The Terror of History (Part 2)

Since Hegel, every effort has been aimed at defending the historical event as such and assigning it intrinsic value. Things are necessarily as they are, not the works of judgment and chance. Hegel saw the manifestation of the Absolute Spirit in every event. The everyday relationship with events can guide man in his relationship with the world and God. How did Hegel know what was necessary in history, that is, exactly how it had to happen? He believed that he knew the will of the Absolute Spirit. However, this eliminates human freedom from history. For him, the historical event was the manifestation of the Absolute Spirit, which is inherently irreversible and valid, as much as the manifestation of God's will. The history of a people always carries significance beyond history, since all of history reveals a further and more perfect manifestation of the Absolute Spirit.

With the advent of Marx, history was stripped of all transcendental significance and simply became a manifestation of class struggle. The successive events are not the arbitrary developments of chance but form a coherent structure, leading to a specific goal, the abolition of the terror of history, "salvation." Thus, at the endpoint of Marxist historical philosophy, we find the golden age of archaic eschatologies. Marx brought Hegel's philosophy back to the earth. However, the golden age is placed only at the end of history, not at the beginning. According to Marxists, the necessary evil manifested in history is merely a prelude to the final victory, which will forever put an end to historical evil.

How can one endure the "terror of history"? How can a person bear the catastrophes and horrors of history if there is no transcendental meaning behind them, if they appear to be merely the blind play of economic, social, and political forces? In the past, humanity regarded suffering as a punishment from God, seeing it as a sign of the decline of the age. These events had a meaning beyond history, and thus could be accepted. Every war repeated the struggle between good and evil; every social injustice was identified with the suffering of the Savior; every massacre repeated the glorious death of the martyrs. We cannot decide whether this defense was effective, but based on this perspective, millions of people were able to endure the pressures of history without despair for centuries.

We hypothesize that as the terror of history becomes increasingly unbearable and existence becomes more threatened, historicism will lose its authority. When history threatens the destruction of humanity, attempts will be made to ban historical events, reintegrating humanity into the world of archetypes (the original type of events) and their repetition. For the survival of humanity, it will renounce shaping history and any spontaneous action that could have historical consequences.

M. Eliade "The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History", Princeton University Press 1974, (ford. Nagy Zsolt)