The End of History

The order of history is the history of order. 

The sphinx?

No, Eric Voegelin. But what is the meaning of this circular...

Antimetabole?

It was on the tip of my tongue. But the point is, it's not circular, rather, more of a spiral, because it presumes our evolving relationship with a transcendent order. 

That is to say, humans live in the space between the poles of immanence and transcendence, and within this space articulate the experience of order through diverse symbols, myths, religions, philosophies, and political systems, none of which can actually map the transcendent in a fully adequate way. 

In fact, modernity is characterized by a flight from transcendence and the attempt to articulate the order within immanence alone, e.g., scientism, metaphysical Darwinism, Marxism, and other earthbound ideologies. 

But such attempts are self-refuting, because man qua man can never actually eliminate the transcendent pole. For the same reason, one cannot eliminate teleology, which is to say, our attraction to the transcendent pole. 

One might say that "progressivism" is an absurd teleology with no telos, in other words, endless "progress" with no end or goal. Which can't actually be progress, rather, just horizontal wandering. Rearranging the deck chairs on a ship lost at sea. A bridge to nowhere.

For example, yesterday we spoke of two different orders, the static and cosmo-centric Greek conception for which time is a movement away from order, and the ancient Hebrew conception that regards history as an eschatological movement ordered toward transcendence. And in the Christian conception, this eschatological telos has entered history, such that the Logos -- which is the very source of intelligible order -- dwells among us. 

For Voegelin, the ancient Hebrew conception represented one small step for the Jews but one giant leap for mankind, because it is a more adequate symbolization of man's true order. 

Notice that the secular left specializes in destroying the symbols of this order, which results in chaos and nihilism. At the same time, they try to reimpose order via the state. But this is an immanent order: the order of the anthill, not the proper order of man toward transcendence. For what is order without transcendence but an existential prison?

We quite justly criticize the theory of progress, seeing it as a false religion that is a substitute for Christianity. But we should remember that the idea of progress is of religious, even Christian origin, that it is only a secularization and distortion of the Christian messianic idea, of the Christian search for and expectation of the Kingdom of God (Berdyaev). 

Berdyaev highlights "the distinction between evolution and progress. Evolution is a naturalistic category, while progress is a spiritual category" that is "higher than the natural process of change." 

Indeed, "the very idea of progress, i.e., movement toward an absolute, supreme purpose of the historical process, became possible only thanks to Christianity,' and which could never have arisen from "the Hellenic mind." 

"History moves toward its central and absolute event," which "determines the existence... of spiritual progress in history." 

The world's history is not an external evolution, devoid of meaning, the rearrangement of elements in the world, where no absolute meanings or values are revealed.

Rather, "there is a dynamic of meaning in the world's history, the Logos, determining inner movement."

Christianity is messianic and eschatological, i.e. dynamic, progressive, in the profound spiritual sense of the word... 

Berdyaev clearly shares many features of the Raccoon perspective, for example,

The history of the world and of mankind has meaning only if it ends. Endless history would be meaningless. 

And it would be meaningless because it is not ordered to anything beyond itself. "Endless progress, an endless process, means the triumph of death." Or, in the words of the Aphorist,

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

An abominable snow job? 

Indeed, from Marx to the 1619 project. As with any con, the payoff never arrives. 

Another relevant aphorism:

If history made sense, the Incarnation would be superfluous.

Put conversely, our manmade efforts to find an immanent meaning in history always end in absurdity. Lucky for us, the end of history has seen fit to incarnate in the middle. Berdyaev:

Any meaning which is not commensurate with the fate of personality, with my fate, and has no significance for it, is meaningless. If the universal meaning is not at the same time personal meaning as well, then it has no meaning. I cannot live in the "great whole"; the "great whole" must live in me.

In other words,

If God existed, and this meant nothing for me and for my eternal destiny, this would be just as though God did not exist at all. 

At the same time and on another level,

my life would be just as devoid of meaning if it were endless life in the objectivized world....  Meaning lies beyond the boundaries of history, beyond the limits of personal and world history.

Man is an appearance who lives in a world of appearances. If that's all there is to it, then to hell with it. In reality, we have a noumenal spark that is drawn to -- and by -- the noumenon itself. How does it work? Here's a start:

There is nothing higher than the search for, and the love of, Truth. 

If you don't love truth you cannot know truth -- or at least don't know it as intimately as you think you do. 

Another good place to start:

Truth is meaning and may not deny meaning. To deny meaning in the world means to deny truth, to recognize nothing but darkness. Truth makes us free. To deny freedom is to deny truth. 

Here again, creative freedom takes place in that vertical space between immanence and transcendence. 

Truth does not mean staying within some closed ideas, in an inescapable circle of consciousness.... Truth is not objective, but rather, trans-subjective. 

Or to be perfectly accurate, vertical and horizontal intersubjectivity is the objective truth of things. We are open, relational, and teleologically ordered to the very ground of trans-subjectivity.

"In the final depth Truth is God and God is truth." But be careful -- "Pure truth would burst the world apart." Or maybe it did burst the world apart via the resurrection, which is, as it were, a smoking crater in the river of time, or something?