Part I: The Dialogues of the Self with Itself, with Others, and with God
Chapter 9: The Self as Creator and Creature in Historical Drama
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The Self and the Dramas of History by Reinhold Niebuhr
Part I: The Dialogues of the Self with Itself, with Others, and with God
One of the foremost philsophers and theologians of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr was for many years a Professor at Union Theological Seminary, New York City. He is the author of many classics in their field, including The Nature and Destiny of Man, Moral Man and Immoral Society, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, and Discerning the Signs of Our Times. He was also the founding editor of the publication Christianity and Crisis. The Self and the Dramas of History, was published in 1955 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. This material prepared for Religion Online by Harry and Grace Adams.
Chapter 9: The Self as Creator and Creature in
learned in the natural sciences to the management of human affairs. Aldous Huxley has satirized the dreams of such voluntarists in his Brave New World.
This interesting combination of determinism and voluntarism usually presupposes a vaguely defined elite of scientists who have the omniscience to manage the events in which ordinary mortals are merely creatures. Modern communism presents us with a much more dangerous combination of such determinism and voluntarism. It has a self-appointed elite, the Communist Party, who, by reason of being the only ones who are privy to the logic, which supposedly
determines historical events, are able to intervene at the crucial moments to further the logic and finally to take the heroic step which will insure not only the victory of the "proletariat," but change the whole human situation by making man the unambiguous master of historical destiny rather than merely both creature and orator.
It remained for some modern cultural anthropologist to correct the absurdities of these
combinations of voluntarism and determinism which underestimated the freedom of the man who is to be managed, and the finiteness of the man who is to do the managing, by projecting an even more absurdly consistent determinism, according to which all men are the prisoners of their respective cultures with no opportunity to exhibit characteristically universal human traits.
The freedom of man beyond the limits of the historical situation in which his art and life is formed does not necessarily reveal itself in those elements of his art which rise to the height of universally valid insights. It may manifest itself in highly individual insights, transcending the conventions of his society. As an instance: the culture of France, in the period of the Empire, nurtured three great novelists, Balzac, Flaubert and George Sand. Their novels were
characterized by a common unconventional attitude toward sexual relations, characteristic of that period. But one of them, George Sand, also expressed a highly individual attitude within the general standards of the period. Her novels left the reader uncertain whether she intended to glorify wantonness or wished to expound the thesis that sexual relations, whether inside or outside of marriage, were intolerable without love. This attitude expressed neither the convention of her period nor some universally valid standard.
The freedom of men above their status as creatures of the historical drama does not necessarily express itself in conscious efforts to determine historical destiny. That ambition may be
reserved for a few great statesmen; and the illusion of such creativity is held only by a few dreamers. Actually the creativity which may, or may not, affect historical destiny is open to every man even in the humblest walks of life when he comes to terms with his unique problems partly in terms which his culture supplies, and partly according to his unique gifts and
inclinations. Whether his unique response "makes" history or not is largely out of his hands, for only the future can determine whether his unique response is to be the basis of a new historical pattern or is to be stored in the storehouse of history as merely another proof of the endless variety of human responses.
We might speculate endlessly upon such mysteries as the source of the unique moral courage which a man like General Rommel exhibited in his final defiance of Hitler and how it was related to his previous Nazi creed and could be compared with the courage of other generals who had the advantage of non-Nazi background but were not able to show a like courage. We will also have to wait upon history to find whether Churchill’s obvious relish in the heroism of this gallant foe restored some of the dignity of gallantry into modern national combats or was merely the last flicker of light from a more romantic age in an age which has no use for such romantic candles in its neon-lighted modernity.
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return to religion-online
The Self and the Dramas of History by Reinhold Niebuhr
Part I: The Dialogues of the Self with Itself, with Others, and with God
One of the foremost philsophers and theologians of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr was for many years a Professor at Union Theological Seminary, New York City. He is the author of many classics in their field, including The Nature and Destiny of Man, Moral Man and Immoral Society, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, and Discerning the Signs of Our Times. He was also the founding editor of the publication Christianity and Crisis. The Self and the Dramas of History, was published in 1955 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. This material prepared for Religion Online by Harry and Grace Adams.