The Ongoing Uphill Battle Against Nonsense

The other day I was in an online discussion which had been started by someone who said that we had no primary sources for 7th-century European history. This amounted to asserting that nothing written in Europe during the 7th century has survived to our day -- or, if one were inclined to be especially generous to them, one could understand them as having said that no historical writing had survived from the 7th century.

The assertion was completely wrong either way, of course. They replied to me by moving the goalposts and saying that we had very few primary sources for the 7th century, and that any given century during the Roman Empire was better-known to us today. I replied that I wasn't sure that the 3rd century wasn't even more poorly attested than the 7th. As an example, I mentioned the Augustan Histories, a purported collection of biographies of Emperors by six different authors, focusing mainly on the 3rd century, upon which both Gibbon and Burckhardt had relied heavily for the period, although both of them were utterly exasperated by its many inaccuracies. There simply wasn't much more writing to be consulted for the 3rd century -- and there still isn't, I added, although today almost all scholars agree that the Augustan histories are the work of one author, not six, and a growing number are coming to suspect that the work is not really history at all, but something more like a parody of historical writing. 

 

At this point someone else said that Gibbon and Burckhardt were very antiquated, and that we today had access to many more sources of 3rd century history than they did.

All fake innocence, I replied that I was fascinated to hear this, and asked them to list some of these sources. I was partly convinced that they were talking out of their butt, and partly curious about whether they actually knew of some 3rd-century sources I hadn't yet heard of. 

They did not. Their reply listed a few Latin authors, all of whom are cited by both Gibbon and Burckhardt, and some of whom are much later than 3rd century and therefore not primary sources. They added that we had Greek sources as well! Not to mention an enormous amount of Roman legal writing and court cases.

Gibbon and Burckhardt were both quite fluent in Greek and cited Greek authors very frequently in their works, and Gibbon, at least, consulted sources in still other ancient languages. Whether he read these untranslated, or had someone translate them for him, I'm not certain. Gibbon greatly advanced the practice of adhering to primary sources, and  Burckhardt was a Musterbeispiel of it. 

And the amount of Roman legal writing we have is not enormous. We have the Corpus Juris Civilis, a summary compiled by Justinian in the 6th century in the 6th century, and a few more items. Romans did not preserve records of every single court case that way we do.

And in any case, Gibbon and Burckhardt had access to these legal writings. 

Other than inscriptions and coins (some classify coins as inscriptions, some don't) which have been discovered and catalogued since their time, and the mostly Greek papyri discovered mostly at Oxyrhynchus, there is in fact very little writing about the Roman Empire which we have and Gibbon and Burckhardt didn't.

And this guy didn't know it. They were saying they "couldn't remember at the moment" all the details of Gibbon and Burckhardt, while making it pretty clear to those have have read Gibbon and Burckhardt, that they haven't.

So what? Happens all the time, somebody talking out of their butt on the Internet. What was different about this time?

This time it made me sad. And also a little ashamed, because this person reminded me a little bit of me: half-bright enough to get away with some of his BS.  I try to talk nonsense less than I used to, but I don't know that I've actually stopped yet. It's hard to stop a train.

Of course, BS doesn't fool everybody. Most of the people who know you're full of it just stop talking to you. 

But not all of them. Over the past couple of years another person on the Internet has corrected me over and over on points of Latin and subjects related in one way or another to Latin literature. It's a new experience for me, and very annoying. I don't know whether they're too young to realize how annoying the corrections are, or too autistic, or what.

Annoying or not, I realize that the corrections are good for me. They help me learn -- you know? So I thank them, and do my best to hide my annoyance.

Jacob Burckhardt

About 35 years ago, David Lee, then the Head of the department of Germanic and Slavic languages at the University of Tennessee, and the instructor of an undergraduate course I was taking, explained to me, as we were chatting between classes, that Germany has a tendency toward the monolithic. More than some other cultures, the Germans tend to regard one person or entity as being the greatest in its category: the greatest conductor, the greatest painter, the greatest automobile manufacturer, the greatest culinary country (not Germany, Germans freely admit) -- the greatest professor of history.

It's the latter category which concerns us here. In the mid-19th century, the University of Berlin was considered by Germans to be the greatest university -- certainly the greatest in Germany, and perhaps in the world. Cultured Germans were certainly not unaware of the Sorbonne and other great universities in other lands -- and Leopold von Ranke, the chairman of the history department in Berlin, was a figure treated with awe. If there was a greater historian than Ranke somewhere in the world in 1872, then Germans, at least, didn't know much about that. In 1872, Jacob Burckhardt,

who had caught Ranke's attention as a student in Berlin, and who was then a professor at Basel, was offered Ranke's chairmanship -- and to the surprise of many, he declined. Burckhardt preferred to stay in Basel, where he had been born in 1818, where he had taught from 1843 to 1855 and again since 1858, and where he would remain until retiring in 1893. And where he had, among great throngs of devoted students, a notable prodigy of his own: Friedrich Nietzsche. If Burckhardt had gone to Berlin in 1872, and if Nietzsche had come with him -- not an unreasonable thought, surely a number of people would've followed Burckhardt anywhere -- what all might have been different in the world since 1872?

Heinrich von Treitschke ended up succeeding Ranke in Berlin, a highly respected figure, to be sure, but not as charismatic, as individualistic, as memorable as Burckhardt. Somewhat the way Nietzsche did in philosophy, Burckhardt drew outside the lines in history. He did things his own way, to the extent that many people describe him as an art historian, or an historian of culture, or something else rather than just an historian. I think it's best to describe him simply as Jacob Burckhardt. To the best of my knowledge, there have not been others like him. Very much of his prose, perhaps most of it, combines political, art-historical, philosophical and other considerations, in a way which no-one else I know of has done. His best known book is probably Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, but he also wrote Der Cicerone, a book intended to be used as a field guide to painting, sculpture and architecture in Italy, from the Greek temple of Paestum, built around 600 BC, up to 18th-century works; Die Zeit Constantins des Grossen (The Time of Constantine the Great); Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (World-Historical Considerations); and other works which don't fit into similar categories any more than the ones I've named.

Burckhardt's reputation may have faded a bit since his time. One of the reasons I say this is that I had a very, very hard time finding a copy of Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, and the copy I found was published in Bern in 1941. And I can't find any record that it was ever translated into English. World-Historical Considerations, that's my own translation. This is a collection of lectures making up a course which Burckhardt gave at Basel just twice. He didn't repeat himself very much, to put it mildly. Those lectures blew students' minds, and they carried his reputation with them out into the world. He very much believed in the view of history being shaped by geniuses, by "world-historical figures," a phrase made popular by Hegel (and then, after Burckhardt's time, by Edward Albee), although Burckhardt is at pains in these lectures to point out how his views differ from those of Hegel. The view that history is shaped by great individuals, by geniuses, is rather unpopular at the moment among academics. But it makes sense to me. And for that reason, it makes sense to me to assume that Burckhardt's reputation will rise again at some point.

Historia Augusta, Eusebius, Gibbon, Burckhardt

The Historia Augusta, written in Latin, claim to be a collection of biographies of Roman Emperors written by 6 authors in the 3rd century AD. Many or most historians of ancient Rome now consider them to be the work of one author in the late 4th century, which perhaps was not meant to be read as history at all, but belongs to some other genre -- perhaps historical fiction, perhaps parody of historical writing. In the opinion of most specialists, the identity of the author of the Historia Augusta remains unknown. A notable exception is the French historian Stéphane Ratti, who says that he has established that the Historia Augusta was written by the elder Nicomachus Flavianus, friend of the illustrious Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, statesman and courageous, albeit unsuccessful defender of the traditional Roman religions against the encroachment of Christianity. If there is a substantial school of thought which follows Ratti in this, it has thus far escaped my (amateur) attention.

The Historia Ecclesiastica is a history of Christianity written in Greek by Eusebius, Bishop of Caesaria, who lived from ca AD 265 to 339 or 340. Which means that the subjects of these first two paragraphs are in the wrong chronological order. They're in the order they were thought for many many centuries to follow.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was written in English by Edward Gibbon and published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. It covers the period from the late 1st century AD until after the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453, with some remarks referring to the period right down to Gibbon's own life.

Die Zeit Konstantin des Grossen (The Time of Constantine the Great) was written in German by Jacob Burckhardt, published in 1853 and revised several times over the next several decades.

Both Gibbon and Burckhardt repeatedly complain about the unreliability of both the Historia Augusta (neither suspecting that it might not actually be historical writing at all) and Eusebius. And both judge Eusebius more harshly. Burckhardt, who usually in his many works of history, art history and culutural criticism writes in a conventionally composed scholarly style, completely loses his composure when referring to Eusebius, not only calling him completely dishonest, the first thoroughly dishonest historian of the ancient world (and Burckhardt was under the impression that the Historia Augusta were written before Eusebius' lifetime), but also becoming quite personal and repeatedly calling him disgusting, the most disgusting liar imaginable, and so forth.

Gibbon was among the earliest European authors who took very little trouble to conceal that they were atheists; Burckhardt rudely abused a highly revered historian of early Christianity. From their own times to the present, without interruption, Christian historians have accused Gibbon and Burckhardt of anti-Christian bias, of having less faith in Christian sources because they were Christian, and more faith in non-Christian sources because they were non-Christian. In their turn, these Christian historians have been accused of being biased in exactly the opposite direction. It has not always been Christians who have attacked Gibbon and Burckhardt and non-Christians who've defended them.

For my part, I find it impossible to imagine an historian who is 100% free of bias. The best we can hope for in reading historical accounts is that the historian we're reading might be less biased than some others.

I find that Gibbon and Burckhardt were at the absolute cutting edges of their times when it came to historical accuracy and insight, to separating the valuable information from the nonsense in the texts they read, out of which they made their own texts. I find that there is still much of value in their work. You may or may not find me quite silly for thinking so.

But, of course, the work of historians constantly continues. We build upon the work of those historians whom we consider to be the best, and we improve their work in the light of new information. This can sometimes be painful to admit, if one has developed a personal fondness for an historian of a previous time. But to expect Gibbon to out-do the historians of the 21st century in all things would be somewhat like believing that a watch made during Gibbon's lifetime

could outperform a quality 21-st century watch

in every way. It would be cuckoo-bananas. Aside from the entire thicket of Eusebius' honesty and Burckhardt's opinion of Eusebius and Burckhardt's objectivity and the objectivity of someone impuning Burckhardt's objectivity, and countless other questions from which it would be somewhere between very difficult and impossible to remove the last trace of prejudice, there are objective advances. Things are discovered, artifacts and texts. The historical picture is revised in the light of new information.

Or it is figured out, by no means with total certainty yet, but approaching it steadily, that what was thought to be a collection of historical writings is... not. That it may be a parody of historical writing. Or perhaps a glimpse into a non-Christian culture which persisted, but went into hiding as the Christians took over the Empire. Or perhaps something else. You see how in this case historians and Classicists, by arriving at an unexpected answer, have multiplied rather than reduced the number of open questions.

Burckhardt, Karl IV, Italianer von Karls Zeit, Priviligien

Seit Jahren strenge ich mich an, eine Seite, eine einzige Seite von Burckhardts Kultur der Renaissance zu verstehen, naemlich S 25-26 in dtv 1982, ueber des Kaisers Karl des IVten italianische Reise. "Eine der schmaehlichsten politischen Komoedien," nennt Burckhardt das. Karl reist nach Italien, verkauft -- irgendetwas, kehrt dann "mit seinem vollen Geldsack" wieder nach Hause, die Italiener lachen sich darueber scheckig, Burckhardt scheint sich als Deutscher darueber zu schaemen, ich weiss nicht was passiert ist.

"Priviligien" habe Karl verkauft. Was sind das? Vorrechte? Recht wozu? Warum waren sie, nach Burckhardt und nach diese sich scheckig lachendedn Italienern zu der Zeit und vor Ort, so viel mehr wert als ein Sack voller Geld?

Kann jemand mir erklaeren, was hier passiert ist, worueber die Italiener sich amuesiert haben and Burckhardt sich verschaemt hat?

Early Christianity: How Much Do We Really Know?

There's the question of the historical Jesus, enthusiastically discussed by more and ever more laymen, and left undiscussed by Biblical scholars and Christian theologians scholars who still almost unanimously insist that the matter has been thoroughly investigated (When? Where?) and that it's certain Jesus existed, and Shut up!

Then there's the entire excitement surrounding Constantine the Great, the inaccuracies about him which are so popular: It's still so often said that he made Christianity Rome's official religion -- he did not. It's said that he (often: he and the Pope) wrote or re-wrote or edited the New Testament at the Council of Nicea. Nope: the Pope wasn't there; the Pope and Constantine had many more reasons to be enemies than to be allies; nobody altered the Bible or discussed what should or shouldn't be in it at Nicea; and there's no evidence that Constantine gave a rat's ass one way or the other about what was in it.

Here's a question which might deserve much more study than it has generally received so far: would Constantine have involved himself with Christianity at all if his mother, the empress Helena, had not been a Christian? I put it to you: which seems more plausible: that a Roman Emperor who, all who have studied his life agree, was a particularly savvy politician, that this Emperor gave some support to Christianity because, at a crucial battle in his struggle to solidify his control of the Empire, he saw a cross in the sky along with words telling him that with this sign he would conquer -- or that he gave some support to Christianity because his mother was a Christian and had a lot of influence on him?

The story of the cross and the words in the sky, and a lot of other nonsense, comes from Eusebius, who unfortunately is our most important single surviving source of the history of Christianity up until Constantine in general, and of biographical information about Constantine in particular. I say unfortunately because Eusebius' pants were on fire. I say unfortunately because the truth was not in him.

Some apologists and conservative historians will attack me for doubting the veracity of Eusebius, but that's okay. I'm in very, very good company: Edward Gibbon's multi-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire



has been praised as a groundbreaking work of genius, still unsurpassed in many ways two and a half centuries after its first publication -- because that's exactly what it is. It has also been vehemently condemned from the time it first appeared uo until the present day -- because Gibbon was clearly (although not quite explicitly) an atheist, and because he dared to question the accuracy of the historical accounts given by people like Eusebius.

A century after Gibbon, Jacob Burckhardt, another historian of great genius, enjoying the greater freedom of expression given to us all by courageous pioneers of freethinking like Hobbes and Spinoza and Hume and Gibbon and Voltaire, found no reason to hide his great annoyance with Eusebius, who had so thoroughly hidden and blurred the history which he, Burckhardt, was working so hard to find. Burckhardt came right out and called Eusebius a liar. and of course, the same people who disliked Gibbon also attacked Burckhardt, for the same reasons.

But lo and behold great wonders, O ye nations: as time passes, Gibbon and Burckhardt look more and more reasonable, as Eusebius, whose veracity was even attacked by other Christian historians as early as the 5th century, looks more and more like a teller of tall tales and less and less like the historian he called himself, and for which he was mostly taken from his time to Gibbon's.

And this man, Eusebius, is pretty much the founder of Christian historicism, the foundation upon which much of the history written over the course of the next millenium in Christendom, was based. Gibbon and Burckhardt and anyone else who cared about investigating history properly were quite right to be annoyed. Such a shaky foundation has produced a lot of spectacularly shaky results, and continues to do so today, although, as I said, Eusebius' falsehoods are finally beginning to be exposed and undone.

So I would say, to those who dislike Christianity and its continued omnipresence and power: don't blame Constantine above all others. If it hadn't been for his mother, he might never have given any support to Christianity. He might have continued Diocletian's persecution of it, and you and I might never have heard of Christianity. But far more, blame Eusebius, who took Constantine's support of Christianity and said that it was a conversion to Christianity, although Constantine never withdrew his support for the pagan religions. Blame Eusebius for intensifying the Christian disregard for reality and reason. Blame Eusebius for spreading the idea that Christianity had conquered Rome, decades before it actually did. Reality and reason and historical accuracy were defeated first, and then the Empire followed.

Holier Than Me

In the Cambridge Medieval History; Vol. VIII: The Close of the Middle Ages,published in 1936, ch II, "John Hus," pp 45-64, Dr Kamil Krofta, then Professor of Bohemian History in Prague and Minister of Foreign Affairs in Czechoslovakia, laments (p 45) some conditions in the later 14th century in Catholic Europe generally and in Bohemia specifically: "the almost limitless wealth and power of the Church of Rome, two factors which resulted in extravagance and immorality among the priesthood," as well as a "general relaxation of morals." Throughout the chapter, Dr Krofta gets no more specific than "extravagance," "immorality," "relaxation of morals" or "moral degeneration," leading the reader to wonder just exactly what he could be talking about -- sexual promiscuity? pagan folk festivals? athletic competitions, with gambling? or without ganbling? or gambling without athletic competitions? mass murder and rape? drunkenness? theatre? the study of ancient literature? Your guess, gentle reader, is at least as good as mine.

But perhaps Dr Krofta himself doesn't know very specifically just what sort of sin it is which he is deploring here. He reminds me more than a bit of Hazel Motes, the protagonist of Flannery O'Conner's novel Wise Blood,and I feel sort of like the man who tells Hazel that talking about sin is best left to those who have some experience with it.

But I'm jumping to conclusions here. Whatever it actually was which, five and a half centuries later, aroused Krofta's indignation so, it bothered some people at the time, too, and aroused "the zealous and extraordinary activity of a few chosen spirits," (p 45) including the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV -- the same Charles who appears as a figure of fun in Burckhardt's Kultur der Renaissance in Italien,being led around by the nose by Italian noblemen -- extravagant and degenerate Italian noblemen, presumably, with relaxed morals -- and selling off Imperial privileges to them at bargain-basement prices. (pp 25-26 in Burckhardt, Frankfurt aM: Insel, 1997) The same Charles whose Autobiography,even by medieval literary standards, so drips with wince-making piety.

To be sure, this is also the same Charles IV who founded the first university in Central Europe, in Prague in 1348. But if we judge this university by Charles, and by Hus, its most famous alumnus, and by Krofta, its Professor of Bohemian History in 1936, how stimulating a place could it ever have been? No. Until we know more, we must not judge it so.

To return to Krofta's narrative -- besides the Emperor Charles IV, another "chosen spirit" who fought the rigorously unspecified bad morals of the time was, of course, John Hus. Krofta gets no more specific about moral things than his mention (p 46) of three "vanities" Hus gave up upon entering the priesthood: fine clothing, fine food and chess. Krofta remarks that although Hus had earlier indulged in all of these, "he was certainly at all times far removed from any debauchery or immorality." So it could have been worse: Krofta seems to be implying that playing chess, getting proper nutrition and not wearing hair shirts won't necessarily send you to Hell, and praising Hus, if I'm reading between the lines properly, for never having had a girlfriend and/or gotten drunk and/or used a cussword.

P 47: Early on in Hus' career -- he was ordained in 1400 or 1401 -- "Queen Sophia herself was so attracted by him that she made him her chaplain or perhaps even her confessor." I've heard of several instances, in bygone Christian centuries, from St Jerome to Franz von Dietrichstein in Bohemia two centuries after Hus, of noble ladies being powerfully drawn to passionate young priests. And I have wondered whether their relationships might have been like those between ancient Roman ladies and leading gladiators -- with the difference of secrecy of course, because of Christianity generally frowning upon sex. But perhaps these suspicions of mine are merely projections of my own preferences and fantasies. Maybe what Jerome and Hus and Dietrichstein and their many lady friends were doing was much more like "Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys." Or maybe Andy Warhol captured the essence of such relstionships with his opinion, "The most exciting thing is not doing it." Actual ascetic ecstasy? Okay, Andy, whatever you say.

P 48: "It is possible[...]that Hus[...]found a divergence between the teaching of Christ and that of the oldest Fathers of the Church on the one hand and doctrines which the Church of his day asked its adherents to believe on the other, that he was dissatisfied with the manner in which the scholasticism of his day settled the fundamental questions of the Christian faith." Quelle horreur! Over the course of a thousand years, some things had diverged! Holier than thou, more Christian than thou, just like Luther -- assuming Krofta is correct.

Krofta sums up his laudatio, (p 63) "Hus assumed for himself and thus for every believer the right to be his own judge in matters of faith. Although he himself placed limits to the freedom of this right of judgment, desiring that the Holy Writ should be acknowledged as a law from which there should be no departure soever[...]"

If Krofta is at all aware of the monstrous irony here, he gives no sign of it: Hus fought and died for the "freedom" of every person to decide just exactly how the Bible was the absolute authority.

Hus, Savonarola, Luther: every now and then a wild-eyed fanatic with a heart full of fear comes along, dreaming of vengeance, taking all of this stuff seriously.