Western Civilization Is Destroying Its Historical Heritage, Part III

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Part 3 of 7 (Part 1 here ^[2], Part 2 here ^[3], Part 4 here ^[4])

The Stalled Development of Chinese and Islamic Historiography

Did the modern Chinese write better histories than ancient Europeans? Hegel said that “no other people has had a series of historical writers succeeding one another in such close continuity as the Chinese.” In academia today students are being asked to “substitute a Europe-centered approach for a global approach” to correct a Western bias that assumed “that the Western style of historical writing is superior in every way.” We now have books (such as “the impressive two-volume Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing“) in which students learn how the historiography of Africa, Asia, and Latin America “rivals that of Western historiography.” The edited collection by historians from across the world, Turning Points in Historiography: A Cross Cultural Perspective (2002), cleverly tells us that history writing is not a “monopoly of the West…interest in the past appears to have existed everywhere and in all periods.” Are they serious that interest in the past can be equated with a tradition of history writing? Not quite, as the editors soon acknowledge (if implicitly) that “writing” has to be a key criteria: “it is well known that history and its writing did not begin in Greece” but “further to the east and earlier.” But this is not the contending issue either. Herodotus himself praised the Egyptians for “their practice of keeping records of the past.” It so happens that all the historians included in Turning Points in Historiography rely on what the book calls the “Western” scientific approach to history — rigorous use of sources and analytical precision—to make their case against “Europe-centered approaches.” None of these academics can undo the veracity that the Chinese tradition of history writing (deemed to be the only real competitor to the West) established in ancient times, the “annals-biographic form of dynastic historical writing,” with its moralistic tales as to “whether or not Tao was present in a certain period of history,” persisted with minimal changes for centuries right until Europeans brought their historical professionalism.

China is indeed the only civilization that can be said to have generated a continuous historiographical tradition, as Hegel understood. This same Hegel, however, would go on to say that it is nevertheless the case that their annals “fail to show any development.” In Turning Points in Historiography there are two very scholarly chapters seeking to show “new directions” in China. The first by T. H. Lee merely shows that in the period 960-1126 there was a “renewed” emphasis on moral teaching based on the reaffirmation of Confucian values, coupled with an increased emphasis on “historical criticism.” We are initially made to believe that this criticism amounted to rigorous questioning to determine the validity od the sources. But Lee, who supplies 89 bibliographic notes at the end of his chapter, soon admits, after a tortuous effort to show “new directions,” that “although Chinese historians were committed to recording historical events factually, they never developed a theory of historical criticism, at least until the end of the eighteenth century.”

The Greeks, Thucydides in particular, started historical criticism of sources, but it was really during the Renaissance that Europeans began to conduct a systematic study for the verification of sources. Lee admits, moreover, that Chinese history books in the period he examines “had yet to exhibit any tendency in employing causal interpretation” beyond showing an awareness that “events were related.” As much as Lee tries to bring Chinese historians closer to the standards of modern Western historiography, telling us that the Chinese understood that “when all the relevant facts are put together, and carefully collated and criticized…the truth will then reveal itself,” he cannot but conclude: “I admit that I have searched in vain for this analytical approach. The idea of causation, incipient as it was, did not continue to attract historical thinkers in imperial China; concern for supra-historical causes prevailed and overwhelmed the post Sung thinkers.” By “supra-historical causes” he means the ancient Chinese idea that history writing should be about the revelation of Tao in history, that is, with the didactic aim of showing that those dynasties that were successful had received the Mandate of Heaven, and those dynasties that were failures had lost the Mandate. The Chinese did not even develop a theory of dynastic cycles properly speaking, in the sense of identifying the causes for the rise and fall of dynasties, as the Romans did in identifying within human nature how the simplicity and frugality of early Rome had nurtured virtues that made its rise possible; and how the ease and affluence that came with successful conquests had nurtured vices that were leading to its decline.

Not even in the eighteenth century did the Chinese manage to transcend the Mandate of Heaven view of history. This can be established by examining the very words and conclusions of the second chapter in Turning Points in Historiography, which ostensibly seeks to demonstrate that China’s historiography underwent a major turning point in the 1700s, leading to a historiography comparable to that of the West during the Enlightenment. The title of this chapter, authored by the respected scholar Benjamin Ellman, is “The Historicization of Classical Learning in Ming-Ch’ing China.” In tedious detail, trying to squeeze every drop of evidence he can, with 113 bibliographical notes, but only barely filling a spoon, Elman concludes that by 1800 we see in China the use of “inductive methods by evidential scholars [that] indicated that they had rediscovered a rigorous methodology to apply to historiography” entailing “analysis of historical sources, correction of anachronisms, revision of texts.” Yet, he has to acknowledge, for otherwise he would have been dismissed as delusional, that this so-called “evidential research” of the Chinese “did not yet equal the ‘objective’ premises of German historicism” and that it only “resemble their European Enlightenment contemporaries.”

We will get to the Enlightenment and German historicism later on. Let it be said now that the “evidential research” of Chinese historians did not resemble the Enlightenment at all. Historians of the non-Western world like to give themselves airs about how they have deeper historical insights by implying that they know both Western and non-Western histories. In truth, their knowledge of the West rarely rises above generalizations bespeaking of their recollections of one or two undergrad surveys of European history. The “evidential research” of the Chinese had nothing to do with an emerging scientific attitude. To the contrary: it was an attempt to ensure a more accurate determination of the ancient Chinese classics as part of a revival of the authority of these texts in the name of a ritualistic conservative reaction. It was for the sake of ensuring the authenticity of ancient texts that Chinese historians cultivated a philological reading to determine which of many editions of the classics were really original and which copied or forged additions of later centuries. It is true that these “evidential” scholars were tired of the bookish Sung and Ming Neo-Confucians, their endless “rationalistic” commentaries on books, and thus they called for the study of “concrete subjects,” philology, history, astronomy, geography, and the like. But there was no resemblance between this and the Enlightenment, which, for starters, came in the heels of a Newtonian revolution, about which the Chinese had no idea.

The Western-educated Chinese historian, Kai-wing Chow, questions the hyped up phrase “evidential research” in his book The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China (1994), arguing that this period witnessed not a philological revolution but the “rise of Classicism, ritualism, and purism.” The “evidential” (k’ao-cheng) movement was a response to the threatened position of the Chinese gentry, an effort to restore an elite culture which had been considerably weakened by Ming commercialization. The vision of this movement was conservative, recovery of the “original” or “pure” Confucian norms and language. They were dedicated to philological precision in their efforts to achieve or recover the pure classical traditions. “Filial devotion, loyalty to the monarch, and wifely fidelity”—these were their mottoes combined with “punctilious observance of hierarchical relationship, and the exaltation of the ritual authority of the Classics.” As it is, the “philological revolution” Elman saw emerging in 17th–18th-century China had already been pioneered by 14th–century Italian humanists in their “rediscovery” of lost ancient Roman classics. Starting with Petrarch (1304–74), who discovered several texts of Cicero, including letters, and verified that these were actually written by him. Lorenzo Valla (1407–54) carried to maturity this philological program by developing sophisticated methods of linguistic analysis to determine age and authenticity. The best-known example of this textual analysis was his determination that the Donation of Constantine, a testament in which Constantine bequeathed his power and wealth to the Church, was actually a forgery.

Turning Points in Historiography has a chapter on the “ascendancy” and “inspirational” work of the contemporary Subaltern School of Indian historians—without asking why India, a civilization thousands of years old, never generated a historiography until Western historians brought their professionalism. The Times of India cited ^[7] the following words from R. C. Majumdar, a highly respected historian of Indian history: “One of the gravest defects of Indian culture, which defies rational explanation, is the aversion of Indians to writing history. They applied themselves to all conceivable branches of literature and excelled in many of them, but they never seriously took to the writing of history, with the result that for a great deal of our knowledge of ancient Indian history we are indebted to foreigners.” The journalist who wrote this article went on to say: “For a country that claims to have a 5000-year-old civilization…There was little recording of the past, only a retelling and that too by poets who mixed fact with fiction and myth with reality.” In the words of Oswald Spengler: “in the Indian Culture we have the perfectly ahistoric soul.”

Praising Islamic historiography “for its richness and variety,” Stephen Humphreys calls for European-centered approaches to be “denounced” as “pure Orientalism of the most invidious kind.” He opposes the “imposition of modern Western concepts and categories on another culture.” Yet, it should be apparent—to those who care to think outside the diversity box—that Humphreys relies on modern Western protocols of scholarship, careful referencing of sources, to make his case. I am against the imposition of Western categories on the non-western world. We should understand the different historiographical traditions of the world in their own terms (even as we abide by principles of modern historical research). Studying other cultures in their own terms, which Humphrey calls for, happens to be a Western idea. The title of Humphrey’s chapter is “Turning points in Islamic Historical Practice.” He admits that the Islamic historiography “never became a systematic science or even a subject of formal academic study among medieval Muslims.” However, a tradition of history writing did emerge in the early 700s, “as a recognized category of knowledge and genre writing” (narratives, reports of events). “Medieval Muslims did have a story to tell about their past, a complex but unmistakably linear narrative reaching from the life of Muhammad…down to their own times, and…far into the future, even until the last day.” In his book Islamic Historiography ^[8], Chase Robinson adds that many Muslim historians “were alert to contradictory evidence, to fabrication, exaggeration and bias.” It was important for them to be true to the history of their religion. But as Humphrey recognizes, Muslim historians “never show any real awareness of change and development” in their chronologies. “Events were in a real sense timeless… conceived and presented as moral exempla, not as links in a continuous narrative or as part of a historical process… The Qur’anic understanding of history is cyclical rather than linear.”

Now, given that Muslims did write “universal chronicles beginning with the life of the prophet or even earlier… year by year to the present [covering] events across the entire Islamic world,” one might suppose that Islamic historiography was comparable to what the ancients and medieval Christians achieved. The purpose of Islamic history, we are told, was also to offer examples of moral instruction, inculcate virtue and castigate vice; and it was also cyclical, combined with its own universalism. But this is misleading. Muslim historians lacked interest in causality, never mind distinguishing different types of causes. Moreover, Humphreys does not indicate whether Muslims offered explanations for the cycles of history (as we saw in Polybius, Sallust, Livy). The point of their moral teaching was to illustrate, not to explain, whereas for the ancients the point was to instruct about the nature of human beings, and why this nature underlies the cycles of history. And, as Humphreys admits, Muslims had no conception of change and development—unlike Christians, who initiated a history of development, and started to identify the main stages of history fitting the history of the ancients and the pagans into the Christian scheme. Finally, and this is very important: we don’t find among Muslims (and Chinese) actual historical narratives, as contrasted to mere chronicles, by which I mean controlled, sustained monographs, with a coherent and continuous narrative, as we see in Thucydides, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus… and in some late medieval European historians. This explains why we can still read with pleasure ancient historians, and historians like Bede and Villehardouin, whereas no one reads the annalistic and monotonous Chinese historians.

It is often said that Muslims “wrote in much the same way” (Robinson) as Christians, seeing God as the ultimate cause of all events, and seeing God’s will manifested through human events. But there is a key difference: the purpose of knowledge in the traditionalist culture of Islam was to conserve the truths that God had already made manifest in the past, beginning with Muhammad’s recitation of the Qur’an about 610, seen as a “golden age.” In Christianity, however, God does not reveal all truths from the beginning but in historical time through a long process of cumulative education. There is fundamental difference between Islam and Christianity that is generally overlooked. Islam is inherently traditionalist, and so is Confucianism, Judaism, and every other culture of the West. For traditionalist cultures the aim of knowledge is to conserve rather than create. We may certainly admire this attribute today in light of the current decimation of Western traditions by liberals. But the difference needs to be made that the ultimate wisdom of traditional cultures lies in a “golden age” in the past. The task of subsequent thinkers is to ensure that the culture remains anchored to the secure wisdom already attained in the past. In the Islamic case, God has already made manifest to man His will in the Koran, beginning with Muhammad’s recitation of the Koran in the year 610. As Robinson notes, by the tenth century, traditionalism in Islam had come to enjoy a virtual monopoly on jurisprudence, and conditioned nearly all branches of knowledge. “The ‘science of traditions’ which meant compiling, editing, and commenting upon reports of the Prophet’s words and deeds, and his transmitters” had come to be equated with knowledge per se. “Without any qualifying adjectives, ‘knowledge’ meant knowledge of traditions, and those who possessed such knowledge were ‘those who know’.” The existing knowledge could be reformulated and refined, but no new knowledge could be generated in the future. Christianity, however, is not traditionalist in the degree to which it holds the truths of God are actualized in the course of time leading to a future of bliss and harmony.

The Achievement of the Renaissance through to the 1600s

The historiographical thinking of the Renaissance is often viewed as a return to the Roman model of history writing, with Rome praised less for creating a Pax Romana that facilitated the spread of Christianity than for being a city that embodied patriotic republican virtues that could be imitated by the Italian city states. The Renaissance term “humanities” referred to an education in Latin rhetoric based on a close imitation of ancient models of writing found in Cicero and Seneca, and in Sallust and Livy. The purpose of history was to learn political lessons, as Roman historians had advocated, about the inherently cyclic character of history, how strong men and order emerge out of ruin and hardness, and how weak men and disorder emerge out of comfort and ease; and about the role of fate (fortuna) in human action, how even leaders with courage and intelligence may nevertheless be overwhelmed by chance events beyond their control. In Machiavelli’s words in Discourses on Livy: “those who read my remarks may derive those advantages which should be the aim of all study of history.” While few, if any, questioned the role of God as the first cause of all events, Christ’s central role and the Last Judgement, Renaissance historians, like the Romans, accounted for events in terms of the motivations and interests of individuals, appealing to constants in human nature to explain the rise and fall of leaders and states.

It is not that the accomplishments of Renaissance historians have been underestimated. In addition to the proliferation of chronicles on the history of Italian cities, great national histories were written, such as Guicciardini’s History of Italy ^[9], a detailed account covering 44 years of history, from 1490 to 1534, which is seen as quite original in its own right, committed to the complexity of historical causation, rather than applying in formulaic fashion a cyclic explanation, concerned with the “interaction of many motives, intentions, calculations, misconceptions, irrational impulses and fleeting or enduring psychological dispositions.” Paolo Giovio’s Histories of His Own Times (1550), had a somewhat “universal” character with its impressive description of the wars of France, Germany, and Spain, and the sack of Rome, and its integration of the entire Mediterranean world ^[10], including the contemporary history of the Muslim nations, into his vivid narrative, by an author with an encyclopedic mind. Moreover, the Renaissance saw the invention of philology, the science of verifying and authenticating old manuscripts, which permitted the identification of forgeries and alterations in old manuscripts and documents. Lorenzo Valla’s Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine (1440) is now seen as initiating the study of modern philology ^[11] and a scholarly spirit in the West that would both ensure a “scientific” approach to the use of historical sources and a more critical attitude towards age-old authoritative writings.

Yet, many can’t help conclude that the famous Renaissance division of history into the Ancient Period, the Dark Ages, and the Renaissance, was a direct refutation of the Christian idea that history is characterized by developmental stages. In the words of Frank Manuel, “The Renaissance writers were directly, almost slavishly, dependent on the cyclical theories that they found in the ancient texts.” Robert Nisbet agrees ^[12]: the humanists “adored the ancient past” and viewed the Middle Ages as “a thousand years of desuetude, of sterility and drought, and worse, of a vast thicket of ignorance, superstition, preoccupation with the hereafter, and unremitting ecclesiastical tyranny.” For Nisbet, the idea of a cumulative history requires a belief in the value of the past as a whole, how past ages contributed, step by step, to the present. Reading Machiavelli, it is hard to disagree that his “inherently cyclical” view sees nothing new but a “fixed oscillation between the bad and the good,” with virtue becoming the very seed of vice, which is anathema to the idea of development, and to the attainment of a proper historical consciousness. Guicciardini’s History of Italy was one where fortune, chance, and evil doings dominated the narrative, “compounded of pessimism, helplessness, and a total inability” to detect any meaning and linearity in history. The West would have to wait until the 1700s to propound a definite linear conception of history.

What Nisbet misses in his otherwise very informative book, The History of the Idea of Progress ^[12] (1980), is that i) the Renaissance also sees major achievements in art, technology, commerce, including the discovery of the world, which would make possible a global perspective, along with the rediscovery of many ancient cultural accomplishments, and that ii) the idea of progress does entail a rejection of the prejudices and false opinions of the past. Human beings cannot become historically conscious unless they have a linear conception and they can’t have a linear conception unless they detect actual progression in history. We have seen that in late antiquity Eusebius, Augustine and Orosius rejected the cyclic view of history in favor of the “education of the human race.” However, it can’t be denied that, while these three men tried to ascertain cumulative epochs in terms of actual historical peoples, leading to a blissful period ahead, they could barely identify progressive changes in the actual history of men. The stages they identified were deeply anchored in Biblical history, with only a few allusions to the importance of Greek philosophy in anticipating some Christian ideas and the importance of Roman imperial peace in facilitating the spread of Christianity and pointing to a future of perpetual peace. This inability to identify stages of progression in history would continue until the 1600s.

Nisbet’s claim that the idea of progress came into “full bloom” in the Middle Ages, only to be abandoned during the Renaissance, to be then renewed in the 1600s, fails to point to any conceptual improvement in this idea of progress during the entire Middle Ages beyond the vague, mainly Biblical conception we saw in the Augustinian view of late antiquity. Otto of Freising’s The Two Cities: A Chronicle of Universal History to the Year 1146 ^[15], follows Augustine in seeing in world historical events the development in time of a divine plan, in seeing that as time passed “the minds of men were suited to grasp more lofty precepts about right living,” and in looking forward to a golden age of happiness—without, however, offering any details about the progress of men during the Middle Ages. St. Bonaventura (1221-1274) argued in his Breviloquium ^[16] that God could have brought perfection in an a “single instant” but “chose instead to act through time, and step by step” in prefiguring the future—without identifying step by step the actual progression of man in history.

Nisbet tries to defend this medieval Christian view by pointing, as I have done elsewhere, to the many achievements of medieval man in Romanesque and Gothic architecture, in the invention of major technologies, such as very efficient water mills, reading glasses, universities, and indeed mechanical clocks with a new conception of time no longer based on the cycles of the weather, but as a “continuum of successive moments” moving in a straight line towards the future. But, then, why would medieval historians fail to integrate these progressive changes into their historical conception, and why would historians during the Renaissance go on to reaffirm the ancient cyclical view, despite further innovations? Keeping in mind that the world of the Middle Ages remained the same for the vast majority, overwhelmingly agricultural, where violence, pillage, and early death were the norm, through to the Renaissance, we can answer with Hegel ^[17] that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” “Minerva” is the goddess of wisdom, and what Hegel is saying is that philosophy takes flight only at the end of the day, after the day’s main events have taken place. Hegel believed that it was only in his own time that human beings came to understand history’s developmental logic for it was only in the 1800s that it became possible to see in full the cumulative progression of the mind. Development was occurring at an accelerating pace during the late Renaissance in a “progressivist” direction beyond what we generally witness in traditional agrarian civilizations (growth in population, extension of agricultural lands, larger cities) such as the discovery of the Americas, the mapping of the world, the gunpowder revolution, the Copernican heliocentric breakthrough, but more time was required for Europeans to fully apprehend their meaning within a comprehensive view of history. Nevertheless, some were beginning to realize that the Renaissance was indeed a new epoch in world history.

Francisco López de Gómara, in General History of the Indies (1553), called the discovery of the Americas the greatest event since Creation, in full awareness that the Christian idea of history, if it was to live up to its “universalist” ambitions, required the incorporation of the peoples of the Americas and the East Indies. Christian universalism was premised on the belief that its moral message, and its vision of the progression of truth in time, was universally true for all human beings irrespective of ethnic or cultural origin, and, for this reason, Christians must make sense of the histories of all peoples. Christians had worked hard incorporating the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the peoples of Europe, but now a whole New World with very different values confronted it. Bartolomé de las Casas, in his History of the Indies (completed in 1561), insisted that the discovery of the New World actually fulfilled the universal aspirations of Christianity: the unity of mankind this religion anticipated was becoming a reality through the conversion of the Indians and the salvation of their souls. In A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies ^[18], he condemned the atrocities committed by the colonizers against the Indians, and argued that they were fully human ^[19] in the eyes of God, and that subjugation was a moral crime. He was indeed the first to extend the Christian view of the unity of mankind to the New World, stating that “All people of the world are humans,” with a natural right to liberty, an idea that combined Aquinas’ natural law principle ^[20] that “the light of reason is placed by nature [and thus by God] in every man to guide him in his acts” with the Augustinian “education of the human race.” Francisco de Vitoria ^[21], a contemporary of de las Casas, is acknowledged as one of the originators of the principle of human rights ^[22], in arguing for the inviolable natural rights of the inhabitants of the New World, “whom he identifies as human persons with equal dignity and rights to their European counterparts.” This was a rejection of the Aristotelian argument that the Indians could be understood as slaves by nature, in line with the Christian belief in the intrinsic dignity of all humans. Starting from the Biblical idea that every dominion exists by God’s authority, Vitoria argued that we should think of the nations of the world as a kind of brotherhood with all peoples sharing a common conception of the ‘law of nations’ in which “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

In 1566, Jean Bodin published Methods for the Easy Comprehension of History, declaring that the unity of mankind was a project of the future, not a reality of the past. Prior universal histories had merely affirmed the unity of human history in terms of the Biblical account of the Genesis, incorporating the histories of unconnected nations without properly fitting them within a cumulative historical path.Bodin, according to Nisbet, emphasized progression from a time when “men were scattered like beasts in the fields and woods…until…the refinement of customs and the law-abiding society we see about us.” Pointing to the invention of printing, the mariner’s compass, which allowed for the circumnavigation of the world, the accumulation of geographical knowledge, Bodin affirmed the superiority of the moderns over the ancients, recognizing the cyclic path of both Greece and Rome as they were eventually overtaken by decay and decline, but adding that within the broader context of a universal history one could detect new historical cycles on a higher level of achievement ^[25]. He opposed slavery ^[26] in the New World as unnatural and envisioned a strong state that would guarantee personal liberal and private property; and, beyond this, of the world as a universal state with the peoples of the world working in solidarity towards the common good. He also called for a new universal history that would compare and contrast the different laws and customs of all nations, based on primary sources—thus pointing towards a universalist multicultural history

Before the 1800s, however, the knowledge Europeans had of the past was extremely sparse for lack of archival historical research, which spoke of their undeveloped historical consciousness. We may date the beginnings of a trend toward systematic archival collections to the late 16th century when King Francis II entrusted Jean du Tillet with the reorganization of the royal archives. Without primary sources historians could not but remain dependent on the memories of the historian or of eyewitnesses and on earlier historians and chroniclers. During the Renaissance and through the 1700s, historians still held as their ideal in historical writing the revered ancient models. Tacitus was the most admired model during the 1600s. Great historical accounts were still being written using and improving upon this ancient model in the psychological analysis of the motivations of human actors and the high literary style of narratives. Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon’s The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England ^[27], published between 1702 and 1704, judged to this day as one of the greatest historical narratives ^[28], the standard for all future histories of the revolution. Like Livy, Plutarch, Thucydides and Tacitus, Clarendon offered keen insights into the ways in which one could find in different men conflicting traits, making up for admirable characters. This type of psychological analysis was non-existent outside the West, where the annalistic traditions, with its impersonal form of history writing, barely changed, and where an unchanging atmosphere, and a lack of self-consciousness, produced stereotypical historians and historical personalities.

Meanwhile, the historical consciousness of Europeans would experience a steady progression in archival research from the 1600s on. The most outstanding ^[29] work was Jean Mabillon’s De Re Diplomatica (1681), known for establishing the methodology for determining the authenticity and dates of medieval manuscripts in its examination of ink, parchment, and handwriting style. This revolution in archival methods, which came in the heels of the invention of printing, which facilitated access to archival documents, was essential to the very possibility of studying the past in a scientific and systematic manner. It encouraged a keen interest in the Middle Ages, away from the Renaissance notion that it was an ignorant “dark age.” It was around this time that Tacitus’ Germania became popularly known, leading historians to trace the origins of France’s Estates General back to the Germanic assemblies of pre-Roman times. Some English historians divided the history of England into pre-feudal, feudal, and post feudal periods, while others argued that a class of independent freeholders was the foundation of European republicanism, in contrast to the Renaissance view which held that republics were controlled by a commercial elite, as the Italian city states showed. These studies in medieval history would eventually lead to a new periodization of history into Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, as historians in the 1700s came to acknowledge the significance of the Middle Ages in laying the foundations for Modern Europe, and as they came to the realization, with the birth of Galilean/Newtonian science, that they were living in an age that was superior to that of the Ancients.

That Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History (1681) was “completely anticipated” in Augustine’s City of God, published 1200+ years earlier, testifies to the immense influence of the Christian conception of history. Bossuet’s book was an updated, more historically self-aware, attempt to demonstrate the omnipresence of Providence ^[30] over the course of world history. Without God, history would be “a void of nothingness.” “Why, after all, were there Greeks and Romans? Of what use was Salamis? Actium? Poitiers? Lepanto? Why was there a Caesar, and a Charlemagne?” Only by postulating the unfolding of God in the course of time and events could humans make sense of their history. Bossuet, advisor to Louis XIV, wanted to show that in history we can detect progressive “epochs”—from the Creation itself, the Flood, the law of Moses, the rise and fall of Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Macedon and Rome, through to the coronation of Charlemagne to his own time. All these seemingly separated peoples were constitutive of one universal process. He praised the Egyptians for their inventive genius, their law-abiding disposition, their advancement in science, their art, education and agriculture. The Divine purpose was anticipated by the prophets in the case of Assyria, Babylonia and Persia. Providence charged the Jewish people with defending the worship of the true God throughout the pagan centuries. The extension of Roman peace across the known universe rendered the conversion of the world to Christianity. It was Providence that brought order to the Germanic barbarians, creating kingdoms that would reconcile the Christian framework inherited from Augustine with the classical rhetoric and civic morals of the Greek/Roman world under the law of Christ.

While the Almighty sustains and directs the secondary causes, and sometimes interferes directly, Bossuet traced, in some degree of historical detail, the course of events without bringing in God, appealing to the role of geographical conditions, climate and fertility, the influence of one country on another, while offering many secular insights, economic, social, and cultural, on the rise and fall of empires. Today, in our secularized age, we may view Bossuet’s argument that the whole past of humanity would be rendered meaningless without the guiding hand of Providence as a meaningless metaphysical assumption without empirical objectivity. As we shall see below, however, all subsequent attempts at writing universal histories merely replaced Providence with another metaphysical agent: Liberty or Reason, and, more recently, the idea that history has been leading towards “a single global identity across all human societies” based on Universal Human Rights.

This essay ^[31] was reprinted from The Postil Magazine ^[32] by permission of the author.

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