"What has been is exceedingly remote and mysterious."  So says Ecclesiastes 7:24. Whatever else you think about the Hebrew Bible (otherwise known as the Old Testament), you may need to admit that, in this case, it is correct.  Sure, with the help of modern historical research and inquiry, we can learn a great deal about the past.  We can learn what people thought, what people did, and what people wanted to do--even if they lived thousands of years ago.
     What we cannot--and may never--understand, however, is what, in the big picture, the past means.  We cannot know why things have gone the way they have.  For some, this isn't a problem.  For the nineteenth century German historian and author of Force and Freedom, Jakob Burckhardt, history is nothing more than a continuing and meaningless series of events. Some things happen, other things do not. Either way, it doesn't matter. There is no greater meaning.
     For others, like Augustine, author of City of God, history is a highly meaningful enterprise, one which God infuses with purpose and point.  Everything means something, everything matters, and everybody is necessary.
     Of course it goes without saying that everything that happens is dependent on what happened before it.  In a way, it is inevitable.  Though Karl Marx, author, with Frederick Engels, of the Communist Manifesto, was an atheist, he believed strongly that history was leading toward something, that there was a greater purpose at hand.  For Marx and Engels, this was the classless society of Marxism.  For Augustine, it was the consummated kingdom of God.  In both cases, purpose remains, but for very different reasons and in very distinctive expressions.
     So who was right:  Burckhardt, Augustine, or Marx?  Is history really without any point, any point at all?  Or is it infused with purpose?  Although I think I've made my loyalties clear in this blog many times before, I'll leave you to decide.  Either way, Ecclesiastes' dictum holds true:  we cannot, from our present vantage point, know. Either way, we cannot know it all.
     What we can know, however, is that if we insist that we have purpose, we must also  insist that history does, too.  And if we say that this purpose does not come from a higher power, i.e., God, we are left to answer the same question as before:  how do we, if we hold that we are meaningful beings in an accidental universe, know?