History as a virtuous conversation

Since I was a boy, history has captivated me. I remember reading our 1955 edition of World Book Encyclopedia when I was in middle school. Those encyclopedias had belonged to my mother when she was in school, and during my early teenage years, I realized they not only contained historical articles but were themselves historical artifacts. In the ’80s, when I was in the eighth grade, I wrote a report on John F. Kennedy and was surprised to find that our World Book included no article on JFK. The simple and obvious reason was that JFK was merely the junior senator from Massachusetts when those encyclopedias were published! That blew my mind.

The study, teaching, and writing of history have been my primary vocation. Beyond those early experiences with World Book, four books I read in my late teens and twenties have had an enduring impact on how I think about my calling.

The meaning of virtue

The Florentine Dante Alighieri penned his three-part Divine Comedy in the early 14th century. Dante takes his reader on an imaginative tour through hell and purgatory, using the Augustan poet Virgil as a guide, and then he begins an ascent through the nine spheres of heaven, culminating with the beatific vision of God. Through these journeys, Dante encounters a host of momentous figures of history, mythology, and the Bible, along with many contemporary political and ecclesiastical leaders. The Divine Comedy is one of the most consequential works of Western civilization. It reminds the reader that all persons are mortal, no matter how wise, wealthy, or strong; that the world to which we go is real and waiting for us after death; and that the Lord our Creator will judge us for the content of our faith and conduct. Dante’s method shows us that understanding the past enables the acquisition of wisdom in the present.

Understanding humanity

John Lukacs fled his native Hungary after the Nazi invasion. He studied at Columbia University, authored 35 books, and taught at Chestnut Hill College in Pennsylvania for 47 years. In his magisterial work on historical thinking, Historical Consciousness (1968), Lukacs called history “the remembered past,” and likened its study to the mission of John the Baptist. The Baptist was not the Light but bore witness to it. In a similar way, history should not be understood as truth itself, but the pursuit of truth. History, for Lukacs, entails the acquisition of knowledge, but more than that, it entails the acquisition of understanding. As human persons, we come to understand other human persons as they once existed, and in doing so, we grasp the common nature we share with those who are dead. Thus, all history is meaningful and relevant, whether we appreciate it or not.

Both Dante and Lukacs taught me that the study of history has a moral dimension. We instinctively associate the reading of history with the acquisition of wisdom, but we must also exercise virtue as we study the past.

Order and freedom

Russell Kirk is best known for writing one of the most vital works of postwar American conservatism, The Conservative Mind (1953). But he also penned The Roots of American Order (1974). Kirk called this order “a systematic and harmonious arrangement” that has animated and defined the national character. Kirk argued that American order was shaped by four civilizations, expressed in the cities of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London. The sublimity of Biblical ethics, the profundity of Greek thought, the impartiality of Roman law, and the hard-won liberties of the English people all came together to birth the American experiment in ordered liberty. This book showed me the relationship between order and liberty—that true liberty is built upon a just order.

Historical dialogue

William Henry Harbaugh’s Power and Responsibility (1961) was among the first biographies of Theodore Roosevelt to treat him as a serious political and intellectual figure. Hubert Humphrey wrote in his endorsement, “It will no longer be possible to pretend that TR didn’t matter or to judge him superficially as historians once did.” In 1931, Henry Pringle wrote Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography, in which he treated Roosevelt as compar­atively insignificant, not much more than a great big boy—which was exactly the way Roosevelt’s political enemy Woodrow Wilson described him. A generation of historians after Pringle agreed with this negative assessment, until John Morton Blum’s The Republican Roosevelt came out in 1954. Blum rehabilitated Roosevelt’s reputation, and Harbaugh’s book solidified him as a figure of singular prominence in 20th-century American history. Since then, Roosevelt has been considered as one of the top-tier American presidents.

I read William Henry Harbaugh’s TR biography as a sophomore in college. It was the first time I recognized a historical conversation taking place over the generations. In Harbaugh’s book, I learned that we receive the persons, events, and ideas of the past in our own contemporary contexts, and those contexts are ever changing. The book sparked a lifelong fascination with Theodore Roosevelt, and it caused me to think historically for perhaps the first time in my life.

I made a B on my critical book review of Harbaugh as a college sophomore, but I have never forgotten this lesson: that the finest thinkers, even across generations, are always in conversation with one another. Let our conversations be animated by virtue.

—John D. Wilsey is a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the author of Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer