The Lord's Judgment

__"Lord Acton’s Ordeal: The Historian and Moral Judgment" by Perez Zagorin, in The Virginia Quarterly Review (Winter 1998), One West Range, Charlottesville, Va. 22903.__

The English historian Lord Acton the historian’s duty so stern, and a moral code (1834–1902) is today best remembered for so absolute, that few historians have been his dictum, "Power tends to corrupt, and able to go along with him. absolute power corrupts absolutely." Behind John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton was those famous words, though, argues Zagorin, both a lifelong Roman Catholic and a lifean emeritus professor of history at the long liberal (in the 19th-century sense of the University of Rochester, was a conception of term), who feared the state as the chief threat to liberty. Though his projected magnum opus on the history of liberty never saw the light of day, the ideas he expressed in his many essays, reviews, and lectures, as well as his notes and letters, continue to fascinate students of politics and history.

Acton’s archival research and enormous historical reading forced him to conclude "that Catholics had committed many great evils for the sake of what they considered the higher interests of the church," notes Zagorin—evils that included the religious murders of the Inquisition and other authorized agencies of persecution. "Catholic historians and controversialists, moreover, had repeatedly distorted, concealed, and falsified the truth for pious reasons."

History persuaded Acton to strongly oppose the doctrine of papal infallibility entertained by the Vatican in the mid-19th century. "A man is not honest who accepts all Papal decisions in questions of morality, for they have often been distinctly immoral," he stated. The Vatican Council of 1870 nevertheless adopted the dogma. To avoid excommunication, Acton made some equivocal statements about the doctrine. But he came away convinced that Catholic churchmen and apologists of his day "were all too often willing to disregard morality and to falsify or ignore the truth," Zagorin says, and this only fortified Acton’s conviction that a historian must render moral judgments.

In the past, historians had to be sympathetic and impartial, Acton believed. Each age, he wrote, was "worthy of study [and] to be understood for its own sake, for the way in which it has met its problems, and its share in the suffering of mankind—not as a stepping stone to the present." At the same time, however, Zagorin says, Acton held that moral principles, based on the permanent, generally acknowledged standard of the sanctity of life, were everywhere and always the same. Murder, as the worst crime, provided what Acton called "our basis for measurement." Thus, after subjecting historical evidence and testimony to rigorous cross-examination, Zagorin says, "the conscientious historian" had the duty to make a moral judgment, one that "belongs to the domain of objective facts and becomes a part of historical science."

Most historians, in contrast, have not deemed it "proper as a rule" to make moral judgments, Zagorin says. Unlike Lord Acton, they believe "that they possess neither the power nor authority to speak as the voice of History and pronounce its verdict for all time."