will be all in all’. This, in biblical terms, is the ἀνακεφαλαίωσις τῶν πάντων in which even the dead are not secure but return and rise again. It is a new reality, which does not put the finishing touch to the reality of history up to then, but so to speak rolls it up. That is why there is sense in asking about the future of past people and things—not merely in order to bring the light of understanding into the dark field of history, but in order to ‘kindle in the past the spark of hope’.
(c) The proof of God from ‘God’ is the ontological proof of God. It derives from Anselm of Canterbury. It was not rejected by Kant, but it was Hegel who first made it once more the foundation of the concept of God. It is no accident that Karl Barth, in the book on Anselm (1931) which is so important for his own theology, took it up in a new form and combined it with his own concept of the self-revelation of God. This proof of the existence of God from the concept of God—‘something beyond which nothing greater can be conceived’—or from the name or self-revelation of God, does not assert that on the ground of what we can learn of the reality of the world, or on the ground of what we can ourselves experience of the reality of existence, we must necessarily conceive of God or ask about God if we are to be able to make clear the truth about the world and about human nature. It says merely that whoever conceives of God must necessarily also conceive of his existence. It has its presupposition not in a specific world-picture or a specific understanding of human nature, but in the fact that man—even the godless man—‘hears’, that he makes room in his mind for the concept of God and has God’s name, or his self-revelation in his name, proclaimed to him. It is not necessary to conceive of God, but if we do conceive of him, then we must conceive of him as necessary. God is known only through ‘God’. Only in his light do we see light.
According to the hermeneutic principles which this involves, all exegesis of historical Bible texts must have its source in the undemonstrable event of the happening of that word in which God is known through God, in which God himself speaks and reveals himself. This to be sure, in contrast to the possibilities so far discussed, is a ‘starting point in the indisposable’, but nevertheless implies hermeneutic and historical consequences. In the preface to the first edition of his Romans in 1919, Karl Barth still expressed these consequences in Platonic terms: ‘But my whole attention was directed towards looking through the historical to the Spirit of the Bible, who is the eternal Spirit.… The understanding of history is a continuing, ever more honest and ever more urgent conversation between the wisdom of yesterday and the wisdom of tomorrow, which is one and the same.’ In the preface to the second edition in 1921 it is said that we should conscientiously determine what stands in the text, and reflect upon it, i.e. wrestle with it until the wall between the first century and our own becomes transparent, until Paul speaks there and man hears here, until the conversation between text and reader is concentrated wholly on the substance (which cannot be any different there and here!). ‘In seeking to understand I must advance to the point where it is wellnigh only the riddle of the substance that confronts me, and really no longer the riddle of the text as such, where I therefore wellnigh forget that it is not I who am the author, where I have understood him wellnigh so perfectly that I can let him speak in my name and can myself speak in his name.’ But what is the ‘substance’ that could bring about this blending together of text and reader, author and hearer? What was then called ‘substance and text’ is in Barth later ‘Word and words’. Before all our methods of appropriating what is said in the text, and before all blending together of the horizons then and now, there stands in Barth the great event ‘that God himself speaks’, that the ‘substance’ of the texts is this word in which God reveals himself and proclaims or proves himself. Only this event—that God proves himself in the word he speaks to man, and thus the proof of God from God takes place in God’s word—can be the ultimate goal of all historical and theological exegesis and bring about the blending together of times and persons. This would mean, for ‘history’, that the presupposition and goal of exegesis is not to be seen in the historic character of existence, nor in a universal historical context, but that the problem of the biblical stories and words lies in the fact of the history of God in Christ for men having taken place. This history is to be grasped neither in historical or universal historical terms, nor in terms of the history of existence, but is only to be repeated as the kerygmatic history of God for men. The goal of exegesis is therefore neither a believing self-understanding nor an orientation in terms of universal history, but is proclamation. The ‘word of God’ in the words urges us on from the exegesis of the ‘words’ to the proclamation of the word. Thus the place of the hermeneutic key provided by the historic character of existence is here taken by the ‘history of God for men’. The place of the word-character of existence is taken by the sovereignty of the divine word.
As with the other proofs of God, so too the ontological proof is really a piece of anticipated eschaton. For that ‘God proves himself through God’, and that ‘God is God’, must undeniably imply that ‘God is all in all’ and that he proves his divinity in all that is and all that is not. Of this omnipotent divinity of God, however, the only sign we have here in history is the foreglow of the raising of Christ from the dead. That God is God accordingly cannot be the eternal source and background of the proclamation of Christ, but must be the promised, but as yet unattained, future goal of Christian proclamation. Barth’s very expressions in their originally Platonic terms of the ‘eternal Spirit’ and the eternally self-identical ‘substance’ of the Bible show a tendency towards uneschatological, and then also unhistorical, thinking which is still to be met even in the later terms of the word of God and his self-revelation. ‘The Word’ in ‘the words’ can, rightly understood, only have an apocalyptic sense and mean the ‘Word’ which here in history is only to be witnessed to, only to be hoped for and expected, the ‘Word’ which God will one day speak as he has promised. That exegesis should lead to proclamation if it rightly follows the intentions of the text, cannot be grounded in the transcendent background of the self-revelation of God, but only in the fact that the once-for-all event of the resurrection of Christ leads to an eschatological, missionary necessity of the proclamation to all peoples. This is possible only within an eschatological horizon, but not on the ground of an eternal self-revelation of God. An onto-theological argument for the proclamation can lead to levelling down the different historic tasks and horizons of Christian mission in the ages of history.
All proofs of God are at bottom anticipations of that eschatological reality in which God is revealed in all things to all. They assume this reality as already present and as immediately perceptible to every man. The hermeneutic principles developed from them take the presence of God which can be demonstrated, experienced or perceived from the world, from existence or from the proclaimed name of God—were it even only because of the necessity of asking about him—and make it the point of reference for the exposition and appropriation of the historic witness of the Bible.
A ‘natural theology’ of this kind, however, in which God is manifest and demonstrable to every man, is not the presupposition of Christian faith, but the future goal of Christian hope. This universal and immediate presence of God is not the source from which faith comes, but the end to which it is on the way. It is not the ground on which faith stands, but it is the object at which it aims. It is only on the ground of the revelation of God in the event of promise constituted by the raising of the crucified Christ that faith must seek and search for the universal and immediate revelation of God in all things and for all. The world which proves God’s divinity, and the existence which is necessarily exercised by the question of God, are here sketches for the future on the part of Christian hope. They are anticipations of the as yet unattained future land in which God is all in all. They are anthropological and cosmological sketches on the part of Christian faith, in which the God of Jesus Christ is ‘imputed’ or given over to all men and all reality as the God of all men and of the whole of reality. This is possible, as long as reality and the people in it are on the move in history. It is necessary, in order to outline the universal future horizon of Christian mission. Without such sketches, which involve the whole of reality and shed a meaningful light on the existence and determination of all men, Christianity would become a sect and faith would become a private religion. Such interpretations of the whole of reality and of authentic human nature, however, remain ‘sketches’, whose goal is the universe and the human nature that are promised and will be. They are historic and subject to change, and always depend upon the movement of the Christian mission. Theologia naturalis is at bottom theologia viatorum, and theologia viatorum will always concern itself with the future theologia gloriae in the form of fragmentary sketches.
(a) The Hermeneutics of the Apostolate
The real point of reference for the exposition and appropriation of the historic Bible witness, and the one that is their motive and driving force, lies in the mission of present Christianity, and in the universal future of God for the world and for all men, towards which this mission takes place.
The key to the hermeneutics of the historic witness of the Bible is the ‘future of scripture’. The question as to the correct exposition of the Old and New Testament scriptures cannot be addressed to the ‘heart of scripture’. The biblical scriptures are not a closed organism with a heart, or a closed circle with a centre. On the contrary, all the biblical scriptures are open towards the future fulfilment of the divine promise whose history they relate. The centre of the New Testament scriptures is the future of the risen Christ, which they announce, point forward to and promise. Thus if we are to understand the biblical scriptures in their proclamation, their understanding of existence and their understanding of the world, then we must look in the same direction as they themselves do. The scriptures, as historic witnesses, are open towards the future, as all promises are open towards the future. In this sense R. Bultmann is right when he declares: ‘It is not at all “in themselves”, nor yet as links in a causal chain, that events or historical figures are historic phenomena. They are such only in their relationship to the future, for which they have significance and for which the present has responsibility.’ ‘Thus it is true also of scripture that it is what it is only in relation to its history and its future.’ Only, this ‘future of scripture’ does not yet lie in the several readers’ own present, but in that which gives the momentary present its orientation towards a universal, eschatological future. Hence present perception of the ‘future of scripture’ takes place in that mission which plays its part in history and in the possibilities of changing history. The biblical witness is witness to a historic forward-moving mission in the past, and hence in the light of the present mission it can be understood for what it really is.
The point of reference and the aim in the exposition of the biblical witness is not something universal which lies at the bottom of history or at the bottom of existence and keeps everything moving, but the concrete, present mission of Christianity towards the future of Christ for the world. One could also say that the point of reference in true, historic and eschatological exposition of the Bible is the reconciliation of the godless, if the reconciliation of the godless is understood to mean also the calling of the heathen to participation in the historic mission of Christianity. The link between coming history and past history is provided in the light of this forward-moving, historic mission. The connection between then and now in the history of tradition is a connection in the history of promise and of mission, for tradition, as Christians understand it, means mission that moves forwards and outwards. The word-event in which past events are brought to expression means the event of being called to the future of salvation in Christ and to the present labour of hope in the service of reconciliation. It is only in mission and promise, in the charge committed and the prospect opened, in the labour of hope, that the ‘meaning of history’ is grasped in a historic way and one that keeps history moving. The link between past history and coming history is not then supplied on the ground of an abstractly ascertained substance of history, nor yet on the ground of the perpetual ‘historically’ of human existence. The missionary direction is the only constant in history. For in the front-line of present mission new possibilities for history are grasped and inadequate realities in history left behind. Eschatological hope and mission thus make men’s reality ‘historic’. The revelation of God in the event of promise reveals, effects and provokes that open history which is grasped in the mission of hope. It takes the reality in which men live together and establish themselves, and makes it a process of history—namely, a judicial process concerning the truth and righteousness of life.
The human nature of man becomes historic inasmuch as the determination of man comes to light in historic mission.
The reality of the world becomes historic inasmuch as in this mission it is seen to be the field of the missionary charge and is examined in search of real possibilities for the world-transforming missionary hope.
God is revealed in this mission as the God who calls and promises. He proves his existence not in terms of man’s already existing question about God, not in terms of the question as to the unity of the existing world, nor yet by means of the concept of God, but he proves his existence and his divinity by making possible the historic and eschatological possibilities of mission.
Thus the questions of true human nature, of the unity of the world and of the divinity of God are removed from the sphere of an illusionary theologia naturalis. These questions are raised, and answered, in the midst of the movement of mission. They are questions of the theologia viatorum.
(b) The Humanizing of Man in the Missionary Hope
The dominant question of all anthropology—who or what is man? who am I?—does not arise in the biblical narratives from comparing man with the animals or with the things of the world. Nor does it arise simply coram Deo, as Augustine and the Reformers affirmed. Rather, it arises in face of a divine mission, charge and appointment which transcend the bounds of the humanly possible. Thus Moses (Ex. 3:11) asks in face of his call to lead the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt: ‘Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?’ Thus, too, Isaiah (Isa. 6:5) in face of his call recognizes himself to be personally guilt-laden in the midst of a guilt-laden people: ‘Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.’ Thus Jeremiah in face of his call recognizes what he is and what he was: ‘Ah, Lord God! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child’ (Jer. 1:6). Self-knowledge here comes about in face of the mission and call of God, which demand impossibilities of man. It is knowledge of self, knowledge of men and knowledge of guilt, knowledge of the impossibility of one’s own existence in face of the possibilities demanded by the divine mission. Man attains to knowledge of himself by discovering the discrepancy between the divine mission and his own being, by learning what he is, and what he is to be, yet of himself cannot be. Hence the answer received to man’s question about himself and his human nature runs: ‘I will be with thee.’ This does not tell man what he was and what he really is, but what he will be and can be in that history and that future to which the mission leads him. In his call man is given the prospect of a new ability to be. What he is and what he can do, is a thing he will learn in hopeful trust in God’s being with him. Man learns his human nature not from himself, but from the future to which the mission leads him. What man is, is told him only by history, declared W. Dilthey. We can here accept this statement, if we add: the history to which the missionary hope leads him. The real mystery of his human nature is discovered by man in the history which discloses to him his future. In this very history of missionary possibilities which are as yet unknown and as yet unlimited, it comes to light that man is not an ‘established being’, that he is open to the future, open for new, promised possibilities of being. The very call to the possibilities of the future which are as yet obscure, makes it clear that man is hidden from himself, a homo absconditus, and will be revealed to himself in those prospects which are opened up to him by the horizons of mission. The mission and call do not reveal man simply to himself, with the result that he can then understand himself again for what he really is. They reveal and open up to him new possibilities, with the result that he can become what he is not yet and never yet was. This is why according to Old and New Testament usage men receive along with their call a new name, and with their new name a new nature and a new future.
Now in the Old Testament such calls and commissions are particular and contingent. They relate to a single people and a few prophets and kings. They contain specific historic charges. Hence they do not yet provide any clue to the human nature of man as such. In the New Testament, however, mission and call are directed ‘without distinction’ to Jews and Gentiles. The call to hope and to participation in the mission here becomes universal. The gospel call contains the summons to the eschatological hope of final and universal salvation. The gospel call is here identical with the reconciliation of the godless and with the instituting of believing obedience among all men. If, however, the gospel summons all men to the hope and the mission of the future of Christ, then it is possible in the light of this particular event to reflect also on the general structures of human nature. For indeed the believer does not understand himself as the adherent of a religion which is one possibility among others, but as being on the way to true humanity, to that which is appointed for all men. That is why he cannot present his truth to others as ‘his’ truth, but only as ‘the truth’. The concrete humanity disclosed by the Christian mission must therefore enter into debate with the universal definitions of humanity in philosophic anthropology, and for its part also outline general structures of human nature, in which the future of faith shines as a foreglow of the future of all men. The gospel call is addressed to all men and promises them a universal eschatological future. It is delivered ‘in all openness’ and must therefore also assume open responsibility for its hope for the future of man. A Christian anthropology will always insist that a general, philosophic anthropology understand human nature in terms of history and conceive its historic character in the light of its future. What man is in body and soul, in partnership and society, in the domination of nature, is disclosed in its reality only from the direction of the life he lives. Human nature first becomes really determinable in the light of the determination to which it is on the way. The comparison with nature and with the animals, or the comparison with other men in the present and in history, does not yet bring out what man’s nature is, but only the comparison with the future possibilities which are disclosed to him from the direction of his life, from his intentio vitalis. Man has no subsistence in himself, but is always on the way towards something and realizes himself in the light of some expected future whole. Man’s nature is not sub-sistent, but ex-sistent. It becomes intelligible not on the ground of an underlying substantia hominis, but only from the perspectives in which he lives and which derive from his direction in body and soul. Man is ‘open towards the world’ only in that he is directionally open to determination and to the future. In other words, the natura hominis first emerges from the forma futurae vitae. It is in process of developing in the light of this ‘shape of the future life’, and its success in attaining to it is staked on history. Hoping in the promised new creation by God, man here stands in statu nascendi, in the process of his being brought into being by the calling, coaxing, compelling word of God.
A missionary exposition of the biblical witness to man’s history and mission will therefore agree with the existentialist interpretation in enquiring about the new possibilities which entered the world through Israel and Christianity. It, too, will have to present these past existential possibilities as possibilities of the present understanding of existence. But it will interpret these existential possibilities as new possibilities for man’s future. It will not interpret the phenomena of past history on the ground of the possibilities of human existence, but on the contrary, it will interpret the new possibilities of human existence on the basis of the ‘phenomenon’ of God’s promise and mission and of the ‘phenomenon’ of the resurrection and future of Christ. It will be able to open up to man today new possibilities, prospects and goals through its exposition of that event which paves the way for the eschatological future. To this end it is necessary to take man in his selfhood along with, and not in abstraction from, the present constellation of human society, in order to subject the whole of present human reality to the future of Christ and to the possibilities of the mission that moves towards his future. The whole present situation must be understood in all its historic possibilities and tasks in the light of the future of the truth.
(c) The Historifying of the World in the Christian Mission
It is not mere theoria, in its investigation of the divine nature of the world as a cosmos, but it is only missionary practice, involved in history and bent on transformation, that first renders the world questionable in a historic way. Its questions are concerned not with the unity and wholeness of the world and with the order in a chaotic reality, but with the transformability of the world. For the eschatological hope shows that which is possible and transformable in the world to be meaningful, and the practical mission embraces that which is now within the bounds of possibility in the world. The theory of world-transforming, future-seeking missionary practice does not search for eternal orders in the existing reality of the world, but for possibilities that exist in the world in the direction of the promised future. The call to obedient moulding of the world would have no object, if this world were immutable. The God who calls and promises would not be God, if he were not the God and Lord of that reality into which his mission leads, and if he could not create real, objective possibilities for his mission. Thus the transforming mission requires in practice a certain Weltanschauung, a confidence in the world and a hope for the world. It seeks for that which is really, objectively possible in this world, in order to grasp it and realize it in the direction of the promised future of the righteousness, the life and the kingdom of God. Hence it regards the world as an open process in which the salvation and destruction, the righteousness and annihilation of the world are at stake. To the eye of mission, not only man is open to the future, full of all kinds of possibilities, but the world, too, is a vast container full of future and of boundless possibilities for good and for evil. Thus it will continually strive to understand world reality in terms of history on the basis of the future that is in prospect. It will therefore not search, like the Greeks, for the nature of history and for the enduring in the midst of change, but on the contrary for the history of nature and for the possibilities of changing the enduring. It does not ask about the hidden wholeness by which this world, as it is, is intrinsically held together, but about the future totum in which everything that is here in flux and threatened by annihilation will be complete and whole. The totality of the world is not here seen as a self-dependent cosmos of nature, but as the goal of a world history which can be understood only in dynamic terms. The world thus appears as a correlate of hope. Hope alone really takes into account the ‘earnest expectation of the creature’ for its freedom and truth. The obedience that comes of hope and mission forms the bridge between that which is promised and hoped for and the real possibilities of the reality of the world. The call and mission of the ‘God of hope’ suffer man no longer to live amid surrounding nature, and no longer in the world as his home, but compel him to exist within the horizon of history. This horizon fills him with hopeful expectation, and at the same time requires of him responsibility and decision for the world of history.
The man who is summoned by the divine promise to the transforming of the world falls outside the sphere of Greek cosmic thinking. He has here ‘no continuing city’, for he seeks ‘the coming city of God’. His thinking will therefore not subject reality to a metaphysical transfiguration in the light of the absolute. His thinking is not directed towards mediating between the multiplicity of beings and the one, eternal being.
His experience of reality as history in all its possibilities of change is not, on the other hand, conditioned by whether history can be made at the whim of the human subject. For him, the world can be changed by the God of his hope, and to that extent also by the obedience to which this hope moves him. The subject of the transformation of the world is for him therefore the Spirit of the divine hope. Thus his experience and his expectation of history is both opened up and tied down by the future promises of the God he believes. World reality therefore does not become for him, as in the modern age, the material for the exercise of duty or of technique. His thinking about the world does not adjust things to the human subject in his imagined needs or his arbitrary prescriptions. His thinking adjusts things to the coming messianic reconciliation. Hence both his world-transforming obedience and also his knowledge of, and reflection on, the world stand ‘in the service of reconciliation’. He does not take being, as it is, and link it in metaphysical transfiguration with the absolute. He does not link things, as in technical positivism, with his own subjectivity. Rather, he adjusts being to the universal, rectifying future of God. Thus his mediation serves the reconciliation of the world with God. His understanding does not consist in contemplating things in search of their eternal ground. His understanding does not consist in practical reflections on the technical appropriation of things. His understanding consists in the fact that in sympathy with the misery of being he anticipates the redeeming future of being and so lays the foundation of its reconciliation, justification and stability. Thus Luther declares: ‘… a strange language and a new grammar.… For his will is, because we are to be new men, that we should also have other and new thoughts, minds and understandings and not regard anything in the light of reason, as it is for the world, but as it is before his eyes, and take our cue from the future, invisible, new nature for which we have to hope and which is to come after this wretched and miserable nature.…’ In this sense it is also possible to take up the concluding words of T. W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia, Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben: ‘Philosophy, in the only form in which it can still be responsibly upheld in face of despair, would be the attempt to regard all things as they present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light save that which shines upon the world from the standpoint of redemption: all else exhausts itself in imitation and remains a piece of technique. Perspectives must be created in which the world looks changed and alien and reveals its cracks and flaws in much the same way as it will one day lie destitute and disfigured in Messiah’s light. To attain such perspectives without arbitrariness or force, entirely out of sensitiveness towards things—that alone is the aim of thought.’
In the field of the investigation and presentation of past history this would surely mean that the historian’s aim can be neither a theodicy of history nor a self-justification of past or present history. The glory and misery of past ages do not require to contain the justification of God or of reason. Nor can they abide the positivisitic dictatorship of present subjectivity. Rather, the ‘earnest expectation of the creature’ seeks to come to expression in them and to attain the prospect of freedom from the powers of annihilation. In the messianic light of hopeful reason the historian must make manifest something of the ‘cracks and flaws’ in which past ages earnestly expect their justification and redemption. Then there is solidarity between the present and the ages of the past, and a certain contemporaneousness both in the historic alienation and in the eschatological hope. This solidarity is the true core of similarity, on the ground of which an analogical understanding becomes possible over the ages. Only this solidarity in the earnest expectation which groans under the tyranny of the negative and hopes for liberating truth, takes historic account of history and performs among the dead shades of history the service of reconciliation.
(d) The Tradition of the Eschatological Hope
Traditions are alive and binding, current and familiar, where, and as long as, they are taken as a matter of course and as such link fathers to sons in the course of the generations and provide continuity in time. Where this unquestioned familiarity and trustworthiness becomes problematical, an essential element in the traditions is already lost. Where reflection sets in and subjects the traditions to critical questioning, with the result that the accepting or rejecting of them becomes a conscious act, the traditions lose their propitious force. It is not only when traditions are discarded, but as soon as they are made consciously problematical, that the character of tradition attaching to human life is abrogated. For the traditions are then no longer the guardian and the subject of present thought and action, but become the object of a kind of thinking which in itself and in its roots is traditionless. They can then be rejected by the revolutionary, or restored by the conservative. But from the day that we speak ‘conservatively’ of tradition, we no longer have it.
The beginning and principle of the modern break with tradition is the basing of assured knowledge upon the method of doubt since Descartes. If the Western mind even up to modern times had been fashioned by the texts of our traditions, now—beginning already in the late Middle Ages—it develops from its own experience and the methodical assimilation of its own experience. This is for Pascal the point at which the paths of theology and modern science divide: ‘When we perceive this distinction clearly, then we shall lament the blindness of those who in physics allow the validity of tradition alone, instead of reason and experiment; we shall be horrified at the error of those who in theology put the arguments of reason in place of the tradition of scripture and the fathers.’ Theology can teach only on the ground of the word given in tradition. But in the realms in which truth is now sought in order to be the ground for human social life, traditions become the epitome of inherited prejudice—idola, as Francis Bacon put it. The place of the historic forms of the spirit which live in and from traditions is taken by the abstract self-assurance of the human mind: sum cogitans. For the human mind the res gestae of history are in principle no different from the res extensae of nature. Hence in the field of history, too, it will seek for methodically assured, critical historical experience. This non-historic concept of reason makes traditions into accidental truths of history and finds eternal truths of reason in itself. Past history, for it, is no longer called to mind in traditions, but is ‘historicized’ by means of scientific reflection. ‘The historical relation to the past not only presupposes that the past in question is past, but has manifestly also itself the effect of confirming and sealing this non-actuality of what has been. Historical science has taken the place of tradition, and this means that it occupies that place and makes it … impossible really to follow the ancients and thus to stand in their tradition.’ The historical reason is then well able to abolish traditions, but not to create new traditions. ‘The pressure which tradition pre-consciously exercises on our behaviour is progressively diminished in history as a result of the advancing science of history.’
This historical relation to history undoubtedly brings in the first instance a break with tradition whose full effects are as yet immeasurable. It is in the first instance a break with quite definite traditions of the West. The question is, however, whether we have here also a break with tradition as a characteristic feature of human existence as such. But with the beginning of the modern age the emancipated reason undergoes new experiences of history, which collapse the received edifice of tradition. The voyages of discovery to America and China bring a knowledge of peoples who cannot be classified in the classical Christian genealogies of mankind. The reason that has become sure of itself in reflection makes discoveries in nature, which antiquate the old world-picture. And finally, it produces in society new economic forms and modes of civil behaviour which destroy the traditional Christian ethic. The French revolution merely executed the testament of the Enlightenment, and was in its turn continued by the industrial revolution and our scientific technical civilization. The support of traditions and authorities, and the connection with the truth as received from of old, which was so essential for the traditional consciousness, have here no longer any constitutive significance. The place of quotation is taken by successful experiment and successful technique. As producer and consumer and in the traffic of everyday, man is the same everywhere, apart from his varied origins. Sciences and techniques thus become independent and indifferent towards the distinctions in historic origin.
These prospects have always led traditionalists, from romanticism to the present day, to paint nihilistic nightmare visions. ‘If tradition were really entirely destroyed, if nihilism were complete, if there were nothing at all that still endures, the self-evident, common foundations of our human nature could no longer be appealed to at all.’ The self-existent world resolves itself into mere subjective views of the world, so that in the end nothing more would exist in itself and nihilism would be the end of the story. Then we should find ourselves in an age ‘which is overtaken by the loss of tradition altogether, as a disastrous fate, as a disappearance of support and security, as a vanishing of all that is enduring, as a suffocating emptiness and annihilation in the realm of spiritual life.’ This romanticonihilistic argument for the necessary readmittance of traditions, however, is not able to integrate the ‘modern age’ into the traditions of history, because it does not grasp the new kind of progressiveness in modern ways of thinking and working. It has regard only to the loss of origin, but does not see the gain of a possible future in the breakaway of the modern age. Hence the realm of history, which the modern age with its visions has opened up before us, must be restricted again by building dams against the overflowing charms of ‘historicality’. This, however, is to make traditions a matter of form. It is not known what traditions are adequate to master the modern age’s break with tradition, but it is recommended that thought and action should be marked by tradition as such.
The real mainspring of the emancipation of reason and society from the guardianship and dominance of tradition, however, lies in the eschatological, messianic passion of the ‘modern age’. The ‘old’ was left behind, because the presence and prospect of the ‘new’ appeared to have come within reach. The hopes that had been bottled up by the old, classical traditions put forth new life and began to influence the future of history. ‘Secularization’ was no apostasy from the traditions and ordinances of Christianity, but meant in the first instance that Christian expectations were realized in the field of world history, and then that Christian hopes were outstripped by millenarianism. It was not that the ‘horrors of history’ overflowed the dams of the old traditions and their bonds, but that the hope that had been domesticated within them broke loose. The place of the accustomed traditions was taken by a messianism of varying content which set to work upon history. Hence we cannot set out from the assumption that the ‘modern age’ is really only a different age, and that the modern historical consciousness is nothing radically new, but merely constitutes a new element within that which has always determined man’s attitude to the past. We shall discover the element of tradition in historical thinking only when we take seriously the revolutionary and indeed millenarian elements in it. Hence we must ask: which traditions were broken down in the upheaval of the modern age, and what was the concept of tradition against which the revolutionary ratio has been able to prevail? What is the tradition of the Christian proclamation, and what does it demand of man? To this end we shall have to make a very clear distinction between the ancient classical concepts of tradition and the Christian concept of tradition, both in regard to their different content and in regard to their different modes of procedure.
The anti-revolutionary, anti-rationalistic concept of tradition in romanticism everywhere shows itself to be a restoration of the ancient classical way of thinking about tradition. Here religion and participation in the divine are bound to the tradition that has existed unbrokenly from of old.
In the ancient way of thinking about tradition, the passing ages are regenerated in the times of sacred festival. Each festival and each liturgical season brings once more the time of the beginning, the time of the origin, in principio. The profane time of the passing and flowing away of life is halted as it were in the times of festival. The world’s time renews itself each year. With each new year it acquires its original holiness again. In the times of festival men periodically become contemporaries of the gods once more and live with them again as in the first beginning. History here means falling away from the origin and degenerating from the holiness of the beginning. Tradition means the bringing back of fallen life to the primaeval age and the first origin. Primaeval mythical events are here presented. For this conception of tradition, ‘truth’ is always bound up with ‘the old’. The prerogative of tradition is expressed in the phrase ‘from of old’.
Similarly, it is held in the classical way of thinking about tradition that the antiqui, the ancestors, the majores, οἱ παλαιοί, οἱ ἀρχαῖοι, are ‘near the beginning, prime, original’. Authority belongs to those ‘who are better than we and dwell nearer to the gods’. ‘The ancients know the truth. If we discovered it, then we should have no need to trouble ourselves about the opinions of men. ‘A gift of the gods was brought down by a certain Prometheus in the bright glow of fire, and the ancients, who are better than we and dwell nearer to the gods, have transmitted this account to us.’ In the phrase πάλαι λέγεται, ‘it was said of old’, lies the proof of the truth. ‘It has been handed down from those of early and primaeval days that the divine surrounds the whole of nature.’ Thus, in this conception of tradition, revelation stands at the beginning. It is from this that the ancients who were before us and lived near the beginning acquire their authority. It is also this which gives the old its proved excellence and which requires its preservation. ἀνάμνησις brings to mind again the true, original nature of things. Tradition is then μνημοσύνη, keeping in memory. To this there belongs the mythical idea of the θησαυρός, the treasure of original truth which we have to guard, and of the depositum, the gift entrusted to our charge.
On the quotation from Plato’s Philebus, Joseph Pieper observes: ‘The most important thing about his remark, however, … is that this remark of Plato’s is largely identical with the answer which Christian theology for its part supplies to the same question. When we consider the elements of Plato’s characterization of the ancients … then we must surely ask whether there is any essential difference between Plato’s description of the ancients on the one hand, and on the other hand the definition which Christian theology applies to the writer who is “inspired” in the strict sense of the word, the author of the holy book. The decisive feature in common is manifestly that both are conceived as the first recipients of a θεῖος λόγος, of a divine word.’ Yet is this really the case? Is the content of Greek tradition ‘from of old’ the same as the content of Christian proclamation? Are the apostles to be equated with Plato’s primaeval ancients? Can the risen Christ be proclaimed in terms of the classical concept of tradition?
What tradition is, and how it comes about, all depends on the matter to be transmitted. The matter determines the tradition even to the extent of determining the process of tradition. In Israel it was not a primaeval mythical event that was handed down and called to mind in principio, but a historic event, and one which determined the nature, the life, the path and the history of Israel. When Israel remembered the ‘days of ancient times’ and the ‘years of former generations’, it was thinking not of a mythical, but of a historic past—namely, of the events of the exodus and the occupation of Canaan brought about by Yahweh. The men of old are not the primaeval ancients, but are the generation which received Yahweh’s promises and experienced in history his acts of faithfulness. ‘God’ is here not the ‘primaeval one’, but the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob. The content of the tradition that was constitutive for Israel was the great acts and promises of Yahweh which are unique and unrepeatable, and therefore at the same time also determine Israel’s future. Because Yahweh’s acts of promise in the past open up a future to Israel—and a historic future at that—therefore the Israelite conception of tradition is not only to be interpreted in terms of retrospective questions, but at the same time also looks forwards. Yahweh’s faithfulness in the past is recalled and recounted to the ‘children of the future’ (Ps. 78:6), in order that the ‘people which shall be created’ may praise Yahweh and recognize his lordship for their own present and future (Ps. 71:18; 102:18). Thus it is in order to awake confidence in Yahweh’s faithfulness in the future that the historic experiences of former times are recounted. Yahweh’s faithfulness is not a doctrine that has been received from the ancients of an early mythical age, but a history which must be recounted and can be expected. Thus this tradition comes from history, and its goal is future history. Now this goal itself can change in the course of Israel’s history. Its aim is in the first instance the confident knowledge: such is Yahweh. As he was, so he will be. This implies an element of repetition, yet not of return to a mythical beginning, but of repetition in historic faithfulness and constancy. If the great prophets introduce the change which G. von Rad has called the ‘eschatologizing of the way of thinking in terms of history’, then we can find in them also an eschatologizing of the way of thinking in terms of tradition. Prophecy, too, proceeds to construct a tradition. Yet it is a construction of tradition in a new form. As the herald of history, the prophetic word rouses men to wait on history. ‘I will bind up the testimony and seal the law among my disciples. And I will wait upon the Lord, that hideth his face from the house of Jacob, and I will look for him’ (Isa. 8:16f.). The prophetic word is preserved and written down ‘that it may be a witness for the time to come for ever and ever’ (Isa. 30:8).
To sum up the development of the conception of tradition in Israel, it may be said that as compared with the classical concept of tradition it has a strikingly firm, non-mythological reference to past and future history. Promises are transmitted, events of God’s faithfulness are recounted, all pointing to the future which has not as yet come about. In this conception of tradition the future which is announced and promised increasingly dominates the present. This tradition of promise turns our eyes not towards some primaeval, original event, but towards the future and finally towards an eschaton of fulfilment. We do not drift through history with our backs to the future and our gaze returning ever and again to the origin, but we stride confidently towards the promised future. It is not the primaeval ancients who are near the truth and dwell nearer to the gods, but it is to future generations that the promises are given, in order that they may see the fulfilment.
As compared with the classical conception of tradition, the Christian tradition of Christian proclamation has in the first instance this much in common with the Old Testament understanding of tradition, (1) that here, too, the tradition is bound to, and binds us to, a unique, unrepeatable, historic event—namely, the raising of the crucified Christ—and (2) that the process of tradition is necessitated and motivated by the future horizon projected ahead of us ‘once and for all’ by this event. Neither the once-for-all event of the resurrection of Christ nor the eschatological future horizon of the Christian mission can be grasped by the ancient or the classical concept of tradition. Hence every formulation of the Christian tradition according to the standard of classical tradition—and since the days of anti-revolutionary romanticism such formulations have often arisen in Catholicism and frequently in Protestantism—is wrong. Both the Christian tradendum, or object to be transmitted, and the process of tradition in the Christian proclamation break these bounds.
(a) Christian proclamation begins with the raising of the crucified Christ and his exaltation to be Lord of the coming world of God. ‘Christian tradition has existed ever since Easter, ever since there was a confession to the risen Lord and with it a Church.’ It can thus be said that Christian tradition was proclamation, and was transmitted in proclamation. Here we have a highly important distinction from the understanding of tradition both in classical and in rabbinical life. What distinguishes the proclamation of the gospel from tradition as it is there understood? Christian proclamation is not a tradition of wisdom and truth in doctrinal principles. Nor is it a tradition of ways and means of living according to the law. It is the announcing, revealing and publishing of an eschatological event. It reveals the risen Christ’s lordship over the world, and sets men free for the coming salvation in faith and hope. As proclamation, the gospel has to do with the advent of the coming lordship of Christ, and is itself an element in this advent. It reveals the presence of the coming Lord. This is why in Paul the proclamation of the gospel and the mission to the heathen in all the world are not derived from those who were there at the start and dwelt temporally nearer the divine, in other words from the apostles, but directly from the exalted Lord (Gal. 1:2ff.; 1 Cor. 9:1; 1 Cor. 15:8), in whose service he therefore knows himself to stand. His gospel accordingly does not seek to transmit doctrinal statements by or about Jesus, but to disclose the presence of the exalted and coming Lord. The process of the proclamation of the gospel, or of the revelation of this mystery, is therefore not described in the terminology of rabbinical tradition, but by new words like κηρύσσειν and εὐαγγελίζεσθαι. ‘Paul is no Christian rabbi who differs from the teachers of late Judaism merely in regard to the content of his tradition. Nor does his understanding of tradition result from a mere spiritual refraction of the Jewish principle of tradition, but it is something specifically new among the conceptions of tradition in the first century of our era.’ It is in understanding his gospel as the eschatological revelation of the exalted Lord that he gains the freedom which, as has often been observed, he exercises over against the primitive Christian tradition in doctrinal, confessional and parenetic statements. This freedom does not, however, mean indifference on the ground of personal inspiration. On the contrary, the gospel which reveals the presence of the coming Lord requires a continuity with the earthly Jesus which has constantly to be discovered anew—for otherwise a myth about some new heavenly being threatens to take the place of Jesus of Nazareth and the gospel turns into gnostic talk of revelation. Historical knowledge of Jesus must therefore be constitutive for the faith which awaits the presence and future of God in the name of Jesus. It is this identity of the exalted Christ with the earthly Jesus which in the gospel and in the process of its proclamation links the eschatological with the historical, the apocalypse of the future with the memory of the past. Hence for his gospel, which, as he says, he received not from men but from the Lord, Paul requires the confirmation, and indeed the identification, of the Jerusalem tradition of Jesus and Easter (cf. 1 Cor. 15:3ff.). Not even this acceptance of historic tradition by Paul justifies the assumption that he understood his gospel one way or another in a traditional sense as tradition, but it plainly has christological grounds and thus means something new as compared with his inherited conceptions of tradition or with those existing elsewhere. The continuity of the risen Christ with the earthly, crucified Jesus necessitates the acceptance of the historic witness about him and about what happened to him. The Easter experiences of the raising of Jesus and his exaltation to be the coming Lord, however, shatter any straightforward continuity in the transmitting of the past. The fundamental process for the gospel is not a continuity which has to be created in the history of transience and which results in endurance through the course of time, but it is the raising of the crucified and dead Christ to eschatological life. The fundamental process is not the surmounting of transience by something that is abiding, but it is the anticipation of the goal of history in the raising of the dead, it is the advent of the coming salvation, life, freedom and righteousness in the resurrection of Christ. It is understandable that this process which the gospel reveals must have a formative and determinative influence extending even to the process of the proclamation. The process of Christian proclamation thus implies a Christology. It cannot be deduced from the general problem of history and continuance. The gospel would be put to the service of foreign gods and ideologies if in the sense of modern romanticism it were expected to provide anti-revolutionary, Western continuity and a rescue for decaying civilizations.
(b) If the Christ event affects the process of proclamation even to the extent of determining the way it takes place, what is then the nature of this process? Christian proclamation shares with the Old Testament tradition its orientation towards the future. Tradition is forward-moving mission, into the new situation of the promised future. The new aspect in the Christian proclamation, however, lies in its universal mission to all peoples. Christian ‘tradition’ is mission that moves forwards and outwards. It does not ride the line of the generations from father to son, but spreads outwards to all men. It is not through birth, but through rebirth, that faith is propagated. And once again this is brought out with special clarity in the apostolate of Paul. Ever since his ‘conversion’ he has known that he is sent to the Gentile mission (Gal. 1:15f.; Rom. 1:5). Proclaiming the gospel and going to the heathen coincide for him. Both have their ground in his understanding of Christ. The God who has raised Jesus from the dead is the God who justifies the godless. Just as all men are subject to sin, so Christ is the reconciliation of the whole world with God. In raising him from the dead, God has appointed Jesus to be Lord and Reconciler of the whole world. In the light of his understanding of the lordship of Christ as being universal and coming without any preconditions, we can understand both the universally inclusive character of his proclamation and also its peculiar, eschatologically anticipatory orientation. There is a certain Old Testament framework here: in the establishment of the obedience of faith among the heathen there already begins to happen what according to the Old Testament promise is to happen only after Israel has received salvation. There begins the eschatological glorification of God in the world. The fact that the order of the Israelite hope is thus changed, however, has its ground in the work and message of Jesus himself: the divine sovereignty which has drawn near becomes a live issue in his gracious communion with publicans and sinners, it arrives in the raising of the crucified one and becomes effectual in the justification of the godless. What is the result of this for the process of Christian proclamation, for its ‘tradition’? Christian tradition is then not to be understood as a handing on of something that has to be preserved, but as an event which summons the dead and the godless to life. The process and procedure of the Christian proclamation is the calling of the heathen, the justification of the godless, the rebirth to a living hope. This is a creative event happening to what is vain, forsaken, lost, godless and dead. It can therefore be designated as a nova creatio ex nihilo, whose continuity lies solely in the guaranteed faithfulness of God. This continuity is to be seen not so much in the unbroken succession of bishops, but rather in the ‘homuncio quispiam e pulvere emersus’, the ‘little man of some kind fashioned from dust’, as Calvin calls the presbyter. The goal towards which Christian proclamation pro-ceeds in the process of the justification and calling of the godless, provides another clear indication of this: it is not the finally perfect triumph of that which has been approved and preserved unbroken from of old, but the ‘raising of the dead’, and the triumph of the resurrection life over death to the glory of the all-embracing lordship of God.
Christian tradition is proclamation of the gospel in justification of the godless. It is made possible and necessary by the raising of the crucified Christ, inasmuch as the hope of the universal future of salvation for the world is therein guaranteed. It is thus identical with eschatological mission.
What significance does the above mentioned ‘break with tradition’ on the part of the modern age have for this tradition of Christian proclamation? What breaks down as a result of the emancipation of reason and society is the ancient and classical tradition in which the tradition of Christian proclamation was also embedded until modern times. Hence the tradition of Christian proclamation either collapses along with these traditions of the religious age, and is understood along with them as being now only a romanticist glorification of the past, or else it radically frees itself from this understanding of tradition. The Christian mission has no cause to enter into an alliance with romanticist nihilism against the revolutionary progressiveness of the modern age and to present its own tradition as a haven of traditionalism for a contemporary world now grown uncertain and weary of hoping. The emancipation of reason and society from their historic past is upheld in modern times by a millenarian enthusiasm. To this present world Christian proclamation must give an answer concerning its hope in the future of the crucified one (1 Peter 3:15) by conveying to the godless justification and hope of resurrection. We cannot turn our backs on the open horizons of modern history and return to perpetual orders and everlasting traditions, but we must take these horizons up into the eschatological horizon of the resurrection and thereby disclose to modern history its true historic character.