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.”
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 n--- D--- 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.
Preciosa
in conspectu Domini. Mors sanctorum ejus
Precious in
the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints
While the media decry
the Ugandan legislation and demand retribution from the international community
and individual western nations, I can see only the blessed fruit of the life
and faithful witness in death of St. Charles Lwanga and his companions in
martyrdom by which their country has been brought to this happy liberation from
the horrors of their history.
By Prayer Crusader St Philip Howard
