Our last century has seen drastic, rapid, monumental historic change. Our intellects look for an interior meaning, direction, logic and intentionality. Where have we come from? Where are we going? Let's consider four models that inform most understandings of history: "no history" (paganism, Nietzsche), evolutionary progressivism (Darwin), dialectical materialism (Marx) and Catholicism.
1. No History. Ancient religions saw no liner history but only the cycle of the seasons. No beginning or end, but an endless, recurring circle of life. Tradition prevailed: each generation repeated the prior one. Chaos and randomness occurred within a continual return to the given. This was an enchanted, magical, mysterious world, haunted with supernatural powers, hostile and benign. Survival was placation of these powers and preservation of the permanent legacy handed down. Family, tribe, and religion defined the real. These were stable, basically immune to change.
Nietzsche retrieved this world view, now disenchanted and void of religion/tradition/community, and installed the Superman and the Will to Power. History comes from nowhere and is going nowhere. Reality is chaos and the void. All that remains is the isolated, raging, ecstatic, futile and ultimately despairing Sovereign Ego. Reality is constant war of Self against other selves.
Hitler and pure forms of national fascism embody this view. Since there is no "arc of history," the Ego and the Nation use raw power to create their own narrative. Trump, while he is supported by many Christians and is himself nominally so, is a good example: what matters is his will as expanded to his nation.
Ayn Rand and extreme individualism of the right (white nationalism, hyper-machismo, proud boys) channel this same spirit.
Likewise, sexual liberationists inhabit just such a closed, entrapping world. Tearing sexuality from procreation, they exult sexual pleasure and live in an "everlasting present" of disconnection from past and future generations. Homosexuality, transgenderism, abortion, contraception, cohabitation, pornography are all postures of isolation, disconnection, sterility and hopelessness.
Extreme forms of environmentalism similarly despise an expanding population, preferring a serenity of nature, a sterility of negative birth rates, and a flight from history.
These diverse expressions, sharing the disenchantment of modernity, are nihilistic and despairing.
2. Evolutionary Progressivism. With Marxism, this is a Christian heresy in that it develops out of the linear view of history originating in Revelation. Paradoxically, this widely influential perspective juxtaposes a reductionist materialism with an extravagant idealism of the human intellect. Evolution progresses in an inevitable, mechanical manner as random mutations, void of purpose, allow for the survival of the fittest and inexorable improvement. Now, however, with the happenstance emergence of human, scientific intelligence, evolution takes direction from a godlike techno-elite. The "arc of history" is now in control with progress in science, technology, education and endless advance over a past of ignorance, superstition, and passions. And, so we pass through eras which are seen as ruptures from each other: dark ages, middle ages, renaissance, enlightenment, industrial age, modernity, post-modernity. This is arguably the dominant worldview, especially in academia and elite circles, even as it mingles with alternate views with which it is inherently incompatible. Within the educated, privileged, meritocratic elites this view fosters an optimism approaching grandiosity, that is without roots and destined for eventual capitulation to the realistic but despairing nihilism of Nietszche.
3. Dialectical (Hegel) Materialism (Marx). Here again we find a self-contradictory Christian heresy: a hard, reductive materialism which assumes a quasi-divine, inexorable force, interior to history, the dialectic, transcendent of human choice and agency, pushing providentially to an earthly utopia. This is a rival "arc of history." The ultimate reality is the conflict between thesis and antithesis: concretely the battle between a dominant socio-economic class and the oppressed. This process leads eventually to a victory which then leads to another class war. Theoretically, in classical Marxism, it concludes in a dictatorship of the proletariat. In real life Marxism exists only in corrupt, violent, totalitarian form as in Cuba and China. In the West, it lives in adulterous decadence with elements of Nietzschean narcissism, sexual license, evolutionary progressivism, and libertarian individualism in LGBTQ and ethnic-identity politics.
4. Catholicism. We will outline the Catholic, rather than the Christian perspective, since the Church has a clear, defined, dogmatic articulation while the myriad alternate forms of Christianity, without boundary and authoritative precision, are vulnerable to corruption by the ideologies explained above.
This life, for the Catholic, is enchanted as open to and infused by the heavenly, the eternal, the Divine. The cycles of natures, as well as the contingencies, ruptures and progressions of history all occur within the Great Event, Encounter and Drama of engagement with God. The free God has freely created free creatures, human and angelic, and invited us to a Great Love Affair. With the rebellion of Lucifer and then Adam and Eve a secondary drama erupted: the war between heaven and hell, on earth. Jesus crucified-risen-ascended-Spirit-sending has achieved victory; but only with his return will that be consummated. There is neither eternal cyclical return nor inevitable, mechanical progress. Every soul, every community, every generation and society are engaged in spiritual combat and a Love Affair.
Preliminarily with Israel and conclusively with the Church, God created a new Person, an organism, a corporate identity, the Church, the body and bride of Christ. This is a living, integral entity that lives through time in continuity of identity with organic change. It engages with the life of the Trinity as it combats the Dark Kingdom, the world-flesh-devil. The heart of history and reality is this living person, ever in communion with the eternal, ever-eventful Trinity. The struggle is ever with personal sin, worldly systems of systemic evil, and the diabolic.
Each person, embodied soul, is organically within The Body, the Church. Each person is a Freedom, spirit or soul, an intellect, will, heart wed to flesh, emotions, vulnerability. An agency within a greater receptivity. The events of each life...sufferings, joys, achievements, tragedies...are in service of and subordinate to the primary Drama: encounter of a Freedom with other Freedoms, God and persons and angels and demons. Each life is a serendipitous itinerary to the Father.
The greater Person, the Church, likewise is a free, responsive, creative, living, organic growth with a an integrated, continuous identity. In her finitude, creaturehood, humanity and sinfulness she is subject to error, corruption, disloyalty. Yet there abides substantial identity precisely in her communion with Christ even as she fights militantly on this earth.
She is herself enclosed within the broader world, and yet distinct. Her boundaries are pervious as she receives, good and bad, from beyond. She is herself the defining interiority of the world, the heart and soul. The history of the world is chaotic, random, ruptured; sometimes progressive, sometimes regressive and corruptive. But the Church herself continues in steadiness, protected by the Holy Spirit and secure in a miraculous, profound organism of practice, prayer, belief, and hope.
And so, the Catholic intuits within the Church a continuity along with a fecundity, creativity and serendipity. All the time she lives within the natural cycles, dialectical conflicts, scientific progress, cultural declines and Nietzschean willfulness of a world madly chaotic and random yet mysteriously guided by Providence.
Within the continuous, creative Church, interactive always with the world, the Catholic sees world history as informed by a continuity, a steadiness, a formal or substantial interiority. Regimes change, societies prevail and then collapse, revolutions and ruptures coexist with progress; but what abides is the Church (herself abiding within the Trinity) in her love affair with the world.
A recent Fleckinstein essay situated Vatican II in continuity with the past and numerous other movements of the Holy Spirit in the 20th century. An yet unpublished article by my priest-theologian-historian-scientist nephew and his colleague identify the continuity of scientific development out of the medieval period, including Arabic Spain, into more recent centuries, thereby correcting the tendency to exaggerate rupture and dissonance in scientific progress.
Conclusion
Like all ancient religions, historical narrative rests on a primal religious mythology and ontology: the Eternal Return, the Will to Power, evolution/progress, and the Hegelian dialectic. The despair of Nietzsche contrasts with the false optimism of Darwin and Marx.
Our Catholic vision flows from Revelation, the Event-Drama-History of our engagement with the living, Triune God in Jesus Christ. It leaves us with a contemplation of history as ever beautiful, purposeful, intelligible, enchanting, stable, dramatic, fecund, serendipitous and hopeful.
No comments:
Post a Comment