Meaning in History

The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History

Karl Löwith

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780226162294
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Modern man sees with one eye of faith and one eye of reason. Consequently, his view of history is confused. For centuries, the history of the Western world has been viewed from the Christian or classical standpoint—from a deep faith in the Kingdom of God or a belief in recurrent and eternal life-cycles. The modern mind, however, is neither Christian nor pagan—and its interpretations of history are Christian in derivation and anti-Christian in result. To develop this theory, Karl Löwith—beginning with the more accessible philosophies of history in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries and working back to the Bible—analyzes the writings of outstanding historians both in antiquity and in Christian times. "A book of distinction and great importance.... The author is a master of philosophical interpretation, and each of his terse and substantial chapters has the balance of a work of art."—Helmut Kuhn, Journal of Philosophy

NOTES

PREFACE

1. “Salvation” does not convey the many connotations of the German word Heil, which indicates associated terms like “heal” and “health,” “hail” and “hale,” “holy” and “whole,” as contrasted with “sick,” “profane,” and “imperfect,” Heilsgeschichte has, therefore, a wider range of meaning than “history of salvation.” At the same time, it unites the concept of history more intimately with the idea of Heil or “salvation.” Weltgeschichte and Heilsgeschichte both characterize the events as worldly and sacred, respectively. In the German compound nouns history is conceived not as an identical entity, related only externally to world and salvation but as determined either by the ways of the world or by those of salvation. They are opposite principles of two different patterns of happenings. This difference does not exclude, but rather implies, the question of their relation (see G. van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation [London, 1938], p. 101).

2. See F. M. Powicke, History, Freedom, and Religion (London, 1940), p. 34.

3. The Joyful Wisdom, § 357.

4. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, I and XII.

INTRODUCTION

1. When Troeltsch and Dilthey endeavored to “overcome” the dogmatic presuppositions of the theology and metaphysics of history, their actual standard of judgment was their dogmatic belief in the absolute value of history as such.

2. See H. Kohn, “The Genesis of English Nationalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. I (January, 1940); H. D. Wendland’s article on “The Kingdom of God and History,” in The Official Oxford Conference Books, III (Chicago and New York, 1938), 167 ff. The secular messianism of Western nations is in every case associated with the consciousness of a national, social, or racial vocation which has its roots in the religious belief of being called by God to a particular task of universal significance. This holds true for England and the United States as well as for France, Italy, Germany, and Russia. Whatever form the perversion of a religious vocation to a secular claim may assume, the abiding significance in these secularizations is the religious conviction that the world lies in evil and has to be saved and regenerated.

3. See Augustine Confessions xi.

4. Herodotus i. 1; Thucydides i. 22 and ii. 64; Polybius i. 35 and vi. 3, 9, 51, 57. Cf. Karl Reinhardt, “Herodots Persergeschichten,” Geistige Überlieferung, ed. Ernesto Grassi (Berlin, 1940), pp. 138 ff.; C. N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (New York, 1940), chap. xii; R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), pp. 17 ff.

5. See W. von Humboldt, Politischer Briefwechsel (Berlin, 1935), Letter 77 of April, 1807.

6. J. Burckhardt, Force and Freedom: Reflections on History (New York, 1943), pp. 90 f.; Griechische Kulturgeschichte, in Gesamtausgabe (Basel, 1929 ff.), IX, 247 ff. Only on this modern assumption that history is a story of “liberty” does the ancient belief in a preordained and predictable future become an absurdity. Thus Collingwood (op. cit., pp. 54, 120, 220) asserts that the philosophy of history must end with the present and must dismiss eschatology as an “intrusive” element because nothing else has happened which could be ascertained; and that “whenever historians claim to be able to determine the future in advance of its happening, we may know with certainty that something has gone wrong with their fundamental conception of history.” But what if history is not such a simple story of free action within a given situation but a story of human action and suffering with a natural and fatal or supernatural and providential pattern? How much deeper did Léon Bloy penetrate into the problem of history when he said that the possibility of proving that history has an architecture and meaning would require “l’holocauste préalable du Libre Arbitre, tel, du moins, que la raison moderne peut le concevoir,” viz., as bound up with arbitrariness and divorced from necessity and therefore unable to understand how a man may accomplish with freedom an act of necessity (Textes choisies, ed. A. Béguin [Fribourg, 1943], pp. 71 f.).

7. Democracy in America, Introd.

8. The Decline of the West (New York, 1937), I, chap. iv, 117 ff.; cf. chap. xi.

9. Ibid., I, 38; II, 292 ff. Cf., below, Appen. II.

10. Jahre der Entscheidung (Munich, 1933); English trans., The Hour of Decision (New York, 1934).

11. A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History (London, 1934–39), IV, 23 ff.

12. Ibid., V, 16 and 188 ff.; VI, 174, n. 4.

13. Ibid., VI, 169 ff.

14. A. J. Toynbee, Civilization on Trial (Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 236.

15. Ibid., p. 242.

16. Ibid., p. 237.

17. Ibid., p. 238.

18. Ibid., p. 239.

19. Ibid., p. 240.

20. A Study of History, I, 339 ff.

21. Ibid., I, 34 and 169 ff.; cf. Spengler, op. cit., I, 15 ff.

22. See the plan (Part XII) of the whole work.

23. A Study of History, I, 196 ff.

24. Ibid., VI, 534 ff.

25. Ibid., pp. 324 ff.

26. Civilization on Trial, pp. 235 f.

27. That this is the fundamental quest of the modern historical consciousness of men like A. Comte, A. de Tocqueville, E. Renan, and F. Nietzsche has been stated most frankly by A. de Tocqueville when, in the Introduction to Democracy in America, he asks himself the question: “Où allons-nous done?” With reference to Nietzsche’s incisive criticism of historical antiquarianism, E. Troeltsch (Der Historismus und seine Probleme [Tübingen, 1922], pp. 495 and 772) formulated the task of the philosophy of history as “Überwindung der Gegenwart und Begründung der Zukunft.” How remote is such a definition of the task and problem of history from the classical historein and how familiar to the Christian idea of history as a history of judgment and fulfilment!

28. Hermann Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Leipzig, 1919), pp. 307 ff., 293 ff.; cf. Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (Berlin, 1902), pp. 131 ff. Within the Christian church the thesis that historical thinking is the product of prophetism has found its fullest application in the prophetical historism of Joachim of Floris.

29. Cf. E. Benz, “Die Geschichtstheologie der Franziskanerspiritualen,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, LII (1933), 118 ff.

CHAPTER I

1. See Vladimir G. Simkhovitch, “Approaches to History,” Political Science Quarterly, Vols. XLIV and XLV (1929 and 1930), containing a critical discussion of the historicogenetic method by which new beginnings, breaks, and changes are looked at with an a priori scheme of mere continuity—as if the actual aim of a new historical effort could be understood by going backward to its antecedents. See...