CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY

BY
H. BUTTERFIELD, M.A.
Professor of Modern History in the
University of Cambridge

Herbert Butterfield 'delivered' lectures on the BBC 'Third Programme' in 1949, printed in The Listener. The Third Programme was the supposedly intellectual part of the BBC. These talks were based on seven lectures at the 'Divinity Faculty' at Cambridge in 1948. Published by G Bell and Sons Ltd, of London, who may have published his other bookssomee on Napoleon, Whigs, and so on; one on The Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800.
Try to bear in mind that Butterfield was the Professor of Modern History in Cambridge. Even allowing for elasticity in the interpretation of 'modern', the Second World War had recently ended officially, with vast numbers of deaths, and vast transfers of power to world Jewry in the USA, USSR, UK, and Germany. Incredibly, Butterfield's trash was presented as serious intellectual work.

Butterfield's book (I have a copy with me, inscribed as a Christmas present in 1949 to a P G Halsey).
It has an Introduction, on 'The God of History', and seven chapters, listed with a contents summary, perhaps as written by Butterfield before he started. Chapter IV , with its summary, has been scanned in below.
I. HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND ITS RELATION TO LIFE | II. HUMAN NATURE IN HISTORY | III. JUDGMENT IN HISTORY | IV. CATACLYSM AND TRAGIC CONFLICT IN HISTORY | V. PROVIDENCE AND THE HISTORICAL ROCESS | VI CHRISTIANITY AS AN HISTORICAL RELIGION | VII HISTORY, RELIGION, AND THE PRESENT DAY
The book is unindexed, as might be expected of a script of a radio programme. Probably Butterfield expected it to be read in a properly awe-inspired and devout state of mind.

Butterfield seems to have annoyed Bertrand Russell, though his argument against Butterfield mostly attacked Christianity as not being true. Russell included a chapter in Human Society in Ethics and Politics (Will Religious Faith Cure Our Troubles?) which contains a longish account of the conventional history since 1914, which largely avoided Jews, and said it's independent of religious beliefs, meaning Jew-naive Christianity. Both these men have parallels now: Kevin MacDonald's Occidental Observer often has articles of similar types, infused with newer Jew fakery. Nobody ever seems to point out that belief in a completely invisible 'God' is yet another Jewish imposition.

Butterfield seems to me a good example of the hired person, accustomed to being paid for his work, marching along in blinders (or blinkers!

CHAPTER FOUR: CATACLYSM AND TRAGIC CONFLICT IN HISTORY

THE ancient Hebrews are remarkable for the way in which they carried to its logical conclusion the belief that there is morality in the processes and the course of history. They recognised that if morality existed at all it was there all the time and was the most important element in human conduct; also that life, experience and history were to be interpreted in terms of it. By it God Himself had to be explained and justified on those occasions when it was tempting to make the charge against Him that He was deserting His people. Indeed the religious difficulties in those days would appear to have been largely moral ones, just as in the modern world (by virtue of a different phase of human experience) we have tended to assume that the real difficulties are scientific. In the world of the Old Testament it was a moral factor which complicated men's relations with God and caused their terrible wrestlings with Him, provoking even religious minds to protests and expostulations which sometimes quite take one's breath away. Everything that happened in human history had to be capable of being construed into morality, it would seem. And everything that happened was to be capable of translation into terms of moral benefit.
At the present time people seem to feel that it is just this kind of thing which was once nice and easy, but which now has become impossible. It was all very well, they say, in the neat logical days of hope and progress, in the snugness of Victorian England, when everything fell into place in an intellectual system which easily achieved the reconciliations required. They argue, however, that what is impossible in the general chanciness and terrible cataclysms of the twentieth century {68 HISTORY AND MORALITY 69} is just that attempt to connect the story with morality. It it impossible, they say, yet without it men are thrown back upon a feeling of the total meaninglessness of everything. And because so many people are worried by this inability to see any meaning in the story, the difficulties of the present day are still moral-historical ones as in Old Testament times, though we are so defective in our self-examination that we are often unaware of the fact. Yet the power of the Old Testament teaching on history—perhaps the point at which the ancient Jews were most original, breaking away from the religious thought of the other peoples around them—lay precisely in the region of those truths which sprang from a reflection on catastrophe and cataclysm, lay indeed in their interpretation of cataclysmic history at its worst. It is almost impossible properly to appreciate the higher developments in the historical reflection of the Old Testament except in another age which has experienced (or has found itself confronted with) colossal cataclysm, an age like the one in which we live.
Machiavelli held the view that no monarch could really know anything of statesmanship unless he was a usurper, alone against the universe and entirely dependent on his wits; for the ordinary legitimate hereditary ruler of a State was supported by custom and the traditional affection of his people, which enabled him to keep his throne without any special exercise of skill. In a similar way men may live to a great age in days of comparative quietness and peaceful progress, without ever having come to grips with the universe, without ever vividly realising the problems and the paradoxes with which human history so often confronts us. And we of the twentieth century have been particularly spoiled; for the men of the Old Testament, the ancient Greeks and all our ancestors down to the seventeenth century betray in their philosophy and their outlook a terrible awareness of the chanciness of human life, and the precarious nature of man's existence in this risky universe. These things—though they are part of the fundamental experience of mankind—have been {70 CATACLYSM AND TRAGIC CONFLICT} greatly concealed from recent generations because modern science and organisation enabled us to build up so tremendous a barrier against fire, famine, plague and violence. The modern world created so vast a system of insurance against the contingencies and accidents of time, that we imagined all the risk eliminated—imagined that it was normal to have a smooth going-on, and that the uncertainties of life in the past had been due to mere inefficiency.
All the same, when men used to talk of making the world safe for democracy, one suspected that one heard half an echo of a satirical laugh a great distance away, somewhere amongst the inter-planetary spaces. After that, statesmen became still more presumptuous and promised that by a victory in war they could secure for the world 'freedom from fear'; but it has not taken us long to realise—with what wealth of dreadful meaning—that there are occasions when God mocks. It once seemed likely that all our modern system of insurance against danger only meant that perhaps we might have fewer wars in future but they would be so much bigger when they came as to cancel out the profit—the bulge in the india-rubber ball would simply come out in another place. We have now reason to ask ourselves whether even this was not in all probability an illusion; for, besides being bigger than before, we might well wonder if the wars are not also to be more frequent. It is questionable whether even we can believe again that the next war will end all war, instead of rendering still a further one more urgently necessary within a shorter time than before. Whether we escape the deluge or not, therefore, we are confronted by the threat of it on a scale out of all comparison with what was even feared in 1914. And history has resumed its risky, cataclysmic character.
When we think of some of the catastrophic events of history, like the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, or perhaps the Norman Conquest of England, we can find an easy reconciliation with them—indeed historians seem to fall unconsciously into the habit of writing about them as though {THE IMPORTANCE OF ANCIENT HISTORY 71} it had turned out to be a good thing in the long run that they did take place. We do not find people saying that life has no meaning because such things happened as the fall of Rome or the Norman Conquest—men point rather to the new world that was able to arise in due course of time on the ruins of the old one. This is a view which seems to imply an acquiescence in some idea of vicarious suffering, for nobody can doubt that such catastrophes were dreadful for great numbers of men who had to live through them, and who had not even the comfort of knowing that from their sufferings there might issue a world more happy than before. There are other catastrophes, however, which do not admit of so easy a reconciliation—for example those Mongol invasions which came like a smear over so many of the lands between Europe and Asia, and which had so great a part in permanently setting back the civilisation of Russia, and in destroying for ever the glory of places like Baghdad. And such were the invasions of the Ottoman Turks, who, when they were turned out of the Balkans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, left behind them a scene which gives the impression that the Balkan peninsula had just come out of a dark tunnel lasting hundreds of years.
It might be claimed that for all students who hope to understand either history or the problem of its interpretation the importance of ancient studies is greater than is usually recognised. It would not be an exaggeration to say that those people who study merely nineteenth-century history, and see the nineteenth century running by apparently natural processes into the world of the present day, are liable to fall into a routine kind of thinking which actually incapacitates them for any appreciation of the pro founder characteristics of our time. In (lie ancient world, where a long series of centuries allows us to see how historical episodes ultimately worked themselves out; in more simple forms of society where events are less entangled, so that causes may be seen more clearly leading to their effects; in antique city-states, where we can more {72 CATACLYSM AND TRAGIC CONFLICT} easily view the body politic as a whole and where developments are telescoped into a shorter compass, so that the processes are more easily traceable—in all such cases as these the student of history may reach a profounder wisdom than can come from any vision of the nineteenth century through the eyes of the twentieth. Even if this were not true it might be well if all historical students were induced to occupy themselves with an internal analysis of a few mighty episodes in history—the fall of the Roman Empire, for example, or the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century—episodes which have represented the climax of human vicissitude and endeavour, high peaks in the experience of humanity on the earth. By all these lines of argument the events in the centre of which stands the famous Exile of the ancient Jews ought to be an element in the curriculum of every serious student of the past. They are more contemporary with the moral predicament of this part of the world since 1939 or 1945 than anything in the history of the nineteenth century. And they enable us to see to what an extent our religious thought itself has developed from wrestlings with God and reflection on tragic history.
It is possible that the power of much of the Old Testament teaching about history would be more vividly appreciated, and its relevance to the twentieth century more readily recognised, if only we could rid ourselves of an obsession and genuinely convince ourselves that the history of the ancient Hebrews was fundamentally of the same texture as our own. There is ample evidence that in their own great days, in the age of the mighty prophets for example, they looked back upon their own distant past in the way in which we ourselves now look back to them; and in manifold ways they express the thought with which the twentieth century itself is so familiar—the longing of Psalm 44: 'We have heard with our ears, O God, and our fathers have told us, what work though didst in their days, in the times of old.' It would appear to have been one of the functions of the great prophets to point out that God was {THE OLD TESTAMENT AND HISTORY 73} still acting and intervening in history as in the time of Moses—that history in their more modern age and the history of the days of their forefathers must be regarded as running all in a single piece. And there is ample evidence of the repeated failure of the prophets to achieve the task—ample evidence of the desire that God should show Himself more plainly, as in the ancient days, so that people should not be able to ignore His part in history any more.
What was unique about the ancient Hebrews was their historiography rather than their history—the fact that their finer spirits saw the hand of God in events, ultimately realising that if they were the Chosen People they were chosen for the purpose of transmitting that discovery to all the other nations. Their historiography was unique also in that it ascribed the successes of Israel not to virtue but to the favour of God; and instead of narrating the glories or demonstrating the righteousness of the nation, like our modern patriotic histories, it denounced the infidelity of the people, denounced it not as an occasional thing but as the constant feature of the nation's conduct throughout the centuries; even proclaiming at times that the sins of Israel were worse, and their hearts more hardened against the light, than those of the other nations around them. The great religious thought which stands as the Old Testament interpretation of the whole human drama was clearly the work of a few select souls—of great prophets often standing with their backs to the wall, for example—in a nation whose history otherwise ran under very much the same rules as the history of other peoples. It is even possibly true to say also that the makers of the Old Testament, while having an extraordinary feeling for the might and grandeur of the human drama, were not historically-minded in the sense that this term has come to have in the twentieth century—not interested in seeing that the past should be accurately recorded for its own sake, or that all the great episodes in the history of their country should be put into narrative for the sake of posterity.
I suppose that we all find it difficult to remember how small {74 CATACLYSM AND TRAGIC CONFLICT} a country the ancient Hebrews possessed—at largest only the size of Wales, and sometimes only the size of one or two of our average counties—while it is easy to forget for how short a period even before the Christian era they were ever able to exist as an independent monarchy. It is remarkable that so small a nation should have come to occupy so great a place in the history of the world; and George Adam Smith, in his Historical Geography of the Holy Land, has given us cogent reasons for not accepting any mere geographical determinism as the explanation of their peculiar historical destiny—cogent reasons for regarding the story as an example of the triumph of the human soul over physical conditions. It was a stormy history that the country had, moreover, with only a remarkably short period of political independence, and it has been questioned whether any area of the earth felt the tramp of troops more often than Palestine did in the period down to the opening of the Christian era. The great original contributions of the ancient Hebrews to both religious and historical thought are curiously connected with the period when this stormy history came to its climax, and the country was engulfed in the conflicts between the vast empires in their neighbourhood. Once again it is necessary to remember that their fate in this respect was not unique—they experienced that cataclysmic history which we find constantly recurring as the centuries succeed one another in this precarious universe. At the critical moment it was all as though they found themselves between a Nazi Germany and a Soviet Russia, and by the rules of the game they too ought to have been smeared off the map—ought to be as dead as the Hittites and as dim in our memory as Tyre and Sidon. Some of us used to wonder whether after the Second World War the Germans, in the very bottom pit of disaster, might not give twentieth-century history a surprising turn and gain a new kind of leadership amongst us, perhaps by a religious revival, perhaps by the fact that sheer grimness of suffering brings men sometimes into a profounder understanding of human destiny. But it appears that unless great spiritual resources are there {REDEEMING CATASTROPHE 75} already men tend rather to lie prostrate—to droop as mere victims of conditions and circumstances.
Even without taking any religious point of view at all, but adopting the purely mundane reckonings of a secular historian, one may say that, amid disasters and predicaments more permanently hopeless than those of present-day Germany, and amid a catastrophic history compared with which the story of modern Belgium or Poland is one of blessedness and peace, the ancient Hebrews, by virtue of inner resources and unparalleled leadership, turned their tragedy, turned their very helplessness, into one of the half-dozen creative moments in world history. In particular the period already mentioned, the period associated with the Jewish Exile, provides us with a remarkable example of the way in which the human spirit can ride disaster and wring victory out of the very extremity of defeat. We have had an opportunity in recent years of picturing to ourselves the chilling horrors associated with the displacement of populations, and some of us may have made for ourselves a vision of such a tribulation as almost a kind of living death. Such things apparently took place amongst the grim empires of the ancient world, to the cruelty of which our own world has been fast reverting. Yet both under these conditions and through a long period of other vicissitudes the Old Testament people vindicated human freedom and the power of personality. They showed that by resources inside themselves, they might turn their very catastrophe into a springboard for human achievement, even when the catastrophe was of that irresistible kind which breaks men's backs.
There is something very moving at times in Negro spirituals—something which makes one feel that human nature under pressure can reach a creative moment, and find a higher end of life (if only in the arts) than the mere continuance of material comfort had seemed to offer them. It is not Old Testament doctrine, so far as I know, but it would seem that one of the clearest and most concrete of the facts of history is the fact that men of spiritual resources may not only redeem catastrophe, {76 CATACLYSM AND TRAGIC CONFLICT} but turn it into a grand creative moment. It is hard to rid oneself of the impression that in general the highest vision and the rarest creative achievements of the mind must come from great internal pressure, and are born of a high degree of distress. In other words, the world is not merely to be enjoyed but is an arena for moral striving. If the end of history lies in personalities, which represent the highest things we know in the mundane realm, then we must face the fact that the purpose of history is not something that lies a thousand years ahead of us—it is constantly here, always with us, for ever achieving itself—the end of human history is the manufacture and education of human souls. History is the business of making personalities, even so to speak by putting them through the mill; and, though it fails us if we expect it to hand us happiness on a spoon, its very vicissitudes bring personality itself to a finer texture.
It is necessary to take a long period into our survey all at once, and to be careful on that dangerous ground where the knowledge of the specialist may affect the state of the question. But if we examine the things which the ancient Hebrews were thinking in the times of their great tribulation we shall find that they are matters of very real interest to the general historian. For one thing, though they may have concerned themselves with the matter before, this people seemed to be having to strain their minds to reach at the truth that the kind of righteousness which God demanded of them consisted not in ritualistic observance and mere burned offerings, but in doing good and showing mercy; and it is interesting that we should possess documents in which the change of emphasis from one kind of righteousness to another—from the ritualistic to the ethical idea—was being carried out in a manner that was to affect the whole history of mankind. Further than this, because Jerusalem, on which they had set their hearts, had been razed to the ground, and because their country, on which their religion had been too closely fixed, had fallen into the hands of the enemy—they themselves having been carried away in exile {THE DEVELOPMENT OF HEBREW RELIGION 77} in great numbers—they now raised their hopes to something less materialistic, and it seems to me that you can actually see religion becoming a more spiritual thing. Then again, precisely because they had been broken and had ceased even to be an organic people in the older political sense, those of them who had been scattered and found themselves now strangers in an alien land learned to picture their situation differently. They came to see more vividly that God was not merely interested in them as a nation in a single piece, a corporate community, but was concerned with them as individuals scattered in an alien country, concerned moreover with the other individuals around them, even though these belonged to different nations altogether. They gained a firmer apprehension of Him as the God of all the peoples of the earth, but not merely of peoples—He was God for individuals as such.
In addition to all this it seems to me that the ancient Hebrews, in the period of their tribulation, gave much of their most anxious thought to the whole problem of human destiny, and superimposed upon their former beliefs on the subject of judgment in history certain peculiar but extremely interesting ideas. Even now their views come short of anything like the Christian outlook on history, but in the development of our religion at each stage of the story the old truth is not cancelled—it stands as a sort of substratum to the new, so that the things which the Old Testament arrived at are ultimately gathered into the Christian synthesis, though often in some sense transformed or transcended. In any case one can hardly resist the feeling that in the work of some of the major prophets the tragedy of human history has that sort of might and grandeur which we often associate with the name of Beethoven. And they even lacked three of the things which ease the path of the modern Christian who has to deal with this question: the doctrine of original sin, which affects any notion of history as judgment; the idea of a future life, with a redistribution of fortunes in another world; and the Christian scheme of salvation.
Unless we imagine people who were confronting the tragic {78 CATACLYSM AND TRAGIC CONFLICT} spectacle of their history in an inescapable manner, and wrestling with it, so to speak, as one might wrestle with things when standing alone in the face of a universe somewhat terrifying—unless we realise that the problems were being faced when everything was at high pressure-even the loftiest achievements of Hebrew prophecy will leave us cold. In situations that must have been beyond weeping some of the thought about man in history carries us to such rarefied realms that we can hardly conceive of the exaltation of mind in which a Hebrew prophet could have produced it. The awful nature and the vivid reality of their catastrophe comes home to us when we meet that conception, so interesting to the historian, of the Remnant of Israel, which was to survive the cataclysm, as Noah and his family had survived the Flood, and which—whether they had remained faithful all the time, or because they had been brought to their senses by the thuds and thunders of disaster—would still carry God's promises to fulfilment and inherit all the promises. Even if the Remnant were only a handful it would inherit the fulness of the Promise, and all the hope that history ever offered to man. Jewish history had been based on the Promise, but the thunderous message of judgment in history' winch the prophets came to announce seemed sometimes to denote a final judgment on the nation, in other words an utter destruction. It came to be realised, however, that the idea of history as Judgment was superimposed on the idea of history as Promise, but without superseding the earlier idea—without actually cancelling the Promise. In the very depths of disaster it came to be realised that if God had used the Assyrians to bring a punishment upon Israel, still it was not Israel but the Assyrians whose name would be blotted out of the land of the living for the very presumption which they had shown in their time of victory. The judgments might be terrible, but, for the children of God, the Old Testament view of history was always one of hope.
It was perhaps in keeping with this that there emerged the messianic expectation, which issued on occasion in such fine {MESSIANISM 79} nostalgic poetry. In so far as it was a hankering for a mere political deliverer, who would bring victory in battle and carry the nation to prosperity and power—which seems to have been its prevailing form—we may regard it as a simple and facile kind of wishful thinking, interesting to the historian precisely because it further illustrates how the history of the ancient Jews tends to resemble that of other nations. Some writers have argued that this political messianism represented a significant moment in human development, since it taught men to look for a grand consummation within the realm of human history itself—it taught people that events were pointing to some end actually to be achieved and enjoyed on the stage of human history. It has even become fashionable to say that this Jewish hope—a hope fixed in the realm of temporal affairs, though possibly in the far future—only required to be secularised in order to become the modern idea of progress, which also purports to give meaning to history by presenting it with a goal in an ever-receding future, but always within the realm of temporal affairs. It is not easy to accept this attempt to salvage Jewish political messianism, for if it produced the effects described it is not clear that it did not mislead the world, and we pay it a doubtful compliment if we make it the parent of the particular idea of progress that is relevant to the case. This political messianism may have led the ancient Jews themselves to political mistakes and disasters at a later time; and it does not make much difference to the political aspect of the case if people, in periods of religious fervour, thought that the political deliverer would be sent by God.
Forms of messianism are not rare in history and the modern historian has seen traces of it in sixteenth-century Europe, where, after the turmoils of the previous age and the turbulence of over-mighty subjects, the new messiah seemed to be the despotic king. We have not only courted disillusionment in the twentieth century by this form of day-dreaming, but it might even be said, that like the ancient Jews, we have been {80 CATACLYSM AND TRAGIC CONFLICT} deluded into a false messianism which has drawn us into wrong policies and brought the world to more than one disaster. A nation in a desperate mood has more than once been ready to welcome the dictator as the saviour for whom it had been yearning. On the other hand, when in the First World War Englishmen thought of 'making the world safe for democracy', or talked of 'the war that would end all war'—alternatively when, in the struggle against Hitler, they tried to be apocalyptic about the four freedoms and dreamed that the world was being cleansed for ever from the evil thing—they were reverting to a primitive messianism not only over two thousand years old, but representing a somewhat inferior version of the ideas of that ancient period. Or rather—since wise and good men fall in weak moments into this kind of messianism—it is not too much to see in the phenomenon something that is fundamental to the human mind, something that appears therefore as a recurring pattern in history. It was only at a further stage—at a stage which we might almost describe as ultra-messianic—that ancient Hebrew thought really came to grips with the problem of their catastrophic history. But this whole branch of Jewish thought on the subject of the human drama was to be wonderfully redeemed at a later date, and was to become wonderfully relevant, when it became spiritualised and was brought to a different kind of fulfilment in the Christian revelation.
In the time of catastrophe all would have been easy for prophets and teachers if God's judgment had fallen only on the wicked, so that the righteous had been spared; but as thought came to focus itself on occasion upon individual people, rather than upon the nation as a whole, the critical problem for the ancient Hebrews was provided by the incidence of suffering in the world. Even die fate of the nation as a whole could not be continuously interpreted as the effect of a judgment and was bound sooner or later to present the problem of undeserved catastrophe. There are signs that the Hebrew prophets dealt tentatively with this problem at first, and put {PATTERNS IN HISTORY 81} out experimental suggestions concerning the incidence of catastrophe. Ezekiel, puzzled to see that some of the unrighteous survived the disaster which God had brought upon the wicked, conjectured that they had been allowed to live in order that their wickedness should provide a standing witness to the provocation that had been given to Heaven. 'Ye shall see their ways and their doings; and ye shall be comforted concerning the evil that I have brought upon Jerusalem . . . and ye shall know that I have not done without cause all that I have done.' The converse case—the case where the doctrine of judgment was palpably insufficient to account for the incidence of suffering—represents the problem which seems to have exercised some of the highest thought of the Old Testament. At this point in the argument a different shape was given to the formulation of the whole human drama.
The Hebrew prophets in the periods of successive disaster found what might almost be called new patterns in history; but the word pattern itself is too hard to be applied to anything so elastic as history, and I see no harm and possibly some good if we call these things rather myths, using the word myth not to represent something untrue or something which did not happen, but to typify an essential process in history. Galileo's name is identified with one of these myths or patterns of essential truth; for when he adopted something like the modern doctrine of inertia (the view that a body once in motion continues that motion to infinity unless something intervenes to stop or deflect it), he was opening a gateway to modern science, but he was specifying something he could never have seen in its actual purity, because things become so entangled, and in the actual world there are always problems of air-resistance, gravity, etc., affecting the issue. When the Marxists say that history works on the principle of thesis fighting its antithesis, the conflict resulting in the discovery of a new synthesis, then that view is extremely interesting to an historian, even though it were to be shown that no such case ever existed in a state of absolute purity. It represents an aspect of truth in respect of the workings {82 CATACLYSM AND TRAGIC CONFLICT} of history—a better myth or pattern to have by us than the generally accepted view of a linear development, an ascending course of progress in history. Similarly when Professor Toynbee talks of challenge and response in history—calls our attention to the kind of challenge which a given environment may give to certain people—he has found a myth or a pattern in the sense which we are here giving to the words, something so wonderful in its elasticity that in a certain sense we can apply it almost anywhere in history, though a critic might pick holes in any particular application of the idea in actual life, where all things are so inextricably entangled. Perhaps the most familiar of the myths or patterns used to typify processes that take place in history is the conception of a Renaissance, which, according to one suggestion, is associated with the idea of the phoenix rising to new life out of its own ashes. It happens that I personally would question the validity of that particular formula or symbol, when used in the way we do use it to indicate the kind of thing which happens in history; but it pleases technical historians immensely, and it illustrates very aptly the kind of point that I wish to make about the application of these symbols or images; for, having begun with a single Renaissance, the Renaissance of the fifteenth century, historians discovered that here was a pattern which could be kept in regular stock and pulled out of the drawer on a great number of occasions. They discovered one Renaissance behind another and applied the concept in many varied fields; and indeed there is no reason why, supposing the concept to be legitimate or useful in the first instance, one should not find a Renaissance every time a new generation grows up, or a Renaissance somewhere or other every ten years.
Now the ancient Hebrews contributed a number of these myths or essential patterns which were to be symbols of historical processes or formulas for something fundamental and significant in history; and one of the best ever produced, for example, is the simile of the leaven that leavens the whole lump, while the idea of the Remnant of Israel, which was to {THE SUFFERING SERVANT 83} inherit all the promises, has its own applicability in history, as we can sec if we consider the Catholic Church after the fall of the Roman Empire, or possibly even the position of the Church at the present day. But the most remarkable of all such types or patterns was the famous picture of the Suffering Servant, who was wounded for our transgressions and who is described with such amazing vision in the latter half of the prophecy of Isaiah, especially the fifty-third chapter, which has been called the greatest religious poem in the world. It does not matter for our particular purpose whether this Suffering Servant were intended to describe an individual who had actually lived, or the author's autobiographical experience, or the figure of some future Messiah. Nor does it matter if the picture of the Suffering Servant is meant to denote a collective body, like the people of Israel themselves (or the people of Israel idealised), or to mark out prophetically the ideal role of the Church in the world. It does not even matter if the picture owes something to a kind of pagan ritual, or is coloured by the part ascribed to the King in a Babylonian cultus. The fact that these alternative theories have been held—sometimes a number of them concurrently by the same scholars—increases the strength of the argument that here at any rate is a pattern or representation of something which is essential, something which lies at the roots of history.
The passages in question deal undoubtedly with the problem of suffering, in a period which at least some scholars regard as contemporary with the Book of Job. Without destroying the former teaching concerning judgment, they superimpose upon that teaching a remarkable piece of further interpretation, in which catastrophe is no longer construed as the mark of God's special anger against the victims of it. The original idea that catastrophe was a judgment is not eliminated, and still lies at the basis of every thing—indeed if we took it away the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah would lose much of its meaning—but so much which is new is built upon it that it is completely transcended. In this connection the same type of {84 CATACLYSM AND TRAGIC CONFLICT} reasoning applies, mutatis mutandis, whatever particular version of the Suffering Servant is adopted, but for purposes of example we may take a fairly conservative and central reading of it. On this view the Suffering Servant is the nation Israel, and if she suffered adversities and even national extinction, it is now realised that this was not because she was wickeder and worse than Assyria or Babylon or Persia, but precisely because she was better, or at least because she had a mission, her sufferings being a necessary part of a Divine Plan. The nation Israel suffered as God's messenger, suffered in order to expiate the sins of the Gentiles; she took their guilt and punishment upon herself, and accepted the consequences of their sins. Israel suffered for all mankind—so that when the Gentiles should hear of it and realise it themselves, even that knowledge alone would move them and exert a redeeming influence upon them—the very spectacle would move the nations to penitence. And behind the whole argument is the assumption that if Israel as a nation could realise that this was her role in the world, she would become reconciled to her suffering and see some meaning in it, and would no longer cry out against God or complain against the apparent injustice of it. If the picture of the Suffering Servant is to be read as implying the nation Israel, as so many people have thought, there can be no doubt of its remarkable applicability to the case of the ancient Jews. This whole piece of teaching also marks in an extraordinarily vivid way the widening of the horizon of that people—the transition to the realisation that Jehovah is the God of all the nations, and is planning to capture all the Gentiles into his fold.
I should be incompetent to discuss the high theological implications of this teaching, but these in any case do not concern us at the moment. I am also unable to estimate its importance in the history of man's moral life, though so far as I can see it marks a stage—and perhaps it is the first coherent summary of that stage, or at any rate the first that most of us are likely to come across—in the development of still a new and {VICARIOUS SUFFERING 85} transformed conception of righteousness, a new posture of human beings under the sun, and a new role to be performed by man in the whole human drama. In a curious sense, however, this particular teaching (wrapped up in the most moving poetry) is in any case the last voice to posterity from the heart of catastrophic history at its most despairing depths. If I were to pretend to say anything in order to reconcile a people to a calamitous history, you might very well ask me what do I know of calamity in any case? If I answered that all my views on the subject were echoed from people who cried out of the bottom pit of tragedy, you might still say that we must not take any notice of victims like these, because such sufferers are always given to nostalgias, day-dreams and wishful thinking.
I never feel quite sure that it is legitimate to use both of these arguments at once. Even granting that it is justifiable, however, the objections are inapplicable in the present case. You cannot by any form of reasoning evade the tragedy of history, any more than by merely holding a particular scientific theory you can make even a cut from a penknife hurt any less. You cannot by philosophy alter the fact—supposing it were a fact and also it were worth bothering about—that it may be possible for scientists, ten years hence, shall we say, to disintegrate the earth itself. But the picture of the Suffering Servant, unlike the more superficial political messianism of the ancient Jews, takes in the tragedy as it actually exists and embraces it with both arms. The writer does not complain now that the catastrophe of the nation is against the rules, but accepts it as part of the game, recognising that it has its place in the scheme of things. He even goes further and induces us to see that, far from being meaningless, it provides the nearest thing to a clue for those who wish to make anything out of the human drama. And that dim clue, even if we only take it at the ordinary human level, is left, like all the important things in life, for each person to follow up in his own way; just as we all know that men fall in love but we do not merely imitate one another, and {86 CATACLYSM AND TRAGIC CONFLICT} if we could see inside one another we should no doubt find that it means different things to different people, precisely because, where things are intimate, they arise as a new creation inside each person.
Nobody can pretend to see the meaning of this human drama as a god might see it, any more than one could hope to foresee the future—what one acquires is a vision for working purposes in the world, and one gains it by adopting an attitude, assuming a certain role within the drama itself. For any reconciliation to be achieved, it requires to be assumed, at this point in Old Testament thought, that the nation has great spiritual resources and recognises a Divine plan in history, recognises also that it has a mission in that scheme, a mission which, though prescribed by God, must be accepted as self-assumed. It will then read its own sufferings as part of the plan and part of the mission, and will regard them as undertaken vicariously on behalf of others. It must do this, in a certain sense, of its own motion, because nobody has any right to tell anybody else to see his sufferings in that way. Ultimately our interpretation of the whole human drama depends on an intimately personal decision concerning the part that we mean to play in it. It is as though we were to say to ourselves: 'There is dissonance in the universe, but if I strike the right note it becomes harmony and reconciliation—and though they may kill me for it they cannot spoil that harmony.'
And here is where the thought of the ancient Jews goes one note higher than the top of the piano, so to speak, and meditation upon history drives one into ultra-historical realms—the interpretation of the human drama is thrown back into the intimate recesses of our personal experience. Here also is the place where the Old Testament most gives the impression that it is trying to break into the New. It has often been pointed out that you cannot moralise history or achieve a reconciliation with it except by some development of a doctrine of vicarious suffering. That thesis is still important, {RECONCILIATION WITH LIFE AND DESTINY 87} the question of supernatural religion apart—important as a thesis about history considered merely as a study of human relations. And though it might be a remarkable thing to find an example of the Suffering Servant existing in its absolute purity—though there may have been only one perfect fulfilment of it in history—it is impossible to deny this picture its place as the pattern or the working-model of ideas which do in fact operate throughout the ages, helping to reconcile man with his destiny. We must note also that the ancient Jews, who in their attitude to history seemed to attach too much to the idea of the solidarity of their nation as an organic whole, began to break that idea down and came to achieve a heightened sense of the importance of the individual person—but only to go further and establish the solidarity of the human race at a higher level of thought altogether. Vicarious suffering—and especially the idea of one man taking on himself the sins of others—implies a solidarity of this kind, achieved this time not on anything like what we call the herd-level, but by a principle of love, and actually even by a heightened conception of personality. Indeed it would appear that only in a world where suffering is possible, and vicarious suffering attainable, can human beings measure the heights and depths of love and reach the finer music of life. Because there is tragedy in history love itself is brought to burn with an intenser flame in human experience. The whole conception seems the more remarkable when we consider that it has to be superimposed upon that picture of human nature in history, which we discussed at an earlier stage in these lectures.
Even so, it is not possible to convince oneself that the men of the Old Testament had resolved the paradoxes of history or found a completely satisfactory interpretation of the human drama. Many significant things seem to have been discovered in the interval between the Old Testament and the New. The Old Testament interpretation of secular history is a necessary substratum to Christianity, or it provides the ground-plan for the edifice. It is difficult to see how anybody could {88 CATACLYSM AND TRAGIC CONFLICT} understand an 'historical religion'—or accept a Christian view of history—without this initial substratum.
There is another aspect of human vicissitude which ought to be considered when we attempt to take stock of the whole spectacle of world-history; and that is the tragic element which so often appears in the wars and struggles of mankind, though the belligerents themselves are often too passionately engaged to recognise this element of tragedy, having eyes for nothing save the crimes of the enemy. The great conflicts that occur between vast bodies of human beings would obviously not have taken place if all men had been perfect saints or had been competing with one another in self-sacrifice. Yet—as in the great struggles between Protestant and Catholic in the sixteenth century—it has often happened that both of the parties carrying on the warfare have devoutly felt themselves to be in the right. It is even true that many of the inhuman conflicts of mankind would probably never have taken place if the situation had been one of completely righteous men confronted by undiluted and unmitigated crime. One can hardly fail to recognise the element of tragedy in many conflicts which take place between one half-right that is perhaps too wilful, and another half-right that is perhaps too proud. It is even possible that great wars should come about because idealists are too egotistical concerning their own plans of salvation for mankind, and because the righteous are stiff-necked. Here is a side of human history which makes it necessary to reflect further on the nature of human beings.
It is not always easy to realise how in modern times we have come to adopt as our initial conception of a human being a pattern that would be more fitting for gods. A speaker once put forward the view that a person who was unable to write poetry was hardly a complete man; he did not extend the principle to the writing of music, but he had caught from the liberals a view of man which was beyond the range of mortals. Those who are scholars and philosophers too easily believe that the unlettered do not really taste life, or that people who are {THE TRAGIC ELEMENT IN HUMAN CONFLICT 89} ignorant in some field of knowledge are less than men. Let us be clear: The whole human race together may compass a great range of knowledge, experience and capacities; but all these are terribly broken and splintered between all the individuals that go to compose the race; and all of us lack a multitude of those things which the liberal would regard as essential to a complete man or a completely rounded view of life.
The splintering, however, is much more serious and goes much deeper, for it even extends to our vision. Each of us is more or less restricted to a narrow vision, gravely conditioned by time, temperament and age, and by the platform on which we happen to be standing. The most friendly foreign offices, the most friendly historians belonging to different nationalities, find somewhere or other the place where they cannot enter into one another's points of view. The Marxists are right when they assume that a member of a certain social class, even if he is unselfish, is liable to be limited in his outlook by the fact that he sees things from the platform of that social class. We may think that we have a spacious vision, level and equal as it takes in wide horizons; but in reality each of us looks upon the world from a special peep-hole of his own. Where actual interests complicate a question and a certain amount of wishful thinking may give a bias to our minds, it is doubtful whether it is possible for any of us to survey a problem comprehensively. And it is certain that we fail to realise our incompetence in an art that is of the greatest importance for human relations—the simple art of putting ourselves in the other person's place.
The situation is still further complicated by a certain human predicament which we are too seldom conscious of, and which I can only call the predicament of Hobbesian fear—Hobbesian because it was subjected to particular analysis by the seventeenth-century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes. If you imagine yourself locked in a room with another person with whom you have often been on the most bitterly hostile terms in the past, and suppose that each of you has a pistol, you may find yourself in a predicament in which both of you would {90 CATACLYSM AND TRAGIC CONFLICT} like to throw the pistols out of the window, yet it defeats the intelligence to find a way of doing it. If you throw yours out the first you rob the other man of the only reason he had for getting rid of his own, and for any thing you know he may break the bargain. If both of you swear to throw the pistols out together, you may feel that he may make the gesture of hurling his away, but in reality hold tight to it, while you, if you have done the honest thing, would then be at his mercy. You may even have an arrière-pensée that he may possibly be concealing a second pistol somewhere about his person. Both of you in fact may have an equal justification for suspecting one another, and both of you may be men who in all predicaments save this had appeared reasonably well-behaved and well-intentioned. You may both of you be utterly honest in your desire to be at peace and to put an end to the predicament, if only in order to enable you to get on with your business. If some great bully were to come into the room and try to take your pistols from you, then as likely as not you would both combine against him, you would find yourselves cherished allies, find yourselves for the time being as thick as thieves. Only, after you had eliminated this intruder, you would discover to your horrible surprise that you were back in the original predicament again.
In international affairs it is this situation of Hobbesian fear which, so far as I can see, has hitherto defeated all the endeavour of the human intellect. Not only may both sides feel utterly self-righteous, but where a great obstruction occurs—as over the question of toleration in the sixteenth century, and that of disarmament in the twentieth—both may feel utterly baffled and frustrated; and sometimes even allies fall to blaming one another, as on one occasion papers of all complexions in England, out of pure exasperation, blamed France for the failure of the Disarmament Conference. Though one side may have more justice than another in the particular occasion of a conflict, there is a sense in which war as such is in reality a judgment on all of us. The fundamental predicament would {RIGHT VERSUS WRONG IN HISTORY 91} not exist if men in general were as righteous as the situation requires, and of course the fundamental predicament is itself so maddening and exasperating that men sometimes resort to desperate measures with an idea of cutting the Gordian knot.
Even if vested interests did not enter more directly into the problem of war, therefore, this situation of Hobbesian fear, as I have called it, would make it difficult for historiography in the long run to regard the great wars between nations or creeds as clear straight conflicts of right against wrong. We are right if we want to see our history in moral terms, but we are not permitted to erect the human drama into a great conflict between good and evil in this particular way. If there is a fundamental fight between good and evil in history, therefore, as I think there is, we must regard it as being waged not directly between Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth century, or between Germans and Russians in the twentieth, but in a deeper realm for the most part out of reach of the technical historian. In reality the essential strategies in the war of good against evil are conducted within the intimate interior of personalities. And if Christianity fights in the world it does not (when Churches are in their right mind) wage war on actual flesh and blood. Like the spread of charity or of education and like most of the good things of the world, it carries on a campaign only in the sense that the leaven may be said to carry on a campaign when it seeks to leaven the whole lump.
For this reason the historian does not content himself with a simple picture of good men fighting bad, and he turns the crude melodrama that some people see in life into a more moving kind of tragedy. In the last resort he sees human history as a pilgrimage of all mankind, and human achievement as a grand co-operative endeavour, in which whigs and tories complement one another, both equally necessary to the picture. In the last resort even tories and socialists are to the historian only allies who happen to have fallen out with one another. In modern history this view is all the more necessary in that, {92 CATACLYSM AND TRAGIC CONFLICT} owing to the complicated character of society, moral responsibility is so subtly diffused and so camouflaged and dispersed that the forces in a democracy may drive a government to war, or may perpetuate a grave abuse, and it yet may be impossible to pin the precise responsibility for THIS anywhere. During the conflicts of actual life we may have neither the time nor the materials for the understanding of the enemy of the moment; and if a madman is attacking a child, one may have to take action against the madman very quickly, though one might be rather sorry for him in his turn afterwards. But once battles are over the human race becomes in a certain sense one again; and just as Christianity tries to bind it together in love, so the role of the technical historian is that of a reconciling mind that seeks to comprehend. Taking things retrospectively and recollecting in tranquillity, the historian works over the past to cover the conflicts with understanding, and explains the unlikenesses between men and makes us sensible of their terrible predicaments; until at the finish—when all is as remote as the tale of Troy—we are able at last perhaps to be a little sorry for everybody. And this is particularly the case since, as Lord Acton once pointed out, the people who are fighting in real life rarely have clear vision, even of the issues which brought them into conflict with one another. Poor things—hey need the historian to follow upon their tracks sometimes in order to discover what the bother was really about.