by Teotonio R. de Souza, S. J.
HISTORIOLOGY AS PROPHECY
In what way can a historian help the Church in Hong Kong to plan and prepare itself for its future? History is commonly understood as a past-oriented exercise, and as such it would seem to have little to offer in reference to a topic that is future-oriented, namely, small faith communities and the future of the Church in Hong Kong.
The relevance of history in this matter lies in its prophetic role, implied in what I would like to call "authentic historizing". Once this is established, the credibility of a historian to help in a consideration of this topic may appear less questionable, even essential.
History is generally taken to mean the story of the significant events－economic, political, cultural－in the life of a people. The sequence of events goes to form an objective process, and it is up to the historian to identify and formulate its internal laws of motion. Underlying this conception is a quantitative notion of time with its mutually exclusive moments of past, present and future. Of these three moments, the past is set up as the specific object of the science of history. Time, in this perspective, is homogeneous and is the common element in which all beings from inorganic things to humans have their beginning and their end. This way of viewing time and history has its own level of truth but fails to reveal the essence of history as a human phenomenon. Deeper reflection will show that time and history are grounded in the kind of being which human beings have and are. In what follows I shall try to show that the historical is constitutive of human existence and how it dovetails with prophetic vision and hope. In doing so, I shall draw largely on the seminal reflections of Sebastian Kappen, or more originally of Martin Heidegger, though on many issues my line of thinking will be found deviating from both.
Temporality as the Ground of the Historical
All sub-human beings, whether organic or inorganic, have a certain completeness in themselves. They are what they are at any given moment and nothing more. Not so human beings. These are essentially more than what they actually are. In this sense human beings alone ex-ist, that is, stand outside and ahead of themselves, in the not-yet. Living from the future is to be understood, not psychologically in the sense of longing for some definite state of being, but ontologically as constitutive of humanness itself. What is the point of arrival of this tending ahead? Death? In a fundamental sense, yes. For with death humans find their outer limit in non-being. But death is not negativity pure and simple. It is not merely passion but also action. It is the act of surrendering all one has to the generations yet to come. It is that definitive act of tradition (from the Latin verb tradere which means "to hand over") which ensures the continuity of history.
But if death is the final act of tradition, it is because life itself is a handing over and a handing down . For no sooner are human beings born than they start dying, hanging down the power and the glory and the shame that was theirs. Every deed done, every word uttered, goes to swell the planetary stream of life for good or for bad.
What is true of the individual is true of the community as well. What it has received from the generations gone by it hands down to the generations to come. For the community, too, to live is to die, and to die is to give itself away, thus constituting the flux of history. Now the question we raised earlier crops up again: What is that to which the human community is tending? The answer can come not from reason but only from hope. And hope will say that the human caravan has for its goal theandric plenitude, the full revelation of the Divine in the full revelation of the human. But theandric fullness can be the future of the human community only if it gathers into itself the past, individual as well as collective.
Seen from this angle, every individual exists as a project, as a structured whole of possibilities, whose ultimate realization merges with the absolute future of mankind. But whence do individuals draw the possibilities that await maturation in the future? From the heritage they were born with. Human existence stretches between two finitudes, birth and death. But just as, by handing down what has been accomplished to coming generations, one transcends the finitude of death, so too, by appropriating the heritage handed down, one transcends the retrospective finitude of birth. In drawing upon the possibilities handed down, one also accepts the limitations accompanying one's birth in a particular family, in a particular community, at a particular historical juncture. These possibilities and limitations are anterior to any choice on our part and go to make up our fate as individuals and our destiny as a collectivity.
Living from the future and talking over the heritage of the past, we comport ourselves in the present. The possibilities of the past are never taken over just as they are found but are subjected to a critique. That is why each generation has its own "world", understood as the structure of meanings that mould our dealings with the environment of humans, implements, and nature. Correspondingly, each generation lets the earth reveal itself in a way unique to it.
It follows from these reflections that the three ecstasies of time－past, present, and future－are immanent in one another thus constitute the temporality of human existence.
Where we live from the future and draw upon the heritage of the times gone by, we invest the present with a meaning that overflows the bounds of the here-and-now and renders our being and acting at once redemptive and re-creative: redemptive, in so far as we gather into, and save for, the future the authentic possibilities of the past; re-creative, in so far as we thus prepare the way for the full revelation of the human and the Divine. To live out in this manner the reciprocal immanence of the future, the past, and the present is to historize authentically.
Historizing in this sense is at once fateful and free: fateful, because the possibilities we take over are not of our own making but pre-given; free, because we choose what we have inherited. This holds true of the community as well. In projecting a future, a community has to rely on the possibilities the past has destined. Between the destiny and the destination (the realm of freedom) lies the way of the Cross.
Fall from Authentic Historizing
Historizing can be inauthentic in relation to the future, the past or the present. And most people most of the time are inauthentic in one way or another.
One can be inauthentic in relation to the future either by denying it or absolutizing it. Whoever denies the future does so for fear of death. One tries to flee from the prospect of death by imprisoning oneself in the here-and-now. Such a one lives by the motto, "Eat, drink and make merry, for tomorrow we die". This is to disown one's responsibility to future generations. For, instead of accepting death as the definitive handing over of oneself to the human community, one consigns it to the subconscious as part of the fate of the anonymous "they". The resulting loss of eschatological tension renders the person incapable of creative intervention in history.
Forgetfulness of the future often coexists with its spiritualization. This happens when the ultimate goal of life is conceived as an overworld of disincarnate souls enjoying the beatific vision of an equally unfleshed divinity. A direct consequence of this is the devaluation of matter and all that is connected with it－body, sex, marriage and the earth. What is more, civilization and history are debased to the level of a necessary evil to be transcended, a scaffolding to be dismantled, once the heaven above is reached. And creation's groaning in travail for the liberation of the children of God is frustrated. Angelism of this kind is what gave birth to the kind of "spirituality" that rules the hearts and minds of most Christians even today.
In regard to the past, too, one can assume two contrary stances, each leading to its own form of inauthentic existence. The first consists in cultural amnesia, i.e. forgetfulness of the past in reaction to the traumatic experiences associated with one's birth, early childhood or lowly social origins, or in response to the colonization of one's mind by an alien culture. Whatever be the cause, the consequences are ruinous to the individual and the community. For without the past there is no incubation of the future nor any meaningful presence in the here-and-now. Where the umbilical bond with the past has been severed, creativity withers away. This explains the sterility of, for example, Indian Christians in the field of literature, drama, painting, music, sculpture, and so on. Shorn of their past, they have no unconscious reservoir of myths and symbols, without which no creation of the beautiful, no sensuous revelation of meaning, is possible.
Negation of the past often provokes its own opposite, namely cult of the past, which, in turn, manifests itself either as fundamentalism or as revivalism. Both look to the past for the supreme revelation of the human and the Divine. Every element of tradition is seen as divinely inspired and, for that reason, valid for all times. Curiously, the cult of the past is, in effect, the negation of the past. For, the past is not allowed to be past, the dead is not left to remain dead but set up as eternally valid. Into the bargain, the real challenges of the present are ignored and collective infantilism holds sway. True of the situation of Hong Kong Christians?
An inevitable consequence of the alienation of the past and the future is the estrangement of the present. Where the past and the future are glorified, the present exhausts itself either in chewing the cud of "one's glorious past" or in dreaming up some illusory bliss yet to come. Both conservatism and futurism dehistoricize the present.
Another way of rendering the present inauthentic is to absolutize it: the past and the future are repudiated and the individual or the community falls back on the present and encases itself in it. Delinked from memory and hope, the present becomes an end in itself and is valued in terms of the pleasure it can give. Human existence is thus reduced to a series of disparate experiences, some pleasing, others annoying. The resulting fragmentation of being and consciousness has become a universal phenomenon under capitalism which, on the one hand, destroys traditional cultures and, on the other, focuses on immediate consumption at the cost of humankind's global, future well-being. Again true of present-day Hong Kong?
From Historizing to Historiology
Having delineated the structured movement of historizing as constitutive of human existence, individual as well as collective, we are in a position to understand the nature of historiology or the science of history. "Every science is constituted by thematizing." To thematize means to render explicit what we are implicitly aware of. What historiology thematizes is the historizing of a people. Its role is to disclose the manner in which a people, placing their hope in the future, draws upon the resources of the past and creatively lives out the here-and-now. This is something different from either discovering the universal laws of motion of history or describing and serializing past events.
But why disclose the historizing of individuals and communities that are no more? Because to be in the future, one's own and that of the community, demands that each one of us human beings appropriate the traditions of our forbearers in order to fulfill our task in the present. What we each do unreflectively in virtue of our historical essence, the historian does methodically and systematically. But he does so as one sharing his being with, and representing, the community. Through him the community reaches back to the past generations who in their day reached out to the future in order to hand down the wealth of what they had wrought in sound, wood and stone.
It follows, then, that the historian is deeply involved in what he is trying to disclose. In disclosing the life of a people, he is appropriating his legacy as a sum of possibilities, which will go to shape his and his community's existential project. This means that the historian is part of the history, he is making it. Here the familiar distinction between subject and object breaks down in favour of an encompassing primordial unity. This is what distinguishes historiology from the natural sciences where the scientist remains neutral (?) to the object of his research.
From Historiology to Prophecy
The triune structure we have discerned in historizing and historiology also defines prophecy. The prophet is one who bears witness to the absolute future of humankind and places his hope in its coming. The Hebrew prophets spoke of that future in terms of the new heaven and the new earth where wolf and lamb shall feed together; Jesus, in terms of the kingdom of God; the Buddha, in terms of the rule of dharma', and traditional religion, in terms of the heaven above.
In the prophetic vision, the future envisaged is also the fulfillment and recovery of the past. Underlying this is the conception that history is not necessarily a progression to ever more perfect modes of human existence but is in many respects a regression and self-estrangement from an original state of wholeness and fullness. A clear instance is Jesus' pronouncement concerning the Mosaic law of divorce that it was made because of the obtuseness of the Hebrews and that "in the beginning, at creation", God had made humans male and female so that they might join together and become one flesh. In fact, at the root of every significant break-through made by humankind in the past, one can find an attempt to recover some state of affairs that obtained "in the beginning". Anticipating the future and recovering the past, the prophet lives the present critically and creatively. Thus Jesus, the prophet par excellence, not only ruthlessly criticized the religion and society of his day but also initiated a counter-culture and a counter-community.
Christian Presence in History
None would contest that, as a follower or "companion" of Jesus, the mission of a Christian is to continue his prophetic intervention in history. But to be prophetic is to be historical in the fullest sense of the term, that is, so to live from the future hoped for that we, drawing upon the possibilities of the past, help usher in a new "world" and bring about a more primordial revelation of the earth.
But in order to be able to fulfill this task, Christians must tear themselves away from the inauthentic forms of historizing in which so many of them are caught up. Chief among such inauthentic forms are angelism, cultural amnesia, and activism.
Angelism, which projects the salvation of the soul as the ultimate goal of life, has for its obverse side the devaluation of matter and of everything material. The underlying dualism of matter and soul is foreign to the original Jesus tradition and is of Hellenistic provenance. To the Hebrew mind, the soul was nothing more than the dimension of inwardness specific to the human body. It is forgetfulness of this holistic conception of the human that led to the proliferation of "spiritualities". While claiming to save the soul, "spirituality" spells doom for the earth. This is bore out by the ecological crisis we are facing today. The pursuit of matters spiritual served to legitimize the aggressive exploitation of the earth as factor of production. The earth and the heaven were thus desacralized and disenchanted. Now the challenge is to reverse this trend and rediscover the divinity of the earth. This calls for dialogue with the fertility cults of old, which the Judeo-Christian tradition has, from the time of the prophets, denounced as incompatible with true faith.
Cultural amnesia has been the lot of Christians in all former colonies. Being a Christian means to have had one's being grafted on to an exotic tree which has not yet struck deep roots in the native soil. True, Christians are as much sons and daughters of the earth as others of the same land. But, whereas the latter make their own the treasures the earth has handed down, the former disown and repudiate them as contrary to their faith. Tortoise-wise, the average Christian imprisons himself in encrusted beliefs and dogmas which makes him immune to the voice of the past. Perhaps this also holds true of many Chinese ecclesiastical leaders, despite their attempts at inculturation? Do they relate to their Chinese past only as an object of study? The past does not speak through their voice, becoming a "subject" in and through them.
The end-result of angelism and cultural amnesia is a present devoid of meaning and creative tension. The estrangement of the present takes the form of cyclicism or activism. The first looks back to the past; the second to the future. Cyclicism characterizes the life of church people working in institutions where they have to conform to the ever recurring cycle of functions, rites, and festivals. Where it holds sway, one always ends where one began, and begins where one ended. Emptied of all uniqueness, the here-and-now offers nothing but boredom.
Unlike cultural amnesia, activism is of comparatively recent origin. It is the industrial-technocratic society's gift to religion. It is not so much a single malaise as a complex syndrome with varied manifestations. The activist ecclesiastic takes after the machine. He wants results and wants them immediately. The Kingdom and its glory begin to take second place. So. too, do promptings of the past. Salvation comes in the here-and-now in the form of tangible results. And producing results is a matter of technique. Hence the frantic search for ever new techniques, psychological as well as para-religious: techniques of counselling and consoling, techniques of communicating and commanding, techniques of conjuring up and monitoring charisms. Mortally afraid of his techniques becoming obsolete and himself among with it, he must at regular intervals go abroad to the Meccas of technicized religion for updating sessions and refresher courses. Like his industrial counterpart, the activist Church leader is acutely aware of the value of time. He knows that time is not only money but also favour with God and man. No wonder he is always busy, hopping from appointment to appointment. Tyrannized by the particular, he lives a life of means and no ends, of expertise and no wisdom. Can such an activist be a leader for the ordinary Christian of Hong Kong, who has to prepare for a future that may begin in a mangerand end on the Cross!