A Christian View of History
by David Meconi, S.J.
“In Christianity time has a fundamental importance.”1 At the dawn of the new millennium, our Philosopher Pope wants to teach the world that time is not inimical to human union with the Divine but is rather the arena in which creation’s encounter with God takes place. The Christian faith is neither a mere remembrance of the past nor is it merely the waiting of things to come. In two recent writings, the Holy Father reemphasizes this distinct Christian understanding of history: that time neither sweeps us further away from God’s revelation in Christ nor does it simply bring us to some future glory, but is the conduit in which the Eternal is fully available and definitively present to us now. John Paul II’s 1994 Apostolic Exhortation, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, is a beautifully constructed meditation on the nature of history and the significance of time while his 1998 encyclical, Fides et Ratio, argues that absolute truth is not some lost or unattainable reality but “is immersed in time and history” (no. 11) and as such, is presently available to those who seek rightly. Both monumental writings draw on the Christian understanding of time as part of the good creation and a means through which God reveals Himself.
Paganism, Protestantism, and Postmodernism all share a mistrust of the Church’s historical optimism. Instead of seeing history as the medium of salvation, these schools of thought maintain that the Divine, the Absolute, is outside of the here and now. To have a distinctly Christian understanding of history, however, is to confess that the Divine is fully present in and accessible to those in space and time. Professing otherwise is to fall into an historical pessimism, taking one of three forms. First, as the pre- or extra-Judeo-Christian pagans believed, time is a pernicious current taking humanity further and further from some Golden Age. In this worldview, divine works were accomplished in a “time before time.” Groping to return to that time unmarked by successive days, religion became the way man could “tie back” (re-ligio) to that eternal present.
The Protestant understanding of history sees time as salvific only in recollecting what God has done and hoping for what He will again do. God is of course active in history but His real presence is something of the past, when Christ walked the earth, as well as something of the future, His Second Coming. Since the “here and now” is void of His tangible and explicit presence, time has no salvific significance in and of itself. The believer is thus forced to “get out” of history through his inner-life of faith. Because God is no longer really objectively present in history, His presence is now determined by human memory and anticipation. Without the Eucharistic mediation of the Church, Protestantism is forced to deny that the fullness of God’s Self is able to be encountered in the present moment and hence denies history’s ability to mediate the Divine.
The third option is of course that there is no Absolute, no Ultimate Reality, and time is able to offer only that which is relative, finite, and passing. This is the Postmodern understanding of history: because we are caught up in endless and inexplicable relationships and webs of networks, the truth always remains something “out there” and is never able to penetrate our own perspectives and positions. In history there can be no immanent truth, beauty, or goodness. In fact, in history we find nothing—no guiding standards, no valid traditions, no objective reality.
By way of explaining the historical pessimism underlying each of these three positions, the following essay will explain what John Paul II means when he holds up time as a fundamental Christian category. The question to be answered here is whether or not God reveals Himself definitively in created time, in history. Is time a medium of redemption or a hindrance to it? Can one encounter the Absolute fully in the here and now? If the answer is yes, how; if no, what then is history’s relationship to the Divine? Jesuit theologian Donald J. Keefe has seen this relationship between Christ and history more clearly than most and has consequently spent most of his academic energy reminding the rest of us that, “There is no other free, intelligible order in history than the one which is grounded in the free unity of the Eucharistic One Flesh, and none has ever been proposed.”2 In the following essay it will therefore be shown that only in the Eucharistic worship of the Church is the Divine essentially and fully present in time while all other creeds share a related distrust toward the historical.
The second section of Tertio Millennio Adveniente begins by contrasting the Christian sense of time with the pre-Christian or pagan understanding. For the Christian, time is created by God and as such—like all of God’s good creation—time is purposeful and a sacramental through which the Divine is seen. John Paul writes, “Time is indeed fulfilled by the very fact that God, in the Incarnation, came down into human history. Eternity entered into time: what ‘fulfillment’ could be greater than this? What other ‘fulfillment’ would be possible? Some have thought in terms of certain mysterious cosmic cycles in which the history of the universe, and of mankind in particular, would constantly repeat itself . . . . Some have considered various forms of reincarnation: depending on one’s previous life, one would receive a new life in either a higher or lower form, until full purification is attained” (no. 9).
The Holy Father knows that apart from God’s covenant fulfilled in the “fullness of time” (cf. Gal 4:4), pre-Christian civilizations could not see how time was good and meaningful. Rather, to find meaning in this world, the pagan myth acted as the safeguard against history’s devouring those caught up in the present day. Because the pagan gods cannot be met in history, the pre- or extra-Judeo-Christian world used myths reenacted in ritual to regain that Golden Age in which the gods walked the earth. These divine events, figures, and sayings which happened in ‘that time before time’ are again made real through the re-telling of the story. The myth offers meaning and protection in a world devoid of significance: since time moves man further and further away from his true home, he clings to the stories and ceremonies which unite him to the heavenly. As Oedipus, the legendary king of Thebes, proclaimed shortly before his death: “Only the gods can never age, the gods can never die. All else in the world almighty Time obliterates, crushes all to nothing . . .” Myth, as in the telling of the Oedipus trilogy, saves the present by injecting the Immutable into an otherwise transient moment.
Greek Orphics depicted their god of time, Chronos, as a vicious monster and the ancient Latins lived by the adage, Tempus edax rerum (Time destroys all things.) Because the non-Christian trembled in the face of the future, he held up the retelling of myth and reenactment of various rites as his only link to the permanent. The eminent scholar in world religions, Mircea Eliade, calls this the pagan’s attempt to escape his “profane duration” by commemorating some pristine past. For those without the proper understanding of God in the world, in history, time must be transcended and even reversed through religious festivals. As Eliade writes, myths reenacted in rituals, “suspend the flow of time, of duration, and project the celebrant into a mythical time, in illo tempore . . . all rituals imitate a divine archetype and that their continual reactualization takes place in one and the same atemporal mythical instant.”3 For example, upon the return of a warrior from battle, stories of the hero—Marduk in the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh Epic or Zeus’ battle against the Titans—would be told to provide meaning and significance, the presence of the gods, to the deeds just wrought. Upon the death of a child, a pious Greek mother would recall Demeter’s perennial loss of Persephone; and every year the citizens of Rome retold the legend of Romulus and Remus so as to recover the sacred origins of their city. For without the individuals’ recalling of these myths, the significance of the present could not convey the Permanent, the Divine, and risks being irretrievably lost to the pernicious current of time.
Pagan texts were read and rites were performed to flee the present and commemorate what the gods had once done. Within this pessimism, however, Christ’s Church was born. “Not by way of cleverly concocted myths” (2 Pet 1:16) did the first Christians teach. Rather, in stark contrast to the pagan attempt to revive a lost time in which Divinity could be found, the Apostles insisted on announcing—literally, to make now (nunc)—the Good News. Whereas the pagan myths and rituals strove to recover an age gone by, the Christian liturgy made available the definitive and real presence of God. As Cambridge University’s Catherine Pickstock writes, “although the Gospel is written down in a book, its proclamation is continuous with the sacrifice it narrates. Its enunciation ‘makes now’ a total sacrifice which is not a prior, closed-off event, but enters the interstices of our present, in contrast to the non-sacrificial silence of the unspoken text.”4
The Scriptures and the Sacrifice of the Mass together are the means Christ gave to His Church in order to give His whole self uninterruptedly to those in history. By continuing His Incarnation through His Body and Blood in the Holy Eucharist and by continuing His teaching through the Scriptures as transmitted and thus interpreted by His living Church, Christ ensured His essential and absolute Presence to those in time.5 The Lord did not condemn us solely to remembering or anticipating Him—sola fide. Nevertheless, the second understanding of time in need of examination is that in which Christ’s actual presence from the here and now has been removed, thus rendering His presence merely spiritual and intangible.
By removing Christ’s Body and Blood from the center of all worship, the Reformers unknowingly and unintentionally removed God from history. The Calvinist maxim finitum capax non infiniti, (the finite cannot mediate the Infinite), annuls the created order’s mediation of the Divine. In rejecting the Eucharist as the historical continuation of Christ’s Incarnation, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and many others took the God-made-flesh out of time and space, out of the world in which we live. Like any other incarnate individual, once Christ’s flesh is removed from the here and now, His presence becomes one of mere spirit: a presence of memory and anticipation but no longer a Presence which we can touch, kneel in front of and adore. Christ’s Real Presence is confined to the Heavens, to the eternal where time cannot reach. But without Christ’s body essentially present in the here and now, how His presence in this world is different than, say, that of the Holy Spirit’s becomes difficult to explain.
Consider, for example, Article XXXVIII of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Anglicanism: “The Body of Christ is given, received, and eaten in the Supper only in a heavenly and spiritual sense. Moreover the medium by which the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is faith.”6 Without the Church’s sacramental mediation, the true object of Protestant worship is removed from history. Christ’s individuality, His ‘scandal of particularity’—which St. Irenaeus knew scandalized the Gnostics who considered Christ’s flesh a phantom or a mere symbol—is no longer an objective presence in this world. It is now the faith of the believer that establishes Christ’s presence in the world. Unlike the time He walked Jerusalem, Christ’s presence no longer elicits faith but is a presence now determined by the individual believer, sola fide. The Eucharistic Lord who summons and causes an individual’s faith is now reduced to a presence determined by the individual believer because history does not mediate God’s true and objective presence.
Cardinal Ratzinger traces this inversion back to Luther’s denial of history’s mediation of Christ’s true presence. Luther, Ratzinger writes, “considered this heavenly-earthly, Christian-secular history no longer as salvation-bringing and Christian but as anti-Christian, and who sought Christianity, not in it [i.e., history], but against it . . .” Rejection of Christ’s objective presence in history, then, forces the individual to “bring” Christ into history via his own act of faith. Ratzinger can maintain that “Luther’s appearance signaled the collapse of the prevailing historical consciousness,” because with the Reformers came an understanding of Jesus Christ unmediated by His Bridal Church, a spiritual “presence” of the Incarnate God, and an inability to encounter God’s final and definitive work in history.7
The most formidable Protestant theologian of this century, Rudolf Bultmann (d. 1976), encouraged each Christian to “demythologize” the Scriptures so as to rid them of any historical particularity. Believers must now understand Christ’s to be an entirely other-worldly presence. Since history is unable to mediate the Kingdom of God, the Christian should see that, “In his faith he is already above time and history. For although the advent of Christ is an historical event that happened ‘once’ in the past, it is at the same time, an eternal event that occurs again and again in the soul of any Christian in whose soul Christ is born, suffers, dies and is raised up to eternal life. In his faith the Christian is a contemporary of Christ, and time and the world of history are overcome. The advent of Christ is an event in the realm of eternity which is incommensurable with historical time.”8 Firmly rejecting Christ’s Incarnation as eucharistically continued throughout history, the Protestant mind no longer understands His Real Presence to be available to those in time but, rather, to be an other-worldly, unhistorical, cure for time.
Postmodernism holds the similar belief that for those in time, there can be no final truth, no definitive meaning. The term Postmodern was popularized at the turn of this century to describe the discontentment with the modern project which promised to quell human dissatisfaction through progress and technology. After these failed promises of the Renaissance and Enlightenment (i.e., Modernity), Postmodernism realized that we have all we want but we are still restless, anxious, and unsatisfied. Postmodern thinkers have accordingly turned away from any allegiance to what has gone before. Theirs is a position marked by a fatigue with history and there can be little doubt that their rejection of tradition has affected all areas of human living: one only needs to think of twelve-tone or atonalism in music (e.g., John Cage), stream of consciousness and free verse in literature and poetry (e.g., Samuel Beckett), and Dadaism and anti-representationalism in art (e.g., Andy Warhol). Abandonment of structure and tradition has likewise influenced architecture, film, television, and flourishes in every imaginable academic discipline.
The Postmodernist quickly points out that history has proven that there are no permanent foundations underlying human existence and any appeal to reality or truth is nothing more than a camouflaged resort to power. In denying the possibility of objective truth, a series of nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Michel Foucault (1926-1984), and Jacques Derrida (b. 1930) maintain the impossibility of encountering the other. The human person is shut up in his own perspective, his own mind; all is relation, there is no real meaning in the world, only dubious viewpoints, perspectives, and personal opinions. One postmodern critic, David Lehman, summed it up this way, “There are no truths, only a radical relativism; there are no longer any standpoints that can a priori be considered privileged, no structure that functions validly as a model for other structures, no postulate of ontological hierarchy that serve as an organizing principle in the manner in which a deity can be said to engender man and the world.”
What began as a reaction against modernity ends in the rejection of the created realm’s ability to encounter the Divine. Why? Like Heraclitus’ river, Postmoderns see time as that which sweeps away all permanence and ability to grasp the other. In this Postmodern world, people can no longer subscribe to a final, definitive Principle which explains the way things are; there is no true self, no external world and no God to whom all is related. Jacques Derrida argues that such Logocentrism, the attempt to relate all meaning to God—the “transcendental signifier”—as the foundation of truth, is “an attempt which can only ever fail, an attempt to trace the sense of being to the logos, to discourse or reason . . .”9 The postmodern understanding of history disallows any stable referents, any fixed natures, and certainly any possibility of Incarnate Truth breaking into created time. Or as D.H. Lawrence once wrote, “individuality, our identity, is nothing more than an accidental cohesion in the flux of time.”10 Time sweeps all away: all selves, all reality, all truth.
Against this pessimism, the Holy Father insists that, “History therefore becomes the arena where we see what God does for humanity . . . In the Incarnation of the Son of God we see forged the enduring and definitive synthesis which the human mind of itself could not even have imagined: the Eternal enters time, the Whole lies hidden in the part, God takes on a human face” (Fides et Ratio, no. 12). Final truth not only exists but is discernible here and now. The human knower is not condemned to grope for unattainable answers, is not doomed to a world of relativism and doubt, but lives in a world where the Absolute Principle of reality can be encountered.
Note how John Paul’s understanding of meaning and truth is rooted in his understanding of history. Because the Church’s authority is grounded in the historical, Eucharistic Lord, she can teach with a final and definitive voice. In today’s postmodern world, however, the Church’s authority is seen, not as a historical extension of the authority Christ gives to His Apostles but, as nothing more than the fulfillment of Nietzsche’s promise that the world’s weak would search for power out of their “vindictive cunning of impotence.” For it is an all too common opinion today that the Pope has a self-appointed monopoly on ecclesial power and that he could change the Church’s teaching against, say, abortion, the male priesthood, artificial contraception, etc. . . . if he only had the will to do so. A world unable to see history as a medium of the Absolute begins to think that every truth is relative and is eventually lulled into understanding every “truth” as nothing more than an expression of individual strength. However, the Catholic understanding of history and its subsequent teaching of the truth of the Ultimate’s Presence in the world stands as a bright beacon to the rejection of history and subsequent nihilism of Postmodernism. As the Holy Father concludes, although many today believe “the time of certainties is irrevocably past, and the human being must now learn to live in a horizon of total absence of meaning, where everything is provisional and ephemeral,” the Church offers the world true hope and meaning (Fides et Ratio, no. 91). Christ’s self-appropriation of all history to Himself is alone what saves us from this postmodern pessimism, this current “crisis of meaning” (ibid., no. 81).
These reflections have helped us see how Paganism, Protestantism, and Postmodernism all share a denial of the historical order’s ability to mediate the Absolute, the Divine. For the pagan the created order was viewed as a destructive river which took him further and further away from a “time before time” in which harmony and unity prevailed. To recapture this Golden Age, the pagan recalled the perfect personages and deeds which injected permanence and meaning into the present. Denying the capacity to meet God-made-flesh today, Protestantism has haphazardly removed Him from history. Apart from the ecclesial event of the Eucharist, God’s Incarnation is absent from time and His presence becomes one of spirit, determined by the individual believer. Postmodernism likewise sees truth and meaning determined not by the individual’s assent to external reality but by personal perspective and determination. The quest for truth and worship is abandoned as illusory and meaningless.
Apart from these three forms of historical pessimism, stands the sacramental mediation of the Church. In contrast to the understanding of time as antagonistic to our encounter with the Divine, the Church teaches that each passing day does not take us further and further away from God but, rather, stands as a perpetual invitation to enter more fully into His closeness. The Church’s message has always stood in hopeful opposition to such despair of the historical. “Within the dimension of time the world was created; within it the history of salvation unfolds…every year, every day and every moment are embraced by his Incarnation and Resurrection, and thus become part of the ‘fullness of time’” (Tertio Millennio Adveniente, no. 10). Time does not diminish Christ’s Presence in the world because as God-made-flesh, Jesus Christ promised to be with us until the end of the age (Mat. 28:20) and it is this same Incarnate God continuously present in the sacramental worship of the Church.
Eucharistic worship is thus not one peripheral liturgy among others but is rather the life-giving event which imparts ultimate meaning into our otherwise transient days. Christ is the Lord of history, the Lord of all places and times equally and fully and it is only in the Church’s life, where the Divine essence is fully available, that the present becomes salvific. Apart from Christ’s Eucharistic presence and His accessibility through the Church’s worship, the only alternative remaining is a fatalistic understanding of time and history. He has however entrusted Himself to His Body on earth (e.g., Acts 9:4-5), and the Church’s historical mediation of Creator to creation offers the only option to those alien creeds insistent on the inaccessibility of the Divine.
End Notes
1 Tertio Millennio Adveniente, no. 10. For all papal writings I will simply include the title and paragraph number in the body of this essay.
2 Donald J. Keefe, “Eucharistic Affirmations,” The Catholic World Report (June, 1999), p. 52. See also Fr. Keefe’s Covenantal Theology: The Eucharistic Order of History (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1996).
3 Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Bollingen Foundation and Pantheon Books, 1954), p. 76.
4 Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 218.
5 See the Second Vatican Council’s Dei Verbum, no. 9, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 74-141 for more on the transmission of divine revelation.
6 As cited in James T. O’Connor, The Hidden Manna (Ignatius Press, 1988), p. 150.
7 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology (Ignatius Press, 1987), p. 157.
8 Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology (New York: Harper and Row 1957), p. 153.
9 Raoul Mortley, French Philosophers in Conversation: Levinas, Schneider, Serres, Irigaray, Le Doeuff, Derrida (New York: Routledge Press, 1991), p. 104.
10 As quoted in Martin Henry, “God in Postmodernity,” The Irish Theological Quarterly, vol. 63 (1998), p. 8, n. 17. For more on Catholicism and Postmodernism, see American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (Spring, 1999) which dedicates five excellent essays to understanding the Church’s response to postmodern claims.
