Historical consciousness: or the remembered past.

It was sometimes said of Evelyn Waugh that nearly always, when he looked at his watch, he was disappointed to find the time no later than it actually was. In this, Waugh betrayed a most unhistorical impatience. After all, what else has history to draw upon but time? And what is time but eternity's reprieve, lest everything happen all at once? Only in Heaven will time be stilled, in that perpetual present that is God's time. Meanwhile, as every creed of Christendom confirms, between the opening words that speak of God without beginning, and the closing ones that speak of world without end, what is there but time?

This is why, of course, Chesterton's celebrated Seller of Sausages is not alone in suffering irreparable harm whenever credibility in those creeds is withdrawn. Historians, too, are entirely dependent upon dogma, the truth of which fully legitimizes (and frequently does so in the face of their own persisting forgetfulness of it) the work of attempting to resurrect the life of the past. Yet, it is only the Christian historian who can hope to discharge this office well, i.e., with integrity of attention to what T. S. Eliot called "The point of intersection of the timeless/With time." Thus time, the medium of history, precisely because it remains completely the work of God--Who both created and directed it from the beginning, then entered fully into it, immersing Himself with such depth and subtlety of drama as finally to transfigure all the dust and the flesh of each human and finite thing--can truly be understood only by the historian for whom Christianity is not a detachable part of the past but rather the linchpin keeping it all together.

Nowadays there are few enough historians of that persuasion around, and of these John Lukacs is about the best in the business. Indeed, he is an exquisite example of the reactionary intellectual who early on absorbed Peguy's warning against the cowardice of writers whose ideas are all wrong lest, in making them right, they appear insufficiently progressive. Professor Lukacs is most wonderfully old-fashioned.

Hungarian by birth, his mind and sensibility shaped by the culture of Europe, Lukacs nevertheless came to this country to stay in 1946. "I came to the United States," he confesses at the end of Historical Consciousness, pecisely because in many ways it represented the past, because it was a country where after two world wars many of the liberal decencies of the nineteenth century were still working, where pesonal freedoms, academic liberties, certain rights to privacy still existed . . . I could not then, and I cannot still now believe that the future of the West is California. The future is the past: I have not departed from this belief: I have but recognized some of its implications.

He wrote that as a postcript to the first edition of this work, published in 1968; in the present edition it stands undistrubed, the intervening years apparently not having diminished his belief that the future of the West will continue as past and not as California.

One thinks here of Faulkner, who, around the time the young Lukacs is crossing over to make a new life for himself amid so many reminders of the past, is constrained by the weight of his own past to remark: "There is no such thing really as was, because the past is." And who proceeds to spin a tale in which a character, musing on the Battle of Gettysburg in the peculiar consciousness of the South, lays hold of a truth that will later rivet and sustain an older Lukacs for some four hundred pages:

It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy 14 years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863.

Or, again, to quote the last line of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men--a story involving a young man's recovery of a past rich enough to qualify as repository of mystery and moral wisdom--"out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time."

Lukacs's theme is really the trancendent importance of a single contribution, namely, the emergence of historical consciousness in the life and thought of Western culture in the course of the last four centuries. It is a development that, while less celebrated than the so-called scientific revolution (whose importance, Lukacs argues, we have tended to exaggerate), nevertheless is one whose implications we have not fully assimilated. "History, for us, has become a form of thought." It is not any mere chronicle of yersteryear that we know, a tale by turns delightful and didactic; instead, to quote Owen Barfield ("one of the greatest philosophers in this century," Lukacs calls him), "history is to be grasped as something substantial . . . essential to the being of man, as an existential encounter."

At the end of the Modern Age [Lukacs writes] the recognition of the historical dimension not merely of our existence but of our consciousness opens the way to a new philosophical unity (indeed, to a new monistic view of the universe) through a historical philosophy, which is the very opposite of a philosophy of history. The latter tried to achieve the knowledgeability of history, but a historical philosophy attempts something else, more modest but also more profound: the recognition of the historicity of human knowledge, with its inevitable limitations.

What then is to become of science? In a word, nothing at all apart from the sum of its own history, "since we all are historians by nature while we are scientists only by choice." And elsewhere: "History cannot be explained scientifically, whereas science can, and indeed it must, be explained historically." Still there is hope ("the hope that lies on the other side of despair") of lasting harmony between the two, which hope Lukacs locates in a series of daring epistemological discoveries by the great physicist Werner Heisenberg. From Heisenberg's uncertainty principle--that the position and the speed of an atomic particle can never both be known at the same time with perfect accuracy . . . which is to say, the behavior of that particle cannot be fixed independently of one's observation of it--Lukacs strings together a number of luminous recognitions that bear on the ultimate historicity of all that we know and are, including science, the myth of whose impersonal objectivity is left in a heap of salutary ruins.

That scientific knowledge, in the end, may not be different from historical knowledge . . . is perhaps the most radical thesis of this book, a thesis which is therefore a herald of a new and monistic view of the universe at the end of the Modern Age, replacing the Cartesian duality established 360 years ago.

It is a story brilliantly told, and while the telling does ramble along some few stretches, it is all eminently worth reading. How wonderful it is to watch Lukacs bring down the whole corrupt Cartesian superstructure of so many minds and bodies sundered one from another. "Descartes," said Walker Percy in Love in the Ruins, "ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own house"--showing us a world from whose matter and history the Flying Dutchman Descartes urged us to take immediate flight, off into the ozone of pure angelic thought. "It is this historicity of our existence that Descartes did not consider. So let me," offers Lukacs, "reverse his famous phrase. Sum, ergo cogito. I am, therefore I think." The dream of Descartes was bound to become a nightmare in which time and memory would necessarily wither, and with them all sense of life conceived as drama, their place in the scheme of things supplanted by so many clear and distnict ideas. The great merit of this book is that it helps ensure our consciousness against those Cartesian slumbers, pouring in the life and the warmth of our remembered past. We should be grateful.