To this point we have explored at some length the nature of the ancient sacral worldview that so thoroughly permeated ancient societies. Now we turn attention to the nature of sacral history, or history written from a sacral perspective, and whether it should be regarded as a legitimate form of historiography. We will begin by considering the broader question of what history is. Because we commonly use the term history in two quite different ways, it is easy to confuse them, and it can sometimes be a challenge to keep them separate in our minds, even for serious students of history.

On the one hand, we often use the word to refer to “the past” or events of the past. Thus we expect a history of ancient Rome to cover everything that took place relating to Rome and its empire; likewise, a history of medieval England would consist of the totality of events related to England from, say, AD 500 to 1500. But we also use the word history in reference to discussions of the past—for example, books and articles written by historians. The confusion arises when we think of a work by a historian as merely a “record of the past.” Yet only a moment’s reflection affirms that no historical work could possibly contain everything that occurred in the past, even during a very limited period. No one truly supposes that a book on the Revolutionary War of 1776 discusses everything that happened during the war. Clearly, such a book contains only a selection of people, events, ideas, and so on.

Nevertheless, it is easy to unconsciously confuse these two usages, so that without being aware, one supposes that a work of history contains “the past”—what actually happened—when the reality is that that kind of objective, comprehensive knowledge is attainable only, as it were, by God. Why is that? There are numerous reasons. First, a historian is limited to the information available in source material at the time of writing. Countless things happen in the world every day that are never recorded anywhere and thus are completely lost to history. This is particularly true for the inner thoughts of individuals. Consider the following statement by Mark Twain about the impossible task of writing anything approaching a complete biography:

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, and every day, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, (which are but the mute articulation of his feelings,) not those other things are his history. His acts and his words are merely the visible thin crust of his world, with its scattered snow summits and its vacant wastes of water—and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden—it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written.[1]

Twain is remarking on the superficial nature of a person’s acts compared with the inner person, which is much harder for a biographer to access—in truth, hardly at all. But consider what it would require even to record every single act of one person’s life! In addition, countless materials that once existed have vanished with the passage of time, never to be recovered. This is especially true for the ancient world but also for the modern world. Historians have greatly lamented, for example, the contemporary use of email and the near disappearance of letter writing. Letters, especially personal letters, have traditionally been one of the most interesting types of primary sources available to the researcher.

Second, it is important to realize that source materials come with their own points of view and cannot be taken at face value. A historian who makes use of a person’s autobiography, for example, must make allowance for the obvious biases of the author. Even government documents, although they are dry and impersonal, are hardly objective in an absolute sense; we all know that governments (and by extension, government employees who produce the records) have their own political perspectives. And finally, as we have already noted, a work of history is limited to what an author can fit into a few hundred pages. The historian must select the details he or she thinks are significant and important.

Most importantly, a meaningful work of history should do more than supply facts to the reader; it should also explain their significance. The past has been described as “an intractable, incomprehensible mass of uncounted and unaccountable data,” from which a historian must make a ruthless selection based on one or more organizing principles.[2] But what kind of organizing principles should be used? The fundamental role of a historian is to explain the causes of what happened in the past—a chain of causation: situation A led to event B, which led to situation C, resulting ultimately in, for example, the outbreak of World War I.

And how does one correctly determine the historical causes of a particular event? As in the work of a medical diagnostician, informed insight and even intuition are as important as scientific evidence. No matter how thorough the research one conducts, the story of causation—of how some events are related to other events—will not emerge automatically from the facts. It requires considerable personal insight on the part of the historian. It will also be based on the unspoken assumptions of the historian, which are rooted in his or her background, culture, and interests.

Much of that background will, of course, have been shaped by the world into which the historian was born. It would be unreasonable to expect writers from Han China, classical Greece, Renaissance Italy, and twentieth-century Russia to see the world from the same perspective. They will each have been molded by the attitudes of the society around them, although they may also perhaps be able, in turn, to shape attitudes going forward. According to Jacob Burckhardt, the great nineteenth-century cultural historian, history is “the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.”[3] The practical reality is that one age will find different things worthy of note than another age. Historical researchers from one age will have different assumptions than those of a researcher in another age; indeed, two historians from the same age will perhaps see things quite differently.

It should be patently clear, then, that a work of history is not simply a retelling of what happened in the past, but rather an account of the past—one person’s interpretation. It is a particular author’s version of what happened in the past based on study of the available sources relating to that time, place, and subject. In order to keep these two meanings of history straight, I will henceforward use the term historiography primarily to refer to written history—so that, for example, a book dealing with Assyrian history will be referred to as a work of Assyrian historiography rather than of Assyrian history.[4]

Is Sacral Historiography Legitimate Historiography?

There is a widely held view—often an unconscious assumption—that proper historians are supposed to be strictly objective in their views, limiting themselves to “just the facts, ma’am,” and to relate the past “as it actually happened.” But it should be clear from the preceding discussion that this is an unattainable ideal. A work that restricted itself to narrating a series of historical events in chronological order, with no analysis of those events, would not be a work of historiography at all but a chronicle. Similarly, a book consisting of no more than a catalog of archaeological finds from classical Greece or lists of the reigns of German emperors would be a work not of historiography but of antiquarianism. Historiography, as already stated, should provide analysis in an effort to understand the significance of the facts, not merely list them one after the other, even if presented in chronological order.

If, as just discussed, historiography is a person’s interpretation of certain events or ideas from the past, does this mean that any given work of history is essentially worthless? Is it simply a biased, subjective, incomplete view of the past? Does it mean that anything goes when it comes to writing history? If there is no such thing as true objectivity in that process, of what value is it?

It goes without saying that accuracy is important for any work of historiography. Nobody would want to read a book about the Civil War that gives an incorrect date for the Battle of Gettysburg. And the fact that bias is present in all historical writings is of course not a license to substitute propaganda for legitimate historiography. A competent historian must exercise basic honesty in discussing the past, not deliberately twisting the facts to meet the demands of the thesis. Nevertheless, pure objectivity is impossible. The mere fact that one is arguing a thesis means that to a certain degree that person is shaping the facts—emphasizing certain facts over others, placing them in one context rather than another. It is important to stress that facts do not speak and explain themselves—the historian must interpret them, which means giving them a particular significance beyond the surface meaning.

One reason that history is revised, so to speak, every generation is that different generations think differently about events and are interested in different details, so they focus on those things that past generations may have almost completely ignored. Women’s history is a major example. Before about 1970, historians were little interested in the roles of women, in part because until recent times they generally did not play a prominent part in political and diplomatic history, which was the primary focus of most historiography. Since the 1920s, social history has become more popular, including the history of domestic practices, which naturally involved women to a much greater degree. In the seventies, the era of the feminist movement, historians began to focus more specifically on the place of women in history, in some cases even arguing that women played a more significant role in public affairs than was previously acknowledged.[5] Another prime example of changing interests is the subject of homosexuality in ancient Greece. Until recent decades, homosexual practices in Greek society were either ignored or greatly downplayed because the matter was considered distasteful. Over the last forty years, numerous books and articles have been published on the subject.

One irony of the academic field of history is that while the maxim is constantly preached that historical research and writing should be objective and free of passion and bias, those works that exhibit a clear sense of purpose and passionately argue a clear thesis are often the most influential works in their field of interest. The eminent historian of ancient Greece J. B. Bury (1861–1927), who once insisted that history is “a science, no less and no more,”[6] acknowledged later: “I do not think that freedom from bias is possible, and I do not think it is desirable. Whoever writes completely free from bias will produce a colourless and dull work.”[7]

To reinforce this point, let me provide brief summaries of two famous (and influential) works of Roman historiography from the twentieth century. Mikhail Rostovtzeff (1870–1952) was a Russian émigré first to the United Kingdom and later to the United States, having left his native land at the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917. His most famous work was a two-volume opus known as The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926, 2nd ed. 1957). The book was recognized as highly innovative methodologically, incorporating mounds of evidence from archaeology, numismatics, papyrology, and epigraphy into his historical account to an unprecedented degree. He provided a vivid interpretation of the chaotic period of the third century of the Roman Empire, effectively likening the social and political conflicts of the time to the Bolshevik Revolution in his native Russia. Although a fierce anti-Bolshevik, he nevertheless framed the near collapse of the Roman Empire in terms of class conflict between the resentful proletariat that had come to fill the ranks of the Roman army and the cultured and economically successful bourgeoisie of the towns and cities of the empire. Later critics, while acknowledging his massive expertise in the ancient evidence, found his interpretation based too much on the incorporation of modern ideas and terminology that were inappropriate for the ancient world.[8]

The second example is Ronald Syme (1903–1989), perhaps the most eminent Roman historian of his generation. His most famous work was The Roman Revolution (1939), which was replete with erudition in the form of prosopographical research. Prosopography deals with the political, social, and family connections of individuals, in this case specifically those who supported the revolution by Octavian (later renamed Augustus) that resulted in the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire. But the key to understanding the philosophical intent of The Roman Revolution is the date; it was published in 1939, at the beginning of World War II. Unlike most scholars of his time, Syme did not view Augustus’s rise to power in terms of a charismatic leader who rescued the Roman state from the political decadence of the late Republic, the age of Pompey the Great, Cicero, and Julius Caesar. Instead, he portrayed him as an ancient Mussolini, as “the thuggish leader of a faction[,] . . . a Duce, a Führer, a gangland capo, who eliminated his enemies, rewarded his friends, and established a new regime.”[9] The main point of the prosopographical analysis was to demonstrate how the future emperor organized “a ‘party’ of supporters devoted solely to his success.”[10]

In each of these cases, critics took serious issue with the author’s specific thesis, but the important point is that if these books had lacked strong theses, they would have been much less interesting and less influential.[11] Some books are extremely learned in content but are in essence catalogs of, say, Roman archaeological materials or Roman prosopography, which are often consulted by specialist researchers but scarcely ever read. Nobody but a masochist would actually read cover to cover The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (1971), the three-volume work by A. H. M. Jones, J. R. Martindale, and J. Morris, whereas Syme’s work is still read regularly, although it weighs in at nearly six hundred pages. The reason should be fairly obvious. The work of Jones et al., while extremely informative and perhaps even fascinating at times to specialists in the field, is still basically a soporific catalog of esoteric information. Yet Syme’s book, while displaying similar erudition, incorporates its data into a vigorous and stimulating argument—a dramatic picture of conflict in one of the most influential eras in all history. Even if the thesis is not fully convincing, it is nevertheless a work that causes one to think deeply about politics and power. The depth of its historical analysis is what makes it a great work, not simply its historical accuracy nor the sheer number of facts it incorporates.

How, then, does sacral historiography fit into all this? Just as any substantial work of written history unavoidably reflects aspects of the author’s culturally inherited values, perspectives, and biases, ancient historiography was similarly filtered, often quite tellingly, through a culture’s dominant sacral perspective. To properly understand the nature of ancient writings, one must keep in mind the fundamental reality that the ancients thought differently than moderns do. The sacral mindset had very different priorities than the modern scientific mentality. As we have seen, because ancient peoples viewed the gods as being at the foundation of reality, secular matters held only minor significance. As previously stated, “The purely secular—insofar as it could be granted to exist at all—was the purely trivial.”[12]

Thus, when an ancient writer—whether it be the author of a biblical history, the Greek historian Herodotus, or Mormon—speaks of God or the gods as being behind a great military victory or defeat, it is not merely a kind of religious propaganda or puffery by which the writer is trying to impress the reader with the superiority of his god or his theology. In the same way that a myth is a genuine attempt to understand the invisible realities of the sacred underlying the world as a whole (i.e., with respect to creation and the setting up of the world order), sacral history is an attempt to explain the genuine significance of the sacred in historical time. We will see shortly that a common technique of sacral historiography is to provide a kind of dual causation: the historian provides a secular narrative explaining how a king was overthrown or a victory was won but then adds an explanation of how deity was really behind what happened. In many cases this second explanation is present only in formulaic language, such as “The gods went before the king and granted him victory.” Complex descriptions of divine involvement and explicit miracles are relatively rare, with the exception of some of the historical writings of the Hebrew Bible.

In the following chapters we will examine the nature of ancient historical writing, from its first beginnings in ancient Sumer, through the Israelites, Greeks, and Romans, and into the medieval and modern ages. The emphasis throughout will be on the nature of sacral history, how it manifested itself in different ways in different cultures, all the while maintaining certain basic values and attitudes. One of the most striking of those values, from a modern perspective, is the emphasis on moral principles in history. Even as historiography became more secular in nature (with less overt mention of deity) in the modern era, the prominence given to questions of morality in history was preserved up to the middle of the nineteenth century, with the rise of the idea of history as an objective science. It turns out after all that the prophet-moralist-historian Mormon, as we will see, was in excellent company.

Notes

[1] Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume 1, Reader’s Edition, ed. Harriet E. Smith et al. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 44.

[2] M. I. Finley, The Use and Abuse of History, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1975), 13.

[3] Jacob Burckhardt, Judgments on History and Historians (London: Allen & Unwin, 1959), 158, quoted in Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (London: Penguin, 1961), 69.

[4] Unfortunately, there is potential for confusion from the fact that historiography can also apply to works that discuss the history of history, such as a book that treats the various works on the Vietnam War by historians over the last fifty years and discusses how interpretations and approaches may have changed over time. Most of part II will focus on this type of historiography—how the nature of sacral history has evolved over many centuries of historical writing.

[5] See, for example, Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, eds., A History of Women in the West, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

[6] J. B. Bury, “The Science of History,” in Selected Essays of J. B. Bury, ed. Harold Temperley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 4.

[7] Quoted in Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 286.

[8] See Meyer Reinhold, “Historian of the Classic World: A Critique of Rostovtzeff,” in Studies in Classical History and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 82–100.

[9] Ronald Mellor, “Sir Ronald Syme: Life and Scholarship,” in Sir Ronald Syme, Sallust (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), xii.

[10] Mellor, “Sir Ronald Syme,” xiii.

[11] “Every one of [Syme’s] books addresses a problem, poses a series of questions. Although he believed deeply in narrative history, no Symean narrative is ever a disinterested record of facts and events. He is always explicating a problem and arguing a thesis.” Mellor, “Sir Ronald Syme,” xxii. Again, it’s useful to keep in mind that Syme was considered the preeminent Roman historian of his era.

[12] Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 3.