The Ethics of Church History

One of the many insights of Diarmaid MacCulloch's Gifford Lecture series on silence in Christian History, now released as a book, is that there is a profoundly ethical dimension to the careful and truthful telling of church history. His approach to silence is to see the theme in its variety of positive and negative forms. Those who are used to reading this blog will know that I have a particular fondness for telling the positive story of Christian silence insofar as it relates to under-appreciated mystical dimension of the faith, with its origins in the teachings of such early exponents as the Desert monastics, Pseudo-Dionysius and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, and such modern champions as Thomas Merton, Bede Griffiths and William Johnston.

But it is the negative story where the question of ethics comes most into focus. Other forms of Christian silence have include the (not always complete and occasionally brutal) repression of heterodox ideas and, most significantly for contemporary Christianity, in the denial and obfuscation surrounding abuse. As well as the sexual abuse of children, MacCulloch reminds the churches of their enormous success in finding arguments to approve of the continuation of slavery and of their undeniable role in the formation and perpetuation of anti-semitic ideologies. The ethical task of the historian is the fearless identification of the causes and practice of such abuses, the analysis of the apparatus used to cover them up and the exercise of careful moral judgement in condemning wrongdoing. On that latter point, it is too easy for historians to excuse past behaviour with the qualification that it was 'reasonable by the standards of the time'. MacCulloch does the church a great service in not letting it use such a lazy way out. He points out that those who discovered some of the earliest recorded clerical abuse of children in the 17th century were fully aware of its evil. It is also important to remind ourselves that the acquiescence of a silent majority does not render moral judgement redundant. Evil is evil, even when the majority are too fearful to name it as such.

There is, I think, a relationship between MacCulloch's positive silences and the historian's task of 'demanding the constant rupture of silences around abuse'. The Christian mystical tradition places a significant emphasis on unflinching self-awareness, on tearful penitence and on inner transformation. With this in mind, the careful telling of the church's history strikes me as a deeply spiritual task as well as its most essential ethical one.

John McLuckie, 
justluckie.typepad.com