Laurus

by Eugene Vodolazkin

Arseny asked: If history is a scroll in the hands of the Creator, does that mean that everything I think and do is my Creator’s thinking and doing, rather than mine? No, that is not what it means: the Creator is good but not everything that you think and do is good. You were created in God’s image and likeness, and your likeness consists, among other things, of freedom. But if people are free in their intentions and actions, then it works out that they create history freely. People are free, Ambrogio replied, but history is not free. As you say, there are so many intentions and actions that history cannot bring them all together, and only God can holde them all. I would even say that it is not people that are free but the individual person. I liken the confluence of human wills to fleas in a container: their movement is obvious but do they really have a common purpose? That is why history has no goal, just as humanity has none. Only an individual person has a goal. And even then, not always.