Who built the seven towers of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed,
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses, that city glittering
with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom did the Caesars
triumph? Byzantium lives in song, were all her dwellings palaces?
Young Alexander plundered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Philip of Spain wept as his fleet
Was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War. Who triumphed with him?
Interested in historiography from a Christian worldview? Here are a few books you might wish to look at.
The Meaning of History, by Ronald Nash
Christian Faith and Historical Understanding, by Ronald Nash
Historiography: Secular and Religious, by Gordon Clark
History and Christianity, by John Warwick Montgomery
The Study of History, by Lord Acton
Jesus and His Death: Historiography, the Historical Jesus, and Atonement Theory, by Scot McKnight
Telling the Truth About History, by Appleby, Hunt & Jacob
Faith and History, by Reinhold Niebuhr
Understanding History, by Louis Gottschalk
The Christian Views History, by Howard Grimes
Meaning In History, by Karl Lowith
The Meaning of History, by Nicolas Berdyaev
Prolegomena To History, by Frederick J. Teggart
The Spiritual Element in History, by Robert W. McLaughlin
God in History, by Sherwood Eddy
The Past and the Present Revisited, by Lawrence Stone
Here is another passage from the book from which I read on Friday; The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
“The notion of historical change compels and vexes me. I am not so much interested in this war or that treaty or invention, although obviously these are critical factors. What I brood about has more to do with the phenomenology of everyday life. How is it that the world greets the senses differently–is experienced differently–form epoch to epoch. We know about certain ways in which the world has changed since, say, 1890, but do we know how the feeling of life has changed? We can isolate the more objective sorts of phenomena, cite improvements in transportation, industrial innovations, and so on, but we have no reliable access to the subjective realm. When older people sigh and say that “life was different back then,” we may instinctively agree, but how can we grasp exactly what that difference means? . . . . I am not in search of private sensation, but of a kind of understanding. I want to know what life may have been like during a certain epoch, what daily living may have felt like, so that I can make a comparison with the present. Why? I suppose because I believe that there is a secret to be found, a clue that will help me to solve the mystery of the present.”
