PERSPECTIVE

'One afternoon [in 1939] I was planting in the orchard under an apple tree iris reticulata...Suddenly I heard Virginia's voice calling to me from the sitting-room window: "Hitler is making a speech." I shouted back: "I shan't come. I'm planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead." Last March, 21 years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowers flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.'

Leonard Woolf in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, p.727.

WHAT HISTORY TEACHES US

'First, whom the gods would destroy they must first make mad with power. Second, the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small. Third, the bee fertilizes the flower it robs. Fourth, when it is dark enough you can see the stars.'

Charles A Beard in Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Death of Evil upon the Seashore', p.86.

THOSE WHO MAKE HISTORY DON'T KNOW IT?

'In historical events what is most obvious is the prohibition against eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Only unconscious activity bears fruit, and a man who plays a role in historical event never understands its significance. If he attempts to understand it, he is struck with fruitlessness.'

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, p.944.

HUMANITIES HUMANIZE

'The humanities humanize. They are well named.'

Marilynne Robinson in Timothy Larsen and Keith L Johnson, Balm in Gilead: A Theological Dialogue with Marilynne Robinson, p.208.

WHAT ARE OUR BLIND SPOTS?

'Every age before this one has performed or permitted acts that to us are morally stupefying. So unless we have any reason to think we are any more reasonable, morally better or wiser than at any time in the past, it is reasonable to assume there will be some things we are presently doing - possibly while flushed with moral virtue - that our descendant will whistle through through their teeth at, and say "What the hell were they thinking?" It is worth wondering what the blind spots of our age might be. What might we be doing that will be regarded by succeeding generations in the same way we now look down on the slave trade or using Victorian children as chimney sweeps.' 

Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds, p.184. 

THE SELF-INTEREST IN FORGIVING YOUR ANCESTORS

'To view the the past with some degree of forgiveness is among other things an early request to be forgiven - or at least understood - in turn.' 

Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds, p.179. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORY IN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

'...history is important, for without it we are at the mercy of whims. Memory is a databank we use to evaluate our position and make decisions. With a biblical memory we have two thousand years of experience from which to make the off-the-cuff responses that are required each day in the life of faith. If we are going to live adequately and maturely as the people of God, we need more data to work from than our own experience can give us. 

What would we think of pollster who issues a definitive report on how the American people felt about a new television special, if we discovered later that he has interviewed only one person who had seen only ten minutes of the program? We would dismiss the conclusions as frivolous. Yet that is exactly the kind of evidence that too many Christians accept as the final truth about many much more important matters - matters such as answered prayer, God's judgement, Christ's forgiveness, eternal salvation. The only person they consult is themselves, and only experience they evaluate is the most recent ten minutes. But we need other experiences, the community of experience of brothers and sisters in the church, the centuries of experience provided by our biblical ancestors. A Christian who has David in his bones, Jeremiah in his bloodstream, Paul in his fingers tips and Christ in his heart will know how much and how little value to put on his own momentary feelings and the experience of the past week.' 

Eugene H Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p.160.  

THE IMPORTANCE OF READING HISTORY

'A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.' 

CS Lewis, 'Learning in War-Time' in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, p.176.  

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

'...we can wrongly interpret unintended effects as once-conscious aims - as though Luther, when he nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of Wittenberg castle, envisioned Protestantism. It is like the man who unwittingly cracks a joke and then takes credit for it, misleading others into thinking him clever. We repeatedly credit famous names with too much power, as if some of them actually intended the consequences of their deeds and so truly held the reins of history. But none did; and those presumptuous enough to think themselves exceptions have only been like the hard-hearted Pharaoh of the Exodus, who decisions were not his own ("God hardened Pharaoh's heart").'.

Dale C Allison Jr., The Luminous Dusk: Finding God in the Deep, Still Places, p.30

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CHURCH HISTORY

'Church history is the hidden center of world history.' 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Craig G Bartholomew, Where Mortals Dwell, p.211. 

SUBMITTING TO THE PAST

'To be willing to submit to what has been received is a distinctly unfashionable idea in contemporary society. That is why the canon of Western literary classics has aroused such controversy in modern academia. It is why in all the arts, modern critics have had a field day cutting the masters down to size and declaring "genius" to be merely a socially constructed category. Scratch below the surface and you will see that the difficulty is not really that the allegedly "great" works were created by European white males. If Shakespeare was someday discovered to be  black woman, the problem with honoring the excellence of the classics would still be the same. It would be the problem of submitting to the authority of Shakespeare and his, or her, brilliance.' 

Hugh Heclo, On Thinking Institutionally, p. 100. 

HISTORY

'We are now hard-wired to expect history to deliver progress, jerky, flawed progress marred by horrors usually of our own making, but progress nonetheless. We look back primarily in order to see how far we have moved on. And one central element in that ever-growing sense of self-confidence was the gradual exclusion of religion from the picture. Man had wriggled free of the divine plan. We were no longer the creation of the mind of God but the product of natural development. 

This wriggling-free was not accomplished without pain or regret. To extricate ourselves from religious belief was a slow and often agonizing proceeds which left many heads muzzy with grief, disorientated in a universe that was suddenly without purpose or pathways. In such a time, only the most confident ideologues of progress could remain confident that they knew exactly where they were heading.   

What none of them would have dreamed of saying was that we might be retracing our steps. That would have been a deeply uncongenial thought. For part of the ideology of modernity is that we are moving forward and that we are going somewhere new. It is our novelty that comforts us. We are travelers who are thrilled to be told that we have reached the trackless quarter of the desert. Besides, it is better not to think too hard about what we have left behind.'

Ferdinand Mount, Full Circle, p.6.

BACK TO WHERE WE STARTED

'God's long funeral is over, and we are back where we started. Two thousand years of history have melted into the back story that no-one reads any more. We have returned to Year Zero, AD 0, or rather 0 CE, because we are in the Common Era now, the years of our Lord having expired.

So much about society that is now emerging bear an astonishing resemblance to the most prominent features of what we call the classical world - its institutions, its priorities, its recreations, its physics, its sexual morality, its food, its politics, even its religion. Often without our being in the least aware of it, the ways in which we live our rich and varied lives correspond, almost eerlily so, to the ways in which the Greeks and Romans lived theirs'. Whether we are eating and drinking, bathing or exercising or making love, pondering, admiring or enquiring, our habits of thought and action, our diversions and concentrations recall theirs. It is as though the 1,500 years after the fall of Rome had been time out from traditional ways of being human.'   

Ferdinand Mount, Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us, p.1.

HISTORY

'The true history of mankind and the true history of each individual man has less to do than we tend to think with the kind of information that gets into most histories, biographies and autobiographies. True history has to do with the saving and losing of souls, and both of these are apt to take place when most people including the one whose soul is at stake are looking the other way. The real turning point in a man's life is less likely to be the day he wins the election or marries the girl than the morning he decides not to mail the letter or the afternoon he watches the woods fill up with snow. The real turning point in human history is less apt to be the day the wheel is invented or Rome falls than the day a boy is born to a couple of hick Jews.'

Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, p.38.

SECULARISM

'For some people, secularism may be desirable as a social ideal. But as a framework for describing, explaining and predicting the course of global politics in the real world, it has become a serious liability. Believers in iron laws of history are usually disappointed in the end. Believers in a "march of history" toward some secular end-state are headed for more disappointment than most.'

Timothy Samuel Shah and Monica Duffy Toft, 'God Is Winning: Religion in Global Politics' in Paul Marshall et al. Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't Get Religion, p.27.

BELIEF

'An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century. If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe in any miracle in any age. If a man believes in a will behind law, he can believe in any miracle in any age.'
GK Chesteron, Orthodoxy, p.53.