We Have Never Been Anti-Modern

Christopher Shannon’s and Christopher O. Blum’s The Past as Pilgrimage is a provocative and courageous book. The book is provocative because while you might disagree with its claims—and I disagree with several—you cannot simply dismiss them. And the book is courageous because the claims it makes are as controversial (to put it mildly) as they are important. I register my support for the broader aims of The Past as Pilgrimage now, because in the remainder of this short review I want to raise an objection to the positive account of “Catholic historiography” that is developed in the book. I do so in the hope of furthering the discussion which Shannon and Blum have helpfully begun.

My objection is that the book’s account of Catholic historiography is unduly influenced by the reactionary anti-modernism of nineteenth-century Catholic thought. It seems to me that Shannon and Blum too readily fall under the sway of a powerful but false dichotomy which can be traced to the historiographical polemics following the French Revolution. These polemics produced two images of the Revolution that are as antithetical as they are totalizing. The Revolution marked either the summit of human progress or the nadir of human decline, with the result that the history of “modernity” (scare quotes very much intended) could be told in only one of two ways: as the “triumph” or the “tragedy” of Western civilization (80, 83).

The presence of this dualist framework helps explain the more curious of the book’s overstatements—as when its concluding chapter dismisses “modernist art” as so many “self-referential exercises in solipsism” (159). What makes this dismissal so odd is that the book’s introductory chapter begins by paying homage to T.S. Eliot’s Criterion. It is hard to know what to make of this. Are all traditionalist cultural critics solipsists, or only those who happen also to be modernist poets?

But the authors’ susceptibility to the self-image of counter-revolutionary thought leads to more than the occasional rhetorical gaffe, it also risks the unwarranted constriction of the very Catholic tradition they are trying to renew. Is it the Catholic tradition—or merely nineteenth-century Catholic traditionalism—which holds that “any criticism of man or society is only as useful as the substantive account of authentic human flourishing upon which it is based” (82). Neither Augustine nor Thomas More, after all, believed that Tacitus’ and Sallust’s criticisms of Roman society were based on true accounts of human flourishing, but this did not stop the saints from incorporating these criticisms into their own historical work. Similarly, it is not clear why the value of Marx’s criticism of the social effects of the capitalist mode of production must depend on Marx’s substantive account of human nature, assuming he even had one. Nor is it obvious that “critical history” is valid only if grounded in “a compelling and accurate account of the common good” (83). Foucault’s critical history of the Enlightenment is useful not because it issues from such an account, but because it unmasks certain truths which had been hidden from view.

Passages such as the above strike me as more indebted to Joseph de Maistre than Alasdair MacIntyre. So, too, I found myself resisting the authors’ elevation of certain strands in the long and variegated tradition of Catholic history as especially normative. Pious, legitimating, and providentialist historians such as Eusebius and Bossuet certainly constitute an important part of Catholic historiography, but there are many others. Most obviously, there is the figure of Augustine himself, whose City of God arguably represents the total rejection of the Eusebian, providentialist program; there is Thomas More, whose History of Richard III is disturbing and ambiguous. In general, I worry that the historical frame that animates the book’s argument necessarily occludes from view whole centuries of the Catholic historical tradition that do not easily conform to its central oppositions.

To be sure...