HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY OF. - It is the comprehension of the course of human events in the complex development of civilization.
I. GENERAL CONCEPTION
While history properly so called investigates the connections of facts in order to express their concrete configuration within the space-time coordinates that contain them, the philosophy of history intends to attain the "meaning" of such facts with respect to an ultimate comprehension of the being of man and of his destiny. In relation to pure philosophy, which considers the being of man in its structure and universal content, the philosophy of history considers the articulation and complication of his temporal becoming, or rather the meaning of the multiplicity of civilizations and of the oppositions that manifest themselves in the religious, economic, political and social struggles of which history properly consists. In this sense the philosophy of history is called upon to resolve the "tension," or rather to clarify a complex of tensions in which the being of man presents itself in its peculiar character of "historical being" as homo faber and animal sociale.
First of all, a) the tension of "freedom and necessity": since if on the one hand every act must be recognized as free and therefore self-standing, in reality it enters into the continuity of development of the whole when it surpasses the atomism of the singularity of individual arbitrium. So that the single fact itself can rise (for example, the conquest of Asia by Alexander the Great for ancient times, the Crusades for the Middle Ages, the French Revolution for the modern age...) to universal value. Further, b) there is the tension of "contingency and inevitability": inasmuch as the single act in its precise individuality is immersed in the nexus of its conditions, whose contingency or actual indifference is removed solely by the decision of freedom, which nevertheless keeps its possibilities intact; and, on the other hand, the act itself reveals itself as the inevitable conclusion of a process and of an epoch and at the same time as the starting point for a new direction of history itself, so that contingency a parte ante seems to have become inevitability a parte post. Then, c) the tension of "individual and society"; inasmuch as every act is always the work of "someone" who places himself at the head of the movement of history so as to drag others along or impose upon others a (supposed) principle of universal salvation, whereby he himself inscribes himself in society and in it finds precisely the others. Moreover, d) the tension between "religion and politics": inasmuch as both assume the task and claim the right to interpret and actualize the being of man in its totality but in opposite directions, the one for transcendence and the other for immanence. Finally, and as a consequence of the preceding tensions, e) the tension of "time and eternity," according as history is envisaged as a ribbon unrolling to infinity in the succession of temporal dimensions, or whether it is considered that time itself is "contained" in eternity and therefore referred and subordinated to eternity where God's judgment for man is accomplished. In the last instance, therefore, the problem of history constitutes the testing ground of every interpretation of the being of man, considered both from within his original possibilities and from without his actions and their consequences with regard to what, from epoch to epoch, has concretely been the "figure of the world."
But, with regard to the "value judgment" of the history of humanity, the central problem - indeed the unique and essential one when the principle of human solidarity or "sympathy" is accepted, which makes present to each as his own the adversities of others - is the existence of evil (v.), its appearance and growing complication in history, whose course often assumes the reality of a catastrophe. Man's entry into history presents itself as a function of evil, which indicates the crisis and the fall of his freedom: the comprehension of history is meant to be the "resumption" of that freedom, in order to stem the evil by which it is invaded and to recover the good that it has lost or that is contested for it. Since time, the flowing of time, does not resolve but aggravates the problem of evil, the reference to eternity on the part of history is essential for defining the precise meaning of the philosophy of history.
II. HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
A) Classical antiquity. - A philosophy of history is properly lacking in classical thought, nor could it have arisen in it, and this for at least two reasons: first, inasmuch as the notion of the perfect equality of all men is lacking in it, and then inasmuch as the time to which becoming is subject has, in Greek thought, a cosmic structure. For the first reason classical civilization concerned itself principally with the history of that certain privileged human nucleus which is the collectivity of Greece and Rome, leaving the "barbarians" outside of history and relegating the origins of humanity to the sphere of myth; for the second reason, in the very comprehension of its own history, classical civilization had to sacrifice the freedom of individuals to the inevitability of the cosmic event. In fact classical philosophy declined the becoming of human freedom within the circle or "wheel" of cosmic becoming; Greek philosophy not only divided time solely according to the periodic course of the stars, but conceived the fate of human civilizations as unfolding to infinity according to a "cyclic alternation" of periods of civilization and barbarism, which had its formula in the theory or myth of "eternal return," which was taken up again at the conclusion of modern thought by F. Nietzsche. This myth is already present in pre-Socratic speculations. Anaximander teaches that all things are born and return to the ἄπειρον (frg. B 1; Diels, I, 89, 11 ff.); Empedocles refers the outcome of events to the conflict and alternating supremacy of creations and destructions through the agency of love (φιλία) and of hate or strife (κότος, νεῖκος), according to two cosmic periods or processes which each comprise two stages, namely the world of friendship and the sphere in the period of love, the world of strife and the dissolution of the elements in the period of hate, and of these two worlds the present is the world of strife (cf. esp. frg. B 17; Diels I, 315, 16 ff. See the discussion of the doxographic material in E. Bignone, Empedocle, Turin 1916, p. 548 ff. The discussion on the "double cycle" in K. Reinhardt, Parmenides u. die Geschichte der griech. Philosophie, Bonn 1916, p. 53 ff.). To the same meaning are to be traced the Pythagorean theories of the "Great Year" and the doctrine of metempsychosis itself: in a more precise sense it seems that the essential nucleus of the theory of "eternal return" belongs to "primitive Pythagoreanism," according to a testimony of Dicearchus (cf. Porphyry, Vita Pythagorae, c. 19; ed. Nauck, Leipzig 1886, p. 26. Cf. B. L. van der Waerden, Das Grosse Jahr u. die ewige Wiederkehr, in Hermes, 80 [1952], pp. 129-55). Plato in the Statesman describes the universe as subject to the following vicissitudes: a) God guides the universe in its circular course, but once the "periods of time" fixed for it are completed, it resumes its movement in the opposite direction (Polit., 269 c. d). b) This change of direction is accompanied by gigantic cataclysms for men as well as for animals (270 C). c) But this catastrophe is followed by a complete renewal of all humanity, the old returned young and the young children" and those already dead conversely are reconstituted and return to life, following the inverse cycle of generation"; these are the "earth-born" (γεγενεῖς) of whom a memory has been preserved in the myth of Cronos (271 c-d. Cf. also: Critias, 109 d; Laws, 667 ff.). Timaeus, 22 a). Aristotle limits himself to affirming the alternation of the cycles of civilization according to a process of ascent and fall, so that "the arts and philosophy itself were many times invented by the human mind and many times lost," whether because of wars that hinder studies or because of floods or other calamities, as St. Thomas comments (Metaph., XII, 8, 1074 b 10 and St. Thomas's Comm., ed. Cathala, Turin 1915, n. 2597. See also: De Coelo, I, 3, 270 b 16; Meteor., I, 3, 339 b 19; De anim. motu, 3, 699 a 27; Polit., I, 10, 1329 b 35). The Stoics gave the doctrine of "cosmic cycles" greater consistency because the real is no longer founded on the "form" that is universal but on the individual "event" (Diano) as the result of the physical process, both by insisting on eternal repetition (as for example Chrysippus: cf. frg. 623-27 in Stoic. Vet. Frag., ed. H. von Arnim, II, Leipzig 1903, 186 ff.), and on the universal cataclysm or conflagration (ἐκπύρωσις) through which the cosmic cycles are renewed (as in Zeno: cf. frg. 98 and 109; ed. cit., I, 32 ff.). Fire considered as both a generative and a dissolving principle (εἰς πῦρ οἶον εἰς σπέρμα: frg. 596; ed. cit., II, 184) is not the ἄπειρον of Anaximander (cf. frg. 610; ed. cit., II, 186), but the "artificer fire" of Heraclitus (cf. Simplicius, In De Coelo, ed. I, J. Heiberg, Berlin 1893, pp. 294, 4, 307, 15). In the last Greek philosophy the motifs of "eternal return" and the "end of the world" become dominant; the "eternal renewal" of the world (παλιγγενεσία of Chrysippus: frg. 627; Stoic. Vet. Fr., II, 191, 1), the "eternal repetition" of events, the doctrine or myth of "restoration" (ἀποκατάστασις) are the dominant elements of Hellenistic culture in the last centuries before Christ and in the first centuries after. There is not yet any awareness of the irreversibility of time, and there is therefore properly no true succession of present, past and future, but everything "remains in place" (Eliade), because everything can return to the present and therefore everything stops and is reduced to the present, and myth as a prior fact takes the place of the becoming of history.
Therefore in the classical age the problem of the immortality (v.) of the individual, that is, of "each" individual as an authentic person, and hence the possibility of an ontological "recovery" of suffering and evil through the sovereign judgment made by God, is dissolved by the very vicissitudes of peoples, which are continually subject to the irreparable erosions of time that cause them to sink. "Fortune" (v.) and "chance" (v.) — that is, the absence of any structure in both the positive and the negative of existence — divide the vicissitudes of history between themselves, and no one has any longer the right to hope or to grieve (the pagans are for St. Paul "οἱ μὴ ἔχοντες ἐλπίδα": I Thess. 4, 13). Even the gods must bow to the ineluctability of fate: Aeneas, on his arrival in Italy after the fall of Troy, is described by the Stoic Virgil: "Ilium in Italiam portans victosque penates" (Aeneid, I, 72. Cf. the commentary of St. Augustine in De Civ. Dei, I, 3, and the profound commiseration of St. Thomas: "In quo satis apparet quantam angustiam patiebantur hinc inde eorum praeclara ingenia, a quibus angustia liberabimur si ponamus... hominem ad veram felicitatem post hanc vitam pervenire posse, anima hominis immortali existente": C. Gent., III, 48 concl.). In antiquity man is too distant from God and too bound to the chain of cosmic "events" to have a history of his own.
B) The Christian patristic-medieval conception. — Only in the revealed religion (Judaic-Christian) does history present itself as a real development or progress, insofar as it is conceived as a "history of salvation" (Heilsgeschichte). The term is that of I. Chr. K. v. Hoffmann, of the school of Erlangen, but the doctrine comes from St. Irenaeus, who clarified more than anyone, in the struggle against Gnostic dualism, the opposition between the Greek and the biblical conception of time: cf. H.-Ch. Puech, Temps, histoire et mythe dans le christianisme des premiers siècles, in Proceedings of the VII Congress for the History of Religion, Amsterdam 1951, p. 33 ff.). The cornerstones or principal moments are: 1. The universal creation sale by God, which eliminates all dualism and affirms at one and the same time God's absolute dominion over all things (including matter) and the positive value that belongs to every creature within its own sphere: man is granted a special dignity because he was created "in the image of God" and destined to live with him. 2. The fall of man, who did not pass the test to which God subjected him, thwarting by the abuse of his freedom the original divine plan and thus remaining in the grip of perditio originalis, that is, of the play of personal and collective passions that unleash disputes and wars (a privative and not constitutive character of evil, because it is the effect and punishment of sin). 3. Promise of salvation made by God to man through the sending of a Savior or Messiah, who is then the eternal Word himself, or Son of God: this promise is brought into the human race by the "chosen people," or Israel, and sustained through prophetism until the coming of the Messiah. 4. The fulfillment of the messianic promise: Jesus Christ presents himself as the Messiah announced by the Prophets, with the "authority" (ἐξουσία) of one who is sent by God ("Ego autem dico vobis!") and proves by his miracles and especially by his Resurrection that he is the Son of God who inaugurates in history the universal Kingdom of God. 5. The realization of the Kingdom of God in time, which is the life of the Church in the presence and guidance of legitimate Authority, in the invisible life of Grace and in the testimony of the Holy Spirit for eternal life (Mt. 16:18; 28:18; Rom. 8:16). 6. The consummation of the Kingdom of God with the final judgment at the end of the world, when Christ, Son of God and Savior of the World, will judge history, which will thus end, and will establish the definitive Kingdom of God for all ages (I Cor. 15:28). The originality of the revealed conception of history lies in the liberation of man from the dominion of cosmic forces and from sin, so that he obtains the exercise of his freedom (v.) and disposes of his own destiny through the intervention of divine Providence (v.), which comes to the aid of fallen human freedom. History therefore has an essentially soteriological and eschatological character; the modern concept of history is consequently a product of biblical "prophetism," which gives prominence to the past through the future, which in turn embraces and grounds the present, creating, precisely through the future to come, the true concept of "progress" in history (cf. H. Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums, Leipzig 1919, p. 307 ff.). The course of human events thus takes on an original physiognomy of its own: only within the sphere of, and with reference to, revealed religion can one truly speak of history as "universal history" (Weltgeschichte) embracing the becoming of the whole human race according to a plan of temporal structure, as Goethe recognized: "the only theme, the proper and most profound one, of the history of the world and of humanity, to which all others remain subordinate, is the conflict between faith and unbelief" (West-östliche Disson. Israel in der Wüste, Cotta ed., IX, Stuttgart 1868, p. 194). The only history, then, that has relevance for man is "sacred history," which claims for itself the definitive fulfillment and salvation of man's being: Christianity, insofar as it presents itself as the sole legitimate heir of the divine promises made to Israel, has removed the national and racial barriers of Judaism and embraces the history of all humanity throughout the centuries, whose fulcrum is therefore represented by the Person and work of Christ the Savior, as the Son of God made Man ("Durch Jesus Christus wird erst die Geschichte als Weltgeschichte bestimmt": E. Brunner, Offenbarung u. Vernunft, Zurich 1941, p. 400).
From this it is understood that only in Christianity does time structure itself into the "development" of its dimensions of present, past and future: a) first of all the present. While in the classical conception it is submerged by the "necessity" (ἀνάγκη) of fate and dispersed by the ungraspability of "chance" (εἱμαρμένη), in the revealed conception the present constitutes the point of consistency of history, insofar as the happening, or event, is always a synthesis of time and eternity, that is, the point of their "encounter." It is this absolute relevance of the present, which in turn springs from the fulfillment of salvation placed in a future as a certain and infallible point of arrival, that confers meaning and value on the past precisely in view of the use that has been made of the present and of the judgment to come: with Christianity there falls away not only the dispersion of history, on account of the "eternal return" that plunges history into the past, but also its limitation within Jewish particularism, which "stretches" it entirely toward the future. In reality the first proclamation of Christianity is that "the appointed time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God has come" (πεπλήρωται ὁ καιρὸς καὶ ἤγγικεν ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ: Mk. 1:15). The "appointed time" (καιρός: cf. G. Delling, s. v. in G. Kittel, Theolog. Wörterb. z. N. T., III, Stuttgart 1950, p. 456 ff.) constitutes the point of encounter of eternity with time, because God's interventions in history (messianism, redemption, judgment) are placed in a given present that is defined by precise spatio-temporal coordinates (Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem in the time of Augustus and suffered in Jerusalem in the time of Tiberius under Pontius Pilate...); it also constitutes the encounter of time with eternity, because man must turn to God with an act of interior "conversion" (μετανοεῖτε: Mk. 1:15) that must be placed in a present and no longer deferred. Therefore the absolute eschatologism of the Gnostics and Modernists annuls the structure of history. b) Then the past is the preparatory time of salvation and at the same time its guarantee, insofar as it preserves the promises, attests their progressive fulfillment on God's part and the correspondence on man's part through the acceptance of faith in Christ the Messiah. c) Finally the future, which, guaranteed by the prophetic structure of history, saves both past and present and thus constitutes the final καιρός that will give definitive order to humanity (Apoc. 1:3; 22:10; ὁ καιρὸς ἐγγύς ἐστιν. Cf. also: Mk. 13:33; Lk. 21:8; I Cor. 4:5; I Pt. 5:6).
Christianity therefore claims for itself the only valid interpretation of history, because it is the only religion that promises and guarantees the definitive liberation from evil, thus escaping the process of "disintegration" inherent in the theories of the heavens: "The Kingdom of God, of which Christ is King, is incommensurable with respect to any other kingdom... Wherever this Civitas Dei enters the dimension of time, it is not as a dream of the future, but as a spiritual reality permeating the present" (Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, abridged by D. C. Somervell, Italian trans., Turin 1950, p. 677). Thanks to these characteristics of human universality and temporal fullness, Christianity, precisely as "Sacred History," offers the only universally valid opening for a perspective on the history of humanity, whose epochs are in fact designated and dated henceforth with respect to the expectation and fulfillment of salvation, that is, before and after the coming of Christ. Finally, since the Kingdom of God on earth that Christ founded coincides with the visible Church, the history of the Church holds the center of every Christian explanation of history ("Die Wirklichkeit der Kirche gehört in den Mittelpunkt aller christlichen Geschichtsdeutung": P. Althaus, Die letzten Dinge, Gütersloh 1926, p. 121). Therefore the "theology of history" is the only clarification of the temporal existence of man, both as an individual and as the whole human race, that draws the certainty of its truth from divine Revelation" (cf. H. Rahner, La théologie catholique et l'histoire, in Dieu vivant, 10 [1948], p. 98).
Patristic theology of history defended these principles against the attacks of heresy, which came from Judaism as well as from paganism. Some Fathers of the early centuries (cf. Didache, 16, 4; Ep. Barn., 15; Justin, Dial., 80, 81; Irenaeus, Adv. Haer., V, 25 ff.; Hippolytus, De Christo et Antichristo; Lactantius, Div. Inst., VII, 17 ff.; Tertullian, Adv. Marc., III, 24), taking literally an expression from the Apocalypse (20, 2), believed the second coming of Christ to be imminent, after which he would reign for "a thousand years" (Chiliasm: v. MILLENARISM) over the earth with the elect. Very soon, however, the conviction gained ground that the end of the world remains hidden in the secret of divine Providence and that the history of humanity is configured, according to the biblical schema of the struggle between good and evil, as the spiritual struggle between the City of God and the City of Satan, as St. Augustine interpreted it — under the influence of the Donatist Tyconius — in systematic form in the De civitate Dei. The Augustinian schema is taken up by his disciple Orosius (v.) and becomes predominant throughout the Middle Ages, culminating in the work of Otto of Freising (v.). A return to the "historical realism of chiliasm" can be considered the prophetic symbolism of Joachim of Fiore (v.), which was taken up in the Renaissance and secularized by modern idealism.
It is still on the fabric of the Augustinian conception that, against the free thinkers of deism and the Enlightenment, Bossuet (v.) conceived his Discours sur l'histoire universelle, to demonstrate the superior dominion of Divine Providence over the alternating vicissitudes of human events. Unlike St. Augustine, however, Bossuet seeks to bring out the concrete concatenations of facts according to causes and effects and elaborates his historical edifice in an optimistic sense — also with respect to temporal history — as the advance of the triumphant Church through the stages of history, from antiquity down to his own times. It is against Bossuet's theology of history that the disintegrating work of Voltaire and of the French Enlightenment (Condorcet, Turgot, Volney, down to Comte) was directed, in order to restore man to his rights. Isolated from the development of European culture, in a politically and spiritually divided Italy, Vico's Scienza Nuova (v.) contains the overcoming of the classical cyclical conception and of Enlightenment historiography in the Christian Providence according to a close collaboration of human freedom with God, inasmuch as "the facts of the actual history of all nations, their origins, progress, states, declines and ends... run according to the eternal laws of ideal history" (Scienza Nuova, § 1096: ed. Nicolini, II, Bari 1928, p. 153).
C) The modern conception. — The philosophy of history in the proper sense is a conquest of modern thought, inasmuch as it has claimed the development of history for the expansion of man's freedom, freed from every external dependence (physical or theological). The advent of the philosophy of history therefore coincides with the secularization of Western culture and marks its stages with the Enlightenment, idealist Romanticism and historicism. Theological Enlightenment has its representatives in Reimarus and Lessing, who develop Spinoza. The contribution of Reimarus and Lessing to the philosophy of history is given principally by their criticism of biblical history, which they strip of every supernatural and revealed character, no differently from what R. Bultmann's Entmythologisierung does today: Reimarus, with the Wolfenbüttelsche Fragmente, above all denied the historical character of Christ's Resurrection, while Lessing in the essay Ueber den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft (1777) contested Christianity's ability to make that insertion of eternity into time — by means of Christ's prophecies and miracles — which must permit man a "choice" of eternal import (it is the "problem of Lessing" that will be discussed by Kierkegaard): absolute incommensurability between history and dogma, between time and eternity.
Less drastic in form, but coinciding in substance with the preceding, is Kant's conception, according to which history presents itself as the execution (Vollziehung) of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a perfect political structure (Staatsverfassung) as a "Kingdom of God on earth" (Reich Gottes auf Erden), both from within and from without, which presents to humanity the only situation in which nature can fully develop the capacities (Anlagen) that it has placed in humanity (Ideen zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht, 1784; Ges. Werke, ed. Cassirer, IV, Berlin 1913, p. 161 ff.). Herder, under the impulse of Romanticism, considers the development of history as a "whole": hence the interest in primitive peoples and in the ancient civilizations of the East that he shows in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (bks. I-X and XI-XII). For Herder history is the resultant of two series of forces, on the one hand the extrinsic environment and on the other the secret operative element that he calls the "spirit of the people" (Volksgeist), in which each individual nation expresses its own individuality in subjection to God, whom he — in agreement with Shaftesbury — calls "Spirit of the world" (Weltgeist): Herder recognizes the divine plan of history, that is, the "way of God above the nations" (Gang Gottes über die Nationen) and celebrates the Person and work of Christ who "sought the spirit and left the dead letter" of the Mosaic Law, thus wishing for a Christianity as pure ethical wisdom without dogmas (cf. Briefe an Theofron, in Sämtliche Werke, XV, Stuttgart and Tübingen 1830, Brief V, p. 100 ff. Cf. Ideen..., I. XVII). Hegel gave the most systematic conception of history, which fuses Spinoza's single substance and the absolute Reason of Kant-Herder with the dogmas of Christianity: history has as its ultimate end the realization of the Absolute in the becoming of humanity, in which, as Kant had already observed, the negative and evil constitute the turning point (the "dialectical mediation") whereby absolute Reason with its "cunning" (List der Vernunft) proceeds to act by making use of the "national spirits" (Volksgeister), which constitute the "apparent dialectic" through which the "universal Spirit" is produced in the development of the whole or Idea (cf. Philos. d. Rechts, III, 3 B, § 340, which ends with the identification of history and the judgment of history according to Schlegel's formula, Weltgeschichte als Weltgericht). The actor and "Person" of universal history is the "Spirit of the world" (Weltgeist), which expresses pure freedom willing itself, which has its effective reality (Wirklichkeit) in the politics of the State: instruments of the "spirit of the world" are the "historico-cosmic men" (weltgeschichtliche Menschen) who bring about the "transitions" of historical epochs, such as Alexander the Great, Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon (cf. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, Einleitung, ed. Lasson, Berlin 1930, p. 39 ff.). The nerve of Hegel's philosophy of history, as of his entire philosophy, is that it is an inverted and immanentized theology in which every evil and every contingency of the finite is volatilized. From the Hegelian philosophy of history derives Marx's historical materialism (v.), through the critique of Feuerbach, according to whom the god immanent in Hegel's history is nothing other than humanity itself, so that "the secret of theology is anthropology, but the secret of speculative philosophy is theology" (Vorläufige Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie, in Sämtl. Werke, II, Stuttgart 1904, p. 222). Therefore the task of philosophy is the "realization and humanization of God" (Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, § 1; ed. cit., II, p. 245). Against rationalism and idealism, in a direction opposed to that of Feuerbach-Marx, Kierkegaard vindicates the consistency of the Christian conception by positing the Incarnation of Christ as the central "event" of history, in response to Lessing's principle that "contingent historical truths cannot be the proof of necessary rational truths" (cf. Diario, 1854, XIᵃ A 269 and XIᵃ A 98 against Hegel's "chatter" on the philosophy of history: Ital. trans. III, p. 300 ff. Cf. S. Holm, S. Kierkegaards Historiefilosofi, Copenhagen 1952, p. 30 ff.).
D) Historicism. — With the disintegration of transcendental idealism through the work of positivism and neo-criticism, which eliminated the Absolute and therefore every theological reference of the real, history was conceived in the ultimate concreteness of mere happening, on this side of any teleology, as also of every dualism of particular and universal, of history and supra-history, of idea and fact, of fact and value. The supreme totality of Reason therefore gives way to the category of Life, which posits and re-posits itself in individual facts, mediating itself in an ever new immediacy. Hence the abandonment of the philosophy of history bound to a notion of "progress" that must nullify the actual reality of the present. The fundamental error of Hegel's philosophy of history was, according to Dilthey, that of having subordinated "life" to the abstract concept and to a mysticism of a cosmic nature, in which therefore all reality is transferred into the logical Idea (cf. W. Dilthey, Das Problem d. Philos. des Geistes, in Gsch. Werke, IV, Leipzig and Berlin 1921, p. 247 ff.). In this line of theoretical simplification arose historicism, in which neo-Hegelianism came to its conclusion, freed from every metaphysical or theological reference: in this way "history has produced relativism, which considers every individual historical formation, every institution, every idea and ideology merely as a transitory moment, causally determined in the infinite flux of becoming," so that things have no more than a relative value (cf. Fr. Meinecke, Geschichte, Staat und Gegenwart, in Logos, 22 [1933], p. 163). The most radical form of history is that defended by B. Croce (d. 1952), who affirms the identity of philosophy, history and philosophy of history and defines historicism as "the affirmation that life and reality is history and nothing but history"; any form of dualism must therefore be rejected, even in the purely cultural sphere, according to the Crocean theory of the equivalence and circularity of the forms of the spirit (Lo storicismo e la sua storia, in La storia come pensiero e come azione, 5th ed., Bari 1952, p. 51. On p. 65 the affirmation that "historicism is a logical principle, and is indeed the very category of logic, logicality understood in an adequate manner, that of the concrete universal"). In this way every problem of the spirit is dissolved into its effective historical dimensions, inasmuch as "only the logic of historical knowledge is adequate to thought" (Filosofia e storiografia, Bari 1949, p. 17). For this reason Croce beautifully affirms that "history is never a judge, but always a justifier": (Teoria e storia della storiografia, 6th ed., Bari 1948, p. 177). Therefore Crocean historicism cuts at the root every philosophy of history that is neither philosophy nor history, inasmuch as it proposes, in its various Enlightenment and idealist forms, including the Marxist one, to give a conclusive "meaning" to history taken as a whole.
An intermediate path seems to be that of existentialist historicism, insofar as it considers "freedom" as the unlimited openness toward the "future," in which therefore the future has a "progressive" meaning that rigid historicism rejects because of its metaphysical-ethical undifferentiation. The later Jaspers elaborated the theory of "axial time" (Achsenzzeit), which allows the prospect of a universal history, denied by historicism, insofar as it is possible to refer the development of the various civilizations to that period which runs from the year 800 to 200 B.C., in which similar spiritual phenomena of construction and dissolution take shape among all the peoples of the East and then of Greece (cf. Vom Ursprung u. Ziel der Geschichte, Munich 1949, p. 19 ff.). Jaspers too recognizes the incomparable value of the person and doctrine of Christ, according to the Hegelian saying that every history leads to Christ and points back to him, so that the appearance of the Son of God constitutes "the axis of universal history." He merely observes that this holds only for those who accept that Christ is the organ of the divine Revelation: something that for modern man no longer has meaning, given that everything presents itself in being only in the form of a "cipher" that each person interprets starting from his own "situation" (Einführung in die Philosophie, Zurich 1950, p. 95 ff.). More sober and more open to the prophetic and eschatological conception of history seems to be the position of Heidegger: the "protension" toward the future is constitutive of the human being (Dasein) insofar as this is realized in concern (Sorge), which therefore projects the human being toward the end, that is, death, so that "the primary sense of existentiality is the future, and time then expresses being as that 'totality' (Ganzheit) which is originally brought about by concern" (Sein und Zeit, Halle a. S. 1927, p. 327 ff.). In this temporality that Sorge structures toward the future, the later Heidegger includes the opening of the "sacred" (das Heilige), that is, the becoming present (Anwesenheit) of the divinity, which closes — as a fourth component together with earth, sky and mortals — the "square" (Geviert) of the human being, who is thereby configured as a "remaining before God" (cf. the Darmstadt lecture: Bauen, Wohnen, Denken, Darmstadt 1952, p. 76 ff.). Such an "opening" toward the divinity man does not attain through philosophical ontology, but rather through poetry and through mysticism, in which there are for now accomplished the two original forms of God's "presence" to man, so that all historical time stretches toward the future in expectation of a revelation of God that may save man from the anguish of death (cf. Was ist Metaphysik?, Einleitung to the 2nd ed., Frankfurt a. M. 1949, p. 18. Also Brief über Humanismus, Bern 1947, p. 101 ff.).
III. VALUTAZIONE
As the structure of the temporal becoming of individual freedom, history eludes all reflective comprehension insofar as the "decision" of the individual is by definition withdrawn from all external investigation, and in this sense it must be said that of the individual as a free person there is no history but at most only "biography." As the structure of the temporal becoming of the various peoples, the only history that assumes freedom at the center of this becoming is "sacred history" according to the "line of salvation" (Heilslinie) that leads from the Hebrew revelation to the Christian religion, in which therefore history is "contained" a parte ante and a parte post by a meta-history that embraces the origin and the end of the world and of man within it. The conception of history of the ancient world, bound to cosmic processes, did not attain the originality of man's being, while modern thought has made humanity the absolute artificer of its own destiny; but in the total reversal of the sign of the forces operating in history the outcome is the same, namely the loss of man as a single person who vainly seeks salvation from the evil and from the death that presses upon him in time. Absolute historicism, which excludes finality from history, represents the extreme form of the dispersal of man's being and therefore coincides with the negation of every comprehension of history that transcends empirical experience; it is equivalent to the renunciation of an effective solution to the tension between good and evil, between individual and society, between time and eternity. It is only in the perspective of a "universal end" of humanity and of an "end of time" in eternity that it is possible to await salvation from evil and "liberation from the continuous terror of history" (Eliade). The philosophy of history cannot explain history because it lacks the unifying axis that embraces the temporal dimensions both of humanity as a whole and of the real nexus of each individual, such as is instead envisaged as "becoming of salvation" (Heilsgeschehen) according to the conception of Christianity.