What is history? In one sense, history could just be the accumulated facts of natural and human events since the beginning of the universe. In this sense, there would be a history of physics, a history of chemistry, a history of geology, a history of biology and a history of animal life on earth; all culminating in “human” history. This last history would be neatly separated into two categories: “pre-history,” pertaining to human history before the invention of writing, and the “history of civilization,” all those facts that come after writing, whereby we gain more direct access to the mental life of those who came before us right now.
However, taken in this simple sense, even the most exhaustive collection of facts about the past, be it about the early stages of the universe’s expansion, the life cycle of the Jurassic-age Diplodocus, or late-Capitalist era immigration policy in technologically advanced western nations, would tell us very little about what history itself is. It would also say little about why history matters. And so it is another of mankind’s inevitable questions to ask not only what is historical, but also how should we think about history and whether or not there is a correct, or better, view of history.
A Word about The Word “History”
Some theologians appropriate two German words to talk about two aspects of history: Historie and Geschichte. Peter Hasbrouck and J.J. Scott write about these two approaches to history:
Historie … refers to persons or events that are external or objective and can be verified by acceptable means of historical inquiry… Geschicthe refers to internal, nonverifiable significance ascribed to a historical person or event, which cannot be demonstrated by historical inquiry and may or may not be true.
An example of historische (the adjectival form) inquiry would be the time, location, and various mundane details surrounding Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon. The geschichtliche aspect of that event would be its meaning for the Roman civilization of Caesar’s own time as well as its meaning for western civilization more broadly, and every social development in between its actual occurrence and the present day. The historische component is, for this reason, significantly easier to determine than the geschichtliche component, which is, in many ways, an act of interpretation.
Another way to put this is “Historie” refers to brute facts, what we can know (or reasonably believe) happened. “Geschichte” refers to what those facts, taken together, may actually mean or signify at a more profound level. The meaning of an event is not the event itself. There is a subjective component to any Geschichte, although it is not purely subjective. It relies on an objective base. This is how most people, and most scholars, understand and do history. It is a rather natural act for us, one that itself is pregnant with theological significance.
However, there is a view of history I will not deal with here. This view presupposes something that the three views in this article do not, namely, that history is nothing more than brute facts. Or, better said, that there is no Geschichte to any Historie, and, as such, that all historical events are intrinsically meaningless. This very postmodern view of history will be set aside for another time, although I have dealt with aspects of it here. Each of the views below instead presuppose that there are both knowable facts of history and that those facts have meaning. Although, as I will argue, only one of the three views has a correct sense of both facts and meaning.
The Three Views of History
The three views that see history as meaningful are as follows: first, there is a view that I will call the “recurrent view.” This is the view that history, all the way back to the beginning of the universe, is an endless cycle of creation, sustainment, annihilation and then re-creation. It has been held by many ancient and even some modern people.
The second view is the “progressive” view of history. This view also has some ancient adherents, but, in general, is a particularly modern sensibility. The progressive view states that history is constantly advancing to some pre-determined, or quasi-determined, culmination point.
Finally, there is what I will simply call the “biblical” or “revelational” view of history. This is the view that God has revealed to us, in part but not in whole, not only what history is but how history will play out. On this view there are features of both of the other two, of recurrence and progression, but history itself cannot be reduced to either of these. I will further argue that this was Jesus’ view of history and, as such, should also be the view of every faithful Christian.
#1 The Recurrence View of History
The recurrence or cyclical view of history goes at least as far back as the ancient Greek stoics, who believed that the universe itself came into being, existed for a while, went out of being (in a fiery conflagration), and then started all over again. The classicist R.W. Sharples articulated this view as such:
Periodically the whole world turns to fire, in a ‘conflagration’ (ekpurôsis) which is not so much a destruction as an apotheosis: the whole world becomes, in the fullest sense, God or Zeus….Seneca … uses Zeus’ resting at this time as an analogy for a wise man’s withdrawing into his own thoughts in time of misfortune; the idea of God withdrawing was already present in Plato … and recalls the Sphere of the Presocratic Empedocles …. Perhaps it is at this time that the Stoic God enjoys the tranquillity which, as we shall see below, the Epicurean gods always enjoy.
The fire then goes out (presumably because the moisture on which it feeds has all been used up), and turns to water, but Zeus remains behind as a spark in the water containing in himself the ‘seminal rational principles’ (spermatikoi logoi) of all things in the future world …, which then develops in exactly the way it did before, history repeating itself in endless cycles.
As Sharples points out, this idea of cosmic recurrence was already to be found in Plato, as well as the Epicureans:
Once again, for all the differences, there is a certain similarity between Stoic and Epicurean theories; for Epicurean world-systems in the infinite universe have their fixed life-cycles too.
Sharples, Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics, Chapter 3
While later Stoics tried to amend this doctrine of recurrence to include variety among successive universes, the Stoic view of immanent, rational causation hardly allowed for this. As such, most recurrence views of history are entirely deterministic. In other words, on this conceptualization of history, literally all events: all natural, all human and all “divine” acts, repeat themselves exactly over and over again, without end. Recurrence views, therefore, tend to be fatalistic:
from Chrysippus himself we have ‘(Fate is) a certain natural connected ordering of all things, one group of things following on and involved with another from eternity, such a weaving-together allowing no avoidance’.’ [i.e., variance]
Sharples, Chapter 3
And,
The chain of causes, which is fate, is identified with providence and with Zeus … reasonably enough, for Zeus is after all present in each thing, making it what it is and thus causing it to have the effects on other things that it does. Everything that happens is simply the inexorable unfolding of the plan present in Zeus at the start of each world-cycle.
Sharples, Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics, Chapter 3
Notice here that the eternal unfolding plan is present in Zeus (god) himself. This pantheist conception ensures that even the divinity itself is bound to unfold in a certain, specified and fatalistic way. There is no freedom whatsoever on this view, even for the gods or the supreme god. This is quite different, as we will see later, than the biblical view of God, who is absolutely free (sort of).
Centuries later, Friedrich Nietzsche, himself a Greco-phile, would adopt this fatalistic view of history, calling it “The eternal return.” Nietzsche, unlike Chryssipus and the early Stoics, however, turned it into a litmus test of one’s moral character. Given an eternal return to exactly the same life you personally have lead, a repetition of every detail, good or bad, would you affirm the goodness of the eternal return, or would you agonize over it in pure despair? Nietzsche believed, falsely I think, that if one could accept the eternal return, then one is noble and “life-affirming.” If one could not they are weak and “haters of life.”
Metaphysical Problems With The Recurrence View
Even more recently than the 19th century German philosopher, some contemporary quantum cosmologists have proposed models of the universe that sound very much like the stoic view of eternal recurrence. These “cyclical models” of universal origins, however, make no existential claims as did Nietzsche, nor moral claims as did the Stoics. They are focused strictly on physical explanations aimed at answering the most basic of all human questions: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” However, these cyclical models have become little more than high-brow attempts to “explain away” an increasingly uncomfortable fact of science, namely, that the universe had an absolute beginning (which implies a “Beginner”).
If the universe had an absolute beginning, then there is one obvious problem with the recurrence view of history: it is patently false. Or, at least, it is terribly unlikely. To hold onto the eternal recurrence view, one would have to simply assert, without evidence, that things like universes come into and go out of existence apart from any other, external cause (remember, god is immanent on the Stoic view). This is literally magical thinking.
However, there is a reason, I think, why many people and various communities throughout human history have held this view. For there is something about human history that seems to reoccur. There are identifiable patterns of human behavior that seem to come in and go out of existence and come in again with an almost predictable nature. The problem, or so it seems, is that thinkers as diverse as Plato and Nietzsche conflated those patterns in human history with cosmic history itself.
That was an unfortunate error, although one less deadly to Plato’s overall view of the world as compared with that of Nietzsche. In the final part of this series, I will discuss this kind of recurrence in greater detail, since it is not insignificant. After all, there is real wisdom in learning from the past, something that the adherents of our next view, the progressive view, consistently ignore.
Existential Problems With The “Eternal Return”
Finally, asides from its rather obvious metaphysical problems, there is another existential problem with the recurrence view of history. Nietzsche, in his rather provocative style, may compel some readers to think that affirming the literal repetition of every individual detail of every individual life ad infinitum, to include all of the evils of life, is an embrace of life itself. But why think this?
There seems to be a logical disconnect here. This advocacy of the “eternal return” assumes not only that life could not be otherwise, but that it is somehow edifying to not even want life to be otherwise. But that is silly. To affirm life doesn’t entail that we accept death or, for Nietzsche, a kind of eternal dying. To affirm goodness does not mean we should be okay with what is obviously bad, let alone be okay with evil happening over, and over, and over again. There is nothing noble about resigning oneself to fate, a deep pathology that does go back to the Stoics themselves.
Wanting the world to be perfected, to be free of evil and absent of harm is not a sign of weakness, it is the very heart of the affirmation of life! It is to say that life and existence is good, even very good (Gen 1:31), and that it rightly grieves us to see it pass, or decay or be ruined in an untimely or grotesque fashion. It is, perhaps, the most natural thing to man, to all men, to want better. If anything, Nietzsche is the pessimist here, for he assumes there can be no overcoming of that which simply is, deterministically and eternally, broken.
This kind of pathetic determinism of the eternal view is antithetical to the biblical view of history. On the biblical view, which we will discuss in the third post in this series, there is not an endless repetition of the very same constituents of cosmic and human history, a most depressing thought if ever there was one. Instead, there is an eternal redemption of all that was and is and is to come, and a transformative process of becoming ever like the infinite and holy Creator of the physical universe and its human history. Or, to be fair to my own position, there is an eternal redemption for those who so choose that life.
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