Word: acton
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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With such a background, young Acton was destined to have a curious education. He studied with Catholic scholars in France, England and Germany, and by the time he finished, he had delved deep into every aspect of history. He could read and all but memorize two books a day. He was said to have known everyone worth knowing and to have read everything worth reading. He was a familiar figure in the great Whig houses, at Windsor Castle and the papal court. He spoke English to his children, German to his wife, French to his sister-in-law, and Italian...
...What We Ought." To Acton, there was one constant in history: the idea of liberty. But this liberty involved far more than the rights of man or the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, said Acton, "if happiness is the end of Society, then liberty is superfluous . . . Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought...
Every age, said Acton, had witnessed man's struggle for freedom, but man would never find it within social or political frameworks alone. Athenian liberty failed, for instance, because it belonged "to an age which possessed no fixed standard of right and wrong," and modern democracies would also fail if they insisted that "the will of man, not the will of God, was the rule of life." True political freedom, Acton insisted, depended on quite another principle-"the principle that all political authorities must be tested and reformed according to a code which was not made...
...history is a continuous development; it is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul." A slavish objectivity subverts the purpose of history: a historian must not only be a judge, but a "hanging judge" as well. "The inflexible integrity of the moral code," said Acton, "is, to me. the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of history . . . Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity...
...Perhaps, Acton admitted, man would never find this moral law, but should he ever cease trying, all true progress would cease, too. Progress is nothing less than the "striving to know and to love God," and the human conscience is nothing less than God's "ambassador." The study of history, therefore, is essentially the study of conscience. "The weight of opinion is against me," cried Acton to his students, "when I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives...