Focusing on humanity’s past and present means delving into an endless repository of beneficial moral and social actions, scientific, technological, and artistic creativity, geographical discoveries… all of which have shaped the complex civilization in which we live. Alongside this, one can also contemplate a vast gallery of horrors: countless devastating crises and collective setbacks, peoples in perpetual armed conflict, apocalyptic atrocities, extinct civilizations, and vanished empires… It is the dark chronicle of the malevolent terror that runs through the centuries.

Does this mean that the course of our planet is as chaotic as a macabre dance of senseless events? It would be, if it were not conceived in relation to a providential order, according to which the world is the product of a mind that transcends the particular purposes to which humankind aspires, so that their narrow objectives serve as means to a broader end: the perpetuation of humankind on Earth. In this way, this providence directs human actions and channels even the most seemingly disordered impulses toward the preservation of our society. This, in essence, is the vision of the Neapolitan philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico (1668–1744).

However, this thinker—in his work *Principles of a New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations*—asserts that the action of providence is not aimed at miraculously correcting the aberrations caused by human disorientation. If that were the case, the only true agent of history would be providence, God himself, and not humankind. There is no impersonal reason, intrinsic to historical events, that necessarily acts upon human individuals, coordinating their actions. Vico argues that the substance, the norm, and the ultimate meaning of history lie beyond the interventions of particular events, of which human beings are the authors.

Therefore, providence is the first principle of nations, an ideal norm to which the course of events never fully conforms. It is present in humankind and, through its mediation, finds its way in temporality, since it is only from its relationship with providence that humanity derives the capacity to found and preserve the world of history. But the presence of providential order in the conscience of humankind serves to guide it, not to determine it. People remain free even knowing the purpose that animates their existence on this earth.

For this reason, the temporal histories of nations—with their advances and setbacks—may not follow the normal course of eternal, ideal history, which is the point of reference according to which particular histories unfold. There is always the possibility of the fall and error, the corruption and decadence of peoples, since this contingency is inherent in human nature, which is its protagonist. This is the historical panorama depicted by Vico in his New Science.

In any case, personal experience also teaches us that everything has its time and there is a moment for everything: “a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.” Following this sentiment from Ecclesiastes, what matters is that we are able to see that God does not leave us alone in our problems and has assured us that He will be with us every day until the end of the world.

Although He placed in the human heart the sense of the past and the future, the limitations of our minds cannot fully grasp the work God has been doing from beginning to end. But humankind can still find hope in the One who has the final word. This hope assists us with the encouragement of what we suspect, allowing us to interpret the core of reality and reach the foundation of shared responsibility that shapes social life.

Pedro Paricio. Give me three minutes