Distance: One Reason Why Writing on Athanasius is Easy
May 19, 2011
If the choice of Athanasius as a subject for a brief intellectual biography is useful, given both his context and his contribution, a second thing that commends him is chronological distance from the present day.
I was asked recently for advice on how to write about someone who is still alive and to whom the potential author was close in terms of friendship. My response was simple, if a little tongue in cheek: Don't do it! Such a project brings with it a number of problems. To begin with, there is the problem of hagiography (to which I will return in the next post). Hagiography is not unique to those writing about friends, of course: one can write uncritically and idealistically about anyone from any period of time; but for friends and colleagues the danger is particularly acute. After all, at the very least one would want to avoid offending a friend; and that will exert a certain influence on how evidence is assessed and the narrative constructed. Some distance, emotional, psychological and chronological, is always helpful in assessing the life of any given subject.
The second danger is what I call `doing a Trelawny,' after the nineteenth century writer Edward John Trelawny. He was a friend and admirer of the two great Romantic poets, Shelley and Byron, and after their deaths wrote a fascinating book entitled Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author. The book is a great read:once one has recovered from the disappointment of not actually being Lord Byron, then reading a first-hand account of his antics by one of his traveling companions is surely the next best thing.
The book is a strange but entertaining document, full of exciting anecdotes. Yet in the end it tells the reader more about Trelawny than it does about Shelley and Byron. That is another danger with writing about friends, particularly famous friends: such books can easily turn into exaggerated and even semi-fictional accounts that are designed merely to show how intimate the author was with the great and the good.
Of course, `doing a Trelawny' or even writing a fairly accurate account of friend will also lack the long vision of the significance of the life which is under scrutny. With Athanasius, for example, a contemporary life would be fascinating, but it would not connect that life to crucial later developments: for example, both the heretic Apollinaris and the great champion of orthodox Christology, Cyril of Alexandria, picked up and developed strands of Athanasius' thought. Any account of the significance of his life cannot therefore end with his death; minimally, it needs to set his story in the context of a narrative which also makes reference to the debates leading up to and including Chalcedon in 451.
Thus, historians should typically regard contemporary or near contemporary biographies of a given subject not so much as historical analyses. Rather, they should seem them as being part of the primary source material, to be sifted, sorted and assessed in the construction of history. Thus, my friend should try his best to avoid doing a full-throttle Trelawny but still produce his Records of Pastor X, Preacher Y, and the Author because, should X or Y prove to be influential beyond the grave, future generations of historians will be grateful for the source material. Even if, given the fact that today's preachers are not as colourful as Shelley or Byron, the account will inevitably not be as much fun as that of Edward John Trelawny.
I was asked recently for advice on how to write about someone who is still alive and to whom the potential author was close in terms of friendship. My response was simple, if a little tongue in cheek: Don't do it! Such a project brings with it a number of problems. To begin with, there is the problem of hagiography (to which I will return in the next post). Hagiography is not unique to those writing about friends, of course: one can write uncritically and idealistically about anyone from any period of time; but for friends and colleagues the danger is particularly acute. After all, at the very least one would want to avoid offending a friend; and that will exert a certain influence on how evidence is assessed and the narrative constructed. Some distance, emotional, psychological and chronological, is always helpful in assessing the life of any given subject.
The second danger is what I call `doing a Trelawny,' after the nineteenth century writer Edward John Trelawny. He was a friend and admirer of the two great Romantic poets, Shelley and Byron, and after their deaths wrote a fascinating book entitled Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author. The book is a great read:once one has recovered from the disappointment of not actually being Lord Byron, then reading a first-hand account of his antics by one of his traveling companions is surely the next best thing.
The book is a strange but entertaining document, full of exciting anecdotes. Yet in the end it tells the reader more about Trelawny than it does about Shelley and Byron. That is another danger with writing about friends, particularly famous friends: such books can easily turn into exaggerated and even semi-fictional accounts that are designed merely to show how intimate the author was with the great and the good.
Of course, `doing a Trelawny' or even writing a fairly accurate account of friend will also lack the long vision of the significance of the life which is under scrutny. With Athanasius, for example, a contemporary life would be fascinating, but it would not connect that life to crucial later developments: for example, both the heretic Apollinaris and the great champion of orthodox Christology, Cyril of Alexandria, picked up and developed strands of Athanasius' thought. Any account of the significance of his life cannot therefore end with his death; minimally, it needs to set his story in the context of a narrative which also makes reference to the debates leading up to and including Chalcedon in 451.
Thus, historians should typically regard contemporary or near contemporary biographies of a given subject not so much as historical analyses. Rather, they should seem them as being part of the primary source material, to be sifted, sorted and assessed in the construction of history. Thus, my friend should try his best to avoid doing a full-throttle Trelawny but still produce his Records of Pastor X, Preacher Y, and the Author because, should X or Y prove to be influential beyond the grave, future generations of historians will be grateful for the source material. Even if, given the fact that today's preachers are not as colourful as Shelley or Byron, the account will inevitably not be as much fun as that of Edward John Trelawny.
