THE HUMAN BEING, GOD, AND HISTORY

CLYDE M. NABE Southern Ill inois Universi ty - Edwardsv i l le

To those of us living after Hegel, Marx and Darwin, history is seen as a

dominant force in and an aspect of what it means to be a human being. Ortega y Gasset tells us that the human being has no nature, what (s)he has

is a history. And history is viewed, at least in modern Western culture, as unidirectional. Some see our future gliding through our present into our

past. Others hold that we march irrevocably out of our past through our

present into our future. In either case, the past is seen as behind us, the

future as before us, and we ourselves are seen as moving irresistibly onward in our actions, and through our decisions.

This is at once a heady view and a disturbing one. We control, indeed create, our own histories. At the same time, what we chose to do yesterday,

and what our parents and others did and do influences and constrains our

possibilities now. We view ourselves as a strange mixture of determined

compulsions over which we have no control, and of the actions of our free wills for which we and we alone are responsible. I chose to study biology as

an undergraduate; therein I created part of the history which is my life. But

1 also thereby constrained the choices available to me today; I can not now reasonably choose to work as a mathematician. Being a historical creature is a challenging existence, but it carries with it certain unhappy correlates.

To see ourselves as imbedded in an historical existence is to see ourselves at the mercy of human history as a whole too, and not just of our personal

histories. I f part of our personal history includes being born in a small

country coveted by large empires, we find ourselves buffeted by the winds of change in international history. Being born in the sub-Saharan region of Africa in the 1970s puts us at the mercy of the want brought about by the drought in that area in that period of its natural history. To live in Germany in the 1930s as a Jew, or in South Africa in the 1970s as a black is to realize what being historical means. It means being vulnerable. Terrors and torture present themselves as a part of history.

lnt J Phil Rel 12:171-178 (1981) 0020-7047/81/0123-0171 $01.20. (�9 Martinus Ni jhof f Publishers, The Hague. Printed in the Netherlands'.

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This paper concerns itself with such questions about the relationship of human beings and history. We will examine various approaches human beings have used to deal with the terrors and torture of history. We will also study whether or not history has some redeeming qualities, in addition to its terrors. I will also argue that we must study how God relates to history if we are to fully understand our relationship to history. In examin- ing the possible roles of God in history, I want the term " G o d " to carry as little theological freight as possible. That is, I want to exclude here as few interpretations of the nature of the divinity as possible. We will examine those views which see God as standing aloof from both our personal histories and human history as a whole. We will also investigate views which see Cod as being intimately involved in history, including that view which holds that God only develops his divinity within history itself. In ap- proaching these topics, we will use as a starting-place Mircea Eliade's dis- cussion, in The Myth of the Eternal Return, of the human being's attempt to negate history. Through an evaluation of Eliade's view, my own under- standing of the relationships of God, the human being, and history will emerge.

II

The terrors of history may be dealt with by what Eliade calls the "meta- physical depreciation of history. ''1 On this view, one seeks to escape history and its terrors. This may be accomplished in a variety of ways; Eliade subsumes most religious systems under some such schema. Thus this view suggests that what the notion of the gods allows us to do is to lift ourselves out of history.

Eliade says that one way human beings seek to escape history is to perform periodic cultic acts. Through such acts, performed usually once a year, history is ended, and begun anew. By performing these acts, the human being imitates the primordial act of Creation; stronger than this, in these acts (s)he is present at and participates in a repetition of the cosmo- gony. Real value is seen as lying at a transcendent level. Human existence is meaningful only as a copy of that transcendence.

A second method of escaping the terrors of history is the method chosen by Indian religious systems. Such systems frequently use two notions to ex- plain (away) the terrors of history. The first of these is karma: present suf- fering is the result of earlier wrongdoing. Each of us goes through cycles of lives, carrying with us, and working off, our karma. Secondly, history itself is seen as cyclical. Everything is repeated; the beginning of a cycle is a golden age, which through history wears down and slowly decays. Even- tually, history is ended, and begins anew. According to Eliade, many

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Indians believe that when existence is viewed in this way, it is so frightening that we are awakened to the only real possibility for ending suffering. We see that we must not cling to existence itself. By a spiritual act, which may take many life times, we lift ourselves out o f the recurring cycles, i.e., we achieve Nirvana (non-existence).

Thirdly, Eliade points to a typical Iranian view. This is the belief in an eschatological end to history. That is, there will come a time at which an ekpyrosis will occur, and everything will be destroyed. Included with this notion is the idea of a judgment of the history which brought degeneration. Those who have not sinned " in history . . . . will know beatitude and eternity. ' '2 On this view then, history is escaped at its termination.

Finally, Eliade fits Jewish and Christian thought into this pattern too. He says that "Chris t iani ty translates the periodic regeneration of the world into a regeneration of the human individual. ' '~ We are to see the eternal nunc of the reign of God as already present. I f this view is taken, once again we escape history, for we live in the eternal now of God ' s kingdom, not in history.

These views depreciate history. The terrors of history are given center stage, leading to the abhorrence of history. The human being's creativity is expressed precisely in the at tempt to escape history in whatever form that a t tempt takes.

I I I

Eliade himself sees the human being as at the mercy of history, and thus he sympathizes with the a t tempt to escape it. I will now evaluate this view, and thereby uncover my own view of the relationship of human beings and history, and also of God and history.

The views which see history as inevitably filled with suffering, and as of no value in itself, misrepresent history. There is value in history, and these views leave this out of their accounts. I will discuss this point more fully later when I discuss the relationship of God (as the source of transcendent value) to history. For now I need only note that if a more adequate view of history is that it contains good as well as evil, and joy as well as suffering, it is not obvious that we should seek to escape it. Indeed, it might appear more likely that we should try to maximize the good in history.

Modern human beings certainly believe that they have a great deal to say about their own lives. Ours is the time of the " m o v e m e n t s " reaching back beyond the beginning of our century to the labor movement . We have seen the civil rights movement , the women 's liberation movement , and the gay liberation front. In the sixties, there was the movement to end the war in Viet Nam; in the seventies there are the ecological and anti-nuclear energy movements.

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These movements reflect the basic belief that we can control our own lives, i.e., that we can to some extent make our own history. And this phenomenon is not unique to Western culture; in the late 1960s it became obvious that Third World peoples were awakening to the possibilities of creating their own histories, instead of following in the wake of the industrialized world. Thus political liberation movements began in Third World nations; new nations were born almost.overnight throughout the world, and especially in Africa. Philosophies and theologies of liberation were discussed.

These views show no fear in the face of history. They reflect to one degree or another what Eliade calls the "historicist" view. This is an atti- tude characteristically found in contemporary western culture. It sees human creativity expressing itself primarily in the making of history, not in escaping it. While anti-historical views can be criticized, Eliade believes any view which values history can be criticized just as persuasively.

It i s . . . more and more doubt fu l . . , modern man can make his tory. . , history either makes itself (as the result of the seed sown by acts that occurred in the pas t . . , we will cite the consequences of the discovery of agricul ture. . . the Industrial Revolut ion. . . ) or it tends to be made by an increasingly smaller number of men . . . Modern man 's boasted freedom to make history is illusory for nearly the whole of the human race."

Thus Eliade sees this view as being naive, and I think justifiably so. For example, nearly a century and a half of attempts to achieve a Marxist society have not yielded persuasive evidence that human beings are capable of achieving such an ideal community. Stalinist terrors, the horrors of the Reign of Four, and Viet Nam's rape of Cambodia have not left us with much faith that Marxism can successfully remove the insensitive aliena- tions of modern life.

And at a more profound level, when we try to understand ourselves wholly in terms of the pattern of historical events, meaning eludes us. For as I suggested earlier, we are never completely in control of our own personal histories, nor of human history as a whole. Thus, history can appear random and capricious. The sudden death of our beloved; an earth- quake that destroys our home; the eruption of war just as we begin our professional careers - all of these are unforeseen, and uncontrollable, by us. Thus, history often forces us to think in terms of " i f only." If only we had worked a little harder; if only we had spent more money; if only we had answered that question some other way. Seen in this light, seeking meaning in history forces us to look behind us with regret, and forward with apprehension.

The historicist view sees history as containing promise and value in itself, and so does not misrepresent history. But it does misrepresent the human being's relationship to history. This view leaves us without meaning for our

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lives because it sees the human begin as completely immersed in his or her history. But human beings are not merely historical, in this sense. True, we are subject to the pressures, conventions and presuppositions of when we happen to live historically. But we are also able to adopt a critical stance on those conventions and presuppositions. And we are able to resist those pressures, and to recognize them for what they are, i.e., historical parochialisms. We need not look far for examples of such activities. Parents are painfully aware of their adolescent children's attempts to criti- cize and resist their historical milieu. And the role of the philosopher, the historian and the scientist demands that they develop an objective view of their subjective matter. The human being can transcend his or her historical position in a way that an animal can not transcend its environ- ment. It is pre-eminently in the act of reflection that the human being demonstrates his or her transcendence of history. He or she rises above (transcends) his or her history, not to another world, but to a recognition of another possible historical stance. We can deal with the terrors of history by taking time to reflect upon them, and to assess them.

We are limited in our success in achieving such a stance, to be sure. The particular stance we take to assess our historical milieu's presuppositions and attitudes is ever itself a historical position. It too is formed in part by when we appear historically. No medieval philosopher formed a critique of capitalism, and few contemporary philosophers argue for the morality of slavery. Under attack in the trenches, or in the face of a hurricane, we may not have much time to stand above the currents of change. But the fact that we never completely transcend historical position does not demonstrate that we do not transcend it at all. The human being is not merely immersed in his or her history. Rather, (s)he is an amphibian, living both " i n " and " o u t " of that history. And it is this ability to stand "outs ide" of one's historical position (i.e., one's transcendence) which provides the human being with the opportunity of finding meaning for his or her life as it is lived in history.

If a human being is to understand his or her life better, struggle with the meaning of both history and transcendence is necessary. These two aspects of our experience must be confronted in a dialogical manner. That is, it is through reflection on our ability to transcend our history, and on how that history informs, limits and structures our possibilities of transcendence, that we come to understand ourselves.

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IV

God too can be thought of as within history, or as outside of it. Eliade has shown us four ways in which the Transcendent can be viewed as other than in history. These views treat history as containing only suffering, with no participation in it by Transcendent Value. The difficulty with such views is that they lead to a divorce between the Transcendent and the world in which human beings irrevocably find themselves. Thus they would separate our daily existence, the only existence we know, from the Transcendent. Furthermore, such views overlook the fact that there is much that human beings value in this world. Such value reveals the Transcendent at work in

our historical lives. The touch of our beloved, our children's laughter, an hour spent with a friend, the growth of our gardens, a trip to the ocean: all occur in our historical lives. Were I not born where and when I was, I would not have known these particular joys. Each lovely day, each person I love, each pleasant moment is unique, and irrevocably historical; yet I value them as such. This fund of value discoverable in human lives must be accounted for, and none of the approaches which seek to escape history succeeds in doing this. Consider Eliade's four views again, in order: (1) my friendship with this person is not just an imitation of "real" friendship found only in a remote "transcendent" world; this friendship has its own unique historical components which themselves lend value to the friend- ship. For example, what I love in this friend of mine is his interest in auto- mobiles, not his "Curiosity" as some abstract Form. That interest makes him unique, and informs my friendship with him. Without that particular interest of his, our friendship would have a different value. Thus, it is his uniqueness which makes our friendship valuable in the particular way in which it is valuable. (2) To seek to dissolve this valued friendship into the nothingness of Nirvana is not just metaphysically to denigrate history, it is to denigrate the friendship itself. But the friendship does not involve only suffering. Suffering may play a part in it too; but there is much good in it. This second view simply sweeps that good aside, without accounting for it. (3) Eliade's Iranian view makes this experience secondary. On this view, real friendship can only be found in the glorification after the eschaton.

But my experience of this friendship is not that it needs to be purified; rather I come to understand and to value friendship only in the act of being involved in one. Friendship for us is the actual process of being involved in an ongoing, developing, changing relationship with another human being. It may be even better after an eschaton, but it is valuable here and now too. And this third view does not account for this, because it believes the Trans- cendent can only be found after history is over. (4) Lastly, I agree with Eliade's fourth view which recognizes the Transcendent to be present in our historical lives. I do not agree with it when it suggests that the Trans-

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cendent replaces history, instead of being somehow related to it. This again treats all of those historical concomitants of this friendship as of no value. I repeat what I said above; these historical particulars of this friendship are part of what makes this friendship valuable to me. That John is a friend to me is not valuable just because a "F r i end" is reliable, sub species aeternita- tis, but because this friend, John is reliable in this particular set of circum- stances. Thus, all of these views which make the transcendent external to history do not adequately explain the values we discover in our uniquely historical existences.

An alternative view sees God as identical with the historical process. This is the view of process theology, and of those who would find value only within history. The difficulty here runs in the opposite direction from the one which we have just discussed. History undeniably is filled with terrors. Faith in the historical social and political processes appears naive in the face of what actual human history reveals to us. The problem of suffering rises before us here with a vengeance. If God is identified with history, we are forced to explain his role in the metaphysical origins of the terrors of that history. If God is history, is he then acting in the holocaust?

To counter this criticism, it might be argued that there is more positive value to be found in history than disvalue, and that this is the reason that God unobjectionably may be seen as identical with history. But this is not entirely credible, in the face of our historical cultural experience. The Nazi holocaust, and the instantaneous blinding terror of Hiroshima and Naga- saki make us doubtful of this comparative judgment. In a century that has already witnessed 110,000,000 man-made deaths, 5 it seems premature to judge that good outweighs evil in human history. It is possible that we can now obliterate human culture, the human species, and perhaps even all of life through our various pollutions, including nuclear pollution. Reflecting

on such events and possibilities raises great doubt about the reliability of the premise. Thus, identifying God with history also turns out to be an in- adequate position.

We are led then to see that God's relationship to history must be neither one of complete transcendence, nor of complete immanence. That is, God is more than history, but at the same time God is not divorced from it. God can not be identified with all of history, but he does appear in history wherever value appears. Indeed, l would suggest that history is produced, at least in part, by the activity of God in and through human lives. This linear development (history) is the essential point at which occurs the inter- section of God 's action and the activity of human beings, or said another way, it is the intersection of our human lives with the Transcendent. History is not an accidental feature of our human nature then; it is in history that we fulfill our humanness, insofar as that humanness involves a relationship to the Transcendent. On my view then, God is at once Trans- cendent, and yet acting within, history.

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With this view, we are in a better position to understand our earlier dis- covery of the human being's relationship to history. For we can now see from where the human being's "amphibiousness" in relationship to history arises. This amphibiousness is one way in which the human being reflects divinity, i.e., it is one way in which the human being can be seen to be an imago Dei. We reflect the image of God both in our being part of history, and in our being able to transcend it.

V

I have argued that two views of the relationship of the human being to history are wrong. First, I have said that history is not just filled with suffering, so that our only hope of finding meaning for our lives is to escape that history. History contains positive values too, and thus is not merely to be seen as something to be escaped. I have also argued that the view that the human being is completely historical in the sense that (s)he is merely a creature of his or her historical milieu is in error. I have presented the view instead of the human being as essentially an amphibian in relation- ship to his or her particular historical milieu. The human being is capable of transcending his or her history by stopping to reflect upon, and to develop a critical stance toward, that history.

I have also argued that God can be viewed as neither wholly outside of history, nor wholly inside of it. Wherever value appears in history, God is present. And I have suggested that to see God as identical with history is to leave us with an irresolvable problem of evil. A more adequate view of God's relationship to history then is to see God as acting in it, but as not identical with it. This last recognition also leads us to understand better the human being's relationship to history. The latter relationship is a reflection of the former; i.e., through his analysis we achieve another understanding of the human being as an imago Dei.

NOTES

1. Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 115.

2. Ibid., p. 126. 3. Ibid., p. 129. 4. Ibid., p. 156. 5. Elliot, Gil. The Twentieth Century Book of the Dead quoted in Death: Current Perspec-

tives, edited by Edwin Shneidman (Palo Alto, Cal.: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1976), p. 118.