Believers, Non-Believers, and the Historian’s Unspoken Assumptions

For the annual meeting last year at this time, Professor Powell organized a very interesting session on "The American Catholic Historical Association in the Twenty-first Century." Colleagues in American history spoke about the early days of the ACHA, when the history of American Catholicism had little place in the curriculum of major universities, and scholars who happened also to be Catholic were often not welcome on the faculty; this led to a consideration of the ACHA of today, an association of scholars interested in the history of Catholicism, without regard to their personal beliefs. But what most engaged my attention was a different question brought up, if I recall correctly, by members of the audience: does it matter that a scholar who seeks to understand the past happens also to be a Catholic, or indeed a person of any definite religious belief? I was reminded of a conference in Amsterdam two years earlier, with papers comparing France's Wars of Religion and the Dutch Revolt. It was a stimulating meeting, ¹ but the moment I remember best came when a distinguished French historian gave several reasons for his interpretation of the Wars of Religion, the last of which was a personal statement presented with an appealing simplicity: "In the end, I am not a believer." In the private world of our own subjectivity, I think each of us who is a historian knows that our belief or non-belief somehow does make a difference. But this was the first time I could remember hearing colleagues talk about what that difference might be. It soon occurred to me that I need not look further for a topic for my remarks today: I would pick up the thread of last year's conversation.

I am not proposing that a historian's belief or unbelief should be visible in his or her works. Writing in the two decades just after World War II, some of the founding fathers and master-mentors of my field, Reformation history, did not think it inappropriate to include in their books a sentence here or there asserting the truth of the gospel. ² But graduate students of my generation took in as if through our pores the idea that historical writing is scholarly only when it is intended for a public domain governed by the canons of critical reason, a domain in which, by definition, no particular religious and philosophical stance should have any privileges. This academic belief was no doubt tinged by the positivism of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, assimilating the discovery of new historical facts to the triumphant march of laboratory science. More recently, as we are all aware, the historian's claim to scientific objectivity has been discredited in a number of ways. ³ Yet the idea of a public realm of intellect in which all scholars may claim citizenship is much older, and can be defended with greater confidence if one sets aside the positivist belief that reason and sentiment dwell in hermetically sealed compartments of the human spirit. In what one might call the pre-positivist or perhaps pre-modernist centuries, some kind of connection between moral sentiment and the pursuit of truth was taken for granted. Cardinal Newman understood "the culture of the intellect"--by which he did not mean the devotion of the intellect to any specific profession--as "good in itself." ⁴ For those who sought to rehabilitate the serious study of history amid the partisan pamphleteering of the late seventeenth century, the true scholar's scrupulous quest for accuracy was part of an author's "moral and civic responsibility," as a recent student of these matters has put it. ⁵ Sixteenth-century humanists spoke of a "republic of letters," a communion of sentiment that transcended confessional differences; their model was Erasmus, who, like the humanist rhetorician he was, appealed to his readers to judge the evidence...