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The past, we are told, is eternally fixed and immutable. Against this assertion, and the restriction on human freedom that it implies, the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov (1866–1938) uttered a powerful protest. A supposed fact, such as Socrates' death by poison, might just be tolerable if it was restricted to a single historical period. ‘But’, he continued, –
to promise it immortality, timeless existence, which no oblivion can obliterate – who has the audacity to take to himself the right to issue such a promise? Why should a philosopher, who knows that everything that has a beginning must have an end, forget this eternal truth and bestow everlasting existence on a ‘fact’ that did not even exist before 399 BC?
Shestov surely exaggerates the sheer givenness of historical events. A death is certainly a death, and the cause of Socrates' death is not open to dispute, but many ‘facts’ of history have a more ambiguous character, and it is impossible to recount any event without some degree of interpretation. It should also be noted that no objective events are directly part of human experience: while they occur, they must be observed, and after they have occurred they survive only in memory. Historical memory can be reshaped by the historian. It is the reshaping in the age of Justinian (and at the ecumenical council of 553) of episodes in the Christological controversy of the mid-fifth century that is the subject of this essay.
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