I

The Viconian paradox, as Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner used to call it, is the notion that humans make history, but cannot control it.Footnote ¹ The paradox belongs in the ambit of Vico's thoughts on the natural versus the human-made and his well-known claim, based on an older topos, that as humans we can understand the domain of history since we made it, while nature, as created by God, eludes us in its vastness. As a codified dichotomy between nature and “culture” (as the human-made), Vico's distinction subsequently became one of the key tools for delimiting the domain of legitimate objects of historical knowledge. If this is indeed, as has often been argued, the point of origin of the modern nature–culture distinction,Footnote ² then theological notions of the distinction of the divine and the human were inscribed in it. The outlines of this inscription might remain visible even under later erasures and emendations. In the present article, I propose some conjectures about the deciphering of some earlier writings and erasures in the palimpsest of the theory of history.

In Kittsteiner's account of Vico's position, intelligibility finds itself in a double bind with agency. Humans can do things because they know how to (e.g. choose appropriate means). Therefore what they do or make is intelligible to them, on condition, perhaps, that the activity in question is somehow knowledge-based. Being accessible to human agency is then a sufficient condition for intelligibility (though not a necessary one). Yet agency implies a complication. Actions have consequences, as people like to tell children, although the same people tend to omit the inconvenient truth that many of these consequences are entirely unforeseeable. Strict but obscure limits impinge on the intelligibility of agency in terms of consequences. In a sense it is odd that a theoretical venture such as moral consequentialism could ever have arisen, as it would require constant reassessment of the moral goodness or badness of actions, the more knowledge about longer-term consequences hindsight produces. For Kittsteiner's Vico, the partial, even near-complete, opacity of agency to itself is natural because not human-made. Not by its own accord, human intelligence is insufficient to grasp all the consequences of any given intentional human action. This natural flaw of comprehension establishes the paradox: we understand what we have made in accordance with our intentions, but at the same time we do not understand it.

Kittsteiner believed that this paradox was the cornerstone of all subsequent philosophies of history. As is well known, these philosophies focused almost monotonously on the notion of historical progress (even those that, increasingly in the twentieth century, turned to criticizing their predecessors). One reason for this monotony would have been a shared strategy of argument: the idea of a collective, blind process of improvement had appeal as a tool for disarming the paradox. It promised to achieve this by way of a twofold strategy. First, actions and consequences were slowed down in a longer-term temporal projection, so that human actors stood a chance to understand them successively (namely through historical writing); second, this understanding became a collective task in which the anonymous many accumulated fragments toward an asymptotic approximation of definitive knowledge. Collective human agency was thus permitted to grow along with knowledge, slowly but steadily.Footnote ³ Kittsteiner maintained that it was possible to pass any modern philosophy of history over the razor of the Viconian paradox. At the same time, he launched a quiet, but prolonged, attack on the argument that his teachers Jacob Taubes and Reinhart Koselleck had upheld in the wake of Karl Löwith and others: that the presence of progressive structures within modern historical thought was primarily the expression of sublimated religious belief in future salvation, or “secularized eschatology.” This argument, in spite of many assaults,Footnote ⁴ remains the most prominent representative of a “theology of history.” Kittsteiner's choice of approach signals the vulnerability of this point. Yet, at the same time, he left the door open for retaining or developing structurally similar lines of argument about other theological revenants, or theological revenance more generally. The present article passes through this door.

II

In 1986 the sociologist Ulrich Beck proposed a novel reformulation of the substantial sociological theory of modernity. As a side effect, his account disabled the notion of progress as improvement. For this purpose, he introduced the concept of “risk society,” a novel stage of modernity increasingly dominated by a dialectic of risk taking and successive attempts at securitization.Footnote ⁵ Technological development generated novel risks; then, novel technologies needed to be developed to hold these risks in check, in an endless spiral that grew in circumference and comprised, increasingly, the entire planet as a biosphere. The book was devised in direct response to the meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, but displayed also awareness of an accumulation of multiple ecological threats as a novel challenge. On account of the manner in which Beck's analysis responded to contemporary concerns, it can be read as a document of the transition from a nuclear-age discourse on the planetary dimensions of modern technology to an ecological one. The latter focused on complex and slowly unfolding unintended consequences whereas the former had mainly theorized the instantaneous and intentional annihilation of life on Earth, by push of a button. Beck's point, if shaved to the bare skin with Kittsteiner's razor, restated the Viconian paradox. Technology epitomized the human-made. It expanded human agency; that is to say, in Isaiah Berlin's terminology, positive freedom, the freedom to do things, as opposed to negative freedom (from …).Footnote ⁶ To this preoccupation with positive freedom, Beck added the notion that technology also, slowly and without prospect of an ending, expanded the sphere of uncontrollable consequences that humanity struggles to rein in, if without much success.

It may be worthwhile adding that one of the distinguishing marks of German-language philosophies of history since the late eighteenth century has been the strong accentuation of technology as collective agency (including politics and even language, also understood as instruments for human purposes). This accentuation emerged at the expense of a key trope of other traditions in the philosophy of history, the concept of “civilization” as moral–political improvement. The sustained, if often subliminal, fascination for technology in German-language philosophies of history may have had to do with a perception of technological lag vis-à-vis the greater European powers at the time. At any rate, the lopsided emphasis on technological progress as the progress of freedom opened German debates to critiques of the consequences of technology—as evident, for instance, in Heidegger's critique of technological modernity or Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of industrialized entertainment.

By the 1970s and 1980s, this tradition had begun to inform a specific line of ecological argument. Beck developed his position within this overall context. What he removed from classical philosophies of history, such as those of Kant and Hegel, was primarily the redemptory promise that the expansionary process of modernity would coincide with improvement. The entire conceptual structure of classical philosophy of history would remain in place; only the notion of progress would be discarded. Indeed, progress turned out to be a mere historical aberrance, a misreading of the evolution of technology that ignored the coevolution of risk. Karl Löwith's analysis of the philosophy of history as a mere “secularized eschatology”—that turned the apocalyptic promise of a redemptive agency on the outside of the world into a world-immanent process of improvementFootnote ⁷—would therefore be rendered into a historical rather than a philosophical diagnosis: the snapshot of a fleeting nostalgia for an imagined, forever lost, security in Christian faith. Even when stripped of all progressive ornamentation, the resources of the philosophy of history still offered a clear analysis of modernity as technological–ecological disaster. The substance of the dominant theology-of-history argument, by contrast, was hollowed out. The ecological predicament of the present remained tied up with the philosophy of history, but not with secularized eschatology.

On an abstract plane, the overall possibility of Beck's position was not novel. Already Kant had set down its terms in his formulation of what, in his last intervention on the topic, he considered to be the basic premise of the philosophy of history. When looking at a significantly sizable portion of worldly affairs as they unfolded in time, Kant insisted, one should be able to tell whether things, on the whole, were improving (“eudaimonism” or “chiliasm,” as he labeled this position, with notable irony that has often gone unnoticed among proponents of the secularized-eschatology argument), whether everything was worsening (“moral terrorism”), or not going anywhere at all (“abderitism”).Footnote ⁸ Kant also held that anything but the affirmation of improvement would be an intolerably defeatist result. Beck's account of risk, by contrast, removed the option of betterment, even in the form a Hegelian dialectic sublation toward progress—a trait his thought arguably shares with Adorno's. This structure left Kant's other two options—worsening and stagnation—untouched, but actually tended toward the “terrorist” approach.Footnote ⁹ Accordingly, Beck still assumed that there was directionality in the development of human affairs as it spilled over into the ecological condition of the biosphere. Things were at least augmenting, growing bigger in scale, if worse. This reduced processual substance sufficed to unify the emergence of what, from Beck's point of view, was the latest form of modernity, global risk society.

It appears fair to say that Beck captured something of a default philosophy of history of the era of latently expanding ecological threat. This type of threat became explicable as a boundless unintended consequence of technological amplification. The basic lines of a critique of the present ecological situation as a consequence of the economic system of industrial capitalism were fully in place in 1986, albeit before the notion of global warming moved to the forefront of ecological concern a few years later. When, in 1995, the climatologist Paul Crutzen posited the “Anthropocene” as a new geological epoch this label was formulated within a tradition of natural history that had become separated from the history of human affairs since the eighteenth century. Yet, in a social sciences and humanities context, the new term aligned with a conceptual infrastructure that was already in place and had jettisoned the theological heritage of “chiliasm.” Kittsteiner's view of what was the basic infrastructure of modern concepts of history—the Viconian paradox about the intelligibility of human agency rather than the regurgitation of theologemes—would appear to be vindicated.

I argue, however, that this diagnosis is hasty and that theology continues to supply resources of meaning that haunt current debates about the boundaries of the natural and the human-made. As opposed to the way it has often been treated by thinkers attempting to come to terms with history, theology is not a finished worldview, but in its guise as a scholarly discipline, within the overall framework of the modern university, continuously on the move, is itself a product of “secularization,” as already Nietzsche's theologian friend Franz Overbeck maintained.Footnote ¹⁰ If so, it is hardly surprising that theology remains an equally flexible and resourceful participant in its relationship with the theory of history.

III

In recent years, Dipesh Chakrabarty has produced a growing body of work to explore the challenges of “Anthopocene time”—the discursive order of temporality required to process the geologically epoch-making impact of activities of the human species on the planet Earth as a system—for humanities discourse.Footnote ¹¹ Among these challenges is the necessity to regard humanity not as a category apart from nature, but as a species within a system of species, and to make this perspective impinge on historical thought. This necessity is instrumental in character, an ecological requirement of the current planetary situation. His interventions can be read as a rejection of the position exemplified by Beck, which singled humanity out by its technological agency. Of late, Chakrabarty has laid particular emphasis on a distinction of viewpoints that concerns, on the one hand, the “world” as described by Husserlian phenomenology, as a stable agglomerate of ontic givens that envelop practical human life and experience; and on the other, “earth” as a planetary system to be studied by science, but that as such does not constitute the framework of human experience. History is that of the “world,” of human affairs, shaped by the categories of experience and expectation, as Koselleck has described them with recourse to the phenomenologists.Footnote ¹² As Paul Ricoeur has forcefully argued, these categories indicate a concept of temporality distinct from that of physics. This concept is based on the way in which the subject of experience “distends” time through organizing it as past and future to a phenomenal present, mediated by narration.Footnote ¹³ Natural–physical and phenomenological–cultural time are not only categorically different. From the point of view of phenomenology, there is even a question of precedence to be asked, and answered: experienced cultural time enjoys conceptual priority. The sphere of the historical would be understood as a particular ontology, a range of kinds of objects and individuals of those kinds, whose common denominator would be their being recognized, or potentially recognized, as belonging to a certain order of knowledge. Within a humanities discourse shaped by these positions, the notion that underpins the concept of Anthropocene is that the time of world history has come to intrude into that of earth history. The distinction between the different orders of time has collapsed.

The enduring force of the division of nature and human history is particularly visible, Chakrabarty argues, in the critical debates that increasingly cluster around the concept of Anthropocene. One of the foremost problems of the term, critics point out, is that it hides the uneven distribution, within humankind, of responsibility for the crisis. Such responsibility lies overwhelmingly with industrial capitalism and “the West” rather than with humankind as such. “Anthropocene,” the age of the “anthropos,” i.e. “man,” aspires to expressing something about humanity as a whole, while critique really should target just a more specific socioeconomic system and the world of social inequality that this system produces.Footnote ¹⁴ This position, which has become very prominent in the debate, also carries a methodological concern as to what the Anthropocene does to the history of the social worlds of humankind. Does the historicity of human beings actually become reduced to their functional participation in the destructive ecological process? Or do they entirely disappear from the discursive constitution of historicity as other categories come into place?

Chakrabarty asserts that the “Capitalocene” line of critique risks imposing, on earth-historical processes, a sense of the political that hails from the discursive sphere of human history. No matter how legitimate the demand for justice that informs the critique, it concerns exchanges between humans only and remains unresponsive to the situation of nonhumans:

The same blind spot also besets Beck's notion of modernity as oscillating between risk and securitization. Here and in many other theoretical efforts, even in the dominant discourse on matters of ecology, the domain of nature is not only factually (i.e. through technology) but also discursively colonized by that of culture. According to Chakrabarty, a more profound critique is called for if the condition addressed by the concept of Anthropocene is to be understood.

There is an interesting “not yet” written into the quoted passage that appears to proffer a subtle progressive claim. Humanity would need to change its thinking and practice in order to attain something like planetary justice. Such change, whether it could be brought about by human action or whether it could only be a matter of blind occurrence, perhaps a matter of sheer luck, would appear to rely on the infrastructure of classical philosophy of history: acceptance of the Viconian paradox, incremental progress. Other actors, such as the nonhuman ones described by Bruno Latour—to whose work Chakrabarty's discussion refersFootnote ¹⁶—do not seem to be onstage in this drama. Even Latour himself does not appear to postulate that what he regards as the wrong thinking of both humanism and antihumanism under the condition of the modernist nature–culture divide can leap over to, or be overcome by, nonhuman actors. Pasteur's microbes are not in error over things, and they do not answer to appeals to come to terms with error. Thus, the Anthropocene argument for species history cannot simply be one of abandoning the conceptual framework of the philosophy of history altogether. Hence it becomes necessary to argue that retaining structural elements from this framework is both feasible and harmless, at least under some circumstances. Perhaps it would be possible to analyze Latour's well-known affinity to and reliance on certain forms of Catholic theological thought as an expression of this necessity.Footnote ¹⁷

Anyway, there are costs to this need. The problem of dealing with the divide of earth history and world history appears to create an opening, not merely for the semblance of progress in the “not yet” of justice, but even, as I will argue, for the problem of theodicy; that is to say, the justification of the deity as creator of the world in the face of evil in the world. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, theodicy had largely figured as a philosophical error, thanks to Kant's demolition not merely of extant strategies of achieving the justification of evil in a divinely created world, but also of the very legitimacy of the question. For Kant, the “limits of reason” prohibit the application of moral categories to matters of the natural order of the world; the domains of human freedom and natural necessity could not be mixed in the manner that the idea of theodicy proposed.Footnote ¹⁸ As Latour and Chakrabarty suggest, I think rightly, Kant's division is cast in doubt when basic natural conditions, such as climate, have to be understood as human-made, products of “freedom,” i.e. human agency, and therefore also subject to moral judgment (not even just on the collective level, since climate change is also pervaded by actual crime attributable to identifiable agents). The argument that had delegitimized the question of theodicy then breaks down.

This only seemingly obscure problem gains considerably in significance if one assumes, with Chakrabarty, that neither earth history nor world history may be permitted to exercise dominance over the other side; and that nonetheless a form of mediation between the sides is required that recognizes the ways in which they are bound together and permits instating justice instead of injustice between them. If these conditions are fulfilled then there needs to be some kind of impartial agency in charge of justice. Such an agency can be vested in human institutions or elsewhere. Traditionally, it has been outsourced to the “tribunal of reason” that Kant mentions in his discussion of theodicy.Footnote ¹⁹ This tribunal would in turn require justification before the deity it professes to put on trial; one cannot strip the godhead of its insurmountable authority over justice. If a regress of deities above deities is to be avoided, the justification of the tribunal can only be imagined in terms of a system of mutual checks and balances.Footnote ²⁰ Such a system would then institute a symbolic polity of all that is in as well as above time. The agency instating the kind of justice in question would have to be on the outside of both earth history and world history, in order to avoid a takeover of one side of the divide by the other. Such an overall arrangement would seem eminently legible through the problems of theodicy and eschatology, both of which function as devices for encoding and decoding abstract accounts of that which is outside the world.

The relationship between the theological concepts at hand is intricate. Theodicy, as it raises the problem of a separation and balance of powers within the world, has an unsettling effect on the meaning of eschatology. This effect is the consequence of the intrusion of a particular aspect of political thought into the metaphysics of history, namely the aspect of systematicity within the political, the notion that government is first and foremost a fixed form, a compound of atemporal elements only the interrelations and balances of which change over time. If justice can be understood, in a preliminary step, as a problem of distribution, one might then specify the present-day problem of the expansion of the sphere of world history at the expense of earth history as an imbalance in the distribution of agency or positive freedom. There is call for an instance, a “tribunal,” above the concerned parties that can oversee and rectify the distribution. Under the condition of theodicy, this agency itself should not simply be an absolute power, but tied into a system of checks and balances with the other parties involved: both world history and earth history. The idea of a succession of balances and imbalances among the systemic components of polities entails a temporalization of its own, whether it be cyclical, as in antiquity as well as in Vico, or developmental, as in Hegelian dialectics. In the context of theodicy, the division of nature and culture would therefore become subject to the problem of what Hegel calls the Rechtsstaat, the organization of differentiated collective agency in a system of maximized, balanced, and calibrated (positive) freedom.

Traditionally, theodicy starts out from the sense that the portion of agency that falls on the side of world history is undersized and that earth history is unfairly privileged. The distributor, i.e. in monotheist traditions the creator deity, is confronted with demand for an apologetic argument on account of that unjust distribution. The historically most important model for this diagnosis of distributive injustice was, as Odo Marquard used to point out, the manner in which the Republic of Letters, and most prominently Voltaire, responded to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake.Footnote ²¹ The disaster appeared as an intrusion of earth history into world history and prompted a stark sense of the powerlessness of human pursuits when confronted with the sheer power of nature. Lisbon was regarded as so overwhelming that it destroyed any hopes still vested in the prospects of theodicy. As soon as nature flexed a muscle, Leibniz's notorious claim—that the given distribution simply had to be considered the best attainable one—appeared laughable. The very notion of a distributive agency lost all credit. The hardheaded realist sense that the domains of natural and human history were basically separate—interconnected only in the form of blind and meaningless cataclysm—became a structural feature of subsequent historical thought, as did anti-theodicy.

Accordingly, there is a mode for the perception of climate change (global heating) that sees it as just one long, geologically drawn-out earthquake of Lisbon. Even if human—or Western capitalist—folly has brought about the disastrous situation, given the feeble powers we humans have been assigned on the whole, the agency of humanity is still just catastrophically inferior. The planet will prevail even after a conceivable end of human history. Nature as such will remain indifferent to the fortunes of the human species, no matter the damage wrought in what humans, or Western capitalists, are accustomed to regard as the “order” of nature. Admittedly, it is not easy to define what would be the unit actually distributed, what would constitute the common measure of justice in the dispute at hand, since the meaning of “damage” and the definition of its possible compensations are unacceptably plural. For this reason, a plain distributive explication of “justice” will always fall short.

Chakrabarty's interventions may be read as promoting a much subtler argument that builds on a different notion of justice. In this reading, justice would not be about distribution, but rather about mediation on the one hand, and retributive duties on the other. These two meanings of justice are interestingly in tension with one another. Already on its own terms, the interpretation of justice as mediation is far from trivial. In the context of relations between earth and world history, the best option for explicating it would perhaps be the processual “hybridization” of the natural and the cultural diagnosed and advocated by Latour that would render a categorical divergence of interests impossible.Footnote ²² One could then argue that such a general state of hybridization would not produce a novel ontology but only amalgamate the given ones of the natural and the cultural, so that it would become impossible to think of them as separate realities. Since both earth history and world history are built on thoroughly temporalized ontologies, the atemporal, for instance, could still be conceived of as excluded from that hybrid. So there would still be an outside. Moreover, amalgamation would not even have to melt away all previously given forms, but would seem to be capable of preserving parts of previous forms. Latour speaks of the assemblage of “monsters” in this context, of beings that are combined against the combinatory taboos of preceding ontologies.

This account of justice as mediation would preserve, even widen, the opening for theodicy. As indicated, theodicy implies the inevitable participation of atemporal, namely systemic, elements in the separation of powers. While the agency producing hybridization would not need to be extraneous to either of the participating ontologies, the arbiter of justice among the hybridized spheres would appear to have to be on the outside of the process. The systemic instance of the judiciary cannot be eliminated from the account of justice as mediation. Accordingly, this understanding of justice requires a systemic instance that transcends the boundaries of the temporal.

By contrast, the meaning of “justice” as retribution appears to impose a contrary condition. If retribution is brought about between disagreeing parties by a systemic arbiter, it is actually just a matter of distribution. Retribution only comes into its own right as an explication of the meaning of justice if there is previous fault with the arbitrating instance itself, if this instance is absent and if justice needs to reinterpret itself in the process. The judge presiding over the trial of his own crimes, as in Heinrich von Kleist's Broken Jug (1808), comes to mind—in a particularly memorable passage, this judge is likened to the devil whose existence no atheist has yet managed to disprove. In a sense, this is what is always at stake in theodicy: that the creator deity turns out to be the devil presiding over and undermining his own trial (an arrangement known from earlier gnostic heresies).Footnote ²³ Retribution then requires a temporalization of the key systemic instance. The tribunal itself has to be rendered immanent to the temporality at hand (in this case, historical time). Subjection to temporality acts as a check on the quasi-transcendental agency of justice. Justice would not simply reside in a systemic, institutional manifestation, but also in a historical process that renders it immediate instead of mediated, a type of event, or happening.

If theodicy intersects with the symbolic universe of European political thought, it is also drawn into the peculiar, ambivalent relations this universe entertains with the modern “regime of historicity.”Footnote ²⁴ The political is, on one hand, an ordered structure, a system whose basic constituents transcend history. On the other hand, the political is part of the collective doings of humans, thus of the domain of human history (in the Viconian meaning). To the extent that attaining justice is part of, or subject to, a political process of this kind, justice is then at the same time supposed to be immanent in, and transcendent to, history, and mediated as well as immediate. This paradox seems to constitute something of a definitive impasse in the conceptual resources of this tradition of thought. It is also a situation only too familiar from Christian theologies.

IV

The Anthropocene debate thus creates questions, apparent contradictions, and theological openings on several levels regarding the status of the familiar history of humanity, in terms of both human-made society and the human species. It may then be helpful to glance sideways; that is to say, without regard to the question of intellectual genealogy. Intellectual history is, needless to say, not solely about tracking the itineraries and contextual transformations of given ideas. It can also be useful for identifying the roads not taken along the way, the abandoned potentials and surplus meanings lingering faintly visible in the backgrounds of theoretical discourses. Especially with regard to present-day debate, attention on these potentials and meanings can often elucidate how one arrived at a given impasse. In the ambit of the present paper, I venture that this may be accomplished by examining some alternative attempt of dealing with the theological ramifications of introducing a notion of species history into the toolkit of historical theory. And perhaps the most obvious choice in this regard is to look at the development of actual eschatology after the withering critique that the older theology of history had undergone in anti-historicist philosophies of history during the first half of the twentieth century.

One of the most pertinent bodies of work is, in my view, that of the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, who had once been a student of Heidegger's and whose existentialist take on faith was designed to disrupt the doctrinaire character of the neo-scholasticism in which he had been educated as a young seminarian.Footnote ²⁵ The theology of history was a recurrent topic in Rahner's works, though not his most prominent concern. One of his focal points was the reconciliation of theological views of history with the natural history of the human species, especially with regard to the problem of “hominization,” the emergence of the species, as a challenge to the scriptural account and theological dogma of creation. In this regard, Rahner also responded to a vast and complex field within twentieth-century Catholic thought that aimed, by way of the refashioning of philosophical concepts, to reconcile aspects of the modern life sciences with theological doctrine. The most prominent author in this field was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, with whose works Rahner, however, never engaged in detail, although similarities with regard to the christological “self-transcendence” of evolution by way of the becoming-man of God were commented on frequently by others.Footnote ²⁶

As far as eschatology is concerned, the basic idea of Rahner's works was that the possibility of salvation had to be vested in humanity as such, a position that is usually referred to under the label of “inclusivism.”Footnote ²⁷ Species history is salvation history, and history is only about salvation if it addresses humanity as a whole, its natural history included. Throughout his career Rahner devoted prominent work to the question of whether divine grace and salvation extended to those who had not lived within the church or within Christianity at all. His doctrines had answered the question in the affirmative.Footnote ²⁸ Enduringly controversial, his position, alongside cognate ones, had been influential in moving the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) to include the possibility of salvation outside the Catholic Church into the new dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium (1964) and the pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes (1965).Footnote ²⁹ The context of inclusivism provided Rahner with the concept of “anonymous Christians” that became an important theory metaphor in his writings. “Anonymous Christians” were those who had never become part of the particular history of textual revelation, but were to be regarded as equal contributors to, and subjects of, the history of salvation.Footnote ³⁰ This threatened to deal a fatal blow to the significance of revelation history, which Rahner hastened to parry by differentiating between a “transcendental” concept of revelation and one that would be immanent in history.Footnote ³¹ This distinction served to open alternative aspects under which one could theologically conceive of revelation. The facticity of redemption was tied to the historical facticity of Christ's sacrifice; but this did not require knowledge about, or even belief in, this sacrifice; nor, as a matter of principle, for the sacrifice in question to have yet occurred. The facticity of Christ's sacrifice was thus uncoupled from actual historical knowledge as well as from the history of revelation as supplied by Scripture. It therefore became necessary to offer a radically novel account of the relation between salvation and revelation, and of the relation of either category to history.

Rahner correlated Heilsgeschichte (salvation history) with its negation, Unheilsgeschichte, a history of evil, perdition, or damnation, but also mere calamity—the pun is difficult to translate, because it seems to play with the association of moral (bad) luck. The main markers of the presence of this bifurcated history were human freedom, as per the transcendence of subjective self-consciousness, and moral judgment. All in all, Rahner relied on the Kantian conceptual grid of practical reason. Accordingly, he placed freedom at the core of the very definition of “historicity” in general, whether eschatological or revelatory. Historicity was

The concept of salvation also had to be explicated through the condition of freedom, namely as “the final and definitive validity of a person's true self-understanding and true self-realization in freedom before God.”Footnote ³³ Thus human history as species history coincided with salvation history. The distinction between Heil and Unheil was not symmetrical. Unheil was a matter of the rejection of freedom, hence secondary to the givenness of freedom. The individual, in a problematic and complicated relationship with his or her own freedom, constituted the “world” as Umwelt and Mitwelt (world of things, world of persons), and this already had to suffice for the justification of the deity as agency of creation. “God,” for Rahner, meant the “absolute secret” underpinning freedom.

Rahner argued that theology had to accept that the history of salvation was extended to colossal dimensions by paleontological knowledge. In present-day terms one might say that salvation became a “deep history.”Footnote ³⁴ According to Rahner, within this “tremendously long and anonymous” history of salvation, then, emerged another, more circumscribed history that extended over the “few millennia of explicit and official history of salvation and revelation” as shaped by the Jewish and Christian holy texts.Footnote ³⁵ This construction—revelation history as a province, albeit a necessary one, within salvation history—was unconventional. The notion that these two histories fully coincided had, by and large, been the basic tenet of preceding Catholic theologies. Indeed, Catholicity as such, the tie of salvation to inclusion into a universal church, appeared to require the coextensiveness of salvation and revelation histories. Rahner, however, realized that adapting theology to the development of scientific knowledge about natural history made this tenet untenable. For him, the history of salvation defined historicity as depending on the ontological givenness of the human species. The basic determination of the historical was species history, which comprised both the natural and cultural histories of humankind. Arguably, then, inclusivism provides an alternative to Latour's account of hybridization, as far as the mere boundary of culture and nature is concerned.

Within this framework, Rahner's last statement, a few months before his death, on the nature of salvation is concerned with the added value of inclusion in the history of revelation as a subdivision of the history of salvation. “Is the long history of the species,” Rahner asked,

Simply stated, then, the problem is this: if one has access to salvation already by being part of the human species, what can the history of revelation as related by the Catholic Church actually offer? Rahner's intricate formulations seem to hinge on the question whether one of these histories, salvation or revelation, could take precedence vis-à-vis the other, in granting access to salvation. And his response, in that late lecture, appears to be that this question remains, and must remain, undecidable.Footnote ³⁷

For Rahner the incompatible prospects of the long and the short of the future of humankind were a way of transcending the underlying question about the significance of the future altogether. Even human survival as such turned out to be irrelevant to the theological problem at hand since the facticity of salvation was already manifest in the past history of the species. If the species went extinct, nonetheless, salvation had occurred, and the unmaking of the world was a revealed promise anyway. As for the distinction of revelation and salvation histories, one could imagine two divergent anthropological foundations, each of which would grant one of these histories precedence over the other: the temporal duration of humanity under one type of human condition, or the tremendous increase of the number of human individuals under the other type. This difference in types of human condition was established only through the advent of revelation history. The point of the question of precedence was that it could not be answered. Species history alone, as based on a single ontological criterion of historicity (i.e. the givenness of humanity as such) would not seem to leave any question about salvation undecided: if humanity is free, all the rest follows. Revelation history within salvation history reopens the question. In the most radical interpretation of this argument, the merit, indeed the necessity, of Christianity would be in the uncertainty about history it generates.

This point of view aligns with Rahner's understanding of the theodicy problem, to which he gives, on first glance, a rather Kantian answer, insofar as the suffering in the world merely indicates the unintelligibility (Unbegreiflichkeit) of the deity. As opposed to Kant, however, Rahner insists that the question is justified and that the deity will have the duty to respond eventually.Footnote ³⁸ Rahner's position appears to suggest that the justification of the deity proceeds in two stages. In the first of these one acknowledges the opening of the human subject to a world of freedom as providing basic justification of the deity. In the second, one acknowledges that revelation subsequently reopens the matter for the free subject by exposing him or her to the unanswerable question whether there is distinctness and priority in access to salvation after all; and whether freedom really is all there is to salvation. Rahner would then attempt to salvage the history of revelation by demonstrating that the term, if taken to its extremes, produces a split within historicity, between that which pertains to the human species and that which exists within the ambit of scriptural revelation. On condition that this split exists, the deity cannot simply be understood as an external mediating agency that adjudicates questions of justice; but it then also becomes the target of demands for immediate justice.

As a philosophical move, Rahner's take on historicity appears to respond to Heidegger's distinction of Geschichtlichkeit and Historizität, usually translated as “historicality” and “historicity,” where the latter is associated with culturally given historical knowledge and the former with the actual past. For Heidegger, this distinction also indicates an antagonistic relationship in which an authentic appropriation of the past, in the horizon of the orientation of human existence toward its end, is opposed to an extraneously imposed set of inauthentic discursive forms. Rahner recognizes an ontological rupture within historicity that is created by the noncoincidence of salvation and revelation history. Yet, unlike in Heidegger, neither side can plausibly claim precedence or an advantage in authenticity. The resulting uncertainty is, theologically speaking, the point of being in time. In order to substantiate this claim, Rahner shifts the problem from Heidegger's existential analysis into the philosophical domain of anthropology, where he subtly exploits the potential of what one might label a “paleo-ontology,” the deep history of the being of the human species. The ontological status of the very old, of deep history, as forming a contrast to what one might then label shallow history, had not figured as much of a problem for previous philosophies of history. The concept of a deep salvation history does not require any concrete human testimony or response. The immanence of the eschaton is complete. Any directedness toward the future becomes obsolete. Instead, the future is exposed to the openness of the unanswerable question of its shallowness or depth, cipher for the question of the relation between the anonymous and what one might then call the onomastic history of salvation.Footnote ³⁹

V

How does Rahner's belaboring of the ontological and anthropological possibilities of deep species history speak to the problems that the Anthropocene debate brings to light within the conceptual infrastructure of the modern regime of historicity?

To begin with, Rahner already saw the possibility of playing through the available options within the conceptual meanings of the “human.” In the divide between species and revelation history, the question of justice arises in the guise of the problem of priority access to salvation, to the good that history has produced and will yet produce. Revelation and its divine author form the agency that inserts a rupture in history, the justification of which has to be sought in turn. In Rahner's account, inclusivism is built on a sense of moral scandal: the deity could hardly be considered just if some humans were excluded from the possibility of salvation simply because they could not have attained knowledge of Christ, whose coming to Earth occurred in revelation history, eons after their lifetimes. Under such conditions, the resource of salvation would have been distributed in a grotesquely uneven manner, and there would be a need for mediation and a cause for remedial retribution. Yet, as regards salvation, the question is more important than the answer. Salvation is in uncertainty. For Rahner, the pretense of previous philosophies of history and their critique—that one could translate revelatory eschatology into the progressive unfolding of human freedom—rests on a misunderstanding of the relationship between salvation and revelation. The relationship, when properly understood, ultimately concerns that which is given beyond human freedom and places this freedom in a condition, and even a history, of uncertainty. This arrangement comprises, but also exceeds, the terms of the Viconian paradox in Kittsteiner's de-theologized version, since it includes the position of the deity.

Arguably, one can take Rahner's arrangement of revelation history within salvation history as a template for the relation of ordinary, disciplinary historical writing to species history—the integration of the human and the natural—under the condition of the Anthropocene. In fact, Rahner's concept of “anonymity” plays with the traditional notion of “prehistory” as the period before the advent of writing from which no names can be known. The onomastic history that then would emerge with the advent of writing functions in the same way as scriptural revelation: the condition of being-named makes it possible for “us” to remember the dead and to understand “our” communities as extending back into the past. The function of onomastic history would be similar to that of revelation history in Rahnerian theology: it would raise the question of why historicity should be a condition that privileges the named over the unnamed. This question has long been around in historical writing. It has usually taken the form of confrontations between anonymous, e.g. macro-historical, social-economic approaches (e.g. Fernand Braudel's), and the more concrete history so famously derided as histoire historisante by sociologists and historians since the rise of social history around 1900, but that so obstinately failed to disappear.Footnote ⁴⁰ If Rahner can be regarded as having thought through and laid open the conditions of a specific crux inherent in twentieth-century theology, then arguably the impasse of the unresolved confrontation of these types of historical writing—anonymous and onomastic—reproduces the aporia already inscribed in the inclusivist theological argument.

The merit of onomastic history in the Anthropocene might then be seen as that of keeping open the question of the place of the human being: mere dissolution in the anonymity of species history, or preservation within an individuating history of the “revelations” of written records that preserve and make known the names of the dead? Historical writing would turn out to be not so much a literary form outdated under changed—even “unprecedented”Footnote ⁴¹—technological–ecological conditions, but a needed agent of uncertainty that would continue to sustain the givenness of the judge's seat in the courtroom where matters of checks and balances are tried. It might even be sufficient simply to sustain the empty chair of the judge, rather than finding an actual judge to pass some actual judgment. Moreover, it might be necessary to acknowledge that even under Anthropocene conditions no amount of conceptual reform will render a single understanding of historicity sufficient in and for itself. There will not be a fundamental, all-overturning shift in the category of the historical that will permit historical writing to once and for all align with the demands of the Anthropocene, and this is not merely on account of practical constraints, but for conceptual reasons. The nature–culture distinction, since it latches itself onto distinct types of historicity, enjoys a staying power that probably still outclasses its newly arisen theoretical competition.

The obverse side of this line of argument might be the sustained relevance of a certain type of theology that provides the semantic framework in which it makes sense to societies to preserve the names of the dead beyond the limits of living memory. For, without the theological sense of the sanctity of naming, as in the baptismal sacrament, the side of anonymous history would easily seem to outweigh that of the onomastic. Similar, yet culturally diverse, conditions hold in the ambit of many different religions, cosmologies, and systems of cultural practice the world over, but, crucially, they do not hold in a universal manner: some cultural systems sanctify the forgetting of names. So modern historical discourse would in the end coincide not so much with secularized eschatology, but with a secularized theology of the baptismal sacrament.