The Church and the Middle Ages: Series Introduction

And he's not the only cynic to venture judgment.  As long as people have been fighting wars and writing books, critics have been there to grumble because "history is what's written by the winners."

Since history has so often been corrupted by political motives, historians in recent centuries have labored to "purify" history and make it a bare science.  From now on, they declared, history should record only facts, without any personal interpretation, without moralizing, without favoring any perspective at all.

It sounds like a good idea.  We all want to know the facts.  The problem is that it's just not possible.  We cannot record history the way we tabulate results of a laboratory experiment.  Why not?  Because we cannot possibly record all the factors that influence a single person's actions — his genetic makeup, the personalities of his parents, the circumstances of his upbringing, the climate in his native land, the state of the economy, the anxieties of his neighbors, the popular superstitions of his time, his chronic indigestion, the weather on a particular day, the secret longings of his heart.

For any action taken in history, there is simply too much material to record, and there is so much more we do not know and can never know.  Even if we were to collect data scrupulously and voluminously, we would still need to assign it relative importance.  After all, was the climate more important than his genetic makeup?

But once you begin to select certain facts and leave others out — and once you begin to emphasize some details over others — you have begun to impose your own perspective, your interpretation, and your idea of the story.

Still, there is no other way to practice history honestly.  When we read, or teach, or write history, we are discerning a story line.  We are saying that certain events are directly related to other events.  We say that events proceed in a particular manner until they reach a particular end, and that they resolve themselves in a particular way.

Every historian has to find the principle that makes sense of those events.  Some choose economics, saying that all human decisions are based on the poverty or prosperity of nations and neighborhoods, the comfort or needs of a given person or population.  Other historians see history as a succession of wars and diplomatic maneuvers.  But if you see history this way, you are not practicing a pure science.  You are using an interpretive key that you've chosen from many possibilities, but which is no less arbitrary than the one chosen in olden days, when the victors wrote the history.  If you choose wars or economics, you are admitting a certain belief: that what matters most is power, wealth, and pleasure in this world.  In doing so, you must assign a lesser role, for example, to the arts, to family life, and to religion.

But if there is a God — and most people believe there is — then God's view of things should not be merely incidental or personal.  God's outlook should define objectivity.  God's view should provide the objective meaning of history.

So how do we get God's view of history?  Who can scale the heavens to bring God down?  We can't, of course.  But since God chose to come down and reveal himself and his purposes to us, we might be able to find what the Greek historians and philosophers despaired of ever finding — that is, the basis for a universal history.

The pagans knew that they could not have a science without universal principles.  But universal principles were elusive because no one could transcend his own culture — and no one dared to question the rightness of the regime.

Not until the Bible do we encounter histories written by historical losers.  God's people were regularly defeated, enslaved, oppressed, occupied, and exiled.  Yet they told their story honestly, because they held themselves — and their historians — to a higher judgment, higher even than the king or the forces of the market.  They looked at history in terms of God's judgment, blessings, curses, and mercy.  This became their principle of selection and interpretation of events.  It didn't matter so much whether the story flattered the king or the victorious armies.

The Bible's human authors saw history in terms of covenant.  In the ancient world, a covenant was the sacred and legal way that people created a family bond.  Marriage was a covenant, and adoption was a covenant.  And God's relationship with his people was always based on a covenant.

God's plan for the kingdom of heaven uses the kingdoms of earth.  And these kingdoms are engaged by God and evangelized for his purpose.  Providence harnesses the road system and the political system of the Roman Empire, and puts it all to use to advance the Gospel.  Yet Rome, too, came in for divine judgment.  If God did not spare the holy city of Jerusalem, then neither would Rome be exempted.

And so the pattern continued through all the subsequent thousands of years — through the rise and fall of the Byzantine Empire, the European empires, and into the new world order that exists for our own fleeting moment.

There's a danger, of course, in trying to discern God's perspective.  We run the risk of moralizing, presuming too much, or playing the prophet.  There's always a danger, too, of identifying God with one "side" or another in a given war or rivalry.  Christian history, at its best, transcends these problems.  We can recognize that even when pagan Persia was the most vehement enemy of Christian Byzantium, the tiny Christian minority in Persia was practicing the most pure and refined Christianity the world has seen.  When God uses imperial structures to advance the Gospel, the imperial structures have no monopoly on God.

It takes a subtle, discerning, and modest hand to write truly Christian history.  In studying world events, a Christian historian must strive to see God's fatherly plan for the whole human race and how it has unfolded since the first Pentecost.

Christian history tells the story not of an empire, nor of a culture, but of a family.  And it is a story, not a scientific treatise.  In many languages, the connection is clear.  In Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German, for example, the same word is used for "history" as for "story": historia, história, storia, Geschichte.  In English we can lose sight of this and teach history as a succession of dates to be memorized and maps to be drawn.  The time lines and atlases are certainly important, but they don't communicate to ordinary people why they should want to read history.  Jacques Barzun complained, almost a half century ago, that history had fallen out of usefulness for ordinary people and was little read.  It had fragmented into overspecialized microdisciplines, with off-putting names like "psychohistory" and "quantohistory."

The authors in this series strive to communicate history in a way that's accessible and even entertaining.  They see history as true stories well told.  They don't fear humor or pathos as threats to their trustworthiness.  They are unabashed about their chosen perspective, but they are neither producing propaganda nor trashing tradition.  The sins and errors of Christians (even Christian saints) are an important part of the grand narrative.

The Catholic Church's story is our inheritance, our legacy, our pride and joy, and our cautionary tale.  We ignore the past at our peril.  We cannot see the present clearly without a deep sense of Christian history.