In the opening lines of Chapter 15, Gibbon notes that "[a] candid and rational inquiry into the progress and establishshment of Christianity may be considered as a very essential part of the history of the Roman Empire.... The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings" (p. 179).Is his treatment of the christian church "candid and rational"? And why does he consider it a "melancholy duty"? Why is it "inevitable" that "a mixture of error and corruption" fell upon the early christian religion? Is his work at all invalidated because of his assumptions and biases?
Wallace Stegner beautifully described the process of historical process in Angle of Repose. The novel's protagonist, Lyman Ward, is a historian who reaches back into history to understand the unmet expectations of his Grandmother, Susan Ward, and her relationship with his Grandfather, Oliver Ward. And in the process he discovers a (depressing) thing or two about his own life. As is evident from the tone of this masterpiece, Stegner also sees the duty of the historian as "melancholy."
“There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you- a train, say, or the future- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I [Lyman] would like to hear your [Susan's] life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a somber sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne" (Angle of Repose 24-25).
I like this description of history. The ever changing pitch of the train as it rumbles toward and away from us is a beautiful metaphor for the difficulty of capturing events. We can record the pitch of the moving train and re-listen to it and re-watch it. But its not the same as seeing and hearing and smelling it in person. And even our present sense of what is happening is different than someone else's present sense of what is happening. How much more so is knowledge of the "event" distorted when we sense it through a recording, or a written description, or a photograph.
Because of our "weak" and "degenerate" state, not only can we not hear life as others before us heard it, but we can all see, hear, touch, taste and smell the same present event, and walk away with completely different points of view. We may be able to create a record of what happened, and we may be tempted to say that the record of what happened is something that we know. But it is filtered and obfuscated and formulated according to the limited ways in which we acquire knowledge.
Hans Reichenbach argues in The Direction of Time that "[w]e might be tempted to [say] that the future is unknown, whereas the past is known. Such a statement however would be obviously false. Some events of the future are well known, such as astronomical events, or the fact that there will be general elections in the fall. And many events of the past are unknown; if they were known, historians and geologists would have an easier task" (excerpted in Law Language and Ethics 283).
But, as Reichenbach points out, even these "known" future events depend upon records from our past. The difference is the way in which we use the record. Some are used to describe what happened at an earlier time, and others are used to predict what will happen at a future time.
To the extent we use history to predict the future, we are engaging in a type of determinism, aren't we? The old cliche, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" presumes a type of historical determinism. Human nature is such, the argument goes, that if we forget our past, or stop evaluating the records of the past, we are doomed to a future filled with the same mistakes that haunt our past. Is this really the case? Is determinism the way our minds try to make sense of the present by taking what we know from the past.
I don't know if this is true and I realize that there is nothing groundbreaking here. This is another epistemological problem that I have to continue to work through.
