J.B. Bury: An Honest Scholar and a Grand Example

J.B. Bury

Today, after clearing trails, cutting brush in front of the deer blind, getting the greenhouse ready for winter, and making a trip into town to do some Mission Committee work, I sat down with a Guinness and a Macanudo and started J.B. Bury's The Life of St. Patrick and His Place in History.  I had downloaded the book some months back after reading Bury's The Reformation in England and Scotland.  He is one of those rare practitioners of Clio's art who can enthrall his readers without sacrificing his respect for facts and available data to the whims of party spirit or pre-supposition.  Even though his arguments and facts are dated after a hundred years plus, his writings still provide the amateur and the professional historian a wonderful example of how good history can be good literature.

Wikipedia says of Professor Bury:
"Bury was born and raised in Clontibret, County Monaghan, where his father was Rector of the Anglican Church of Ireland. He was educated first by his parents and then at Foyle College in Derry and Trinity College in Dublin, where he graduated in 1882 and was made a fellow in 1885, at the age of 24. In 1893 he gained a chair in Modern History at Trinity College, which he held for nine years. In 1898 he was appointed Regius Professor of Greek, also at Trinity, a post he held simultaneously with his history professorship.^[1] In 1902 he became Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University.
At Cambridge, Bury became mentor to the medievalist Sir Steven Runciman, who later commented that he had been Bury's "first, and only, student." At first the reclusive Bury tried to brush him off; then, when Runciman mentioned that he could read Russian, Bury gave him a stack of Bulgarian articles to edit, and so their relationship began. Bury was the author of the first truly authoritative biography of Saint Patrick (1905).
Bury remained at Cambridge until his death at the age of 65 in Rome. He is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome."

So often. honest scholars are forgotten rather quickly after their death or retirement, and they seem never to reach the celeberity status of rock stars or athletes (perhaps C.S. Lewis is the lone modern exception.)  But there are many good people in the academy who rise above the prejudices of their age and write with clarity and honesty.  What they say is perhaps not as important as how they say it.  They provide for us all an example of honest scholarship which neither goes beyond the data available nor seeks to replace reason with rhetoric.  At its best, scholarly argument is a wonderful example of that Holy Wisdom which comes from God alone.  I was taught at Asbury College back in the 70's that all truth is God's truth, regardless of the medium through which it is delivered, and that rightly understood, science and faith are merely flip sides of the same coin.  I still believe that to be true.  It is the basis for the contention in Article XX of the Church of England's Articles of Religion that the Church has no power or right to interpret one part of Scripture in a way which contradicts another.  All wisdom, you see, is of God, and therefore if there seems to be a disconnect between two sources of genuine wisdom, it must be my limited intellect or partial data which is to blame, not the wisdom of God. 

St. Paul writes to the Corinthians, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face:  now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (I Corinthians 13:12.)  Scholars like J.B. Bury are a partial, but blessed foretaste of that day when all things shall be revealed, and the perceived difficulties between science and religion, between culture and faith, between us and God, will at last be reconciled.  Might we all strive to be as careful, as honest, and as willing to defer judgement in the absence of facts as was J.B. Bury..