Out of the Ghetto: Church History as Global History, Part III

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:05 am by Peter Leithart

Out of the Ghetto: Church History as Global History, Part III 2017-09-07T00:05:19+06:00 Peter Leithart

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Postmodern historiography has rightly protested against this kind of bigotry. But in the process, postmoderns have apparently jettisoned the entire idea of a universal history, if not the idea of history itself. For postmoderns, to reduce humanity to a single unit is not only intellectually incoherent, but an act of oppression, an illegitimate placement and labeling of the other and the incorporation of the other into the framework of the same. Jean-Francois Lyotard?s summary of the postmodern mentality ( Le grand r?cit a perdu sa cr?dibilit?E/i> ) is invoked as a slogan to show that universal history is an impossibility. Wolf Schafer observes that ?The goal of creating a unifying vision of the whole human past strikes me as very alteurop?isch (old-European); it tries to compute the sum total of every-thing, which creates an epistemological dinosaur.?EApplying Lyotard directly to historiography, he suggests that ?What must be resisted is the temptation to create a new grand narrative for our time, which lurks in deep ecology, new wave holism, the ?comprehensive self-organization paradigm,?Eand other currents of thought.?E

Yet, I wish to suggest that the postmodern critique of what Lyotard called ?metanarrative?Edoes not spell the end of global or universal history, but instead offers an opportunity to reassert traditional Christian historiography, albeit in a chastened and updated mode. Post-Enlightenment historiography has extended the historian?s palate, given him new forms of dissonance to color his melodies. It should not be dismissed wholesale. Yet, there is a window of opportunity for the development of a distinctively Christian post-Enlightenment, postmodern historiography, which sees church history as global history, a historiography that can fit the story of the development of modern Buddhism and Hinduism into its sweep, without falling prey to the Eurocentric maladies of Enlightenment history.

Making such a case for this conclusion involves a closer examination of what exactly constitutes the postmodern ?eclipse of metanarrative,?Ewhich will lead to the suggestion that postmodernism, by recognizing the ?constructivist?Easpects of history-writing, and the analogies between history and myth, provides an opportunity for Christians to pursue a distinctively Christian mode of history-writing. In following these arguments, I do not intend to endorse the postmodernist program (as if there were a singular program). Rather, I hope to show that postmodernism cannot, from its own premises, object to such a project in Christian historiography. I will close with an observation or two about why Christian history, specifically church history, has appeal within the postmodern context that other ?mythistories?Edo not.

Lyotard?s book revolves around two different modes of knowing and telling, science and narrative. Modern science disparages narrative knowledge as ?anecdotal?Eor worse, ?savage, primitive, underdeveloped, backward, alienated, composed of opinions, customs, authority, prejudice, ignorance, ideology.?EFrom the perspective of modern science, stories are ?fables, myths, legends, fit only for women and children.?EYet, science ultimately depends on narrative for its legitimation: ?to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seeks the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game. It then produces a discourse of legitimation with respected to its own status, a discourse called philosophy.?EThis ?second-level?Ediscourse that legitimates science Lyotard describes as a ?metadiscourse,?Eand points out that such metadiscourses make ?explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth.?EIn fact, ?scientific knowledge cannot know and make known that it is true knowledge without resorting to the other, narrative, kind of knowledge, which from its point of view is no knowledge at all. Without such recourse it would be in the position of presupposing its own validity and would be stooping to what it condemns: begging the question, proceeding on prejudice.?EThis is Lyotard?s definition of ?modern?Escience, i.e., one that legitimates its own discourse by reference to a ?metanarrative,?Eor what he calls elsewhere a ?narrative of legitimation.?EOn this definition, social as well as natural science qualifies as modern.

Lyotard examines two main modern metanarratives, each of which not only legitimates the discourse of science, but also the institutional arrangements in which the science takes place. In the first, humanity is ?the hero of liberty,?Eaccording to which ?all peoples have a right to science.?EOnly obscurantists ?Epriests and tyrants in particular ?Ekeep people from exercising this right. Unfettered scientific research is for the good of humanity, as it pursues the goal of liberating all peoples from ignorance and oppression. The other, largely German, narrative was that science is good in itself, and must be pursued for its own sake, but this narrative ultimately ?has recourse to a metaprinciple that simultaneously grounds the development of learning, of society, and of the State in the realization of the ?life?Eof a Subject, called ?divine life?Eby Fichte and ?Life of the spirit?Eby Hegel.?EKnowledge legitimates itself in this scenario, and also dictate to society and the State, but this occurs only because ?knowledge?Eno longer refers to knowledge-of but also to speculative knowledge of the Geist or life. In this second metanarrative, humanity, or scientific humanity at least, is a hero of knowledge.

These nineteenth-century grand narratives had within them, Lyotard argues, the seeds of their own delegitimation. Take the idealistic story of man as a hero of knowledge: Lyotard points out that this narrative tends to erode confidence in positive knowledge, knowledge of particulars: ?knowledge is only worthy of that name to the extent that it reduplicates itself (?lifts itself up,?Ehebt sich auf; is sublated) by citing its own statements in a second-level discourse (autonymy) that functions to legitimate them.?EThus, ?positive science is not a form of knowledge. And speculation feeds on its suppression.?EHegel admitted that ?speculative narrative thus harbors a certain skepticism toward positive learning.?EHe asks whether a statement like ?A scientific statement is knowledge if and only if it can take its place in a universal process of engendering?Eis a statement of knowledge on its own definition. It is such ?only if it can take its place in a universal process of engendering,?Ewhich it can do if it presupposes ?that such a process exists (the Life of the spirit) and that it is itself an expression of that process.?EYet, Lyotard points out that the presupposition can also be taken in a different sense, namely, that it simply ?defines a set of rules one must accept in order to play the speculative game.?ENietzsche was making the same move ?when he shows that ?European nihilism?Eresulted from the truth requirement of science being turned back against itself.?EThus, the ?process of delegitimation?Earises from ?the demand for legitimation itself,?Efrom ?an internal erosion of the legitimacy principle of knowledge.?E

Let me draw two main conclusions from this summary of certain aspects of Lyotard?s work. First, from the foregoing, as Merold Westphal has pointed out, Lyotard?s characterization of postmodernism has little or nothing to do with the size of the narrative, but with its legitimating function. What makes a narrative a metanarrative is not the fact that it seeks to be universal but that it provides support for institutional and intellectual language games of various sorts. Lyotard?s postmodernism is incredulous about metanarratives, not meganarratives. Second, Lyotard?s analysis is quite explicitly dependent upon Wittgenstein?s notion of discrete ?language games,?Ewhich cannot be legitimated by exter

nal criteria but do function according to certain internal rules, and Lyotard also explicitly notes the connection between the postmodern recognition of the variety of language games and Nietzschean perspectivism: ?There thus arises an idea of perspective that is not far removed, at least in this respect, from the idea of language games.?EWith science dethroned as the master language game to which all other games must conform, postmodernism would seem to open up the possibility for a Christian historiographic ?language game.?E

Though he does not invoke Lyotard or postmodernism directly, William H. McNeill has advocated a form of historical writing that he calls ?mythistory,?Ein his 1985 presidential address to the American Historical Society. Scientific models of history, McNeill argues, are no longer persuasive. Indeed, not even science could live up to the standards of scientific proof and method: ?Facts that could be established beyond all reasonable doubt remained trivial in the sense that they did not, in and of themselves, give meaning or intelligibility to the record of the past.?EInstead, historians must engage in a form of ?pattern recognition,?Ein which they pay ?selective attention to the total input of stimuli that perpetually swarm in upon our consciousness.?EPattern recognition foregrounds certain features of a situation and backgrounds others, and only in this way ?can what matters most in a given situation become recognizable.?EIn fact, this is what natural scientists have always done, and it is ?what historians have always done, whether they knew it or not.?EAdditionally, the liberal myth that ?Truth will eventually prevail?Edied in the trenches along the Western front during the Great War.

Given the collapse of scientific models of history, can no longer afford the ?luxury of such parochialism?Ethat has ?no need to pay attention to ignoramuses who had not accepted the truths of ?modern science.?? The historian faces ?multiplex, competing faiths.?EThere is no longer a consensus among historians that they should facilitate ?the consolidation of a new American nation by writing national history in a WASPish mold,?Ebut the alternative of concentrating ?on discovering the history of various segments of the population that had been lift out or ill-treated by older historians?Edoes not serve as an ?architectonic vision?Ethat can guide the purpose of the historical profession.

In this pluralistic and confused situation, McNeill suggests that historians think again about the category of myth: “Myths are . . . often self-validating. A nation or any other human groupd that knows how to behave in crisis situations because it has inherited a heroic historiographical tradition that tells how ancestors resisted their enemies successfully is more likely ot act together effectively than a group lacking such a tradition. Great Britain?s conduct in 1940 shows how world politics can be redirected by such a heritage. Flattering historiography does more than assist a given group to survive by affecting the balance of power among warring peoples, for an appropriately idealized version of the past may also allow a group of human beings to come close to living up to its noblest ideals . . . . The American civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties illustrates this phenomenon amongst us.”

There is a danger to historiography as myth-making. Myths generally draw the boundaries between the group and the outsider, between us and them, and as a result ?may mislead disastrously.?EEspecially in the atomic age, drawing these boundaries could be catastrophic. Great historians ?have always responded to these difficulties by expanding their sympathies beyond narrow in-group boundaries.?EThe alternative, then, is to pursue a history of ?humanity entire,?Ewhich would ?diminish the lethality of group encounters with the triumphs and tribulations of humanity as a whole.?EIt is thus a ?moral duty of the historical profession?Eto develop an ?ecumenical history.?EMcNeill recognizes the institutional, evidential, and other problems with this endeavor, but claims that the problems of world history are no different from the problems of local history. Historians have always ?used our sources to discern, support, and reinforce group identities at national, transnational, and subnational levels, and, once in a while, to attack or pick apart a group identity to which a school of revisionists has taken a scunner.?EAs historians achieve truths by bending their minds to their task, the result will be a form of ?mythistory,?Esince there will always be people who denounce my truth as myth. This is not an abandonment of the historian?s search for consensus about the past: ?one may, as an act of faith, believe that our historiographical myth making and myth breaking is bound to cumulate across time, propagating mythistories that fit experience better and allow human survival more often, sustaining in-groups in ways that are less destructive to themselves and to their neighbors than was once the case or is the case today.?EAs a result, ?ever-evolving mythistories?Emight even ?become truer and more adequate to public life.?E

If all historiography is a form of ?mythography,?Ethen there can be no objection to Christian historians organizing their histories according to our own mythology, our grand narrative. Postmodernists may object to the Christian claim that our grand narrative is the grand narrative. And at this point, one must simply point out that a grand narrative of some sort is inescapable (though ?metanarratives?Ein Lyotard?s sense are not). A modern liberal pluralist who tells the story of proliferating difference is telling a grand narrative of proliferating difference; a hard-core multiculturalist who merely tells local tales still positions himself as a collector of local tales, and is telling a (dissonant) story where tribes clash and recoil. From the moment that an historian selects to include this and not that, or to emphasize one fact and not another, he has committed himself to some scale of value.

If an organizing historigraphical narrative or logic is inescapable, is there any reason to think that the Christian narrative is superior to others? For Christians, the question answers itself; the Christian narrative is superior because it is true. But I submit that in this respect too the postmodern context offers an opportunity for Christian historiography. To put it baldly: Christian history meets the demands of post-Enlightenment historiography better than the alternatives.

C. A. Bayly has also reflected on the question of a global history in a postmodern context. Large-scale modern narratives, he notes, are not longer acceptable, since they are ?complicit with the very processes of imperialism or capitalism which they seek to describe.?EInstead, postmodern or postcolonial historians attempt to ?recover the ?decentred?Enarratives of people without power,?Eas a way of overcoming the systematic removal of such peoples from their global histories. Yet, this leads to a serious tension in contemporary historiography: ?The academic and popular demand for world histories seems to be expanding enormously as ?globalization?Ebecomes the most fashionable concept of the day. Yet some of the basic assumptions of world history writing have been subject to stringent criticism by postmodernists on grounds that they homogenize human experience and ?airbrush out?Ethe history of ?people without power.??

Bayly notes that even historians attempting to rescue marginalized peoples from their exclusion employ concepts and refer to larger structures and movements: ?Even when writing of the particular experiences of the poor, the subordinated woman, or the ?native,?Ethe postmodernist and postcolonial historians make constant reference to the state, religion, and colonialism, all broad phenomena, but ones which are sometimes taken for granted in such accounts.?EAs a result, postmodern historians tend to ?conceal their own underlying ?meta-narrative,?Ewhich is political and moralizing in
its origins and implications.?EEven the history of the marginalized thus becomes part of a universal history. He concludes that there is really no contradiction ?between the study of the social fragment or the disempowered and the story of the broad processes which constructed modernity.?E

Where Bayly?s discussion fails, I think, is in identifying the object of study in a universal history. He distinguishes between a ?core?E(his quotation marks) in Europe and America, and the ?world societies?Eoutside, and intends to describe how the two interacted with one another. Through these interactions, ?as world events became more interconnected and interdependent, so forms of human action adjusted to each other and came to resemble each other across the world.?EHis goal in the book, then, is to trace ?the rise of global uniformities in the state, religion, political ideologies, and economic life as they developed through the nineteenth century.?EYet, this still falls prey to the postcolonial objection that it fails to be a truly ?global?Ehistory, and leaves the marginalized that do not conform to the growing uniformities still marginalized. From a postcolonial perspective, too, Bayly is clearly writing a Eurocentric story, even using the term ?core?Eto describe the American-European center of modern history. No doubt, he could give a commonsensical defense: Where else does one find the core? But that kind of commonsensical response seems to carry little weight these days.

From this angle, Christian historiography has in fact a distinct advantage over other mythological historians. The fact that Christianity for centuries Christianity was a largely European phenomenon was a pure historical/Providential accident. Church history is not in principle Eurocentric, and if Philip Jenkins is to be believed, it cannot continue to be Eurocentric without series distortion of the realities of modern history. Further, though the church has a collection of central beliefs and rites, it is transferable to many different cultures. In a certain sense, it is accurate to say that Christianity is ?imperialistic?Ein regard to those cultures; it does not leave them unchanged, and intends to remake them. Yet, Christian missionaries have, at least since Gregory the Great, made efforts to honor and tolerate local custom when possible.

In short, if postmodernism reduces to intellectual tribalism, it gives Christian historians an opportunity to develop history in terms of our own ?tribal?Eoutlook. And if postmodernism reduces to a quest for justice for the marginalized, Christian historians again have a unique opportunity to tell the tale of the church as the tale of humanity, humanity as a whole, of which the tale of Western man is only a chapter.

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