Reflections on Montaigne’s Essays

Posted on March 2, 2016 by theamericanplutarch

A year ago, I created this blog, the American Plutarch, to write reflections on a variety of historical, philosophical, and religious topics. I invite responses from readers, as I enjoy a dialogue about the nature of humanity.

To me, history, philosophy, and religion are all about the nature of humanity. One of the most significant writers in this regard, in my view, was Michel de Montaigne, a French aristocrat who lived from 1533 to 1592. I was introduced to Montaigne and his works, the Essays, when I was a graduate student at the University of New Hampshire (many years ago!). Professor Donald Wilcox asked me to read some of Montaigne’s Essays when I took a summer reading seminar. Linda and I lived at Country Pond, New Hampshire, and I read voraciously while enjoying nature and life with Linda, our preschooler Ben, and our dog Hannibal. Montaigne’s writings opened up a new world to me. His essays were a combination of erudition, skepticism, wit, penetrating philosophy, self-reflection, faith and piety, and historical thinking. Montaigne was himself deeply influenced by the ancient classics of Greece and Rome, and particularly the writer Plutarch, author of Lives. I, too, when a teenager, had discovered Plutarch, and found in Montaigne a like-minded thinker who engaged in a “dialogue with the past” with Plutarch and other ancient writers.

This idea of the dialogue with the past probably defines me more than anything else. In a way, I live in the past, not so much my own, but the human past. It surrounds me. Likewise Montaigne, in the library of his chateau in Burgundy, France, surrounded himself with the books of ancient writers as well as words carved into the wooden rafters of the room from the most compelling writers of the past. He surrounded himself with the works, the ideas, the experiences, of the past. I do, too.

I have always encouraged students (I have been teaching since 1983) and readers (my first book was published 18 years ago) to engage in a dialogue with the past. It is the means by which to know oneself. Since we live in time, and the present is so fleeting, and the future is unknowable–does not exist, yet–the past is essentially the repository of knowledge. The past, of course, also does not exist, but the mind, through memory, and images in art, photography and video, and writings in books and other literary expressions, provide us with the means to recover the past in a way that we cannot similarly know the future, as it does not yet exist, nor make sense of the present, as it is so fleeting. The past is the key to knowledge. Therefore, everyone is a historian.

Montaigne wrote in his final essay, “Of Experience”: “Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.” The idea that living can be a masterpiece, a work of art, is an old one in world thought: it is the sum of the thought of Epicurus and Zeno, Socrates and Plato, Livy and Cicero, Marcus Aurelius and Boethius, the Psalmist David, Lao Tze and Siddhartha Gautama, Augustine and Jesus. It is our most difficult challenge, as Michel de Montaigne knew.

Montaigne’s Essays were written in French, and can be found in a variety of good translations. I use Donald Frame’s translation, published by Stanford University Press. If you wish to read Montaigne’s Essays in a free, English version, you can find the entirety at Google Books: search Montaigne, Essays, and William Hazlett.

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Richard Hooker’s Message from the Past

Posted on June 30, 2015 by theamericanplutarch

In light of the Supreme Court decision on marriage this past week, and the controversy from opposing sides that has ensued, it is worthwhile, in my opinion, to seek the wisdom of the past. Oftentimes the human perspective living in the moment is skewed by the immediate concerns and needs of the present; to have a perspective of time, granted by historical study, allows for the ability to form more balanced judgments not driven by the enthusiasm of the moment.

Richard Hooker was arguably the greatest English theologian, who wrote The Laws of the Ecclesiastical Polity in 1594. In this book he argued for the validity of the established Church of England, that the wisdom and tradition of the Christian past focused through human reason based on the study of natural and human history, provided moral stability and theological order that surpassed the superficiality of the passing moment.

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For Hooker, whereas Catholics claim the authority of the Church infallible, and the Bishop of Rome the ability to provide statements of Church doctrine that have the force of truth, the Anglican church has the Book of Common Prayer, which is a written testament based on Scripture, tradition, and reason, hence has a sense of authority and power that transcends the individual believer. The Book of Common Prayer, like Scripture, can embrace various peoples of different times and places, to share a broad communion over time, that is, to provide a liturgical, scriptural, traditional anchor for transient individual lives. The individual can still interpret for self within the overarching umbrella, as it were, of the Book of Common Prayer, Scripture, and Church. The Anglican church provides more freedom of individual interpretation than does Catholic Dogma but not so much freedom as to allow for the particular whims of the moment, by groups or individuals, to take hold, as Calvinists did in the past, and independent congregations do today.

Hooker pointedly criticized the Puritans for focusing too much on personal beliefs, for focusing too much on the moment, for deciding that whatever they feel or think in time is in accord with God. He argued that they sought power as the moment, circumstance, and whim struck them. As a result, they were often inconsistent.

He wrote regarding the human proclivity to believe what is the priority of the moment: “Nature works in us all a love to our own counsels. The contradiction of others is a fan to inflame that love. Our love sets on fire to maintain that which once we have done, sharpens the wit to dispute, to argue, and by all means to reason for it.” “When the minds of men are once erroneously persuaded that it is the will of God to have those things done which they fancy, their opinions are as thorns in their sides, never suffering them to take rest till they have brought their speculations into practice.”

People, Hooker wrote, who dispute the current order will always have hearers because of human restlessness and dissatisfaction, whereas those who defend the current order are supposedly doing so for their own benefit or out of preconceived bias.

On human morality, Hooker wrote that “nature teaches men to judge good from evil, as well in laws as in other things” by “the force of their own discretion.” It follows then that “whatsoever we do, if our own secret judgment consent not unto it as fit and good to be done, the doing of it to us is sin, although the thing itself be allowable.” In short, it might be legal to do something though it is, according to God’s law, immoral.

Respecting the laws of God and humans, Hooker wrote that God is a law unto Himself, in that He is both the Author of Law and the Doer of Law, both equally in perfection. Human natural and civil laws are learned from nature, learned from God, not original to humans, who perceive disorder and chaos because we are ignorant of God’s true purposes and His eternal laws: all things work according to His will, which is good and perfect.

Some things in nature in human hands do not work perfectly, which is a consequence of human sin, “divine malediction, laid for the sin of man upon these creatures which God had made for the use of man.”

Humans want to do good, Hooker wrote. All things yearn for what is more perfect, all things therefore yearn for Goodness, and by this yearning, all things are good. All things therefore yearn for God. “There was never sin committed, wherein a less good was not preferred before a greater, and that willfully.” The Deceiver misleads us as to what is good. In doing evil, we seek the good, but there is a greater good we ignore, usually through indolence and what is convenient in the moment.

Humans who behave most closely to apriori truths of nature most closely imitate nature, hence mirror the universal morality and truth brought forth by God.

“The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God himself. For that which all men have at all times learned, Nature herself must needs have taught; and God being the author of Nature, her voice is but his instrument. By her from Him we receive whatsoever in such sort we learn.” By listening to the voice of reason and the authority of teaching over time we know the Good.

The human challenge, according to Richard Hooker, is to discover the truths that transcend the individual moment, the current fad or whim. The difficulty in accomplishing this is revealed starkly by the tendency of the Protestant Episcopal Church, the American expression of the Anglican Communion that still calls Richard Hooker their intellectual father, to embrace the whims of the moment to satisfy the individual, particular needs of humans now irregardless of what appears to be the ongoing transcendent truth as revealed in Scripture and countenanced by by God.

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Whose Democracy Is It, Anyway?

Posted on June 28, 2015 by theamericanplutarch

Is America under the Constitution a democracy?

The Constitution was written over the course of a summer in 1787 (in Philadelphia: the Constitutional Convention). The 55 or so men who wrote the Constitution did not have mandated authority from the 13 states to alter the then present government (the Articles of Confederation) much less to write a new plan of government. Of the men who wrote the Constitution, about a third owned slaves. The only race represented at the Constitutional Convention was Caucasian. The models for the Constitution were the democracy of ancient Greece, the republic of ancient Rome, and the constitutional monarchy of England.


The Framers of the Constitution modeled the Constitution more upon the Roman Republic than the Democracy of Greece, since republicanism, representative government, allows for control by the best people. The Framers of the Constitution believed that there was a natural aristocracy of talent, merit, and wealth more than an aristocracy based on birth. These men mistrusted Democracy because they mistrusted the common people: hence protections against the unbridled power of the people became a part of the Constitution.

One protection against the power of the people was that members of the powerful upper house of the legislature, the Senate (each state of which has two), were elected not by the people, rather by state legislatures (the 17th Amendment in 1913 changed this to allow the direct election of Senators by the people). Another protection against the power of the people is the Electoral College, which ensures that a direct vote of the people (the popular vote) for President can be overturned by a few people, the members of the Electoral College, who ultimately elect the President about a month after the popular vote (the Constitution has never been amended to change the Electoral College). To allow for future contingencies, the Framers of the Constitution made the list of powers of the three branches of government (legislative, executive, judicial) intentionally vague, which has led to the expansion of federal power.

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James Madison, principle author of the Constitution

The Framers of the Constitution decided to create a very powerful executive (the President of the United States–even though most Americans distrusted giving so much power to one individual), partly because the first person that they assumed would be President, George Washington, was a man they could trust.

In the space of 226 years, the Constitution has only been amended 27 times, and 10 of those times occurred in one year, 1791—the Bill of Rights, the first 10 Amendments of the Constitution, which were brought about by the opponents of the ratification of the Constitution. The Anti-Federalists only agreed to support the adoption of the Constitution if it would be immediately amended with a clear list of the rights of the people.

The Constitution grants sovereignty to “the people,” but “We the People,” the first three words, appears to mean “citizens,” which at the time the Constitution was written included only adult white males of property, at the most 20% of the population. White paupers, Indians, Blacks, Women and Youth were disenfranchised (no votes, no power) by the Constitution. For the first fifty years, poor Whites were not given the right to vote. Slaves were freed by the 13th Amendment (1865), given civil rights by the 14th Amendment (in 1868), and given the right to vote (free adult black males) by the 15th Amendment (in 1870). In 1920, adult Women were given the right to vote (19th Amendment). American Indians are only mentioned once in the Constitution, and were not made citizens until 1924; since then, Indians have often been denied the right to vote by states and localities.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ensured that all citizens can vote irregardless of racial and ethnic background. The right to vote was extended to young people between age 18 and 21 in 1971 (the 26th Amendment). Today, Children under the age of 18 cannot vote, yet this group is the most defenseless and the poorest in America, especially if Black, Hispanic, or Indian children.

Even if many people have been disenfranchised in America over time, a majority of citizens today typically do not care to vote, disenfranchising themselves.

Democracy is a word that comes from the Greek, meaning rule (cratia) of the people (demos). Democracy involves the people, citizens, who have certain rights and responsibilities: the right to speak, believe, meet, and move; the responsibility to vote, participate, legitimize the government, and protect one-another.

Democracy involves debate and disagreement by people who are involved in a common pursuit of what is right and good. Democracy thrives on different points of view. But it also thrives on the respect people have for different points of view, and allowing those who disagree to disagree without feeling threatened.

The Framers of the Constitution feared mob rule, feared the common people, feared that the people would be captivated by a demagogue, feared that most Americans would not have the sense to think, to participate, to discuss intelligently, to disagree respectfully. They feared violence, disorder, intimidation, silencing the other.

So, whose democracy is it, anyway?

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Liberty or Order?

Posted on June 26, 2015 by theamericanplutarch

The title of this essay, Liberty or Order?, has been a headline in the news recently. Indeed, it is one of the longest running headlines in the American news media. The first newspapers in America, printed in the early 1700s, frequently printed the headline—or something like it. Often the headline has been posed less as a question and more as a mandate: liberty then order, or, order then liberty. The question has intrigued thinkers for millennia. The Athenians of the fifth century, BC, asked it when they invented the idea of democracy. The Romans at the same time asked it when they invented the Republic. The question intrigued Cicero and Caesar in the first century BC. Since then it has constantly been on the minds of political thinkers, whether conservatives seeking more order than liberty, or liberals seeking more liberty than order. Magna Carta was signed by King John II in the shadow of the debate over liberty or order. The English Civil War was fought to reconcile the issue. The participants of the American Revolution, and after it the French Revolution, furiously (and violently) debated the issue. It was central to the debates among the Lincoln administration during the Civil War. It entered foreign policy discussions during the administration of Woodrow Wilson. It was a hot topic when Roosevelt proposed the New Deal. Liberty or order became a life and death issue during World War II and in its aftermath, when America stood opposed to the Soviet Union, while McCarthyism raised its ugly head at home in the 1950s. It was again a frequent headline in the 1960s during the Vietnam War. More recently, since 9/11, the issue of liberty and order dominates political discussion, especially in the wake of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and the government’s attempts to stifle terrorist acts in America. A few years ago, Christopher Dodd, Connecticut Democrat and presidential contender, stated in an interview on NPR that he disagreed with the Republican contention, as enforced by the Bush administration, that Americans should be “more secure with less rights.” It reminds me of the New Hampshire license plate, “Live Free or Die.”

There have been a variety of great philosophers over the centuries who have considered the issue of liberty or order. Two of the most important, especially in respect to American government, were Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Hobbes and Locke were English philosophers who lived and wrote during the 1600s, at the same time as the founding and development of the British-American colonies. Hobbes was the philosopher of the English Restoration (1660), when Charles II ascended the throne of England, restoring monarchy to the realm. Locke was the philosopher of the Glorious Revolution (1689), when James II was exiled and William of Orange made king. Hobbes is best known for his book, Leviathan. Locke is known for his Letter Concerning Religious Toleration, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Treatises on Civil Government.

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Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes wrote Leviathan to argue that a strong orderly government, particularly the rule of one man (monarch), was the best way to ensure liberty, since without order people cannot experience the freedom to go about their business unimpeded by criminals and harassed by those who live a different lifestyle. Hobbes assumed that humans are inherently sinful, evil, hence will constantly be tempted to hurt others, to make war, as it were, on their fellow humans.

Locke wrote Treatise on Civil Government to argue that order comes about naturally through liberty, since humans are inherently good. Though humans can live together without a structured government, they voluntarily choose to associate or incorporate themselves in government to ensure their own survival, even prosperity.

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John Locke

So who had it right, Locke or Hobbes? Is liberty or order the best platform upon which to build government?

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Healing History

Posted on June 15, 2015 by theamericanplutarch

Two thousand years ago Titus Livius, in his History of Rome, declared that his book, indeed any narrative history of human events told with empathy and truth, is therapy for mental malaise, especially the malaise that is a product of conspicuous consumption, avarice, lust, fear, violence, narcissism, and all of the other sins that beset humankind. History is therapeutic, Livy argued, because its study is the means by which a person can find the good in past human behavior to imitate, and discover the evil in past human behavior to avoid. History provides a didactic purpose of moral reform.

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Does it still? Is this still the point behind historical inquiry, to educate people in moral behavior, to teach them how to act, how to achieve contentment? I wonder . . . especially in our age of cultural and moral relativism, where “anything goes” seems to be the moral prerogative of people—as long as one’s behavior does not apparently hurt anyone else (no matter what it does to the self), then the behavior is acceptable

One argument against didacticism in historical study is that there is no longer a recognized universal moral system that unites people of such diverse cultural, ethnic, racial, religious, and philosophical backgrounds. Narrative history such as Livy wrote tends to reflect the worldview of the writer who typically represents the majority view of the time, leaving out the cultural, ethnic, and racial minorities.

Livy wrote, however, during a golden age of historical inquiry, when the likes of Tacitus and Plutarch wrote. Plutarch, the author of Lives and Moralia, believed that the historian/biographer should treat the past like a person inviting a guest to visit; Plutarch would settle down to his writing desk and, looking through the writings of Caesar (for example), invite the Roman general and writer, as it were, to sit down with him, and vicariously discuss the issues and ideas of his time. This dialogue with a person of the past allowed Plutarch to build an intellectual and empathetic connection with the past person, which allowed the subject and object (Plutarch and Caesar in this case), to join together, seeing what united them, what divided them, and discovering the common human experiences, feelings, and thoughts that bridge time and place.

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The dialogue with the past is the didactic purpose behind historical inquiry that I seek to reproduce and engender in my writing. This is the kind of moral history that I believe in. When two humans—and many more—join together in a dialogue, enabled by surviving historical sources, joining feelings and thoughts together, then I believe the historian and his/her readers discover what is universally true in human affairs, and yes, as Livy would have it, what is the good to imitate, and what is the evil to avoid.

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Time and the Church

Posted on June 7, 2015 by theamericanplutarch

The Church, that is, organized Christian religion, has always struggled to make sense of time. The date of Christian holy days, such as Easter and Christmas, has been under dispute for centuries. Some Christians in the past, and even today, are annoyed that Christ’s birth and resurrection are celebrated during pagan ceremonies of the winter solstice and spring equinox. The Christian calendar begins with the year 1, anno domini, yet Jesus most certainly was not born on this year, rather in any one of a dozen years before or after 1 A. D. New Testament writers refused to date annual events except according to the system of dating used by the Romans. The first great Christian historian after Luke, Eusebius of Caesarea, was very unclear when Jesus was born, and it was not until Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th century that a system, ante Christos and anno domini, became accepted by the Christian world. Yet even in the past century the Church has gone along with the politically correct decision to change BC/AD to BCE/CE—Before the Common Era and Common Era—essentially denying that the Western dating system has anything to do with Jesus of Nazareth.

Many Christian denominations are beholden to the Christian calendar according to the supposed chronology in the life of Jesus. The calendar begins with Advent, then proceeds to Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, and Ordinary Time until Advent returns in late autumn. Hymns, liturgy, prayers, and sermons are guided by this calendar, and some of it can be quite moving and wonderful; but as with anything repeated over and over, it often becomes stale and repetitive, requiring new ideas, new approaches, new ways to celebrate the same events. Indeed, liturgy in more formal Christian denominations can be mystifying to outsiders, and even to insiders, the participants and members, the words are said and the hymns are sung, not always with meaning and feeling.

Even more perplexing is the scriptural basis for the church calendar, indeed for the church itself. Jesus rarely used the word ekklesia, which meant not church, rather assembly. Indeed, he was extremely vague as to how his followers should go about spreading the good news, loving one another, doing God’s will. Once, in the Gospel of Mark, he is told that his mother and brothers are waiting for him, and he responds that those who do the will of God are his mother and brothers. The will of God, he says over and over, is to love: others, friends, enemies. Jesus sometimes preaches to a group of people, sometimes to individuals. The New Testament can speak to groups, and to the individual. The assembly of believers, the ekklesia, might be people in a certain community who join a set organization, but it can refer to people worldwide, in different places reading the same words, worshiping the same God, or it can refer to people across time and place, those who a thousand years ago worshiped God and those who worship God at this particular moment. Doing the will of God matters little when one does it, at what season one does it, or where one does it, alone or with others. Doing the will of God is something not subject to the constraints of time and place, to the Christian calendar or the Church. Love, after all, cannot be set by the clock, the calendar, the venue, or the particular people joined together. Love is timeless, placeless, simply love.

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The Sea Mark and Missionaries

Posted on June 6, 2015 by theamericanplutarch

New book The Sea Mark: Captain ‘s Voyage to

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Fulbright Canada tweeted today about my latest book, The Sea Mark: Captain John Smith’s Voyage to New England. I was a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at Brock University in Ontario in 2010, during which time I taught a class on the History of the First Nations of Canada and researched Anglican missionaries to the First Nations during the 18th and 19th centuries.
It was during this Fulbright sabbatical that I began to consider the various expressions of missionary work in America. I studied Roman Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, and Anglican missionaries to American Indians throughout North America. As I studied Anglicans, I realized that the Great Commission, Jesus’s command to his disciples to spread the Good News to all nations, to the whole creation, was something that motivated many more people than just missionaries and priests. Indeed, many of the sailors and explorers who crossed the Atlantic to North America seemed to have had the Great Commission in the fore, or at least in the back, of their minds. I found this to be the case with John Smith, who though he was a man of action, soldier and discoverer and colonist, still believed that he was driven by God’s will, which included the Great Commission.
There were many sides to John Smith, as there were many sides to other explorers and discoverers of America. They  had many failings, they committed many sins. But part of their motivation was the Great Commission, and God’s commandment to love one-another.
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Jesus and Time

Posted on May 30, 2015 by theamericanplutarch

Time is a mystery. Is time a physical phenomenon? Is it a geologic phenomena? Does time exist outside of human consciousness? Is time absolute or relative? Why do humans put so much emphasis on time, so that we gauge our entire lives by hours, days, months, years?

The Bible, Old Testament and New Testament, says little that is concrete about time. Time, indeed, seems more of a metaphor for passing than an exact instrument of measuring movement. Like all ancient literature, there are no dates, no clear chronology, in the Bible. And yet Jesus, as the Gospels record his comments and sayings, appears to have been very aware and concerned about time.

Take Matthew chapter 6, after Jesus tells his disciples that one cannot serve both God and Mammon. Mammon–riches–are acquired in time: people spend their hours, days, weeks, months, and years trying to figure out how to gain property and accumulate riches. Jesus brings Mammon down to an everyday level: the food we eat, the clothes we wear. He cautions the disciples not to spend their days worrying about food, drink, clothing, and shelter. Life is more than this.

Anxiety adds little to our existence, yet, Jesus implies, people spend their days anxiously trying to secure food, drink, clothing, property, wealth, riches. He argues that if God provides for the birds of the air, the flowers of the field, then God will provide for us.

Each day has it owns challenges, its own evil. One should focus on the moral challenges of the day rather than what to eat and drink. Each moment should be savored for the life that is being lived rather than constantly anticipating what will happen next, what I will eat and wear and where I will go to do it.

I constantly feel oppressed by time and worry over its passing and the passages of my family and my life. I seem to want to record or grasp hold of passing moments, perhaps to the exclusion of actually experiencing and savoring them. Each moment is a gift from God and should be savored—one doesn’t know how many such moments one has in life, how many are left. On the other hand, I have also felt dissatisfied in various moments, like I cannot wait for them to pass to get to another time, another day, another week. I feel restless and often at a loss as to what to do. My books often seem to be a panacea for this restlessness, but in the act of writing them I am restless for the end of the book to come and for the next project to begin. What folly!

Jesus taught that there are increments of transcendent truth found in the everyday, in the isolated moments of existence, in the sensations and feelings that appear real if fleeting, true if just for an instant, that we can gleam from everyday life. We hardly see them in the distractions of the moment but these increments we see combined as we reflect on the past in retrospect, and we see revealed the transcendent, that truth exists.

Therefore, he says, don’t be anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will have enough in it to produce anxiety. Think of today, the present, and achieve contentment now, in God. Each day has it own challenges, its own evil: to find peace–rather than a good dinner and excellent glass of wine–is the key to happiness, to living as Jesus taught us to do.

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Time, the Healer

Posted on May 28, 2015 by theamericanplutarch

There is an expression often used by the wise that time is the great healer, which of course means that as time passes people forgive wrongs done to them, scars slowly fade, and the memory of what was once so important, so terrible, slowly dims and is forgotten.

Time is a healer both for the individual as well as the society and culture at large. There have been many horrible actions taken by a government over its people, or by one group over another. Some of these wounds have not quite healed in America: for example, slavery perpetrated against African-Americans and, after the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery, its by-products in Jim Crow laws and the many forms of racism that continue to haunt and hurt people in the present. Likewise American Indians succumbed to the onslaught of aggressive government policies and greed among American land speculators and bigotry among white settlers that continue to hurt and haunt.

The passing of the years, the movement from one generation to the next, and the distance from past times of evil and woe, allow people to find a measure of contentment, tarnished some by the memory of past wrongs—but the wrongs become fewer and they are mitigated by a society that is increasingly aware of the wrong-headed policies and beliefs of the past.

Race-relations among whites and blacks, whites and American Indians, have clearly become less violent, more peaceful, and although there are some who hold on to past views and past wrongs, more people today in America accept others of different skin color, different beliefs and customs. We are truly becoming a more tolerant, multi-cultural society.

Time heals: it is a natural occurrence, a blessing brought by the passing moments of our lives as we move from youth to adulthood to old age.

Such healing cannot be rushed. Such healing cannot be legislated. A government that tries to force upon people a head-on confrontation with past wrongs and biased views stirs up people, makes people hope for premature change, inflames passions, and as a result violence often erupts.

Artificial healing, artificial removal of past wrongs and memories, doesn’t work. People must be allowed the time to forgive and forget. Natural ways are best. Time naturally heals. Let us embrace this slow movement of change, rather than trying to force it, artificially, by laws, directives, and the false promises of demagogues.

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History and Miracle

Posted on May 18, 2015 by theamericanplutarch

What is a historian to do about miracles, events in time that break the rules of natural law and sensory evidence, products of a supernatural force, that is, God?

The easiest approach is, of course, to reject all theism, to put on the atheist’s mantle, and say simply that miracle, anything supernatural, has not occurred, does not occur, will not occur.

But anything that cannot be fully explained, that is out of the ordinary, might have a supernatural basis. If we cannot quite explain the creation of the universe, or what the nature of time is, or how genetic mutation occurs in life, or from where life originates in the first place, or what happens at death—or the many other countless questions that humans have pondered and for which we have no definite, scientific, logical answer—then how can we be certain, how can we know for sure, 100%, that a supernatural force, God, has not been behind it, created it, willed it, planned it?

There have been many skeptics over the centuries who have questioned, ridiculed, declared insignificant anything that cannot be explained by humans, by science. David Hume the English skeptic criticized those who accept miracles described in the New Testament with the argument that any argument based on sensory evidence is stronger than an argument based on hearsay evidence. Thomas Paine, in The Age of Reason, represented Deists of the 18th century in condemning the New Testament as nonsense to the rational mind: How can a person who is dead live again? How can a person walk on water? How can water be turned into wine? These things do not happen, and contradict natural law.

Yet consider: If there is a God, if that God is active not passive, if that God has power and uses it, even the power to listen to prayers and respond, if God is the God of Creation, the maker, even the originator, of all things, if God is outside of time in the one moment and sees all things, knows all things, then why cannot such a God of creation of time, of knowledge, hence of power, cause the physical and material world, time and space, to alter according to His will?

To us who live in time and space, living moment by moment in the material world, the normalcy and predictability of it, of the laws of nature, are expected and assumed by our observation and confirmation of the process of cause and effect. But God and His ways are so different, so beyond our comprehension limited by time and space, that it requires singular arrogance to assume we know, and only what we know and observe, or hypothesize and predict, can exist, and therefore eliminate all miracle or the supernatural.

The eighteenth-century historian and scientist Jeremy Belknap, in his book, Dissertations on the Character, Death & Resurrection of Jesus Christ, argued that if we assume other ancient works written by reasonable humans, such as Plato and Aristotle, are legitimate sources, if accounts of people observing things and recording them, like Livy and Plutarch, are legitimate, then why not the Gospels as well? If we assume that Plato’s account of the death of Socrates in Phaedo is a legitimate source, then why not John’s account of Jesus’s death in the fourth Gospel? Belknap correctly argued that the Deist assumption of the regularity and order of the created universe requires as much faith as the Christian assumption of the divinity of Christ. Besides, Belknap argued, to read and analyze the New Testament requires more than a purely credulous mind, rather a mind seeking “sensible demonstrative proof.” Even Jesus’s disciples doubted what he did and taught, but in time “there was an exercise of reason in judging of the evidence, and the result was conviction and faith.” No one can read the Gospels without the exercise of reason that “applies to his understanding, judgment, conscience, will and affections.”

Belknap, who was a leading scientist of his day, played Hume’s (and Paine’s) game, trying to conform the New Testament to standards of human science. But think: Jesus in the Gospels repeatedly challenges our basic ideas, received tradition, expectations, customs, and thoughts with his teaching, some of which can appear almost foolish. Clearly the Gospels have to be read with feeling and intuition more than logic and science.

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The Apostle Paul noted that the foolishness of God surpasses the weakest human wisdom. God uses weakness, foolishness (the weakness of logic and reason) to accomplish his purposes and make known his strength.

Jeremy Belknap argued that there are two Scriptural foundations for belief: the written scriptures of the Old and New Testament and the Elder Scripture of God’s works in nature. Humans must approach both of these sources of scripture with reason, study, analysis, and thought. Science and logic applied toward natural history, Elder Scripture, is clearly justified, just as using reason when studying the written scriptures. There has to be a balance—of faith and reason, credulity and incredulity, intuition and logic analysis, deduction and induction. One must bring the objective and subjective mindsets to bear on any object of inquiry, whether it be the Gospels, natural history, human history, science, God, or miracle.

If miracle then exists, how does it occur in time, in history? When are events in the past and present contingent, happenstance, or the product of the will of God? How is the historian to interpret the amazing, and unexpected, events of the past?

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