Meta Chestnutt Sager's Letter to Eva Heiliger, February 11,1945 (1)

The Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection presents mostly one-sided correspondence. Specifically, the archive contains letters written by Meta to her great-niece, Eva Heiliger, most of which directly reply to letters from Eva. But the archive includes none of the letters Mrs. Heiliger wrote to her Aunt Meta. These circumstances create problems for the historical sleuth. In some cases, for example, it seems impossible to know the referent of a certain word, phrase, or question in one of Chestnutt Sager's letters. In other cases, however, determining what she is replying to is simple.

Religious questions, especially matters on which Sager and Heiliger disagreed, are a frequent topic. What seems clear is that Heiliger did not understand, and sometimes differed with, the views of her Aunt Meta. What was the source of their disagreements?

When Heiliger died in 2009, her brief obituary mentioned that she was "an active member of the Community Church of the Nazarene where she taught children's classes."[1] Likewise, when Eva's husband, Richard C. Heiliger, died in 2002, his obituary noted that a memorial fund had been set up at the very same church.[2] The denomination known as the Church of the Nazarene resulted from a series of mergers from 1895 to 1908. All of the merging bodies had roots in the nineteenth-century Holiness Movement, which advanced the doctrine of Christian perfection taught by John Wesley (1703-91), the founder of Methodism.

True to their name, Holiness churches emphasize above all the expectation and goal of the complete sanctification of believers.[3] According to the Church's sixteen "Articles of Faith," God grants "full pardon" and "complete release" from the penalty of sin "to all who believe on Jesus Christ and receive Him as Lord and Savior."[4] The section on baptism describes it as "a symbol of the new covenant" and affirms that it "may be administered by sprinkling, pouring, or immersion." In addition, "young children may be baptized upon request of parents or guardians who shall give assurance for them of necessary Christian training."[5]

In a letter she wrote to Eva Heiliger on February 11, 1945, Meta Sager, then 81 years old, discussed each of these ideas and then some. In my next post, I'll say more about what she said.

Notes

[1] "Eva Heiliger, March 15, 1915--Feb. 2, 2009," Sedona Red Rock News, accessed January 30, 2021, https://www.redrocknews.com/2008/05/14/eva-heiliger/.

[2] "Richard C. Heiliger," Glendale News-Press, accessed January 30, 2021, https://www.latimes.com/socal/glendale-news-press/news/tn-gnp-xpm-2002-10-19-export23732-story.html.

[3] H. E. Raser, "Church of the Nazarene," in Dictionary of Christianity in America, ed. Daniel G. Reid, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990), 274-75; J. Gordon Melton, Nelson's Guide to Denominations (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2007), 385-401, esp. 388 and 391. See also Church of the Nazarene, Articles of Faith, https://nazarene.org/sites/default/files/2019-09 /ArticlesOfFaith%28English%29_0.pdf, accessed January 30, 2021. According to article "X. Christian Holiness and Entire Sanctification," members affirm that "subsequent to regeneration" and "preceded by consecration," that is, the absolute devotion of the individual, a person may be completely filled with the Holy Spirit. This experience, described by phrases like "Christian perfection," "the fullness of the blessing," and "perfect love," brings the believer into a state of entire devotion to God.

[4] Church of the Nazarene, Articles of Faith, "IX. Justification, Regeneration, and Adoption."

[5] Ibid., "XII. Baptism."

A Glimpse of What Historians Actually Do

Farge, Arlette. The Allure of the Archives. Translated by Thomas Scott-Railton. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.

First published in French in 1989, this book is now available to English readers thanks to what appears to be a very fine translation by Thomas Scott-Railton. As the "Forward" by Natalie Zemon Davis explains, author Arlette Farge is a social historian who has focused on eighteenth-century France. But this book of hers is not another historical monograph. It is, instead, a book about the experience, value, and proper uses of archival research. In other words, in The Allure of the Archives, Farge does not practice her craft so much as she elegantly describes and reflects on it.

The author's approach is to toggle back and forth between descriptive, analytical chapters and brief, autobiographical sections--which tend to reveal how petty and annoying some people in the archives can be, and how one easily distinguishes between veterans and rookies. Along the way, Farge puts in a good word for the necessary task of transcribing old, handwritten documents. Though tedious, she insists that there is something essential and rewarding about such work (15-17).

In a section titled "Her Presence," she notes that if traditional histories often omit women, the archives never do: "In every popular expression of emotion, in groups large and small, women were on the scene and dove in headfirst into the action" (39).

Farge is convinced that the prime way of getting at social history is to focus on conflict: "Why not choose to take a deliberately provocative position on this, and assert that society's character manifests itself through antagonisms and conflicts? It is more important to say this than ever, because today there is a tendency to doubt the centrality of conflict" (43).

In another memorable section, the author describes how it is that some manuscripts are much easier to decipher when they are read out loud: "Nothing looks like anything, unless it is articulated, and the tongue delivers the writing from incomprehensibility" (60). Yet, people in reading rooms are supposed to work silently.

Farge also notes several pitfalls associated with archival research. For example, "you can become absorbed by the archives to the point that you no longer know how to interrogate them" (70). She observes that another common trap is to identify a thesis too early, thereby ensuring that you will "find" exactly and only what you were looking for in the first place.

Nearing the end, the author raises and responds to the question of the relationship between truth and written history. She takes a mediating approach, one that says that, while no historian every produces "the definitive truthful narrative," no historian worthy of the name can ever disregard truth, or fail to care about what is true (95-96). 

Here, I noticed a correspondence between Farge's book and one by Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis titled, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford, 2002). Gaddis notes that, on the one hand, historians have always known that arriving at historical consciousness means you have learned "that there is no 'correct' interpretation of the past" and that "the act of interpreting is itself a vicarious enlargement of experience" (10). On the other hand, he rejects the extreme conclusion that because "we have no absolute basis for measuring time and space" we therefore "can't know anything about what happened within them" (34). Both Farge and Gaddis would agree, I think, that historians can and should identify many things that are true, while at the same time recognizing that one's interpretation of a set of facts is just that, an interpretation.