The Enduring Interest of Germany

In his previous post, Aaron touches on one of the most fundamental points in our discussion: modern German history is a compression of all of modern Western history. But, there is one point I must add which makes German history even richer than its dramatic events already are by themselves: Germans not only made history, but they have also written history.

On the one hand, Germans have excelled at researching the minutiae of history. Although textual criticism had been around for some time (the Renaissance, for example, witnessed an upsurge in interest), it really took off in 19th-century Germany, particularly in the field of Biblical studies. But classical philology of all sorts in the 19th-century was dominated by Germans; the texts we use for reading the ancient Greek and Latin authors are in large part the texts we have inherited from German philologists. Without their painstaking scholarship, we would lack basic knowledge about many basic aspects of the ancient world. Of course, this focus on the minutiae of ancient texts, as necessary as it may be to produce an accurate text, led to a kind of scientific myopia in the German academy. Professors did not necessarily read ancient authors for their inherent interest or historical importance, but rather so they could resolve technical questions of text criticism. As a result, German professors were caricatured as pedants writing preposterously impenetrable prose both at home (e.g., Heine’s dream professor in Die Harzreise) and abroad (e.g., Carlyle’s Teufelsdröckh and Henry Adams in Democracy).

But, there are other voices in the 19th-century German academic tradition. For instance, Nietzsche, whose essay on the Use and Abuse of History we have cited before, rebelled against this academic tradition by focusing on the literary and philosophical problems posed by the Greek authors he was ready. The Birth of Tragedy was an audacious essay for a young professor to write—instead of writing a technically correct but boring essay for specialists, he dared to reinterpret the Greek spirit. On a more theoretical level, Wilhelm Dilthey initiated much of German philosophy’s interest in hermeneutics.

Outside of the academy (at least partly so), German Romanticism brought a sense of history—and a sense of historical loss—to the common people. The work of Clemens Brentanto and Achim von Arnim in compiling the folk songs contained in Des Knaben Wunderhorn, or the Grimm Brothers’ collection of folk tales—following Herder’s and Goethe’s lead—highlighted to the German people that their medieval past was still alive, yet in danger of being lost. Indeed, German Romanticism is one of the reasons for the widespread neo-medievalism throughout 19th-century Europe.

Most importantly, Germans have loved to theorize about history more than any other nation, and they have loved to apply their grand theories to the writing of history. They are the ones who taught us how to theorize about history at all. Some of the first great historians of the modern era came from the German lands, such as Leopold von Ranke and Jacob Burckhardt (who was Swiss but studied in Germany). No matter what one’s opinion of Hegel is, no one can deny that his focus on history led us to look at historical processes and their “world-historical” meaning more carefully.

But the mention of Hegel inevitably leads to the dark side of German theorizing. Germany is the heartland of modern ideology. Marxism and Nazism in particular inflicted immense suffering on the 20th century. In Germany, ideology was more than just the occupation of a small coterie of fanatical professors and revolutionaries; it spread to the educated classes as a whole. Eric Voegelin, in one of his autobiographical notes, recalls how the students he taught in Munich in the 1950’s, were usually much better academically prepared for university students than the Americans he had met in the 1940’s (e.g., they read more languages), but they were also far more ideological than American students; because they were already exposed to competing theories of history, they could not keep an open mind when studying history.

Yet, in the end, Voegelin, who reacted against the German tradition, was in so many ways the finest product of that very tradition. He was an immensely learned man in many fields, who did not shrink from dirtying his hands with detailed textual criticism, but was also intimately familiar with philosophy throughout the ages. He combined the love of minutiae with the love of theory.

The enduring interest of Germany for the modern American, then, lies not necessarily in the lessons its recent history can teach us. Dictatorships of the masses are a danger even in America. But, Germany has not only given us exciting history to learn about and extremely relevant history to learn from, but it has also given us the lenses through which to view history.

Herodotus, Thucydides and The Idea of History

Earlier this year I read R. G. Collingwood's The Idea of History. The book is quite insightful, a "must read" for any philosopher of history. On the whole, I quite enjoyed it.

However, one passage hit me hard, like watching one friend knife another friend. You see, Collingwood insists that Thucydides is not really a historian. Herodotus gets the honor, but not Thucydides.

Ever since I first read Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War I have been a fan. Not a historian? No, Collingwood explains, Thucydides is really a philosopher. Historians, Collingwood says, recreate the thoughts of past men. That is their task. It is a fundamentally particular task, dealing with men individually. Philosophers, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with the general, those things which are true of all men. Herodotus is often criticized for repeating legends and hear-say, and he deserves the criticism. However, his approach is fundamentally particular, asking here about the Persians and there about the Egyptians; though he makes connections across cultures, he is also willing to accept them with their differences.

Thucydides has a rather different approach, though the difference is not always obvious. In his introduction, Thucydides notes that when he had no report of a given speech, he has filled in the gap with what must have been said. In other words, if we know the speech was preceded by A, and followed by C, the speaker must have said something along the lines of B - it's the obvious way to get from one to the other. Thucydides' method is broadly sound; after all, we infer things all the time, in history and in life. However, this method reveals a disregard for the messy details of life, and leans on broad statements about men generally. Why do men go to war? Thucydides asks. Only three reasons: fear, greed or honor. This is profound insight into the human person, but it is not history. History is more concrete than that.

Must history simply involve disconnected facts? Can it never approach the general? The philosophic historian - and by that I do not mean one that belongs to the discipline of philosophy, but one that desires the deepest truths - must constantly hold together the tension between the particularities of history and the desire for general knowledge. To stray too far from this tension produces something other than good history. The unthinking particularist becomes a kind of antiquarian, collecting factoids and minutia, content never to connect them to one another. This person has no concept of or desire for knowledge of mankind as a whole or justice as a virtue. The more thoughtful man who becomes a particularist is likely a kind of agnostic, someone who recognizes that history cannot produce complete knowledge of general things, but concludes that there is no reason to try to hold together the tension. He is typically a bitter soul, someone who longs for general knowledge but does not believe it possible. The unthinking generalist becomes a Whig historian in the most pejorative sense of the term, shoehorning the complications of the past into broad categories that are inadequate to describe it. The thinking generalist is ultimately a philosopher, someone who realizes that history is always bound up with the particular and lays it aside in favor of another vocation.

History, then, is a curious thing, with one foot in the mud of earth and another on the clouds of heaven. It's not for everyone, but I'm rather happy with that tension.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to read some Herodotus.


Today's image of R. G. Collingwood comes from Ovi Magazine.

Divine and Worldly History

Yesterday I began a consideration of the theology of history, how a Catholic historian might approach his work. I offered a distinction between spiritual and mundane history, and probed both the strengths and weaknesses of this distinction. Today I’d like to consider another distinction, between divine and worldly history.

If spiritual history concerns all the working of God, the angels (including demons) and men, divine history concerns specifically those spiritual realities which are good. One might be tempted to conclude that divine history, together with a counterpart perhaps called “satanic history”, is a subset of spiritual history. Let me contend, however, that the divine/worldly distinction stands apart from the spiritual/mundane.

Many of the Church Fathers argue that evil does not exist; existence itself, they argue, is good, and so evil is a privation, a lack of good, and therefore also a deficiency in being. Whatever one makes of these metaphysical claims, I think we can agree that evil is more of a lack than a positive thing. Thus, rather than talking about the presence of evil, we might more accurately refer to the absence of God. Likewise, while St. John refers to “the Anti-Christ” (1 John 2:22, 2 John 7), he also refers to “many anti-Christs” (1 John 2:18. These anti-Christs all lack a positive identity of their own; they are defined in opposition to Jesus and His work.

Thus, the opposite of divine history is not satanic history, but anti-divine history. Put another way, active hostility to God (of the demonic form) and apathetic rejection of God both constitute an absence of God. This is what I mean by “worldly history.”

When trying to understand the most important happenings in history, we may see the hand of God wherever there is truth, beauty, goodness, self-giving, joy and other such qualities. We find these in abundance in the lives of the saints: Frances of Assisi, Thomas More, Teresa of Calcutta and countless others. But when trying to understand that which opposes God, we should look not only for the horrors of child-immolating Carthage or Nazi Germany, but also for the apathy and relativism common in our own age and many before it.

A historian would be laughed at if he offered a paper on “Why the 17th Century Saw Divine Victory and the Retreat of Satan”. Nevertheless, the historian should be driven by the desire to understand, an understanding which should not preclude the highest things. (That the academy is so hostile to any consideration of spiritual or divine history shows how far it has strayed from an interest in profound understanding or first principles.)

We should not forget, however, that all this is simply a framework for thinking about history, not a method for approaching it. The method of the historian is humble: he collects stories, facts and bits of data and then assembles them, trying to make sense of it all, like trying to piece together the fragmented pages of some lost epic. But in so doing, he may take confidence from the knowledge that the epic indeed exists, that it has an Author, and that the Author’s loving ways are, to some extent, known.

Finding a Theology of History

It is somewhat common in the history profession – or at least in graduate school – to be asked about one’s philosophy of history. What is your guiding framework? Economic determinism? Marxism? Gender theory? The Annales school?

I don’t generally think of myself as having a philosophy or overarching theory of history. I just read about the past and tell stories, trying to make sense of what happened, and why. But lately I’ve decided to think more about the biggest questions in history. After all, I am a Catholic and a historian, but am I a Catholic historian? Does my faith inform my work? Some days I think I have a better sense of what it would mean to be a Catholic physicist than a Catholic historian. So I’ve picked up Joseph Ratzinger’s The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure.

Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) is a theologian, not a historian, but he became interested in history for a very simple reason: our salvation occurs in history. This might seem trite, but in fact it is a major question with which Ratzinger wrestles. Most theology is grounded in metaphysics and asks questions about things that are eternal and universal, such as the Holy Trinity or the nature of man. But the key moments in salvation are moments, particular events. Jesus Christ was made incarnate at a particular time in the town of Nazareth in the womb of a woman named Mary. He was not made incarnate in an earlier age, nor in another land, nor was He born of another woman. His birth, ministry, death and resurrection also occurred as discrete events in particular places. What then is the relationship between theology (universals) and history (particulars), Ratzinger asks.

I have not finished reading The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, nor am I expecting it to definitively answer this quandary. Still, I am beginning to sketch out two distinctions that I think might be useful.

The first distinction is between “spiritual history” and “mundane history”. The former involves all things non-material: the working of God, the angels (including demons) and men (at least in their spiritual capacity). Mundane history, in contrast, involves things that are of little spiritual or eternal consequence. The Incarnation clearly belongs to spiritual history, while the fluctuations of the price of rye are fairly mundane. (To clarify, this is not a distinction between a history of the Church and the secular world. Ecclesiastical history can be just as mundane as the price of rye. Just ask any parish secretary.) There are, however, events which are not so easy to place, such as disasters which prompt men to turn to God in prayer. Rising water levels or spiraling inflation are, of themselves, mundane, but may take on spiritual significance. This is because man is himself a hybrid, possessing a spirit like the angels but also a body like the animals. To divorce these two aspects of man from one another is a grave danger; we should expect similar dangers if we try to divide history.

Moreover, Bonaventure notes that sapientia omniformis (omniform wisdom) perceives the traces of God’s work in all things. As St. Paul writes to the Romans, “What can be known about God is plain to [the nations]…. Ever since the creation of the world His invisible nature, namely His eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (1:19-20). Thus, if all creation points to God, it becomes problematic to label any of it “mundane”.

Still, I think the spiritual/mundane distinction has its merit. Most of the history that is written today is terribly mundane, though occasional works on the Civil Rights Movement in America or the battle against Nazism in Europe may touch the spiritual. Still, historians should be reminded that much of what they study, though interesting in its way, is of only passing importance. Moreover, they should be encouraged to push through the mundane and at least aspire to charting the spiritual, when possible.

Alas, that “when possible” may be the hang-up. C. S. Lewis argues in his essay “Historicism” that charting spiritual history by means short of divine revelation is impossible. First there is the problem of collecting data: how do you know if or when God has touched the hearts of men? Few people keep spiritual diaries, and I know of no World Bank of the spiritual world which tabulates such information, telling whether or not the spiritual life has enjoyed a good year. But even if we somehow had access to all the right data, Lewis points out that it would be overwhelming. Important things in politics get written down; key moments in art are recorded by the works of art themselves. Thus it is fairly easy to pick out the high points of political or cultural history, or at least to collect some events which are of arguable importance. But the spiritual life is both fuller and more subtle. At any moment of your life, you are experiencing life with all of your being: the five senses, recent memories, more latent concerns, a history of experiences and your particular intellectual and emotional formation. To see a picture of a place you have been is not the same as returning to a past visit. Even a second visit to the same place cannot recapture the old moment. If somehow you could be re-inserted into a past experience, it would take the whole of your being to re-live it properly. Thus, Lewis contends, for the spiritual historian to properly reconsider a single day of a single life would take him an entire day himself. He could never properly survey even his own life, much less a century or two of an entire nation.

Still, Lewis leaves the door open to spiritual history by freely conceding that his comments do not apply to those who claim knowledge by revelation. Indeed, Lewis clearly knows that Christianity makes just such a claim, contending that God has revealed Himself throughout the centuries and has made known His actions through Scripture. Thus, at least with regards to events discussed by Scripture, the Christian can claim knowledge of spiritual history by revelation.

But can we hope for a spiritual history of the 20th century, or must we settle for mundane history? Bonaventure’s understanding of “revelation” gives us hope for more recent spiritual history. He contends that the revelation of Scripture is not in the words on the page, but the spiritual understanding of the individual reading them. (After all, there are anthropologists and literary critics who have read Scripture inside and out but remain atheists; nothing has been revealed to them.) Bonaventure does not claim that any interpretation of Scripture has equal claim to being “revelation”; the authoritative interpretation is that found within the Church and her life of faith. Still, his definition may be seen as an invitation to consider “revelation” in a broader sense, one which allows us to apply the principles of Scripture to more recent events. I would not claim such an interpretation as authoritative or “revealed” in the same way as the Trinity is revealed, but I think it suggests a way out of Lewis’ dilemma.

Finally, we must consider the possibility of direct revelation, that is, spiritual insight apart from Scripture. The Church teaches that the revelation of doctrine is closed – expect no news flashes about a Fourth Person of the Godhead – but interpreting the events of history need not be a doctrinal matter. Thus, the historian who is faithful to prayer might reasonably consider the possibility of the Holy Spirit guiding his efforts.

This may sound a bit far from history as it is practiced in the academy. In fact, it may sound more like staring into a crystal ball. I advocate no such thing. But I do advocate an approach to history which is not divorced from faith. At the bottom of things I desire to understand history in a why that is meaningful, as are all things in a world created and sustained by a loving God.

That second distinction, you ask. Where is it? Today’s discussion has gone on long enough. Tomorrow we will consider divine and worldly history.

Against the Great Books?

The Great Books are not the solution to the problems of higher education in this country. In fact, the Great Books are enemies of wisdom.

How could a proud graduate of the University of Dallas like myself say such a thing? Such a statement practically amounts to blasphemy!

But, before you dismiss me as some crazy liberal, let me point out that I am not the one who made those statements. They were made by Patrick Deneen and Fritz Wilhelmsen--hardly crazy liberals. If anything, they are usually described as crazy conservatives. And indeed, both men make their critique of Great Books programs from a conservative perspective. Last week Deneen wrote an article "Why the Great Books Aren't the Answer" which has sparked some lively discussion on a couple Internet forums. Deneen's concerns, though, are not entirely original; they were voiced years ago by one of UD's very own, the late Fritz Wilhelmsen, in his essay "The Great Books: Enemies of Wisdom."

There is a lot to think about in Deneen's and Wilhelmsen's articles, but I would like to focus on one interesting issue they both raise, and one which is, I believe, at the heart of their critique of Great Books programs: the role of tradition in a proper education.

Deneen identifies two potential effects that Great Books programs will have on most students. On the one hand, making students read a "potpourri of conflicting views"--from the ancient Greeks through the 20th century--can easily lead a student to adopt relativism or to despair of ever finding the truth once he realizes that all the great thinkers he has read disagreed radically with one another. On the other hand, many students enter college with a progressive theory of history in their mind: all of history has reached its culmination in the present, therefore the present is the best. Instead of relativism, these students will simply be confirmed in progressivist dogma. But more worrisome than either relativism or progressivism by itself is the possibility that students will combine these twin dangers of relativism to form a single monster: the dogmatic relativist. The dogmatic relativist will believe that history, and therefore truth, has culminated in relativism.

To fend off these dangers, universities, in Deneen's view, need to give students a framework within which to read the Great Books, and not simply approach them with neutrality. Ultimately, Deneen (a professor at Georgetown) believes it is necessary to teach "in the light of the standards that the Catholic tradition would provide."

Wilhelmsen in his article focuses less on the conflicting content of the Great Books and more on the inadequacy of the Great Books in fostering in students the virtues necessary for the philosophical life. For Wilhelmsen, following Aristotle, philosophy is a way of knowing; it is not found in books, but rather in the philosopher's virtues, the habits of the mind, "through which things are understood in their causal structures." Philosophy, though, also requires that a master educate a beginner in these virtues. This approach to philosophy--which Wilhelmsen describes as it used to be practiced in Catholic universities in America--is at once both traditional and personal. Each student (and teacher) submits to the tradition, but is also able, thanks to his own virtues, to contribute to that tradition. Wilhelmsen at one point even uses the word "apprentice" to describe a student's relationship to his teacher. A philosophy department at a university, then, should in this respect quite literally resemble a craft guild.

For Wilhelmsen, one of the chief follies of the typical Great Books program, besides only teaching students what others said rather than to philosophize themselves, is to teach certain texts with no regard for the historical context in which they were written. Students are expected to cope with the most varied authors "without having the faintest hint of the kind of world within which these men lived and thought." In other words, the typical Great Books program utterly neglects the importance of tradition.

Deneen's and Wilhelmsen's critiques of Great Books programs, though they emphasize different aspects of education, both rest on the assumption that a student cannot learn the truth unless he is embedded within a craft and a tradition.

This insight that has been developed by Alisdair MacIntyre in the area of virtue ethics, especially in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (in particular, chapter III: “Too Many Thomisms?”) According to MacIntyre, tradition embodies the claim that “reason can only move towards being genuinely universal and impersonal insofar as it is neither neutral nor disinterested, that membership in a particular type of moral community, one from which fundamental dissent has to be excluded, is a condition for genuinely rational enquiry and more especially for moral and theological enquiry.” This claim would sound preposterous to most people today, especially in a discussion of higher education, since most people conceive of higher education as “free enquiry." MacIntyre, however, defends the rationality of tradition by pointing to two things an apprentice in any craft has to learn:

[First,] the apprentice has to learn, at first from his or her teachers and then in his or her continuing self-education, how to identify mistakes made by him or herself in applying the acknowledged standards, the standards recognized to be the best available so far in the history of that particular craft…[Second,] the apprentice has to learn to distinguish between the kind of excellence which both others and he or she can expect of him or herself here and now and that ultimate excellence which furnishes both apprentices and mastercraftsmen with their telos.

But, how does an individual’s membership in a craft connect with a larger historical tradition? “The standards of achievement within any craft are justified historically. They have emerged from the criticism of their predecessors and they are justified because and insofar as they have remedied the defects and transcended the limitations of those predecessors as guides to excellent achievement within that particular craft.”

To conclude before I quote the entirety of Three Rival Versions, I would like not to provide a complete justification of tradition--that would require me to write books I am not capable of writing--but simply to draw out three implications which Deneen, Wilhelmsen, and MacIntyre's position has for higher education, particularly Catholic higher education.

First, we must take the historical aspect of learning within a tradition much more seriously than we do now. Many of the problematic aspects of a Great Books program arise from false philosophies of history--especially, as Deneen notes, relativism and progressivism. The solution is a proper understanding of education as initiation into a craft, into a tradition. And a tradition's standards, as MacIntyre reminds us, are justified historically.

Second, if we want to restore this understanding of education as initiation into a craft, we cannot make students fumble in the dark reading all the Great Books yet expect them somehow to figure out how to philosophize on their own. And realistically, we cannot expect students to find their own way into the tradition in the four short years of their undergraduate education. College is, in many cases, already a late stage to enter into a tradition. This means we have a lot of work to do in restoring the educational craft, not only at the university level, but also in high schools, and even in elementary schools.

Third, if any healthy tradition necessarily excludes fundamental dissent in order to teach students to philosophize, we have to radically rethink our notion of academic freedom. More specifically, we have to rethink the relationship of education and religion. Academic freedom today is often portrayed as the freedom to ignore or even disparage religion. But academic freedom is not the freedom to mock what is holy, or even to read the Great Books; academic freedom--as Wilhelmsen explains--is really the freedom of a craftsman working in a tradition.


Note: For further comments on Deneen's article, see Front Porch Republic and First Things.

Religion as Contract

I was sitting yesterday morning in a review session for one of my law school exams. We were analyzing a hypothetical problem (based on a real-life case) in which a Catholic priest delivers a fire-and-brimstone sermon at the funeral of a young homosexual man who died in a tragic accident. The priest seems to have restated the Catholic Church’s position on the sinfulness of homosexual acts, albeit in rather stark and indelicate terms. The parents then sue the priest for the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress.

I don’t want to discuss the legal issues, because I simply don’t know enough about the 1st Amendment (freedom of speech and free exercise of religion) at this point to give an adequate answer. I also don’t want to discuss the priest’s behavior. Rather, I want to discuss the reactions of some of my classmates for what it reveals about their attitude toward religion. Some of them, in order to find the priest liable, analyzed the case not from the perspective of tort law, but of contract law. Their basic argument was that the family had hired the Catholic Church to hold a funeral Mass for their son and that the priest, the Church’s agent, had breached the contract by delivering a sermon critical of their son’s conduct. My classmates, however, failed to make clear what the essential terms of such a contract are. The contract would look something like the following:

“We, the bereaved parents, pay the Church/priest valuable consideration of X in exchange for the service of saying nice things about our son in front of our friends and family at his funeral Mass. Furthermore, the views of the Church with regard to our son’s conduct are irrelevant and therefore not to be mentioned.”

I find such a contract, and the underlying view of religion, disturbing for two reasons. First, this contract reduces religion to a matter of mere personal choice. Joining the Church (or any other religion, for that matter) has no ontological effect on the individual which would make leaving problematic. Baptism, in this scheme, means just getting wet, and Confirmation is just getting some nasty oil rubbed on one’s forehead.

Second, according to this contract, the Church has absolutely no right to speak on important moral issues. If a member of the Church says he disagrees with certain teachings, no priest could present the Church’s teaching in a forceful manner for fear of a lawsuit. At the same time, the Church would be required to be at the beck and call of all her members. The Church bears all the obligations of the contract, and the individual member bears none.

I think the root problem of this “contractual” view of religion is that it doesn’t even rise to the level of a real contract. Any other contract this one-sided would be voided by a court for unconscionability. The individual demands complete autonomy and freedom, and the Church is told to recognize that. The Church cannot demand anything of the individual, but the individual can demand everything of the church.

Even a real contract, however, between man and Church/God would not be enough. The ancient Romans were said to regard religion as a matter of do ut des: I give so that you give. This at least is a contract; both sides are required to do something for the other party. Such an attitude, though, should strike any Catholic as somehow vulgar, at the very least. Who am I to demand anything from God, if He made me? Can I take Him to court if He doesn’t perform as I expect?

Such a contractual view of religion appears even in the Old Testament, in some misguided understandings of covenant, and still crops up today. It is for some reason extremely hard to avoid. I am referring to the so-called Deuteronomic theory of history, which views all evil as a direct punishment from God for failing to live up to the terms of the covenant. This theory was refuted first in the Book of Job, and later in the death of Jesus. Jesus taught that the sun rises for the just as well as the unjust man. Loving God in this life must be something more than a mere contractual duty, because God makes no guarantee that life will go as we wish, if we love Him.

Some may raise the objection that belief in the afterlife is merely a postponed performance. Yes, it is true that we believe that evil cannot conquer forever. However, the proper response is that we are to love God for His own sake, and not for our sake.

Anyway, I’ve gone on longer than I meant to. Just a few thoughts on contractual views of religion.