Destiny, Becoming

The way of a people in history or of a creative personality, determined by Providence, will, and capacity.

Destiny is the spark that lies within a people (or an exceptional individual), that is, it’s a projection of oneself into the future, as well as an invisible pact with a transcendent power and a struggle against the hazards of time.

Only long-living peoples and great creative personalities have a destiny. It’s the fatum of the Romans and the moïra of the Greeks, this unknown but very real force that bends the backs of the gods themselves. Destiny is the sombre light that enabled Ulysses to find his way back to Ithaca and Penelope, Agamemnon to conquer Troy, Romulus to found Rome, Charles the Hammer to defeat Abd-el-Rahman. The rage of destiny has been embraced by Buddha, Confucius, Christ, Muhammad, and many others.

The mystery of destiny is both biological and spiritual, it reunites hazard and will to power in the same concentration of strength. But destiny is not haphazard or random; a good part of it is willed. It doesn’t suffice just ‘to be’, it also needs ‘to become’. As Robert Steuckers puts it, identity is inconceivable without continuity and the latter must be willed. Said differently: in the European tradition, destiny isn’t passive but active. It’s a response to an appeal, a positive response to a predestination, a call to the divine. For ‘he who has a destiny is possessed’, as Shakespeare put it; he who possesses a destiny, it might be added, responds to inner forces that possess him and call him to act. A people unconscious of its destiny is a people destined to disappear.

(see history; people, long-living)