Those Who Do Not Escape History are Doomed to Progress

I'm well into the book -- After Enlightenment -- but it's a bit repetitive, so I'm not sure there's enough new material with which to build a post. But for us there is only the hammering & yammering. Whether it results in a habitable structure is down to forces beyond our control.  

For Hamann, "history is a revelation of something more than reason and therefore requires more than reason, namely, faith... as the sine qua non of its interpretation" (Betz). Again, it is only reasonable to appeal to the supra-rational -- which is not the irrational. Which calls to mind Aphorisms:

Nothing is explainable outside of history, but history is not enough to explain anything. 

For 

Real history exceeds what merely happened. 

But whatever it is,  

History would be an abominable farce if it were to have a worldly culmination.

So, apparently it has either a trans-rational meaning or it is the A.F. alluded to by the Aphorist. Disappointed?

The promises of life disappoint no one but the one who believes they are fulfilled here. 

Hamann suggests that history is "a sealed book, a concealed witness, a riddle that will not be solved unless we plow with another heifer than our reason." What heifer might this be, and how do we yoke it?

More concretely, the choice is between a multi-dimensional Christian understanding of history... and a uni-dimensional secular view of history, which has no fulfillment but the social and technological progress that every subsequent moment supposedly brings....

In short, the choice is between a Christian view of history as a kind of unfinished divine poem, whose meaning can be grasped only in part, and a secular view of history as a series of discrete moments which, having no part to play in any larger poem or unfolding drama, expressing nothing but the banality of "progress as such" (Betz).

Really? A binary forced choice? Sources can confirm that

Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God and another who believes he is a god.

History is not cleared of its miasmas except in the brief periods in which Christian winds blow.

Suffice it to say, those winds aren't blowing at the moment -- local gusts notwithstanding -- thus the farcical abomination of our politico-cultural miasma. 

He who does not smell sulphur in the modern world has no sense of smell. 

And certainly no taste. Or vision, for that matter. Let those with ears hear! There is

a worldly way of knowing, which merely "puffs up" and redounds to the glory of the knowing subject, and a higher, Socratic-Christian way of knowing [which] glories ironically in weakness and limitations, whereby the intellect is made receptive of divine light and wisdom. Herein, not in any proud rationalism, lies the true path to enlightenment. 

I'll buy that. Here again, it is a matter of being a vertically open system, open to what transcends history, to its nonlocal source. For if we were actually confined to history, we could never know it. Am I wrong? We are in history but surely we are not of it? 

Who wants to be enclosed in history, with no possibility of ingress or escape?

whereas the way of rational autonomy popularized by the Enlightenment is ultimately dead and unenlightened, the way foreshadowed by Socratic ignorance and fulfilled in Christian humility is fruitful because it is alive to the illuminating presence of the Holy Spirit (Betz).

Otherwise to hell with it. Literally, for

Hell is any place from which God is absent.

Or, put conversely,

Hell is the place where man finds all his projects realized. 

Hamann is not against reason, rather, "against only a puritanical form of secular rationality, summed up in the phrase 'pure reason,' that hypocritically presumes to do without faith." 

apart from faith, reason itself and the entire enterprise of human knowledge is ultimately defenseless against skepticism and nihilism (Betz).

A reminder that 

Man calls "absurd" what escapes his secret pretensions to omnipotence.

I like to think of faith in the broadest sense imarginable as openness to the transcendent object, O.   

And that

God is the guest of silence.

 Of a silent openness, or of an open silence.