While nine of his twenty-two books are still in print, albeit in paperback, Random House, under its Vintage imprint, has brought out a new hardcover edition of Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Creators.  Boorstin (1914-2004) was a master of clear, succinct prose that went to the heart of any subject he chose to study.  Among his many interests was the theology of history presented by Saint Augustine of Hippo.

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, but reared in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Boorstin began his career as a lawyer, having studied at Harvard, Yale, and Oxford.  A Rhodes Scholar, he distinguished himself by being admitted to the bar both in America and in Britain.  He then taught for twenty-five years at the University of Chicago, and his professional life culminated with service as Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987.  Between 1958 and 1973 wrote The Americans, a highly-acclaimed three-volume history of the United States.  In 1962 he wrote The Image, about the trend towards publicity and celebrity being dominant features in modern life.

The Creators (1992) is the second in another trilogy, the other volumes being The Discoverers (1983) and The Seekers (1998).  Each wide-ranging volume can stand on its own, however, and in nearly eight-hundred pages of text The Creators surveys such creative figures as Homer and Leonardo da Vinci, Confucius and Giuseppe Verdi.  At the end of August, 1992, in what it hailed as a “special double issue,” U. S. News and World Report devoted thirty pages to judicious excerpts from The Creators, lushly illustrated.  The magazine’s cover bore in letters three inches high the title The Creators and a color picture of Ludwig van Beethoven.

In October of that year rival Time magazine reviewed the book under the sniffy heading “Conventional Wisdom.”  While conceding that Boorstin “has a magisterial gift for summary and organization,” and that “some readers will doubtless find his guidance helpful,” it concluded that “The Creators is not the book it could have been.”  The reviewer had pointed out that although Boorstin’s book had a chapter on Charles Dickens, there was barely a mention of Anthony Trollope, and a chapter focusing on Johann Sebastian Bach but briefly referred to George Frideric Handel.

Boorstin’s obituary in The Economist noted the disciplined and reticent nature of a man chosen to be national librarian by the stolid, pipe-smoking Gerald Ford.  Always an early riser, Boorstin was busy each day clattering away on his old manual typewriter at four in the morning.  “Worshipping, as he did,” The Economist explained, “the original vigour of the American experiment, he often found modern America hard to take.”  It added, “In tweed jacket, glasses, and bow tie, he played the closeted [cloistered] academic to perfection; but his perception of his own times was acute.”  Especially in the early 1990s, he appeared on television news shows as the wise old man who could nevertheless stick to the point.

One of Boorstin’s literary heroes was Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), and at least once in his or her life, any English-speaking historian worthy of the name must read, ponder, and argue with Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Gibbon merits a chapter in The Creators, as do his eminent nineteenth-century American peers, William H. Prescott (1796-1859) and Francis Parkman (1823-1893).  Boorstin steeped himself in the writings of those three masters of the historian’s craft, and if one were to guess which American historians from the twentieth century will be read a hundred years from now, Boorstin would join a short list with David McCullough and Barbara W. Tuchman.

Even though Boorstin favored Bach to Handel and Dickens to Trollope, his was a generous spirit, not meaning to slight or snub.  The seventy chapters of The Creators are really essays, crisply conveying Boorstin’s enthusiasm for what he deemed the finest of human achievement.  Page after page, Boorstin described the glories and genius of human creativity, from the cave paintings at Altamira, Spain, and Lascaux, France, to Chinese and Japanese landscape paintings, from Stonehenge to Frank Lloyd Wright, from Gregorian chant to Igor Stravinsky.

All the while, Boorstin also paid tribute to great religious figures, including Moses, Buddha, and Mohammed.  Prominent among them stood Saint Augustine of Hippo.  Boorstin wrote that Saint Augustine “remains one of the most versatile and challenging thinkers in Western history.”  Given Boorstin’s long hours of re-reading Gibbon, no friend to the Church, as well as his own Jewish heritage, he nevertheless admired Augustine and his permeating influence on Western culture.

According to Boorstin, Augustine’s essential contribution to the ongoing intellectual conversation was teaching that time is linear, not cyclical.  Since at least the days of Hesiod, the ancient Greeks and Romans had believed that human nature and human history would languish forever after the demise of a long-lost Golden Age.  Like the perpetually recurring seasons of the year, time and again mankind faced the same dismal fates.  A brighter future free of this sad cycle was beyond ancient imagination.

“Christianity,” wrote Boorstin, “turning our eyes to the future, played a leading role in the discovery of our power to create.”  Boorstin noted that for Augustine, “the climactic event of the world was the coming of Christ.”  Since that event could never be repeated, Boorstin said that for Augustine, history “begins with the Creation and will end with the Last Judgment.”  In between, “every event is unique, and every soul follows its own destiny, to survive in Hell or in Heaven.”  History thus was not an ever-turning wheel of fortune but “a continuous unfolding of man’s mysterious capacities—for creation, for love of God, for joining the Eternal City,” meaning in this case not old Rome but the new Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation, the City of God in Heaven.

Boorstin therefore saw Augustine, especially in The City of God, revealing how the Christian message of Incarnation and Redemption “transported the classical Golden Age from the remote past into the remote but certain future.”  Mankind need no longer be resigned to life here on this weary old world being as good as it gets, the best having faded away long ago, but could welcome each new day as a gift, an opportunity to co-operate with God’s grace and creation.

 

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B, is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.  He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.