NOTE

THE CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY*

Under this somewhat mysterious title I would like to present a synthetic
and substantial description, more objective than personal, of the general
agreement which has been reached on this subject by European scholars
as the result of their work on it during the last few years. I do not intend
to go through the great historical civilizations in an attempt to discover
the laws of the rise and decline of the great historical cultures, empires,
and civilizations. Nor is it my intention to establish the relations, close or
distant, which may have existed between these civilizations before the
coming of the biblical revelation. Still less do I intend to study the develop-
ment and expansion of Christianity in the Mediterranean world, the
Western world, or the world in general. And it is even farther from my mind
to discuss the grave problems which arise from the meeting—whether it
lead to harmony or conflict—between Christianity and our social, political,
and cultural structures. There are masterly treatments of all these subjects
in English, too well known to need any mention here.1
None of the authors of these treatments, it seems to me, approaches our
subject with the same problematic and the same preoccupations as the
European authors. The latter look on it from the viewpoint of religious
philosophy—I might almost say theology. The most striking thing at first
glance about the recent writing on the subject is that this theme, which is
the focal point of the preoccupations of English, French, Swiss, German,
and Belgian thinkers today, interests philosophers more than historians, and
theologians more than philosophers. There is a reason for this, and it will
be clear in a moment. Of the historians, about the only one that I can
mention is Henri Marrou, Professor of Primitive Christianity at the Sor-
bonne and a specialist on St. Augustine, who is really a lay theologian.2
* Translated, with the kind permission of the Trustees, from the original French text
of the Philip Maurice Deneke Lecture, delivered at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, Feb. 23,
1950.
1
Cf. e.g., Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (abridged from six-volume edition
by D. C. Somervell; New York: Oxford, 1947), which traces the tragic crises of the various
civilizations; Christopher Dawson's profound books, like Progress and Religion (London:
Sheed and Ward, 1931) and Beyond Politics (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1939); Kenneth
Scott Latourette's dynamic panorama, A History of the Expansion of Christianity (7
volumes; New York: Harper, 1937-45); and a very recent work, whose point of view is
closer to the one we will take, Eric C. Rust's The Christian Understanding of History
(London: Lutterworth, 1947).
2
Henri Marrou, VAmbivalence du temps de Vhistoire chez s. Augustin (Montreal:
Institut d'Etudes MSdieVales, 1950).
419
420 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

Among the philosophers or historians of philosophy, I should mention

Raymond Aron and Jean Hyppolite, although their contributions have
been made much more by word of mouth than through their writings.3
Attention should likewise be directed to Jean Guitton, also a religious
philosopher and almost a theologian.4 The Jesuit Fessard should be men-
tioned as well; like Hyppolite, he is an authority on Hegel and follows him
to some extent.5 Finally we should not forget Jules Monchanin's remarkable
article on the concept of time in Hinduism and Christianity.6
Principally, however, it has been the theologians who have raised the
question; and they have tried to find an answer to it from the Catholic
point of view, the Protestant, and even the Orthodox.7 On the Protestant
side it is worth noting that the two theologians who are perhaps the most
influential on the continent, the "fraternal enemies" of dialectical theology,
Karl Barth of Basel and Emil Brunner of Zurich, have written on the
subject.8 The most prominent figure on the Protestant side, however, has
been the exegete of Strasbourg, Paris, and Basel, Oscar Cullmann, whose
book, Christ and Time, has exposed the intensely temporal and specifically
historical character of the vision of the world and destiny which is found in
the authors of the New Testament.9 On the Catholic side there is a great
number of names—French,10 Belgian,11 German,12 and Italian13—which
3
Raymond Aron, Introduction a la philosophie de Vhistoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1939);
Jean Hyppolite, "L'Existentialisme de Hegel, ,, Etudes germaniques (April-June, 1946).
4
Jean Guitton, Le temps et Vtternitt selon Plotin et saint Augustin (Paris, 1933).
5
Gaston Fessard, S.J., "Th6ologie et histoire, ,, Dieu vivant, 8 (1947), 37-65.
6
Jules Monchanin, "Le temps selon Phindouisme et le christianisme," Dieu vivant,
14 (1949), 109-22.
7
Cf. Nicholas Berdiaeff, Essai de mttaphysique eschatologique (Paris: Aubier, 1946),
and the last chapters of Serge Boulgakof's book on the Incarnation, Du Verbe incarnS,
tr. by A. Andronikov (Paris, 1943).
8
Karl Barth, Die Theologie und die Kirche (Munich, 1928); Gotteserkenntnis und
Gottesdienst (Zurich, 1938); Emil Brunner, "La conception chrStienne du temps," Dieu
vivant, 14 (1949), 15-30.
9
Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time (London: SCM Press, 1951).
10
Louis Bouyer, "Christianisme et eschatologie,,, Vie intellectuelle, XVI (1948), 6-38;
H. M. F6ret, O.P., VApocalypse de Saint Jean: Vision chretienne de Vhistoire (Paris:
Corr£a, 1943); M. I. Montuclard, O.P., "La mediation de PEglise et la mediation de
Phistoire," Jeunesse de VEglise, 7; Jean Danielou, S.J., "Christianisme et histoire,"
Etudes, 254 (1947), 166-84; "Existentialism and the Theology of History/' Month, I
(1949), 66-70; "The Christian View of History," ibid., I I (1949), 68-72; "Christianity
and History," Downside Review, LXVIII (1950), 182-90; "The Conception of History in
the Christian Tradition," Journal of Religion, X X X (1950), 171-79; "The Meaning of
History," Month, VI (1951), 41-44.
11
Roger Aubert, "Discussions r£centes autour de la thSologie de l'histoire," Collectanea
 CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 421

should be mentioned, but I cannot pass over a little book which, though no
longer new, is still drawing attention because of its enthusiasm and pro-
fundity. I mean Fr. Laberthonniere's Uldealisme grec et le rSalisme chr$tien;u
it is only very recently that the seeds of thought sown by that book have
borne their fruit.
The names of some of the most influential modern exegetes and theo-
logians are proof enough that the problem has stirred the souls and minds
of our day. And it is highly significant that, no matter what point of the
compass they come from—philosophers as well as historians, exegetes as
well as systematic theologians, whether they be Catholic, Protestant, or
Orthodox—all these authors, despite their disagreements (and they are by
no means negligible), are unanimous in their admission that Christianity
alone has given and can give a meaning to history, and that outside Judeo-
Christian revelation or Islam (which is to some degree a Christian heresy)
there is no philosophy of history. They admit that there may be a physics
of history, which analyses its laws and discovers its constant elements,
but there is no progress—we can say that time does not exist either in the
destiny of the human race or in the destiny of individuals. Even more, pure
philosophy, metaphysics, Greek as well as Indian, knows nothing of be-
coming, time, evolution. Independently of the fact of Christianity, there is
no history in the objective sense, that is to say, there is no direction in the
unfolding of events or of historical structures. Independently of Christian
thought, even though it may be at times distorted or actually denied, there
is no historical knowledge which can be raised to the level of a philosophy
Mechliniensia, XVIII (1948), 139-49; Leopold Malevez, S.J., "La philosophic chretienne
du progres," Nouvelle revue theologique, LIX (1937), 377-85; "La vision chretienne de
l'histoire, I: Dans la thSologie de Karl Barth," ibid., LXXI (1949), 113-34; "La vision
chretienne de l'histoire, I I : Dans la th£ologie catholique," ibid., LXXI (1949), 244-64;
"Deux theologies catholiques de l'histoire," Bijdragen der Nederlandse Jezuieten, X
(1949), 225-40; Gustave Thils, Theologie des realites terrestres, II: TMologie de Vhistoire
(Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1949).
12
H. Frankenheim, "Christliche Schau der Geschichte," Der katholische Gedanke
(Minister, 1947), pp. 62-73; H. Rahner, "Grundziige katholischer Geschichtstheologie,"
Stimmen der Zeit, CXL (1947), 408-27; "La th6ologie catholique de rhistoire," Dieu
vivant, 10 (1948), 91-116. We can also mention: Th. Haecker, Der Christ und die Geschichte
(Leipzig: Hegner, 1933); H. D. Wendland, Geschichtesanschauung und Geschichtsbewusstsein
im Neuen Testament (Gottingen, 1938); Eric Seeberg, "Geschichte und Geschichtsan-
schauung dargestellt in altchristlichen Geschichtsvorstellungen," Zeitschrift fiir neu-
testamentliche Wissenschaft, LX (1941).
13
Petruzelli, II valore delta storia (Rome, 1939); L. Alfonsi, "II problema della storia
negli antichi scrittori cristiani," Humanitas, 11 (1946); F. Battaglia, 77 valore della storia
(Bologna, 1948); F. Bartolone, 77 problema della storia del cristianesimo (Messina, 1948).
14
L. Laberthonniere, VIdealisme grec et le realisme chrStien (Paris, 1904).
422 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

of history or in which can be found the meaning of history. That is certainly

an imposing and astonishing affirmation. It is a statement which should be
tempered and made more precise, but I state it bluntly because—whether
it be right or wrong—it is the unanimous conclusion of the authors whose
names I have just mentioned.
Once this thesis is established (and the proof will itself indicate the
limits of this surprising statement and show its precise bearing), we must
in a following part (which will be quite brief and schematic) point out a
basic lack of accord in this apparent unanimity. The point here is this:
Not only is Christianity historical, but since together with Judaism which
prepares for it, and Islamism and Marxism which both depend upon and
distort it (the first along lines definitely religious; the latter in the direction
of an atheism which pretends to free itself and to surpass the Christian
conception of history by secularizing it)—since Christianity is the only
religion, the only body of thought which is essentially historical, does it
thereby follow that the Christian, because of his transcendent vocation,
must labor to shape the course of human history and thus "integrate"
himself with this transitory world; or must he on the contrary remain
indifferent to human progress that apparently has nothing in common with
his supernatural vocation? The first view is called the Incarnationist view:
Christ by His Incarnation, prolonged in the Church, has consecrated the
universe through and through, and all its human and cosmic values. The
other view is called the eschatological view: the transcendence of religion
is such that it can do little to achieve or help human progress.
Before answering that question, let us try to show how Christianity
alone possesses a philosophy of history and a sense of the temporal.
Neither Greek philosophy nor the idealist philosophies which stem from
it have any sense of time, of events, of history, of a destiny for either the
human race itself or for the individual. Greek philosophy is dominated by
the idea of law, and the "idea" is something fixed and eternal. While not a
mere appearance or image as in Indian philosophies, "becoming" is still
only a participation in the idea, and time is qualitatively different from
eternity, of which it is but the degraded reflection, the weak image. Eternity
is ever contemporaneous with time and entirely present to its each suc-
cessive instant. On this point Aristotle's definition of time is most charac-
teristic: Kal yap 6 XP^VOS 8OK€L elvai KVKXOS TLS. "Time is a cycle"; it is
the doctrine of the eternal return. There is nothing really new under the
sun; nothing has an absolute beginning, nothing ever ends, because all
begins anew. Nothing is decisive, nothing is ever finally achieved. And
since the idea has an inexorable necessity and there is never any escape
 CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 423

from the idea, there can be neither true liberty, choice, nor anything
gratuitous. Necessity (avaynrj) is master of all. This cyclic conception of
time which governs the process ("devenir"), more apparent than real, of
the cosmos and the universe, also controls the "becoming" in that part of
ourselves which at first glance would seem to escape the avayicr): the \pvxh,
the soul. It too is subject to the perpetual return, a perpetual re-beginning.
That is the doctrine of metempsychosis.
Such is the feature of a metaphysics which starts from the observation
of matter, reduces psychology to a kind of physics, seeks to contemplate
the eternal laws of motion and thereby tends to discard the genuine move-
ment which is progressive and has a definite direction. The consequences in
the fields of ethics and literature are evident. Greek thought is penetrated
throughout with an intellectual determinism, pessimism, and individualism.
With individualism, because there is no continuity of one person with
another, and society itself is nothing more than the translation in this
world of the eternal laws that result from the combination of unchangeable
ideas. And with pessimism, because nothing ever comes to term, nothing is
of any real utility, and the supreme happiness consists in an escape from
this fiction which is time to the contemplation, through knowledge, of the
eternal laws. Salvation lies in flight—flight achieved through knowledge.
Let us note that for Greek philosophy not only is the idea itself eternal
but so too is its limitation, its negation; matter also is eternal. And the
nearest that Hellenic thought ever came to the notion of creation was the
demiurge imposing order, that is to say, reason or idea, upon the flux of
the multiple.
In such a philosophy of the eternal and in a religion where salvation is
found wholly in the contemplation of an idea, there can be no history in the
full sense of the term. It is remarkable that no Greek historian has ever
been preoccupied with rehearsing the history of even a nation or a people,
let alone that of humanity at large. Herodotus never goes beyond anecdote
or chronicle, as has been shown by Collingwood. And Thucydides, for
technical reasons no doubt, but probably also because he was a philosopher
and profoundly Greek, never thought of describing anything more than a
brief period of the life of Greece. By way of objection one might cite the
Greek epics, the Iliad and Odyssey. But here again we are given the tale
of an individual or of a small group of individuals rather than the history
of a nation or of two nations in conflict with each other. Following the
tragic events depicted for us by Homer nothing has really changed in the
world. And I believe it is Aristotle who said that there is nothing to prevent
the Iliad from happening again. It is apparent, then, that nothing is ever
424 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

decisive and that the singular event is of no significance. Of course there are
the Greek myths on the origin of humanity but these are much more in the
nature of fables with a temporal moral, and representations of permanent
moral conflicts and perpetually recurring situations, such as those wherein
man's vfipus (pride) arouses the jealousy of the gods of Olympus, rather
than genuine descriptions of a destiny so definitive as never again to repeat
itself. Or if there should chance to be any real change, it is always for the
worse; if there is any movement, it is not progress but decline. It has been
remarked that antiquity has always seen its golden age in retrospect; the
further on man moves, the worse his plight becomes. His perfection is
found in a "return" to his origins, never in a forward march. The modern
idea, often wholly secular, which sees progress in the future—even a sheerly
material future—would have been impossible without the "Christian fact."
All philosophies have inherited this tendency to dichotomize the idea
and the temporal, and in their desire to rationalize and to sift out the laws
of history they have as a matter of fact tried to discard the event, which
as part and parcel of the airupov (indefinite) cannot be an object of science
and is consequently without true value. The most ingenious attempt along
these lines is undoubtedly Hegel's dialectic of history. Here we have an effort
to rationalize the irrational, to insert necessity into the contingent, and to
find liberty itself in the most absolute determinism. In reality, it amounts
to the actual denial of history.
Such is the picture, very sketchily drawn, that we find in the writers
whom I am now interpreting. It would be easy to show that Hindu phi-
losophies move in an atmosphere which, if not exactly similar, is at least
analogous. There too the world is but an appearance, and time a cycle;
there too souls undergo successive reincarnations; there too salvation is
sought in an escape from time and history. Nothing that ever happens is
important; nothing ever really happens; nothing begins, nothing ends.
Personally, I think that we must correct this picture which is somewhat
one-sided. To me it seems certain that the Roman world had some apprecia-
tion of what we call history. Granted that the Iliad and the German epics
are not genuine epopees involving a race, much less humanity itself, yet
the Aeneid of Virgil is a national epic in which the temporal factor comes
into play and which has a meaning that carries over to the empire
of Augustus and which concerns the destiny of the whole inhabited world
(oUovnevri). From the beginning of the poem the end is foreseen, and this
end itself is, in the author's thought, the beginning of a new expansion.
Likewise, if Greek art presents us with an ideal type of beauty, a "canon,"
that is, a law of aesthetics, Roman art has created the portrait; it has, in
 CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 425

its faces with their strongly-marked features, delineated individual destinies

in plastic form. And if Greek philosophy was ignorant of the "person"—in
Greek the word signifies only a mask, an appearance, a fiction—Roman law
gave life to the concept and to the reality. But I would not even dare to say
here that the exception confirms the rule, for the Roman is not a philosopher;
he is not concerned with ideas; he is entirely oriented towards action. On
this account a Christian thinker can be of the opinion that the mediation
of the Romans was providential and necessary to assure the fusion, in our
Christian West, of Greek idealism and biblical realism.
We shall remember, then, that philosophical thought—Eastern as well as
Western—when left to itself, is incapable of integrating time and of dis-
covering the meaning of history.
The situation is quite different with biblical revelation, which is not a
metaphysic but essentially a history. It is not concerned with an idea but
with life. It seeks to penetrate the meaning, not of nature and its laws,
but of man and his destiny. We are here in a radically different world,
faced by concepts, or, if you prefer, by existential categories that are almost
incapable of being incorporated into Greek philosophical thought or Hindu
mysticism: linear time, creation, the meaning of the destiny of the race
and of the individual, the promise, prophecy, providence, the event, and
finally faith which always implies a relation to past, present, and future.
Time is no longer cyclical but linear. There is a beginning in the true sense:
creation; and there is an end in the true sense: the Parousia, which is not
the denial of time but the fulness and consummation of time. Together with
the cosmos time is born. Brunner has observed in this connection that by
the power of his religious intuition Augustine has here anticipated Einstein
in linking the extension of the material world with temporal succession.
Creation is truly an absolute beginning, even of matter. Above all, there is
at the heart of the biblical revelation this history of the origins of humanity,
this Genesis; there is at the other end of the Bible the Apocalypse, an-
nouncing the end of time. There is this fact, that God is concerned with the
destiny of humanity and directs it. Providence is truly a irpovoia, a thought
which foresees (the prefix is temporal); it is not only this universal law
immanent to the cosmos, the idea of necessary sequence; it is a value which
supposes a sovereign Liberty that concerns itself with, and orients itself
towards, other liberties. For a Plotinus, providence is quite an inferior
function, belonging to the Universal Soul, the third and last of the divine
hypostases; for the Judeo-Christian revelation, it is an attribute of God, of
the Absolute. Cullmann has shown how the very vocabulary of the New
Testament was penetrated with words indicating time: the hour, the day,
426 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

the opportune moment (/catpos), the moment for a decision, a choice;

alccv, a word we would be tempted to translate as "eternity," but which is
something quite different. In biblical revelation the opposition is not
between a "here below" and a "beyond," but between a "before" and an
"after." Alchp OVTOS and aiw neXXcov, the present age, the age to come.
Morphology itself is here revealing; think of the whole metaphysic of
becoming and of destiny that is implied in such words as providence,
^destination, prophecy. God Himself is not above time, indifferent to
time and history, but before the beginning of time and after the end of time.
It is not without reason that Genesis and the Prologue of St. John both
begin with the same temporal words: In the beginning God created; in the
beginning was the Word. God is, in both directions, beyond this straight
line represented by time; He prolongs this straight line by a dotted line
that extends indefinitely a parte ante and a parte post. Furthermore, God
even breaks into history, from which the Pure Act of Aristotle, the Idea of
the Good of Plato, and the One of Plotinus carefully remained apart in
their majestic and immobile indifference. Actually, we are dealing with two
different conceptions of God. It is Laberthonniere's merit that he stressed
this point strongly. Cullmann contents himself with the remark that the
Bible is concerned only marginally with the intimate life and eternal being
of God; God, as it were, would exist only in the degree in which He would
manifest Himself in history, by a revelation either of word or, especially, of
action. This, it seems to me, is an incomplete view. For by the logic of this
conception God, in His innermost nature, would be, in a way, conditioned
by time. Moreover, it is certain that the Jewish revelation already speaks
to us of absolute attributes of God, such as His sanctity, His unicity, His
transcendence. And as for the Christian revelation, is not its very substance
the revelation of the interior being, the interior life, of God—through
temporal constructions, of course, but nonetheless of a triune God, whether
one speaks of it as above time with the Greeks, or before and after time
according to the so-called Judeo-Christian conception?
It is quite true that the Christian and Jewish God is not simply the
prime immovable mover of Aristotle or his self-thinking thought, a faceless
God. Neither is He the high point of a pyramid of ideal forms resting in the
heaven of intelligible realities; nor is He the dialectical residue of a flight
of the mind from multiplicity to unity. He is the living God, living in
Himself and revealing Himself in life. He is the God of Abraham, of Isaac,
and of Jacob, the God who intervenes in the destiny of the human race, of
the Chosen People, of the flock of Israel; the God of the Promise made of
old and prepared in the course of the present and which will, in the future,
 CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 427

see inevitable fulfillment. He is the God of decisions, of free choices, a God

who changes the order of the world. He is above all, for the Christian, God
who has become Incarnate, that is to say, who shares our temporal con-
dition, who, like us, is born, lives, and dies, to live again—not several times
but once only and with a definite and perfect life. It is, then, not merely
the conception of time, linear in the one case and cyclic in the other, which
distinguishes philosophy, the work of reason, from the Judeo-Christian
religion. Rather it is the conception of God Himself, which the Judeo-
Christian religion has as a result of an historical revelation of a living God
who has Himself a sort of history both in Himself and in His actions.
Just as God is the Word, that is, dabar, "act," and consequently acts in
history through a succession of wonderful signs or miracles, a succession of
absolute, free, unique, and unforeseeable initiatives, so also God is the
Word in the second sense of that term. Not only does He make history,
but, as Word or Expression, He also interprets history. This interpretation
of history is prophecy; it is that which allows history to have a meaning
for our intelligence. And the response to prophecy, that is, the historical
word of God, throwing light on history's direction—that is faith. The three
theological virtues—faith, hope, and charity—have each of them a temporal
connotation. Faith rests upon a past promise; hope tends to the future,
waits for the realization of this promise; and charity is that flower of faith
working always in the present to hasten the realization of the promise made
to faith and promised to hope. Fr. F6ret has noted that the only religions
based on faith are the religions where revelation is inseparable from history:
Judaism, Christianity, and Islamism.
It is easy to understand, therefore, why this religion that is so eminently
historical substitutes for the pessimism and individualism of philosophy an
atmosphere of optimism and an acute sense of social and traditional values
along with the primacy of free choice and, in the last analysis, of grace.
Optimism is founded on the conviction that God concerns Himself with
us, that God directs the destiny of the race and of individuals towards an
end which is marked with the seal of the definitive and the perfect. More-
over it is through a heritage received and transmitted within the collectivity
of the chosen people of God that this promise is transmitted and that
omnipotence works in history. For the Greek, salvation is possible only by
a flight beyond time and duration; for the Jew and the Christian, salvation
happens in history and through history. This optimism is even more startling
when we recall that biblical revelation professes that it is by the fault of but
one man, by an event that for him also is unique and irreversible and forever
destined to mark humanity, that our human race is born, lives, and dies in
428 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

sin and is, on the first level of its being, delivered over to the Prince and
powers of this world.
But man knows that, if he is given up to sin, it is God the Savior who
delivers him from sin with a sovereignty for good more powerful than the
sovereignty of the devil and the flesh for evil. He believes in God's ultimate
victory, in himself and in the world, over this negation of God which is sin.
It is not avayicri which weighs man down under misfortune and sin; it is
not a flight from his human condition which delivers him from sin. No,
man's sin is free and the deliverance which comes to him from God is the
fruit of an election, of a love, of a predilection, i.e., of a gratuity, I might
almost say of a caprice. While the Platonic fall of souls takes place outside
of time, in an ideal and intemporal pre-existence, and according to a "law,"
and while salvation for Plato and Platonists consists in an escape to the
beyond, biblical sin and redemption are situated in time, constitute a
destiny, and, far from suppressing history, transform it. It is the ixtravoia
of man and the human race.
Within this historical revelation, made by the miraculous divine action
and expressed by promise and prophecy, a revelation common to Judaism
and Christianity, what is the specific and distinguishing character of the
latter? For both religions time is linear, destiny is a life, and God is a living
God. For both time has a beginning and an end and an intermediate period.
Both recognize a threefold division: before creation, from creation to the
Parousia, after the Parousia or the end of time; also a twofold division: this
world and the world to come. The only difference—but it is a capital one—
is in the position occupied by the center, or point of gravity, of this line of
salvation. For the Jews this center coincides with the Parousia. It is uniquely
in the future. Judaism is only a messianism and its only fundamental
virtue is hope. For the Christian the center is in the middle of the second
period. It does not coincide with the end of the intermediate period but it
cuts it in half; it divides the present age of humanity into the part before
Christ and the part after Christ. For Judaism the future alone lights up
the present; for the Christian it is the past, gathered up and always actual
in the present, which by prolonging itself lights up the future and permits
us to know the meaning of history even before we have arrived at the end
of history. One event, decisive, capital, unique, lights up the whole line of
salvation—the event of the Incarnation. In a certain sense Christ is the
end. After Him there is no further decisive event; victory and salvation are
virtually but definitively acquired: all that remains is to profit by it. Thus
the date of the return of Christ, the date of the Parousia, is of minor im-
portance; it matters little when Christ returns, for He has already come.
 CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 429

The Christ who dominates history is perhaps the Christ of the Parousia,
but this Christ is only a reflection of the resurrected Christ of the eternal
Easter.
For the philosopher and for the historian Christianity's claim to see in
the Incarnation the unique fact par excellence is folly and scandal. How,
then, can an anecdote, the life and death of a Galilean Jew, be the center
of history? Why should this fact, this strictly individual fact, hold a privi-
leged place? How can one center the history of all civilization and of all
humanity around the thirty years of Jesus of Nazareth, which besides
ended with a resounding failure? And yet right there you have the very
heart of the Christian faith, but it is a. faith with which we are dealing, not
historical science or philosophical speculation. History can doubtless reveal
the influence of this individual destiny over an entire section of human
destiny, but it will always refuse to recognize that Jesus is unique in the
sense that faith understands Him to be so, and that He is the end of history.
Raymond Aron, in his book on the philosophy of history, has noted that
for the pure historian history cannot have meaning, because, in order to
discover its direction, one would have to be situated at the term of the
historic evolution. It is only at the end of the world—if this expression
makes any sense—that we shall be able to know the guided virtualities that
it developed in the course of its becoming. But precisely the Christian does
know, because he has the faith, that with Jesus we have entered into the
"last age of the world," that He is truly the end, and consequently that, as
soon as He inserted Himself into our becoming, our history acquired a
meaning. Before Him, everything centers about Him, prepares for Him,
announces Him; and after Him who is the Unique, the incarnate presence
of God radiates within our universe and within historical time. The whole
of human destiny converges on Christ—from the many to the One—and
then expands Christ—from the One to the many.
This expansion of Christ, this drive towards the fulness of humanity and
of the world in Christ, takes place in time and through history. It is the
time of the Church: the period of tension, between a past that is always
present, and a future already radically present, but to be realized pro-
gressively. It is in this period of tension that the Church builds herself up
and the Christian lives his life. Here we find ourselves confronted by two
temptations, each of which would, in its own way, try to suppress the
tension that is proper to the period situated between the Christ of Easter
and the Christ of the Parousia. The one would "absolutize" the past, the
other the present. The first is the temptation natural to the Protestant who
strives, by a sort of simultaneity, to get back to the beginnings, to make
430 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

himself by faith a contemporary of Christ. Hence the zurilck zum Altertum

(back to antiquity) of Luther and that anguish of Kierkegaard to find Christ
anew, that exclusive cult of the Bible, that refusal to admit that it is in-
serted and prolonged in tradition. On the other hand, Catholicism (I do
not intend, by this term, to exclude the Orthodox, any more than I mean
to include Anglicanism or Episcopalianism in the term "Protestantism")
has the tendency to absolutize the present. It puts tradition above the Bible,
or rather it inserts the Bible, as a privileged moment, within tradition
which gives to it a Christ who is perpetually present and acting. When you
think of the tranquil assurance of the Catholic who believes that Christ
continues to speak to him, now as ever, through the councils of His Church,
still directs him through His bishops, is and remains with him through the
sacraments—especially through the sacrament of his "real presence," you
can understand the anguish of Protestantism, which despairs of ever being
able to recapture this physical presence of the historic Christ whom it
seeks to know, and with whom it craves a sort of immediate contact. You
can understand the almost scandalous optimism of the Catholic who knows
that Christ is always with him, through the Church, His Mystical Body—
prolongation of the Incarnation. But this optimism does not imply laziness.
For the Church knows that she is called "to complete what is wanting to
the Passion of Christ," to capitalize on the victory of her Head in the
individual destinies of her members. There is a third attitude, an unchristian
one, which looks exclusively to the future, which deems itself able to surpass
the past and the present that is Christ and expects everything from the
future. It is, for example, the attitude of Marxism, that materialistic
messianism that has laicized Christian hope. For Marxism Christ is only a
stopover from which to pass beyond, a dialectical moment of the historical
becoming. It is in a sense a revival of the Jewish idea that puts humanity's
center of gravity in the future. It is the negation of the unicity and finality
of Christ. However, between Judaism and Marxism there is this tremendous
difference: Judaism awaited the salvation of divine liberty, while Marxism
envisages salvation at the end of a necessary chain of revolutions. The
avayKt) and determinism of Greek philosophy are introduced anew; the
Judeo-Christian revelation of progress is rationalized. But the Marxist
dialectic of history could arise only in a Judeo-Christian climate. It is a
religion but a religion without God.
Such, in its essential traits, is the Christian philosophy of history, the
only philosophy of history, really a theology of history which the authors,
whose names I cited at the beginning of this paper, have set forth with a
striking unanimity.
 CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 431

We should point out their divergences. The most essential bears on the
duty of the Christian in face of present realities. I shall say only a word
about this. Two theologies of action and of the Christian attitude are here
opposed to one another. The first can be called "eschatological"; it claims
that the Christian can and, in a certain measure, ought to disinterest
himself in culture and in human progress. The final reason for this position
is the incommensurability of the transcendence of revelation, pure gratuity
passively received. There is no Christian humanism. The figure of the
world passes; it is ephemeral. At first glance, many affirmations of the New
Testament tend in this direction and invite us, following the word of the
Epistle to the Hebrews, to be here only as "strangers and travellers." The
extreme form of this conception is that given by K. Barth, but it also
appears in more than one Catholic author, such as Louis Bouyer and Jean
Danielou, who insist on the rupture introduced by the Incarnation, which
is the Cross and laceration. Others (Incarnationalists), in greater number,
especially on the Catholic side—and I range myself among them—think
that the Christian cannot be indifferent to natural values, to human
progress; they believe that the Christian has not only the right but also the
duty, and therefore the possibility, of working with all his forces for the
construction of a better world, the natural substructure of a world spirit-
ualized by grace. He has confidence in reason, in thought, in human action,
inserted in Christ, and the prolongation of His action in the unfolding of
time and in the extension of space. I believe that in the New Testament
there are elements which support this conception of a theology of the
Incarnation prolonged by the action of the Christian in the bosom of the
Church of Christ. Before all else the appeal addressed to Christians to
build the Body of Christ, the Church, a society not only divine but human.
By the Incarnation Christ has reconciled us with our "human condition"
and invites us to make of this world a real anticipation, a beginning of the
world to come. This is possible because the grace of God transforms us
within and because the charity of God radiates in us and through us in
order to ameliorate the lot of our fellow men, all men. The eighth chapter
of the Epistle to the Romans expresses the formidable idea that the material
world itself participates in the hope of the children of God and will partake
in their lot of resuscitation by a spiritualization of itself. I believe that in
this line of thought one must say that all technological progress, all the
conquests of science, all the expressions of the human in the arts and in
letters, all social progress will forever remain inscribed in the body of man,
that body which in and through the Body of Christ is promised to the
Resurrection. The cosmos itself, which is like the body of the body of man
432 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

and of the Christian, is therefore summoned to a glorified transformation.

This, it seems to me, justifies a moral of complete commitment in all human
tasks that are properly human and that are in store for humanity. The
Christian cannot disinterest himself in the world, because this world will
disappear only to be transformed into "new heavens and a new earth," the
natural and necessary milieu of its spiritualized and resuscitated body. The
insertion of the Christian into the world, his duty to contribute to the
march of progress, appear to me to be the logical consequence of this phi-
losophy of history, which proclaims that Christ is the center of history, that
He gives it its meaning, that He is forever working within it in the eternal
present of His Incarnation continued in and through the Church.
VInstitut Catholique, Paris PAUL HENRY, S.J.