Our third remark aims at the infinite singularity of historical reality. Let us take as our departure a passage (p. 196) of [Karl] Löwith’s book [Meaning in History], where he writes that the message of the New Testament does not consist in a call to a historical deed but in a call to repentance. It is, to be sure, in general the case that history does not consist in calls to historical deeds. Rather, it is like a passage through lack, hunger, and invigorating impotence. However, in order to clarify our thought, let us juxtapose Löwith’s proposition with a different one, which is supposed to keep us from any philosophical, ethical, and other acts of leveling, and let us dare to suggest: Christianity is in its essence no morality and no doctrine. It is no penitential sermon, and no religion in the sense of comparative religious studies, but a historical event of infinite, non-appropriable, non-occupiable singularity. It is the incarnation in the Virgin Mary. The Christian Credo speaks of historical events. Pontius Pilate belongs there essentially. He is not just a pitiful creature who oddly ended up there. Christians look back on completed events and find a basic reason [Ingrund] and an archetype [Inbild]. Through the active contemplation of them, the dark meaning of our history continues to grow. The Marian image of history of a great German poet, the Christian Epimetheus by Konrad Weiss, emerged from it. In the Vienna journal Wort und Wahrheit [Word and Truth, April 1949], Friedhelm Kemp published an essay, which provides an excellent introduction in this respect. For Konrad Weiss, the merely restraining forces are not sufficient. He claims that historical circumstances are more often to be seized rather than to be restrained. One may dismiss his Marian image of history as mere historical mysticism. However, its dark truth is thereby not disconfirmed, and neither is its significance as a historical counterforce against the leveling of history to the status of universal humanity, to the museum of the past, and an exchangeable costume to conceal the bluntness of activist attempts to give meaning to the meaningless.
All of this—the great parallel, the katechon, and the Christian Epimetheus— becomes for us an ardent theme because of Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History. By way of expressing this, we distinguish his book from a variety of other publications that address issues from history and the philosophy of history. We draw concrete consequences from the great impression of his critical analysis and dare to once again speak of a history that is not merely an archive of what has been, but also not a humanistic self-mirroring or a mere piece of nature circling around itself. Rather, history blows like a storm in great testimonies. It grows through strong creations, which insert the eternal into the course of time. It is a striking of roots in the space of meaning of the earth. Through scarcity and impotence, this history is the hope and honor of our existence.
– Carl Schmitt, “Three Possibilities for a Christian Conception of History,” Telos pg. 170 (Spring 2009) (originally published in 1950)
March 11, 2016
I’ve been intending to get to Löwith for awhile, but I never do. I intend to read him side-by-side with Blumenberg. First, however, I must read through the primary source material of the thinkers he engages with, and must go back again over Hegel and especially Heidegger.