A Thought from C.S. Lewis on Dividing Up the Past
History and its labels
Above: Peasants at work before the gates of a town. Miniature painting from the Breviarium Grimani (late 15th century).
It’s often said that history is written by the victors. Ours, it seems, are chronological snobs—keen on what is recent, dismissive of everything else. To them, the past is little more than a catalog of ignorance: superstition, oppression, bad hygiene. But this is no trivial prejudice. To control the story of the past is to shape the present—and, by extension, the future. There is real power in deciding how to divide up history: which eras matter, which get a title, which are quietly set aside.
Take the Middle Ages. Generations of students have had their imaginations dulled by the myth of the “Dark Ages”—a thousand years waved off with a shrug and a sneer. How many would-be historians—bright, curious, eager to understand the world—were quietly steered away from that period by teachers who knew little of it beyond the usual clichés? The damage isn’t just academic. When we distort the past to flatter our present assumptions, we don’t just lie about what was. We lose the ability to see what is.
Serious study of history, then, tends to make one suspicious—at the very least—of the standard labels: “Dark Ages,” “Renaissance,” “Enlightenment.” Read the rhetoric of Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, or Gibbon, and you may begin to suspect that these divisions are less matters of chronology than of choreography—carefully staged movements in a story written to serve a modern conceit.
The Protestant historian Rodney Stark, in a recent book, makes a compelling case for that conclusion. He writes:
Just as a group of eighteenth-century philosophers invented the notion of the Dark Ages to discredit Christianity, they labeled their own era the Enlightenment on grounds that religious darkness had finally been dispelled by secular humanism. As Bertrand Russell explained, the “Enlightenment was essentially a revaluation of independent intellectual activity, aimed quite literally at spreading light where hitherto darkness had prevailed.”1 [Emphasis mine]
The way we sort history into neat boxes is a useful fiction. But we should remember that how we divide the past often reflects our own biases and ambitions. We reach for categories not merely to describe, but to judge—to elevate some eras and condemn others. The labels speak for themselves: “Dark Ages” versus “Enlightenment.” Unsurprisingly, we tend to cast our own age in the most flattering light.
C.S. Lewis took up this very point.2 His reflection is worth quoting at length:
From the formula ‘Medieval and Renaissance,’ then, I inferred that the University was encouraging my own belief that the barrier between those two ages has been greatly exaggerated, if indeed it was not largely a figment of Humanist propaganda. At the very least, I was ready to welcome any increased flexibility in our conception of history.
All lines of demarcation between what we call ‘periods’ should be subject to constant revision. Would that we could dispense with them altogether! As a great Cambridge historian has said: ‘Unlike dates, periods are not facts. They are retrospective conceptions that we form about past events, useful to focus discussion, but very often leading historical thought astray.’
The actual temporal process, as we meet it in our lives (and we meet it, in a strict sense, nowhere else), has no divisions—except, perhaps, those ‘blessed barriers between day and day,’ our sleeps. Change is never complete, and change never ceases. Nothing is ever quite finished with; it may always begin over again. (This is one of the sides of life that Richardson hits off with wearying accuracy.) And nothing is quite new; it was always somehow anticipated or prepared for. A seamless, formless continuity-in-mutability is the mode of our life.
But unhappily, we cannot as historians dispense with periods. We cannot use for literary history the technique of Mrs. Woolf’s The Waves. We cannot hold together huge masses of particulars without putting into them some kind of structure. Still less can we arrange a term’s work or draw up a lecture list. Thus we are driven back upon periods.
All divisions will falsify our material to some extent; the best one can hope is to choose those which will falsify it least. But because we must divide, to reduce the emphasis on any one traditional division must, in the long run, mean an increase of emphasis on some other division. And that is the subject I want to discuss. If we do not put the Great Divide between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, where should we put it?
I ask this question with the full consciousness that, in the reality studied, there is no Great Divide. There is nothing in history that quite corresponds to a coastline or a watershed in geography. If, in spite of this, I still think my question worth asking, that is certainly not because I claim for my answer more than a methodological value, or even much of that. Least of all would I wish it to be any less subject than others to continual attack and speedy revision. But I believe that the discussion is as good a way as any other of explaining how I look at the work you have given me. When I have finished it, I shall at least have laid the cards on the table and you will know the worst.
I recommend reading the rest. The lesson stands: history is far more interesting—and far less tidy—than our favored fictions would have us believe.
Stark, Rodney. Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History. First edition. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2016.
De Descriptione Temporum. Inaugural Lecture from The Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, 1954.