The past is ever-present. You may not be interested in history, but history is interested in you.
That’s because none of us can escape the past. The events of the past are relevant to the present. Past causes produce present effects that compel the living to reckon with the legacies left by the dead. Someone may enjoy historical movies, documentaries, novels, or tourist sites but not see much relevance to the pressing events of the day. Whether or not we understand the past, appreciate it, and find it personally interesting, we cannot escape the perennial relevance of what is past.
Historian John Lukacs describes history as “the memory of mankind” and “the remembered past.” Acknowledging that all sentient animals have some sort of memory, Lukacs observes that only human persons intentionally remember their past. We tell stories, sing songs, write books, build statues, memorialize significant sites, bury our dead in cemeteries, and dedicate things to past people or events. We do these to make sense of what is past in our present.
This is especially significant for Christians, because our faith has been handed down to us from the past by the saints (Jude 3). Christianity is a faith rooted in history, so we Christians have a primary interest in the study of the past for both temporal and eternal purposes. It’s vitally important that we conduct our historical investigations with virtue.
History as Human Endeavor
Humans have a historical consciousness because we’re created by God in his image. He’s the Maker of time, and he gave us the ability to mark time—the past, the present, and the future. Not only did he give us a historical consciousness, but he placed the sun, the moon, and the stars in the sky to “be for signs and for seasons and for days and years” (Gen. 1:14). God made the great lights to be an immutable frame of reference for our marking the passage of time.
So to study the past for the purposes of the present and to base aspirations for the future is one of the most essentially human activities we do.
You may not be interested in history, but history is interested in you.
We study history to make sense of the past. To study history is to pursue truth. History doesn’t give us a God’s-eye perspective on the truth of the past, but it directs us to truth. Since history is the pursuit of truth, it’s a moral exercise. And for that reason, historical thinking requires virtue.
The apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:6 (NASB), “[Love] does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth.” All the classical virtues find their perfect expressions in the theological virtue of love.
Virtues in History
The classical virtues are wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance. Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430) writes, “As to virtue leading us to a happy life, I hold virtue to be nothing less than perfect love of God.”
He sees wisdom as love differentiating that which drives a person toward God and that which compels a person to abandon God. Justice is love that gives every person his or her due: God first, and others second. Courage is the bearing of all things for the love of God and for others. Temperance is the love for those things that God loves, resulting in a holy life and the enjoyment of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
It may sound strange to say we owe the dead our love. After all, they aren’t here to receive, or return, our love. We can’t know them in relationship, because they are no more.
How can we show love to the dead? We can tell the truth about them. We don’t idealize their lives and actions to deify them, nor do we emphasize their faults to demonize them. We bring their lives, actions, and intents into the light as best we can in the interest of representing them with truthfulness. We don’t rejoice in wrong, thus we neither worship them nor condemn them. We rejoice in the truth, so we pursue the truth as we seek to make sense of their lives’ contributions and legacies.
We get wisdom from the study of the past, but we must bring wisdom to our study if understanding is our goal. Thus, we humbly recognize our limitations as we approach the past. We acknowledge that the dead were once as we are now, and one day, we’ll be as they are.
We also remember that we cannot know the things they knew in their time from their perspective. We have our own perspective, which gives us the ability to see their lives from start to finish, but we can never see the moments in their lives from their perspectives. We exercise wisdom to know when and how to make sound judgments of a past life and how to refrain from self-righteous condemnation.
Measured Justice and Courage
Justice comes into our study of the past when we give the dead their due. We don’t treat them as good guys or bad guys and thus idealize or demonize them. We in the present have the duty to speak for the dead, because they aren’t here to speak for themselves. We represent them truthfully as best we can, given the available evidence. And for those who never had anyone to speak for them, we rise to tell their stories truthfully, as the evidence leads us.
We get wisdom from the study of the past, but we must bring wisdom to our study if understanding is our goal.
Peering into the events, lives, and ideas of the past can be unsettling, uncomfortable, and disturbing. Slavery, genocide, war, poverty, pestilence, and all kinds of suffering are to be found in every civilization at every time.
It takes courage to wade into the suffering of people across time, especially for someone who has an emotional, national, traditional, or familial connection to those who suffered or those who caused the suffering. Courage, according to Aristotle, is being afraid of the right things for the right reasons, and cowardice is fear of the wrong things for the wrong reasons. We should fear ignorance, self-righteousness, and short-sightedness more than we fear the passing sentiments of a transient zeitgeist.
Finally, temperance in historical thinking is found in the exercise of self-control. We control our passions when we engage the past, and we take the past on its own terms. We don’t seek to advance a political agenda by using the past to our advantage, because to do so is intemperate, indecorous, and contrary to the pursuit of truth.
Our times are marked by innumerable vices, all of which serve as obstacles to the attainment of truth. To be countercultural in the 21st century, think Christianly about the past. As you do so, you’ll treat the dead with charity and come to the past with virtue.
