The Nature and Destiny of Man by Niebuhr Reinhold;

Author:Niebuhr, Reinhold;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Presbyterian Publishing Corporation
Published: 2021-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

2. History Swallowed Up in Eternity

“Christ,” declares St. Paul, is “to the Greeks foolishness” because “they seek after wisdom.” This is to say that the expectation of the disclosure and fulfillment of the meaning of history at a point in history or at the end of history, has no meaning for the Greek world. It seeks after wisdom and therefore does not expect a Christ. It has no need of Christ because it finds a Christ in every man: the logos principle. If classical materialism reduces history to the proportions of natural sequence and temporal process, classical idealism and mysticism seek to flee the world of history precisely because they find no more meaning in history than classical naturalism finds. But they find something in man which classical naturalism does not find; and by that something man is to be emancipated from history. That something is either the intellectual principle of his soul, or something even more transcendent than his mind. Classical idealism and mysticism in short understand the transcendent freedom of the human spirit; but they do not understand it in its organic relation to the temporal process. The natural and temporal process is merely something from which man must be emancipated. That emancipation is the very fulfillment of the meaning of life. There is no yearning for fulfillment in history; there is only a desire to be freed from history.

In Platonism the intellectual principle, the logisticon, is the organ of this emancipation. “The true lover of knowledge,” declares Plato, “is always striving after being . . . that is his nature; he will not rest at those multitudinous particular phenomena whose existence is appearance only, but will go on . . . the keen edge will not be blunted nor the force of his passion abate until he have attained the true knowledge of every essence by a sympathetic and kindred power in the soul and by that power drawing near and becoming incorporate with very being, have begotten mind and truth, he will know and truly live and increase; and then and not till then, will he cease from travail.”9

The important point in Platonism is that the “brightest and best of being, in other words the Good” belongs to the world of “being” and not to the world of “becoming,”10 and that a “power resides in each of us” which enables us to reach that world. This is to say that history is either an inferior or an illusory world: “the prison house is the world of sight,” the “Absolute Good” is the world of changeless essence underlying the changing world; and “the light of reason only without the assistance of the senses”11 is the power in man which makes it possible for him to rise to this world of pure being.

Since the human mind transcends itself in infinite regression, and human reason is able to contemplate the fact of human reason,12 rational and intellectual methods of transcending, and escaping from, history always finally give way to

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