Can There Be a Christian Culture?--Part 3

The participants in the twentieth-century debate were all in agreement, nonetheless, that the meaning of history, if it had one, was a human meaning. The question as to whether history has socio-psychological laws was not precisely the same as to whether history has an inner dynamic that propels it in a certain direction, though the two were (and are) related. Human freedom as opposed to social and biological determinism concerned thinkers of all persuasions, as did whether history should be considered a matter of progress or of tragedy in light of two world wars. Had the last 40 years of violence disproved the early modern notion of progress? Equally, had the Hegelian notion that the divine Idea was working itself out in history been discredited by Nazi misuse of it?

Individualism and collectivism were, thus, important themes, and not just because of the rise of fascism and Marxism. They were at the heart of what to make of the politic orders of the last 50 years. They were also at the heart of what it means to be a human being within a political and social context. Finally, they were at the heart of whether human culture had any stable meaning at all.

Even deeper, then were what Ernst Troeltsch in 1922 had called the “crisis of historicism,” and what Benedetto Croce in 1916 had identified as the “humanity of history.” Historicism, the predominant worldview of nineteenth and early twentieth century Continental historians, held that each nation has its own intrinsic meaning, its own language, and is shaped by its history and place in nature. For some this suggested a divine guiding hand in giving expression to each nation, while for others this increasingly implied that no overarching human nature existed across cultures. For Troeltsch the crisis was that with historicism no objective laws or truths existed which could be applied to all people. People in their entirety are the product of their culture.

Croce in similar fashion decried the practitioners of individualist and/or collectivist historiography as reducing history to either a few powerful “men of genius” or to collectives as the producers of ideas. “Let him who cuts individuals out of history pay close attention,” Croce warned, “and he will perceive that either he has not cut them out at all, as he imagined, or he has cut out with them history itself.”

The shadow side, some would say the “demonic” side, was how such notions when tied to doctrines of the state led to Nazism or Communism, but just as important and as disturbing was the implication that most or all human choices were meaningless. That historicism actually undercut claims of Enlightenment progress or Hegelian idealism only opened the window for a further sense of meaninglessness. Was history's "truth" finally reducible to set of existential decisions by otherwise culturally-determined individuals?

For some such as Paul Tillich the category of the demonic need not be understand as strictly a spiritual category, but more like a general human Gestalt or archetypal flowering of irrational evil: "The dialectics of the demonic . . . the unity of form-creating and form-destroying strength. That is true of the demon who determines the great destiny which disrupts all forms of existence; it is true of the demon who drives the personality beyond the limits of its allotted form to creations and destructions it cannot grasp as its own. Where the destructive quality is lacking, one can speak of outstanding power, of genius, of creative force, not of demonry."

If history is the product of social and economic forces, if culture is the product of national collectives or even of a few inspired geniuses, or if a non-human force drives history (be it biological and/or spiritual), then human freedom would seem to be an illusion.

Berlin labeled any system that posited discoverable laws or outcomes for history as "deterministic," and charged them with being not only fatalistic but even desirous of a system that excused them from human action and freedom. He was especially distrustful of teleological systems: "For the teleological thinker all apparent disorder, inexplicable disaster, gratuitous suffering, unintelligible concatenations of random events are due not to the nature of things but to our failure to discover their purpose."

Strangely enough, history became reduced reduced to theodicy.