On Ignorance of History

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On Ignorance of History
by David Mitchell on Wednesday, 18 August 2010 at 20:17

I make no pretence to a sufficiently deep or sufficiently broad knowledge of History; but I would not dare to write this article if I were not making some attempts to further and to deepen my own historical knowledge.







I believe that the knowledge of our own history is important, for many reasons; but I believe it to be of particular importance at the present time, in which we are witnessing before our very eyes the apparent collapse of the West—but even now it is not too late to save it.







I hope I shall be forgiven for saying that if we do not understand our fathers, we cannot fully understand ourselves. I do not mean that all that has happened in the past is of equal importance, or that we need to know every action and event that has taken place since the beginning of time. I mean that we need to know certain things in order to understand other things. We cannot understand the breakdown of Western civilization, which we are witnessing, if we do not know what that civilization is. We cannot know what that civilization is if we do not know what made that civilization—to wit, if we do not know what the Roman Empire was (from which we all derive), and what the Catholic Church, I do not say *was*, but *is*—for She exists still, and indeed in eternity. We need to understand the Catholic Church in order to understand Islam, for Islam is a perversion of Catholicism, and we need to understand the Catholic Church in order to understand those denominations that have broken off from her, but to whom they owe their origin, and without whose existence they simply could not be. We need to understand the Catholic Church in order to understand the New Atheism which is a consequence of the shipwreck of five hundred years ago. It is not necessary to an understanding of the Church, or the Empire, or the West in general, that we ourselves be of the Faith, for our province here is not that of Theology but that of History. We are dealing with matters of demonstrable historical fact. Of course there are also many factors in History upon which we cannot be sure, but this does not counteract my general assertion.







I wish to lay an especial stress upon *religious* history: in particular, that of the Catholic Church, which preserved all that could be preserved of the Roman Empire in the decline of that Empire, and which has renewed, and continues to renew, the spiritual life of the world—*not* because I believe that that Church is the true one, but because without understanding that Church, we cannot understand what has been in Europe. The two primary questions of history, as Belloc remarks on the first page of *How the Reformation Happened*, are the conversion of the Roman Empire to Catholicism, and the religious breakdown of the sixteenth century. It is not my place in this short essay to discuss how these things came to be: rather, I wish to affirm that these were great *spiritual* changes—they affected most profoundly the *minds* of men—and it is in the minds of men that reality is most living. I wish people more strongly appreciated the place of the *mind* in human history: the importance of *ideas*.







We may use the word *doctrine* if we prefer it to *ideas*. If we particularly dislike a set of ideas, we call it an *ideology*.







I wish more people appreciated the power of ideas. Ideas are far more powerful than dynamite, and ten thousand times as dangerous. All ideas are not equal; nor, it seems to me, is a man free to hold any ideas he pleases. Some ideas are good; other ideas are evil. If one idea is good, its contradictory is evil. Are we free to hold beliefs which are evil? If we hold the strange doctrine of complete freedom of thought, we must conclude that we are. But while many people will praise intellectual freedom—without making it clear what it is that they wish to be free *from*—few take their notion of mental freedom quite that far—as yet.







Now I do not think that when a person uses the phrase "ignorance of history," we should automatically accuse him of "mere name-calling." *Mere* is a very strong word in any case. For it may be that he is not in the act of addressing a meaningless contumely at his adversary. He may in fact be making the criticism that his opponent is ignorant of History—or, at any rate, of *some* history—or of that history which relates to the subject in question, and which either his opponent ought to know or the knowledge of which would enlighten his opponent. He may be right or wrong in supposing that this knowledge—real or imaginary knowledge—will enlighten his opponent-in-argument; but to accuse him of "mere name-calling" appears to me to be unjust and inaccurate.



It is a great error in historiography—I understand that Gibbon is notorious for this—to neglect the spiritual state of men. It derives, I suppose, from a materialist outlook on the world: the idea that those things only are real which can be seen, heard, felt, smelt, and tasted. That matter alone is, and—logically—that mind, soul, spirit, therefore are not. In our day hardly anybody will deny the existence of the mind, though they may deny the soul because they do not know what a soul is. This brings to my mind the epigram of Belloc's:







ON PUGLEY: A DON



Pugley denies the soul? Why, so do I



The soul, of Pugley, heartily deny.







There are many, I imagine, who believe in spirits of one kind or another. But we are not wholly freed from the materialist outlook: indeed in some quarters it seems to be gaining—in works on popular science, for example, which are often written from an atheist materialist perspective. In such works, and sometimes in documentaries on television, it is *presumed* that the reader or viewer, being a Cultivated Fellow, is an atheist materialist—or he is addressed as such. It is as if it has been demonstrably proved that Nothing can turn itself into Something (O miracle of miracles!) [1], and that what is not material does not exist. The non-material will escape the observation of the scientist—*whose business it is to examine material objects closely*—for it is not the business of physical science to observe immaterial things! It is the business of physical science to observe *material* things—and the observation and measurement of material things and their properties requires no especial talent. [2] And in the close observation of matter, it is natural that *if* one simultaneously neglects to observe that which is spiritual (i.e. not material), then one will magnify the importance of matter and proportionately diminish that of spirit. It does not logically follow from the fact of one's failure to see something that that thing is not there.







Now this *need* not be the case. There is no intrinsic reason why practitioners of physical science should be spiritually blind; and not all scientists are. I fear that the less intelligent of my readers will interpret this part of my essay as an attack upon science. It is not that at all. It is an observation of an historical trend upon the part of some persons. If the spiritual state of the scientist is healthy—that is, if he does not neglect the spiritual life—his scientific work will be healthy and beneficial. But when his scientific work, his material life, becomes a substitute for his spiritual life, then will the former become disordered and out of touch with reality.







By and large, the scientific work [3] undertaken in the high intellectual life of the Middle Ages was undertaken in such an environment. And later, Herschel (who discovered that Uranus was a planet and not a star); that great Catholic scientist Galileo (whose condemnation did not derive from "the Catholic Church" and which was not for "holding heretical beliefs," as I was once misinformed in a University lecture); Mendel (the Augustinian monk); Pasteur (a convert); the great Jesuit Father Athanasius Kircher; the Catholic priest Fr McEnery (1796-1841), the founder of modern Anthropology—whose discoveries at Torbay were suppressed by those scientists (not churchmen) who opposed him, and suppressed so successfully that almost nobody has heard of him, and he does not even have a Wikipedia article—; and a myriad of further names I might add, are sufficient to demonstrate that there is no intrinsic contradiction between Science and Faith. There may be a conflict between Science and Victorian English Protestantism (as witness the silencing of Dr McEnery); and perhaps this is part of the difficulty with those who think that science has exploded theology: that they call Victorian English Protestantism by such silly names as "the foundations of Western religion."







So much for those who do not think, but merely repeat, like parrots, what others have told them.







When I say "history," I have in mind not only those events of importance which have happened in the past, but the human (and the deeper than human) motives which led to those events. I also have in mind the conception that there is a true and a false history. Our historical writing in English has, with certain exceptions, particularly before History became a scientific study, been warped by an anti-Catholic bias so strong that it has falsified history. A man may, conceivably and at least in theory, be biased against the Catholic Church and yet write true history—but when his bias leads him so to distort events as to render his narration the narration of things very different from those which actually occurred (as witness the amazing distortion of the business of Alaric), then he is not writing true history. If anybody doubts that our official historians of once upon a time falsified history, let him undertake the following steps. Let him read the official historians, and let him read the original documents. Then I shall be prepared to listen to him; and if he can prove himself to be right, I shall accept his argument. Since, however, there is a great cleft between the original documents and our traditionally accepted historians, he will not succeed. Fortunately this school of history can no longer be taken seriously. It has been debunked. But it held sway for so long that its residual scum is still with us.







For there are many ways of keeping people ignorant of history. One is this method of teaching them false history. Another is teaching them parts of history, and ignoring vast important tracts, as is done at the present time in the schools of this country. Another is by a false sense of proportion: setting such importance on one unimportant element, and skimming over something else which is of very great importance. All these are but a few of the many various methods of telling a lie.







In order to extricate myself from the rut of my own ignorance I am endeavouring, as I said at the beginning, to educate myself in the subject of History—a subject which seems to me to be of much more importance than I had realized (though I knew it was important), if we are to understand the downfall we witness around us. I repeat, I do not mean by History all that has happened: I mean that which has made us what we are. For if we do not know how and why we have come to be what we are, then surely we cannot understand ourselves, at least not fully; neither can we understand whither we are led. Do you not agree?



(18th August, 2010.)







[1] The only alternative would be that the universe is uncreated and exists in eternity—yet the doctrine of the eternity of the universe is never asserted at the present day. This would make the universe into the Supreme Being, for nothing would then be greater than the universe.



[2] Nor does the attempt to draw conclusions from them (which may be right or wrong) require any intellectual or creative ability beyond that of any normal man - though the inference of correct conclusions may in some circumstances be the outward expression of a genius lurking behind.

Also, a man does not become more or less intelligent, or right in his judgement of morality, of theology, of the metaphysic, etc., by virtue of being "a famous scientist." There is no correlation between fame and intelligence, nor between fame and scientific ability. But my point is the materialist consequence to the soul of the isolation of what is (or used to be) called the Scientific Method.



[3] Which may be read of in the somewhat unequal book *God's Philosophers* by James Hannam (Icon Books, 2009).