The past Isn't past

 

The Past Isn’t Even Past

 

A fond farewell to Catholic Truth and its Catholic Truth (Scotland) blog after twenty-four years fighting for the Faith; it will be sorely missed. “Ae farewell and then for ever.” We wish its editor, Patricia (Pat) McKeever, every blessing on all her future endeavours. 

            The newsletter once published a letter in which I replied to a priest who had said he could never make any sense out of why The Three Musketeers had been on the Index of Prohibited Books.  We learn what we learn in the course of our formal education – and even that in itself is subject to the vagaries of an individual’s schooling – then we forget much of it if not quite all.  What might remain to us is a general impression that can serve as a broad foundation for our future prejudices; but in many cases we do not retain even that, and the entirety of our attitude to any particular subject will be formed on the basis of our cultural environment, which is to say our media environment.

            Having mentioned historical fiction we must give it some further consideration because it is necessarily the most vivid and engaging material that sticks in the memory and shapes our understanding of history, and that will very often be fiction whether written or broadcast.  Who controls the past controls the present: who controls the present controls the future because the past isn’t really even past as our interpretation of history underpins our social, political and cultural attitudes.  Indeed, much of our political development in the nineteenth century may be traced to the embrace by conservatives under the novelist Disraeli of the Catholic alternative to the Whig interpretation of history understood as a Tory version. We are who we are because we think we were who we think we were, and that includes being a ‘we’ in the first place as well as what ‘we’ might think of ‘them’ whoever ‘they’ might be.

            Returning to my example, The Three Musketeers is a work the contents of which are generally transmitted to British youth at an early age while the details of French history are not.  That transmission might possibly include reading the book itself, or extracts from it, in the mid-teens, but more often does not.  There are simplified texts and illustrated versions for the under-tens along with films and television series so children encounter it repeatedly.  Was that your experience? 

            The condemnation of the amatory fictions of the Alexandres Dumas, père et fils, along with the younger Dumas’ pamphlet advocating divorce, was not due to their ‘amatory’ nature – censorship on the basis of decency was a matter primarily for the secular authorities – but because such beguiling and exciting works draw readers into their creators’ mindset or general outlook.  That is more true of broadcast works than written material because they are usually imbibed in a more passive manner with less discernment on the part of the consumer.  Hence works proceeding from the dangerously flawed mentality of undesirable types like the Alexandres Dumas should be avoided as simple entertainments – and should be consumed only warily if at all. 

            The Dumas were Bonapartists, (the father even joined the self-proclaimed emperor’s meritocratic aristocracy) and their works were shot through with all the attitudes and opinions that that implies.  If you had the experience I described of an early introduction to The Three Musketeers, might I ask how much of it you believed, and how much of it sticks in the memory?  The book presents the court of Louis XIII as having been a thoroughly decadent nest of intrigue with a weak and ineffectual cuckold of a king, a flighty adulteress of a queen and a scheming villain of a minister; a regime, in short, ripe for revolutionary overthrow even then in the days of French glory.  Yet these were among the greatest figures in the history of France!  Of course, there is an implication that what had been true of one branch of the traditional monarchy was true also of that reigning at the time of publication in the 1840s.     

            As was normal under a Catholic polity, and had been the case with our own Lords Chancellor before Henry VIII’s time, the first minister of France (the keeper of the king’s conscience) was ordinarily a bishop made a cardinal as a mark of papal approval of the close connection between Church and State, and with it between secular and divine law, under such an arrangement.  To depict Cardinal Richelieu as a scheming villain amounted to an attack upon the clergy (backed up by the characterisation of various other clerical figures across the Dumas’ oeuvre) and not an argument but rather a certain measure of pressure in favour of disestablishment.

            The Dumas did not promote the excesses of the Revolution but its general objectives and its outcome as realised, in their opinion, under their supposedly imperial hero.  Similarly, in our own day, popular historical fictions such as Dame Hilary Mantel’s (adapted for stage and small screen) Wolf Hall Trilogy, tend not to endorse the contentious actions of their protagonists, but by their choice of heroes and villains, their characterisation of people real and fictitious, and their interpretation of events by which they impose an artificial narrative arc upon carefully selected facts they make clear where their creators’ sympathies lie and they insinuate all manner of ideas deep into the intellectual subconscious of the consumer.

            As we all know, the imposition of an ideologically contrived narrative is not restricted to material presented as fiction but transforms narrations of historical events, objective facts, into effective fictions.  While events as they occur certainly have a coherence in the light of divine providence, the coinage of eternity is not spent in a television studio packaging the past in neat and tidy parcels congratulating today on having evolved through history into a wonderfully enlightened present.  Written history may be flawed in many ways, but one definite advance in modern practice is that in print the inclusion of footnotes indicating sources, and giving at least some clue as to where facts and their interpretation can be distinguished, has become almost universal.

            It is quite clearly possible to create historical narratives, whether of fact or fiction, in which that which is believed to have occurred is presented in a manner compatible with Church teaching by rejecting the Pelagian myth of constant moral progress under the weight of human effort, or the alternative of natural evolutionary development in the direction of freedom from antiquated moral norms.  It is also possible to create narratives in which the ‘boo and hooray’ words and names accord with the perspectives of faithful Catholics in wherever the narrative is set.  The EWTN films we promote do exactly that.  What is not possible, however, is a narrative that is both narrative and a neutral presentation of life as it actually happened.  ‘The past is another country’ we do not have a visa to visit; historiography is not only possible but obligatory if we are to achieve an understanding of history that might allow us to build the future we want to see, but history itself is irrecoverably impossible to grasp.  The past remains ever with us in its moral, social and political effects precisely because we can only ever see it recreated one way or another, interpreted for us or against.

By Prayer Crusader St Philip Howard