A Creature with Memory: Discovering Pasts, Conceiving Futures

“Knowledge,” Joyce Appleby reminds us, “begins with memory.”[1] With the historiographical turn toward postmodern modes of discourse in the early 1980s and 1990s, the epistemological relationship between knowledge and authorial power has characterized the debate over how best to interpret the past. If memory is the beginning of knowledge, then historians must understand how the past has been remembered individually by participants in historical events and collectively by racial and ethnic groups, regions, and nations after these events have passed. Divisive and contentious events such as the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement, and media-driven modern warfare have created situations in which the “truth” of that experience depends largely on the position of the contributor. Postmodernist theorists argue that this subjectivity of the truth colors all historical writing, and whether or not one accedes to the more extreme positions of these thinkers, it is difficult to deny the subjectivity inherent in using memory as a methodological category. By examining the process through which memory transforms from an immediately lived experience into institutional or collective memory narrated as history, historians may better understand the subjectivity intrinsic to postmodern historiography.

According to Appleby, at its most basic level, the creation of history consists of the continuous process of translating memory into text, and in the postmodern sense of the term “text”, these “written histories are exposed to the critical scrutiny of unknown, unseen outsiders.”[2] In other words, once memory is committed to history, it becomes an object open to the historiographical interpretation of later scholars, regardless of their ability to objectively ascertain the validity of those memories. Postmodern deconstructions of these texts, in the Foucaultian sense, operate by revealing the unconscious omissions of their writers—or “rememberers”—and by acknowledging the multiplicity of meaning derived from even the most authoritative texts. Similarly, the fact that one account of an event can be construed in so many diverse ways indicates that “there is no stability in language” and, perhaps implicitly, none in memory either.[3] If historical texts are generated from remembered events and these texts lack a dependable objective stance, does this suggest that memory, too, is impossible to condense into a reasonably objective account of an event?

In the era of media-driven conflicts and twenty-four hour news cycles, late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century warfare constitutes one area in which individual memory and its relationship with collective memory becomes important. The increased audio-visual documentation of war as an event broadcasted to homes across the United States since the Vietnam War necessitates that the significance of memory become greater for the individual “worm’s-eye-view” than for more omniscient-style of narrative historical construction. In other words, ground-level histories must rely more greatly on memory because this is the “lived” event—less ideologically constructed and more personally constructed—or in Yuval Noah Harari’s terminology, the experience that only the “flesh-witness” is capable of describing.[4] While the traditional methods of viewing the totality of war by analyzing its geopolitical, diplomatic, and strategic aspects remain the primary discursive modes employed to understand the wider repercussions of these events, historians risk ignoring the experiences of the individuals advancing these goals. The reticence on the part of many traditional historians likely stems from the fact that it is difficult to tell a monolithic narrative of an event in warfare from an array of subjective viewpoints. The problem is not only in attempting to construct a narrative that is sensitive to both “sides” of a story but also in recognizing that binary categories for a plethora of remembrances is not enough to create a complete narrative. For example, in The Generals’ War Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor claim that “there has been no attempt to create an omniscient narrator” because that would portend an entirely reconcilable interpretation of events, thus negating their thesis that “cultural differences” among branches of the armed forces and between civilian and military commands led to a mismanagement of the war.[5] Gordon and Trainor skillfully acknowledge the many perspectives in the preparation stages—they do, after all, maintain the plural possessive of their titular “Generals’.” However, they succeed in one sense while failing in another. By drawing together numerous accounts of the planning and implementation of Desert Storm into one coherent narrative, an omniscient narrator foists himself onto the historical account, while at the same time allowing the many distinct voices of the narrative to speak for themselves.

Despite their appreciation for the multitude of interpretations, Trainor and Gordon did not intend to use memory as a methodological tool for understanding that conflict. Since memory begins as an individual understanding of the past, historians must approach it at this level first. The reliability of memory becomes most debatable when external forces such as stress, fatigue, or cognitive dissonance distort one’s personal understanding of a lived past event. The experience of combat exhibits exactly these difficulties. In his autobiography of life in the Marine Corps, One Bullet Away, Nathaniel Fick describes combat as “a form of vertigo” that causes one to “doubt…[one’s] own senses.”[6] This personal memory is, by definition, subjective, and when the story-telling process begins—almost immediately afterward, according to Fick—the remembrance of an event entails a simultaneous reconciliation of one’s own viewpoint with that of others and a solidification of one’s personal rendition of it. This is what Appleby refers to as the “psychological dynamics of knowing,” meaning that memory requires both the maintenance of factual accuracy and the “personal recognition” that “encourages myth-making.”[7] When recalling an ambush while driving through the Iraqi town of al-Gharraf, Fick concedes that “something in the retelling unnerved [him]” because “faith in our senses is what anchors us to reality.”[8] The fact that “five marines told five different stories” that would later coalesce into a unified, grand-narrative of the unit suggests that the subjectivity of memory is still reconcilable.[9] However, the notion that our memories are faulty and unreliable imply that reality itself, and especially the immediately remembered past, may be unreliable as well. On a larger scale, this way of remembering often reflects historiographical emphases on individual wars as well: World War I and Vietnam occupy a cultural space in the American psyche that, according to Harari, “focuses overwhelmingly on the experience of war rather than politics or strategy.”[10] The question, then, is to what extent memory as a methodological tool should be used to reconcile competing points of view. For Fick, this process involves “institutionalizing” memory through “telling and retelling” and “changing and learning” from combat events.[11] This mirrors what Appleby describes as the “winnowing of memory” for the “health of [a] nation.”[12] Perhaps this is precisely the progression from individual to collective memory about which Foucault theorizes.

Individual memory, of course, has important bearings on later recollections and interpre-tations of earlier events and ideas. The southern Lost Cause—a particular version of Civil War remem-brance—emerged, according to Gaines M. Foster, out of the collective southern desire to ease the social tensions that accompanied rapid social and economic change during Reconstruction. Public celebrations, memorials, and reenactments designed to mourn the loss of the dead and commemorate the honor of the endeavor reduced the psychological impact of southern failure in the Civil War.[13] Some of the earliest iterations of the Lost Cause mentality were expressed in the immediate aftermath of the war, and the commiseration of the military defeat echoed the grievances of personal loss suffered by its “flesh-witnesses.” For example, according to Rod Andrew, Jr., for Confederate general and later South Carolina politician Wade Hampton III, “the Lost Cause message transcended politics and even race—it was personal.”[14] The immediacy of Hampton’s grief over the Confederacy reflected the battlefield anguish he experienced in losing his son. For Southerners in general, the direct memories of the war consisted of “burning homes, pillaging foragers, and dying loved ones,” and by mourning and sanctifying these personal losses, they presaged later deferential commemorations of the Confederacy as a whole.[15] And, as the events of the war itself receded into the past, the horrific memories of solidiers’ experience were supplanted by more heroic notions of honor and valor by the turn of the twentieth century, as personal memory transformed into collective memory.[16] As Robert Penn Warren opined, if “the Civil War is our felt history—history lived in the American imagination,” then memory becomes an ideally suited method to reveal the personal, collective, and institutional interpretations of such a divisive event.[17] The event “lived” personally became “relived” via the national memory.

If southern soldiers were “flesh-witnesses” to the carnage of the Civil War itself, African-American slaves were another sort of “flesh-witness” to the bondage that, in part, precipitated the outbreak of that war. As personal memory gave way to a collective memory among southern whites, it also gave way to a national forgetting of another type. This begs the question: how does a national memory cope with events, institutions, and ideas it wishes to forget? Obviously, slavery and the Civil War were remembered very differently depending on racial and regional identity, and according to David W. Blight, the reconciliationist approach to Civil War memory overwhelmed the emancipationist version and relegated the tragedy of slavery to the margins its interpretation. “The memory of slavery,” Blight writes, “…never fit well into a developing narrative in which the Old and New South were romanticized and welcomed back into a new nationalism…”[18] Blight argues that by framing the Civil War in terms of states’ rights, property rights, and a resistance to the economic domination of the North, white southerners willfully ignored the fact that slavery played an enormous role in its origins, conduct, and outcome.[19] In this way, memory as methodology retains a racial and regional context that historians must confront in order to more objectively resolve these differences in remembrance. Collective, institutional, and public memories are fluid concepts, and nations often take an active role in “molding their citizens’ understanding of the past.”[20] This selective form of memory, as Mary Douglas has argued, causes “its members to forget those events that do not accord with its righteous image,” which certainly describes the historiography of the Civil War, slavery, and racial injustice in America.[21]

Clearly, creating a public memory is a multifaceted process that can be either organic, directed, or a combination of the two. One final issue historians must address when dealing with the interpretive hermeneutics of memory is the question of how much distance—chronological, ideological, or otherwise—is necessary between a historian and an event before a reasonable degree of objectivity may be reached. With reference to diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis, Charles W. Eagles has averred that “writing in the midst of a struggle can lead to a lack of scholarly detachment and an asymmetrical approach” that falls short of the objective detachment necessary for scholarly analysis.[22] Paradoxically, detachment from events at once lends a credible objectivity to historians, yet at the same time reduces their capacity as “witnesses” to an event. By comparing the Cold War and its definitive conclusion following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union with the Civil Rights Movement—an open-ended, ongoing struggle—Eagles argues that modern historians cannot approach the kind of objectivity necessary to discuss such a charged event dispassionately.[23] While this is a valid and important critique, it strains credibility by concluding, as Gaddis wrote, that “this is an abnormal way of writing history.”[24] In a postmodern sense, this is precisely the normal way of writing history, since dispassionate objectivity is theoretically impossible no matter one’s chronological or ideological detachment from the subject. For the twenty-first-century historian, memory remains a compelling methodological structure with which to elucidate a more personal past.

Is it necessary for historians to reach a sort of “new” consensus history in order to reconcile all of the diverse and conflicting memories borne out of past events? This seems as unlikely as it is unfeasible. When using memory as a practical means of comprehending a historically relevant past, the retention of a multiplicity of viewpoints is both desirable and inevitable, and as a by-product, the fierce individuality of subjective memory accords with recent postmodern trends, whether historians wish to identify themselves with that movement or not. Race, region, chronological proximity to events, and varying degrees of privilege afforded by eye- and flesh-witness accounts all affect personal memory and the collective and institutional memories that follow. The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana quipped that “a creature without memory cannot discover the past; one without expectation cannot conceive a future.”[25] Although this aphorism is often distilled into clichés condemning those who do not “learn from the past” to historical repetition, Santayana understood that the entire bedrock of history consisted of the human ability to remember “what happened” and that the knowledge gained through this endeavor allows us to construct meaning out of these events. Ironically, the fragility of memory—as well as the fragility of human life—has made the historical apparatus of memory a distinctly subjective tool. Historians should not lament this non-positivistic approach, though. Santayana also conceded that “knowledge,” and thus memory “is not truth,” and within the postmodern historiographical context, this subjectivity may be a virtue and not a curse.[26] The past is, after all, lived individually, and therefore, interpreting it through the lens of individual memory may be as valid as many other methods.

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[1] Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1994), 258.

[2] Ibid., 266.

[3] Ibid., 267.

[4] Yuval Noah Harari, “Armchairs, Coffee, and Authority: Eye-witnesses and Flesh-witnesses Speak about War, 1100-2000,” Journal of Military History 74, no. 1 (January 2010): 75 and passim.

[5] Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1995), xii and 472.

[6] Nathaniel Fick, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 219.

[7] Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, 261.

[8] Fick, One Bullet Away, 219.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Harari, “Armchairs, Coffee, and Authority: Eye-witnesses and Flesh-witnesses Speak about War, 1100-2000,” 57.

[11] Fick, One Bullet Away, 219.

[12] Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, 307.

[13] Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 62-87.

[14] Rod Andrew, “‘My Children on the Field’: Wade Hampton Biography, and the Roots of the Lost Cause,” in Cimbala and Miller, eds., The Great Task Remaining Before Us: Reconstruction as America’s Continuing Civil War (forthcoming, Fordham, 2010), 17.

[15] Ibid., 17 and 23-24.

[16] David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 179.

[17] In Matthew J. Grow, “The Shadow of the Civil War: A Historiography of Civil War Memory,” American Nineteenth Century History (Summer 2003): 77.

[18] Blight, Race and Reunion, 4.

[19] Ibid., 6-30.

[20] Appleby, Hunt, Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, 297.

[21] Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, 1986), 112, quoted in Appleby, Hunt, Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, 297.

[22] Charles W. Eagles, “Toward New Histories of the Civil Rights Era,” Journal of Southern History 66, no. 4 (November 2000): 815.

[23] Ibid.

[24] John Lewis Gaddis, “The New Cold War History: First Impressions,” in We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford and New York, 1997), 281-295, quoted in Eagles, “Toward New Histories of the Civil Rights Era,” 4.

[25] John McCormick, George Santayana: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1988), 348.

[26] Ibid., 357

Revolt and Reaction in Twentieth Century Historiography: Microhistorians and the Annalistes

The nineteenth century was instrumental in the development of the modern professional discipline of history. Leopold von Ranke epitomized this movement in Germany and contributed to the advance of historicism, which affirmed that “historical knowledge will not emerge by applying conceptual schemata to the past but…through the analysis of individual instances and concrete events.”[1] The tenets of historicism stood in stark contrast to some of the more progressive notions of Whiggish history all the while accepting the ideas of historical change discoverable through scientific modes of discourse. Ranke promoted objective, empirical, source- and fact-based history and specifically rejected the imposition of overarching themes and principles onto the past.[2] Historians, he asserted, had no business passing judgments on the past using modern-day values, but rather should simply tell history, in the oft quoted phrase, “wie es eigenlich gewesen ist,” or “as it actually happened.”[3] This approach to history owed much to the scientific optimism of the late nineteenth century, as well as the belief that “universal history comprehends the past life of mankind, not in its particular relations and trends, but in its fullness and totality.”[4] Interestingly, Ranke, so keen on this weltgeschichte, conceded that “the study of particulars, even of a single detail, ha[d] its value, if it [was] done well.”[5] It is to the “particulars” of twentieth century microhistory and its reaction to “traditional” history that looms large in modern shifts in historiography.

The greatest expression of these new ways of thinking about history originated with the French Annales School of the early and mid-twentieth century. Applying new techniques of social science to history, the Annalistes rejected the politico-military aspect of history and instead “attempt[ed]…to adapt economic, linguistic, sociological, geographical, anthropological, psychological, and natural science notions to the study of history and to infuse a historical orientation into the social and human sciences.”[6] Beginning with the founding of the Annales journal by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929, the Annalistes focused primarily on the major social and cultural structures that existed over long arcs of time, or the longue dureé, and on the mentalités, or psychological states, of history’s participants.

The most prominent historian among the second generation of Annalistes was Fernand Braudel, who took the Annales synthesis of social sciences to the next extreme by integrating each of these new aims of history into his grand vision of an all-encompassing history of the Mediterranean. In his Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Braudel expounds upon three levels of history, which correspond not only to the people involved but the geographies and climates as well. Braudel’s history is quantitative and analytical but rarely narrates events. For the Annalistes, this methodology reflected their interest in telling the “total history” of a particular time period, event, or place, in this case, the Mediterranean Sea.[8] As Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie writes in The Territory of the Historian, the topics on which historians should write need not be confined to the human participants, and he contends that the historian may concern himself with any aspect of a subject’s past. For example, “the aim of climatic history, is not to explain human history, nor to offer simplistic accounts of this or that remarkable episode…[but] to produce a clear picture of the changing meteorological patterns of past ages in the spirit of what Paul Veyne calls ‘a cosmological history of nature.’”[9] As history became more and more depersonalized through the use of these social scientific methods, Annales history, by the 1960s and 70s, reached a point at which its explanatory power veered out of the range of normal historical inquiry. Although the techniques used by the Annalistes proved invaluable to later historians, their seeming lack of interest in the actual individuals of history masked what many believed to be the true subject of historical study. As Jim Sharpe has argued, “such quantified evidence,” while important, “cannot be the whole story.”[10] From the 1970s onward, in the new field known as microhistory, human beings reasserted their dominance as the most essential subject matter for historians. By becoming active historical participants, rather than subject to the movement of history around them, people became “the historical actors…[who] created history.”[11] While microhistory deferred to the more traditional narrative forms of history, it was regarded as anything but traditional among academic historians. As a variety of Sharpe’s “history from below,” microhistorians have sought to tell local, often personal, stories of obscure or marginal figures, or they have illuminate little-known or little-documented events from the past. Let us examine three representative microhistories—Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, Robert Darnton’s “The Great Cat Massacre,” and Rhys Isaac’s Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom­—and their relationship with “traditional history.”

One difficulty traditional historians have had with microhistory is the indeterminacy of many of its sources. For example, while the primary source for The Cheese and Worms is the trial record of the principle historical actor, Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, Ginzburg concedes that oral popular culture has come down to historians largely through the distorted lenses of upper class written sources. Since Menocchio is not among the elites, and left no written record of his own, his story is known to us only through others. “At best, what is noted,” Ginzburg grieves, “is the ‘decay’ or the ‘distortion’ experienced by those ideas or beliefs in the course of their transmission,” and he accedes that “the thoughts, the beliefs and the aspirations of the peasants and artisans of the past reach us…through distorting viewpoints and intermediaries.”[12] At the outset, Ginzburg acknowledges that by dealing with a historical actor for whom we have essentially no other sources, we are at a clear disadvantage over other well-documented histories. Similarly, Robert Darnton seems reluctant to “overload” the story of the seventeenth century massacre of cats on the Rue Saint-Séverin “with social commentary,” but he finds it difficult to proceed without this form of historical analysis. Darnton, too, confess that the primary sources available for his microhistory are scant, with “the only version of the cat massacre available” being “put into writing, long after the fact, by Nicolas Contat,” who “selected details, ordered events, and framed his story in such a way as to bring out what was meaningful for him.”[13] Darnton’s primary source amounts to an admittedly biased secondary source. However, Ginzburg replies to this general charge by asserting that “the fact that a source is not ‘objective’…does not mean that it is not useful,” adding that even “meager, scattered, and obscure documentation can be put to good use.”[14]

Rhys Isaac’s treatment of Landon Carter encounters similar difficulties. His principle primary source is the diary of Carter himself, though in many chapters the narrative he weaves has more to do with other characters involved in Carter’s life—namely, the slaves Carter owned as a plantation patriarch in mid-eighteenth century Virginia. Unfortunately, as Isaac discloses, we have no slave narratives written by “the Eight” runaway slaves, and he attempts to close the gaps in knowledge with other related information. Isaac utilizes the 1930s Federal Writer’s Project archives of aged, former slaves’ stories, claiming that he was “persuaded that these memoirs from the enslaved must be called upon to the one-sided, harsh account of the lives of their people that Landon left to his diary….”[15] These imperfectly-recollected, disparate accounts afford no continuity between the lives of mid-eighteenth century Virginian slaves and the various ex-slaves who were released from bondage as youths in the 1860s. Furthermore, Isaac’s exploitation of these sources presumes that popular and folk cultures existed in a vacuum and remained static over the course of nearly two centuries. By defining slavery as “being compelled to act out not one’s own story but the story imposed on one by another,” Isaac makes it difficult to reconcile his own imposition of stories onto those whom he seeks to historically emancipate.[16]

Another issue traditional historians have with microhistory is its seeming lack of broad explanatory power. Traditionally, history was a discipline used to explicate the origin, causation, or meaning of large historical events. While this focus was narrowed once the nineteenth-century history of “great men” and their politico-military exploits gave way to the more nuanced social and cultural histories of the twentieth century, history remained the story of big events, ideas, and movements. What can we learn of the broader historical implications of sixteenth-century religion, for example, by examining one Friulian miller, and an atypical one at that? Ginzburg claims that we can learn a great deal because even individual stories are important for their own sake. Although he does not claim that Menocchio is representative of his age, Ginzburg does declare that an investigation into his trial “confirm[s] the existence of traits reduceable [sic] to a common peasant culture.”[17] Likewise, the folk traditions of early modern Frenchmen remain largely a matter of guesswork, and while Darnton is careful not to extrapolate too much from his study of the cat massacre, he does imply that “common motifs [can] be found” that bond the French print-shop apprentices to similar popular cultures in space and time.[18] By sifting “through collections of folk tales, superstitions, proverbs, and popular medicine” that “resisted the influence of the printed word,” Darnton grants that the typical historical dimensions may not be able to hold this investigation. As opposed to the Annales School’s interest in mentalités, or the mindset of an entire culture, microhistorians often use the term “cosmology” to describe the individual outlook of one person, not necessarily in the metaphysical sense, but certainly in descriptive terms affirming personal identity or “self-hood.”[19] Personal ideologies constitute “cosmologies,” and it is the microhistorian’s task to elucidate these.

One final issue traditional historians have had with microhistory is its haphazard theoretical approach. While in many ways, microhistory may be viewed as a reaction against the broad and impersonal Annales School, it has maintained, as Giovanni Levi has averred, an “interchange with the social sciences…without…feeling any need to refer to any coherent system of concepts or principles of their own.”[20] In short, with “no body of established orthodoxy,” microhistory may best be regarded as a methodological tool rather than a theoretical construct.[21] If this is true, do historians approach microhistory with preconceived intellectual and interpretive frameworks, and if so, does this defeat the purpose of historical inquiry? While this is a greater issue among postmodernists, microhistorians and their critics must contend with it as well. Levi has argued that microhistory may best be viewed as a form of cultural anthropology, and just as anthropological research is often conducted from within, microhistorical research may be best understood from within as well. This, of course, entails an insertion of the author into his own historical narrative, and certainly this is the case with Ginzburg and Isaac. Ginzburg—the son of a father murdered by Nazis—must refute claims that he may be dehistoricizing Menocchio in order to empathize with him. As a commoner used by elites with power over him, Menocchio provides an excellent canvas on which to paint one’s own personal picture.[22] Still, Ginzburg’s careful handling of the historical material makes this a tenuous position to hold. Rhys Isaac introduces himself into Landon Carter’s story several pages into his narrative, describing his own “fascination with the past” and his conviction that “Landon Carter’s diary…should be systematically read for the riches it contained.”[23] One wonders whether the story is more about him than Carter, though if it does not obscure the telling of the historical narrative, has it really contravened the aim of history?

In conclusion, microhistory, though it has its drawbacks, represents one of the many ways history diversified in the 1970s and 80s, and it remains a methodological tool often employed by historians interested in subjects that otherwise would be given only brief treatment in larger historical works. On the one hand, it utilizes many of the social science tools bequeathed to it by the Annales School, but on the other, it tells a historical story that is deeply narrative in structure and eschews the impersonal tone of those histories against which it reacted. Western historiography has undergone numerous changes in its long history, and microhistory is simply another in a long line of historical writing and thinking, and it is particularly well-suited as a companion of contemporary social, cultural, and intellectual history. As, in part, a product of the societies that produce them, these major historical trends illuminate not only the time periods on which they comment, but also the time periods from which they spring.

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[1] Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography: An Introduction, 37.

[2]Ibid., 39 and 41.

[3]Leopold von Ranke, The Ideal of Universal History, 55.

[4]Ibid., 61.

[5]Ibid.

[6]T. Stoianavich, French Historical Method: The ‘Annales’ Paradigm, quoted in Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography, 107.

[7]Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography, 103.

[8]Thomas Keuhn, The Annales School and Microhistory, Lecture Hardin Hall, Clemson University, 19 October 2009.

[9]Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Territory of the Historian, 295.

[10]Jim Sharpe, “History from Below” in New Perspectives in Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke, 31.

[11]Ibid., 37.

[12]Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi, xv.

[13]Robert Darnton, “The Great Cat Massacre”, 99.

[14]Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, xvii.

[15]Rhys Isaac, Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation, 193.

[16]Ibid., 7, and Paul Anderson, Sources and Themes in Southern History, Lecture Hardin Hall, Clemson University, 16 November 2009.

[17]Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, xxi.

[18]Robert Darnton, “The Great Cat Massacre,” 92.

[19]Paul Anderson, Sources and Themes in Southern History, Lecture Hardin Hall, Clemson University, 16 November 2009.

[20]Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Perter Burke, 93.

[21]Ibid.

[22]Thomas Keuhn, The Annales School and Microhistory, Lecture Hardin Hall, Clemson University, 19 October 2009.

[23]Rhys Isaac, Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation, xix.

Conflict and Complexity in the Historiography of Science and Religion: A Comparison of Andrew Dickson White and David C. Lindberg, Part 2

David C. Lindberg, the Complexity Thesis,
and the Deconstruction of the Conflict Thesis

Lindberg acknowledges two typical techniques used by White to explain early Christians’ lack of interest in empirical science: “First, the early Church denigrated the investigation of nature for its own sake: with the kingdom of heaven just around the corner, there was no time or energy to waste on irrelevancies.”[1] For virtually every major scientific paradigm shift, White discerned a traditional religious figure opposing it: “The establishment of Christianity, beginning a new evolution in theology,” White intoned,

arrested the normal development of the physical sciences for over fifteen hundred years… The general belief derived from the New Testament was that the end of the world was at hand… This belief appears frequently throughout the entire period of the Middle Ages; but during the first thousand years it is clearly dominant. From Lactantius and Eusebius, in the third century, pouring contempt…over studies in astronomy to Peter Damian, the noted chancellor of Pope Gregory VII, in the eleventh century declaring all worldly sciences to be “absurdities” and “fooleries,” it becomes a very important element in the atmosphere of thought.[2]

Lindberg continues: “Second, whatever truth was discovered through patient observation and reasoning was forced to yield to the puerile opinions extracted by dogmatic superstitions from sacred writings. The result was a tyranny of ignorance and superstition that ‘perverted’ and ‘crushed’ true science.”[3] White consistently uses this quarrelsome language throughout his Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom—“conflict,” “war,” “attack,” “besiege,” “battles,” “triumph,” “defeat,” “soldier,” and so on, appear dozens of times throughout the work.[4] In the introduction to his abridgment, Warfare of Science, White even employs a direct analogy to historical and contemporary military leaders of what were, to him, far less serious conflicts in the long arc of history: “A hard contest it has been; a war waged longer, with battles fiercer, with sieges more persistent, with strategies more shrewd than in any of the comparatively transient warfare of Caesar or Napoleon or Moltke.”[5] He continued to employ this rhetoric throughout his work. For example, White reestablished the familiar trope of a flat earth—which had not been seriously used to describe the shape of the earth since before the time of Plato—in his scathing denunciation of medieval geography:

Although the great majority of the early fathers of the Church, and especially Lactantius, sought to crush [the idea of a spherical earth] beneath the utterances attributed to Isaiah, David, and St. Paul, the better opinions of Eudoxus and Aristotle could not be forgotten. Clement of Alexandria and Origen had even supported it. Ambrose and Augustine tolerated it, and, after Cosmas had held sway a hundred years, it received new life from a great churchman of southern Europe, Isidore of Seville, who, however fettered by the dominant theology in many other things, braved it in this.[6]

Although White acknowledged that some early Christians understood the physical geography bequeathed to them by the ancient Greeks, he mistrusted the Christian patristic writers who, in his mind, merely “tolerated” it in spite of their scriptural predilections. In his warfare metaphor, White drew the battle lines and pitted his soldiers against one another:

Columbus is the next warrior. The world has heard of his battles: how the Bishop of Ceuta worsted him in Portugal; how at the Junta of Salamanca the theologians overwhelmed him with quotations from St. Paul, and from St. Augustine. And even after Columbus was triumphant, and after his voyage had greatly strengthened the theory of the earth’s sphericity, the Church, by its highest authority, was again solemnly committed to the theory of the earth’s flatness…But in 1519 Science gains a crushing victory. Magellan makes his famous voyages. He proves the earth to be round, for his great expedition circumnavigates it…but this does not end the war.[7]

As we have seen, the “perversion” and “crushing” of science demonstrated for White, not the pitfalls of religious belief, but the drawbacks of authoritarianism in religious institutions. Lindberg, whose specialty is the history of the physical sciences in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, presents numerous rejoinders in his voluminous writings in direct opposition to White’s dualistic arguments. For example, White decries Augustine’s positions on rationalism and empiricism and styles him as among the worst offenders in Western history:

Following [the] precept[s] of St. Augustine, there were developed, in every field, theological views of science, which have never led to a single truth—which, without exception, have forced mankind away from the truth, and have caused Christendom to stumble for centuries into abysses of error and sorrow. In meteorology, as in every other science which he dealt, Augustine based everything on the letter of the sacred text…[8]

The influence of Augustine on not only Christian theology but also the Western intellectual and philosophical traditions need not be overstated. However, Lindberg describes Augustine’s concept of science, which consisted not as a barrier to spiritual truth but as a handmaiden to better comprehend the mysteries of God and His creations, thusly:

Augustine, who did so much to determine medieval attitudes, admonished his readers to set their hearts on the celestial and eternal, rather than the earthly and the temporal. Nonetheless, he acknowledged that the temporal could serve the eternal by supplying knowledge about nature that would contribute to the proper interpretation of Scripture and the development of Christian doctrine. And in his own works, Augustine displayed a sophisticated knowledge of Greek natural philosophy. Natural philosophy, like philosophy more generally, was to serve handmaiden functions.[9]

Roger Bacon serves as another interesting character in the narrative White presents in his epic war between science and religion. In the thirteenth century, Roger Bacon, an English Franciscan friar and natural philosopher, was imprisoned for a period of ten years. Lindberg maintains a rather skeptical position of his incarceration:

Despite a widespread popular belief that Roger Bacon was imprisoned for his attack on authority and his urgent assertion of a novel scientific methodology, for example, Bacon in fact represented very old methodological traditions, and his imprisonment, if it occurred at all (which I doubt), probably resulted from his sympathies with the radical “poverty” wing of the Franciscan Order (a wholly theological matter), rather than from any scientific novelties that he may have proposed.[10]

A devoted supporter of empirical observational techniques, Bacon made great strides in optics and the refraction of light, kept detailed astronomical observation, and anticipated the uses of gunpowder, among many other things.[11] Bacon is often described as an eccentric—even by the even-tempered Lindberg—and portrayals of his odd personality, intertwined with his advocacy of notions seemingly out of step with medieval sensibilities, contribute to the misunderstanding that he was imprisoned for experimentation. White added to this archetypal character the prescience of a prophet:

It should be borne in mind that his method of investigation was even greater than its results. In an age when theological subtilizing was alone thought to give the title of scholar, he insisted on real reasoning and the aid of natural science by mathematics; in an age when experimenting was sure to cost a man his reputation, and was likely to cost him his life, he insisted on experimenting, and braved all its risks…. On this man came the brunt of the battle. The most conscientious men of his time thought it their duty to fight him, and they fought him steadily and bitterly. His sin was not disbelief in Christianity, not want of fidelity to the Church, not even dissent from the main lines of orthodoxy; on the contrary, he showed in all his writings a desire to strengthen Christianity, to build up the Church and to develop orthodoxy. He was attacked and condemned mainly because he did not believe that philosophy had become complete, and that nothing more was to be learned; he was condemned, as his opponents expressly declared, “on account of suspicious novelties.” [12]

Lindberg is highly skeptical of the allegation that Bacon’s difficulties with religious authorities originated from his dabbling with “scientific novelties” and it is telling that he preserves White’s language in his revision. Lindberg ventured to “rescue Bacon from the mythologizers and debunkers,” and he surely had White in mind when he proposed this reclamation of Bacon’s identity as “a brilliant, combative and somewhat eccentric schoolman of the thirteenth century endeavoring to take advantage of the new learning just then coming available while remaining true to traditional notions, patristic in origin, of the importance to be attached to philosophical knowledge,” rather than “a modern, out of step with his age, [or] a harbinger of things to come.”[13] White positioned Bacon as an ally of science in his binary war, but Bacon, a Franciscan friar, confounded these clear-cut divisions by advocating both empiricism and adherence to Church doctrine. Lindberg forcefully redefines him not as the “champion of autonomous, secularized natural science against a repressive church,” but as a more dynamic figure with internal contradictions: “The growing autonomy and secularization of science were among the things he feared. But he also feared the suppression of new learning. He was endeavoring, therefore, to steer a middle course between two equally dangerous extremes. In this he reflects, in microcosm, the dilemma of the thirteenth century.”[14] Indeed, he reflects the dilemma of simplifying any historical figure to the point of misrepresentation.

The trial of Galileo—the penultimate archetype in the story of religion leveling a crushing blow against an undeserving scientific mind—offers, of course, the most dramatic example of White’s Conflict Thesis in action. Galileo Galilei championed the heliocentric theory of Copernicus after his telescopic observations of the heavens in 1609 and 1610 yielded evidence of mountains and valleys on the moon, sunspots, the phases of Venus, and moons orbiting Jupiter. In 1632, he was brought before the Roman Inquisition to defend his position that the earth revolved around the sun. After the Inquisition found his views suspect of heresy, Galileo was forced to retract his offending statements, and he spent the remainder of his life under house arrest.[15] Most modern interpretations of the trial have cast a far more nuanced light on the subject than the black-and-white affair promoted by White. According to Mario Biagioli, Galileo’s difficulties emerged out of the convoluted nature of early seventeenth century patronage dynamics. Galileo’s guilt was regarded by religious authorities as a double indignation—not only did he contest the official position of the Church on Copernicanism, but he also insulted his former benefactor. In his early years as a mathematics professor in Padua, Galileo received significant support from Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, later to become Pope Urban VIII. It is possible that with an ally in the upper echelons of the Church, Galileo believed he might escape retribution for publishing hypotheses subtly challenging established Church positions. It did not help matters that Galileo, in his groundbreaking Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, put the geocentric, Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system, of which Pope Urban VIII availed himself, in the mouth of a character named Simplicio. Although modeled upon a sixth century commentator on Aristotle, the unfortunate connotations of the name did not endear Galileo to his former patron.

White suffused this story with his usual aggressive language, claiming that “the whole war [between science and religion] was at last concentrated” on Galileo, against whom it “was long and bitter.”[16] For White, Galileo’s trial also served as a proxy war for the Church to squelch the rising tide of Copernicus’ theory, and its conclusion brought a “victory for the Church” over his erroneous ideas.[17] It would require the undeniable proofs of later observational science to herald “the retreat of the Church” after this victory:

In spite of all that has been said by the…apologists, there no longer remains the shadow of a doubt that the papal infallibility was committed fully and irrevocably against the double revolution of the earth. As the documents of Galileo’s trial show, Paul V, in 1616, pushed on with all his might the condemnation of Galileo and of the works of Copernicus and of all others teaching the motion of the earth around its axis and around the sun. So, too, the condemnation of Galileo in 1633, and in all the proceedings which led up to it and which followed it, Urban VIII was the central figure. Without his sanction no action could be taken.[18]

However, Lindberg acknowledges the “complex realities” that better construe the proper nature of Galileo’s troubles with the authorities. He notes the obvious facts that are often obscured by didactic narratives of the affair:

Every one of the combatants, whether Church official or disciple of Galileo, called himself a Christian; and all, without exception, acknowledged the authority of the Bible. Many on both sides of the struggle, including Galileo, were theologically informed, capable of articulating carefully reasoned theological positions.[19]

Lindberg is careful not to minimize the importance of the conflict over heliocentrism in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe, but he also definitively states that “it is impossible to identify clearly defined battle lines falling along a divide separating heliocentric scientists, prepared to overlook the Bible or interpret it allegorically, from geocentric theologians or clergy, committed to church tradition and Biblical literalism.”[20] Rather, the conflict was located “as much within the church (between opposing theories of biblical interpretation) and within science (between alternative cosmologies) as between science and religion.”[21]

Conclusions

Science and religion are, arguably, the most potent forces in modern life. As human institutions with a history of entanglement, modern historians face a difficult task in attempting to delineate their complex historical and contemporary relationships. Simplifying this relationship as one of unmitigated conflict obscures the rich tapestry of cooperation in which theological precepts often motivated empirical discovery, and natural philosophy often augmented the authority of Scripture. The simple act of defining “science” and “religion” as unified monoliths, ossified into rigid categories that are immune to historical change, ignores the transformations and modifications both have undergone in their long histories. David C. Lindberg reminds us that “strictly speaking, ideas cannot clash and theoretical claims cannot, of themselves, engage in combat.”[22] Obviously, Andrew Dickson White’s Conflict Thesis exerted immense influence over the historiography of science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and still wields considerable clout among the general populace today. And certainly, White reflects the spirit of his own age of progress, enlightenment, and scientific optimism. However, Lindberg’s reinterpretation of this relationship presents a more fruitful method of inquiry. If the proper territory of the historian is the study of people, then we must always emphasize the human dimensions of both conflict and complexity in science and religion.

[1] Lindberg, “Science and the Early Christian Church,” Isis 74 (1983): 510.
[2] White, Warfare of Science with Theology, 375-376.
[3] Lindberg, “Science and the Early Christian Church,” Isis 74 (1983): 510
[4] White, Warfare of Science with Theology, passim.
[5] Andrew Dickson White, Warfare of Science, 7.
[6] White, Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, vol. 1, 97.
[7] White, Warfare of Science, 20-21. The myth of the medieval acceptance of a flat earth derives almost entirely from Washington Irving’s mostly fictional biography The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 1828. For a modern-day synthesis of historical scholarship on the endurance of this myth in popular culture and the American educational system, see Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishing, 1991).
[8] White, Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, vol. 1, 325.
[9] David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 150-151.
[10] David C. Lindberg, “Medieval Science and Its Religious Context,” Osiris 10 (1995): 76.
[11] David C. Lindberg, “Science as Handmaiden: Roger Bacon and the Patristic Tradition,” Isis 78 (1987): 520.
[12] White, History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, vol. 1, 387.
[13] Lindberg, “Science as Handmaiden: Roger Bacon and the Patristic Tradition,” Isis 78 (1987): 520.
[14] Ibid., 534.
[15] David C. Lindberg, “Galileo, the Church, and the Cosmos,” in When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 34-35 and 53-57. Galileo is the subject of an extraordinary amount of scholarship. See especially Giorgio Santillana, The Crime of Galileo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955) for an adequate, if dated, general biography. For a more modern, politically contextualized study, see Mario Biagioli’s Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
[16] White, Warfare of Science with Theology vol. 1, 130.
[17] Ibid., 140.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Lindberg, “Galileo, the Church, and the Cosmos,” 58.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid., 34.

Conflict and Complexity in the Historiography of Science and Religion: A Comparison of Andrew Dickson White and David C. Lindberg, Part 1

This is a paper I wrote for my historiography class last semester. It's a topic I've written on several times before, including this blog. It's rather long, so as with most papers I post, I'm cutting it into two segments. It's a little more quotation-heavy than some of my other papers, but I think that's because both of these historians' writings simply beg to be paired with one another. Plus, since this historiography, there's not much that I can say on the topic that probably hasn't been said better by my two figures. Primarily, I track the development of the historiography of science and religion, looking at the two major bookends in the debate among historians. The basic historical consensus on the issue is that there is no consensus, but most historians do acknowledge that merely viewing the relationship as conflict is far too simplistic. Note, this doesn't mean there isn't conflict. There have obviously been numerous conflicts in the past and I discuss some of them. The point is that we can't just characterize it as science vs. religion because plenty of scientists in the past (and some now, though admittedly fewer) were religious, and plenty of religious authorities were more than acquiescent to the latest scientific discoveries. There are many other reasons that we need a more nuanced understanding of their relationship. Indeed, today's conflict is far more binary than at almost any point in the past. Enjoy!

Introduction

Scholarship regarding the historical relationship between science and religion has undergone a number of paradigm shifts since the terms of the debate were first enunciated in the late nineteenth century. Positivist historians, political progressives, and optimistic scientists interpreted their intersection with a vocabulary of combative rhetoric that depicted them locked in perpetual struggle with one another. Today, science and religion remain two of the major ideational structures in modern-day public discourse on the nature of epistemological authority. It is easy to imagine them as unqualified enemies diametrically opposed to one another based on the contemporary fundamentalist intervention with science in public education and the reactionary denunciation of all forms of religion by its most ardent atheistic detractors. The confrontational relationship that so characterizes the current popular perception of their dialogue has led many thinkers on both sides of the current divide to foist their opinions onto the history of these two edifices of Western thought. The problem in this interpretation stems from the fact that no such monolithic entities called “science” or “religion” exist as unified structures, and the critics of both desire to categorize them as if they were, which drastically oversimplifies their associations in unfair terms. Science and religion describe various disciplines and belief systems that defy this form of typecasting.[1] Most contemporary historians allege that conflict does not adequately convey the true nature of their nuanced historical junctures, and they typically paint a much more complex picture of their oftentimes connected pasts.

The modern terms of this debate can be traced back to the late nineteenth century. In 1874, the English-born American scientist and historian John William Draper published his History of the Conflict between Religion and Science. Draper composed this magnum opus, in part, as a response to what he perceived to be the unjustified consolidation of authority in the Catholic Church, which, in 1870, proclaimed the doctrine of papal infallibility and solidified its traditional positions on theology.[2] Among intellectuals and academics, Draper’s work was an immediate critical and commercial success, and this reception emboldened scientific detractors of religious dogmatism. The cultural climate of positivistic confidence buoyed the interpretation of their relationship as one of conflict and allowed this new historiographical thesis to flourish. While intellectuals enthusiastically ascribed to the tenets of higher biblical criticism, many conservative religious figures argued for a more literal, fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible.[3] This burgeoning antagonism was exacerbated in 1895 when Andrew Dickson White published the even more influential History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. Whereas Draper had argued that revealed religion contributed nothing of rational or empirical value to science, White attempted to preserve modern liberal Christianity and denounce theological dogmatism by demonstrating that the institutional Church had historically hampered scientific progress.[4] “He [Draper] regarded the struggle as one between Science and Religion,” White wrote, “[and] I believed then, and am convinced now, that it was a struggle between Science and Dogmatic Theology.”[5] According to biographer Glenn Altschuler, White endeavored not to prove science and religion historically incompatible, but rather to reconcile them with one another, hoping that

when the myths that had been associated with Christianity were cleared away, the essence of Christianity would emerge. He believed that everyone had spiritual needs that only religion could satisfy. He also recognized that religion and ethics were inextricably linked; thus an orderly society depended upon a healthy Christianity.[6]

For White, this “healthy Christianity” was the interpretative hermeneutics of higher criticism. The theories promulgated by White and Draper, and articulated for the first time in the late nineteenth century, later received the appellation of Conflict Thesis. As its name implies, this hypothesis envisioned a relationship in which religious institutions forbade any scientific teaching contrary to Biblical dogma, and science played the role of downtrodden bearer of light amidst the darkness. The progress of science over religion constituted one of the many important chapters in the Whiggish interpretation of history.[7] However, most modern interpretations of the Conflict Thesis contend that the discord envisioned by thinkers such as Draper and White was a contemporary extension of several currents of thought specific to this era: new Biblical exegeses based on the latest archaeological, historical, and philological evidence; Darwin’s theory of evolution; and the beginnings of fundamentalist Christian belief.[8]

David C. Lindberg, professor emeritus in the history of science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has been at the forefront of the reinterpretation of the intersection of science and religion, and he has composed many revisionist histories of science in order to amend the Conflict Thesis. The modern-day rejection of this theory accompanied the similar rejection of positivistic history in the early and mid-twentieth century, but the Conflict Thesis proved more resilient than the positivism it outlasted. Though it has been unfashionable in academia since at least the 1970s, it has remained an accepted notion among popular historians, the nonreligious public, and many scientists themselves. For example, in The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason, Charles Freeman describes the systematic destruction of Greek rationalism by the triumphant Church of the fourth and fifth centuries:

Christianity, under the influential banner of Paul’s denunciation of Greek philosophy, began to create the barrier between science—and rational thought in general—and religion that appears to be unique to Christianity. Far from the rise of science challenging the Christian concept of God (as is often assumed by protagonists in the debate), it was Christianity that actively challenged a well- established and sophisticated tradition of scientific thinking.[9]

Similarly, outspoken atheist science writers such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet regularly trumpet the danger fundamentalist religious belief poses to science not only in the present, but also in the past.[10] Lindberg and other modern academics have sought to eliminate the “retrospective fallacy,” in which the accomplishments of science in the past are judged by their later corroboration.[11] Using this methodology, modern historians have replaced “conflict” with “complexity.”[12] By comparing the Conflict Thesis of Andrew Dickson White with the Complexity Thesis of David C. Lindberg, the former emerges as an oversimplified account of the relationship between these two often overlapping positions.

Andrew Dickson White and the Conflict Thesis

Andrew Dickson White was born in Homer, New York, on November 7, 1832, to Episcopalian, abolitionist parents.[13] Despite their wealth, Horace White and Clara Dickson imparted to their son the importance of meritocracy in America and the noblesse oblige that accompanied their affluence and social status.[14] These values later influenced White’s emphasis on the importance of education not only for the betterment of the individual but also as the key to rectifying the ills of society. Throughout his childhood, White maintained the lofty goal of attending Yale University, but at his father’s insistence, he enrolled in the smaller Episcopalian Geneva College (now, Hobart and William Smith College) in 1849. He never fully acclimated himself to the school, and after only a year, he informed his family of his intention to withdraw from the university. He claimed that he had “wasted enough time, and, anxious to try for something better, urged upon [his] father [his] desire to go to one of the larger New England universities.”[15] Rather than risk a falling out with his son, Horace White acquiesced, and Andrew Dickson White left for Yale in 1850.

While at Yale, White gravitated toward the study of history. He traveled to Europe in 1853 and studied in both Russia and Germany. In Germany, he attended the lectures of the eminent historian Leopold von Ranke, which he found dull and uninspiring, though the empiricism with which Ranke conducted both his research and lectures left an impression on White that would later be manifested in his attitudes toward the history of science.[16] His time in Germany also solidified his position on the need for a well-educated clergy, amenable to the progress of science, and purged of their more parochial and conventional modes of thought. Referring to the declining numbers of church attendance in Germany—and implying that the United States might follow suit if the clergy enforced their literal interpretation of Scripture on their flocks—White wrote that

…no one who has lived among them [Germans] can doubt the existence of…a [religious] spirit; but it is due mainly to the fact that, while the simple results of scientific investigation have filtered down among the people at large, the dominant party in the Lutheran Church has steadily refused to recognise this fact, and has persisted in imposing on Scripture the fetters of literal and dogmatic interpretation which Germany has largely outgrown. A similar danger threatens every other country in which the clergy pursue a similar policy. No thinking man, whatever may be his religious views, can fail to regret this. A thoughtful, reverent, enlightened clergy is a great blessing to any country…[17]

Disturbed by what he perceived as the repressive nature of the Lutheran church in Germany and distinctly aware of the importance of education in rectifying these problems, White resolved to pursue a compromise between believing Christians and the observable facts of science.

In 1856, after studying at the Sorbonne and the University of Berlin, White returned to Yale and received a Master’s degree in history. Hoping to obtain a teaching position at Yale, White remained in New Haven, Connecticut, following his matriculation. This optimism was to be short lived, and his alma mater denied him a position, in part, because the administration was guarded about its acceptance of nondenominational professors. Although raised as an Episcopalian, White never confirmed his adherence to the faith officially, and the Calvinist Congregationalist institution professed misgivings about his full acceptance into their academic community.[18] Disappointed by this turn of events, White wrote that

[w]hile in this state of mind, I met my class assembled at the Yale commencement of 1856 to take the master’s degree in course, after the manner of those days. This was the turning point for me. I had for some time been more and more uneasy and unhappy because my way did not seem clear; but at this commencement in 1856, while lounging among my classmates in the college yard, I heard one say that President Wayland of Brown University was addressing the graduates in the Hall of the Alumni… He spoke very impressively as follows: “The best field of graduates is now in the West…our Western States are to hold the balance of power in the Union and to determine whether the country shall become a blessing or a curse in human history."[19]

Shortly thereafter, White accepted a position at the nondenominational state university of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The nonsectarian colleges of the western United States convinced White of the need for similar schools in New England and encouraged him to transplant these values to his native New York.[20]

In the early 1860s, White became a Republican state senator in New York, where he made the acquaintance of fellow senator Ezra Cornell, a Quaker who had made his fortune with Western Union Telegraph Company. Cornell, a budding philanthropist, approached White in 1863 with a sum of $500,000 and asked for suggestions on ways to use this money to benefit the state of New York.[21] White replied that the best thing Cornell could do for the state was to “establish or strengthen some institution for higher instruction,” adding that “education in history and literature should be the bloom of the whole growth.”[22] Due to his previous difficulties with denominational institutions, White also recommended that the university be established as nonsectarian—the first private land grant institution of higher education to hold this distinction.[23] Cornell, who had been expelled by the Quakers for marrying a non-Quaker, agreed, and in 1865 Cornell University was founded in Ithaca, New York, and Andrew Dickson White served as its first president.[24]

White administered Cornell as president for nearly two decades, from 1866 to 1885, and then spent much of the remainder of his life as a diplomat in Russia and Germany. While president of Cornell, White also served as a professor in the history department, and it was in this capacity that he began the twenty-year-long project that would culminate in the publication in 1895 of his two-volume chef d’oeuvre, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. White was a conservative socially and politically, but he grew increasingly wary throughout adulthood of the literalistic, rigidly dogmatic, fundamentalist manifestations of the Third Great Awakening that undermined the intellectual Christianity of the educated elite.[25] As a Christian rationalist, White imagined it was his duty to affirm the progress of science and to incorporate this reasoned approach into the study of religion. Before this could happen, White sought to demolish theological dogmatism and unscientific myths that obstructed a deeper, more spiritually fulfilling understanding of Christianity.[26] Altschuler contends that White’s objective was

to affirm a rational, non-mythical religion and at the same time preserve those religious truths (primarily ethical maxims such as love of God and neighbor) which he regarded as absolutes. Yet he also accepted unquestioningly the results of recent scientific investigation which threatened to destroy religion as a moral bulwark.[27]

White was concerned with the unwarranted intrusion of religion into the sphere of science, and he asserted that authoritarian constraints on the freedom of ideas harmed both institutions because it halted the progress of science and typecast religion as an unenlightened institution. According to White,

In all modern history, interference with science in the supposed interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such interference may have been, has resulted in the direst evils both to religion and to science—and invariably. And, on the other hand, all untrammeled scientific investigation, no matter how dangerous to religion some of its stages may have seemed, for the time, to be, has invariably resulted in the highest good of religion and of science.[28]

Despite his stated goal of “aid[ing]—even if it be but a little—in the gradual and healthful dissolving away of this mass of unreason, that the stream of ‘religion pure and undefiled’ may flow on broad and clear, a blessing to humanity,” the adulation of White’s work came mainly from nonbelievers and the most vociferous criticism came from those Christians whom he most fervently hoped to persuade.[29] “I wish the clergy to read it,” he wrote to a colleague in 1888, seven years before its publication, “and if they like to attack it, and no university on my shoulders.”[30] The clergy, in general, reacted harshly by arguing that if any portion of the Bible was erroneous then it must all be called into question. Still, White maintained that, although science had “evidently conquered religious dogmatism based on Biblical texts and ancient modes of thought,” he still believed that the two would “go hand in hand” as theology relinquished its monopoly on knowledge.[31]

Historical and Contemporary Criticism

The terms of the argument, of course, have changed a great deal since White enunciated them in the 1890s. By the early twentieth century, the Conflict Thesis—or “Warfare Model” or “Military Metaphor” or any number of other designations—became inextricably connected to the names of Draper and White.[32] This thesis retained a general currency in the historiography of science as late as the 1960s, though it confronted numerous challenges not only from religious apologists but from academic historians as well. The influential Reverend Walton Battershall of the North American Review criticized White for his lack of distinction between the protagonists on the side of science and their enemies on the side of theology. He cited numerous examples of White’s use of particular religious figures as an opponent of scientific progress in one section of his Warfare of Science with Theology and as a proponent of certain scientific advancements in another. For example, Augustine, depicted as an adversary of the sphericity of the earth in the early section on geography, was later championed as a forerunner of evolutionary theory.[33] Likewise, Battershall noted that White neglected to acknowledge the fact that most practitioners of science before the late eighteenth century were usually deeply religious Christians and often members of the clergy or scholars of theology themselves.[34] Battershall also suggested that White, in defining the principal adversary as “dogmatic theology,” implied tacitly that Protestantism—which had no official, hierarchically-determined doctrine—remained above the fray. Nevertheless, Battershall praised White’s work for its erudition while alleging that its ultimate goal of reconciliation had not been achieved.[35]

Secular critic David Starr Jordan, though he lavished praise on the overall aim of the book, extended Batershall’s critique to other institutional structures. Intolerance, he claimed, pervaded all organizations, and representing the Church as the most distinctly repressive establishment in history ignored past examples of non-religious persecutions of science.[36]Jordan argued that “the same spirit that burned Servetus and Giordano Bruno, led the ‘liberal’ atheist mob of Paris to send to the scaffold the great chemist Lavoisier with the sneer that the public had no need of savants.”[37] Jordan faulted White for failing to understand that anti-intellectualism pervaded all eras of human history regardless of the religiosity of its participants. Similarly, Lindberg has remarked that the binary nature of the Conflict Thesis presumes that if Christian theologians were intolerant, then pagan philosophers must necessarily have been a force of open-mindedness, pushing for a "free marketplace of ideas."[38] This viewpoint, of course, obscures the dynamic natures of both these varied and pliable systems. The most influential, comprehensive reevaluation of the thesis came in 1938 with sociologist Robert K. Merton’s “Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth Century England,” which contended that the Puritan work ethic and emphasis on practical solutions to everyday problems fostered scientific thinking and the application of technology during the Scientific Revolution.[39] However, further studies revealed that few practicing Puritans held positions in the Royal Society, and Merton was criticized for discounting the considerable theoretical, rather than practical, contributions made by scientists in seventeenth century England. Still, the demonstration of positive contributions to science by religious figures began to undermine the basis for White’s Conflict Thesis.

Most people are familiar with the most infamous instances of the supposed religious persecution of scientific thinkers: Copernicus did not publish his heliocentric theory until he was on his deathbed for fear of the backlash; Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for asserting that the earth moves; Scopes was banned from teaching evolution in Tennessee in 1925, and so on. Modern historiography of science and religion outlines these admittedly dramatic vignettes from the historical record as the exception rather than the rule. So, if the Conflict Thesis does not adequately describe the nature of the dialogue between science and religion, what does? Historians’ answers to this question have been numerous: that the “conflict” between science and religion was a “hypostatization of a number of smaller conflicts, a battle within the minds of individual scientists, a conflict of competing systems of science, or as a struggle [for dominance] among competing professionals.”[40] Owen Chadwick, a historian of the early Church, avers that there is a difference between religion being at war with science and being at war with scientists, and he claims that far more conflicts have occurred within the religious sphere due to disparate interpretations of the Bible than between scientists and religious figures clashing over virtues of empirical reasoning or observational methods.[41] Similarly, James Moore has argued against using terms like “conflict” or “warfare” to describe the meetings of science and religion because it implies that all scientists assembled on one side of a partisan divide while all clergy amassed on the other. In reality, the debates were largely reconciled “within [the] heads” of individuals as they underwent “crises of faith.”[42] Finally, Frank Turner has reasoned that the warfare model, in Victorian England, appertained more to intellectual prestige and cultural currency than doctrinal differences. From the middle of the nineteenth century onward, the authority of scientists quickly began to replace that of clerics in the realm of public education, and religious professionals reacted to their loss of prestige.[43] In short, modern scholars, including Lindberg, resist granting it definitive terminology precisely because no label adequately describes their mottled relationships.

One term employed precisely because it expresses this indistinct state of affairs is the Complexity Thesis, which, as its name implies, posits a relationship of neither outright hostility nor harmonious cooperation.[44] Lindberg argues that the reason for the endurance of such an unforgiving view of the relationship between science and religion, especially in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, is that White’s vocabulary of “warfare” and “repression” remained the primary mode of discourse in the history of science for much of the twentieth century and still colors the popular discussion today. This thesis, as Lindberg writes in the introduction to God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Science and Religion, “portrays a complex and diverse interaction that defies reduction to simple ‘conflict’ or ‘harmony’” and it is telling that he used the more neutral term “encounter” to illustrate the interaction between the two.[45] Many of Lindberg’s writings have been interpreted by critics as a direct revision of White’s thesis and a synthesis of all modern scholarship on the increasingly contentious topic.

[1] See especially Ian G. Barbour’s Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (New York: Harper Collins, 1997) and Stephen Jay Gould’s Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine, 1999).
[2] Gary B. Ferngren, Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 4.
[3] See Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2000), 135-146. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the Niagara Bible conference, regarded by many modern scholars as the origins of the modern American fundamentalist movement, met for the first time in 1883 and continued to meet annually until 1897. The decrees of the mostly dispensationalist congress enunciated for the first time the tenets of a more literalist interpretation of the Bible. It was convened, at least in part, as a reaction to Darwinism and the more liberal higher criticism.
[4] Glenn C. Altschuler, Andrew D. White—Educator, Historian, Diplomat (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 202.
[5] Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare between Science and Theology in Christendom, vol. 1, (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1895), ix.
[6] Altschuler, Andrew D. White, 153.
[7] For a classic study on the influence of positivism on the study of history, especially insofar as it has bearings on the historiography of science, see Herbert Butterfield’s Whig Interpretation of History (New York: Norton Library, 1965).
[8] David C. Lindberg, When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 2.
[9] Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (New York: Random House, Inc., 2002), 6.
[10] See especially Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York; Mariner Books, 2008) and Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (London: Viking Press, 2006).
[11] David B. Wilson, “The Historiography of Science and Religion,” in Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, ed. Gary B. Ferngren (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 23.
[12] Ibid., 24.
[13] Altschuler, Andrew D. White, 20-21.
[14] Ibid., 23.
[15] Andrew Dickson White, The Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White: Vol.1 (New York: The Century Company, 1904), 23.
[16] Altschuler, Andrew D. White, 33.
[17] Andrew Dickson White, Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, vol. 1, 239.
[18] Ibid., 34.
[19] Andrew Dickson White, Autobiography, vol. 1, 256-57.
[20] Altschuler, Andrew D. White, 51.
[21]Ibid., 58.
[22] White, Autobiography: vol. 1, 298.
[23] Colin A. Russell, “The Warfare of Science and Religion,” in Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, ed. Gary B. Ferngren (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 4.
[24] Altschuler, Andrew D. White, 58 and 81.
[25] Ibid., 13-15.
[26] Ibid., 204.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Andrew Dickson White, The Warfare of Science (London: Henry S. King and Co., 1876), 8. This shorter work, based on a series of lectures given by White, formed the foundation of his later, longer work A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. For the purposes of this paper, I will cite the shorter version as Warfare of Science and the longer one with its full title of Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. The shorter work is organized by scientific discipline and each chapter contains vignettes and anecdotes of historical figures in the history of science who encountered difficulties with various religious authorities. Curiously, White does not discuss biology, nor is there any mention of Darwin or evolution, despite its influence on late nineteenth century Biblical interpretations and its inclusion in the later work.
[29] Andrew Dickson White, Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, vol. 1, vi.
[30] Letter to George Lincoln Burr, 26 October, 1888, quoted in Altschuler, Andrew Dickson White, 202.
[31] White, Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, vol. 1, xii.
[32] Russell, “The Conflict of Science and Religion,” in Science and Religion, 3.
[33] Walton Battershall, review of History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, North American Review 165 (1897): 90-91, and Altschuler, Andrew D. White, 210. Battershall names St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Augustine, St. Isidore of Seville, Peter Lombard, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Ralph Cudworth as pre-Darwinian figures whose statements, he construed, lent support for the theory of evolution.
[34] Battershall, review of History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, 92.
[35] Altschuler, Andrew D. White, 210.
[36] Ibid.
[37] David Starr Jordan, review of History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, Dial 21 (1896):146-148, quoted in Altschuler, Andrew D. White, 211.
[38] David C. Lindberg, “Science and the Early Christian Church,” Isis 74 (1983): 512.
[39] David C. Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Science and Religion (Oakland: University of California Press, 1986), 4 and 5 and Robert K. Merton, “Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth Century England,” Osiris 4 (1938):360-632.
[40] Lindberg and Numbers, God and Nature, 7.
[41] Ibid. See also Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (New York: Penguin Books, 1967)
[42] Ibid., 7-8.
[43] Ibid.
[44] David B. Wilson, “The Historiography of Science and Religion,” in Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, ed. Gary B. Ferngren (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 23-26.
[45] Lindberg and Numbers, God and Nature, 10.