History

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." - Sir Winston Churchill

“It may be replied that some meddlesome human writers, notably Boethius, have let this secret out [i.e. that God perceives all of creation as it is, not in terms of location and time, but beyond space and time in His ‘unbounded Now’. This misunderstanding, Lewis hints, is responsible for numerous errors concerning both free will and predestination.] But in the intellectual climate which we have at last succeeded in producing throughout Western Europe, you needn’t bother about that. Only the learned read old books and we [devils] have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcation the Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the ‘present state of the question’. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge – to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour – this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to Our Father and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that ‘history is bunk.’” - C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters.

While I had intended to fill this space with a few elloquent words on history, I'm affraid I frankly cannot think of any at the moment having just come from a three hour discussion section. What follows is a collection of essays - mere ramblings for the most part - which I have written over the years.

Note: These essays have yet to be corrected and purged of the numerous spelling mistakes which they contain.