Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian's Vocation

6. Enlightenment History, Objectivity, and the Moral Imagination

128 Chapter Six Enlightenment History, Objectivity, and the Moral Imagination Michael Kugler The search for objective knowledge, because of its commitment to a realist picture, is inescapably subject to skepticism and cannot refute it but must proceed under its shadow. Skepticism, in turn, is a problem only because of the realist claims of objectivity. —Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere Well into Europe’s seventeenth century, the classical tradition of reading history was bent towards forming a masculine civic personality. Political, ecclesiastical, and military narratives, mostly, they offered moral models of tested authenticity. Historians (with the possible exception of Machiavelli) typically exhorted young male readers to become virtuous Christian citizens. This development of the civic personality was the exchange of one character—selfish, slothful, greedy, lustful—for one identified by the impress of duty, moral rectitude, and spiritual righteousness. According to Mark Salber Phillips, fiction challenged history with a new model. Poetry, the stage, and the novel encouraged reading towards Enlightenment History, Objectivity, and the Moral Imagination   129 shaping an inner life that competed with reading for instruction in public action.1 The invocation of sympathy and sentiment suggests how characteristics previously considered feminine, different from the civic masculinity of the classical tradition, begin to invade Enlightenment historical writing. The reader’s enthusiasm for assuming the identity of both the historical and fictional character was renewed by the Protestant emphasis on conversion, especially since intense individual spiritual scrutiny increasingly came through the reading of conversion narratives. In the Christian faith the person is fragile, a redeemed sinner in a fallen world. For Protestants, a soul was reborn in conversion, an event that had to be narrated. Maintaining one’s love and dedication to God, turning every thought and desire over to Him in obedience, was difficult. The classical tradition likewise described a fragile person, the citizen struggling to retain his civic zeal in the face of his republic’s political and territorial successes. In Britain it is possible to follow these two accounts of spiritual and cultural fragility from Bunyan to Defoe to Boswell. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European Christians also had the opportunity to shape their souls through spiritual techniques , techniques increasingly formed under the new empirical epistemologies and psychologies.2 But there was danger in changing one’s moral character. Assuming a new identity meant exchanging a Godgiven specific identity and moral and spiritual responsibility for frivolous mask-wearing. The Protestant fear of the stage took on a revived form in eighteenth-century Britain in the context of the striking effect of sensory experience discussed by empirical epistemology, and further worked out by the growing concern over sentiments—concern about proper education of youth, increasingly female, in a literate, middling class consumer culture. The public exercise and exhibition of emotion provoked by plays paralleled similar private experiences of reading.3 One of the most striking defenses of the re-creation of historical sentiment emerged from the Scottish Enlightenment. The influential Edinburgh jurist and writer, Henry Home (Lord Kames), suggested just how willing the reader must be to abandon his or her true person­ality in order to assume one found in history texts. In his Elements of Criticism (1762) Kames wrote, “The reader’s passions are never sensibly moved, 130   Michael Kugler till he be thrown into a kind of reverie; in which state, losing the consciousness of self, and of reading, his present occupation, he conceives every incident as passing in his presence, precisely as if he were an eyewitness .”4 Kames echoed a claim made some years earlier by his friend and relative, David Hume: the present should dissolve within this engagement with a literary past right before the eye of the imagination.5 Even self-consciousness momentarily vanishes. If moving the passions is the goal, only such a powerful reader-response will do so. Kames asserted that this was the writer’s great and central desire . Nothing should, as Phillips put it, interfere with “the illusion of actuality,” techniques eighteenth-century British historians borrowed from the novel, poetry, and the stage.6 They earnestly wanted to give the reader the air of immediacy and identification with the past actor’s interi­ority. Documents, letters, eyewitness accounts certainly allowed historians like William Robertson and Edward Gibbon to render their claims unimpeachable. To increase this air of actuality they depended upon documents and upon accurately portrayed universal human capacities to passion and sentiment...