Interesting comparison. But I suspect that theology and history are apples and oranges. I agree wholeheartedly that in matters of establishing theological principles, one does nobody any favors by pulling out of the ditch on one side of the highway only to veer into the ditch on the other side. I’ll agree that such things happen all too often (witness the way today’s ‘gay’ debates too often seem to be between forces of ‘gays are demonically evil’ battling the legions of ‘God made us to be this way.’ Nobody benefits from such mutually exclusive errors.)
But history is more often not a battle about principles, but of subjective judgements over the prudential decisions that were made. When a prevailing history is biased, a nuanced center position is unlikely to pull the historians out of the ditch they are in.
The value someone like Belloc contributes is not so much for a 101 level introductory text, but as an idol-smasher for those who have been submerged in the biased historical narrative their whole lives (as I contend most high school educated English speakers to this day have been). Once you read Belloc and realize there are gaping holes in what you’ve been told your whole life, you become interested in reading sources like that which you recommended. (Thanks by the way!)
You know, I agree with you in many ways. I got my “idol-smashing” from Chesterton, but that makes your point even more, because Chesterton on these issues was just recycling Belloc with far
less nuance and accuracy! I now read Chesterton’s remarks about history and cringe. But he revolutionized my sympathies by making me see that you could look at the story the other way round.
A Man for All Seasons, which I encountered about the same time, also contributed (and again, this is not necessarily a historically accurate picture but one that counteracts the mythology Protestants have grown up with in which the Protestants are always the heroic underdogs and the Catholics are the tyrannical Establishment).
But what also contributed was that at the same time I was studying history with fair-minded
Protestant professors who challenged me when I engaged in Protestant cliches. I remember having a big argument with one professor about the persecution of Catholics in Elizabethan England, in which I made the typical Whig-Protestant argument that this persecution was political and not religious, and he wouldn’t let me get away with it. He was actually an American historian and his arguments, looking back, were not that precise. But again, he made me start to think about it.
If people would preface Belloc by “this isn’t the best treatment from a scholarly point of view, but he will give you a different perspective than you may have heard,” I’d be fine with it.
I don’t want people not to read Belloc. Shucks, I rarely want people
not to read anything, and certainly I don’t want to turn them away from as fine a writer and as interesting a person as Belloc. I just worry about the way for CAF members Belloc simply confirms their own prejudices. If you think Belloc has told it “like it really is,” then you need to read a lot more.
But I doubt it. Like I said above, I went to catholic schools and I STILL received a historical picture growing up that the English were generally peaceful settlers and the Spanish mostly brutal looters.
Are you by any chance older than I am? (I’m 38.) The college American history text I studied went out of its way to debunk that idea–and that was a secular text.
I wonder if the problem is high school. Certainly when I taught Western Civ in a state university I found that my students had an entrenched Whig perspective. And I’ll grant that my attempts to be nuanced left that perspective far too entrenched. I would ask questions on the exams designed to see if they’d heard what I was saying about the Middle Ages not being the Dark Ages, witch-hunting being more of an early modern phenomenon, etc., and they would still give me all the silly old cliches. Perhaps that wasn’t entirely my fault, but I probably do need to paint with a broader brush. My wife does, and she’s a more effective teacher than I am on the whole.
(One particularly frustrating result was that after making the point that the “real” Renaissance–in the sense of a rebirth of culture–was in the 12th century–the students simply took everything I’d said about the 12th-century Renaissance and applied it to the Renaissance they already thought they knew about, which made me resolve to be careful about using the term “12th-century Renaissance” in the future.)
Edwin
