Theory & History of Historiography

by Benedetto Croce

The opportuneness of this warning is confirmed by the astonishment of those who consider the passage from ancient to Christian or medieval historiography; for what can be the meaning of this passage, in which we find ourselves faced with a miraculous and mythological world all over again, identical as it seems, in its general characteristics, with that of the ancient historians, which has disappeared? It is certainly not progress, but rather falling into a ditch, into which also fall all the dearest illusions relating to the perpetual advance of humanity. And the Middle Ages did seem to be a ditch or a declivity, sometimes during the period itself and most clearly at the Renaissance, and this image is still represented in common belief. Restricting ourselves solely to the domain of historiography, and following up the impression of astonishment at first caused by it, we end by representing events at the beginning of the Middle Ages somewhat in the way they appeared to our writer Adolfo Bartoli, in his introductory volume to the History of Italian Literature, which is all broken up with cries of horror and with the gesture of covering the face lest he should see so much ugliness. "We are in a world," writes Bartoli, when speaking of Gregory of Tours, "where thought has descended so low as to cause pity, in a world where a conception of history no longer exists," and history also becomes "a humble handmaid to theology—that is to say, an aberration of the spirit." And after Gregory of Tours (continues Bartoli) there is a further fall: "Behold Fredigarius, in whom credulity, ignorance, and confusion surpass every limit... there survives in him nothing of a previous civilization." After Fredigarius, with the monastic chronicle, we take another step down-ward toward nothingness, though this would seem to be impossible. Here "we seem to see the lean monk putting his trembling head out of the narrow window of his cell every five or eleven years, to make sure that men are not all dead, and then shutting himself up again in the prison, where he lives only in the expectation of death." We must protest against such shrinking back (which makes the critic of to-day look like the "lean monk" whose appearance he has so vividly portrayed); we must assert that mythology and miracle and transcendency certainly returned in the Middle Ages—that is to say, that these ideal categories again acted with almost equal force and that they almost reassumed their ancient bulk, but they did not return historically identical with those of the pre-Hellenic world. We must seek in the heart of their new manifestations for the effective progress which is certainly accomplished by Gregory of Tours and Fredigarius, and even by the monkish chroniclers.

The divinity descends again to mingle anthropomorphically with the affairs of men, as a most powerful or ultra-powerful personage among the less powerful; the gods are now the saints, and Peter and Paul intervene in favour of this or that people; St Mark, St Gregory, St Andrew, or St January lead the array of the combatants, the one vying with the other, and sometimes against the other, playing malicious tricks upon one another; and in the performance or the non-performance of an act of worship is again placed the loss or gain of a battle: medieval poems and chronicles are full of such stories. These conceptions are analogous to the antique, and indeed they are their historical continuation. This is not only so (as has so often been pointed out) owing to the attachment of this or that particular of ancient faith to popular religion and to the transformation of gods into saints and demons, but also, and above all, to a more substantial reason. Ancient thought had left fortune, the divinity, the inscrutable, at the edge of its humanism, with the result that the prodigious was never completely eliminated even from the most severe historians—the door at any rate was left open by which it could return. All are aware with how many 'superstitions' philosophy, science, history, and customs were impregnated during late antiquity, which in this respect was not intellectually superior, but indeed inferior, to the new Christian religion. In the latter the fables gradually formed and miracles which were believed became spiritualized and ceased to be 'superstitions'—that is to say, something extraneous or discordant to the general humanistic conception—and set themselves in harmony with the new supernaturalistic and transcendental conception, of which they were the accompaniment. Thus myth and miracle, becoming intensified in Christianity, became at the same time different from ancient myths and miracles.

They were different and more lofty, because they contained a more lofty thought: the thought of spiritual worth, which was not peculiar to this or to that people, but common to the whole of humanity. The ancients had indeed touched upon this thought in speculation, but they had never possessed it, and their philosophers had sought it in vain or attained to it only in abstract speculation not capable of investing the whole soul, as is the case with thoughts that are profoundly thought, and as was the case with Christianity. Paulus Orosius expresses this in his Historæ adversus paganos, in such accents as no Græco-Roman historian had been able to utter: Ubique patria, ubique lex et religio mea est.... Latitudo orientis, septentrionis copiositas, meridiana diffusio, magnarum insularum largissimæ tutissimæque sedes mei juris et nominis sunt, quia ad Christianos et Romanos Romanus et Christianus accedo. To the virtue of the citizen is added that of man, of spiritual man, who puts himself on a level with the truth by means of his religious faith and by his work, which is humanly good. To the illustrious men among the pagans are opposed illustrious men among the Christians who are better than illustrious, being saints; and the new Plutarch is found in the Vitæ patrum or eremitarum, in the lives of the confessors of Christ, of the martyrs, of the propagators of the true faith; the new epics describe the conflicts of the faithful against unbelievers, of Christians against heretics and Islamites. There is here a greater consciousness of conflict than the Greeks had of the conflict between Greeks and barbarians, or freedmen and slaves, which were usually looked upon rather as representing differences of nature than of spiritual values. Ecclesiastical history now appears, no longer that of Athens or of Rome, but of religion and of the Church which represented it in its strifes and in its triumphs—that is to say, the strifes and triumphs of the truth. This was a thing without precedent in the ancient world, whose histories of culture, of art or philosophy, did not go beyond the empirical stage, as we have seen, whereas ecclesiastical history has a spiritual value as its subject, by means of which it illuminates and judges facts. To censure ecclesiastical history because it overrules and oppresses profane history will perhaps be justified, as we shall see, from certain points of view and in a certain sense; but it is not justifiable as a general criticism of the idea of that history, and, indeed, when we formulate the censure in these terms we are unconsciously pronouncing a warm eulogy of it. The historia spiritalis (as we may also call it, employing the title of Avito's poem) could not and in truth would not consent to be a mere part, or to suffer rivals at its side: it must dominate and affirm itself as the whole. And since history becomes history of the truth with Christianity, it abandons at the same time the fortuitous and chance, to which the ancients had often abandoned it, and recognizes its own proper law, which is no longer a natural law, blind fate, or even the influence of the stars (St Augustine confutes this doctrine of the pagans), but rationality, intelligence, providence. This conception was not unknown to ancient philosophy, but is now set free from the frost of intellectualism and abstractionism and becomes warm and fruitful. Providence guides and disposes the course of events, directing them to an end, permitting evils as punishments and as instruments of education, determining the greatness and the catastrophes of empires, in order to prepare the kingdom of God. This means that for the first time is really broken the idea of the circle, of the perpetual return of human affairs to their starting-point, of the vain labour of the Danaïds (St Augustine also combats the circuitus); history for the first time is here understood as progress: a progress that the ancient historians did not succeed in discovering, save in rare glimpses, thus falling into unconsolable pessimism, whereas Christian pessimism is irradiated with hope. Hence the importance to be attributed to the succession of empires and to the function fulfilled by each of them, and especially with regard to the Roman Empire, which politically unified the world that Christ came to unify spiritually, to the position of Judaism as opposed to Christianity, and the like. These questions have been answered in various ways, but on the common assumption that divine intelligence had willed those events, that greatness and that decadence, those joys and afflictions, and therefore that all had been necessary means of the divine work, and that all had competed in and were competing in the final end of history, linked one with the other, not as effects following from a blind cause, but as stages of a process. Hence, too, history understood as universal history, no longer in the sense of Polybius, who narrates the transactions of those states which enter into relations with one another, but in the profounder sense of a history of the universal, of the universal by excellence, which is history in labour with God and toward God. By means of this spirit which invests them, even the most neglected of the chronicles become surrounded with a halo, which is wanting to the classical histories of Greece and Rome, and which, however distant they be from our particular view-points, yet in their general aspect makes them very near to our heart and mind.

Such are the new problems and the new solutions which Christianity brought to historical thought, and it may be said of them, as of the political and humanistic thought of the ancients, that they constitute a solid possession of perpetual efficacy for the human spirit. Eusebius of Cæsarea is to be placed beside Herodotus as 'father' of modern historiography, however little disposed it may be to recognize its parents in that barbaric author and in the others who were called 'fathers of the Church,' to whom, and particularly to St Augustine, it yet owes so great a part of itself. What are our histories of culture, of civilization, of progress, of humanity, of truth, save the form of ecclesiastical history in harmony with our times—that is to say, of the triumph and propagation of the faith, of the strife against the powers of darkness, of the successive treatments of the new evangel, or good news, made afresh with each succeeding epoch? Do not the modern histories, which narrate the function performed or the pre-eminence assumed by this or that nation in the work of civilization, correspond to the Gesta Dei per Francos and to other like formulas of medieval historiography? And our universal histories are such not only in the sense of Polybius, but also of the universal as ideal, purified and elevated in the Christian sense; hence the religious sentiment which we experience on approaching the solemnity of history.

It will be observed that in presenting it in this way we to some extent idealize the Christian conception; and this is true, but in the same way and in the same measure as we have idealized ancient humanism, which was not only humanism, but also transcendency and mystery. Christian historiography, like ancient historiography, solved the problems that were set to it, but it did not solve other problems that were only formed afterward, because they were not set to it. A proof of this is to be found in the caprices and the myths that accompanied its fundamental conception. The prodigious and the miraculous, which, as already observed, surrounded Christian historiography, bore witness precisely to the incomplete ideality of the new and loftier God, the thought of whom became converted into a myth, his action into fabulous anecdotes. Yet when it was not a question of miracles, or when these were reduced to small compass, attenuated and held back, if not refuted, there nevertheless remained the miracle of the divinity and of the truth, conceived as transcendent, separated from and opposed to human affairs. This too was an attestation of the Christian spirit, in so far as it surpassed the ancient spirit, not with the calmness and security of thought, but with the violence of sentiment and with the enthusiasm of the imagination. Transcendency led to a consideration of worldly things as external and rebellious to divine things: hence the dualism of God and the world, of a civitas colestis and of another that was terrena, of a civitas Dei and of a civitas diaboli which revived most ancient Oriental conceptions, such as Parseeism, and was tempered, if not internally corrected, by means of the providential course of history, internally compromised by that unconquered dualism. The city of God destroyed the earthly city and took its place, but did not justify it, although it tried to do so here and there, in accordance with the logic of its providential and progressive principle. St Augustine, obliged to explain the reasons of the fortune of Rome, escaped from the difficulty with the sophism that God conceded that greatness to the Romans as a reward for their virtues, earthly though they were and not such as to lead to the attainment of heavenly glories, but yet worthy the fleeting reward of earthly glory. Thus the Romans remained always reprobate, but less reprehensible than other reprobates; there could not have been true virtue where there had not been true religion. The contests of ideas did not appear as conflicting forms of the true in its becoming, but simply diabolical suggestions, which disturbed the truth, which was complete and possessed by the Church. Eusebius of Cæsarea treated heresies as the work of the devil, because it was the devil who prompted Simon Magus, and then Menander, and the two currents of gnosis represented by Saturninus and Basil. Otto of Frisia contemplated the Roman Empire succeeding to the Babylonian as son to father, and the kings of the Persians and the Greeks almost as its tutors and pedagogues. In the political unity of Rome he discovers a prelude to Christian unity, in order that the minds of men should form themselves ad majora intelligenda promptiores et capaciores, be disciplined to the cult of a single man, the emperor, and to the fear of a single dominant city, that they should learn unam quoque fidem tenendam. But the same Otto imagines the whole world a primo homine ad Christum ... exceptis de Israelitico populo paucis, errore deceptus, vanis superstitionibus deditus, dæmonum ludicris captus, mundi illecebris irretitus, fighting sub principe mundi diabolo, until venit plenitudo temporis and God sent His son to earth. The doctrine of salvation as a grace due to the good pleasure of God, indebita Dei gratia, is not at all an accidental excrescence upon this conception, but is its foundation or logical complement. Christian humanity was destined to make itself unhuman, and St Augustine, however much reverence he excites by the energy of his temperament, by his gaze ever fixed above, offends us to an equal degree by his lack of human sympathy, his harshness and cruelty; and the 'grace' of which he speaks assumes in our eyes the aspect of odious favouritism and undue exercise of power. It is nevertheless well to remember that by means of these oscillations and deviations of sentiment and imagination Christian historiography prepared the problem of the surpassing of dualism. For if the search for the Christianity of the non-Christians, for grace due to all men from their very character of men, the truth of heresies, the goodness of pagan virtue, was a historical task that has matured slowly in modern times, the division and opposition of the two histories and the two cities, introduced by Christianity, was a fundamental necessity, as their unity thought in the providential divine Unity was a good preparation for it.

Another well-known aspect of this dualism is dogmatism, the incapacity to understand the concrete particularization of itself by the spirit in its various activities and forms. This explains the accusation levelled against ecclesiastical history of overriding and tyrannically oppressing the whole of the rest of history. This did in fact take place, because ecclesiastical history, instead of developing itself in the concrete universal of the spirit, remained rooted in a particular determination of it. All human values were reduced to a single value—that is to say, to firmness of Christian faith and to service of the Church. This value, thus abstractly conceived, became deprived of its natural virtue and declined to the level of a material and immobile fact, and indeed the vivid, fluid Christian consciousness after some centuries of development became solidified in dogmas. That materialized and motionless dogma necessarily prevailed as a universal measure, and men of all times were judged according to whether they had or had not been touched with the divine grace, were pious or impious, and the lives of the holy fathers and of believers were a Plutarch, who excluded every other profane Plutarch. This was the dogmatism of transcendency, which therefore resolved itself into asceticism, in the name of which the whole actual history of mankind is covered with contempt, with horror, and with lamentation. This is particularly noticeable in Augustine, in Orosius, and in Otto of Frisia, but is to be perceived at least in germ as a tendency among all the historians or chroniclers of the early Middle Ages. What thoughts are suggested by the battle of Thermopylæ to Otto of Frisia? Tædet hic inextricabilem malorum texere cratem; tamen ad ostendendam mortalium miseriam, summatim ea attingere volo. And what by the deeds of Alexander? Regni Macedonum monarchia, quæ al ipso cœpit, ipso mortuo cum ipso finitur.... Civitas autem Christi firmata supra firmam petram.... With asceticism is linked the often noted and often ridiculed credulity of the medieval historians (not to be confounded with the belief in miracles, originating from religion): this credulity is generally attributed to the prevalence of imagination, or to social conditions, which rendered books rare and critical capacity difficult to find—that is to say, to things which required to be explained in their turn.

Indifference is, indeed, one of the principal sources of credulity, because no one is ever credulous in the things that touch him closely and of which he treats, while on the other hand all (as is proved in daily life) are ready to lend an ear to more or less indifferent talk. Asceticism, diminishing the interest for things of the world and for history, assisted in the neglect and dispersion of books and documents, promoted credulity toward everything heard or read, unbridling the imagination, ever desirous of the wonderful and curious, to the disadvantage of discernment. It did this not only in history properly so called, but also in the science of nature or natural history, which was also indifferent to one, who possessed the ultimate truth of religion. The weak capacity for individualization noticeable in medieval historiography must be attributed to ascetism, which is usually satisfied with the general character of goodness or badness (the 'portrait' is very rare in it, as in the figurative arts of the same age), and it has even less consciousness of the historical differences of place and time, travestying persons and events in contemporary costume. It even goes so far as to compose imaginary histories and false documents, which portray the supposed type. This extends from Agnello of Ravenna, who declared that he wrote also the lives of those bishops of Ravenna about whom he possessed no information, et credo (he said) non mentitum esse, because, if they filled so high a past, they must of necessity have been good, charitable, zealous, and so forth, down to the false decretals of the pseudo-Isidore. We also owe to asceticism the form of chronicle as its intimate cause, because, when the meaning of particular facts was neglected, it only remained to note them as they were observed or related, without any ideological connexion and with only the chronological connexion. Thus we frequently find among the historians of the Middle Ages the union (at first sight strange, yet not without logical coherence) of a grandiose history, beginning with the creation of the world and the dispersion of the races, and an arid chronicle, following the other principle and becoming ever more particular and more contingent as approach is gradually made to the times of the authors.

When on the one hand the two cities, the heavenly and the earthly, and on the other the transcendency of the principle of explanation had been conceived, the composition of dualism could not be sought for in intelligence, but in myth, which put an end to the strife with the triumph of one of the two adversaries: the myth of the fall, of the redemption, of the expected reign of Christ, of the Last Judgment, and of the final separation of the two cities, one ascending to Paradise with the elect, the other driven back into hell with the wicked. This mythology had its precedent in the Judaic expectations of a Messiah, and also, from some points of view, in Orphism, and continued to develop through gnosis, millenarism, and other heretical tentatives and heresies, until it took a definite or almost a definite form in St Augustine. It has been remarked that in this conception metaphysic became identified with history, as an entirely new thought, altogether opposed to Greek thought, and that it is a philosophical contribution altogether novel and proper to Christianity. But we must add here that, as mythology, it did not unite, but indeed confounded, metaphysic and history, making the finite infinite, avoiding the fallacy of the circle as perpetual return of things, but falling into the other fallacy of a progress beginning and ending in time. History was therefore arranged in spiritual epochs or phases, through which humanity was born, grew up, and attained completion: there were six, seven, or eight epochs, according to the various ways of dividing and calculating, which sometimes corresponded to the ages of human life, sometimes to the days of the creation, sometimes to both these schemes combined; or where the hermeneutic of St Jerome upon the Book of Daniel was accepted, the succession of events was distributed among the four monarchies, of which the last was the Roman, not only in order of time, but also in that of the idea, because after the Roman Empire (the Middle Ages, as we know, long nourished the illusion that that empire persisted in the form of the Holy Roman Empire) there would be nothing else, and the reign of Christ or of the Church and then of Antichrist and the universal judgment were expected to follow without any intermission. The end which history had not yet reached chronologically, being also intrinsic to the system, was ideally constructible, as the Apocalypses had already ideally constructed it, pervading theological works and even histories, which in their last section (see the works of Otto of Frisia for all of them) described the coming of Antichrist and the end of the world: hence the idea of a history of things future, continued by the paradoxical Francesco Patrizzi, who gave utterance to his theory in the sixteenth century in his dialogues Upon History (1560). This general historical picture might be here and there varied in its particulars, but never shattered and confuted; it varied in orthodoxy up to the time of Augustine, and afterward among the dissentients and the heretics: most noteworthy of these variations was the Eternal Evangel of the followers of Gioacchino di Flora, who divided history into three epochs, corresponding to the three persons of the Trinity: the first that of the Old Testament or of the Father, the second that of the New Testament or of the Son, the third and last, that of the Spirit. These are but artificial combinations and transactions, by means of which life always seeks to find a passage between the preconceived schemes which compress and threaten to suffocate it.

But such transactions did not avail to get the better of the discord between reality and plan which everywhere revealed itself. Hence the necessity of the allegorical interpretation, so dear to the Middle Ages. This consisted substantially in placing an imaginary figure between the plan and the historical reality, a mixture of both, like a bridge, but a bridge which could be crossed only in imagination. Thus personages and events of sacred and profane history were allegorized, and subtle numerical calculations made and continually reinforced with new imaginary contributions, in order to discover correspondences and parallelisms; and not only were the ages of life and the days of creation placed on a parallel line with historical epochs, but so also were the virtues and other conceptions. Such notions are still to be found in books of devotion and in the preaching of the less acute and less modernized of sacred orators. The 'reign of nature' was also included in allegorical interpretation; and since history and metaphysic had been set at variance with one another, so in like manner was natural science set at variance with both of them, and all appeared together in allegorical forms in the medieval encyclopædias, the Pantheons and Mirrors of the World.

Notwithstanding these inevitable strayings, the new idea of history as the spiritual drama of humanity, although it inclined toward myth, yet acted with such energy as to weaken the ancient heteronomous conception of history as directed toward the administration of abstract instruction, useful in actual practice. History itself was now the teaching, the knowledge of the life of the human race from its creation upon the earth, through its struggles, up to its final state, which was indicated in the near or remote horizon. History thus became the work of God, teaching by His direct word and presence, which is to be seen and heard in every part of it. Declarations are certainly not wanting, indeed they abound, that the reading of histories is useful as counselling, and particularly as inculcating, good behaviour and abstention from evil. Sometimes it is a question of traditional and conventional declarations, at others of particular designs: but medieval historiography was not conceived, because it could not be conceived, heteronomously.