History Regarded As Theophany
Among the Hebrews, every new historical calamity was regarded
as a punishment inflicted by Yahweh, angered by the orgy of sin to which
the chosen people had abandoned themselves. No military disaster seemed
absurd, no suffering was vain, for, beyond the "event," it was
always possible to perceive the will of Yahweh. Even more: these catastrophes
were, we may say, necessary, they were foreseen by God so that the Jewish
people should not contravene its true destiny by alienating the religious
heritage left by Moses. Indeed, each time that history gave them the opportunity,
each time that they enjoyed a period of comparative peace and economic
prosperity, the Hebrews turned from Yahweh and to the Baals and Astartes
of their neighbors. Only historical catastrophes brought them back to
the right road by forcing them to look toward the true God. Then "they
cried unto the Lord, and said, We have sinned, because we have forsaken
the Lord, and have served Baalim and Ashtaroth: but now deliver us out
of the hand of our enemies, and we will serve thee" (I Samuel 12:10).
This return to the true God in the hour of disaster reminds us of the
desperate gesture of the primitive, who, to rediscover the existence of
the Supreme Being, requires the extreme of peril and the failure of all
addresses to other divine forms (gods, ancestors, demons). Yet the Hebrews,
from the moment the great military Assyro-Babylonian empires appeared
on their historical horizon, lived constantly under the threat proclaimed
by Yahweh: "But if ye will not obey the voice of the Lord, but rebel
against the commandment of the Lord, then shall the hand of the Lord be
against you, as it was against your fathers" (I Samuel 12:15).
Through their terrifying visions, the prophets but confirmed and amplified
Yahweh's ineluctable chastisement upon His people who had not kept the
faith. And it is only insofar as such prophecies were ratified by catastrophes
(as, indeed, was the case from Elijah to Jeremiah) that historical events
acquired religious significance; i.e., that they clearly appeared as punishments
inflicted by the Lord in return for the impiousness of Israel. Because
of the prophets, who interpreted contemporary events in the light of a
strict faith, these events were transformed into "negative theophanies,"
into Yahweh's "wrath." Thus they not only acquired a meaning
(because, as we have seen, for the entire Oriental world, every historical
event had its own signification) but they also revealed their hidden coherence
by proving to be the concrete expression of the same single divine will.
Thus, for the first time, the prophets placed a value on history, succeeded
in transcending the traditional vision of the cycle (the conception that
ensures all things will be repeated forever), and discovered a one-way
time. This discovery was not to be immediately and fully accepted by the
consciousness of the entire Jewish people, and the ancient conceptions
were still long to survive.
But, for the first time, we find affirmed, and increasingly accepted,
the idea that historical events have a value in themselves, insofar as
they are determined by the will of God. This God of the Jewish people
is no longer a Oriental divinity, creator of archetypal gestures, but
a personality who ceaselessly intervenes in history, who reveals his will
through events (invasions, sieges, battles, and so on). Historical facts
thus become "situations" of man in respect to God, and as such
they acquire a religious value that nothing had previously been able to
confer on them. It may, then, be said with truth that the Hebrews were
the first to discover the meaning of history as the epiphany of God, and
this conception, as we should expect, was taken up and amplified by Christianity.
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Freedom and History
In his rejection of concepts of periodicity and hence, in
the last analysis, of the archaic concepts of archetypes and repetition,
we are, we believe, justified in seeing modern man's resistance to nature,
the will of "historical man" to affirm his autonomy. As Hegel
remarked, with noble self-assurance, nothing new ever occurs in nature.
And the crucial difference between the man of the archaic civilizations
and modern, historical man lies in the increasing value the latter gives
to historical events, that is, to the “novelties” that, for
traditional man, represented either meaningless conjunctures or infractions
of norms (hence "faults," "sins," and so on) and that,
as such, required to be expelled (abolished) periodically. The man who
adopts the historical viewpoint would be justified in regarding the traditional
conception of archetypes and repetition as an aberrant reidentification
of history (that is, of "freedom” and “novelty”)
with nature (in which everything repeats itself). For, as modern man can
observe, archetypes themselves constitute a "history" insofar
as they are made up of gestures, acts, and decrees that, although supposed
to have been manifested in illo tempore, were nevertheless manifested,
that is, came to birth in time, "took place," like any other
historical event. Primitive myths often mention the birth, activity, and
disappearance of a god or a hero whose "civilizing" gestures
are thenceforth repeated ad infinitum. This comes down to saying that
archaic man also knows a history, although it is a primordial history,
placed in a mythical time. Archaic man's rejection of history, his refusal
to situate himself in a concrete, historical time, would, then, be the
symptom of a precocious weariness, a fear of movement and spontaneity;
in short, placed between accepting the historical condition and its risks
on the one hand, and his reidentification with the modes of nature on
the other, he would choose such a reidentification.
In this total adherence, on the part of archaic man, to archetypes and
repetition, modern man would be justified in seeing not only the primitives'
amazement at their own first spontaneous and creative free gestures and
their veneration, repeated ad infinitum, but also a feeling of guilt on
the part of man hardly emerged from the paradise of animality (i.e., from
nature), a feeling that urges him to reidentify with nature's eternal
repetition the few primordial, creative, and spontaneous gestures that
had signalized the appearance of freedom. Continuing his critique, modern
man could even read in this fear, this hesitation or fatigue in the presence
of any gesture without an archetype, nature's tendency toward equilibrium
and rest; and he would read this tendency in the anticlimax that fatally
follows upon any exuberant gesture of life and that some have gone so
far as to recognize in the need felt by human reason to unify the real
through knowledge. In the last analysis, modern man, who accepts history
or claims to accept it, can reproach archaic man, imprisoned within the
mythical horizon of archetypes and repetition, with his creative impotence,
or, what amounts to the same thing, his inability to accept the risks
entailed by every creative act. For the modern man can be creative only
insofar as he is historical; in other words, all creation is forbidden
him except that which has its source in his own freedom; and, consequently,
everything is denied him except the freedom to make history by making
himself.
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Source: Mircea Eliade The Myth of the Eternal Return,
or Cosmos and History. Princeton University Press.