What's history?  One of Christianity's greatest prelates, Augustine lived toward the very beginning of the medieval era.  Even today, his thought shapes countless theological inquiry around the globe.  One dimension of existence about which Augustine thought extensively was history.  History, he said, is the story of two cities, the city of man, and the city of God (for details, see Augustine's voluminous City of God).  History is a struggle between human striving and divine purpose, a purpose which, in the end, prevails.
     Yet it does so through the agency of human adventure and exploration.  God's ideas last, but human activity does, too.  None means anything without the other.
     On the other hand, Karl Marx saw history as the story of class struggle, the conflict between the workers and the owners.  It had nothing to do with God.  Spirituality is a myth.
     In many ways, both Augustine and Marx have much to offer.  We understand the necessity of God, and we understand the fact of human presence.  What we will never see, however, is what they mean when we fit them together.  In the end, who in history can ever know, fully, what this history means?  We may live history, but only God understands it.
     Otherwise, its meaning would be solely our own.  And apart from transcendent moral structure, what do we mean, anyway?  We're only here.
     And as French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre once remarked, if there is no God, then we are simply "useless passions," bundles of subjectivity with nowhere to go.