De historia Christiana

Welcome, Unauthorized Students! Classes starting soon on Unauthorized.tv. Today’s lesson from the Fencing Bear archives: a meditation on what it means to teach history as a Christian.

My departmental colleague Amy Stanley worries that I am using the classroom as “a place for the conversion of students to Christian religious faith”—as if that were something diabolical! She needn’t worry. I understand the difference between preaching and teaching. Preaching is what my colleagues do! (They do, they know it. That is why they are so mad at me: I have called their bluff.) I, on the other hand, teach. Because that is what Christians do.

What does it mean to teach history as a Christian? I take my instruction from Augustine of Hippo, who knew a thing or two about teaching as well as about Christ.

First and foremost, Christians recognize the inadequacy of language for conveying even the simplest thoughts. In Augustine’s words, explaining to his friend Deogratias why teaching is so frustrating:

For I am covetous of something better, the possession of which I frequently enjoy within me before I commence to body it forth in intelligible words: and then when my capacities of expression prove inferior to my inner apprehensions, I grieve over the inability which my tongue has betrayed in answering to my heart. 

For it is my wish that he who hears me should have the same complete understanding of the subject which I have myself; and I perceive that I fail to speak in a manner calculated to effect that, and that this arises mainly from the circumstance that the intellectual apprehension diffuses itself through the mind with something like a rapid flash, whereas the utterance is slow, and occupies time, and is of a vastly different nature, so that, while this latter is moving on, the intellectual apprehension has already withdrawn itself within its secret abodes.

Do you have any idea how frustrating it has been these past three years, not being able to find the words to help my academic colleagues see what I see in Milo? Or in Mary? Or in Christianity? Or in God?

Now, it is a common occurrence with us that, in the ardent desire to effect what is of profit to our hearer, our aim is to express ourselves to him exactly as our intellectual apprehension is at the time, when, in the very effort, we are failing in the ability to speak; and then, because this does not succeed with us, we are vexed, and we pine in weariness as if we were applying ourselves to vain labors; and, as the result of this very weariness, our discourse becomes itself more languid and pointless even than it was when it first induced such a sense of tediousness.

God knows. That—according to Augustine—is why He became incarnate: so as to make Himself knowable to us in human terms, and thereby elevate our understanding to the divine. But if we find ourselves frustrated at not being able to communicate with our fellow human beings, what must it have been like for God?

Now if the cause of our sadness lies in the circumstance that our hearer does not apprehend what we mean, so that we have to come down in a certain fashion from the elevation of our own conceptions, and are under the necessity of dwelling long in the tedious processes of syllables which come far beneath the standard of our ideas, and have anxiously to consider how that which we ourselves take in with a most rapid draught of mental apprehension is to be given forth by the mouth of flesh in the long and perplexed intricacies of its method of enunciation; and if the great dissimilarity thus felt (between our utterance and our thought) makes it distasteful to us to speak, and a pleasure to us to keep silence, then let us ponder what has been set before us by Him who has showed us an example that we should follow His steps. 

For however much our articulate speech may differ from the vivacity of our intelligence, much greater is the difference of the flesh of mortality from the equality of God. 

And, nevertheless, although He was in the same form, He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant,— and so on down to the words the death of the cross. What is the explanation of this but that He made Himself weak to the weak, in order that He might gain the weak? Listen to His follower as he expresses himself also in another place to this effect: For whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God; or whether we be sober, it is for your cause. For the love of Christ constrains us, because we thus judge that He died for all. And how, indeed, should one be ready to be spent for their souls, if he should find it irksome to him to bend himself to their ears? For this reason, therefore, He became a little child in the midst of us, (and) like a nurse cherishing her children.

The whole point of the Incarnation was for the Word to become flesh—for the Logos by which the world was made to become visible to His human creatures that they, made in His image and likeness, might learn to know and love Him.

To teach as a Christian is, therefore, to invoke the study of history for the sake of love:

If, therefore, it was mainly for this purpose that Christ came, to wit, that man might learn how much God loves him; and that he might learn this, to the intent that he might be kindled to the love of Him by whom he was first loved, and might also love his neighbor at the command and showing of Him who became our neighbor, in that He loved man when, instead of being a neighbor to Him, he was sojourning far apart: if, again, all divine Scripture, which was written aforetime, was written with the view of presignifying the Lord’s advent; and if whatever has been committed to writing in times subsequent to these, and established by divine authority, is a record of Christ, and admonishes us of love, it is manifest that on those two commandments of love to God and love to our neighbor hang not only all the law and the prophets, which at the time when the Lord spoke to that effect were as yet the only Holy Scripture, but also all those books of the divine literature which have been written at a later period for our health, and consigned to remembrance.

Perhaps my colleagues do not want students to learn about love? I have wondered sometimes, particularly in the way that they talk about history, literature, music, and art as something to be subverted and deconstructed, made ugly in our students’ eyes. I do not get the sense that my colleagues love the subjects that they teach, although I am certain that they love the social justice that they preach.

If only my academic colleagues could see the story from my perspective—enter into the light by which I see! But that, of course, would be to teach history as a Christian, to be willing to take the perspective of another, again, as Augustine advised: 

But as we are dealing at present with the matter of the instruction of the unlearned, I am a witness to you, as regards my own experience, that I find myself variously moved, according as I see before me, for the purposes of catechetical instruction, a highly educated man, a dull fellow, a citizen, a foreigner, a rich man, a poor man, a private individual, a man of honors, a person occupying some position of authority, an individual of this or the other nation, of this or the other age or sex, one proceeding from this or the other sect, from this or the other common error — and ever in accordance with the difference of my feelings does my discourse itself at once set out, go on, and reach its end. And inasmuch as, although the same charity is due to all, yet the same medicine is not to be administered to all, in like manner charity itself travails with some, is made weak together with others; is at pains to edify some, tremblingly apprehends being an offense to others; bends to some, lifts itself erect to others; is gentle to some, severe to others; to none an enemy, to all a mother.

In my own work, I have used this method to imagine myself into the perspective of the authors of the medieval liturgy. “Would you like to learn to pray like a medieval Christian?,” I ask readers of my book Mary and the Art of Prayer. In other words: “Would you like to see the world through another’s eyes?” Isn’t this what we are all supposed to want to do? Why is the perspective of a medieval Christian less worthy of academic inquiry than that of a nineteenth-century slave? Or of a twentieth-century victim of the Holocaust? I help my students take those perspectives in my teaching, too. Are my academic colleagues willing to reciprocate?

My sense is no, but then most of them are not Christian, and even those who are Christians seem not to have taken Augustine’s instruction to heart. What is the essence of Christian teaching? According to Augustine, joy in guiding others to the love that we have for God and His works:

But if we ourselves have made any considerable progress in the contemplative study of things, it is not our wish that those whom we love should simply be gratified and astonished as they gaze upon the works of men’s hands; but it becomes our wish to lift them to (the contemplation of) the very skill or wisdom of their author, and from this to (see them) rise to the admiration and praise of the all-creating God, with whom is the most fruitful end of love. How much more, then, ought we to be delighted when men come to us with the purpose already formed of obtaining the knowledge of God Himself, with a view to (the knowledge of) whom all things should be learned which are to be learned! And how ought we to feel ourselves renewed in their newness (of experience), so that if our ordinary preaching is somewhat frigid, it may rise to fresh warmth under (the stimulus of) their extraordinary hearing!

Quelle horreur! Taking joy in the admiration and praise of the all-creating God?! Well, of course, if my colleagues are devotees of the cult of Enlightened Reason, they don’t want to hear that God loves them. They prefer a pitiless universe in which human beings are nothing but particles of matter, bounced about like billiard balls by the impulses of passion. They prefer to believe that there is no such thing as a moral law by which they might be judged—other than the opinions of their fellow human beings, whom they are willing to judge without qualms according to the dictates of their own prejudices and sins.

Too much? Augustine knew where they were coming from:

For even in this life men go in quest of rest and security at the cost of heavy labors, but they fail to find such in consequence of their wicked lusts. For their thought is to find rest in things which are unquiet, and which endure not. And these objects, inasmuch as they are withdrawn from them and pass away in the course of time, agitate them by fears and griefs, and suffer them not to enjoy tranquillity. For if it be that a man seeks to find his rest in wealth, he is rendered proud rather than at ease. 

Do we not see how many have lost their riches on a sudden — how many, too, have been undone by reason of them, either as they have been coveting to possess them, or as they have been borne down and despoiled of them by others more covetous than themselves? And even should they remain with the man all his life long, and never leave their lover, yet would he himself (have to) leave them at his death. 

For of what measure is the life of man, even if he lives to old age? Or when men desire for themselves old age, what else do they really desire but long infirmity? So, too, with the honors of this world — what are they but empty pride and vanity, and peril of ruin? For holy Scripture speaks in this wise: All flesh is grass, and the glory of man is as the flower of grass. The grass withers, the flower thereof falls away; but the word of the Lord endures forever.

Teaching history as a Christian means recognizing the propensity of all human beings to vanity and sin, even those who consider themselves so Enlightened as to be above sin, never mind the long centuries of human folly at thinking ourselves capable of creating heaven on earth—only for that “heaven” to reveal itself over and over again as the Hell over which Lucifer preferred to reign.

To judge from the way they continue to comment about me on social media, my academic colleagues seem to believe that I am preaching a triumphalist narrative of conquest rather than a story of love and compassion for my fellow human beings. They say things about my wanting to impose myself on others and exclude all those with whom I would disagree. They insist that the story I want to tell is one of power, when the Lord whom I worship emptied himself even unto death on the cross rather than take up the sword to force people to live in a certain way. Would many of my academic colleagues even take it as an insult if I were to describe their position as diabolical? Some of them celebrate their hatred for God—all the while claiming that I am the one “preaching” hate.

In the classroom, I use Augustine’s instructions on catechizing the uninstructed at the beginning of my two-quarter section of History of European Civilization. What I want my students to understand is that the tradition we are studying was itself conscious of the problem of studying history “from within.” That is Augustine’s main purpose: to provide Deogratias with a narratio by which to instruct the catechumens in the history of salvation. In the latter part of the treatise, Augustine gives a summary of what would become his argument in The City of God: that Christians belong not to the city of the world, but to the city of God, so their history is never going to be one of triumph, at least in this life. And yet, for all that, their history is one of hope because they have faith that they are saved, much to the chagrin of those who see only the history of the world as significant and who look only to the world for salvation.

Is such a narrative dangerous for students to learn? Yes, if what my academic colleagues want is for our students to become social activists woke to the injustices that human institutions inflict upon the world so that they can go out and fix them. It might make our students, I don’t know, apathetic—or so Edward Gibbon famously claimed. I think it will make our students more compassionate and patient, not to mention less likely to assume that their perspective is necessarily correct. I also hope it will make them both more courageous in confronting sin as well as more humble in believing that it is up to them to save the world—as so many of my colleagues seem to believe it is their mission to do. And if learning the narrative of human history as an exercise in humility, compassion, and love inspires our students to look upon the world and their fellow human beings as the work of a loving God? Well, then. They might all by themselves decide to go to church and say, “Thanks.”

Reference: Augustine of Hippo, On the Catechizing of the Uninstructed (ca AD 406)

Image: Bible moralisée de Toledo, fol. 1 (ca AD 1220-1240)

For my ongoing adventures in academia as a Christian, go here.

For my attempts to help my colleagues see Milo as a Christian, go here.

For my attempts to help Christians see Mary, go here.

—Originally published on Fencing Bear at Prayer, April 12, 2019