The Tale of Years; or,
Why Study History?
A Coda to
the Texts in Context Series
By Gabriel Blanchard
We opened this series noting that, while Henry Ford stated his opinion that "History is bunk," it is hard fact that Henry Ford is now history. So—what shall we do with him?
A Case Against the Past
In the introduction to the Texts in Context series as a whole, the present author advanced the claim that, whatever the design of this or that curriculum, human beings are always going to study history, out of natural curiosity if nothing else. He stands by that claim, and upholds the place of Clio among the Muses. However, when you pause to think through that claim, it is, if anything, really an argument for not bothering to include history as a subject in the halls of Academe—perhaps not even in grade school. It isn’t as though we give classes on “how to feel hungry” or “how to be offended by insults”; things that happen naturally, i.e. of their own accord, aren’t (usually) thought of as calling for instruction.
Moreover, the exaltation of history can have an ideological dimension. This concern may seem overwrought, in an age where all of the humanities seem to be in increasing jeopardy, even at flagship institutes of higher learning. But, though the present author’s childhood occurred mostly during the tepid consensus of the Clinton administration, during which it was highly fashionable to “hate politics”—a phrase strangely substituted for the feeling truly shown by the fashionable, which was contempt of politics, not hatred1—nevertheless, there is no society in which the common weal is something trivial. There can’t be. Politics is nothing else: it is concerned with the choices every society must collectively make, the principles on which it makes those choices, and the future they result in. The point is, it matters what role a school of thought assigns to history.
Take a concrete example. CLT recently collaborated with Classical Academic Press to create The Justice Reader, a selection of texts penned by members of CLT’s Author Bank on the virtue that title names. We selected passages from all periods of the Bank—Medieval, modern, and ancient—and did our best to give an impression of the great variety of topics under the heading “justice,” from the ideal economic order to the soul’s fate after death. Nor did we restrict ourselves to philosophers and clergy: there were plenty of those, but we also drew in selections from essays, epics, novels, even plays. Writers and books like Æschylus, The Thousand and One Nights, William Shakespeare, and Franz Kafka rub shoulders there with Cicero, St. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Jefferson, and Anna Julia Cooper. Naturally, we consulted with scholars both on the selection and arrangement of our material. For some time, we hesitated between two basic structures: topical or chronological. One scholar strongly recommended the former and said of the latter that there was “nothing more Marxist” than treating history as the chief ordering discipline of education.
The present author isn’t sure about “nothing more Marxist”—one would think economics would at least have a claim to be equal with history, in that regard?—but perhaps the said scholar was right, and anyway, that is only a quibble. For it is perfectly true that Marxism esteems history as the study par excellence, the discipline that explains all the others. Marx himself wrote that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” (Which, one must admit, is a top-notch quote at any rate.)
But this prompts2 further questions. To start with, what would history replace?
Revolutions of the Spheres
Though Christianized, the course of study in the Middle Ages was more or less continuous with the education esteemed by Classical Antiquity. Traditionally, there were exactly four faculties at a fully-fledged Medieval university. From least to most exalted, they were the following:
- Arts—i.e., the seven liberal arts (the basics of all subsequent learning, whose only overlap with the modern category of “fine arts” was music3);
- Medicine—a term which then embraced the hard sciences in general;
- Law—which then embraced fields like history and ethnography (and would mostly likely have covered the social sciences); and
- Theology—whether dogmatic, Biblical, moral, or mystical.
This setup had a distinct harmony to it. The liberal arts taught scholars how to use words (in the Trivium) and numbers (in the Quadrivium),4 which are the essential instruments of all other learning. The scholar could then move on to specialize in sub-human creation, or in humanity itself, or in the Creator of humanity. History had its place—beneath theology; but then, so were most subjects. This is why theology was known as “the queen of the sciences.” And it should be borne in mind that to the Medievals, theology was the study, not of an extremely large man, but of the foundation of all being. (Ontology itself is arguably only a branch of theology, from this point of view.) Logically speaking, everything else radiated outward from this, and the views of it that one held determined their possible views about all other subjects.
But this fourfold structure proved unable to survive the Enlightenment. As Protestant Christianity became established in most of northern Europe, the common standard for the Faculty of Theology was broken into warring factions. Literally warring: hardly anywhere in Europe was spared from the religious violence of the seventeenth century. The Catholic Habsburgs fought a Franco-Protestant alliance against the emperor in the Thirty Years’ War; and though the British Isles stayed successfully aloof from that conflict, before it had ended, Covenanters, Puritans, Catholics, and Laudians were shedding each other’s blood in England, Ireland, and Scotland. In the following centuries, Deism and secularism increasingly became the norm, in the sense of dictating public conduct and policy. Thus, theology fell as surely as Babylon: sīc trānsit glōria cælī.5
Accordingly, we passed through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth with no clear claimant to the Academy’s throne; this, at the very moment when radical new political ideals were being spread by the success of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions.6 This might in any case have been expected to refashion a lot about universities. But two additional revolutions were underway at the same time which also affected curricula, and more directly than the political ones: the Scientific and the Industrial.
Some time (as you may know) has passed since then. The Industrial Revolution went on to be fostered by the Scientific, somewhat accidentally. Around the middle of the last century, give or take, the two between them brought about the Technological Revolution, whose progress and effects we are still living through: it is one of the very few great historical changes to impact most people on earth, and one of the vanishingly few such changes to do so on the level of daily life.
As a result, we seem to have settled into a slightly silly mindset that treats “science” as the supreme subject—silly, not because there’s anything the matter with the sciences, but because “science,” thus generically, is not really a subject; it is a method. (In fact, it’s been handily nicknamed “the scientific method,” to help us keep from mixing it up with things like Methodism7 or Descartes‘ Meditations Upon the ______.)
In the Beginning Is the Word
It should be admitted that this mindset has its advantages: At its best, the scientific methods trains us to recognize and examine our assumptions, testing them by investigation, which is an invaluable corrective. The present author likes the Middle Ages quite a bit, but one of their characteristic bad habits was their tendency to treat assumptions that seemed obvious as certainties, without bothering to look and see whether they were in fact correct. To take a famous example that misled both the ancients and their medieval successors, as soon as one knows what an orbit is, “orbits are perfect circles” feels like an obvious thing to assume, and it is. The problem isn’t that it’s counter-intuitive; the problem is that it isn’t true.
The Lord God of the holy prophets sent his angel to shew unto his servants the things which must shortly be done. Behold, I come quickly ... Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book: for the time is at hand.
But the silliness of this mindset is not merely a technical silliness. Getting mixed up about what’s a method versus a subject, proprement dit—who cares. More dangerous (and more ridiculous) is the tendency our present outlook has to encourage scientism: the idea that the only knowledge worth having is the kind we get from the sciences. In mere fairness, it should be noted that professional scientists are as divided over this view as anybody else; if anything, they seem less likely than laymen to be scientistic, perhaps because the practice of a science brings them up, again and again, against the boundaries of what they can and cannot discern by means of its method.
Beyond this, there is a yet more foundational problem. A method may help a person achieve some goal they already had. But methods do not, of themselves, set goals; we have to do that ourselves, because we have the power of choice and abstractions like the scientific method do not. We do not look at our tools and then decide, on the basis of what tools we have, whether we want a strip mall, a set of cottages, or a cathedral: we decide what we want to build and then, if necessary, acquire new tools to do it. The sciences are therefore ill-suited to serve as the pinnacle of education, because they are incapable of telling us what education, as such, is for. Is it pragmatic, aimed at getting the best possible job? Or is it about something greater than that?
This is not a new question, and CLT’s answer to it is the classical and Medieval answer. Education (and in particular, American education) should not be servile, but liberal; it should not be aimed at making good employees whose work will line the pockets of billionaires, but at making good human beings—people who are so principled, well-informed, humane, and shrewd that they are worthy to govern a republic. After all, that is exactly what we will be asking them to begin to do, just about as soon as they finish their gradeschool education.
The three great roots of Western civilization—Athens in culture, Rome in law, and Jerusalem in religion—never had altogether the same view of society, yet there is a respect in which they speak as one. Tertullian asked sarcastically Quid Athenis Hierosolymæ, “What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?”—but there is a reply, and a pertinent one. Aristotle tells us in the Politics that ὁ ἄνθρωπος φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῷον [ho anthrōpos füsei politikon zōon], “Man is a political animal.” The maxims of the forum included Salūs populī suprēma lēx, “The highest law is the welfare of the people.” In the early chapters of the Torah, we read, וַיֹּ֙אמֶר֙ יְהוָ֣ה אֱלֹהִ֔ים לֹא־ט֛וֹב הֱי֥וֹת הָֽאָדָ֖ם לְבַדּ֑וֹ אֶֽעֱשֶׂהּ־לּ֥וֹ עֵ֖זֶר כְּנֶגְדּֽוֹ׃ [Wayo’mer {TETRAGRAMMATON} ‘Elohym, Lo’-ṭouv heyouth hâ’âdhâm l’vaddou ‘euešehh-lou uêzer k’neghddou], “And the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make an help meet for him.'” Athens and Rome and Jerusalem alike are all cities, places where men dwell in relationship; no man comes into being except through relationship among other human beings. To put the same idea another way: people, like words, all come with a context. “Even the anchorite, who meditates alone, / For whom the days and nights repeat the praise of God, / Prays for the Church, the body of Christ incarnate.”8 And history, when you come to think of it, is nothing but the study of human context.
How Shall We Then Teach?
This has implications for education (especially for Christians, who make up a large fraction of the movement to renew American education). We devoted a post in our series on fallacies to the importance of context and the sophistry known as “cherry-picking,” i.e. taking things out of context in order to deprive them of their real meaning. Several posts from the Rhetorica series touch on the same thing, directly or indirectly. Everything human has a history, a context. We all need to recognize this. Christians ought to be especially sensitive to it: on the Christian view, God himself chose to become a human with a history.
Are we, then, to shake hands with Marx and crown history the holy emperor of Academe? Not quite. For although context may give us indispensable information about what a word means in that specific place, that only tells us how to select among the possible meanings of a word. The meanings themselves, we must learn otherwise. Likewise, history can help us discern which meaning will be relevant in a choice made today, but the range of possible meanings that inhere in a choice must learned elsewhere.
In that sense, theology (the category under which moral theology falls) is forever the queen of the sciences. Indeed, it is so for the atheist scholar as much as the Christian mystic. The atheist’s theology will, admittedly, probably be much briefer than the mystic’s: “There is no God” certainly wins the concision contest with the Nicene Creed. In fact, it even has a great Christian mystic who will go to bat for it, albeit on terms most self-professed atheists would consider unacceptable, or at any rate irrelevant. By the very nature of what the two subjects are—theology for being, history for becoming—theology will always hold first place, logically. If we do not place it in the center, nevertheless, whatever assumptions about it we have unconsciously absorbed will dictate our perspective on all else; the difference is that we won’t have the benefit of knowing about our assumptions. Yet the Marxist, and a lot of people who aren’t Marxists, are right to see something approaching supremacy in history. Though second to theology, history is second to theology: it is the discipline of context. If theology is queen, history is her viceroy.
This is the chief reason this series opened not only by reviewing the proper scope and tools of history, but by scrutinizing one of the key tools of the historian (periodization) and discussing some of the dangers posed by pseudo-historians and pseudo-archæologists. Those who peddle flattering lies about history, whether they share our politics or not, are doing something worse than “just” telling lies (though that ought to be cause enough for them to be hurled bodily from Academe’s precincts). Lies about the past distort our interpretation of the present, and thus corrupt our decisions about the future. In its most ridiculous forms, like Heribert Illig’s “phantom time” theory or Anatoly Fomenko’s “New Chronology,” pseudo-history is good for a laugh and does no substantial harm; but there are subtler pseudo-scholars who have a mind to do real harm, and who generally know to honey their tongues while first winning a friend over; they conceal their malicious intent until they judge it is too late.
The Church is Catholike, universall, so are all her Actions; All that she does, belongs to all … when she buries a Man, that action concernes me: All mankinde is of one Author, and is one volume; when one Man dies, one Chapter is not torne out of the booke, but translated into a better language; and every Chapter must be so translated … some peeces are translated by age, some by sicknesse, some by warre, some by justice; but Gods hand is in every translation; and his hand shall binde up all our scattered leaves againe, for that Librarie where every booke shall lie open to one another: … If a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde.
—John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Med. XVII9
1This distinction, between hatred and contempt, is significant. Though hostility can inspire contempt, many people feel contempt for persons or groups which they regard with affection; this often conceals, even from themselves, the fact that they feel any contempt—the attitude of many parents toward their own children often evinces this. It is unfortunate the suffix -phobia has become a common way to denote bias, and the prefix miso- (as in “misogyny”). These misidentify bias as cowardice or wrath, when it is really an issue of pride—and thus primes us to make flawed assumptions about what bias looks like and how it operates.
2What it DOES NOT DO is “beg” this, or any, question. That is not what “begging the question” was coined to mean. It would be better to retire the phrase than misuse it, and it probably has outlived its usefulness. (When it was coined, beg had a meaning it has since lost.)
3The seven liberal arts were grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric (the Trivium, then called the humanities), plus arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy (the Quadrivium, then called the sciences).
4That music was classed as a science (i.e., as an essentially mathematical field) may baffle to us, but made perfect sense at the time. Music as an academic subject makes us think of musical performance, but to the Middle Ages, it first of all meant music theory; and Medieval music theory was derived from ancient sources, attributed by them to Pythagoras. It was he who observed, on the strings of a lyre, that two notes would be one octave apart if one of the strings was twice the length of the other, or in other words, in a ratio of 2:1; he went on to discover that all intervals used in music could be expressed as ratios of two integers—for instance, the perfect fifth and perfect fourth are in ratios of 3:2 and 4:3
5This is a play on the expression sīc trānsit glōria mundī, “thus passeth the glory of this world”; in place of mundus “this world,” our maxim uses cælum “heaven” (also occasionally spelled coelum in non-Classical Latin).
6The principal effects of the Haitian Revolution were of course local. However, it is worth alluding to here, because the Haitian Revolution was the first slave rebellion to not only achieve its aim (the liberation of the slaves who rebelled) but result in the formation of an independent, internationally-recognized state. Against the backdrop of the contemporary justifications for slavery, this was far more significant than the revolts that followed in the Viceroyalties of New Granada, New Spain, Peru, and the Río de la Plata.
7The name “Methodism” originated at Oxford University, where the brothers John and Charles Wesley founded a religious club whose members agreed to live by a rule of life; this rule was referred to by outsiders, derisively, as “the method,” and the name ultimately stuck.
8T. S. Eliot, Choruses from “The Rock,” Chorus II, lines 41-43.
9This version of the text (including its use of spelling, capitalization, and italics) comes from pp. 445-446 of the Random House edition of The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, published in 2001 under the “Modern Library” imprint.
Gabriel Blanchard is a freelance author, contracting with CLT since 2019. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
Thank you for reading the Journal of the Classic Learning Test. Be sure to stay tuned in to our official podcast, Anchored, for further updates and more great conversations.
Published on 2nd October, 2025.
Page image of the Mappa Mundi (“Map of the World”) of Hereford Cathedral. Created around 1300, the Mappa Mundi is the largest extant map from the Middle Ages, drawn on a piece of vellum measuring about four and a half by five feet. Like most Medieval maps, its “up” is east, not north. The form of this map is a “T and O” design: this displayed the lands then known to Europeans arranged within a circle (reflecting the fact, well-known to Medieval scholars, that the world is round), split into three continents—Africa, Asia, and Europe—by the Red, Black, and Mediterranean Seas; inside the circle, the Red and Black Seas formed the crossbar of a T with the Mediterranean as its stem (hence “T and O“). This may have been a pun on orbis terrārum, “globe of the earth.” Jerusalem is in the center, at the joint of the T; this makes for another kind of pun, since some forms of the cross (e.g. St. Anthony’s Cross) resemble a T more than a †.
Author thumbnail from a woodcut from 1643, popularly referred to as “the Puritan’s Nightmare.” Created during the English Civil War, it shows a pair of arms coming down out of heaven and exposing the true-though-disavowed design of the Royalist cause, namely to restore Catholicism in England: the royalist’s human shape is occupied, Trojan-horse style, with a many-headed gorgon of “Papi∫t Con∫pirators.”