8 - History and the secular

Summary

They tell us that history is in danger from the social and political sciences, because social sciences tackle the need of today and history directs the mind to irrelevant yesterday. They need not be so gloomy. No human being is satisfied if he knows nothing of his father or mother. And no human society is content unless it knows how it came to be, and why it adopted the shape and the institutions which it finds. The European mind demands imperiously the perspective which history alone can give. Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis accident, id est semper esse puerum, Cicero Orator, 120–that is, you cannot even grow up without history.

This demand, however, does not appear to derive its necessity from the constitution of man's mind. Renan once wondered whether it was a passing mood of the romantic age. Men of eastern philosophies and religions paid small heed to it, neglecting it as a kaleidoscope of trivial little lights which pale before the sight of eternal being and truth. Historical consciousness arose, first among Greek storytellers and their Roman successors; and then within the heritage of Christendom, so that church history was the seed of general history. Why is the Church of Rome corrupt? or What is the continuity in Catholicism? or Where was your Church before Luther? or Where was your face before you washed it? – these were the questions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries round which gathered the formidable historical enquirers in the age of the Renaissance and after.