The Unintended Abdication

In his engaging review of Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation, Mark Lilla says we should grow up and accept the Hebrew Bible's view of history.  We should not satisfy ourselves with "stories of fated decline, which give temporal reasons why life is so hard...."  The kind of history that Lilla prefers are chronicles, which forgo "the underlying processes by which the world took on its present shape," and instead "place the responsibility for history on our very small shoulders...  Human beings should be content with such stories and the gods who come with them."

Intrigued by Lilla's perspective, I picked up the Hebrew Bible, and - following his advice as closely as possible - caught up on some chronicles (I and II Chronicles to be precise).  What I found was exactly what Lilla said I would not: A brazen claim to understand "the underlying processes by which the world took on its present shape":  Davidic ascent, idolatrous decline, the punishment of exile, and the chronicler's claim to know God's workings through it all.

Lilla also tells us that Augustine's view of history (which Lilla commends) was ambiguous and agnostic.  Augustine presumably counseled Christians to "let the past bury itself and concentrate on spreading the Gospel." Again intrigued, I picked up City of God, and there also encountered what Lilla said I would not.  Here was another sweeping historical narrative (a.k.a. the Gospel), the very thing that Lilla limits to his historiographical scapegoat, Eusebius.  "God decided that a Western empire should arise" (5:16), relates Augustine, countering pagan fatalism not with indeterminacy, but with discernible design.  To be sure, Augustine displays shrewd ambivalence about current events. "Who knows what is God's will in this matter [the sack of Rome]?" (4:8).  This Lilla emphasizes.  But elsewhere, rather than burying the past, Augustine chastises pagans for attempting to "bury in universal oblivion" a recent act of providential provision in the defeat of a particular barbarian king (5:23). Lilla admits as much, conceding that Augustine sometimes, against his better judgment, got carried away with meaning.

Lilla's placing The Unintended Reformation in the "fated decline" genre that alleviates human responsibility is also, it turns out, off the mark.  "This book argues that the historical intelligibility of the past in no sense implies the inevitability of the present," writes Gregory.  "The method employed here is geneological... in no sense is it teleological...  things did not have to turn out this way...  human decisions were made."  Gregory's conclusion, "Against Nostalgia," is also in perfect contrast to Lilla's characterization of the book as hopelessly nostalgic. 

"Most of us today do not believe that we live is such catastrophic times," writes Lilla, countering Brad Gregory's pessimism.  Here, of course, Lilla is perfectly correct.  We satisfy ourselves with tidy narratives which are just as deserving of nuance-checks as Gregory's: Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the World Became Modern  or Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (not to mention Mad Men).  I wonder, therefore, if one cause for the allergic reactions to Gregory's book is our eagerness to believe we occupy history's moral high ground.  So, after admitting he admires Étienne Gilson's declinism, and that Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac were declinists as well (albeit not "simple" ones), Lilla throws his progressive audience some red meat.  After alluding to theocons (Boo!), he somehow bundles Brad Gregory, Charles Taylor, John Milbank and Alisdair MacIntyre into a tidy category - "inverted Whiggism for depressives" - which The New Republic's Whig readership need not seriously engage. 

Lilla, to be fair, cautions against progressivist fantasies as well.  Indeed, to really "grow up" in one's view of history is to forego Whiggism of either kind, and to answer "Is history progressing or regressing?" with the word Yes.  "History cannot move forward towards increasing cosmos without developing possibilities of chaos," wrote Reinhold Niebuhr.  "The dynamic of progress in history, while genuine," writes Wilfred McClay, "is also by its very nature full of moral peril for us, because of the kind of beings we are."

Examples of this dual dynamic would include George Dyson's statement (culled from Alan Jacobs' review) that "the most destructive [the military industrial complex] and the most constructive [the computer] of human inventions appeared at exactly the same time."  Or Erik Larsen's narrative strategy in The Devil in the White City, which contrasts the American architectural genius of Daniel Burnham with his contemporary H.H. Holmes, an equally astute architect, who became America's first serial killer.  As ever, G.K. Chesteron efficiently encapsulates:  "Barbarism and civilisation were not successive states in the progress of the world.  They were conditions that existed side by side, as they still exist side by side" (62). 

One of the most sustained articulation of this viewpoint on history, which embraces a nearly postmillenial optimism and Oswald Spengler's declinism at once, comes from Paul Ricouer.  History and Truth offers "neither an active pessimism nor to a tragic optimism - which in the last analysis is the same thing - but rather to an epical sense of our personal existence situated... within the perspective a a vaster epic of [hu]mankind and creation."  Consequently the Christian - argues Ricouer - has faith in broader meaning, but is simultaneously distrustful of accounts that claim to strike that meaning too soon.

One has to choose between system or mystery. The mystery of history puts me on guard against the theoretical, practical, intellectual, and political fanaticisms...   From the methodological point of view this sense of mystery encourages the desire to multiply our outlooks on history, to correct one interpretation with another in order to defend ourselves from pronouncing the last word....  [the Christian is thus] situated between the rational schema of progress and the superrational schema of hope.

The Christian meaning of history is therefore the hope that secular history is also a part of that meaning which sacred history sets forth, that in the end there is only one history, that all history is ultimately sacred...  The meaning of history, however, remains an object of faith...   [The Christian historian] hopes that the oneness of meaning will become clear on the "last day," that he will understand how everything is "in Christ," how the histories of empires, of wars and revolutions, of inventions, of the arts, of moralities and philosophies - through greatness and guilt - are "recapitulated in Christ."  [Which is to say] meaning, but a hidden meaning.

One anticipates here an impending chastisement of those who (like Gregory?) jump to hidden meaning too quickly.  Instead though, Ricouer offers a concluding contrast between the once fashionable existentialist view of history and the Christian one.  It is difficult not to see in this contrast a reflection of Lilla (who admits to being a lapsed Catholic) and Gregory (a fervent one).

Ambiguity is the last word for existentialism; for Christianity it is real, it is lived, but is the next to last word. This is why the Christian, in the very name of this confidence in a hidden meaning, is encouraged by his faith to attempt to construct comprehensive schemata, to embrace the terms of a philosophy of history at least as an hypothesis.  In this respect, the Christian is closer to the Marxist than to the existentialist temper, at least if Marxism manages to remain a method of investigation without falling into dogmatism. 

All this is to say, history is not so simple as Mark Lilla telling Brad Gregory in The New Republic that it's not so simple. It involves advance and regress at once, which gives declinist narratives their place (especially for an era attracted to progress).  The details of Gregory's narrative are, of course, up for debate, and with some of them I disagree.  But Lilla, as I read him, is not merely disputing those details.  Instead, he's disputing the possibility of history itself.  That's a big claim for a scholar of Lilla's stature, but read that last paragraph.  His concluding advice to Christians is that the "detritus" of history reveals little more than our fallenness, that we "must let the past bury itself," and that "the only road that ever matters" is the one in front of us.  And to take issue with the attempt to tell, however imperfectly, a "single complex story" (387), to refuse Ricouer's "attempt to construct comprehensive schemata," is lots of things - but Augustinian is not one of them.

How to Make History

One can smell 1990s academic prose, heavily seasoned with fin de siècle despair, from three book shelves away.  I was fortunate enough to go to graduate school when this kind of academic work had curdled.  People clearly wanted something new, and yet, the ladders used to attained academic posts of influence were built with such prose, so resistance was thin and scattered. Things change fast, however, and resistance is not so scattered anymore. One can find it books like this, or in this fantastic Festschrift for historian Caroline Walker Bynum, where Bruce Holsinger and Rachel Fulton Brown put it this way:

If (to generalize wildly) the ‘new cultural history’ of the 1980s and 1990s was taken up primarily with questions of representation and discourse and the ‘new cultural studies’ of the 1990s with questions of domination or power, the question now might seem to be, what kinds of issues and questions should govern the practice of "history in the comic mode."

 Post-ironic history in the comic mode, among other things, involves a refusal to

smirk at the past or to wink at the reader as if to say, "But we know this can't really be true."  Instead… [it is] to recognize at least implicitly (and, we could claim, more rigorously) that a hermeneutics of suspicion must always go hand –in-hand with what Paul Ricoeur has called a hermeneutics of the sacred: a fundamental trust and investment in what’s actually there, staring us in the eye, as an inextricable part of meaning and significance…

Because of the subject matter that Bynum investigates (Jesus as mother, the dietary practices of female saints, blood piety, material devotion), Bynum always seems to be part of the fashionable turns to the marginalized and grotesque, even while she transcends fashion by refusing to do history ironically.  Holsinger and Fulton try to isolate her method.  What they cannot find is a list of "musts" or "hot topics" or "regrettable lacunae in previous work" to be redressed.  The best formula they can identify is to "start with the text - or the image, or the statue, or the piece of music.  As you study to interpret it, pay attention above all to the things that surprise you and then see how they compare with the things that you expect."  Bynum became a trend setter exactly by refusing to set trends.  She just did the work, "seek[ing] out religiously grounded answers to religious questions, intellectually grounded answers to intellectual questions."

Ultimately, this kind of straightforwardness involves a degree of risk: 

The point of writing history is not...  somehow to cleanse ourselves, as it were, of the taint of the past- the humanist/Reformation/Enlightenment project of exposing the past as past and cordoning it off behind the fence of anachronism.  Rather, it is to allow ourselves still to be touched by the past....

Because Bynum claimed that "Every view of things that is not wonderful is false," Holsinger and Fulton insist that "Scholarly irony about the things that make us smile is out of place here. It is not possible to wonder ironically."  If avowedly Marxist historians (who will always be with us) are ever on the edge of ushering their students to a protest march, then medieval historians in the school of Bynum, regardless of their faith commitments, seem ever on the edge of having their students pray, or at least imagining what it'd be like to do so.

All this returns to mind the curious religious mood in the academy of late.  Fulton and Holsinger explain that the profession [history] "has taken its 'quantitative' turn, its 'cultural' or 'anthropological' turn, its 'feminist' turn, its 'linguistic' turn, its 'postmodern' turn, its 'postcolonial' turn, its second 'cultural' turn," and now, we could certainly add, its religious one.

But my colleague Tiffany Kriner has some pointed remarks in this respect.  In an article entitled Our turn now?, she ratchets up the aforementioned risk even higher, letting it get dangerously close to our carefully curated career trajectories.  She turns Girardian theory not on literary material, but on scholars themselves:  "Perhaps in light of Girard's understanding of Christ's nonviolent, nonsacrificial, nonrivaling love, Christians in literary [or, we could add, historical] study ought to give up the mimetic competition, or perhaps, turn from claiming the territory of 'the turn' toward something else."  Kriner argues for the most novel turn of all, a "turn from the trap of acquisitive mimesis in academic cultures."

Unless they straight up quit, however, Christians (of which I am one) still have to inhabit the academy.  Is it possible to do so while still taking up Kriner's challenge?  Perhaps so.  Even though none of us - individually or institutionally - will do it perfectly, the famous second century Letter to Diognetus affords an answer.  Here is an excerpt, with some translation tweaks of my own to accommodate the academic life:

For Christians are not distinguished from the rest of academia by country, language, or custom. For nowhere do they use methodologies of their own... nor do they practice an eccentric lifestyle.... But while they live in both Christian and secular universities, as each one’s lot was cast, and follow the local customs in dress and food and other aspects of life, at the same time they demonstrate the remarkable and admittedly unusual character of their own citizenship. They live in their own colleges, but only as aliens; they participate in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners...  They are dishonored, yet they are glorified in their dishonor; they are slandered, yet they are vindicated. They are cursed, yet they bless; they are insulted, yet they offer respect...  In a word, what the soul is in a body, this the Christian is in the University.

Again, an impossible standard, but one worth advancing nonetheless.  That last sentence, it seems to me, even offers a reply to Marsden's well known book.  As Christians, it's too easy to overplay our distinction.  So long as guild standards are not gummed up with anti-religious prejudice (as they still sometimes are), we need those standards as much as anyone.  It may then be time, like Bynum, to simply do the work, to (in the case of historians) make history, while reneging the mimetic pressure that so frequently bedevils academic labor.   At the conclusion to his follow up to The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Mark Noll argues that a besetting temptation for Christian scholars is to talk about how to engage the academy instead of actually doing it, like officials at a track meet perpetually calling the competitors to the starting line.  But the 90s are over, and the methodological openness of scholars like Bynum, Fulton and Holsinger gives us no excuse not to run. 

The Gift of the Guild

Having just finished graduate school, I'm beginning to see more clearly how much I needed it.  Early on I designed a makeshift one-man historiographical seminar, comprised of Herbert Butterfield, Kenneth Scott Latourette's remarkable presidential address, some Christopher Dawson, and any other books I could put together that espoused a "Christian" view of history, whatever that might mean.  George Marsden's and Mark Noll's work played in as well, and a bit later, this little volume came in quite handy.  I'm deeply indebted, however, to Wilfred McClay for providing the capstone to this homemade seminar in his contribution to the series of essays on offer in Confessing History.

Christopher Dawson's view of history is intoxicating, especially considering how much it informed T.S. Eliot. "Every living culture," wrote Dawson, "must possess some spiritual dynamic, which provides the energy necessary for... sustained social effort." Europe's spiritual dynamic is Christianity.  It was challenged by science, but "only through the cooperation of both these forces can Europe can realize its latent potentialities."  McClay's, however, is the best critique of Dawson I have read:

It is one thing to argue that the Christian faith is socially beneficial and even intellectual and morally plausible, but quite another to argue that it is true.  But unless men and women are convinced of the truth of the Christian faith, how can it have the culture-forming role that Dawson describes - how can it even be a 'religion' in Dawson's sense, that organizing force that constitutes a social world?  For to argue for the resurrection of religion because it is the dynamic core of the culture of the West, and the proper partner for (and opposite to) science is, at bottom, to make an argument from utility, from the standpoint of consequences rather than truth.

Even if one were to defend Dawson's rhetoric as an apologetic strategy, McClay's critique still seems to stick.

I have a copy of the very book that McClay says is so rare, Herbert Butterfield's Christianity and History, and it has been dear to me.  For Butterfield, providence, like vengeance, is God's alone, and is not necessarily the domain of the historian.  His little book concludes, "Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted."  McClay, however, criticizes Butterfield as well, whose historiographical detachment makes little sense of the kind of history on offer in the Bible, rife with declinist narratives and precise attributions of providential activity.  For McClay, "Butterfield did something rather similar to what the analytic philosophers of his day were doing: asserting that because nothing can be said with clarity and precision about God's activity in history, nothing should be said at all."  The middle ground between Dawson and Butterfield, between Christian cultural progressivism and the providential cloud of unknowing, is something to which I will return.

In Confessing History, George Marsden emerges as a sort of neo-Butterfieldian.  Christopher Shannon summarizes what is termed "the Marsden settlement":

Christian scholarship consists in Christian scholars infusing the relatively neutral, technical, procedural norms of the various academic professions with their distinctly Christian background faith commitments.  These spiritual commitments inspire distinctly Christian questions and nurture a sensibility capable of producing distinctly Christian interpretive insights that may enrich the historical understanding of Christian and non-Christian alike, provided the Christian scholar achieves these insights with all due respect to secular professional standards of evidence and argument.

Though I find this rather plausible, Shannon - to put it perhaps a bit too strongly - smells a rat.  "It is my contention that in embracing naturalistic causality and the procedural norms of the historical profession, Christian historians merely trade one providentialism for another.  Where Christian historians of old once looked for the hand of the Holy Spirit, the new-model Christian history follows the naturalist quest for historical agency."  Shannon compellingly insists that we must think behind the nineteenth century:  "Christian historians should engage the profession not by adopting partisan positions on the causes of the Reformation but by exposing the real stakes of [the] debate:  The legitimation the modern secular world." 

Most essays in this volume aren't as extreme as Shannon's (which I'll confess I found appealing).  Others seek to restore a personal dimension to scholarship, as in a wonderfully moving essays by Una Cadegan (which could have availed itself of more art historical scholarship!).  But for me, the hinge paragraph, serving as a fulcrum for the sometimes conflicting essays, came from William Katerburg:

The crisis in contemporary historiography... is threefold: unresolved theoretical debates; mainstream historians who as a matter of practice ignore these debates; and a neglect of the useful, life-serving purpose of history (even though the scientific ideal that fosters this neglect has long been fragmenting).  One way through these dilemmas is to shift the focus of historical and theoretical debates form methodology and the possibility of producing stable knowledge to the purpose and meaning of historical study.  In short, a shift from epistemology to vocation.  If history is in the midst of a crisis, it is a crisis of vocation, not a crisis of epistemology.

Katerberg's very nuanced approach calls for a return to civic and ecclesial responsibility.  Confessing History's solution - if it can be said to have one - is pedagogy or perish.  Hence a focus later in the book on the classroom, on imparting virtues, caring for students, and serving the church as well as the academy.  This vocational turn emerges most clearly in Douglas Sweeney's essay:

During the mid-twentieth century, Christian scholars had to work hard to earn the respect of secular colleagues.  We devoted a great deal of energy to impressing them with our work.  We sought to acquire places of honor at the academic banquet.  But now that we have done this, a different agenda may be in order...  I am certainly not calling for a return to shoddy scholarship...  We must maintain, and even improve, our levels of academic excellence if we hope to make a difference as historians in our guild.  But rather than operate as other-directed, status conscious scholars, I hope we will finish the task of moving beyond our need for recognition and engage a bit more freely in public service that is fueled by Christian faith.

It is here that Alister Chapman's Books & Culture review is helpful.  Amidst all the important talk of meaning over monographs and pupils over the profession, "There is the question of how new this new inclination is.  Some of the engagement with postmodern thought is indeed new, but Christin historians have been committed to loving students and addressing society for a long time," Marsden and Noll among them.  In fact, Katerberg, in an interesting move, places Noll right next to Howard Zinn as a perspectivalist model for this new kind of history.  With Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (and its sequel), Noll spoke in and to his community from where he was situated, but he also - obviously - speaks in and to the profession of history with his other work as well.

Overall, it is dissatisfaction with the state of the profession (one which is by no means limited to Christian historians) that seems to animate many of Confessing History's essays. One historian complains about program envy and another (quoted anonymously) gripes about Christians who seem to have sold out to academic success.  Beth Barton Schweiger's illuminating essay affords a peek behind the academic curtain:

Graduate students learn that the hierarchy of the profession is predicated on knowledge, and not all of it is knowledge about the past.  The most powerful knowledge for students is knowledge of professional networks that will afford them fellowships, book contracts, or even the highly prized tenure-track job.  Intellectual merit is simply not enough.  In the end, scholarship is not the purely intellectual pursuit many students expected...  Historians like to cast the profession as one in which the value of ideas transcends that of cash and where wisdom is valued above power, but one of the most important lessons of graduate school is that professional history is a bureaucracy like any other.   There are careers to be made.

This, of course, is all true.  But is there any profession where it isn't?

All this is to return to McClay.  The middle-ground between Dawson's somewhat utilitarian progressivism and Butterfield's withdrawal from providential assignation is Reinhold Niehbur's view of history. 

Of the three writers under consideration [Dawson, Butterfield and Niebuhr], I suspect that Niebuhr may well be the one with the most to offer us in thinking about how a religious perspective can shed light on the present condition and future prospects of the idea of progress.  His "reflexive" outlook takes account of the virtues of both Dawson's and Butterfield's works, by acknowledging that the idea of progress is deeply rooted in the Christian Weltanschaaung and in Christian culture, but also by insisting that the misuses of the idea, including the overconfident identification of man's purposes with God's, are paradigmatic examples of sin at work - and moreover by insisting that the dynamic of progress in history, while genuine, is also by its very nature full of moral peril for us, because of the kind of being we are.

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)

Chapman's very fine review suggests that McClay's essay doesn't neatly fit into this volume.  But by applying McClay's Niebuhrian insight in that paragraph to the guild of history (or, in my case, art history), McClay's essay fits the volume well.  Niebuhr, to be sure, is not good for everything.  But we do well to bring to our guilds, which are not untouched by providence, the kind of realism that Niehbur brought to history.  To the extent that they have succeeded in countering historical misconceptions they have, however unwittingly, served God.  There has been a lot of poor history in the name of faith, and the existence of the profession of history can help Christians avoid, and correct, those mistakes.  Our academic guilds have progressed, they have been (not hopelessly) corrupted, and they are - especially now - open to correction.   It is consequently not duplicitous to, in Mark Schwein's words, "honor Chronos in our work and the Logos in our alleluias." The Lord of Chronos, after all, is Christ.

Confessing History makes clear that there are many ways to be a Christian historian, but the guild suspicion, though not present in every essay, seemed somewhat overblown.  The post-secular turn in academia makes conditioning in materialist epistemology much less of a concern than it may once have been.  The secular providentialism that Shannon rightly decries is certainly still there, but it is easily dismantled using the very guild standards that such views transgress.  Perhaps I say this because I've been professionalized, but that's a good thing, one which I'm well aware hasn't happened to me sufficiently enough.  Guild standards beat my mind into something better than it was; and because it is a mind that certainly requires more beating, there is nothing like a healthy fear of colleagues - perhaps especially secular colleagues - to help that process along.

Confessing History contains a moving sermon entitled, "For Teachers to Live Professors Must Die." It employs an elaborate mountaineering parable to propose that rather than ascending their professions in search of status, professors should kenotically descend to the cognitive level of their students (the pedagogic bibliography for this descent is especially helpful).  And while this is no doubt necessary, the sermon neglects to emphasize the rest of the story.  The aim of such a descent is to teach students how to climb.  Christian historians, because they're required to love their students, should naturally be better teachers.  Encouraging them to be better scholars, ones who thereby sharpen their students, continues to strike me as a more urgent concern.  And there is Scriptural support for that as well.

We should attempt to summit our disciplines because it's too easy not to try, and the views from the top need be seen with Christian eyes as well.  If the peak seems boring or irrelevant, that's because it hasn't been reached yet, so we should keep climbing   If we exert ourselves primarily to change our disciplines, for their sake over our own, we will only better serve our students and churches.  If we focus primarily on our students and churches, our guilds - which are ready for change - won't.