CONFRONTING THE CHURCH'S PAST : An interview with Eamon Duffy - Interview

Commonweal, Jan 14, 2000 by Raymond De Souza

Eamon Duffy, professor in church history at the University of Cambridge, is one of the leading contemporary historians of the church. His landmark book, The Stripping of the Altars (Yale) challenged the reigning Protestant account of the English Reformation. He also authored a highly acclaimed book on papal history, Saints and Sinners (Yale). He was invited by the Vatican last fall to participate in the symposium examining the history of the Inquisition. Raymond De Souza spoke with Duffy in his office at Magdalene College in Cambridge, England.

* Raymond De Souza: Is there a specifically Christian way of doing the work of a historian?

* Eamon Duffy: I do not think there is a Christian shape to history in the sense that things move according to God's plan in any discernible way. I think a Christian approaches history with a sense that human life matters and has meaning and that it is both possible and important to tell the truth. Perhaps that constitutes a Christian approach to history because none of those things can be taken for granted now, even among people practicing history. There are people who practice history who think that it is a branch of the creative arts in the sense that we impose patterns on the past. I believe that we discover patterns in the past.

* De Souza: Would that make Christians better historians?

* Duffy: I do not think Christians are necessarily better historians or more truthful historians than other people. Some Christian historians have been shabby workmen and rather economical with the truth. In England, for example, Cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet, a great Benedictine historian, was both a bad workman and not entirely scrupulous about what he said. So you can be a churchman and a lousy historian. There are perfectly good secular historians who have all the virtues that I have said I thought a Christian ought to practice. I suppose a Christian also comes to the past equipped with a certain set of assumptions about the way human beings behave, why they behave in particular ways, and with a set of prejudices and ideas which are a result of one's own religious formation. That used to be thought disabling in a historian-to have a point of view, to have a prejudice or a set of expectations. In fact, all historians, whether they are Christians or not, have a point of view, have a set of prejudices. The important thing is to know what you have got and to use it as a tool, not as a fortress wall.

In my own area, for example, in the history of the Reformation, I came to the Reformation period with an acquired understanding of how the Catholic religion functions as a symbol system. I did not think of religious ritual, for example, as meaningless mumbo jumbo. I was, therefore, able to read aspects of the pre-Reformation and Reformation period that did not make sense to colleagues who did not share that formation. No doubt, I have blind spots and cannot see things that somebody with a prejudice against the Catholic church might be more alert to. We have to work with the grain of our own inheritance.

* De Souza: Is that what explains why your book, The Stripping of the Altars, challenged the standard telling of the English Reformation?

* Duffy: The legacy of Protestant Christians writing the history of the Reformation was that it was seen as the story of the restoration of true Christianity after a period of corruption. Many of the historians who practiced Reformation history were not Protestants, in the sense that they were not believers, but they inherited a Whig view of the Reformation as a stage in modernity-in the liberation of the human mind from superstition and prejudice-and so they worked with a whole set of assumptions about what must have happened. The Reformation must have been popular because it was true and therefore they never looked for evidence to see actually whether or not it was popular.

One of the things that happened in English Reformation history over the last fifteen or twenty years has been the discovery-which is not a terribly surprising discovery-that most people were religiously conservative and did not like what was happening. That simple discovery, which has been endlessly endorsed by local studies, has completely shifted perceptions of the Reformation. The Reformation is now seen not as a popular movement which quickly took effect but as something that had to be labored for over a couple or even three generations and which was largely driven by elite and governmental power. I would not want to argue that Catholicism is the superior article in every culture and is always popular while Protestantism is always unpopular. That is patently not always the case, but in England that was the case.

* De Souza: Should a church historian see his work as part of the intellectual work of the church, akin to the vocation of a theologian?

* Duffy: I would be very suspicious, myself, of historians who thought it was their primary job to vindicate the Catholic religion. I think they would be tempted to massage the past into a particular form. I think it is the historian's job to tell the truth and if the truth goes against the church then so be it. It is more important to tell the truth than to protect the church. I am a Catholic so I think that more often than not the truth is no threat to the church. That is not always true. Remember that the church is human history in a particular mode.