“Mouse effort”, or historical materialism and christian providentialism in the philosophy of history

In historical materialism, history is “set” by the material needs and interests of people, and in Christian providentialism, as it is usually believed, history is based on God’s will unknown to man. Therefore, in the first case, a person can be a creator of history, and in the second case, he passively accepts what is happening as inevitable. The article attempts to show that not only are the two concepts not mutually exclusive, but surprisingly enough, the providential understanding of history can be presented as an expanded version of its materialistic explanation: the events of global history are really made up of a multitude of human needs, behind which there is always a certain motive, which, in its turn, is determined by the general spiritual state of a person. That is why, what is happening to a particular human society and to humanity as a whole results from the spiritual state of both of them, and this does not contradict the providential view that the will of God does not exclude but presupposes the free will of a person, and having it means that the person is aware both of his own spiritual state and the possibility of its changing and transfiguration. It turns out that the voluntary attempts of a person to change his spiritual state are the very “mouse effort”, small, that can trigger large-scale social and historical transformations, and in fact, the real path to a possible future social order is not that of revolutionary heroism or intellectual reformation, but the one of religious asceticism.