The Past As Pilgrimage: Narrative Tradition and the Renewal of Catholic History by Christopher Shannon and Christopher O. Blum (review)

History as a Penitential Practice

The central thesis of this book is the idea that the historian’s task is to make right judgments about the past for the sake of the shared memory of a community. The fact that this commonsense idea could be controversial is an indictment of the state of academic departments of history and of universities more generally. It is an indictment that Shannon and Blum accomplish effectively but unevenly in The Past as Pilgrimage.

The most compelling part of the book is chapters one and two, where the authors show that the profession since the late nineteenth century has oscillated between objectivity and relativism, or between encyclopedia and genealogy, in Alasdair MacIntyre’s terms. Both poles represent impossibilities: either the illusory pursuit of “just the facts” or the reduction of all history to perspective and bias. Shannon and Blum argue rightly that “All works of history are embedded in some master narrative of human events” (92), either implicit or explicit, either true or false. They show how most influential histories in twentieth century America—including Catholic histories—were Americanist, embedded in some implicit providential master narrative about America while dismissing explicitly providential histories as naïve and unscientific.

Shannon and Blum want a style of history that recognizes that it operates within what MacIntyre calls “tradition.” Historians make right judgments using reason, but reason is not a generic human faculty that floats free of particular commitments. Any historian makes judgments based on some conception of the true ends of human life. The Catholic historian needs to be honest enough to tell stories in the light of what she (yes, “she”—I found the unrelenting use of “he” and “man” in the book unnecessary and annoying) holds to be true in an ultimate sense, which is God’s turning of human history into a comedy encompassing creation, incarnation, redemption, and eschaton. If these things are true—and not just “true for me”—then history must be told in their light, while respecting the irreducible particularity of people and events. Shannon and Blum suggest provocatively that remarkable individuals are not simply products of their time but rather represent God’s breaking into history: “the saint becomes the context through which we understand the social, cultural, political, economic, and material forces that give shape to the particularity of an age” (162). To the objection that such tradition-informed history isolates historians from different traditions into ghettoes, Shannon and Blum observe that “rival traditions” already engage each other in battle (38); more irenically, they call for dialogue among the different traditions, to which each must have something distinct to bring (166–167).

Universities are not currently conducive to the right practice of history. Professors tend to act as independent intellectual entrepreneurs rather than servants of a common good, and emphasis on quantifiable outputs such as published articles for specialists leaves little room for reflection on ends and good pedagogy. Shannon and Blum make a case for thinking of history more broadly as a public shaping of collective memory, embodied not just in academic monographs but in popular writings, sermons, parade planning, design of monuments, and so on.

The authors’ attempt to illustrate the practice of history through such different genres, but with limited success. If the main target of this book is academic historians, the chapter on Benedict XVI’s papal audiences as an exemplary exercise of the historian’s craft seems destined to persuade few. The other exemplars in the book—John Henry Newman on Saints Basil and Gregory, for instance—tend to speak to the historian of the Church, to the neglect of historians of the extra-ecclesial world. The least effective set of examples is the one with which the authors begin the book. Pages 5–24 are taken up with an analysis of panegyrics preached in honor of Louis IX in...