That Old Time Religion

The great German writer Thomas Mann began his biblical trilogy, Joseph and His Brothers, with the comment, “Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it unfathomable?” Mann plumbed the depths of the past with his brilliant literary imagination. The historian also gazes into the well of the past, which seems to recede endlessly. Each moment of the past has its own history, which leads to earlier historical antecedents, and so on, in a near-infinite regression. There are no solid points of beginning, because each beginning is part of a chain of earlier events and circumstances. […]