HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY OF. – It is the understanding of the course of human events within the complex development of civilization.
OUTLINE:
I. General conception
II. Historical development: A) Classical antiquity. B) The Christian patristic-medieval conception. C) The modern conception. D) Historicism. – III. Evaluation.I. GENERAL CONCEPTION
While history proper investigates the connections between events to express their concrete configuration within the space-time coordinates that contain them, the philosophy of history aims to grasp the meaning of such events in relation to a final understanding of human being and its destiny. Compared to pure philosophy, which considers human being in its universal structure and content, the philosophy of history considers the articulation and complication of its temporal becoming, that is, the meaning of the multiplicity of civilizations and the oppositions that manifest themselves in the religious, economic, political, and social struggles that constitute history proper. In this sense, the philosophy of history is called upon to resolve the “tension” or, better, to clarify a complex of tensions in which the being of man presents itself in its peculiarity as a “historical being,” as *homo faber* and *animal sociale*.First, a) the tension of “freedom and necessity”: for while on the one hand every act must be recognized as free and therefore self-standing, in reality it enters into the continuity of the development of the whole when it overcomes the atomism of the singularity of individual arbitrariness. Thus, the very single event can rise (e.g., Alexander the Great’s conquest of Asia for ancient gold, the Crusades for the Middle Ages, the French Revolution for the modern age...) to universal value. Again, b) there is the tension of “contingency and inevitability”: in that the single act, in its precise individuality, is immersed in the nexus of its conditions, whose contingency or present indifference is removed solely by the decision of freedom, which nevertheless maintains its possibilities intact; and, on the other hand, the act itself reveals itself as the inevitable conclusion of a process and 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 between “individual and society”: in that every act is always the work of “someone” who takes the lead in the movement of history so as to drag others along or impose on them a (supposed) principle of universal salvation, while he himself inserts himself into society and in it precisely finds the others. Moreover, d) the tension between “religion and politics”: in that both assume the task and claim the right to interpret and realize the being of man in its totality but in opposite directions, one for transcendence and the other for immanence. Finally, and as a consequence of the preceding tensions, e) the tension between “time and eternity”: depending on whether history is envisaged as an endless ribbon unfolding in the succession of temporal dimensions, or whether it is considered that time
They will become young again and the young children, and those already dead conversely are recomposed and come back to life, following the inverse cycle of generation: these are the "terrigenes" (γεγενεῖς) whose memory is preserved in the myth of Cronos (271 c-d. Cf. also: Chryse, 109 d; Laws, 667 ff.; Timaeus, 22 a). Aristotle limits himself to affirming the alternation of cycles of civilization according to a process of ascent and decline so that the arts and philosophy itself were invented by the human mind many times and many times lost either through wars that hinder study or through floods and other disasters, as St. Thomas comments (Metaph., XII, 8, 1074 b 10 and Commentary of St. Thomas, ed. Cathala, Turin 1915, no. 2597. Cf. also: De Coelo, I, 3, 270 b 16; Meteor., I, 3, 339 b 19; De anim. motu, 3, 669 a 27; Polit., I, 10, 1329 b 35). The Stoics gave greater coherence to the doctrine of cosmic cycles because the real is no longer founded on the "form" which is universal but on the individual event (Diano) as the result of the physical process, insisting both 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 conflagration (ἐκπύρωσις) through which cosmic cycles are renewed (as in Zeno: cf. frg. 98 and 109; ed. cit., I, 32 ff.). Fire, considered as both a generative and dissolving principle (εἰς πῦρ οἶον εἰς σπέρμα: frg. 596; ed. cit., II, 184), is not the "apeiron" of Anaximander (cf. frg. 610; ed. cit., II, 186), but the artisan fire of Heraclitus (cf. Simplicius, In De Coelo, ed. I. J. Heiberg, Berlin 1893, pp. 249, 340, 315). In the final phase of Greek philosophy, the motifs of eternal return and the end of the world become dominant; the eternal renewal of the world (παλλιγενεῖς) 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 the first centuries after. There is as yet no awareness of the irreversibility of time, and thus there is not properly speaking a true succession of present, past, and future, but everything remains in place (Eliade), because everything can return to the present and thus everything is suspended, reduced to the present, and myth as antecedent takes the place of the unfolding of history.
Therefore, in the classical age the problem of the immortality (v.) of the individual, that is, of "every" individual as an authentic person, and thus the possibility of an ontological "recovery" of suffering and evil through a superhistorical judgment by God, is dissolved by the very vicissitudes of peoples who 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 the positive as in the negative of existence—divide the vicissitudes of history, and no one has any right to hope or to lament (the pagans are for St. Paul or 1/9) (οἱ γὰρ νεκροὶ: 1 Thess. 4, 13). Even the gods must yield to the inevitability of fate: Aeneas, upon his arrival in Italy after the fall of Troy, is described by the Stoic Virgil: "Ille 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 quantum angustiam patiebantur hinc inde eorum praeclara ingenia, a quibus angustius liberabitur 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 his own history.
B) The patristic-medieval Christian conception. — Only in revealed religion (Judeo-Christian) does history present itself as an actual development or progress inasmuch as it is conceived as a "history of salvation" (Heilsgeschichte. The term is from I. C. R. K. von Hoffmann, of the Erlangen school, but the doctrine comes from St. Irenaeus who more than anyone clarified, in the struggle against Gnostic dualism, the opposition between the Greek conception 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 main pillars or principal moments are: 1. The universal creation by God, which eliminates all dualism and at the same time affirms God’s absolute dominion over all things (even over matter) and the positive value that belongs to every creature within its own sphere: man has a special dignity because he is 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 he was subjected by God, frustrating with the abuse of his freedom the original divine plan and thus remaining prey to the loss of the age, that is, to the play of personal and collective passions that unleash strife and wars (the privative and not constitutive character of evil, since it is the effect and punishment of sin).
3. The promise of salvation made by God to man through the sending of a Saviour or Messiah, who is none other than the eternal Word or Son of God: this promise is borne within the human race by the “chosen people” or Israel and sustained through prophecy until the coming of the Messiah.
4. The fulfilment of the messianic promise: Jesus Christ presents Himself as the Messiah foretold by the Prophets, with the self-authority (ἐξουσία) of one sent by God (Ego autem dico vobis!) and proves through miracles and especially through His Resurrection that He is the Son of God who inaugurates in history the universal Kingdom of God.
5. The realisation 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 fulfilment of the Kingdom of God with the final judgement at the end of the world, when Christ, Son of God and Saviour of the world, will judge history, which will thus come to an end, and 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 may exercise his freedom (v.) and dispose of his own destiny through the intervention of divine Providence (v.), which respects human freedom even when it is fallen. History therefore has an essentially salvific and eschatological character; the modern concept of history is consequently a product of biblical “prophecy,” which gives prominence to the past through the future, which in turn embraces and founds the present, precisely by creating, 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, pp. 307 ff.).
The course of human events thus assumes an original character: only within the sphere and in reference to revealed religion can one truly speak of history as “universal history” (Weltgeschichte) embracing the becoming of the entire human race according to a plan of temporal structure, as Goethe recognised when he wrote that “the only theme, the proper and deepest one, of the history of the world and of humanity to which all others are subordinate, is the conflict of faith and unbelief” (West-östliche Diwan, Israel in der Wüste, ed. Cotta, IX, Stuttgart 1868, p. 194). The only history, then, that has relevance for man is “sacred history,” which claims for itself the definitive fulfilment and the salvation of man’s being: Christianity, inasmuch 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 through the ages, whose centre is thus represented by the Person and the work of Christ the Saviour, as Son of God made man (Durch Jesus Christus wird erst die Geschichte als Weltgeschichte bestimmt): E. Brunner, Offenbarung und Vernunft, Zurich 1941, p. 400).
From this it is clear that only in Christianity does time take on a structure in the “development” of its dimensions of present, past, and future:
a) first, the present. Whereas in the classical conception it is submerged by the “necessity” (ἀνάγκη) of fate and dispersed by the elusiveness of “chance” (εἰμαρμένη), in the revealed conception the present constitutes the point of consistency of history, inasmuch as what happens or the event is always a synthesis of time and eternity, i.e. the point of their “encounter.” It is this absolute relevance of the present, which in turn springs from the fulfilment of salvation placed in a future that is certain and infallible as a point of arrival, that gives meaning and value to the past in view precisely of the use made of the present and the coming judgement: with Christianity there falls not only the dispersion of history, caused by the “eternal return” that sinks history into the past, but also its limitation within Jewish particularism that projects all “protection” into the future. In reality, the first announcement of Christianity is that the “fullness of time” has been accomplished and the Kingdom of God has come (πεπλήρωται ὁ καιρὸς καὶ ἤγγικεν ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ Θεοῦ: Mk. 1, 15). The “fullness of time” (καιρός: cf. G. Delling, s.V. in G. Kittel, Theologisches Wörterbuch zum N.T., III, Stuttgart 1950, pp. 456 ff.) constitutes the point of encounter of eternity with time, because the interventions of God in history (messianism, redemption, judgement) are situated in a given present that is defined by precise spatio-temporal coordinates (Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem in the days of Augustus and suffered in Jerusalem in the days of Tiberius under Pontius Pilate...); it also constitutes the encounter of time with eternity, because man must turn to God with an act of inner “conversion” (μετανοεῖτε: Mk. 1, 15) that must be placed in the present and no longer deferred. Hence absolute eschatologism, whether gnostic or modernist, nullifies the structure of history.
b) Then the past is the preparatory time of salvation and at the same time its guarantee, inasmuch as it preserves the promises, attests their progressive fulfilment by God and the corresponding response by man 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 ultimate καιρός that will give definitive order to humanity (Rev. 1, 3; 22, 10: ὁ καιρός ἐγγύς ἐστιν. Cf. also Mk. 13, 33; Lk. 21, 8; 1 Cor. 4, 5; 1 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 theories of the heavens: “The Kingdom of God, of which Christ is King, is incommensurable with any other kingdom... In so far as the Civitas Dei enters into the dimension of time, it is not like a dream of the future, but as a spiritual reality permeating the present” (Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, abridged by D. C. Sommervell, Italian trans., Turin 1950, p. 677). Thanks to these characteristics of human universality and temporal fullness, Christianity as “sacred history” offers the only valid universal perspective for a history of humanity whose epochs are indeed designated and dated now in relation to the expectation and fulfilment of salvation, i.e. before and after the coming of Christ. Finally, since the Kingdom of God on earth, which Christ founded, coincides with the visible Church, the history of the Church holds the centre 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). Hence the “theology of history” is the only clarification of man’s temporal existence, whether as an individual or as the entire human race, that attains certainty of its truth from divine Revelation (cf. H. Rahner, La théologie catholique et l'histoire, in Dieu vivant, 10 [1948], p. 98).
The patristic theology of history defended these principles against the attacks of heresy that arose from both Judaism and paganism. Some Fathers of the early centuries (cf. Didache, 16.4; Epistle of Barnabas, 15; Justin, Dialogue, 80–81; Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 25 ff.; Hippolytus, On Christ and Antichrist; Lactantius, Divine Institutes, VII, 17 ff.; Tertullian, Against Marcion, III, 24), taking literally an expression from the Apocalypse (20.2), believed that the second coming of Christ was imminent, after which He would reign for “a thousand years” (Chiliasm: V. MILLENARISM) upon earth with the elect. Soon, however, the conviction took hold that the end of the world remains hidden in the secret of divine Providence, and that the history of humanity unfolds, 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—under the influence of the Donatist Ticonius—in systematic form in *The City of God*. Augustine’s schema was adopted by his disciple Orosius (v.) and became predominant throughout the Middle Ages, culminating in the work of Otto of Freising (v.). A return to the “historical realism of chiliasm” may be seen in the FIORE, IL (v.), which was revived in the Renaissance and secularized by modern idealism.
It is still upon the framework Bossuet (v.), against the free-thinkers of deism and the Enlightenment, framed his *Discourse on Universal History*, in order to demonstrate the supreme dominion of Divine Providence over the shifting fortunes of human events. Unlike St Augustine, however, Bossuet sought to emphasize the concrete concatenations of facts according to causes and effects, and constructed his historical edifice in an optimistic sense—even with regard to temporal history—as the advance of the triumphant Church through the stages of history, from antiquity to his own time. It was against Bossuet’s theology of history that the disintegrating work of Voltaire and the French Enlightenment (Condorcet, Turgot, Volney, down to Comte) was directed, in order to restore to man his rights. Isolated from the development of European culture, in an Italy politically and spiritually divided, Vico’s *New Science* (v.) contains the overcoming of the classical cyclical conception and of Enlightenment historiography within the Christian Providence, according to a strict collaboration of human freedom with God, inasmuch as “the facts of the history of all nations, their origins, progress, states, declines and ends... proceed according to the eternal laws of ideal history” (*New Science*, § 1096: ed. Nicolini, II, Bari 1928, p. 153).
C) The modern conception. – The philosophy of history in the proper sense is an achievement of modern thought insofar as it has claimed the development of history for the expansion of human freedom, freed from every external (physical or theological) dependence. The advent of the philosophy of history thus coincides with the secularization of Western culture and marks its stages with the Enlightenment, Romantic idealism, and historicism. Theological Enlightenment finds its representatives in Reimarus and Lessing, who develop Spinoza. The contribution of Reimarus and Lessing to the philosophy of history lay chiefly in their critique of biblical history, which they stripped of every supernatural and revealed character, not unlike what R. Bultmann’s *Entmythologisierung* does today: Reimarus, with his *Wolfenbüttel Fragments*, denied above all the historical character of Christ’s Resurrection, while Lessing, in the essay *On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power* (1777), contested the ability of Christianity to effect that insertion of eternity into time—through prophecy and Christ’s miracles—which should enable man to make an “eternal choice” (this is the “problem of Lessing,” which would be taken up by Kierkegaard): the absolute incommensurability between history and dogma, between time and eternity.
Less radical in form, but coinciding in substance with the foregoing, 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 offers humanity the only situation in which nature can fully develop the capacities (*Anlagen*) it has placed in humanity (*Ideas for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View*, 1784; *Gesammelte Schriften*, ed. Cassirer, IV, Berlin 1913, pp. 161 ff.). Herder, under the impulse of Romanticism, regards the development of history as a “whole”: hence his interest in primitive peoples and the ancient civilizations of the East, which he displays in his *Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind* (Parts 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 element that he calls the “spirit of the people” (*Volksgeist*), in which each individual nation expresses its own individuality in subjection to God, whom—agreeing with Shaftesbury—he calls the “Spirit of the World” (*Weltgeist*). Herder recognizes the divine plan of history, namely the “path of God over the nations” (*Gang Gottes
and celebrates the Person and the work of Christ who sought the spirit and left behind the dead letter of the Mosaic Law, thus hoping for a Christianity as pure ethical wisdom without dogmas (cf. Briefe an Theofron, in Sämtliche Werke, XV, Stuttgart and Tübingen 1830, Letter V, pp. 100 ff. Cf. Ideen..., pt. XVII). Hegel gave the most systematic conception of history, which fuses the single substance of Spinoza and the Absolute Reason of Kant 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) by which Absolute Reason with its “cunning” (List der Vernunft) proceeds to act by using 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 the formula of Schlegel, Weltgeschichte als Weltgericht). The actor and “Person” of universal history is the “Spirit of the World” (Weltgeist), which expresses pure freedom that wills itself and which has its effective reality (Wirklichkeit) in the logic of the State: instruments of the “Spirit of the World” are the historical-cosmic men (weltgeschichtliche Menschen) who bring about the “passages” of historical epochs, such as Alexander the Great, Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon (cf. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, Introduction, ed. Lasson, Berlin 1930, pp. 39 ff.). The nerve of faith, i.e., of Hegel, as of all his philosophy, is to be an inverted and immanentized theology where the logic of the agents and the agents of logic have flown away. Hegel, through the criticism of Feuerbach, according to whom the immaterial world of logic 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 opposite to that of Feuerbach-Marx, the consistency of the Christian conception is claimed by Kierkegaard, who places as the central “event” of history the incarnation of Christ in response to Lessing’s principle that “contingent historical truths cannot be the proof of necessary rational truths” (cf. Diary, 1854, XI 1 A 269 and XI 2 A 98 against the “chatter of Hegel” on the so-called philosophy of history: Italian trans. III, pp. 300 ff. Cf. S. Holm, S. Kierkegaard, Historiefilosofi, Copenhagen 1952, pp. 30 ff.).
II. Historicism
With the collapse of transcendental idealism under the impact of positivism and neocriticism, which eliminated the Absolute and therefore every theological reference of the real, history was conceived within the conception of logic, just as every dualism of particular and universal, of history and superhistory, 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-proposes itself in single facts through a new unmediated idea. Hence the abandonment of the so-called philosophy of history, tied to a notion of “progress” that must nullify the actual reality of the present. The fundamental error of Hegel’s philosophy of history, according to Dilthey, was to have subordinated “life” to the abstract concept and to a mystique of cosmic nature, whereby all reality is transferred into the logical idea (cf. W. Dilthey, Das Problem d. Philos. des Geistes, in Ges. Werke, IV, Leipzig and Berlin 1921, pp. 247 ff.).In this line of theoretical simplification historicism arose, in which neo-idealism concluded, freed from every metaphysical or theological reference: in this way “history has produced relativism, which considers every single historical formation, every institution, every idea and ideology only as a transitory moment, causally determined in the infinite flow 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 historicism is that defended by B. Croce (d. 1952), who affirms the identity of philosophy, history, and the so-called philosophy of history and defines historicism as “the assertion that life and reality is history and nothing but history”; hence any form of dualism must be rejected, even in the purely cultural sphere, according to the chronic 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. At p. 65 the assertion that “historicism is a logical principle, and indeed the very category of logic, logic understood in an adequate way, that of the concrete universal”). In this way every problem of the spirit is dissolved into its historical dimensions, accomplished inasmuch as “only the logic of historical knowledge is adequate to thought” (Filosofia e storiografia, Bari 1949, p. 17). For this reason Croce rightly affirms that “history is never judged, but always justifying” (Teoria e storia della storiografia, 6th ed., Bari 1948, p. 177).
Hence historicism radically cuts off every so-called philosophy of history, which is neither philosophy nor history insofar as it proposes, in its various Enlightenment and idealist forms, including the Marxist, to give a conclusive meaning to history taken as a whole. A middle way seems to be that of existential historicism, which considers “freedom” as the open. Philosophy is a fact “where therefore the future has a ‘progressive’ meaning” that rigid historicism rejects because of its indifferent metaphysical-ethical historicism. The later Jaspers has elaborated the theory of the “axial age” (Achsenzeit), which allows for the prospect of a universal history denied by historicism, insofar as it is possible to relate the development of the various civilizations to that period which goes from 800 to 1200 B.C., in which similar spiritual phenomena of construction and dissolution appear among all the peoples of the East and then of Greece (cf. Vom Ursprung u. Ziel der Geschichte, Munich 1949, pp. 19 ff.). Jaspers also 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 only observes, however, that this holds only for those who accept that Christ is the organ of divine Revelation: something that has no meaning for modern man, given that everything presents itself in being only in the form of a “cipher” that each interprets from his own “situation” (Einführung in die Philosophie, Zurich 1950, pp. 95 ff.).
A more sober and open position to the prophetic and eschatological conception of history seems to be that of Heidegger, for whom “projection” toward the future is constitutive of human being (Dasein), insofar as this is realized in concern (Sorge), which therefore projects human being toward its end, i.e., death, so that the “primary sense of existence” is the future and time then expresses being as that “totality” (Ganzheit) which is originally effected by concern (Sein und Zeit, Halle a. S. 1927, pp. 327 ff.). In this temporality structured by Sorge toward the future, the later Heidegger interprets the opening of the “sacred” (das Heilige), i.e., the becoming present (Anwesenheit) of the deity, which closes, as a fourth component, with earth, sky, and mortals — the “quadrate” (Geviert) of human being, which is thereby configured as a “remaining before God” (cf. the Darmstadt lecture: Bauen, Wohnen, Denken, Darmstadt 1952, pp. 76 ff.). This “opening” toward the deity man does not achieve through philosophical ontology, but rather through poetry and mysticism, in which for now the two original forms of “presence” of God to man are accomplished, so that all historical time stretches toward the future in expectation of a revelation of God that will save man from the anxiety of death (cf. Was ist Meta-physik?, Introduction to the 5th ed., Frankfurt a. M. 1949, p. 18. Also Brief über Humanismus, Bern 1947, pp. 101 ff.).
III. EVALUATION
As the structure of the temporal becoming of individual freedom, history eludes every reflective comprehension insofar as the “decision” of the individual, by definition, eludes every external inquiry, and in this sense it must be said that of the individual as a personThere is no history here, but at most merely “biography.” As the structural framework of the temporal becoming of the various peoples, the only history that places freedom at the center of this becoming is “sacred history,” according to the “line of salvation” (Heilslinie) which, from the Jewish revelation, leads to the Christian religion, in which, therefore, history is “contained” both before and after by a metahistory embracing the origin and the end of the world and of man within II. The conception of history in the ancient world, tied to cosmic processes, never attained the originality of the being of man, whereas modern thought has made humanity the absolute artificer of its own destiny; yet in the total reversal of the sign of the forces at work in history the outcome is the same, namely the loss of man as a single person who vainly seeks salvation from evil and from death that grips him in time. Absolute historicism, which excludes finality from history, represents the extreme form of the dispersal of the being of man and thus coincides with the denial of any understanding of history that transcends the empirical, 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 salvation from evil and liberation from the continuous terror of history can be awaited (Eliade). The philosophy of history cannot explain history because it lacks the unifying axis that embraces the temporal dimensions both of the entire human race and of the real complex of every individual, as is instead envisaged in the “becoming of salvation” (Heilsgeschichte) according to the Christian conception.
1387
**HISTORIA AUGUSTA — HISTORIOGRAPHY**
*Études sur l’Histoire Auguste*, Paris 1904; E. Dichl, s.V. in Pauly-Wissowa, VIII, cols. 2051–2120; N. H. Baynes, *The Historia Augusta, its Date and Purpose*, Oxford 1926. Other studies cited in N. I. Herescu, *Bibliographie de la littérature latine*, Paris 1943, pp. 353–55, to which is added W. Hartke, *Geschichte und Politik im spätantiken Rom; Untersuchungen über die Scriptores Historiae Augustae* (Klio Beiheft, 45), Leipzig 1940.