The Birth of the Past

Foreword

ix Foreword A mericans know that history matters. Jurists and politicians, pundits and bloggers invoke history to support their visions of the form of government we should live under and the sort of wars we should wage, the schools and universities we should build and support and the ways in which we should exploit our natural resources. But as Jill Lepore and others have pointed out, most of the history that is retold in such contexts is actually unhistorical .1 Ordinary citizens and politicians alike assume that past thinkers can guide us in a present they could not have envisioned: that the founders of the United States can tell us everything we need to know about women’s rights, nuclear weapons, and the exploration of space. We ask what Jesus would have driven, without reflecting that he rode a donkey rather than a car. Historians look at the past in a very different way. Like L. P. Hartley, they assume that “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Past societies and leaders certainly offer examples that we can still study with profit. But we can learn from them only if we bear in mind that they are part of a past—a continuum of social and cultural, economic and political development, their place in which was different from ours. We judge our colleagues and graduate students by their ability to put this principle into practice, and we train our undergraduates, or try to train them, to do so as well. When did Western intellectuals first begin to think about the past in these distinctive terms? In this book, Zachary Schiffman offers a powerful and engaging answer. For a quarter of a century, he has explored, in articles that are now classics, in a remarkable study of French historical thought, and in a prescient collaborative book, the history of Western ways of preserving and imagining the past.2 His work has shaped that of his colleagues and of younger scholars— for example, the distinguished Harvard historian Ann Blair, whose own brilliant inquiries into the history of information management began from a read- x Foreword ing of one of Schiffman’s articles.3 But for all the clarity of his thought and the elegance of his prose, he has found his readers among his fellow specialists. In his new book Schiffman develops a sweeping argument about the origins of what he describes as “our”—that is, the modern Western—vision of the past, as a country different from the one we inhabit. The argument is carried on with great gusto and stylistic virtuosity, growing into a book-length essay that challenges comparison with some of the great past essays on the vision and meaning of history. Classic works by Isaiah Berlin, R. G. Collingwood, and H. Stuart Hughes come immediately to mind. But Schiffman’s work also rests on close reading of texts and friendly debate with many interpreters, both old and new. The combination of broad-gauged argument and tightly focused interpretation of particular witnesses gives Schiffman’s book a special distinction. Beginning with the Greeks, Schiffman argues—using Thucydides as his chief witness—that it is in fact an anachronism, a sin against Western historical consciousness, to ascribe that sort of consciousness to the ancients. Augustine dismissed secular history as one long noisy nightmare. Yet he and other Christian thinkers did more to create a sense of the past, as a continuum, than the secular historians of Greece. For they forged the concept of a single, continuous sæculum—a vision that was novel, sophisticated, and powerful even if, as Schiffman argues from the works of the Venerable Bede, it rested on a causal understanding of the past that differs radically from that of most moderns. More than half a century ago, Erwin Panofsky argued that Renaissance scholars and artists arrived at a new vision of the past—a new historical perspective. As their new system of visual perspective enabled them to see the world around them from a fixed distance and in three dimensions, so their historical perspective enabled them to do the same for the ancient past. Where medieval scholars and artists had pulled antiquity apart, separating form from content, their Renaissance successors reassembled antiquity as a single coherent mosaic.4 Schiffman agrees that Renaissance humanists came to see the ancient past as distant from the world of fragments they were forced to inhabit. But he also shows that they deliberately read the past...