Universal History and the Making of the Global by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Civilization
ISBN: 9780429849855
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2018-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

Therefore, Bossuet’s Discourse is not a testimony or a tribute to things past, but an attempt to reconstruct a predefined order, an order set from time immemorial.22 Actually, contemplation of this stopped time (which is in itself a temporal process) must eventually produce a sort of temporal inversion, leading the reader to this origin of time: the more he watches the tableau, the more he approaches this original moment when God designed and created the world. History is an anamorphosis because it can only acquire its full meaning by returning (ana) to the origin of salvation, to the original design of its Creator, to the original truth. However, it even goes beyond origin, which radicalizes this temporal inversion into an annihilation of time. As I have tried to show elsewhere (Régent-Susini 2013), the world is an anamorphic tableau, as Bossuet’s Sermons sur la Providence claim, but this anamorphosis turns out to be a portrait, the portrait of a God-made man: human history is a continuous manifestation of God, a continuation of the Incarnation, which is always present.23 History ultimately outlines another type of Gestalt: the abstract set of general rules designing a world ruled (to a certain extent) by rational causes, is finally replaced and literally transcended by the silhouette of Christ.

That also means that at the very core of universal history lies, in a way, the negation of time—at least when universal history is conceived in a religious (and, thus, in one way or another, eschatological) framework. If “some day our history will be represented to us” (Bossuet, Sermon sur l’endurcissement), that day will be outside of time. For the moment (for the time being…), nothing is stable enough to provide the historian with any certainty.24 As is often the case, anamorphosis is in league with vanitas. History is closely related to vanity, since as the 20th-century Christian philosopher of history Henri-Irénée Marrou notes, there is actually no belvedere from which a man could envision and depict history. Not only is it an enterprise doomed to (at least partial) failure, but it is also dedicated to deceitful grandeurs:

Histories will vanish with the empires, and no one will talk any more about those glorious deeds they are full of.

(Bossuet, Oraison funèbre de Louis de Bourbon (1687), in Bossuet 1914–1926, VI:449)25

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