By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
Niebuhr's "dialectical conception of time and eternity" (2:289) strikes me as problematic. For while it is certainly proper to speak of "an eternity involved in, and yet transcending, the temporal (2:290), or of "an eternal ground of existence which is, nevertheless, involved in man's historical striving to the very point of suffering with and for him" (2:321), it seems to me rather more problematic to speak of "a consummation which will sublimate [sic: sublate?] rather than annul the whole historical process" (2:298). For the idea of "sublimation," like the notion that the "fulfillment" of things consists in "the fuller embodiment of their essential character" (287), appears to trade on the monism implicit in traditional Western philosophy generally, and in modern idealism in particular. Otherwise put, Niebuhr does not seem to allow sufficiently for "the infinite qualitative difference" between time and eternity; instead of being radically discontinuous, time and eternity, as he thinks and speaks of them, seem to lie on the same level or plane. His motives in this are transparent -- and sound: to take man's "historical responsibilities" or "historical obligations" seriously, and thus to insist that the individual has an "indirect" as well as a "direct" relation to eternity. But I question whether his way of doing this is adequate. Consider, e.g., his statement: "A Christ is expected wherever history is thought of as a realm of fragmentary revelations of a purpose and power transcending history, pointing to a fuller disclosure of that purpose and power" (2:5). Note the quantitative language ("fuller disclosure," "fragmentary revelations"). To be sure, Niebuhr also says: "[T]here is no point in history, whatever the cumulations of wisdom and power, in which the finiteness of man is overcome so that he could complete his own life, or in which history as such does not retain the ambiguity of being rooted in nature-necessity on the one hand while pointing towards transcendent, 'eternal' and trans-historical ends on the other hand" (2:4). But the difficulty, it seems to me, is that Niebuhr never succeeds in integrating these two strands of thought, except by a "dialectical conception of time and eternity" in which the second, ultimately, gives way to the first. Within the quantitative bounds of the monism underlying his thought, he may well stress the qualitative difference as much as it can be stressed -- within it is the office of "the power of God" "to overcome [sic] the ambiguity of man's finiteness and freedom" (2:297). "Overcome" here means, I fear, not the objective completion of our subjective incompleteness, but, somehow (never clearly explained!), the transformation of our subjective incompleteness into a subjective completeness, the domestication of our vita aliena in and through God's love for us into a vita domestica of our own. Still otherwise put, Niebuhr makes essentially the same assumption that Hartshorne accuses Dewey of making -- namely, that "all ideals can be reduced to . . . potential human achievements" (Beyond Humanism: 47). Thus Niebuhr can say that a "fuller disclosure" is necessary because "the potential meaningfulness of history is recognized as fragmentary and corrupted. It must be completed and clarified" (NDM 2:5). But a more than "fragmentary" meaningfulness of history is not a "potentiality" of history itself, but solely of God as the ultimate end of history, in the sense, not of "an end of duration," but of "an end of ultimate significance." No doubt, the one point where Niebuhr is led well beyond such a position is in his stress on the divine judgment, which implies, as he says, that "the eternal and divine is not regarded as the extension and fulfillment of the highest human possibilities," since "God's word is spoken against both his favoured nation and against all nations" (2:25). But, again, isn't the very notion of "impossible possibility" indicative of the problem?