Historical Revisionism: Some Thoughts

This past week, my review of Jesse Hoover’s study of apocalyptic thinking among the Donatists was published in Ancient Jew Review. For the link to this review, click here. Aside from what I wrote in that brief summary of Hoover’s work, I wanted to contribute a couple of further observations here.

To begin with, I appreciated Hoover’s balanced attempt to give the Donatists a more sympathetic reading than is usually found within older secondary scholarship as well as our primary sources—dominated as these are by the Caecilianist perspective. Just this label, ‘Caecilianist’ as opposed to the more often used ‘Catholic’ to describe Donatist opponents, is a helpful reminder that (as Hoover writes and I noted in my review) both sides actually competed for the rights to call themselves ‘Catholic’.

The other observation that I would like to note with appreciation is Hoover’s argument that apocalyptic hopes did not fade with the onset of imperial favour toward Christianity after Constantine. Hoover has demonstrated well that such thinking continued not only throughout the Constantinian era, but also long afterward.

Each of these observations touches on the continuing need for greater objectivity when studying and making use of the past. Reading the work of some scholars, it seems their commendable desire to counter-act a dominant narrative or received interpretation sometimes tends toward over-compensation. Not only do their revised narratives give the marginalised group a sympathetic hearing, but for some reason it seems necessary to be especially critical of the given version of events and the 'winning' faction or key individual.

I don’t claim to believe in the human ability to achieve absolute objectivity, but I do believe in the need to strive after it. I believe in the possibility of improvement in this area through criticism and dialogue. I think that some revisionist works by historians such as Jesse Hoover and Maureen Tilley have great value in confronting us with our biases toward disregarded groups such as the Donatists. The twenty-first century is not a propitious or healthy time for polemic, and it is not only fair but also vital that we increasingly seek to hear and understand perspectives that differ from our own. But I don’t think it is necessary to be overly critical of the so-called mainstream for the sake of highlighting the overlooked and neglected.

Where the Donatists and Caecilianists are concerned, I would really like to see a study that treats each side both sympathetically and critically. The received view that the Donatists were somehow less than sincerely Christian or that they nefariously conspired to undermine ‘Catholic truth’ is rightly questioned, critiqued, and perhaps even rejected. It is of inestimable worth to do what Hoover tried to accomplish in his study—to understand the Donatists on their own terms. The bishop Augustine, remembered as a formidable opponent of the Donatists, is not above reproach. But even criticism should give its subject a fair hearing. I don’t believe it does any justice to a revisionist view when the standard perspective is now overlooked, neglected, oversimplified, moralised, and otherwise abandoned.

Regarding Constantine, I can speak from the recent experience of research within his life and reign: objectivity is almost as potentially daunting a challenge as sorting through all the paradoxes and ambiguities. Maybe this is too bold, but I doubt whether any scholarly work that does not acknowledge and grapple with the challenge of sorting through all such disparities can claim to be academically disinterested in any genuine sense. Hoover’s study points to the inadequacy of assuming that having an identifiable representative in a place of ultimate worldly power led Christians to immediately abandon apocalyptic hopes. Aside from Hoover’s argument that such hopes continued to burn long after the Constantinian era, this assumption begs the question of what such hopes really involved in the first place in terms of their relation to this world as well as the one to come.

A lot more could, and perhaps should, be said. My concern here in this limited space is that we bring more baggage into our research than we manage to leave behind. Striving after objectivity means that it is important to critically revise a conventional view. But in doing so, I don’t believe this means that the conventional view itself should be treated with any greater degree of criticism or lower measure of positive regard.