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The Role of Providence in History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Extract
Serious historical inquiry is inevitably at odds with the idea of providence in history. To such inquiry providence is an unnecessary and frustrating hypothesis. For somewhat different reasons, including embarrassment about triumphalism and presumption in the past, modem theologians rarely speak of providence. Nevertheless, what men have made of providence has had a considerable role in making and viewing history. Here then my concern is with the ways of men to God.
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- Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1973
References
1 Black, J.B., The Reign of Elizabeth (Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1936), p. 3Google Scholar.
2 St. Augustine, , “Divine Providence and the Problem of Evil,” in Writings of St. Augustine (New York, 1948), p. 239Google Scholar. Menander, in “The Arbitration” presented characters who argue that God could not put in a long enough working day to go around damning or saving the people in a world estimated to consist of one thousand cities. God cannot dole out daily good and evil to us but his concern for us appears in that “he's given each of us our character to be the captain of our soul.” Casson, Lionel (ed. & trans.): Masters of Ancient Comedy (New York, 1950), p. 150Google Scholar. Robert Frost has written of the terror of an all-encompassing design:
What but design of darkness to appall?
If design govern in a thing so small.
3 Turgot, , Oeuvres (Paris, 1844), II 598 and 595Google Scholar quoted in Löwith, Karl, Meaning in History (Chicago, 1949), pp. 100, 103Google Scholar.
4 The first quotation is from Hegel and the longer quotation is from Löwith, Karl, Meaning in History (Chicago, 1949), p. 54Google Scholar.
5 There are, as well, Thomist theologians of history who see history as the word of God, the revelation of God. Here God's role, to use fumbling words, is conceived as more than providence. See Navone, John, “History as the Word of God,” in Philip McShane, S.J., ed., Foundations of Theology (Notre Dame, 1971), pp. 124–140Google Scholar; and Connolly, James M., Human History and the Word of God (New York, 1965Google Scholar). I do not reject these theological remarks but even with the fragmentary help of Teilhard de Chardin I cannot establish helpful correlations between the theological statements and the course of world history as I am able to order it.
6 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Critique de la Raison Dialectique (Paris, 1960), I, 62–63Google Scholar. I quote from Barnes's, Hazel translation of its first section, Search for a Method (New York, 1963), pp. 89–90Google Scholar.
7 See the introduction, pp. 191–208, texts and notes, pp. 209–266, to Ecclesiastes, in The Anchor Bible, XVIII, edited by Scott, R. B. Y. (Garden City, 1965)Google Scholar.
8 Eccles. 3:11, ibid, p. 220.
9 Kant has argued the desirability of assuming a plan of nature. As it is developed, it comforts us with the prospect of the future development of the race's potentialities. This can, he wrote, perhaps be called providence. “For what is the use of lauding and holding up for contemplation the glory and wisdom of creation in the non-rational sphere of nature, if the history of mankind, the very part of this great display of supreme wisdom which contains the purpose of all the rest, is to remain a constant reproach to everything else?” “Idea For A Universal History” in Reiss, Hans, ed., Kant's Political Writings (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 52–53Google Scholar.