The Creation of History (Biblical And Otherwise)

An excerpt from, “Herodotus and The Invention of History” by Raymond Kierstead, Reed Magazine, September 1, 2011:

Herodotus also stood heir to the tradition of Ionian critical thinking or rational inquiry. He openly recognized the influence of the late sixth- and very early fifth-century “historian,” Hecataeus of Miletus. Hecataeus was a questioner of traditions who sought to purify and rationalize the legendary inheritance of the Greeks and to purge some of the miraculous from the received tradition. For example, a King Aegyptus was said by tradition to have had 50 sons and a certain Danaos 50 daughters. Hecataeus concluded that each had 20. His attempts to sort out legends and stories and to establish the most likely and most commonsensical solution clearly shaped Herodotus’ method of inquiry and generated a tradition of separating fact from fancy, what some would see as the very essence of historical practice. This is evident in Herodotus’ skeptical treatment of ancient stories about the origins of the wars between Greeks and barbarians. Herodotus’ keen analysis of the differences between Eastern despotism and Greek liberty may well have derived in some fashion from speculative tradition among Ionian thinkers on the responsibility of climate for the character of states. In short, we can place Herodotus in a broad intellectual setting, as long as we understand that none of the Ionian traditions comprised history as such. For better or worse, as is inevitably quoted in lectures such as this, “there was no Herodotus before Herodotus.”

Herodotus’ unique invention, history, may be understood in several ways. He told an epic story of war and great deeds that was at bottom a human story. In the tradition of Hecataeus, Herodotus sought to separate fact from myth, to query his sources, to get the story right. In so doing, Herodotus established what would be the fundamental framework and subject matter of this new form of inquiry. History would deal with near-contemporary and contemporary events. As in epic, war and the causes of war and the clashes of cultures at war would be the essential subject matter of history. It would examine political life. In a certain sense, history would be polis literature, that is, a serious reflection on political cultures from the perspective of Greek political experience in the fifth century. 

In the latter aspect as least, Herodotus reflected less his Ionian background, his generally cosmopolitan outlook, and his profound interest in cultures than his acquired Athenian allegiance. As the late Moses Finley wrote, “His political vision was Athenian and democratic, but it lacked any trace of chauvinism. He was committed, but not for one moment did that release him from the high obligation of understanding . . . Nothing could be more wrongheaded than the persistent and seemingly indestructible legend of Herodotus the charmingly naïve storyteller.” Though one must add here that his history, as a reading of book I suggests, stands somewhere at the boundaries between artful storytelling and explanation.  

In sum, Herodotus defined the boundaries of his invention, history, and tied that invention to the Greek, and particularly fifth-century Athenian, passion for the political life and for political understanding. No more than we can understand fifth-century tragedy outside the polis can we understand history in its earliest manifestation outside of polis political culture.   

In establishing a narrative of the Persian Wars, in separating many facts from myths, in devising enormously complex chronologies of events, Herodotus laid fair claim to his posthumous title, Father of History. On occasion, however, one encounters a fairly naïve interpretation of Herodotus that confuses the achievement of this eminent fifth-century Greek with certain modern ideas about the possibilities of scientific history, ideas that held that historical statements or generalizations derive from the true facts of history, patiently accumulated and clearly arranged. In this light, Herodotus’ prodigious attempts to sort out truth from fiction and to compare and criticize different accounts of the same event look indeed like the beginning of an evolution that, with some unfortunate detours, culminated in modern historical method. Now, only nonhistorians suffer the delusion that history is in any sense a science, a discipline in which one argues in a simple linear way from fact to generalization. The human mind—alas, even the historian’s mind—is more complicated and interesting than that. In fact, a careful reading of Herodotus suggests that he probably has far more in common with his friend Sophocles, the fifth-century writer of tragedy, than with any post-Renaissance or modern historian. Although this might appear to be a negative comparison and judgment, it is certainly not meant to be. The narrowest conceptions of history as an empirical discipline have long since been consigned to the trash bin reserved for intellectual silliness, and modern historians increasingly appreciate not Herodotus’ prodigious fact-grubbing, worthy as it may be of admiration, but rather his imaginative capacity to give shape to time—time being the historian’s medium and the shaping of time the historian’s principal task.

An excerpt from, “The Meaning of History (Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant)” by Henry A. Kissinger, Bokförlaget Stolpe, 2022, Pg. 10-12:

Who is right then? Is history the self-realization of the spirit of freedom as Hegel held? Or does it represent the growth and decline of organic cultures, their essence a mystery, their moving force longing and their manifestation power as Spengler argued? Is there a deeper purpose in all this emergence and decay of civilizations, a realization of salvation by faith as Toynbee implies? Does history amount to no more than eternal recurrence, the stage for the Man who surpasses himself of Nietzsche or does it reveal the drama of a divine plan, gradually unfolding and culminating in universal peace, as Kant asserts?

If meaning is the metaphysical context that ascribes significance does this preclude differentia by which to judge validity? These criteria exist, but they are not as obvious as the logical positivists assumed.

Though the questions delimit the range of answers, we can require the answers to be relevant to the problem. Though each culture, and perhaps each individual interprets his data in an intensely personal way, we can insist that the data be adhered to. We can analyse internal consistency. On another level we can judge the adequacy of the thinker’s philosophical  assumptions by their scope, by their grasp of the totality of life, instead of just its appearances. Newton sitting under the apple tree might have correctly concluded that apples fall when ripe. It is not a question of right or wrong, therefore, but of depth and shallowness. It does not suffice to show logically deduced theorems, as an absolute test of validity. There must also exist a relation to the pervasiveness of an inward experience which transcends phenomenal reality. For though man is a thinking being, it does not follow that his being exhausts itself in thinking. The ultimate mysteries of life are perhaps not approachable by dissection, but may require the poet’s view who grasps the unity of life, which is greater than any, however painstaking analysis of its manifestations. 

The Philosophy of History exhibits therefore in its metaphysical assumptions an attitude towards the basic problems of existence. They reveal whether life is approached with reverence and humility or with the assertive tool of a reason that admits no reality outside itself. The resolution of the dilemma of historical events serving as the condition for a transcendental experience or reality exhausting itself in phenomenal appearances discloses the ethical predispositions of a personality, not a property of historical data.

An excerpt from, “Finding Meaning in History” by William Anthony Hay, Law & Liberty, January 9, 2020:

The fact that grand narratives of history have largely fallen away from the intellectual landscape in the last few decades downplays their earlier prevalence, especially in the United States. Postmodernist efforts at deconstructing grand narratives had an effect from the late 1960s, while academic specialists had always been skeptical of going beyond what evidence could support. Take, for instance, Herbert Butterfield’s point that as historical accounts took a broader view, they tended to impose what he called a Whig interpretation. Butterfield stressed that this practice of reading outcomes back into events to impose structure and causation draws attention to some things while suppressing material inconvenient to the story. Others, however, found such grand narratives a helpful way to locate themselves and the problems of their own day in a larger context that gave meaning.

Through their volumes on the history of civilization, Will and Ariel Durant tapped into a large audience in the United States—readers that presumably had more than a vestigial interest in culture. The series paralleled the introduction of courses in Western Civilization by American colleges designed, as David Gress argued in From Plato to NATO, to make sense of the crisis brought on by World War I. By contrast, academics had long sought to ground their approaches to society and culture in scientific method with its prestige and claim to understanding. An older tradition of philosophical history as belle lettres did not suit this cultural moment. Nor did the more narrowly focused application of forensic methodology by matching documentary evidence to reconstruct events provide enough structure. Social science demanded a system to make sense of episodes and events which otherwise blend together without any means of distinguishing immediacy from importance.

In The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis, Carroll Quigley sought to provide that kind of system. A foreword by his friend Harry Hogan for the 1979 edition by Liberty Fund describes it as “an ambitious effort to make history understandable.” Critics at its original release in 1961 thought it a considerable improvement on Arnold Toynbee’s influential but now largely forgotten A Study of History, which traced in twelve volumes the development and decay of historic civilizations. Lacking rigor, his volumes amounted to a large collection of evidence without the critical analysis the task demanded. Toynbee, Quigley warned, failed to explain adequately the process of change and particularly why apparently successful civilizations suddenly fail to meet challenges and thereby fall into decline. Quigley’s concern about the prospects for American civilization made him determined to put analysis on a scientific basis that avoids what he disparages as childish judgments on historical events.

An excerpt from, “Narrative Art in Genesis: Specimens of Stylistic and Structural Analysis” by Jan P. Fokkelman, Wipf and Stock Publishers, May 2004, Pg. 11 – 14: