The attendant clatter of a silent statue falling on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was loud enough to be heard throughout the country. Loud, not just because of the coverage it received in the main stream media, but also because it was joined in chorus by the death knell of one historical vision and the triumphal melody of its replacement. Although Confederate statues have been toppling over with great regularity, this one is different. Different because it occurred on the campus of an institution of higher learning, an institution that prides itself on its department of history whose “primary goal is to foster the creation and communication of historical knowledge.” History as it has been understood up until now is, well, history.
We must first admit that there is no such thing as merely communicating historical knowledge. The essence of history is not found in facts, but in interpretation of specific historical events. Good historians always allow the data of facts to drive them, but in the end how they view reality itself is always going to color their communication. Events never occur within a vacuum so that the context itself also matters. As the great Catholic historian Christopher Dawson once quipped, an alien may witness the Battle of Hastings and have more facts than we do, but this knowledge would not be historical because it lacked both an understanding of reality and a context.
The Two Views of History
What are these two views of history that have been grappling for the Western Mind? What we might call modern history has won out strictly because it is modern. It is modern because it feeds off of the two great modern ideologies—communism and liberalism. In the communist view, all of history is marked by a conflict between oppressor and oppressed. History for liberalism is only subtly different in that it documents the struggle at various stages pitting those who fought against for freedom against the enemies of freedom. Either way, a reduction occurs in which history is driven by conflict with the bad things always left in the past. This inevitability of progress assumes everything in the past was backwards and that those who do not see this are evil, ignorant or both.
In this way history parallels the theory of evolution in that there is always progress towards a time of enlightened peace. Progress will save us. And like its intellectual counterpart, the evolutionary view of history also suffers under the weight of materialism (even if there is some lingering Deism). With conflict as the only thread, there is a sit-com-like disconnect of events from each other. History is simply one episode after another, with very little reference to the previous episode. Retaining a historical memory really has no value, because, as the great historical student Henry Ford once said, “all history is bunk. The only history I care about is the history I am making.”
The toppling of Silent Sam gives us a prime example of this viewpoint of history. The Civil War was a battle between the white oppressors in the South and the Union proxies of the oppressed slaves. Even the great Karl Marx saw it that way. Sure there are other things that happened, but it all really comes down to this one thing. Freedom, of course, won the day and the United States marched on in its messianic mission as the instrument of liberal progress. Because the statues harken back to those days of un-freedom, they must be literally dumped in the dust bin of history. Anyone who sets his hand to the handle of the bulldozer and looks back can have no part in progress. History, like our favorite sit-com, has nothing to do with here and now so why would we need reminders of it? If you do not understand that then you are, at best, an ignorant fool, or just as likely, a racist xenophobe who wants to put other people in chains.
This view of history has finally eclipsed its previous contender; what one might call the Christian view of history. Christianity is by definition of historical religion because its Divine Founder “in the fullness of time pitched His tent and dwelt among us.” Whether you use BC/AD or BCE/CE, the fact still remains that the Incarnation is the center of history. It is the center of history because it proves once and for all that history does not merely have a direction, but a Director Who regularly makes cameos in His story. History now becomes the field in which the redemption of Creation plays out.
Knowing this, history must always leave room for the supernatural. There are no accidents. Where would the world be if St. Joan of Arc was blown off because she merely “heard voices”? What if St. Pius V hadn’t pleaded with the Queen of Victory at Lepanto? Or what if Pius VI when imprisoned by Napoleon in France had not prayed while the Emperor mocked him (Napoleon is purported to have said “does he think the weapons will fall form the hands of my soldiers?” which is exactly what happened in Waterloo)? What if the steady handed, trained assassin had not encountered the hand of God in the chest of John Paul II?
The exemplar of all Christian historians is the great St. Augustine. His City of God is a synthesis of human history read through the lens of Christian principles. History for Augustine, and for us as Christians, is not a record of events but the revelation of a divine plan that embraces all ages and peoples. He also shows that history, in order to be truly history, must be continuous. There are no episodes or seasons, but a continuing story. Memory is a key component of identity. Both liberal democracy and Communism create regimes for forgetting the past. Fans of the Jason Bourne series know the dangers of forgetting the past—not that you are doomed to repeat it, but that an amnesic people is defenseless and malleable.
What About the Statues?
Through the lens of the Christian notion of history, what place do Confederate Statues have as tokens of history? In an age in which the conflict theory of history prevails they are very important. When we think we have moved on, it is easy to think we should sanitize all versions of the past. When we see history as the revelation of God’s plan of redemption for mankind however we need statues. Statues, as the name suggests, are not symbols of honor but signs of someone who stood firm. They may have stood firm for bad things like slavery. Or they may have stood firm for good things like the courage to defend your homeland. Or, as in the case of many of the Confederate statues, it was both. But as tokens of history they teach us to choose carefully those things we are going to stand firm in. They also teach us through real life examples that our actions, good and evil, endure. They will not be erased. Finally, they remind us that even the greatest of men is still flawed. We wonder how courageous young men like those depicted in the Silent Sam statue could have such a blind spot and hopefully wonder where our own blind spots are. Finally, it keeps our hubris in check in thinking we can build some messianic kingdom.
Let the statues stand—if for no other reason that they keep history from falling into the dustbin.