As I prepare for a lecture tonight on the meaning of myth, I've come across some meaningful thoughts by two of my heroes, Christopher Dawson and Russell Kirk, each significantly influenced by St. Augustine.
St. Augustine’s, Dawson’s, and Kirk’s vision of history, is not strictly history in the modern, professional sense of the term. The City of God, Dawson explained, is “a vast synthesis which embraces the history of the whole human race and its destinies in time and eternity.”[1]
Larger than a study of mere fact or a laying out a sequence of names and dates, St. Augustine’s City of God is “metahistory.”
Metahistory is concerned with the nature of history, the meaning of history and the cause and significance of historical change. The historian himself is primarily engaged in the study of the past. He does not ask himself why the past is different from the present or what is the meaning of history as a whole. What he wants to know is what actually happened at a particular time and place and what effect it had on the immediate future.[2]
True history, according to Dawson is poetic: “The mastery of” professional historical methods and “techniques will not produce great history, any more than a mastery of metrical technique will produce great poetry.” The true historian, or the metahistorian, will recognize that “something more is necessary—intuitive understanding, creative imagination, and finally a universal vision transcending the relative limitation of the particular field of historical study.”[3]
Dawson on what his parents offered him: “Thanks to my parents I learnt the essential connection between story and history, so that I came to know the past not so much by the arid path . . . as through the enchanted world of myth and legend. In this way I discovered very early that history was not a flat expanse of time, measured off in date, but a series of different worlds and that each of them had its own spirit and form and its own riches of poetic imagination.”[4]
Dawson on why myth opens one to a culture: “I believe the old myths are better not only intrinsically, but because they lead further and open a door into the mind as well as into the past. This was the old road which carries us back not merely for centuries but for thousands of years; the road by which every people has travelled and from which the beginnings of every literature have come.”[5]
“In the modern age we have known no Thucydides, no Polybius, no Livy, no Plutarch,” Russell Kirk wrote. “Obsessed by the Fact, a nineteenth-century idol, most modern historians have forgotten that facts, too, are constructions—and meaningful only in association. It is the event, rather than the isolated fact, which is the proper concern of historians.”[6]
The historian, like the poet, should be divinely inspired, accepting the creativity offered by the love of the Holy Spirit, the source of all creativity and imagination. So armed, the historian should recognize the Creator and glorify the creation.
Kirk wrote: “To seek for truths in history. . . distinctly is not to indulge in dreamy visions of unborn ages, or to predict the inevitability of some political domination. Rather, the truths of history, the real meanings, are to be discovered in what history can teach us about the framework of the Logos, if you will: about the significance of human existence: about the splendor and the misery of our condition. In this inquiry, there must be joined with the historical discipline certain insights of philosophy and psychology. For historical consciousness necessarily is entwined with the mystery of personal consciousness.”[7]
“For good or ill,” Kirk concluded, “ideas about history and its lessons probably will be powerful in the dawning era—even though the average member of the rising generation has studied not history, but ‘social stew.’ If ignorant of history, that rising generation may wander bewildered in cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues. And at the heart of such a labyrinth, we are told, there has lurked for ages the Minotaur.”[8]
[1] Dawson, “St. Augustine and His Age,” 223.
[2] Dawson, Dynamics of World History, 303. For a critique of Dawson’s position, see Hayden V. White, “Religion, Culture, and Western Civilization in Christopher’s Dawson’s Idea of History,” English Miscellany 9 (1958): 247-87.
[4] Dawson, “Memories,” reprinted in Scott, “A Historian and His World,” 239.
[5] Dawson, “Memories,” reprinted in Scott, “A Historian and His World,” 239.
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