The Fragility of History

I love studying history. I always have—my grandmother loves the story of how I ambushed her at the age of five, begging, “Tell me about the Peloponnesian War!”

And at lunch today, I sat down with three friends and we began to tell family histories. Hashing through the stories of our ancestors, we continually came upon stories of disaster and peril and war. I mentioned that my great-grandparents sailed to Cape Town in 1917, crossing the Atlantic under fire from U-Boats. The next guy mentioned that his great-great-grandparents gave their lives to defend Romania against Ottoman invasion. And then Ivan interjected with a tale of his Polish grandparents in World War II.

Our humanity—our body-and-soul personhood as mortal beings in this vale-of-tears world—is a desperately fragile thing. We inevitably depend on and are the result of decisions and circumstances generations and even centuries prior to our conscious wondering at the world. After that lunchtime chat, I could not help but think of Chesterton’s warning to heed “the democracy of the dead” and to refuse to submit to the “small arrogant oligarchy of those who happen to walking about.”

And we must heed the voice of tradition and authority because we are originally sinful. For all the intelligence, opportunity, and learning we’ve been given, we are terribly prone to erupt with evil. History, with all its bloodshed, cruelty, and betrayal certainly bears witness to that dismal fact.

In his The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman warned against the folly of coming to believe that we can achieve perfection without grace:

Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.