Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

Does History Matter?

Article from Joseph Pearce:

The truth will set us free. So says Christ. If this is so, which of course it is, it follows that falsehood will enslave us. Falsehood in history prevents us from understanding our past and, in consequence, our present...

If we don’t know why things happened, history remains devoid of meaning; it makes no sense. As such, historians must have knowledge of the history of belief. They must know what people believed when they did the things that they did in order to know why they acted as they did. They must have empathy with the great ideas that shaped human history, even if they don’t have sympathy with them.

This issue was addressed with great lucidity by Hilaire Belloc, perhaps the most important historian of the twentieth century (with the possible exception of Christopher Dawson):

"The worst fault in [writing] history . . . is the fault of not knowing what the spiritual state of those whom one describes really was. Gibbon and his master Voltaire, the very best of reading, are for that reason bad writers of history. To pass through the tremendous history of the Trinitarian dispute from which our civilization arose and to treat it as a farce is not history. To write the story of the sixteenth century in England and to make of either the Protestant or the Catholic a grotesque is to miss history altogether" (A Conversation with an Angel and Other Essays, Jonathan Cape, 166–7).

Clearly frustrated at this supercilious approach toward the past that blinded many historians, Belloc offers a practical example of its effects upon scholarship:

"There is an enormous book called volume 1 of A Cambridge History of the Middle Ages. It is 759 pages in length of close print. . . . It does not mention the Mass once. That is as though you were to write a history of the Jewish dispersion without mentioning the synagogue or of the British empire without mentioning the city of London or the Navy" (Letters from Hilaire Belloc, Hollis and Carter, 75).

...It is, for instance, almost chilling that Belloc wrote of the lifting of the Muslim siege of Vienna "on a date that ought to be among the most famous in history—September 11, 1683" (The Great Heresies, Sheed and Ward, 85). It is a date that Christendom has forgotten, to its shame, but the militants of Islam apparently had remembered. "It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent" (ibid., 87). These words, written more than sixty years ago, went unheeded. Today they resound like the death-knell of Europe.