By IHE Graduate Scholar Daryl Li
Radical historicism implies that the insights and values of the past are irrelevant to us today since they are, at most, true and good in their historical contexts but not our own. In this framework, ideas about right and wrong within the current epoch must be determined by us and for us alone. Radical historicism denies the existence of universal, objective truth, posing a grave challenge to those of us who seek to know God and the truth He represents.
In Natural Right and History, philosopher Leo Strauss warns of the dangers of radical historicism. Strauss defines the thesis of radical historicism in these terms: “all understanding, all knowledge . . . presupposes a horizon, a comprehensive view within which understanding and knowing take place.”1 That comprehensive view, in turn, is defined by its historical epoch in a way that makes all truth historically contingent or relative. In the radical-historicist view, no idea or claim can be universally and objectively true.
What does this entail for the Catholic faith? Can we learn any truths about God from the Bible? After all, if radical historicism is correct about the historical relativity of truth, then, judging through the lens of our current time, we must reject the Bible as written by ancient peoples whose perspective is defined by “barbarism, stupidity, rudeness, [and] extreme scarcity.”2
Given that God became man and revealed Himself in first-century Judea, radical historicism implies that this revelation and the Gospels’ record of it can be neither true nor even intelligible to moderns living in the twenty-first century. Any truth about God revealed in the past is for the past. Catholics, on the other hand, believe that God is objective Truth, eternal and unchanging from age to age. Thus, radical historicism and Catholicism conflict. How to proceed?
In fact, the radical historicist’s argument is self-defeating. If all truths are historically contingent, what excludes the radical historicist’s own thesis from this condition? Radical historicism asserts its claim as true of all times and places, but this is precisely the same type of claim that it categorically denies. Radical historicism thus embodies a self-contradiction and must be rejected as incoherent. Truth is not merely a function of a particular era and its cultural perspective. Truths are often expressed in the idiom of a particular culture, but a universal truth revealed in the terms of a particular time and place remains nevertheless true for all times and places.
The books of the Bible certainly reflect the times, places, and cultures from which they emerged, but the truths they express are timeless. We should be on guard against the attitude of radical historicism, mindful of the incoherent philosophy it represents. As Catholics, let us apply ourselves diligently to the task of discerning the eternal truths expressed in Sacred Scripture, interpreting them in our own culture’s idiom, and applying them to our lives in the particular historical circumstances we inhabit.
At times, we might feel pressured by the world to compromise on the truths of our faith. We must always remember to take our bearings from God, the eternal Truth, and fix our gaze firmly on Him. Only then are we able to follow our Lord and “give careful thought to the paths for [our] feet” (Proverbs, 4:25-26).
- Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953), 26. ↩︎
- Leo Strauss, “Progress or Return,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), 89. ↩︎
