The Sense of History by Myron P. Gilmore

 

By the eve of the Reformation the European world of learning had been supplied with editions and commentaries on the Old and New Testaments which represented the application to scripture of the humanistic techniques of criticism. Upon this achievement rested the hopes of a whole generation of elites for the purification and restoration of the Christian Church.

The common denominator between Greek and Hebrew scholarship was a new understanding of history. The development of a sense of perspective on the past, the ability to place oneself in time with respect to an age as a whole, the awareness of historic distance, all this  was a contribution build on the Christian heritage, which stressed the linear evolution in which the Incarnation was the most important event and the Last Judgment was the  goal towards which society was tending. But in spite of this historic element in Christian thought the Middle Ages had singularly lacked a sense of the reality of time. Countless representations of biblical; and classical scenes on manuscripts and portals testify to the fact that these distant events were thought to have happened only yesterday. The Flight to Egypt is the peasant family in the next village on their mule.

This tradition had a powerful hold on men’s minds and indeed in many ways was not completely shaken off until the triumph of historicism in the nineteenth century. No popular representation today of Imperial Rome or of the Old Testament Judea such as Hollywood has from time to time given us would be attempted without all the apparatus that archeology and history, fake or real, could supply. But down through the eighteenth century popular audiences were not bothered by the fact that Greeks of the Age of Pericles appeared in the costumes of Versailles. Yet the attainment of a sense of distance in time and space which is one kind of reality has been accomplished at the sacrifice of another kind of reality. Today the process goes so far that we feel self-conscious about trotting out characters dressed in historical costumes as if for a fancy  dress ball. Shakespeare in modern dress or St. Joan in modern talk may come with a greater shock of recognition.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century this sense of history, which was subsequently to triumph*, was only beginning  to manifest humanist thought. The tradition of the medieval chronicle continued in many forms. Whether such chronicles purported to give the history of a national group, a political entity, a city or a monastery, they began with the history of creation and pretended to universal scope Among the famous examples of this genre was the Nurnberg Chronicle of Hartmann von Schedel, published in 1493 and illustrated with woodcuts by Wohlgemut, the father-in-law of Durer. Mixed with the realistic portrayal of German cities were representations of biblical; events and wonderful prodigies. A work of this kind, still essentially medieval, exemplified the philosophy of history shared by the greatest number of the contemporaries of Columbus.

Side by side with these interpretations of the past, however, there appeared increasing numbers of direct personal accounts of contemporary episodes and experiences. The Memoirs of Commines remain perhaps the most famous example, but diaries such as those of Burchard, Infessura and Marino Sanudo belong in the same category. Personal, secular, limited to the life span of the individual, these accounts are at the opposite extreme from the world chronicle. To those who were connected with a more remote past they opened the possibilities of a more individualistic and realistic treatment of history.

In still another category was the formal humanist historiography modeled on ancient examples. The tradition which had begun in Italy with Bruni and Poggio was carried on in most of the Italian Courts. Rucellai wrote his History of the invasion of Charles VIII, which Erasmus thought worthy to be compared with Sallust and Polydore Vergil had begun as early as 1505 the collection of materials for his history of England which was finally published only in 1533. The chief contribution of the Italian school of humanists was to limit history to past politics and treat it as an autonomous area of study. The emphasis was on the pedagogic value of history and upon the belief that the record of the past was in reality philosophy teaching by example. In many of the most formal humanist histories the chief figures were described as personifications of abstract and traditional virtues and vices, and this approach was replaced only in the sixteenth century with the more realistic observation of the age of Machiavelli and Guicciardini. Divine intervention and prodigies of all sorts might still be allowed – and even in some cases recommended –but the thread of political action could be followed by the interpretation of human motives.

Works of this kind were bound to raise by implication the question how far man controlled his own history. What areas in the past could be understood in terms of a secular understanding of men’s behavior and so what could be learned from history? The question preoccupied the historical work of Machiavelli and Guicciardini and it frequently received a pessimistic answer. Yes in the long run these histories were written in the faith that men could learn from them. In the twenty-fifth chapter of The Prince Machiavelli considered how much fortune can do in  human affairs and how it might be opposed. He felt that

 

‘Fortune is the ruler of half our actions, but that she allows the other half or thereabouts to be governed by us . . .

I compare her to an impetuous river, that when the turbulent, inundates  the plains, cuts down trees and buildings, removes the earth from tis side and places it on the other, everyone flees before it and everything yields to its fury without being opposed to it, and yet though it is of such a kind, still when it is quiet men can make provision against it by dykes and banks, so that when it rises it will either go into a canal, or its rush will not be so wild and dangerous. So it is with fortune .  .  .’

If even the pessimistic Machiavelli could see that the study of the past might enable men to make this much provision for the future, the hopes of those who studied the distant classical and Christian pasts were still more comprehensive. Both antiquity and early Christianity were now seen as remote eras, but they could be known through the proper application of historical; techniques and the fruit of knowledge would be the restoration of piety and learning that lay at the roots of western civilization.





*Seems like a bit of  Post-World War Two optimism from the standpoint of 2022.