Obviously, royal biography is the hardest. The art of remembering the past honestly is history, and given the natural imperfections of people, including our vanity, that is and will ever be a difficult one. The first clear-cut efforts at what we might call history come from the two most explicitly demotic cultures of the ancient world the Hebrews and the Greeks. But the whole point of this inquiry is that it is honest we look for the errors and faults as well as the victories and virtues. If we are to learn from the past, we must inquire into its lessons, and the more honest the inquiry, the more valuable the product.
Good history is a symptom of a culture with a strong learning curve.
History is one of the ballasts of such a dissenting tradition, a meditative dissent, a disciplined iconoclasm. Christian culture has always had a profoundly ambivalent attitude towards history. No religion had more mythical investment in the composition of historical texts than Christianity a salvific truth depended on how we told ourselves the tale of the past. Lying, for the sake of souls, was doing God s work. No more moral agendas, morality tales, propaganda.