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>> 9 [ 1 ] History and Religion The holy spirit of God writes in an open book this sacred history which is not yet finished nor will be till the end of the world. This history contains an account of the guidance and designs of God with regard to men. John-Pierre De Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence (1673) Religion is both history’s foremost rival and first aegis. The result is an uneasy collaboration. The earliest surviving invocations of priests and religious mystics include references to history. With these words the intimate tie of history and religion is written and sealed—that is, if history is God’s work and our study of history a search for the details of God’s decree. Even for the skeptic, the impulse behind religion—to find the deeper meaning of the spirit—is never far from the motivating force behind the study of history. Religion and history are prickly but avowed partners in this quest. I have a colleague who teaches and writes about religious history. He is not a believer. But when he unravels the conversations among the Puritans he enters into their world so totally that the question of his own beliefs fades into the background. He becomes one of them. Watching his career and reading his work convinces me that one need not take a position on religion itself to understand how closely tied religion and history, religious studies and historical studies, are. I am not a believer in divine plans, intervention, or supervision of human conduct, but I do believe that history and religion are indissolubly tied.1 10 > 11 These link the religious cycle to “historically significant events” that must be chronicled if one is to understand the inner workings of the cycle itself.3 The oldest creation stories are not for the squeamish. Society and culture come into being rough-hewn. Native Americans’ origin stories recalled warring siblings, untrustworthy spirits, malevolent animals, and ignorant people. The Aztec creation story, tied to the agricultural cycle, ran through a series of bloody sacrifices. Every year an “impersonator” of the creation deity Tezcatlipoca, a figure of strife and darkness, lost his life in a ritual of bloodletting. In the Tanakh the Jewish people inflict suffering on one another and take revenge on their enemies. Whole cities vanish as punishment for their perfidy. In the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, students of religion and students of history embarked on a common (though not collaborative) effort to determine how accurate religious depictions of human history origins were. This hermeneutic quest led some historians to conclude that the religious stories were mythological. The theologians decided that the historians missed the spiritual significance of texts. The effort failed. But easily dismissed by modern humanists as themes and variations on mythology, in fact the various creation stories recapitulated essential historical events—the conquests of one people by another, floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, migrations, and the rise of new cults. While the keepers of these distant memories did not subject them to source criticism, bound into religious observances they kept alive a history that could not have otherwise survived.4 While modern critical scholarship subjects religious stories to judgments external to the particular religious tradition itself, the first religious historians took the job seriously because they believed they saw the guiding hand of the deity in all history. Like their work, they would be judged wanting if it were found wanting. Human events perceived by human eyes and chronicled by human hands were imperfect records of the deity’s design, to be sure, making the confidence of these chroniclers suspect. But history was to them a proof of Providence, and in the course of human events one found clues to God’s intentions for men and women. 12 > 13 Alban would martyr himself to protect the stranger and their common faith, and his fate remained an example of history’s teaching God’s will.6 Later Middle Age kings and their vassals ranged over the Flemish countryside in Jean Froissart’s chronicles of the years 1327–1400. Though devoted to battles, sieges, and the lives of knights, the work remains profoundly religious. “God, who is all seeing and all powerful” lurked backstage throughout the work, for “if god is good to us in the battle” the virtuous would win and the villainous fail. For in the end, men’s guile and strength could not prevail in an unjust cause. God stood behind the victors. How could...

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