History

Abstract

Like the question of the self, the question of history has been pressing on this book since the opening chapter. It is the nature of history to press, and to oppress, and again the most surprising thing is that this should be so. Why should history not teach us wisdom, unequivocally, or why are we so constituted that we want it to? Why should it not have a luminous shape, an evident architecture, or what is there in us which makes us look for such things? If the world is random, why should that bother us? I can see no other reason than the one which has been proclaimed over and again but which no one wishes to hear: that we have suffered a loss of origin; that what we call history occurs because of that loss (we do not know what kind of passage through time there would have been in a world still in fellowship with its beginning), and that the writing of history is a testimony to that specific alienation. A choice was made to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and we have been eating it ever since. History is a consequence. It makes itself intelligible when seen, in part, as the temporal form of a punishment. It results from the Fall, and prolongs the Fall; it is our experience of falling. Because of such forces as love and grace, however, it is also our experience of being sustained.