AVERAGE USER RATING
Recently On Home
Featured Sponsors
The historian is more than a chronicler, Kagan insists. The historian's singular task is to identify the truly important story--the events infused with meaning.
Herodotus, identified by Kagan as "the first true historian," wrote of the war between the Greeks and the Persians "so that time may not blot out from among men the memory of the past, and that the fame of the great and marvelous deeds done by Greeks and foreigners may not be lost, and especially the reason why they fought against each other."
That approach is what makes history both interesting and important, but the very idea of great events, great individuals, and great deeds is looked upon with condescension in today's academic environment. As Kagan explains, "The traditional great events and subjects: high politics, constitutions, diplomacy, war, great books and ideas, are not to be considered, except to show why they must be excluded as the product of dead white males engaged in the permanent process of oppressing good ordinary people of one kind or another. The purpose of the enterprise is not to seek the truth with the greatest objectivity one can muster but to raise the consciousness of the oppressed, to bring them the self-esteem they will need to overthrow the current version of this ancient establishment."
Kagan looks to his fellow historians for rescue from this postmodern predicament. Even though university historians "have given far too much ground to such mindlessness promoted by contemporary political partisanship," Kagan believes that the historians "are better situated than their colleagues in the other humanities to recover their senses."
In a very real sense, Professor Kagan was calling his fellow professors in the humanities to acknowledge a moral dimension to the liberal arts, to establish virtue as an honorable goal, and to affirm truth as something that is both real and knowable. In other words, Kagan was proposing a platform for moral recovery now that religion has faded in influence. As he explains, "If we cannot look simply to moral guidance firmly founded on religious precepts it is natural and reasonable to turn to history, the record of human experience, as a necessary supplement if not a substitute. History, it seems to me, is the most useful key we have to open the mysteries of the human predicament."
That statement reveals both the glory and the futility of Professor Kagan's approach. His defense of history and historical knowledge is intellectually brilliant and courageous. Nevertheless, his confidence that history can "open the mysteries of the human predicament" is disastrously misplaced.
In the Christian analysis, history, taken with full intellectual respect, unquestionably illustrates the human predicament. Christians can agree with the claim that history reveals moral lessons through the rising and falling of empires and the crucibles of human conflict.
Nevertheless, the "mysteries of the human predicament" are understood only by revelation. The humanities have their place--and a recovery of sanity in the liberal arts would be a tremendous cultural achievement--but the deepest truths about humanity can come only from our Creator and can be understood only against the backdrop of eternity.
Professor Donald Kagan's brave address is worthy of serious attention. Americans should be encouraged to know that the National Endowment for the Humanities provided the occasion for such an important presentation of substantial ideas. For Christians, this event should serve as another reminder of why we, of all people, must look to history with respect, humility, and seriousness.
_________________________________________________
R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. For more articles and resources by Dr. Mohler, and for information on The Albert Mohler Program, a daily national radio program broadcast on the Salem Radio Network, go to
