The holy spirit of God writes in an open book this sacred history which is not yet finished nor will be till the end of the world. This history contains an account of the guidance and designs of God with regard to men.
JOHN-PIERRE DE CAUSSADE, Abandonment to Divine Providence (1673)
Religion is both history’s foremost rival and first aegis. The result is an uneasy collaboration. The earliest surviving invocations of priests and religious mystics include references to history. With these words the intimate tie of history and religion is written and sealed—that is, if history is God’s work and our study of history a search for the details of God’s decree. Even for the skeptic, the impulse behind religion—to find the deeper meaning of the spirit—is never far from the motivating force behind the study of history. Religion and history are prickly but avowed partners in this quest.
I have a colleague who teaches and writes about religious history. He is not a believer. But when he unravels the conversations among the Puritans he enters into their world so totally that the question of his own beliefs fades into the background. He becomes one of them. Watching his career and reading his work convinces me that one need not take a position on religion itself to understand how closely tied religion and history, religious studies and historical studies, are. I am not a believer in divine plans, intervention, or supervision of human conduct, but I do believe that history and religion are indissolubly tied.1
Once upon a time, written history and religious writings were inseparable. They shared a birthright. The priests of yore were the first historians. Religious texts passed from hand to hand, the work of “untold generations of scribes.” Mayan glyphs, the historical records of kings and battles, were also the record of religious observances. The Tanakh is a history of the human race in general and the origins of Judaism suffused with the presence of Hashem. The histories of Saxon England were the work of monks as were the histories of the Celts. Medieval chroniclers were clerics. One could multiply the list, but the point is undeniable. The documentation of human events and the recording of religious beliefs had a common ancestry.2
The religiously based histories with which Western culture is familiar had a linear narrative form. Time begins at creation and continues through judgment. An immanent God, with whom Abraham had covenanted, who allowed his only begotten son to suffer for mankind’s sins, watches over His people. Modern eyes see in Bible the influences of the time and place on its authors. Historians call this “context.” The end of the Jewish Bible is coincident with the return of the Jewish people from their Babylonian exile about 515 B.C.E. That is when the books of the Bible were reduced to writing on animal skins by scribes. The Babylonians had their own origin or creation story, the Enuma Elish, and its beginning bears a strong similarity to Genesis. For the Jews and their former Babylonian captors, creation was the beginning of time. God or the gods create the earth, the waters, and time itself. Man occupies the space, honors God or the gods, and begins his travails.
Other religions see history traveling in cycles. The world-cycle of the stoic is an endless repetition that one can retell but cannot change. For the Hindu, in the beginning of the cycle, the world is new and fresh, a flower that is budding. At the end of the cycle, bad events presage a terrible calamity. Like the seasons, the world dies and is reborn. History is the record of events in these cycles and, read correctly, predicts each stage of rise and decay. In each cycle, forms of worship may change, for worship is human in origin, “with socioeconomic, political, historical, or climatic causes.” These link the religious cycle to “historically significant events” that must be chronicled if one is to understand the inner workings of the cycle itself.3
The oldest creation stories are not for the squeamish. Society and culture come into being rough-hewn. Native Americans’ origin stories recalled warring siblings, untrustworthy spirits, malevolent animals, and ignorant people. The Aztec creation story, tied to the agricultural cycle, ran through a series of bloody sacrifices. Every year an “impersonator” of the creation deity Tezcatlipoca, a figure of strife and darkness, lost his life in a ritual of bloodletting. In the Tanakh the Jewish people inflict suffering on one another and take revenge on their enemies. Whole cities vanish as punishment for their perfidy.
In the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, students of religion and students of history embarked on a common (though not collaborative) effort to determine how accurate religious depictions of human history origins were. This hermeneutic quest led some historians to conclude that the religious stories were mythological. The theologians decided that the historians missed the spiritual significance of texts. The effort failed. But easily dismissed by modern humanists as themes and variations on mythology, in fact the various creation stories recapitulated essential historical events—the conquests of one people by another, floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, migrations, and the rise of new cults. While the keepers of these distant memories did not subject them to source criticism, bound into religious observances they kept alive a history that could not have otherwise survived.4
While modern critical scholarship subjects religious stories to judgments external to the particular religious tradition itself, the first religious historians took the job seriously because they believed they saw the guiding hand of the deity in all history. Like their work, they would be judged wanting if it were found wanting. Human events perceived by human eyes and chronicled by human hands were imperfect records of the deity’s design, to be sure, making the confidence of these chroniclers suspect. But history was to them a proof of Providence, and in the course of human events one found clues to God’s intentions for men and women.
In a sense, this history was partisan. It served a cause. It also had moral implications, though these might be contradictory. Sometimes it spurred men to violent acts in the name of the true faith. Sometimes it served to remind men who were hell-bent on violence that there was a final judgment. Consider the case of some of the Frankish kings, successors to the Roman magistrates of Gaul, who had little regard for Christian virtues, including hospitality. Their impious attitude spurred Gregory, bishop of the Frankish Roman city of Tours in the sixth century, to write their history.
Proposing as I do to describe the wars waged by kings against hostile peoples, by martyrs against the heathen, and by Churches against the heretics, I wish first of all to explain my own faith. … My one desire is that, without the slightest deviation, and with no hesitation whatsoever in my heart, I may hold fast to what is ordained in church that we should believe, for I know that one given to sin may obtain pardon with God through the purity of his faith.
The Franks, whose kings were as brutal and corrupt as any (especially to their kinfolk), might appear to be a proof that God had turned his eyes away from the successor kingdoms to the Roman Empire, but Gregory could not tell their story without a faith in God’s ultimate sway and the vital role of the Church in history.5
As Christianity spread to the far corners of Europe, religious chroniclers found the hand of the deity in the most unexpected places. In the eighth century, the “Venerable” Bede, a northern English monk, crafted one of the most respected of all Christian histories. The conversion story of St. Alban was typical of Bede’s lessons: “When infidel rulers [in England] were issuing violent edicts against the Christians, Alban, though still a heathen at the time, gave hospitality to a certain cleric who was fleeing from his persecutors. When Alban saw this man occupied day and night in continual vigils and prayers, divine grace suddenly shown upon him, and he learned to imitate his guests’ faith and devotion. … Alban forsook the darkness of idolatry and became a wholehearted Christian.” Alban would martyr himself to protect the stranger and their common faith, and his fate remained an example of history’s teaching God’s will.6
Later Middle Age kings and their vassals ranged over the Flemish countryside in Jean Froissart’s chronicles of the years 1327–1400. Though devoted to battles, sieges, and the lives of knights, the work remains profoundly religious. “God, who is all seeing and all powerful” lurked backstage throughout the work, for “if god is good to us in the battle” the virtuous would win and the villainous fail. For in the end, men’s guile and strength could not prevail in an unjust cause. God stood behind the victors. How could it be otherwise?7
No group of people was more committed to the historical search for signs of God’s will than the English radical religious reform party called “hot blooded puritans” by their critics. The Puritans in seventeenth-century New England saw themselves as a people chosen by God whose mission to the New World history would vindicate, and they looked to history to prove their point. Edward Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour In New-England (1654) applied this reading of God’s plan to the Puritans’ historical experience—“the working providence of Christ to stir up this English nation, to plant these parts” as the Lord had bid the Israelites depart the corruptions of Egyptian bondage. The Lord spread disease through the native peoples to clear the land for His chosen people. Surviving Indians were God’s instruments to aid the settlement. Each success was a remarkable proof of favoring Providence. Each setback was God’s test of the Puritans’ will. The history the Puritans wrote was proof of God’s plan for His chosen people in New England.8
In the nineteenth-century United States, religion and history still found each other to be companions. The puritan ideal of history, reaching vertically from believer up to the Lord, was laid on its side and made a justification for western expansion. Typically, the Democratic publicist John O’Sullivan explained the need for westward migration in historical and religious terms.
We must onward to the fulfilment of our mission—to the entire development of the principle of our organization—freedom of conscience, freedom of person, freedom of trade and business pursuits, universality of freedom and equality. This is our high destiny, and in nature’s eternal, inevitable decree of cause and effect we must accomplish it. All this will be our future history, to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man—the immutable truth and beneficence of God.
The doctrine was called “manifest destiny,” for history and God together had ordained it. In the Civil War, both sides appealed to history and to God for inspiration. As Abraham Lincoln said in his second inaugural address,
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully.9
The quest for religious meaning in past events proceeds apace today among those who believe in an immanent deity. They maintain one cannot simply say that natural catastrophes and man’s inhumanity to man have no meaning, that they just are. “We must go beyond theses pragmatic, realist reasons to reject the call for silence. It is erroneous. Scripture teaches that God directs the course of events so as to give meaning to history. However difficult it often is for us to discern that meaning.” To be sure, the “must” here is less a scholarly one than part of the search for the nature of God.10
This religious version of global history one might call “the new ecumenical history.” If one were to put aside the “Eurocentrism” of much of Western history (maps with Europe at their center; accounts of “civilization” that begin with Aristotle and end with Western science; meta-narratives that explain why imperialism was good for the colonies) and focus instead on the common spiritual yearnings of all peoples, one could fashion a “trans-cultural” spiritual history. Perhaps this is what the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration “Dignitatis Humanae, on the Right of the Person and of Communities to Social and Religious Freedom in Matters Religion” aspired to promote. Certainly, the core of that Declaration, that “A sense of the dignity of the human person has been impressing itself more and more deeply on the consciousness of contemporary man, and the demand is increasingly made that men should act on their own judgment, enjoying and making use of a responsible freedom,” lends itself to an ecumenical view of history.
It is the hope of ecumenicists that one can interpret human acts in human terms within a larger framework of shared religious values. As the medieval Jewish philosopher and theologian Moses Maimonides wrote, “[D]o not imagine that character is determined at birth. We have been given free will. Any person can become as righteous as Moses or as wicked as Jeroboam. We ourselves decide whether to make ourselves learned or ignorant, compassionate or cruel, generous or miserly. No one forces us, no one decides for us, no one drags us along one path or the other; we ourselves, by our own volition, choose our own way.”11
But what if one were to tell another story about the meaning of history? What if that story denied the role of religion entirely? What if it saw religion, at least implicitly, as a pervasive misrepresentation of the course of history? Such a story exists; indeed, it is the central story of the modern science of creation.
The most devastating critique of religious views of history comes not from the historical profession but from evolutionary biology. The evolution of species is a historical account of the earth’s biological history that directly confutes religious eschatology. The history of that concept is worth recounting. In 1859, after more than twenty years of cautious inquiry, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. At its heart was an idea of how new species evolved from older ones. Darwin rushed into print because other biologists, notably Alfred Russel Wallace and Richard Owen, were hot on the trail of the same idea, but that takes nothing away from Darwin’s achievement. The idea now seems straightforward: “There is a struggle for existence leading to the preservation of profitable deviations of structure or instinct.” Old species that could not adapt to changing climate or other conditions died out. New species that were adaptive reproduced themselves. The mechanism, natural selection, was based on random mutations, though Darwin did not know exactly how these occurred. He knew that there was variation within species. He knew that there must have been differential reproduction, because the fossil record showed that some species had died out. He knew that traits, adaptive and not so adaptive, were inherited. It was not until the middle of the next century that biologists, fully understanding the genetic basis of species’ characteristics, pulled all the pieces of evolution together.12
Darwin was a cautious man and an even more circumspect biologist. As David Quammen has written in The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, “He never assembled a creed of scientific axioms and chiseled them on to a stone tablet beneath his own name. He was a reclusive biologist who wrote books. Sometimes he made mistakes. Sometimes he changed his mind.” Darwin had hesitated to publish because he saw holes in his account. That is, he was worried that he had not gotten the science right. Because he could not experiment, he could not replicate results. In a fashion, the entire earth was his laboratory and all history of its living things his experiment. His method was to ask other researchers about their findings, to openly share his own concerns in correspondence and at meetings of scientific societies. He was willing to revise and republish. In short, he acted like a historian.13
The publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species caused a sensation. Biological scientists, geologists, men of the cloth, and educated readers all over the English-speaking world read it. “Everyone had an opinion. The book sold out of stores the first day; the country’s largest circulating library made the Origin a selection; commuters read it on the train. Darwin’s publisher rushed 3,000 more copies into print right away.” From the moment he published he had scientific critics. “Some of Darwin’s mentors were shocked or scornful: astronomer John Herschel called natural selection ‘the law of Higgledy piggledy.’ But many younger men were full of praise—biologist T. H. Huxley announced he was ‘ready to go to the stake’ in Darwin’s defense.” St. George Mivart, a zoologist, believed that evolution could not explain human consciousness. Wallace, whose own thinking on evolution paralleled Darwin’s, thought that environmental pressures rather than competition among species was the key cause of evolution.14
Darwin extended his thinking to our own species in his Descent of Man (1872).
Many of the views which have been advanced are highly speculative, and some no doubt will prove erroneous; but I have in every case given the reasons which have led me to one view rather than to another. It seemed worth while to try how far the principle of evolution would throw light on some of the more complex problems in the natural history of man. … He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation.15
Evolution offers a model of historical change, a macrocosmic version of history with human history as its most recent chapter, that dispenses with religion altogether. Scientific findings replace Providence as the prime mover. As the geneticist Richard Dawkins has written, “History has been described as one damn thing after another … but this is an impoverished view.” Human history, like the grander story of the evolution of species, has patterns not imposed by human ingenuity so much as by biological needs and opportunities. This is the “grand unifying theory” of evolution writ small, of individuals and groups, peoples and nations, that find in a harsh world ways to improve themselves and their progeny. There is no place for a caring, immanent God in these theories. The mechanisms of human history do not require divine assistance.16
Drawing the most extreme implications about religion and history from Darwin’s thought, scientists like Dawkins regard evolution as “the ultimate consciousness-raiser” and dismiss religion as nonsense at best and a murderous mistake at worst. To be sure, such judgments, clothed in historical examples, are not actually historical. Dawkins believes that the “Darwinian imperative” reveals, once and for all, that religion is a delusion. “Religion is so wasteful, so extravagant, and Darwinian selection habitually targets and eliminates waste.” But atheism of the Dawkins sort is itself an ideology with a history, exponents, and critics, and no certain proof other than the ability to negate arguments for an immanent deity.17
Darwin was not conventionally religious himself, and his casual indifference to organized religion deeply concerned his wife, Emma; nevertheless, Darwin was aware that his idea would upset Christians. He was right. From the first, Darwin’s ideas were not acceptable to some theologians on religious grounds. In 1873, the theologian and divinity school professor Charles Hodge devoted an entire book to refuting Darwin. What is Darwinism? he asked rhetorically. “It is atheism,” for it was “utterly inconsistent with the Scriptures.” The pope condemned the work, as did spokesmen for the Church of England. Some Christian critics were not quite so severe. Biologists like Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray, contemporaries of Darwin, proposed a compromise—God had permitted variation of the species, part of his ongoing involvement in the world. Thus evolution could be theistic. By the beginning of the twentieth century, liberal Christian leaders, particularly those in the van of progressive education, decried the equation of belief in evolution and atheism. As Wake Forest University President William Louis Poteat told an audience at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, “fundamentalists ‘were making it difficult for intelligent, educated men to be Christians.’”18
Natural selection might (and in time was) acceptable to many religious groups, but not to fundamentalists. They regarded the Bible story as divine truth, which meant that evolution could never be more than a theory. It could not be squared with the literal account of creation in the Bible, because God had created all the species at one time. In this version, the earth is young, not billions or even millions of years old, and creation occurred in seven days. Evolution requires the belief in epochs of supposed time and chance improvements. More sophisticated versions of religious-based criticism of evolution have modified creationism to argue that evolution is still a theory because it cannot be replicated in a laboratory. “The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.” The intelligent design alternative to evolution is that over the course of geological time species have died out and new species have appeared but that the hand of God, not natural selection or any of its variants, controls the process. The divide between biological science, in particular the most respected and reputable teachers and researchers in the field, and the advocates of creationism and intelligent design is now unbridgeable.19
With most historians accepting some version of evolution, can one build a bridge between faith-inspired history and history that rejects such faith? The task seems difficult. To be sure, one can have faith in some superhuman force without belonging to any particular religious sect, but if history is the showcase of God’s judgment of man, either the deepest springs of action are impenetrable to the scholar (who can truly know God’s intent?) or one simply accepts that the flight of every sparrow is God’s will. Either way, human agency has no efficacy. Ideals do not matter, including religious ideals, because the effective cause of all action is God, not man. At the same time, proposing that history means any one thing or another would simply be putting one’s own words in God’s mouth. To seek to know what cannot be known may be very human, but for fundamentalists of all stripes it is an affront to God’s authority and a form of arrogant pride even in a pious person. In the Western tradition a religious person’s passion for history is a passion for clues to individual and collective salvation—for one can seek evidence of one’s own salvation even though one is utterly incapable of advancing it, not a quest for human meaning at all.
Seen in this admitted very narrow beam of light, the prospect of collaboration seemed doomed to fail. On the one hand, the great Christian religious chroniclers were not interested so much in explaining history as in defending faith. As Martin Cyril D’Arcy, a wise Jesuit philosopher and historian, conceded, “What seems to have happened is that the theologians took under their wing the subject of belief and thought and wrote about it as it interested them. This meant that they explored the Christian teaching of faith and were attracted to more general problems only in so far as they bore upon the nature of the supernatural act and habit.” But the supernatural is precisely what historians cannot know, much less judge.20
On the other hand, with the apparent illogic of faith-based history so obvious to them, doggedly humanistic students of history scoffed at any and all attempts to provide a theological reading of the meaning of our past. As one of Voltaire’s characters apologized, “Excuse the absurdity of my remarks. I have hitherto been a theologian, and one cannot divest oneself in a moment of every silly opinion.” Twentieth-century secularist scholars were even harsher on a religious view of history. Arnold Toynbee’s magisterial A Study of History illustrated and defended the retreat of the historians from anything resembling a providential interpretation of the past. Speaking of intolerance and religious violence, he wrote,
This great blot upon our Western Civilization in the early modern age present … an extraordinary contrast to the rapid yet sure-footed contemporary progress of the same society in other directions; and the fact that religious intolerance, in this time and place, was not merely an absolute evil in itself, but was also a glaring anachronism[,] no doubt accounts in part for the unprecedented excesses to which it ran in the latest chapter of its history in the West.
Toynbee had his own explanation for the problem with religious accounts of historical events—organized religion itself was the source of evil. By the close of the twentieth century, the educated elite in the West were uncomfortable with religious insights into the meaning of the past. “Man’s willingness to turn to history rather than to God for final judgment reveals how truly secular our culture and society have become. … In the process, the historian, whether he admits it or not, assumes the role of moral arbiter—a position traditionally accorded to the gods or the keepers of tradition. The judgment of history for a secular culture, therefore, can only mean the judgment of historians.” The time when history was evidence to the educated layman of a providential will seems to have passed. The magister of American history in the second half of the twentieth century, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in 1989 proposed that when it came to judgment of practical matters, “the American mind is by nature and tradition skeptical, irreverent, pluralistic and relativistic.” Or was Schlesinger’s obituary for religious history too hasty?21
A more sensitive intellectual tolerance than Schlesinger’s might counsel students of history to travel a different path, a path along which spiritual values inspire the search for history’s truths and scholarly canons direct that search to the realm of human action, desire, and thought. To adapt the zoologist Stephen J. Gould’s remarkable little essay on religion and science, “[P]eople of goodwill wish to see [history] and religion at peace, working together to enrich … our lives.” The way to achieve this objective is to regard history and religion as sovereign in separate realms. The first is a world of empirical facts—past human actions and expressions of thought and belief. The second is a world of faith and worship that cannot be proved or disproved according to accepted historical methods. Let a “respectful non-interference” be the principle upon which both realms operate. Gould called this arrangement “non-overlapping magisteria.” For example, miraculous interpretations of human events would belong to religion, not history.22
A good scientist, Gould offered what seemed to him neutral rules to keep the two houses in order. To paraphrase them, first, the facts of history “are what they are, and cannot, in principle, resolve religious questions,” except questions about the history of religion. Second, historians “remain free” to search for human meaning in human events, whatever the historians’ religious beliefs might be, if any. Third, history is “amoral,” to be written, judged, and applied “without reference to this strictly human concept” or morality. In this scheme, historical knowledge and religious faith would no longer be wary of each other, like feral cats eying one another as they mark the boundaries of their respective territories.23
A caveat: In this formulation, religious faith should not pit the historian’s view of history against the ordinary person’s—though that is what happens most often. In the so-called culture wars at the end of the twentieth century, local and state school boards were captured by born-again Protestants who had an agenda for the adoption of textbooks. According to Russell Shorto, “The one thing that underlies the entire program of the nation’s Christian conservative activists is, naturally, religion. But it isn’t merely the case that their Christian orientation shapes their opinions on gay marriage, abortion and government spending. More elementally, they hold that the United States was founded by devout Christians and according to biblical precepts.” By contrast, good history can never be the tool of self-interested sectarianism.24
For much as one traditional Western religious historian might read and regard Scripture as holy, in the sense of its having been divinely inspired, history places the scripture—the writing—within the human rather than the divine time and place of its creation. As Garry Wills—a historian, a person of faith, and an interpreter of Scripture—has admonished readers, “To present ignorance of the history as a mystery to be revered is an exercise in false religiosity.” His own view of the gospels, for example, concedes that “they are not historically true as that term would be understood today. They are not history at all, as our history is practiced.” Their truth is of a different order and sort.25
A religious sensibility could remind a historian of the frailties of the human heart and the limitations of the human intellect, though one need not be religious in any conventional sense of the word, or have faith in anything beyond the purview of science, to understand human frailties and limitations. In their later years, two American Marxian historians traveled this path. Both were critics of modernity, particularly mass production of ideas, uncritical faith in scientific progress, and cultural narcissism. Sometimes dismissed by their more liberal colleagues as neoconservatives or apostates from radicalism, they found in a religious sensibility a way to read the past. The first, Christopher Lasch, remained a skeptic. The second, Eugene Genovese, returned to his roots in Roman Catholicism. Neither concluded that history was God’s Providence writ small, but both saw a limit to the claims that historians might make about their own work rooted deeply, if not overtly, in religious submission to a greater power.
A religious sensibility could tutor the scholar that everyone in the human family has feelings, aspirations, and needs, though an empathetic observer need not be a religious one. As Lasch wrote late in his life, “[T]he dangers of unlimited economic growth, unlimited technological development, unlimited exploitation of nature” should tutor every student of the past that there are limits, “a reminder both of our fallen state and our surprising capacity for gratitude, remorse, and forgiveness.” Genovese put the case even more strongly: “Individualism … tends to place the state in hostile relation to society’s discrete units, individual and corporate. Herein lies the principal germ of the dissolution of community itself.” A purely rational academic discipline, like a purely rational society, becomes a raucous anarchy of ideas. Only through a faith in some unifying theme in common human aspiration can any humanistic study succeed. Historians need faith.26
Certainly, a tolerant study of history cannot tell us which faith is right, what is noble in our soul, or what we want from religion. A history whose religious impulse was “facile” or “self-indulgent” would not be good history. A history into which we pour our own beliefs, reading backward, is not good history. Instead, as Diarmaid MacCulloch writes in his sweeping history of Christianity, historians of religion and religious-minded historians “should seek to promote sanity and to curb the rhetoric which breeds fanaticism.”27
For, in this sense, Western religion’s foundational assertion that we are somehow created in a divine image underlay the Western historical enterprise. Without the assumption of a basic similarity among people then and now, a kind of universal human nature, no scholar could begin to seek insight into the motives of people who lived long ago. This sort of sensibility, historically rooted in a Judeo-Christian assumption about the divine, elevated the historian, allowing him or her to stand as “judge and arbiter, counsel and witness.” Like the Almighty on the holiest of days, “you write and you seal, you record and recount. You remember deeds long forgotten.” Once, long ago, religious sensibility empowered the historical vision and gave depth and meaning to historical judgments. It is a debt historians should honor.28