Hagiography: Can't live with it. Can't live without it.

How the passing of Modernity is forcing us to remake how we make History

In today's video I take another look at what's going on with "Universal History" and hagiography. @PageauJonathan and @richardrohlin have been doing a series that I can't stay away from.

One of the main assassination targets for the Enlightenment is what they are calling "Universal History". Modernist-physicalist-concordism would purport to be the standard for what "really happened".

.@klwong43 asked me a few days ago what I meant by that. "Modernist" is the philosophy beneath it. "Physicalist", that which pertains to the physical layer, “concordism” was what people defaulted in the modern frame to "save" Genesis 1. See this Biologos page for a brief history of the use of the word.

"History" has always been a tremendously slippery term. One what level it simply means "what happened" but when it comes to human beings you can't reduce "what happened" to merely physicalist terms. Meaning can never be excluded. One of the first terms that popped out of my mouth in my delphic video making mode was "monarchical vision". This is the fantasy mode that Modernity tempts us into. We imagine we can see the world "as it is". When @AndreaLynnLewis asked @PageauJonathan how to interview a modern physicist Pageau shot back "a pattern seeing patterns. When we try to attain the monarchical vision we attempt to NOT be a pattern and yet see patterns. That is the lie of modernity.

Historians have played a coy little game when it comes to "what really happened". Because History always involves people (as opposed to physics or evolutionary biology) they could never fully escape meaning, but to not lose status in Modernity they played to the physical. Now of course the further you go back our grasp on physical evidence evaporates exponentially as @holland_tom and @dcsandbrook keep noting in their podcasts. Historians must rely on seeing the physical layer through the minds of ancients.

Ancients saw their worlds differently than we do. Yes the physical layer was vital, but the physical layer is empty of meaning apart from people. What do we do when people see miracles after the Enlightenment declared that all miracles are faux pas?

We read our meaning back into history automatically deprecating the testimony of the ancients in order to impose our religious presuppositions upon them. That of course destroys their testimony and their credibility as witnesses leaving us lost in space. My favorite episodes of my favorite podcast @TheRestHistory are when they bump into this and try to figure out what to do. Part of what makes @holland_tom so much fun to watch is that he is open about trying to live in the space where modernism decays.

.@PageauJonathan and @richardrohlin are part of the new explorers that say "damn the faux pas back in time we will go!" They understand that you cannot live without a "universal history". You can't have a community or a civilization without one. But what to do? You can't live with modernity nor can you live without its fruits? So just start relearning what which has been discarded. Start mining modernity's land fills where the consumer goods of the past where carted away.

When @richardrohlin said that hagiography was the most popular genre of the Middle Ages and "the saints uphold the world" (I'll forgive the "literally" comment) the light went on. How could this NOT be the case? "Saints" are of course "heroes" through a religious lens. In this video I wrestled with the question of how ideals work in communities. We desire our ideals instantiated in flesh.

But in order for us to appropriate saints back into the manifest image we must relocate them narratively within a meaningful context, hence hagiography. At that moment I saw that we continue to write hagiography today.

We're awash in hagiographic material today, we just seldom "call it out". We hallow our saints and anyone who points to their clay feet is denounced as a heretic and threatened with exile.

As with almost everything in my project the quest is to get honest about what we are and what we do without losing the blessings that Modernity has brought. The physical layer of history is vital. This is grounded in Christianity's claim of Christ's physical resurrection. Humanity is the breath of God/heaven and the stuff of earth. The two worlds mythology is not going away. Our project is to attend to the stitching.