Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian's Vocation

3. Seeing Things: Knowledge and Love in History

60 Chapter Three Seeing Things Knowledge and Love in History Beth Barton Schweiger Jesus looked at him and loved him. —Mark 10:21 You can know a thing to death and for all purposes be completely ignorant of it. —Marilynne Robinson, Gilead There is, Nicholas Boyle has argued, an intimacy between language, people, and moral meaning that postmodern theory has very nearly robbed from us.1 Although Boyle writes to defend Christian literary humanism, the relationship he invokes stands as fine a description as any of why I write history. “Intimacy” is the best word I can muster to describe what it is to spend eight hours bent over the diary of a person who has been dead for a hundred and fifty years, trying to trace personality and tone of voice in spidery handwriting that is maddeningly difficult to make out, straining to hear one side of nearly incomprehensible conversations about people and events I can rarely Seeing Things   61 identify. To write history is, for me, to make a relationship with the dead. I try to see people in the archives. I take enormous pleasure in this task of recovery and discovery, and in the creative work that follows as I decide how to tell their story. Like the meeting of characters in fiction, these encounters count as a genuine expansion of my experience, offering a perspective beyond self and the possibility of wisdom. Yet my pursuit of the dead is a problem. One does not have to be in thrall to theory to wonder if seeing people across the centuries is even possible. What Rowan Williams has called “the sheer dreadful irreducible distance” between people only seems worse in the archive.2 Some of the great minds of our time have devoted their lives to telling us how much we will never be able to see in dusty manuscripts, arguing that any archive is incomplete and arbitrary, and that language can obscure even more than it reveals.3 At best, it seems, I might be able to see the dead only as they chose to represent themselves. At worst, I will only see myself reflected in the records they have left behind. In this essay, I want to briefly explore how the limits on our ability to see and to know the dead bear on a central problem for any Christian who writes history: the necessity of loving them. It seems inescapable that I must love the subjects of my history.4 I mean love here neither in a sentimental nor idealistic sense. Far from the Pauline “love which bears all things,” love for St. Augustine signified enjoyment, “not the name of something that we do, but of a relation in which we stand.” As Oliver O’Donovan has explained, in the Augustinian sense, enjoyment “distinguishes between enjoyment and ‘use,’ where the object is put to the service of some project. Love, whatever actions it gives rise to, is contemplative in itself, rejoicing in the fact that its object is there, not wanting to do anything ‘with’ it.”5 Love, then, discounts violence against the beloved. Yet on these terms, my relationship with the subjects of my history seems to defy any understanding of what a loving relationship might be. This is true in two very different senses. How can I love the author of a fragment of poetry? Or a nameless face in a photograph? Or the author of a diary I have worked for years to comprehend? How can I love people whom I have never met? Limited knowledge of the dead is compounded by a second problem, that of the stunning imbalance of power between 62   Beth Barton Schweiger historian and subject. I can use the people I encounter in the archives without their consent for my own purposes, for my own pleasures, for my own professional gain. The dead can languish without defense in my books; I can even silence them with their own words. My purposes may be honest. But what if they are not? And what if my honest purposes only end by disfiguring my subjects? How can they speak truthfully in my history? How can I be a neighbor to the dead in my books? In history, the call to love one’s neighbor is extended to the dead.6 For the Christian, knowledge about the past, as any knowledge, should serve the ends of love. Miroslav Volf...