554
PARTISAN REVIEW
when we feel that we have reached the bounds of dispute, and be–
yond is silence. For to some this conclusion seems the ultimate distilla–
tion of wisdom: to others the apotheosis of silliness. And that is that.
As I have already said, skepticism of this generalized variety does
not possess a monopoly of skepticism in politics, even on
th~
Right.
It shares the field with another kind of skepticism that is narrowly
political in essence. Skepticism of this second kind is of course nothing
new. There is in the Christian tradition a long line of thinking that
is so fiercely engrossed in, and consumed with, the eternal verities
in all their absoluteness and certainty, that it finds all attempts to
apply them and interpret them in the sphere of ordinary day-to-day
happenings crude and unreliable: the very ideal or model of cer–
tainty that is gained in acquaintance with the teachings of religion
has ultimately an unsettling effect on the judgment because we can–
not but at all times be aware of the extent to which our everyday
secular verdicts fall short of it. Today this train of thinking has found
new and original expression in the writings and teachings of Herbert
Butterfield, Professor of Modern History in the University of
Cambridge.
Butterfield's place in the esteem of the young is not really very
difficult to account for. In the first place, he is .a historian: and in
England today, history is a subject that enjoys immense prestige–
as perhaps in all countries where imaginative literature is in eclipse.
Nowadays we look to historians for belief, for entertainment and for
enlightenment: they provide the theories, the illusions, the supersti–
tions, and the controversies of the age. Secondly, Butterfield is a very
distinguished historian. And this also is important: for it cannot have
escaped the notice of any clever young man that the various experts
of one kind or another who ordinarily presume to address
him
on
politics are not those who have won the right to do so by success in
their own field but rather those who hope that politics will turn
out to be an easier field for success than that of their original choice.
Thirdly, Butterfield is a very eccentric historian. For in the recent
past English historians have tended to fall into two broad categories:
those with faith who write in faith and those without faith who write
outside faith. Butterfield cuts across this distinction and moreover
believes it to be the supreme duty of the historian to cut across it,
by being with faith and writing outside it.
