On Seeking Continuity in History

One of the most pernicious mistakes in thinking about history is to consider adjacent historical periods as diametrically opposed to each other and to paint an exaggerated contrast between them. In doing so, we fail to see the organic continuity of history, the way that periods and movements overlap and interact. The result is a dangerous oversimplification that distorts our view of the past.

Some of the best books on history were themselves written in an earlier period. I have on my shelf a book published by a Harvard scholar in the 1920s and still in print; its surprising title is The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. The author, Charles Homer Haskins, gives a succinct statement of the dangers of drawing an exaggerated contrast between successive historical periods:

“The title of this book will appear to many to contain a flagrant contradiction. A renaissance in the twelfth century! Do not the Middle Ages, that epoch of ignorance, stagnation, and gloom, stand in the sharpest contrast to the light and progress and freedom of the Italian Renaissance which followed?

And then, the sound answer:

“The answer is that the continuity of history rejects such sharp and violent contrasts between successive periods…”

Haskins was right. One of the most pernicious mistakes in thinking about history is to consider adjacent historical periods as diametrically opposed to each other and to paint an exaggerated contrast between them. In doing so, we fail to see the organic continuity of history, the way that periods and movements overlap and interact. The result is a dangerous oversimplification that distorts our view of the past.

Haskins goes on to show in his book that most or all of the features we associate with what we call the Renaissance—its entire revival of culture and learning—were anticipated in the later portion of what we call the Middle Ages, from the eleventh century onward. In fact, one might as well talk of the renaissance of culture as beginning with the so-called Carolingian Renaissance in the ninth century.

This theme is echoed by C.S. Lewis, who was fond of arguing that “the Renaissance never happened.” By this he meant to suggest that our ideas of historical periods are simply conveniences, formed after the fact. Lewis acknowledges in his lecture “De Descriptione Temporum” the remarkable change that had taken place during his lifetime in scholars’ view of the Middle Ages, which amounted to a full-scale rehabilitation.

In this, Lewis was following the lead of an older Oxford colleague of his who had written, again very astutely: “Unlike dates, ‘periods’ are not facts. They are retrospective conceptions that we form about past events, useful to focus discussion, but very often leading historical thought astray.” [1]

I would add that historical periods are conveniences, subjective and sometimes arbitrary. Too often we reify the labels, deluding ourselves into thinking that they are as real as people and things in the world. “Middle Ages,” “Renaissance,” and many other historical labels are prejudicial in origin, carrying a bias with them. I often remember what a literature professor of mine said: “Ordinary people in Shakespeare’s day had no idea they were not still living in the Middle Ages.”

Viewing successive periods as antithetical is very often a one-sided view. It is usually the case that successive periods are antithetical in some respects and continuous in others. Take the contrast in aesthetic history between classicism and romanticism. There is a sense in which romanticism was a reaction against classicist standards, and also a sense in which it grew naturally out of classicism. In fact, every period is necessarily the parent of the next; every period is the necessary precondition for the next. An honest historical commentary must see things in proper perspective and take all sides of an era into account.

It must also recognize that historical eras are not monolithic, marked by a single prevailing mood. In any given period, there are many things going on; trends clash or overlap. Too often we “personify” historical periods, giving them a fixed set of human characteristics, when in fact it is human actors themselves who stand behind the events of a period. Much historical writing and discussion takes place on a level of excessive abstraction, in which blind forces seem to be acting in the absence of humans. One can even read whole historical essays in which no people seem to be present at all, only a collection of isms. Such abstraction is perilous because it obscures the variety that human wills and personalities bring to history. The result is a rigid, one-sided view of historical periods.

Preserving a balanced view of history is especially important for conservatives. We believe in a steady building of civilization, not in disjunction and revolution. Now, it’s true that revolutions happen. But often we view a historical event as being revolutionary when, on closer examination, it is really evolutionary; most historical developments have precedents. I shall never forget my surprise on reading this prose passage from the Romantic poet Wordsworth, a passage which seems to depict an early stage of the modern information society:

[A] multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. [2]

A good historical writer will seek out these sorts of precedents and continuing lines of development, instead of presenting history as a succession of massive blocks. One thing which I believe will help in this is to think about history in longer spans of time.

That brings us to another bothersome trend in our thinking about history. It has become fashionable to analyze recent history (within living memory, let’s say) in terms of decades, and to give different labels to generations; in this way, time and people can be categorized and placed like cereal boxes on the supermarket shelf. But thinking about history in terms of decades, an artificial unit of time, is misleading and not very useful. (We don’t do this with periods before the twentieth century, presumably because those periods are more remote from us.) An egregious example of this can be seen in the outlandish contrasts often drawn between the 1950s and the 1960s—many of which I must assume are based on exaggeration, faulty memory, or reading events or attitudes from later decades back into an earlier decade. It’s unfortunate when historical eras become repositories of clichés and stereotyped images—mostly creations of the popular media—instead of objective facts about which we can make objective descriptions.

In discussions about the Catholic Church, for example, there is often a failure to realize that the Second Vatican Council was the result of a whole complex of philosophical and theological developments going back to the early twentieth century; that it was broadly a phenomenon of the post-World War II era, and not of something called “the Sixties,” retrospectively and stereotypically conceived.

Again, much is written about social upheavals that took place in American society and elsewhere in the Western world in the late 1960s and 1970s. This is often presented as being unprecedented and entirely new. But read literature and journalism written during those years and you will find the motif of “haven’t we seen this all before?” You find Russell Kirk writing that the radicalism of the hippies reminded him of revolutionary youth movements of the early 1930s. This reminds us that history has its cyclical aspect.

One must also remember that periods of history are reinterpreted by later generations, often with a decided bias. Lewis reminds us that the very idea of a “Renaissance” in the 15^th century was conceived by humanist scholars, who had an interest in promoting their achievements and scorning the preceding centuries—centuries now to be reinterpreted as a dull intermission between the glories of antiquity and the glories of the present age. The need felt by partisans of various movements to repudiate what came before is unfortunate and destructive of our understanding of the line of continuity in history.

The reception of the Middle Ages illustrates that history is subject to revision based on deeper knowledge and research and, one hopes, the abandonment of shallow and stereotypical thinking. The recovery of the Middle Ages as a period worthy of admiration started in the Romantic era and continued into the early 20^th century, making possible the work of such thinkers as C.S. Lewis who were now at a position to see the flaws and blind spots in pervious generations’ assumptions.

Our perception of historical periods has thus passed through a number of filters, including the historians who have told the tale, and it is fitting to question whether the “received wisdom” is correct. One rule of thumb is that historical periods should be looked at in terms of what came before, not in terms of what came after. This will allow us properly to evaluate the motives and intentions of historical actors, and thus avoid the error of seeing them as the direct causes of later developments they knew nothing about. We will see them as human beings who reacted to their unique circumstances, not merely as dots on a historical grid.

It would also be well to avoid the abstract generalization in which much historical discussion proceeds. One often reads “the Enlightenment believed,” “the Victorian era feared,” “modernism hates,” etc. These are convenient rhetorical phrases, but it’s important to recognize that they are only that. Periods of time don’t believe, fear, hope, love, hate, eat sandwiches, etc.; people alone do these things, and people should always be at the center of the telling of history so as to assure continuity and an emphasis on human motives.

***

What do we really know about history, and how do we know it? I would suggest that unless we have studied a particular period intently and read serious books about it—and above all read primary sources—then our understanding is vague and spotty, and we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking otherwise. Too often our knowledge of a particular period is made of up half-digested bits and pieces made up of books, movies, and art, mixed with vague memories from the classroom. In our day, serious history has largely been replaced by journalism, complete with ready-made sound bites, clichés, simplifications, and sensationalism. To counteract this and gain true historical knowledge one must read trustworthy historical books and most importantly primary sources, wherein the actors of history speak to us in their own words without interpreters.

That the great mass of people has little sense of history is a theme C.S. Lewis treats in his essay “God in the Dock.” His experience giving lectures on religion to pilots during World War II showed him that common people had almost no historical perspective whatsoever nor even a basic trust in historical witness. Since we all need guides to historical knowledge, scholars have a responsibility to present well-rounded accounts of history for the public. Historical narratives should avoid broad-brush generalities, melodramatic contrasts, and biased or emotionally charged interpretation posing as objective description. All the while the historical writer should balance the different points of view of the human actors to give a three-dimensional portrait. True historical understanding requires nothing less.

Let us observe in passing that in Christianity we have a powerful model for understanding historical continuity. For in it we find an original revelation, the Old Testament, that is superseded—but not obliterated—by a new revelation, the New Testament. The two dispensations are in continuity with each other, the one fulfilling the expectations of the other. In preserving the scriptures of the Old Testament alongside those of the New, the Christian church confirmed the need to keep the continuity of its history in view. It bequeathed to us a model of how we should always look at the past.

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Notes:

[1] Quoted in Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis: A Life. Tyndale, 2013, p. 316.

[2] William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, p. 5.

The featured image is “Napolean and his General Staff in Egypt” (c. 1867) by Jean-Léon Gérôme, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.