The 'Terror of History' is Mircea Eliade's signature diagnostic term for the existential dread that afflicts the modern human being who has been stripped of archaic ontological protections — the cyclical cosmologies, the myth of eternal return, the archetype of sacred repetition — and left naked before the irreversibility and apparent meaninglessness of linear historical time. In Eliade's elaboration, pre-modern peoples neutralized the suffering of historical events by assimilating them to mythic archetypes and cyclical patterns; suffering thereby acquired ontological dignity and eschatological purpose. With the collapse of those symbolic shelters under the pressure of historicism, Marxism, and existentialism, historical catastrophe — war, oppression, deportation, mass death — can no longer be redeemed by reference to a transhistorical model, and becomes simply intolerable. Eliade surveys the modern responses: Marxism displaces the age of gold to a historical terminus and so preserves an eschatological anesthetic; existentialism elevates despair to heroic lucidity; the nostalgia of Eliot and Joyce reaches toward cyclical myth; and Judaeo-Christian faith, uniquely, introduces the category of freedom that can transcend the archetype without succumbing to terror. The tension between historical consciousness and the need for meaning — archetypal repetition versus linear freedom — constitutes the conceptual core of Eliade's comparative religion of history.
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the terror of history becomes more and more intolerable from the viewpoints afforded by the various historicistic philosophies. For in them, of course, every historical event finds its full and only meaning in its realization alone.
Eliade argues that historicist philosophies, by grounding meaning exclusively in the historical event itself, render the terror of history progressively unbearable, while Marxism offers a compensatory eschatological anesthetic by projecting the age of gold to history's end.
Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954thesis
such a philosophy can exorcise the terror of history. If, for historical tragedies to be excused, it suffices that they should be regarded as the means by which man has been enabled to know the limit of human resistance, such an excuse can in no way make man less haunted by the terror of history.
Eliade contends that no existentialist or humanist philosophy that merely reframes suffering as self-knowledge can actually dissolve the terror of history, and that only a philosophy of freedom that does not exclude God — exemplified by Judaeo-Christian faith — can transcend the archetype without succumbing to dread.
Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954thesis
man is left free to choose between two positions: (1) to oppose the history that is being made by the very small minority... (2) to take refuge in a subhuman existence or in flight.
Eliade demonstrates that for the overwhelming majority of modern humanity the vaunted 'freedom' of historical existence is illusory, reducing to forced complicity or flight, which intensifies rather than alleviates the terror of history.
Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954thesis
rather than a resistance to history, a revolt against historical time, an attempt to restore this historical time, freighted as it is with human experience, to a place in the time that is cosmic, cyclical, and infinite.
Eliade reads the cyclical nostalgia visible in Eliot and Joyce as symptomatic revolt against the terror of history — a culturally significant attempt to re-embed human suffering within cosmic, regenerative temporality.
Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954thesis
the theory of the archetype (which transformed a historical personage into an exemplary hero and a historical event into a mythical category) or the cyclical and astral theories (according to which history was justified, and the sufferings provoked by it assumed an eschatological meaning).
Eliade traces the pre-modern mechanism by which archetype and cyclical cosmology collectively served to protect traditional societies from the terror of history by conferring ontological and eschatological meaning on historical suffering.
Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954supporting
the historical moment, despite the possibilities of escape it offers contemporaries, can never, in its entirety, be anything but tragic, pathetic, unjust, chaotic, as any moment that heralds the final catastrophe must be.
Eliade shows that within Indo-Iranian and Hellenistic cyclical systems the current historical moment is structurally consigned to decadence and catastrophe, a cosmological diagnosis that both acknowledges and ritually contains the terror of history.
Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954supporting
the myth of eternal return is revivified by Nietzsche; or that, in the philosophy of history, a Spengler or a Toynbee concern themselves with the problem of periodicity.
Eliade situates Nietzsche's eternal return and the cyclical philosophies of Spengler and Toynbee as modern intellectual responses to the terror of history — attempts to rehabilitate cyclical time against historicist linearism.
Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954supporting
terror doesn't depend only on whether what's done to you is 'voluntary' or not... the terror is there even if it's not perceived.
Hillman extends the concept of historical terror beyond overt political atrocity to covert structural violence, arguing that modern anesthesia may make quotidian terror harder to perceive than the explicit horrors of the 1940s.
Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989aside
the guardians of the authority of Rome and the Scripture were seized with a passion of anxiety that released throughout the Christian world a reign of terror matched in history only by the mass liquidations of the modern tyrant states.
Campbell invokes a comparatively scaled historical terror — the Inquisition's reign — as analogous to modern totalitarian mass violence, implicitly situating both within the broader problematic of institutionalized responses to existential anxiety.
Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968aside
with the end of the Middle Ages anno 1918 the age of total blood baths, total demonization, and total dehumanization could begin.
Jung diagnoses modernity's unleashing of collective violence as the psychological consequence of Christianity's failure to contain projected demonic energies, providing a depth-psychological parallel to Eliade's account of the terror of history as a consequence of lost symbolic protection.
Jung, C.G., Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976aside