Unhistorical
With fascination I have read and re-read the inaugural lecture CS Lewis gave in 1954 on taking up the Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. What he says about the descriptio temporum, the notional division of epochs, is intriguing. Essential, though, is his remark about historical knowledge itself: ‘I do not think you need fear that the study of a dead period, however prolonged and however sympathetic, need prove an indulgence in nostalgia or an enslavement to the past. In the individual life, as the psychologists have taught us, it is not the remembered but the forgotten past that enslaves us. I think the same is true of society. To study the past does indeed liberate us from the present, from the idols of our own market-place. But I think it liberates us from the past too. I think no class of men are less enslaved to the past than historians. The unhistorical are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past.’ That insight provides a key to much that is going on, and not going on, at the moment – in the Church as in politics.
