Resisting history

Religious transcendence and the invention of the unconscious

Rhodri Hayward

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719095375
• eBook ISBN: 9781847796592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

How can historians make sense of visions, hauntings and demonic possession? Do miraculous events have any place in a world governed by cause and effect? In Resisting history, Rhodri Hayward examines the cumulative attempts of theologians, historians and psychologists to create a consistent and rational narrative capable of containing the inexplicable. This lucid and provocative account argues that the psychological theories we routinely use to make sense of supernatural experience were born out of struggles between popular mystics and conservative authorities. Hayward's lively analysis of the Victorian disciplines of Christology, psychology and psychical research reveals how our modern concept of the subconscious was developed as a tool for policing religious inspiration. He concludes his argument with a vivid study of the Welsh Revival of 1904-5, in which the attempt of thousands of converts to cast off their everyday identity was diffused and defeated using the language of the new psychology. By revealing the politics inherent in such language, Hayward raises questions about its deployment in the work of today's historians.Written in a clear and accessible style, Resisting history provides a fresh and entertaining perspective for anyone interested in questioning the concepts that underlie historical writing and psychological thought today.

1

The invention of the self

When truth embodied in a tale (Tennyson, In Memoriam, 36)

There are moments when the pursuit of history can seem truly unnerving. Sometimes that past which was meant to ground our ideas and conceptions gives way and reveals something stranger, alien and uncanny. Although such episodes are rare events in most historians’ lives, they form a recurring motif in fantastic literature, where they are widely associated with the breakdown of identity and personality. Stories of historians driven to madness and despair when their narratives are confounded recur repeatedly in novels, from Mary Ward’s Robert Elsmere and the ghost stories of M. R. James to the works of modern authors such as Penelope Fitzgerald or Elizabeth Kostova.¹ They suggest that our failure to make sense of the past is reflected in a deeper failure to make sense of ourselves. Narrative incoherence invokes personal incoherence and the collapse of history in turn initiates a psychological collapse. At the point in our historical researches ‘where we encounter an alien element which we cannot recognise as akin to ourselves … the hope and purpose which inspired us dies, and the endeavour is thwarted’. As F. H. Bradley observed, this experience left ‘in those to whom it has befallen, the bitterest pain of the most cruel estrangement’.²

This connection between history and sanity is perhaps unsurprising, since the past is now widely seen as the bedrock of our sense of self. We feel that our identities are somehow defined by memory and experience, and we look to our biographies when making sense of our own actions or those of our colleagues and our friends. Yet there is nothing straightforward about our ready equation of identity with history. Other societies and cultures maintain quite different conceptions of selfhood, seeing it as something defined through one’s relationship with nature or one’s position in the wider social order. And even in the West, many commentators believe that our historical or psychological understanding of the self is now giving way to new models based in neuroscience and biochemistry.³ These cultural variations and transformations have, of course, been widely commented upon.⁴ As anthropologists, philosophers and historians across the academy have all made clear, the self is not some kind of natural or pre-given entity with its own inherent form, but a contingent accomplishment which varies among cultures and between individuals.

All of us (I imagine) at some point become vaguely aware of these variations. We have moments when we identify so strongly with our work, our families or our friends that our personality seems to escape its basis in the body and instead extend out into the world. At other times we can feel so suspicious of the memories and desires which accompany our thoughts that the self seems to retreat into the mere moment of present consciousness.⁵ The psychologist William James argued at the end of the nineteenth century that such variations turn the self into a kind of moral project. Those who embrace their histories and surroundings are rewarded with lives of vigour and joy. Those who retreat from the past and from contact with the wider world are condemned to suffer the agonies of the sick soul.⁶

This moral reading of the self has not been universally accepted. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many philosophers and theologians held history and identity under deep suspicion. Evangelical Protestants had long insisted that the self and its past were worldly distractions from the life of the spirit. European existentialists lamented the constraining effects of historical knowledge, seeing it as a fetter on self-awareness and future aspiration. The melancholy philosopher Søren Kierkegaard followed G. W. F. Hegel in seeing recollection as a form of unhappiness. He believed that our pursuit of a lost past was a mortifying process which absents us from the pleasures of life in the present.⁷ Similarly Friedrich Nietzsche envied the bovine forgetfulness of the beasts in the field, believing that they had escaped the demands of memory and responsibility.⁸ And of course this form of existentialist critique persists in the writings of post-structuralists today. Although their arguments are far from straightforward, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault both argue that our modern idea of deep historical identity can be seen as an insidious form of political control.⁹ In their works, historical knowledge achieves at best an ambiguous position. Although it can instil an awareness of contingency and hence the possibility of transformation, an uncritical knowledge of the past – be it political history or personal history – simply serves to fix the individual’s place in a wider network of power.¹⁰

This book is about the conflict between these two opposed visions of the relationship between history and identity. It describes the triumph of the historicist perspective and the struggles that that victory has obscured. Returning to those struggles is important, for it helps to remind us of the contingency of our contemporary sense of self and of the political costs involved in its achievement. We live in an age in which understanding our personal past is held up as the key to an authentic life and individual fulfilment; an age in which the inability to maintain a coherent life narrative is regarded by medical professionals as a threat to physical health and survival.¹¹ It seems that other forms of selfhood have moved from being simply oppositional and instead are now seen as somehow unnatural or pathological. The failure of biography and the failure of narrative history are presented as threats to the natural order.

Yet despite the pathological associations of narrative failure, academics have managed to maintain a remarkable equanimity in the face of evidence and testimonies which apparently threaten the integrity of the historical record. Although the equation of narrative breakdown with personal breakdown might persist in contemporary fiction, one rarely sees historians succumbing to psychological collapse in the reading rooms of the Public Record Office or the British Library. Instead of being threatened or disturbed by reports of miraculous or supernatural events, academics seem drawn to them and the last decades of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a rich literature on the history of magic, hauntings, visions, spiritualism and witchcraft.¹² However, this turn to the occult, as we shall see, is based less in the recognition of the power of the supernatural to disrupt our conventional narratives or self images than in an assumption that such events can be used to launch new levels of historical explanation.

Instead of letting miraculous evidence mark the gaps in our historical knowledge, modern academics have used it as the starting point for virtuoso displays of intellectual analysis. The most common strategy renders the miraculous superficial in the most banal sense of the term, portraying it as the weird excrescence of a deeper historical process. Catholic visions of the Virgin or spiritualist encounters with the voluble dead are taken, variously, as psychoanalytic symptoms revealing scenes of maternal deprivation, sexual frustration or domestic oppression; alternatively, they are understood in functionalist terms, as attempts by those on the margins of society to achieve some sort of mystical empowerment or emotional release from the burdens of political control or economic disruption. The sheer brilliance of many of these accounts is undeniable and there is a satisfying sense of coherence achieved as strange and inexplicable events are mapped onto wider social, political or sexual agendas.¹³

The emotional satisfaction we experience in reading such histories reminds us of our psychological involvement in the historical project. As they render the strange familiar, such works turn the historical witness into a mirror of ourselves: beneath their miraculous claims, the witnesses of the past share the same economic motivations, political anxieties and sexual frustrations that animate our own twenty-first-century lives. History thus operates as a kind of psychological consolation, assuring us of the stability of our inner and outer natures, and revealing how the same mechanisms – be they physical or psychological – are shared across the expanse of time. As Raphael Samuel has argued, current methods serve to turn historical actors into our ‘contemporaries, not so much by transporting us into the past, in the manner of the time traveller, not by piling up period detail, in the manner of the empiricist, but rather by investing the historical subject with a contemporary psyche or interpreting their actions in contemporary terms’.¹⁴

Samuel’s insight is perceptive, yet it is difficult to see how the situation could be different. For in our interrogation of the historical evidence, we are forced into an ongoing assessment of the witness’s veracity; an assessment which is guided by our psychological empathy and our common-sense knowledge of the natural order.¹⁵ For these reasons Marc Bloch insisted that historical writing assumed that ‘the universe and society possess sufficient uniformity to exclude the possibility of overly pronounced deviations’, while his friend and colleague Henri Pirenne argued that, ‘one cannot comprehend men’s actions at all unless one assumes in the beginning that their physical and moral beings have been at all periods what they are today’.¹⁶

The writing of history, it can be argued, promotes a certain model of psychology. In our discriminations between what counts as reportage and what counts as mythical invention, we sketch out a map of the historical witness’s character, values and motivations.¹⁷ What we find alien in their reports does not threaten our worldview; instead it demonstrates their failure as witnesses. And this in itself operates as a consoling failure. It is a failure which reveals the power of human beliefs and desires while at the same time preserving our faith in the uniformity of the natural world.¹⁸

Of course the writing of history is rarely presented in this form. Historians no longer pursue the secularising agenda of nineteenth-century rationalists such as W. H. Lecky or Thomas Buckle, who used their histories of civilisation to expose and critique the mistaken apprehensions of the past.¹⁹ Instead they maintain a very different sensibility, eschewing any judgement over the truth of various happenings and pursuing the more modest course of placing the events in a cultural or political context.²⁰ Yet even this procedure promotes a model of subjectivity – a subjectivity bound up in the body and society – which stands opposed to the pure, selfless experience claimed by many historical actors, from the religious mystic to the plain-speaking witness to the miraculous.

It seems that the historical approach is all encompassing, ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 The invention of the self
• 2 The invention of the unconscious
• 3 The soul governed
• 4 The self triumphant
• Index