Faith in History

Author(s): Gareth Stedman Jones

Source: History Workshop, No. 30 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 63-67
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4289007
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 CRITIQUE

Hegel lecturing

Faith in History*
by Gareth Stedman Jones

For a historian, and in particular for a historian like myself, who has been studying
the history of socialist and radical thought in the last two hundred years, the events of
the last twelve months have had a strange and special significance. 1989 was the
fitting climax to an astonishing decade which began with the Islamic revolution in
Iran and with the rise of Solidarity in Poland, witnessed the West winning the Cold
War, saw the emergence of new and horrible plagues like Aids, brought famine to
large parts of the Third World, and engendered mounting alarm about the impact of
industry on the global environment. But above all, 1989 announced the nemesis of a
world movement - Communism - whose creed had been precisely: Faith in History.
The 1980s have brought to an end, at least for the foreseeable future, all lingering
beliefs in the historical promise of secular utopias. Not only has Communism - the
most concentrated expression of that faith - collapsed, dishonoured and unloved in
the cyes of the people it was supposed to scrve, but the props upon which that faith
relied, the secular scientific inquiry into Man, have similarly proved fragile and
unreliable. Science has made little headway against Aids, and after events such as
Chernobyl it confesses that it had little idea of how to dispose of the nuclear
Frankensteins that it had so confidently multiplied. The factory towns and the
smoking chimneys of which Communists were once so proud, are now exposed not
only as filthy, but as detrimental to life and threatening to the ionosphere. Even the
climate with its violent storms and scorching droughts, which brings to mind the
extremes of nature described in Genesis, seem to mock the hubris of the secular
optimist.
In these strange times when all the apparent secular certainties of the twentieth
century seem to have melted away, it is perhaps not surprising that one of the

* This is the text of an address delivered at King's College Chapel, in Cambridge, in a series of six ser
historians on this theme.

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64 History Workshop Journal

casualties in this process has been secularism itself. Evidence of this is not only
provided by the re-emergence of religious fundamentalism in different parts of the
world. More positively, from my point of view, one particularly striking feature of
the last year has been the courageous and exemplary part played by the Churches in
places as far apart as Timosaura, Dresden, El Salvador and Soweto, in taking a
principled stand against tyranny and in offering what protection they could to all
those struggling against oppression, poverty and the trampling-under of basic human
rights. All the more impressive in that they have often offered this protection
irrespective of sect or creed. And here, in this country, it is equally heartening to find
oneself at one with the Churches in their uncompromising reminders of the
dehumanizing and degrading consequences of a prevalent set of values, which has
removed the stigma from greed, undermined the dignity of local communities and
brusquely derided inherited notions of the public good. It is primarily because so
many contemporary Christians have joined hands with others in taking a principled
and consistent stand on issues of justice throughout the world, that I feel able, and
indeed feel honoured to address you in this chapel today.
But there is also another reason of particular relevance to my interests as a
historian. For faith in history in the sense of a belief in the historical possibility of th
social and moral improvement of humanity was the issue on which Enlightenment
thinkers in Germany parted company with the established Protestant Church
towards the end of the eighteenth century. Unlike their French counterparts,
German Enlightenment philosophers never mocked religion as such. Their aim was
rather to reformulate Christianity on a morally and intellectually purified basis.
Rejecting the Augustinian understanding of original sin and its consequences for
Mankind, and adopting a Pelagian view that Man was born in the image of God with
reason as a divine gift implanted in him to be employed, thinkers like Lessing
(1729-1781) and Kant (1724-1804) rejected religion as a mere dogma resting on
authority. In its place Kant attempted to build upon the inner light of Christian
conscience and to transform it into a universal basis of ethics, while Lessing
attempted to envisage history as a process of the moral education of the human race.
In the generation following Kant and Lessing, the vision of a moral community of
free beings acting only as practical reason prescribed was a seductive one. But under
the sway of the romantic themes which crystallized in the 1790s, Kant's idea of
obedience to a moral law prescribed by practical reason was conjoined to an aesthetic
of free self-expression. Reason and morality were no longer to be followed at the
expense of Man's finite nature, but rather to be at one with it. In the thought of Hegel
(1770-1831) Man became the vehicle through which absolute spirit realized itself.
God and the processes of the world were merged in human history in ascending
stages of relation and recognition, until Spirit came to see that reason and reality
were identical. The Christian story was thus seen as a symbolic enactment of this
process of recognition and merging. According to Hegel, Jesus had been falsely
understood, in that divinity had been placed in an single individual. Christianity
should not be a matter of the relationship between God and the individual soul, it was
rather a spirit indwelling in the community. With the death and resurrection of
Christ, followed by the moment of Pentecost, the age of the Son gave way to the age
of the Spirit, the age of the Holy Ghost. Henceforward the life of the community
became the realisation of the true Christ of Hegelianism. The death of Christ made
each person a Christ. Christ the mediator between the human and the divine gave
way to mediation as an endless process of becoming of the Spirit.

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 Faith in History 65

Hegel's understanding of the Bible

a passage from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians (11, 6-11):

Have this in mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ

Jesus who, though he was in the form of God, did not count
equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself,
taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of
man. And being found in human form he humbled hihmself and
became obedient unto death, even death on the cross.

Here, the term 'emptied himself' (Greek: ekenoseen), is crucial in Hegel's idea of
becoming Other, Entausserung, (the word which Marx later used to refer to
alienation). Similarly Hegel radically transformed the traditional Catholic under-
standing of the term incarnatio, which implied the coexistence of human and divine
within Christ. In Luther's translation this term became Menschwerden ('becoming
Man'), which introduces a notion of becoming, of process, which is absent in the
original Latin or Greek. This notion formed the basis of Hegel's interpretation of the
Christian tale, as one in which Christ dissolved himself into the community. Thus, in
Hegel's thinking, God is ultimately a series of figures into history into which He
unceasingly pours Himself. The act of becoming these figures constitutes His very
being, and Man's very History.
Already we can see how Kant's critique of what was referred to as 'positivity' and
'heteronomy' in the Christian religion - the critique of an emphasis upon the Church
as an embodiment of external authority and tradition based on revelation at the
expense of reason and the inner light of moral conscience, is in danger of being
transformed into a new type of positivity. For Kant's morality was collectivized into
what Hegel called 'ethical substance' (Sittlichkeit). Authority was now embodied in
History, and the rational community became embodied in Hegel's scheme, into the
State. Hegel had succeeded in overcoming the division between the spiritual and the
temporal inherent in the Christian tradition and, through his distinction between
Civil Society and the State, had managed to incorporate plurality within a unified
historic whole. But in doing so, he had also dangerously weakened the status of the
individual moral conscience and all but dissolved Kant's careful distinction between
ethics and politics. In Hegel's formulation, that spiritual democracy of reasoned
individual conscience envisaged by Kant, gave way to a world in which the partial and
the particular views of individuals in their everyday life, in family and at work, were
encompassed and surpassed in a larger political-ethical whole.
It only remained for the young Marx (1818-1883), a generation later, to claim that
Hegel's State was not a true universal concept, that his political community was not a
true community, because it left the everyday life of Civil Society outside it. Marx
addressed Civil Society and painted it in the darkest of colours. It was depicted as the
sphere of the individual's workaday life in which the individual was no more than an
egoist, and his activities, a relentless engagement in a war of all against all. Kant's
irreducible duality of moral person and natural being within each human individual
was first dispersed into the plurality of moments of Hegel's State, and then
re-presented by Marx as a struggle between a Capitalist present and a Communist
future. Similarly, Christ, the mediator between God and man, between finite and the
infinite, who had not only taken on human form but had died like a thief on the cross,
now reappeared as the proletariat who, abased to the extreme of inhumanity and

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66 History Workshop Journal

without particular interests to defend, would redeem humanity through the

transfiguration of struggle.
The Communist movement which was eventually born out of Marx's reflection
was largely unaware of these religious roots of its founding philosophy and was
violently hostile to any suggestion of its affinity to the Christian religion. The
redemptive role of the proletariat was now clothed in a language derived from
natural history and economics. Science, industrial technology, the clash between
classes and above all, the historical process itself were to perform the task once
ascribed to the morality embedded in practical reason. Here was faith in history at its
most unbounded.
But however invisible, the old-world roots of this new world-view were
nevertheless to shape its development in significant ways. In the twentieth-centur
Communist state, a form of Hegel's reconciliation between spiritual and tempor
re-appeared in a grotesque fusion between politics and ideology, resulting in a
strange new type of state religion - dialectical materialism. The rigid and lifeless (but
by modern standards, relatively harmless), external authority of the eighteenth-
century German church attacked by Kant, re-emerged in Communism as an
infinitely more terrifying phenomenon, in which ethics and political conformity
officially became one, and dissent was declared a symptom of insanity.
If the Christian churches have now played a dignified and unobtrusive part in the
dismantling of this nightmarish amalgam of spiritual and temporal authority, it
would appear that the wheel has turned full circle. But we should also remember that
the Churches have only been able to do this to the extent that they no longer aspire to
such concentrations of power and authority themselves. The Church militant backed
by the armoury of state power is an evil phenomenon wherever it emerges: we need
only think of contemporary Iran.
In this year of all years, it is all too easy to preach against any faith in history. The
once magical invocation of history's numinous and redemptive powers now looks
either tawdry or sinister; at best, like the childish contraptions assembled by the
Wizard of Oz, at worst like Walter Benjamin's (1892-1940) vision of the angel
history who 'sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage
and hurls it in front of his feet . . . while the pile of debris before him grows skyward'.
From Passchendaele to Auschwitz, from the Gulag to Hiroshima, and so on to the
Killing Fields, the twentieth century has remorselessly torn away from us all
remaining vestiges of a simple nineteenth-century faith in historical progress. It has
also gone beyond the limits of what historians can honestly claim to have understood.
But if we have turned away from the immense panoramas of past and future
displayed by nineteenth-century prophets, it should not be in order that our heads be
turned by the epistemological vortex of post-modernism. Rather, we should return
to that original point of divergence between religion and secular humanism, with
which my address began, and to that more modest vision of history as a field in which
moral choice and action can have effect. We are not obliged to believe that history of
itself will deliver moral progress, but nor are we obliged to renounce all hope of
moral progress itself. Morality is not borne forward by nations, classes or the World
Spirit, it is a project embarked upon by individuals in communities, inspired in their
actions by the maxims of practical reason. Such a morality cannot be imposed by
states, parties, churches or schools, but these institutions can certainly create
positive frameworks and environments in which individuals can join in the unending
project of building a moral community. The history of the twentieth century allows

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 Faith in History 67

none of us to be naive or over-confi

at least continue to act as if such a project were realizable. In that task, the role of
historians is not to provide hope, but rather to contribute to the knowledge and
realism by which any such hope might be tempered. In that more modest venture, a
historian might concede that some Faith in History was now and again justified.

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