The Metaphysics of History: Living Meaning and the Transcendent Horizon

Keywords: Metaphysics of history; living meaning; critique of positivism; Christianity; Franks.

Always Meaning

What occurs is always meaning clothed in the fabric of events. In the deepest sense, man himself is living meaning. Let us fix this.

• Let us note that it is often difficult to perceive what is taking place as the presence of genuine living meaning.
• Yet, having noticed this fact, and remaining always within reflection upon events, let us retain this as an indispensable dimension of reality—something that our immobilized formal reason constantly attempts to exclude from its analytical equations.

The Weakness of Positivism

Positivist history consists of "models assembled from facts," of "constructions built from events," which frequently neither seek meaning nor recognize the living meaning—the spirit—that was present.

Historical positivism, armed with its analytical apparatus, occupies itself with the accumulation of constructions and then with the production of new synthetic constructions.

Thereafter arise confusion and ever newer constructions.

And afterward—a bad infinity.

Herein lies the weakness of analytical reason.

If one opens any simplified historical textbook and immerses oneself in historical commentary, one discovers either constructions composed of facts or constructions composed of interpretations of facts, themselves determined by ideological presuppositions.

Such interpretations arrange facts in accordance with particular simplified schemes, without attempting to understand the living meaning that was once present.

Yet in the end, even the most refined positivist, wishing to become a genuine scholar and to free himself from invention, nevertheless finds himself inventing meaning.

The Search for Living Meaning and Interpretation

Let us suppose that the living decipherment of history consists in understanding the meaning of what occurs.

Of course, such decipherment—such understanding—cannot become a universal historical science for everyone.

It presupposes only the manifestation of singular acts of understanding.

Such acts of understanding may be interpreted by positivists as distortions of reality or as "mere poetry."

Yet what remains problematic for positivism is that its own understanding of events is itself understanding.

And thus, interpretation cannot be escaped.

The principal weakness of positive interpretations lies in their failure to recognize that concepts borrowed from the present are incapable of disclosing the living presence of a distant yesterday.

In the context of seeking and criticizing acts of decipherment, one may suppose, for example, that Christianity, when defined by historical positivism merely as "religion," becomes an empty concept.

It no longer permits one to understand: "What was all this about then?"

In those so-called dark ages, once Christianity is understood merely as "a religion adopted by the Franks," we lose access to the concealed living meaning.

The Search for Decipherments

Why was it necessary for the Franks to "accept" Christianity?

Why?

How are we to understand this why?

In order to understand this "why" through the prism of living meaning, one must set aside the positivist model in which Clovis merely calculates bonuses from an alliance with Rome or engages in some situational bargain.

Let us suppose that all this may indeed have existed.

Yet the living essence of the problem lies far deeper.

If we regard man as living meaning, then the adoption of Christianity by the Franks was not simply the abandonment of yesterday's paganism because it had become obsolete.

It may instead represent the discovery by living meaning itself of a new transcendental foundation.

A global reconfiguration of spirit.

Let us advance several hypotheses.

The Meaning of Warfare as the Meaning of Life for an Armed People

Let us suppose that for the Germanic world of the early Middle Ages, living meaning was concentrated in the Heil of the leader.

If the leader prevailed, then the gods were with him.

If he suffered defeat, he was empty.

Such a structure produced a condition of strategic deadlock.

The Germanic peoples became imprisoned within an endless cycle of wars for fortune—a fortune capable of evaporating at any moment.

Accidental Digestion

The entire mass of tribes that inhabited a transcendental pre-Christian world now unknown to us, and which participated in the Great Migration, directed itself toward the continual fortune involved in the "digestion" of the provinces of the Empire.

But why Christianity?

Why?

The Discovery of Transcendent Meaning

Let us suppose that Christianity granted the Franks access to a transcendent Meaning that did not depend upon the outcome of a particular battle.

It introduced the category of transcendent Eternity, standing above Fortune itself.

This allowed the group—the Frankish elite together with the armed people as a whole—to cease being merely a band and to become a timeless, campaignless, battleless Subject of History.

A Subject possessing a global and cementing purpose directed toward transforming the whole surrounding space into a new reality under its leadership.

The Transcendental Transformation of Space

And thereafter transformed living meaning itself became the instrument for mastering the entire territory, employing the passionate energy of the tribe and of tribes through their connection with an inexhaustible transcendental beginning.

This was no longer a random raid followed by another raid and then yet another.

Nor was it the fate of the Vandals, who exhausted their passionate energy without ever discovering the possibility of arresting eternity here in the form of a new reality.

Mere Administration or Eternal Order?

Positivism says: "They adopted Christianity in order to gain access to Roman administration and the technologies of a more advanced civilization."

But is that really so?

Let us suppose that Roman administrative structures, together with Roman techniques of governance, were indeed indispensable for a tribal military society attempting to digest territories.

Eternal Order and the Transcendent Horizon

Yet let us suppose that something more important was involved. Namely, the structure of meaning itself—the Church.

It became the very fabric into which the Franks clothed their passionate energies.

Temporary eruptions of spirit were directed toward a permanent process of creation.

The contingent and accidental everyday world became united with the infinite dimension that produces eternal order.

Let us suppose that without this garment, Frankish energy itself would simply have dissipated—as happened to the Huns.

The Importance of the Other Technologies

Within this same framework, wherein living meaning is understood not merely as a transcendental anchoring but also as the formation of earthly life, the juridical apparatus of Rome—as well as all the remaining technologies—acquired profound significance.

Infinite Meaning Here

Such an anchoring of meaning within the transcendent beginning made possible the discovery of a new infinite meaning.

This meaning itself began to determine the living meaning present within events.

And it did not perish within the bad infinity of internecine struggles and the randomness of meaningless raids.

The "Protocol of the Future" and the Determination of Eternity

If early Christianity is understood not merely as a moral doctrine—or, still worse, as "religion," that empty category of positivism—but rather as a living transcendental meaning for spirit, then for the Franks it constituted the only means of deciphering Rome.

Of becoming Rome.

Of ceasing to be something accidental.

And of discovering a way to determine eternity itself.

In such a context, the acceptance of faith becomes a particular act: to comprehend the transcendent by becoming it.

Thus, "acceptance" means incorporation into the logic of the higher Roman civilization.

Therefore, the Franks did not merely "adopt" a religion.

They became participants in the Logos that exists beyond the ordinary events of everyday life.

Conclusion

This stabilization of meaning, this discovery of meaning within the transcendent, became the foundation for the production of a new civilization.

A civilization that united within itself the living spirit of the Germanic peoples together with the spirit of Ancient Rome and Greece.

And thus, what emerged was not merely a continuation of Rome, nor merely the triumph of the Germanic peoples.

It was the birth of something new.

A civilization produced through the union of the vital energy of the Germans with the spiritual inheritance of Greece and Rome.

And perhaps it was precisely this discovery of eternity, this discovery of the transcendent horizon, that enabled living meaning to escape the bad infinity of accidental history and to become History itself.