the consolation of history
Things have always been terrible.
Contra Boethius, I tend to find consolation not in philosophy—ideas about the world—but in stories, which tell how people actually live in the world and with each other. Since last fall I have been seeking—and binging on—stories about history, mostly via podcast. Mike Duncan’s History of Rome and Revolutions and Jamie Jeffers’s The British History Podcast are favorite binges, and This Day in Esoteric Political History provides (usually delightful, sometimes bitter) small bites. Listening to these stories is for me a form of escapism that isn’t a complete escape from present realities, insofar as history reminds me that in one way or another, things have always been terrible—war, plague, and famine among the reliably recurring disasters.
My view is akin to that of Qoheleth, the narrator of Ecclesiastes:
Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth,
vanity of vanities! All things are vanity!
What profit have we from all the toil
which we toil at under the sun?
One generation departs and another generation comes,
but the world forever stays.
The sun rises and the sun sets;
then it presses on to the place where it rises.
Shifting south, then north,
back and forth shifts the wind, constantly shifting its course.
All rivers flow to the sea,
yet never does the sea become full.
To the place where they flow,
the rivers continue to flow.
All things are wearisome,
too wearisome for words.
The eye is not satisfied by seeing
nor has the ear enough of hearing.
What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun!
Even the thing of which we say, “See, this is new!” has already existed in the ages that preceded us.
There is no remembrance of past generations; nor will future generations be remembered by those who come after them.
I suppose that holding such views, I might be inclined to conservatism, cynicism, apathy, or despair, but actually the opposite is true. Knowing that Nothing is new under the sun reminds me that humans have always lived on the brink of catastrophe, have always been vulnerable, and have always found ways to care for each other. All things are wearisome, and here we are anyway, preparing another meal, listening to music, loving each other. Being able to situate current troubles—such as the apparent capitulation of the powers that be to SARS-CoV-2, or the war in Ukraine, which at least one morning last month I was convinced was going to lead that very day to the nuclear conflagration I’ve feared my entire life—as endemic to the human condition, at least through the past several thousand years, is for me the consolation of history.
At the same time, I am always wary that finding consolation in anything—in the return of the daffodils, in poetry, in history—might be a form of spiritual bypassing, a way of using spirituality to protect myself from troubling feelings and realities. I’ve joked—but also really mean it, though it feels heretical even to this lapsed Catholic to say so—that The City of God by St. Augustine of Hippo is the urtext of spritual bypassing, a castle that Augustine spun in the air after the Visigoths sacked Rome. Mike Duncan beautifully summarizes Augustine’s argument in just three sentences: “Augustine did not dwell on religious cause and effect so much as he argued that everyone was missing the point. We ought to be dedicating ourselves to the eternal and non-corporal City of God as revealed through the divine incarnation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit rather than fretting about what happens to the base and worldly City of Man. This call not to save Rome but to look past it was a powerful comfort to a population facing what looked an awful lot to them like the end of the world.”
Maybe, unlike the fifth-century Romans, we really do live at the end of the world, but I very much care what happens to the base and worldly City of Man. I don’t want to find comfort in looking past it. In fact, I believe that the only salvation for us is in caring for this earthly city—right here, right now, ourselves, without looking to anyone else to swoop in and save it for us. My desire to care has led to a mid-life change in profession. What else can I do? This question is a real one, that I ask of myself every day. . . .
Is April the month of “shoures soote,” or is it the cruellest month? I’m going to take Chaucer’s side on this question, but I also have a soft spot for Edna St. Vincent Millay’s view, that “April / Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” At any rate, happy April, everyone!
