From the Introduction (by Alexander Dru) to Haecker’s Journal in the Night:
It is here that the importance of Burckhardt can hardly be exaggerated. Burckhardt composed no universal history, though his Reflections have been included under that heading. But in everything he wrote, and particularly in his Greek Culture, he is concerned with the unity of history framed, as it were, between the alpha and the omega, between the origins and the end. ‘The philosophers,’ he says, ‘encumbered with speculations on origins, ought by rights to speak of the future. We can dispense with theories of origins, and no one can expect from us a theory of the end.’ Burckhardt had, in his way, understood as clearly as Haecker the role of theology; the Jewish conception of history is dominated by origins and end, creation and eschatology; Burckhardt’s study of Greek culture did not lead him to usurp that function. His ‘great theme of contemplation’ is easily defined: ‘We, however (unlike the philosopher of history, whom he dismisses as a centaur) shall start out from the one point accessible to us, the one eternal centre of all things – man, suffering, striving, doing, as he is, was, and ever shall be. Hence our study will, in a certain sense, be pathological in kind.’ His study is in fact concerned with man’s feelings and his imagination.
Burckhardt’s view of the immediate future was as dark as Haecker’s, but their point of view cannot usefully be studied within the framework of optimism and pessimism, progress and reaction. The spirit, Haecker concludes, bloweth where it listeth, and to Burckhardt man’s creative faculty the imagination was essentially free; – both believed in man’s capacity, to build himself a new house.