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which does not follow from the old by evolution. The new, which occurs wherever history
occurs, is meaning. In creating meaning, being rises above itself. For meaning as we use this
word here is realized by freedom and only by freedom; in creating meaning, being gains
freedom from itself, from the necessity of its nature. History exists where meaning is realized
by freedom. The new which is produced in history is really new because it is produced by
freedom. Freedom is the leap in which history transgresses the realm of pure being and
creates meaning.
But history, like being, has the dual character of seriousness and insecurity. History has in it
the inexhaustibility of meaning as well as the threat of plunging into the abyss of
meaninglessness and nothingness. Our own life clearly shows us this dual quality, our might
and impotence in realizing the meaning of life. History transcends itself, as being transcends
itself, for a believing intuition. It points to a transcendent meaning of history in which the
threat of meaninglessness is warded off. This transcendence is not the transcendence of the
origin, as is true of pure being; it is the transcendence of the ultimate, as is true of being, in its
creation of meaning and history. Therefore this transcendence is implied in history for
belief, of course with the same certainty, as the other transcendence is implied in being. The
ultimate is the transcendent meaning of history.
Therefrom it follows that history is clearly to be separated from development. There are many
developments in history, but insofar as they are mere developments they are not yet history.
The concept of history does not imply that something develops, and the concept of
development does not imply that something historical occurs. Both can be united, but they
need not be. The transition from antiquity to Christianity, for instance, was history in an
outstanding sense but development only to a very slight extent. The meaning of history is
transcendent, is the ultimate, not the accidental and doubtful result of a development. Neither
does the meaning of history of a single life lie in its age, nor that of antiquity in modern times,
nor that of mankind in a last generation, but rather every part of history, no matter how small
or great, shares in the ultimate, in the transcendent meaning of history.
These considerations force us to reject Utopianism and the belief in a general progress, since
they attempt to locate the meaning of history in history itself. That is impossible and destroys
the meaning of history through depreciating past and present in favor of an imagined future.
In the idea of infinite progress, realization of meaning is never attained, and in Utopianism the
inescapable disillusionment makes us despair of the meaning of history. And if the expected
Utopia were to be found, history would be at an end. If Marx says that the prehistory of
mankind ends and its history begins with classless society, one might ask whether this history
really is history, or whether all real history does not rather belong to what he calls pre-history.
With respect to the ultimate, all history is pre-history, and only through being "pre-history"
does it have its historical meaning.
However, when one speaks thus of history, not only the progressive but the conservative
organic conception of history is refuted. The immediate relation of all history to the ultimate
does not imply the need of our resting in this immediacy, claiming ultimate meaning for a
very conditioned and ambiguous historical situation in order to prevent criticism and progress.
The conservative conception, to be sure, assumes an ultimate transcendent meaning of history.
But the ultimate stands outside of concrete history at its mythological end and without
essential relation to it. The ultimate becomes a mythical idea which has significance only in
regard to the individual fate, but which leaves history untouched to become motion which
remains in the circle of pure being. History, however, breaks through the circle of being;
therefore it contains a revolutionary, transforming element in individual as well as in social
life. That is the reason religious socialism believes that the socialistic movement has made the
meaning of the ultimate more manifest than has Christian conservatism.
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