|
Index | Preface |
1. Introduction | 2. The
Underlying Assumption | 3. The Historical
Process
4. History and Judgements of Value | 5. The
Art of the Historian | 6. Moral Judgements
in History
4. HISTORY AND JUDGEMENTS OF VALUE
History has been taken out of the hands of the strolling minstrels and the
pedlars of stories and has been accepted as a means by which we can gain more
understanding of ourselves and our place in the sun – a more clear consciousness
of what we are tending to and what we are trying to do. It would seem even that
we have perhaps placed too much faith in the study of this aspect of ourselves,
and we have let our thinking run to history with more enthusiasm than judgement.
The historian like every other specialist is quick to over-step the bounds of
his subject and elicit from history more than history can really give; and he
is for ever tempted to bring his stories to a conclusiveness and his judgements
to a finality that are not warranted by either the materials or the processes
of his research. Behind all the fallacies of the whig historian there lies the
passionate desire to come to a judgement of values, to make history answer questions
and decide issues and to give the historian the last word in a controversy.
He imagines that he is inconclusive unless he can give a verdict; and studying
Protestant and Catholic in the sixteenth century he feels that loose threads
are still left hanging unless he can show which party was in the right. He wishes
to come to a general proposition that can be held as a truth demonstrated by
history, a lesson that can be taken away and pondered apart from the accidents
of a particular historical episode; and unless he can attain to something like
this he feels that he has been working at a sum which had no answer, he has
been wasting himself upon mere processes, he has been watching complication
and change for the mere sake of complication and change. Yet this, which he
seems to disparage, is precisely the function of the historian. The eliciting
of general truths or of propositions claiming universal validity is the one
kind of consummation which it is beyond the competence of history to achieve.
The historian is concerned with the concrete and is at home in the world of
facts and people and happenings. The web spun out of the play of time and circumstance
is everything to him. Accidents and conjunctures and curious juxtapositions
of events are the very stuff of his story. All his art is to recapture a moment
and seize upon particulars and fasten down a contingency. The theorist who loves
principles for themselves may discuss them freely, for he discusses them so
to speak in the air; but the historian must bring them to earth for he only
studies them in other men’s lives; he must see principles caught amongst
chance and accident; he must watch their logic being tricked and entangled in
the events of a concrete world. The historian is essentially the observer, watching
the moving scene. Like the traveller he describes an unknown country to us who
cannot visit it; and like the traveller he deals with the tangible, the concrete,
the particular; he is not greatly concerned with philosophy or abstract reasoning.
Were he too much a philosopher he would be perhaps too impatient of the waste
and repetitiveness and triviality of all the things that it is his business
to notice, and perhaps like Thomas Carlyle he would imprint too much of his
own mind upon the shape of events. History indeed is a form of descriptive writing
as books of travel are. It is concerned with the processes of life rather than
with the meaning or purpose or goal of life. It is interested in the way in
which ideals movement and give a turn to events rather than in the ultimate
validity of the ideals themselves. One might say that rather than being interested
in light and the nature of light, the historian studies merely its refractions
as it breaks up in the external world – he is concerned to examine colours,
he is interested in a whole universe of colour. His training and habits of mind
and all the methods of his research fasten him down to the particular and the
concrete and make him essentially an observer of the events of the external
world. For this cause it has generally happened that historians have reflected
little upon the nature of things and even the nature of their own subject, and
have indeed what they feel to be a healthy kind of distrust of such disembodied
reasoning. They have been content as a rule to accept current views of the place
of history in the scheme of knowledge, to apply a hasty common sense to the
problems that arise and to make rather facile analogies from the other arts
and sciences. They have critically examined and placed upon a scientific basis
only one aspect of their study, and that the concrete side – the use of
sources and the weighing of evidence – and they have not been so careful
in the establishment of a system in regard to their organization of a historical
story, or in regard to their processes of inference upon their subject. They
are not happy when they leave the concrete world and start reasoning in a general
way.
The value of history lies in the richness of its recovery of the concrete life
of the past. It is a story that cannot be told in dry lines, and its meaning
cannot be conveyed in a species of geometry. There is not an essence of history
that can be got by evaporating the human and the personal factors, the incidental
or momentary or local things, and the circumstantial elements, as though at
the bottom of the well there were something absolute, some truth independent
of time and circumstance. There may an essence of Protestantism and a formula
that lies at the root of the matter, but there is no essence of the history
of the Reformation, no formula that can take the place of the whole story. When
he describes the past the historian has to recapture the richness of the moments,
the humanity of the men, the setting of external circumstances, and the implications
of events; and far from sweeping them away, he piles up the concrete, the particular,
the personal; for he studies the changes of things which change and not the
permanence of the mountains and the stars. To recover the personality of Martin
Luther in a full rich concrete sense – including of course all that some
people might consider to be the accidents and non-essentials – is not only
the aim of the historian, but is an end in itself; and here the thing which
is unhistorical is to imagine that we can get the essence apart from the accidents;
it is to think of Luther in terms of a formula, "the founder of Protestantism",
"the apostle of religious liberty". The whole process of historical
study is a movement towards historical research – it is to carry us from
the general to the particular, from the abstract to the concrete, from the thesis
that the Reformation led to liberty to an actual vision of all the chances and
changes which brought about the modern world.
The fourth century of the Christian era, for example, represents an age when
important things were happening, and paganism completed its decline, while Christianity
entered upon its victory. It is obvious that great and palpable human issues
were being raised and decided in these years, and special varieties of human
relationship arose, giving life and experience a peculiar intensity. One cannot
avoid asking what men were like when they were breaking with an old order of
things, changing Gods and putting on new habits and making new adjustments to
life. It must be interesting to learn how such a human crisis would present
itself in a single soul, in a home, a village, a city, a court. What did men
think of an emperor who accepted the guidance and even the reproof of bishops,
and refused to grant state-aid for the service of the ancient gods? What kind
of rapprochements took place between declining paganism and rising Christianity?
What did the Christians borrow from pagan rites and fêtes and ideas –
what consciously and what unawares? What was the feeling of the old men when
the young were forgetting their gods, and in the after-day, when evil fell,
did not some men take their Christianity with a misgiving? It is easy to see
the fight between Christianity and paganism as a play of forces and to discuss
it so to speak in the abstract; but much more illuminating to watch it as the
interplay of personalities and people, with the four winds of heaven blowing
around them; much more interesting if we can take the general statement with
which we began, the mere formula for what happened in this age, and pursue it
in its concrete incidence till we discover into what manifold detail it differentiates
itself, and learn how various were its workings in actual life, how surprising
even its byplay and the side-issues which it raised, how rich its underlying
complexity and its implications in human story. It is along this road that the
historian carries us, away from the world of general ideas.
It is not for him to give a philosophical explanation of what happens in time
and space. Indeed any history that he writes ought to be as capable of varied
philosophical interpretation as life itself seems to be. In the last resort
the historian’s explanation of what has happened is not a piece of general
reasoning at all. He explains the French Revolution by discovering exactly what
it was that occurred; and if at any point we need further elucidation all that
he can do is to take us into greater detail, and make us see in still more definite
concreteness what really did take place. In doing this he is bound to lead us
to something which we never could have inferred. And this is his justification;
it is the romance of historical research. We, after a survey of the Reformation,
may seek to deduce from general principles what must have been the reasons for
its occurrence; but there is all the difference in the world between this kind
of philosophising and a close and concrete examination of how Martin Luther’s
great decision came to be made. This accounts for the air of unreality which
hangs around much of our general history when it has been compiled with too
great impatience of historical research. The result of historical study is precisely
the demonstration of the fallacy of our arm-chair logic – the proof of
the poverty of all this kind of speculation when compared with the surprise
of what actually did take place. And the historian’s passion for manuscripts
and sources is not the desire to confirm facts and dates or to correct occasional
points of error in the historical story, but the desire to bring himself into
genuine relationship with the actual, with all the particularities of chance
and chance – the desire to see at first hand how an important decision
comes to be made. So the last word of the historian is not some fine firm general
statement; it is a piece of detailed research. It is a study of the complexity
that underlies any generalization that we can make.
Above all it is not the role of the historian to come to what might be called
judgements of value. He may try to show how men came to differ in religion,
but he can no more adjudicate between religions than he can adjudicate between
systems of philosophy; and though he might show that one religion has been more
favourable in its sociological consequences than another though even –
which is much more difficult – he might think he has shown that the one
is bound to be better in its ultimate consequences through time – still
it is not for him to beg the question of the assessment of material losses against
what might be considered spiritual and eternal gains. His role is to describe;
he stands impartial between Christian and Mohammedan; he is interested in neither
one religion nor the other except as they are entangled in human lives. Though
he might describe, if he can untwist them, the economic consequences of the
Inquisition in modern Spain, though he might even show that the Inquisition
was in some way responsible for reducing Spain from the ranks of the great powers,
still he has not shown that it was fatal to happiness, and he cannot beg questions
concerning what is the good life. At the end of it all the Spaniard might retort
that the Inquisition which robbed him of greatness was the institution which
once gave him prestige and power; and it is proper that the historian should
be driven to pursue his inquiries a step further, and ask why the Inquisition
which in one set of circumstances helped the power of Spain should in another
set of circumstances have contributed to its downfall. He is back in his proper
place when he takes us away from simple and absolute judgements and by returning
to the historical context entangles everything up again. He is back in his proper
place when he tell us that a thing is good or harmful according to circumstances,
according to the interactions that are produced. If history can do anything
it is to remind us of those complications that undermine our certainties, and
to show us that all our judgements are merely relative to time and circumstance.
There is one argument against the whig interpretation of history which is paradoxical
and is in conflict with all our habits of mind, for it takes away what many
might feel to be the virtue and the utility of history, and it robs the historian
of his most trenchant attitudes and his grandest note of finality. It lies in
the fact that we can never assert that history has proved any man right in the
long run. We can never say that the ultimate issue, the succeeding course of
events, or the lapse of time have proved that Luther was right against the Pope
or that Pitt was wrong against Charles James Fox. We cannot say that the ultimate
consequences of Luther’s action have justified his purpose or his conduct;
for the modern secularised world has no more vindicated Luther’s mastering
purpose or his ideal of a religious society than it vindicates the medieval
ideal of the Popes; and in any case we cannot work out the ultimate consequences
of Luther’s conduct unless we wish to imitate the schoolboy who, writing
on the results of Columbus’s discovery of America, enumerated amongst other
things the execution of Charles I, the war of the Spanish Succession and the
French Revolution. By great labour we can perhaps track down the displacements
which the Lutheran revolt produced in Luther’s own day; we may be able
to disentangle something roughly like cause and effects in the transition from
one generation to the next; but very soon we can trace out nothing more, we
can only see the results of everything else that was producing change at that
period; we can only focus ourselves upon the new situation as a whole and watch
fresh displacements being produced now by fresh conjunctures. The most that
we can say is that if Luther did ill in his day, the evil for which he was responsible
was part of the situation that men in future had to face; and that his successors,
working upon the new state of the problem, would set their purposes anew and
still make all things work together for good, though henceforward it might have
to be some new good that they set their hearts upon. When the sins and errors
of an age have made the world impossible to live in, the next generation, seeking
to make life tolerable again, may be able to find no way save by the surrender
of cherished ideals, and so may find themselves compelled to cast about for
new dreams and purposes. An important aspect of the historical process is the
work of the new generation for ever playing providence over even the disasters
of the old, and being driven to something like a creative act for the very reason
that life on the old terms has become impossible. It represents a complication
that may be hidden from our sight if the story is telescoped into a whig version
of abridged history. For this reason we have to be on our guard when the whig
historian tells us for example that the Reformation is justified because it
led ultimately to liberty; we must avoid the temptation to make what seem to
be the obvious inferences from this statement; for it is possible to argue against
the whig historian that the ultimate issue which he applauds only came in the
long run from the fact that, in its immediate results, the Reformation was so
disastrous to liberty .
The Reformation which is so often regarded as a result and continuation of
the Renaissance – a parallel movement of man’s expanding mind –
might also be looked upon as a reassertion of religious authority in the world,
a revolt against the secularisation, the laxness and the sins of the time. Luther,
who appeals to us so strongly as an innovator and a rebel against constituted
authority, was behind everything else the religious leader, in a sense the revivalist,
whose rebellion was only an incident in his great attempt to establish right
religion in the world. Luther and Calvin were both alike in that they attacked
the papal and medieval conception of the religious society; but it is doubtful
whether the Biblical Commonwealth for which they laboured would have been nay
less severe in its control of the individual, or would have commended itself
to these men if it had been less severe. And although the Bible has proved to
be the most flexible of authorities and the most capable of progressive interpretation,
it has yet to be demonstrated that the Reformers who used it to confound the
Popes did not regard it as a more firm and rigid authority than the Roman tradition
or the canon law, of which they seem to have condemned precisely the innovations
and the development. Luther, when he was making his development of religious
doctrine, was not hindered but was generously encouraged by his superiors in
the Catholic Church, and he was not molested when, like so many other preachers
of his day, he fulminated in his sermons against the common attitude to indulgences.
One might say that the very action which precipitated the break with Rome was
prompted by Luther’s own intolerance of what he deemed wrong religion in
other people. It might be argued that what Luther rebelled against was not the
severity but the laxity of the Popes .
In any case the sixteenth century was a time when any serious error concerning
divine things was almost universally regarded as blasphemy; when the state and
the secular rulers could not imagine that religious nonconformity might be consistent
with public order; and when a great theological controversy was calculated to
make religious militant and fanatical. One might have predicted that in the
sixteenth century a religious movement which assumed large proportions and implied
a schism in the Catholic Church would almost make the continent run with blood;
particularly if it provoked by reaction a revival of religious fanaticism in
Rome itself. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Luther’s break
with the Papacy – for which the Popes themselves were so greatly responsible,
since they seemed determined to drive him to revolt – had disastrous results
in the succeeding generation and was terrible in its effects on life and society.
I do not know who could deny that the Reformation provoked a revival of religious
passions, religious fanaticism and religious hatreds which were unlike the world
to which things had seemed to be moving in the year 1500; and when we look at
Erasmus and Machiavelli and the spirit of the Renaissance we must at least wonder
whether freedom of thought and modern rationalism might not have had an easier
course if Luther had never resuscitated militant religion. Even though it might
be argued that the terrible wars which devastated so many countries during a
whole century were not by any means solely due to their ostensible religious
cause, it is none the less certain that religion contributed to them their fanaticism
and intensity, and the introduction of the religious element neither helped
to clarify the other issues, nor tended to make them more capable of compromise.
It would be as great a mistake to deny the genuineness of religious fanaticism
in this period, as to ascribe all the horrors and evils to the iniquity of Roman
Catholics; for the real seat of the tragedy lay in the ideas which Luther and
Calvin and the Popes held in common and held with equal intensity – the
idea that society and government should be founded on the basis of the one authoritative
religion, that all thought should be dominated by religion, and that within
this religious society no heresy or blasphemy or abomination should be allowed
to rear itself up in defiance of God. There is little point in blaming either
Luther or the Popes for a view of religious authority which was connected with
their fundamental assumption concerning society, or in attacking them for a
belief in persecution which was perhaps only the reflex side of their religious
certainty; but we can say that when such assumptions were so deeply rooted in
the minds of almost all religious men, a movement like the Reformation, working
in direct antagonism to the hitherto recognized and constituted authority, was
bound to be disastrous in its terrestrial consequences. Catholics were not alone
responsible for the tragedy and the devastation of the religious struggles;
we can only say that Catholics and Protestants alike, working upon assumptions
which they held in common, produced by their clash, by their very coexistence
in one society and in Christendom, wars and bitterness and disasters which are
too terrible to contemplate.
If we focus our vision afresh and fix our attention on the post-Reformation
world, we see a generation faced with a new weight of problems, and confronted
particularly by the strange problem that arose out the coexistence of two forms
of religion in one society – what we should call the problem of religious
minorities. We can see novel experiments being tried – a great attempt
to make life possible and tolerable again; and it is almost amusing to see the
measures to which men had to resort because they could not escape the fundamental
assumption that church and society should be coextensive – they could not
imagine that a government should be anything but the first servant of the one
true faith. A long road had to be taken before religion could be regarded as
an optional matter for the individual, or churches could be accepted as voluntary
societies within the state. Elizabeth of England tried to secure "comprehension"
by a via media, so that one inclusive religious organization could cover
the whole country. Catherine de’ Medici, failing comprehension, was willing
to tolerate a religious minority, somewhat as an anomaly, almost as a "state
within the state" . Toleration was enforced at times as a suspension of
the problem, being regarded at first, very often, as an interim measure –
an attempt to reach a modus vivendi until the healing of the church.
Parties like that of the Politiques in France might still acknowledge that persecution
was the religious ideal and one religion alone the true one, but decided that
persecution could not be carried out on the scale of a massacre, and said that
the state must not be wrecked for the sake of religion. As the struggles proceeded
the state found the opportunity to rise into the position of adjudicator, while
the religious bodies tended to look like conflicting parties within the state;
the secular government, instead of regarding itself as the servant of the one
true faith, might even stand out as the guardian of the interests of society,
imposing peace upon religious factions. In all these ways toleration emerges
with the return of religious indifference. It comes as a secular ideal. It is
the re-assertion of the rights of society and the rights of this world against
religions which by their warfare and by the absoluteness of their claims were
acting in defiance of social consequences. Elizabeth of England, Catherine de’
Medici, William the Silent, Wallenstein, and all those parties which in one
country or another adopted the attitude of the Politiques, attempted to heal
the sorrows of the time and to overcome the Reformation tragedy by subordinating
religion to policy. They helped the cause of liberty because they were too worldly,
and from the point of view of their own age they were perhaps too wicked, to
support one religion or another in defiance of social consequences, and in disregard
of a political good.
But all the time religious bodies themselves were altering and were being affected
by changes in the world. From the first all parties had cried out for freedom
of conscience against the dominating church; and each had attacked the persecutions
of the other; but Protestants, arising as a minority in so many countries, had
the greater experience of this manner of protesting. Some people were bound
ultimately to arrive at the view that all persecution even on behalf of the
truth was wicked. The Bible became a more fluid and flexible authority than
Luther or Calvin had imagined it to be. Protestantism broke up into more divisions
and parties than its original leaders would have liked to see. These sects could
not for ever go on persecuting one another when the Papacy menaced them all.
The Protestants were in a better position than the Catholics to learn the relativity
of the various forms of religion, and to regard church organization as the subject
of experiment, and doctrine as the subject of inquiry. Protestants came to tolerate
one another, though it, was long before most of them could tolerate a Catholic.
There emerged ideas like that of the Independents in England, who advocated
a congregational system that permitted of religious diversity within the state.
Toleration, which had been a secular policy, a political necessity, was turned
into a religious ideal, and churches came to take their place as voluntary societies
within the state. Instead of the old ideal of the state as one uniform and coherent
religious society – the ideal of Lutheran, Calvinist. Anabaptist, Anglican,
and Roman Catholic – there grew up the principle of religious liberty,
the idea of the secular state within which men could join any religious group
or choose not to belong to any at all, the view that a government must be indifferent
to men’s choice of church or religion. The original Protestants had brought
new passion into the ideal of the state as a religious society and they had
set about to discipline this society more strictly than ever upon the pattern
of the Bible. The later Protestants reversed a fundamental purpose and became
the allies of individualism and the secular state.
At the back of everything, moving men to this change of purpose, this revision
of ideals, was the tragedy of the Reformation, the havoc caused by the coexistence
of two forms of religion in the same society. It was because the results of
the Reformation had been so disastrous to life and liberty that people were
driven to re-examine their principles and were compelled even to alter religious
ideals. The truth is that if in a certain generation men are bitterly quarrelling
over the claims of one religion and another, the havoc may become so serious
that the very state of the problem is changed, and men slide into a world of
new issues and are diverted to new preoccupations. The question that exercises
the next generation will be how to secure some sort of religious peace, how
at least to contrive that religious controversy shall not spread ruin over the
world. The whig historian, assuming a false continuity in events, overlooks
this shifting of the problem and ignores this transition between one generation
and another. He likes to imagine religious liberty issuing beautifully out of
Protestantism when in reality it emerges painfully and grudgingly out of something
quite different, out of the tragedy of the post-Reformation world. He imagines
that Luther has been vindicated by the course of subsequent events when in fact
it was the generations after Luther which performed the work of reconciliation,
it was the heritage of disaster itself which drove men later to a creative act.
The whig historian thinks that the course of history, the passage of centuries
can give judgement on a man or an age or a movement. In reality there is only
one thing that history can say on this matter, and this itself is so commonplace
that it can almost be reduced to a piece of tautology. It is, that provided
disaster is not utterly irretrievable – provided a generation is not destroyed
or a state wiped entirely from the map – there is no sin or error or calamity
can take place but succeeding generations will make the best of it; and though
it be a Black Death or a Fire of London that comes as a scourge and a visitation.
men will still make virtue of necessity and use the very downfall of the old
world as the opportunity for making a new, till the whig historian looking back
upon the catastrophe can see only the acquired advantages and the happy readjustments.
So in the result the whig historian will be tempted to forget the sufferings
of a generation, and will find it easy to assert that the original tragedy was
no tragedy at all. We of the present-day can be thankful for the religious quarrels
of the sixteenth century, as we are thankful for the Black Death and the Fire
of London – because the very disasters drove men to what was tantamount
to a creative act; and we, coming in the after-flow of the centuries, can see
only the good that was produced. But we are deceived by the optical illusion
if we deny that when Luther rebelled against the Catholic Church and the Popes
so deliberately hounded him into rebellion they did not between them produce
a tragedy which meant the sacrifice of more than one generation.
Index | Preface
| 1. Introduction | 2. The
Underlying Assumption | 3. The Historical
Process
4. History and Judgements of Value | 5. The
Art of the Historian | 6. Moral Judgements
in History
|
