The Historical Theory of Benedict XVI

Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, “I give you praise, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned, you have revealed them to the childlike. Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father.”

luke 10:21–24

This article is an attempt to articulate a theory of history in the writings of Pope Benedict XVI, a project that he has not undertaken, whether due to lack of time, or interest, or both. Indeed there is no reason why he should have. The business or craft of history has been an exclusively secular enterprise for the last two centuries or so. A historian need only mention the possibility of divine action or spiritual forces at play in a given event and he or she is immediately dismissed as a methodological heretic or intellectual leper. This is not to say that historians have taken no interest in religion. On the contrary, it is one of the basic facts and facets of human life, an intrinsic part of the conversation about humanity in time that no good historian dares to ignore entirely. But religious belief is almost without exception regarded as an immaterial aspect of the subject of study, a set of ideas and social conventions, with wide-ranging cultural implications. It is considered bad form for historians to regard religion as potentially real or possibly true, except in reference to the people they study; many state that what certain people believed may have been true for them at the time, but few if any would venture to claim that these beliefs might still be, for us today, simply true.

Pope Benedict XVI is a historian in his own right, dedicated to the pursuit of truth. History figures prominently throughout his corpus, from his German Habilitation in 1959 to his recent works on European culture, civilization, and identity, and his analysis relies on reasoned argument and critical evaluation of sources. Although this great theologian has never written a history in the restrictive, professional sense of the term, his thoughts about the subject emerge from over four decades of writing. This article argues that the Pope has a distinct, well-formulated theory of history, about what it is and how it works; for him, history without a theology is analogous to language without grammar. At the center of his theory of history is a firm belief in the reality of human freedom and the purposiveness of God.

“History” is a term well known for multiple meanings, and it is essential to establish clear usage at the outset. History in one sense is the whole of the past, all that happened, all human experience, including thoughts and feelings, up until this present moment, when the crest of the wave of time descends into the unknowable future. This history simply must have a firm relationship with reality, with the truth, a noun that historians seldom utter these days, and when they hear it they greet it with a patronizing smile. History as the entirety of the past is of course unknowable and incommunicable, but that cannot mean that things did not happen. There is a reality of human existence and action in the past, such as, on the most basic level, your having been where you were yesterday. Even the most extreme postmodernist cannot dismiss this fact of life as a mere presentist delusion or linguistic trope.

Then there is the scholarly discipline, historians’ history, the dialogue among the living about the dead, about what happened, the attempt to understand the lived experience of those before us, based on the sources of evidence they left behind. This history, a rational field of inquiry, is of unquestionable use in the search for truth about humanity over time, on this side of eternity. That this history has limits, that it should not extrapolate about life after death, is almost too obvious to mention.

The Pope has no problem with the method, as long as it does not restrict...