The more I looked over my notes, the more I realized that the basic “either-or” choice already posited in the quarrels of Plato and Isocrates in the pre-Christian world was merely intensified by the message of Christ. And it is the lack of Faith that causes solid, well-meaning historians to “miss the point”, and present a picture of a Church and a Catholicism that ultimately does not do justice to the spirit-exalting force that has inebriated men like myself, making our lives worth living in a way that our non-believing contemporaries cannot experience.įinally, I came to the conclusion that a practical means of avoiding an unnuanced generalism and an all too mundane specialization could be found in presenting Church History within the context of the ancient battle of rhetoric versus philosophy. It was, after all, the Faith that enabled a Ludwig von Pastor, whose career involved a recounting of endless tales of ecclesiastical misdeeds, to shed tears over the historical reality of holiness at a canonization ceremony in the early twentieth century. But for me, a believer, for whom the Faith is a real, true, different, and central element in grasping the meaning of life, a history written with my Faith in mind would be one that could finally permit a combination of the general and the specific and allow for “seeing the forest and the trees” at one and the same time. Even a sincere non-believer might have to admit that a traditionalist work, offering the perspective of a formidable religious force in world history, was necessary to his better understanding of the whole picture of human thought and action. Secondly, I began to think that it would be refreshing for a consciously traditionalist historian who did not accept the modernist contention that belief had to be left aside when discussing natural historical events, to add his voice to the record of the past.
It seemed to me, therefore, that something desperately needed to be done to bridge this gap between generalists and specialists. On the other hand, it has exposed me to excellent general meditations on historical developments which nevertheless do not sufficiently take into account the work of the above-mentioned specialists, and frequently read more like exaggeratedly tidy literary tours de force rather than honest studies of the past. On the one hand, it has revealed the superb work done by a large number of non-Catholic scholars who have painted reliable, insightful pictures of slices of Church History while often displaying terrible gaps in their knowledge of theology, philosophy, and historical eras other than the narrow one chosen for their studies. Three factors have played a role in stimulating my desire to write this book.įirst of all, thirteen years of research covering Church History from the beginnings to the present has left me with a mass of material illustrating a basic problem which needs seriously to be addressed.
#The black legend and the historical truth series#
The Black Legends and the Timeless Drama of Truth A Series of Essays Based on the Gardone Lectures, 1993-2004
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