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| 143367145X
| 9781433671456
| B004O6MR4I
| 4.49
| 1,496
| Jun 01, 2009
| Apr 01, 2010
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it was ok
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Please give my review a helpful vote on Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/review/R1HJ520... This book is more of a devotional exercise than a work of sch Please give my review a helpful vote on Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/review/R1HJ520... This book is more of a devotional exercise than a work of scholarship. It seems to be designed to arouse the "base" against the notion that the "Reformation is over." It does this by flogging the "black legends" of Catholicism and insisting that a chemically pure mental understanding of the mechanics of salvation is the sine qua non on which God determines the salvation of the individual. The first indication that this is not a book of scholarship is that it lacks any footnotes of substance. For example, although the chapter on Luther makes many claims about Luther's life and theology, and his debate with Erasmus (and Erasmus comes across in this book as quite the whipping boy who let down the winning side), author Michael Reeves has only three footnotes, citing three sources, and maybe five pages from those sources. His citation for Luther's debate with Erasmus consists of a reference to page 33 of "Erasmus of Christendom," published in 1969. The absence of relevant footnotes suggests that Reeve's has read neither Erasmus's opening salvo, "A Discussion on Free Will" or his response to Luther's "Bondage of the Will," namely the "Hyperaspistes." Of course, very few people have actually read either of Erasmus's works in this very important debate on the true essential issue of the Reformation, whether human beings have any role in their own salvation, or, instead, if everything is done by God such that individuals have no choice and no role and no contribution at all in their own salvation. Since, as Erasmus points out, the Old Testament and the New Testament are replete with statements vouching that people do play a role in their salvation, such as jeopardizing salvation by engaging in sin, Luther's position seems problematic as a biblical proposition, notwithstanding his efforts to explain every contrary text away by grammatical parsing worthy of a Scholastic. Reeves characterizes the Erasmus-Luther Debates as follows: "Erasmus was, at the time, the most revered scholar in the world, and since On the Freedom of the Will came from so eminent a figure (and one who had been so instrumental in his own conversion), Luther actually read it. Usually he only read a couple of pages of polemics against himself before using them as toilet paper. Because of Erasmus’ scholarly reputation, it looked like he was the heavyweight; but this was theology, and Erasmus was no theologian. In this arena, Erasmus was like an ant attacking a rhino. Luther responded with The Bondage of the Will, savaging Erasmus’ half-baked arguments. And it really was a savaging. Luther refused to talk about the heart of how to be saved in Erasmus’ cool, dispassionate style. He thought Erasmus had been worryingly glib about the key issue: are we able to do anything toward our salvation? In complete contrast to Erasmus, Luther was adamant that, for all we freely choose to do, we never naturally choose to please God, and therefore all our salvation must be God’s doing, not ours. The difference is evidenced in the words used by the two men to describe their depressions. Luther called his Anfechtung. The word suggests an assault from without, an attack by the Devil. The only hope lay in a conquest from without by Christ, who for us overcame the Devil, Death, and Hell. Erasmus called his depressions pusillanimitas, literally, weakness of spirit, faint-heartedness, for which we have the little-used English derivative, pusillanimity. This implies a weakness within, which man can do something to remedy by pulling himself together. In Luther’s case moral effort was useless, but not so for Erasmus. 3 Fine, Reeves has a side he's rooting for, which is why this is not a book of scholarship. However, I must concede that Reeve's accurate distinction between "Anfechtung" and "pusillanimitas" is worth the price of the book that points to a key distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism, albeit Protestantism has tended to move in a Catholic direction with the Arminians. However, a more neutral description of the debate would be that Erasmus treated Luther with respect as a scholar, and that Luther became unhinged, as was his normal style - notice the part about toilet paper? - and attacked Erasmus personally as well as his arguments. This resulted in Erasmus taking off the gloves in his rebuttal. A fair reading the entire debate is that Erasmus wins the argument by pointing out Luther's textual errors, historical errors and logical inconsistencies, although Luther's name-calling is noteworthy. But this is not a book of scholarship. For Reeves, Erasmus was a pusillanimous turncoat who "purrs" and "smiles" when he debates Luther - except in the Hyperaspistes, when he returns Lutheran vulgarity with Erasmian vulgarity. For example, in the preface of the Hyperaspistes Erasmus observes that he is writing the rebuttal, in part, because "Luther himself acts as if there had been no response at all and celebrates his triumphs with sufficient vainglory in a German pamphlet, challenging me contemptuously, or rather farting in everyone's face with that most boastful term of his "defiance..." Erasmus is not "purring" and "smiling" in the Hyperaspistes. He has taken off the gloves and is "savaging" Luther's well-known vulgarity with well-aimed mockery. Reeves characterizes Erasmus's argument as follows: "For, Erasmus purred, God is like a loving father, and takes our fumbling efforts and smiles on them as if they really were worth something. Erasmus always liked to position himself as the wise man, above the crude extremes of more petty minds, and this was typical Erasmus, aiming at a sophisticated middle position between Rome and the Reformation. But of course, he smiled, like Luther he wanted to uphold God’s grace. Yet surely God would reward a good deed? Quite simply, he could not understand that Luther placed all his certainty of salvation on Christ alone, and not on his own performance at all." Well....no. Erasmus was simply quoting scripture. In the Discussion, Erasmus argues in the Discussion of Free Will: "Accordingly, Paul says in Romans, chapter 8[26] 'Likewise the Spirit assists our weakness.' 'Weak' is never used to describe someone who can do nothing, but rather someone whose strength is not sufficient to complete what he attempts; and someone who does everything by himself is not said to "assist.' The whole of Scripture proclaims assistance, aid, succor, help; but how can you be said to 'assist' a person unless he is doing something himself? 'The potter does not 'assist' the clay to become a pot, nor does the workman 'assist' the axe to make a bench!" (Discussion of Free Will (Toronto University Press, 1999), p. 73.) Erasmus might be wrong, of course, but his argument is not self-evidently wrong. It seems to be a matter of interpretation, and one held by all Christians prior to Luther, which raises the question of why "private interpretation" is a thing only for Protestants, but not for Erasmus. In any event, we do not get into any interesting discussion like that because this is a devotional work, not a work of scholarship. As a devotional text, it is important to the author to affirm not only was Erasmus foolish, weak and dangerous with his non-doctrinal views, but that the Catholic Church prior to 1517 was hopelessly corrupt wherever it was. Ironically, though, this corruption is actually irrelevant to the issue of Reform because the reform was not really about ending simony or the sale of indulgences - that's what the wimp Erasmus wanted - instead it was about changing Christian faith completely. Reeve's offers up this candid admission as follows: "Because Erasmus failed to rely entirely upon God’s grace, Luther concluded sadly that Erasmus must be a stranger to it. With his Greek New Testament, he had, like Moses, led many out of slavery; yet like Moses he never entered the Promised Land. The stark difference between them showed that reform of abuses and the Reformation were two completely distinct projects. The former was a call for man to do better; the latter was an admission that he cannot and hence must rely on the all-sufficient grace of God that the moralizers implicitly denied." I appreciated the candor of this statement because I have never been able to see how ending simony or the sale of indulgences required the abolition of Holy Orders or the denial of Transubstantiation or new definition of "justification." The answer is that it didn't. Rather, in order to overthrow the existing institutional structure, which let German princes take over control of religion in their lands, or, more clearly, in the case of England, allowed Henry VIII to sell off monasteries, the maxim was "never let a good crisis go to waste." Reeves' discussions of the differences between Luther and Erasmus are revealing. Reeves acknowledges that Erasmus and Luther split over the extent of human capacity to will the good, with Luther denying that there was any such capacity whatsoever, and that Erasmus wanted to reform the Church, whereas Luther wanted to end the Church, and that Luther was essentially dogmatic. Reeves observes: "Christianity, to Erasmus, was essentially morality, with a minimum of doctrinal statement loosely appended. . . . Luther’s attitude was very different. To him, Christianity was a matter of doctrine first and foremost, because true religion was first and foremost a matter of faith; and faith is correlative to truth. . . . Christianity was to Luther a dogmatic religion, or it was nothing. . . . Erasmus’ conception of an undogmatic Christianity, and the humanist’s airy indifference to matters of doctrine seemed to him as essentially un-Christian as anything well could be. 2" Dogmatic, convinced in the evil nature of humanity, and giving moral reform a position of lesser importance than theological perspicuity....do most modern Protestant Christians really understand that this is how their religion is supposed to look? Frankly, that's normally what Catholicism is accused of. Reeves' devotional approach is most unfortunate in the efforts to continue the tradition of what sociologist Rodney Stark refers to as "bearing false witness." [[ASIN:B01F57R0LO Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History]] I don't mean to suggest that all of Reeves' examples are untrue, but his method is to deny context to events or to overlook or minimize similar Protestant excesses or to exaggerate some events. For example, Pope Julius II did wear armor and participate as a war leader for the Papal States, but, apparently, according to Reeves, so did Ulrich Zwingli, who died in armor. However, when Zwingli fought that, apparently, was hunky dory because his was a good fight or something. Popes engaged in sexual sins, but then again so did Ulrich Zwingli, but when he did it that wasn't important because that was a one-time deal only, maybe, and besides he was just a likable guy or something. Catholicism was repressive and intolerant but - gosh! - Anabaptists got drowned in Zurich and Calvin's Geneva executed Servetus and the entire town of Munster was slaughtered by Catholics and Lutherans. With respect to Calvin and Servetus, we get an explanation from Reeves that Servetus was a dangerous heretic who denied the Trinity - which he did - and besides executions were quite normal at the time – which they were. (I will be the first to agree that Calvin played by the rules of the time, but, then, so did the Catholics.) Another example, Catholics intolerantly prevented laypeople from reading the Bible to prevent misinterpretation, but after Luther translated the Bible into German, there were so many kinds of crazy interpretations (see Anabaptist Kingdom of Munster) that Luther insisted that his Bible contain footnotes, dogmatic explanations, and commentaries to prevent that kind of crazy "private interpretation." (It was also ironic that in the the prologue Mark Devers scoffs at the notion that Protestantism divided into mutually antagonistic denominations since Reeves spends a lot of time showing that it did, including arguing that the English Reformation was a Reformation but not a Protestant Reformation.) Reeves spends time explaining away Luther’s awful book on “The Jews and Their Lies,” but he doesn’t mention that Luther reinvigorated the "blood libel" after Catholic Popes had spent centuries attempting to end that dangerous claim. These are all examples in Reeves' book, but apart from Calvin and Servetus, and Luther and the Jews, Reeves doesn't seem to think that problematic behavior on the part of the Reformers needs explanation - except Calvin and Servetus, for some reason - so he blows right past all of these inconsistencies between theory and practice while condemning Catholicism for immorality. Interestingly in writing this review, I ran across this line from the Concordia Theological Quarterly (Lutheran): " It must be added that some Roman Catholicism and Fundamentalist Protestants point out that a certain amoral streak exists in Lutheranism.32 I am not going to belabor this point since historically Lutherans have been anything but antinomian. The truthfulness of a religion is not ultimately judged by the moral conduct of its adherents, though the lack of morality can curtail its influence." True, unless one is writing a history of the Reformation, it seems, and then it applies against Catholicism only. I also was amused by the treatment of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre which got mentioned and its own section and Reeve's casual reference to something that Reeves wants to depict as an obscure kerfuffle by a few Catholics in the north of England who were stubbornly refusing to become reconciled with the future: "In similar style, Henry legislated both for and against Catholicism, and both for and against Protestantism. A large anti-Protestant uprising in the North, though savagely put down by Henry, was an alarm-call to him that antagonizing the old order could be dangerous. He responded by announcing harsh measures against those who denied such traditional beliefs as transubstantiation and celibacy for priests (no doubt making Mr and Mrs Cranmer nervous)." This is amusing because it sugests how the anti-Catholic "Black Legend" lives on in the subterranean Protestant world, while Protestant persecutions of Catholics are forgotten. In this passage, Reeves is referring to the Pilgrimage of Grace, which resulted in Henry reneging on pardons to Catholics and promises not to suppress some Catholic practices. As a result of his promise-breaking, Henry executed over 140 Catholics, including burning one pregnant woman. But those were only Catholics on the wrong side of history, so, never mind. Those kinds of things just don’t make it into the history books. Also, I was amused by the absence of any reference to Luther’s decision to secretly permit one of his supporters to enter into a bigamous marriage. Again, this is a devotional work, so I had no expectation that there would be a mention of that problematic conflict of interest. I suspect that if even one bishop had done the same thing, that would have made the list of Catholic sins. Because of Reeves reference to it, I spent some time reading up on the “revered Rood of Boxley", which he describes as "a crucifix which would jiggle excitedly whenever anyone made a generous donation.” I learned from scholars who had read primary sources on the subject that at the time of the English Reformation it was not in working condition and that no monk knew that it had the ability to be manipulated. In addition, it was known to be a mechanical contraption of a kind well-known to be used in Passion Plays. By omitting this detail, of course, Reeves can plant the notion of stupid and gullible Catholic peasants who would be liberated by enlightened and literate Protestants. Weirdly, this book is an intentional throwback to the anti-Catholic triumphalism of earlier decades. Mark Dever’s prologue acknowledges as much: “This book focuses on the first few decades of this remarkable story. With stories, anecdotes, and explanations that catch something of the flash and thunder of the insights and conflicts of the time, this book tells the story of the attempted reform of the universal Church and its rejection by many of those in positions of power and authority. For the last several decades, it has been the accepted thing to tell the story of the Reformation from Rome’s standpoint. The wider contrarianism of the 1960s joined with important, real, and fresh research into the sixteenth century that has revised much of the accepted historical orthodoxies about the state of the Christian church in western Europe, and of the popular practices of piety in the early 1500s. J. J. Scarisbricke, Christopher Haigh, Eamon Duffy, John Bossy, and a host of others have refined the more Protestant reading of the early sixteenth century as a time solely of corruption and despair. They have explained political and economic interests of rulers in backing Lutheran teachings and rejecting the political claims of the Roman Church. John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs has been balanced and demythologized and corrected. Traditional readings of the Reformation by everyone from Merle d’Aubigne to A. G. Dickens have been dismissed. To many ‘the Protestant Reformation’ has been removed from history altogether as little more than pious propaganda, more hagiography than history.” Reeves’ book clearly intends to play the old song. It nowhere indicates any awareness that things were far more nuanced and complicated than his Manichean story of good v. evil. This book, on the whole, reads as if it were recited from Sunday School lessons learned long ago when the good guys were the good guys and the bad guys were the bad guys. That would explain the absence of footnotes and the fact that sometimes this book reads like it was written for children, e.g., “Yet with Bucer and Farel ganging up on him, he was eventually persuaded. Poor Calvin!” Obviously, if a person is looking for a devotional that will convince them that the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon, then this is the correct book to read and enjoy. However, there are other books that are more scholarly and more informative and provide a more neutral overview of the Reformation. I recommend that those books be read. Merged review: Please give my review a helpful vote on Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/review/R1HJ520... This book is more of a devotional exercise than a work of scholarship. It seems to be designed to arouse the "base" against the notion that the "Reformation is over." It does this by flogging the "black legends" of Catholicism and insisting that a chemically pure mental understanding of the mechanics of salvation is the sine qua non on which God determines the salvation of the individual. The first indication that this is not a book of scholarship is that it lacks any footnotes of substance. For example, although the chapter on Luther makes many claims about Luther's life and theology, and his debate with Erasmus (and Erasmus comes across in this book as quite the whipping boy who let down the winning side), author Michael Reeves has only three footnotes, citing three sources, and maybe five pages from those sources. His citation for Luther's debate with Erasmus consists of a reference to page 33 of "Erasmus of Christendom," published in 1969. The absence of relevant footnotes suggests that Reeve's has read neither Erasmus's opening salvo, "A Discussion on Free Will" or his response to Luther's "Bondage of the Will," namely the "Hyperaspistes." Of course, very few people have actually read either of Erasmus's works in this very important d ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 29, 2017
not set
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Oct 2017
not set
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Sep 18, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 1541646002
| 9781541646001
| B0B8YXWVFM
| 3.77
| 91
| unknown
| Apr 18, 2023
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it was amazing
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240811 Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions by Kate Cooper https://www.amazon.com/Queens-Fallen-... As the subtitle says 240811 Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions by Kate Cooper https://www.amazon.com/Queens-Fallen-... As the subtitle says, this is a book about the women in St. Augustine’s life. Since two of the for women discussed in this book are never named by Augustine and one of the two remaining women are never mentioned in the book, I had two thoughts: first, how much invention and mind-reading would the author indulge, and, second, how much of a feminist polemic would this be. The latter concern almost kept me from buying the book. The good news is that Kate Cooper pulls off her assignment in a scholarly and interesting way. The historical part is well done. The scarcity of biographical information is rounded out by Cooper’s knowledge of Roman society. The theological/historical part is even-handed and avoids any tendency to make St. Augustine into a monster of the patriarchy. The four women that Cooper discusses are Monnica – Augustine’s sainted mother; Tacita – the twelve year old heiress with the fat dowry that Augustine would have married as his ticket to Roman high society; Una – the concubine that Augustine was involved with for twelve years and with whom he had a son named Adeodatus; and Empress Justina, who is not mentioned in The Confessions, but who played a significant behind-the- scenes role. Cooper provides a good deal of Roman cultural knowledge and history as a way of filling out the stories of these women. For example, she explains Roman inheritance rules and how those rules connected with the institutions of marriage and concubinage. The purpose of marriage in Roman society of the fourth century was to create an heir to property. Only the children of marriage could inherit. Concubinage was an accepted institution in the fourth century and carried no bit of shame or dishonor. It was a relationship of inequality between the man and the women, although it was not uncommon for a man to free a concubine slave in order to marry her. In concubinage, the man had no duties to the concubine or the children of the relationship. The children of a concubinal relationship could never inherit. When the relationship was over, the woman would take the children with her. This is why it was so remarkable that Adeodatus remained with Augustine after he ended the relationship with “Una” in order to enter the relationship with “Tacita.” Augustine loved Una. Except for the fact that he was ambitious, he could – he should have – remained dutiful to Una, something that he realized too late. From the Confessions, one doesn’t get a sense that Augustine saw concubinage as morally problematic for the reasons we see it as morally problematic. I think we see it as morally problematic because it involves sex outside of marriage. This doesn’t seem to be a problem for Augustine, even when he was writing the Confessions as a Christian bishop. According to Cooper, Augustine’s moral problem with his concubinal relationship was that it actually was a marriage, but he didn’t recognize it as such until later. This says a lot about the moral change in Western society between Augustine’s age and ours. Empress Justina isn’t mentioned in the Confession, but knowledge of her role behind the scenes is informative. Justina was the stepmother of Emperor Gratian, who was murdered in 383 AD, and the mother of Valentinian II, the minor was the sole sovereign of the Western Roman Empire. Gratian was murdered by a usurper named Maximus, who positioned himself to the north of Italy. Augustine’s mentor, St. Ambrose, acted as an intermediary between Justina and Maximus to stall Maximus’ invasion of Italy. Ambrose was successful – Maximus delayed long enough for Emperor Theodosius to intervene to end Maximus’ insurrection. All of this plays out, unmentioned, in the background of the time that Augustine is in Milan studying under Ambrose. All the time of Augustine’s spiritual turmoil, his conversion after hearing “tolle lege,” and his baptism by Ambrose are foregrounded against a never-mentioned reality that an army was about to invade Milan. In fact, people were fleeing Milan and Italy, general. Augustine’s departure from Italy may have been motivated by the threat of the invasion, but this is never mentioned. The woman most clearly described is Monnica. In Cooper’s telling, Augustine had a loving relationship with his mother, Monnica was a wise woman, and Augustine respected her intelligence. Monnica taught Augustine that social status was less important than personal merit. Monnica’s lessons were propagated into Western society. Usually, Augustine is blamed for being addicted to lust, who transmitted a negative attitude about sex to the future. Cooper disagrees with this understanding. In her eyes, Augustine’s addiction was to greed and ambition, not lust. The following is such a revision of the traditional picture of Augustine, that it deserves quoting in full: But reading the Confessions carefully, we encounter a different story. Augustine tells us that he and Alypius had debated whether marriage was a better way of life than asceticism, but he makes clear that he, Augustine, had won the debate. Largely by pointing to the example of his own harmonious home life with Una and their small son, Augustine had persuaded his friend that marriage had to be better than the single life. As he saw things in hindsight, the problem he had faced in the summer of 386 was not that sex and marriage were obstacles to communion with God. Rather, it was that his way of pursuing them had been immoral. On this reading, the received view is not wrong that Augustine was recoiling from sin when he decided not to marry. But the sin that repulsed him was not lust; it was greed. What shook him, finally, was his willingness to betray the woman who ought to have been his wife—the mother of his child—for a lucrative arranged marriage. The root of his problem was not sexual desire. It was ambition. Years later, after returning to Africa, Augustine would go on to become first a monk and then a Christian bishop, and his pastoral writings would repeatedly recognize a spiritual value in romantic partnerships outside wedlock. He would argue that a man who had lived with a concubine should not be allowed to marry, since in his day, second marriages were prohibited. Even if Roman law saw concubines as a having no legal standing, he argued, the church should see the union as spiritually equivalent to marriage. In other words, neither one of the pair should move on to marry someone else while the other was still living. This was and remained a minority view. Many Christians shared Monnica’s view that divorce was impossible, but this only applied to marriage, while others believed that under the right circumstances, Christians could divorce and remarry. With the exception of Augustine, no one seems to have believed that men should be forever faithful to a concubine whom they had specifically chosen not to marry. If Bishop Augustine came to argue that a man who takes a concubine has a moral obligation to her, his contemporaries mostly saw a concubine as a person there to be exploited. Whether slave or free, she provided a service, and if she earned genuine affection from her partner, this spoke well of her but did not alter her position. By sleeping with her, the male partner acquired no long-term obligation toward her or her children, even if he was the biological father. Augustine would break with this tradition by arguing that in moral terms an established extramarital relationship carried the same responsibility as the legal bond of marriage. We can see this in the famous scene in the garden at the climax of Book Eight of the Confessions, when Augustine decides to dedicate his life to God. This momentous scene has been persistently misunderstood. Certainly, he was guilty of a terrible sexual sin, but the sin was not sleeping with his concubine. It was casting her away. Augustine’s story of his conversion begins with an admission that he had been a slave to lust and to worldly ambition. But now, God had freed him: “I will tell the story of how You, my help and my salvation, set me free from the chains of sexual desire, which held me so tightly, and from the slavery of my worldly ambition.”3 That Augustine addresses God by the term dominus—which means both “lord” and “master”—here is no accident; he wants to underline the helpless subjection he had labored under. “I was going about my usual activities,” he says, “with anxiety mounting ever higher, and every day I sighed for You.”4 Cooper, Kate. Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions (pp. 195-196). Basic Books. Kindle Edition. This crystallizes something for me that I had long intuited. I’ve read The Confessions three or four times. I’ve never formed the picture that Augustine was a particularly “lustful” guy. His relationship with “Una” was one of faithfulness. He was obviously torn by putting her away. Admittedly, he said that he needed to have a woman in his life, but we do not hear about him visiting prostitutes, which were plentiful in the Roman Empire. Based on what Augustine says, Cooper’s understanding is that Augustine came to understand himself as actually married to “Una.” This meant that marriage was not simply about inheritance. It involved a mutual willing of the “goods of marriage,” a term that the Church would use to describe the openness to children and the unity of life. Augustine wrote on marriage in several books. He also wrote pastoral letters where he expressed these ideas. In a letter to a married woman named Ecdicia, he gave her counsel about her relationship with her husband. Augustine insisted that marriage was more than a contract, it was a spiritual fellowship. According to Cooper: The letter to Ecdicia caught the eye of these later divines for it contained many distinctive ideas about the spiritual value of the marriage bond. It argued that marriage was not, as the Romans had always believed, simply a contract between families to organize the transmission of property. Instead, it was a spiritual fellowship that could be undertaken between individuals who had no intention of having children or even sleeping together, and it involved a vow before God that would last into eternity. No one would have been more surprised than Ecdicia to learn that something good had come of her troubles. But in the eyes of the medieval church, her predicament was nothing less than providential; it was the grain of sand around which the pearl of the medieval Christian sacrament of marriage later grew. Cooper, Kate. Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions (p. 229). Basic Books. Kindle Edition. In a treatise, Augustine equated marriage with fidelity. According to Cooper: In his treatise On the Good of Marriage, Augustine makes an unprecedented argument for an element of fair play between the sexes. The Confessions and On the Good of Marriage have traditionally been dated to the same period, the years directly after Augustine’s consecration as a bishop in 395, but in fact the date of both is uncertain. Yet the two texts need not have been written at the same time for us to see what they have in common. Both develop an impulse of self-criticism and offer an implicit critique of male privilege in relations with women. Marriage is about trust, Augustine argues—the Latin term is fides, often translated as “faith” or “fidelity.” This means that each partner should be accountable to the other in the same way. A husband and wife enter the bond on the same terms: “They owe equal fidelity to each other.”18 So far, Augustine might not have ruffled too many Roman feathers—but only if he held back from spelling out in detail what his words actually meant. But Augustine did not hold back: “Betrayal of this fidelity,” he says, “is called adultery, when through the prompting of one’s own lust, or through acceding to the lust of another, sexual intercourse takes place with another man or woman contrary to the marriage-pact.”19 With a stroke, he makes radical departure from the Roman understanding of marital fidelity, which deemed the relationship exclusive only for the wife. By suggesting that for a man to sleep with a woman other than his wife constitutes adultery simply because he himself is married, even if she is single, Augustine steers definitively away from the Roman legal definition of adultery as a crime that turned exclusively on the violation of a married woman’s chastity. That definition was still in force at the time he was writing. Cooper, Kate. Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions (pp. 239-240). Basic Books. Kindle Edition. This is getting closer to the modern – Christian – understanding of marriage. It is hard for us to see how a Christian marriage could be otherwise, how it could be “Roman,” but that is an artifact of shapers of culture like Augustine. This is a good work of intellectual history. It manages to demonstrate that the past is a different county and how we got from there to here. I do question one thing in this book. It seems that Cooper believes that Arianism was an invented issue: Originally, the presbyter Arius taught that the Son of God was a human being born like any other creature, while his rival Athanasius, later bishop of Alexandria, taught that the Son of God was much more than a historical person: he was also the Word of God—the Logos—which had been spoken at the creation of the world. The creed proclaimed at the Council of Nicaea in 325 captured the idea by speaking of the Son of God as “eternally begotten of the Father.” After Nicaea there was no enduring “Arian” movement—Arius himself quickly modified his views to try to keep the peace. Still, the Nicene party discovered that constant accusations of heresy against their rivals was a powerful tool for populist crowd-building, and the fact that “Arianism” was an empty accusation made it particularly useful as a slur to aim at whomever the Nicene bishops disagreed with.2 Cooper, Kate. Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions (pp. 137-138). Basic Books. Kindle Edition. First, I believe that the issue was whether the Son was created or eternal. Arianism agreed that the Son was divine, but also claimed that the Son was created by the Father, i.e., “there was a time when he was not.” Second, there were emperors, churches, and entire Germanic tribes, such as the Ostrogoths, who were Arian. These groups persecuted Catholics, and vice versa, to be fair. I am not sure what Cooper means here. Nonetheless this is a short, accessible read that provides interesting background for one of the most interesting men in history. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 30, 2024
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Aug 05, 2024
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Jul 30, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 0374157359
| 9780374157357
| 0374157359
| 4.20
| 20,613
| Oct 19, 2021
| Nov 09, 2021
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it was ok
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240224 The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow This book promises a lot. It promises to turn upside down the reader’s understanding. 240224 The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow This book promises a lot. It promises to turn upside down the reader’s understanding. It promises to reveal hitherto concealed facts about early human civilization. It promises to undercut the conventional understanding of the history of early human civilization. It promises to tell us how we got “stuck.” “Stuck” is a favorite word of the authors. “Stuck” is used 16 times. “Stuck” is a kind of criticism of modern Western society, as the authors imagine it. For example, they write the following: Second, we’ll start answering the question we posed in the last chapter: how did we get stuck? How did some human societies begin to move away from the flexible, shifting arrangements that appear to have characterized our earliest ancestors, in such a way that certain individuals or groups were able to claim permanent power over others: men over women; elders over youth; and eventually, priestly castes, warrior aristocracies and rulers who actually ruled? Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (p. 121). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. So, how do they do? In that they oversell the sizzle and provide a product that is far less then what they promise, not very well in my opinion. What got me interested in the book was the promise to reveal human “deep history” – history prior to the last approximately 7,000 years. Scholars can sketch out a trace of human history up to around 5,000 years BCE. Before that time, things get sketchy. For example, we know that Jericho has been more or less continuously occupied since 9400 BCE. https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog... By 8,000 BCE Jericho can be called a “town” with about 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants. Jericho appears to be the oldest such community that we have evidence for. The age of Jericho means that by the time that ancient Hebrews allegedly arrived at the walls of Jericho around 1,200 BCE, Jericho had a history that went back a further 8,000 years. Ponder that. History is deep. Jericho’s history is dwarfed by still deeper human history. Prior to the founding of Jericho, humans had been wandering the landscape of the region for a further 40,000 years. What were they doing? I purchased this book with the hope of finding out. Unfortunately, Graeber and Wengrow are less interested in telling us about what science has to say about the deep human past than in using an imagined past – both deep and far more recent (substantial attention is paid to the attractions of North American Native culture from the 18th century) – as a foil against modernity. For example, the book beings with a critique of Rousseau and Hobbes’ notion of the “state of nature.” Neither philosopher intended the idea of the state of nature to be historical. Rather, they used the state of nature – a hypothetical condition of equality that existed before human communities – as a way of critiquing their cultures. Similarly, Graeber and Wengrow critique Rousseau to argue that the idea of a primitive condition of human equality is a mistaken quest. Although they acknowledge that Rousseau didn’t think such equality ever existed as a matter of history, the authors spend a lot of time and effort arguing that we won’t find such equality in the past. As an attack on a strawman, they win they point. However, they go on to create their own version of an ur-state of human equality, but this time it is labeled “freedom.” Their write: Is this an example of how relations that were once flexible and negotiable ended up getting fixed in place: an example, in other words, of how we effectively got stuck? If there is a particular story we should be telling, a big question we should be asking of human history (instead of the ‘origins of social inequality’), is it precisely this: how did we find ourselves stuck in just one form of social reality, and how did relations based ultimately on violence and domination come to be normalized within it? Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (p. 519). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. So, apparently, we are now “stuck” but previously we were not “stuck.” What did things look like before we became “stuck”? They write: Over the course of these chapters we have instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones. Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (p. 503). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. It is hard to see where Rousseau would disagree with this new formula. Where does this formula come from? If you aren’t paying attention, you might think that Graeber and Wengrow have proven it somehow. They offer a lot of anthropological examples which give the impression that they are marshalling unassailable evidence They offer examples from the Wendat, California versus Northwest Indians, Egypt, Sudan, Gobekli Tepe, etc., etc. They have all of human history to cherry-pick. What they don’t offer are counter-examples that prove their point or some logical demonstration as to why these three freedoms are basic. . While criticizing other anthropologists for projecting their biases into the evidence, Graeber and Wengrow do the same. It is worth noting that Graeber was heavily involved in the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. I didn’t know this until after I had finished the book. There were red flags throughout the book that made me suspect that this book was aiming at indoctrination rather than objectivity. One such “tell” was the resurrection of Marija Gimbutas’s hoary “The Goddess and Gods of Old Europe (1982).” While Gimbutas has always been popular among the feminist left and people who want to feel smart in having their biases confirmed, her theories that Europe was occupied by matriarchal Goddess-worshippers until the nasty Indo-Europeans invaded an imposed patriarchy and Sky God were rejected by anthropologists. Graeber and Wengrow attempt to rehabilitate Gimbutas via “recent research” on DNA that shows that there was an influx of invaders into Europe. What they don’t explain is how this proves a matriarchal society was overturned. No one to my knowledge ever denied that there were population invasions. Long before DNA research was possible, no one disputed that the intrusion of the Indo-European language family into Europe meant that a new population had arrived. What’s going on here is that Graeber is, and Wengrow may be, men of the Left and they have fairly conventional post-modern attitudes about feminism, colonialism, the evils of patriarchy, and the rest of the social imaginary package that constitutes the evils of modernity. They also probably know that they are going to score major points if they beat the feminist drum. All that is missing is some evidence of this matriarchal culture. It is confirmation bias as far as the eye can see. Thus, they offer the example of the Iroquoian longhouses being run by a council of women. This may be surprising to the average person but I read anthropologist Marvin Harris’s excellent “Cow, Pigs, Wars, and Witches” back in the 1970s. Harris described the Iroquois as an exception because their men were often away from home on raiding parties. In other words, there was a reason for this exception. They don’t mention this and I suspect that we will find similar reasons apply to the scant other examples they mention, such as the Hopi, Zinu and Minangkabau, a Muslim people of Sumatra. By the way, what do these examples have to do with Gimbutas’ thesis? Nothing, really. We can’t infer from a handful of exceptions to an unknown group as if it were a matter of deductive reasoning. This point is particularly germane when the reader understands that it is key part of Graeber and Wengrow’s argument that social forms are not determined; rather, social forms just happen (perhaps because the intelligent hunter-gatherers tried one form, disliked it, and moved to another form, and sometimes because we got “stuck” for some reason.) Graeber and Wengrow also offer the Cretans as a matriarchy based on Cretan paintings depicting women as larger figures and smaller male figures as bowing toward them. What this shows is aristocracy. According to other sources, there both male and female figures that are depicted as larger than other figures who are serving the larger figures. Could Crete have been a matriarchy? Sure, but my problem is that this sounds like a lot of anthropology I read as a child in the 1960s that depicted the Mayans as peaceful. Later anthropology revealed the bloodletting, wars, and human sacrifices of the Mayans. It is not the case that Western scholars are always projecting racial inferior stereotypes into non-Western culture. A lot of anthropology involves using the imagined non-Western culture as an example of a utopia that the West missed out on having. Sort of like Graeber and Wengrow do. Graeber and Wengrow are particularly obnoxious on this front when they fall for the Kandiaronk hoax. Kandiaronk was a “Wendat Philosopher-Statesman” - an Indian chief - who befriended the French in approximately 1683. A Frenchman named Baron de la Hontan (Lahontan) purportedly transcribed conversations between Kandiaronk and the Governor General. Surprisingly, Kanriaronk turns out to have been the very model of the Enlightenment philosopher, with piercing comments about inequality and money. Graeber and Wengrow discount the possibility that Kandiaronk was what moderns would call a “sock puppet” to put Lahontan’s ideas into circulation, but this kind of thing was an established industry at the time. Lahontan’s memoirs may be accurate, but if that was the case, they would have been exceptional in that regard. David Bell who teaches on the French Enlightenment at Princeton has this to say: https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-... The error that Mann makes—and that Graeber and Wengrow uncritically repeat—is in some ways an understandable one. It can be very tempting to mistake Western critiques of the West, placed in “indigenous” mouths, for authentically indigenous ones. The language is familiar, and the authors know exactly which chords will resonate with their audience. Genuinely indigenous critiques, coming out of traditions with which people raised in Western environments are unfamiliar, can seem much more strange and difficult. The reductio ad absurdum of this mistake comes when people take as authentically Native American the words of Pocahontas, in the Disney film of the name: “You think you own whatever land you land on / The Earth is just a dead thing you can claim…” The error is also—of course—deeply political. It fits what Graeber and Wengrow describe in their conclusion as a principal aim of the book: to “[expose] the mythical substructure of our ‘social science,’” and to reveal, contrary to what social scientists insist, that humans still have “the freedom to shape entirely new social realities.” Many Native Americans in the time of Kandiaronk still possessed this freedom, they claim. European societies, meanwhile, were incapable of real self-criticism. It took the wise Huron to open Western eyes to the possibility of a genuinely revolutionary politics. Graeber and Wengrow themselves now want to play a similar role. Unfortunately, if their treatment of the Enlightenment is any indication, in pursuing this goal they are willing to engage in what comes perilously close to scholarly malpractice. I don’t have the expertise to comment on Graeber and Wengrow’s arguments about matters other than the French Enlightenment, but the quality of their scholarship on this subject does not bode well for the remainder of the book, to say the least. Other scholars offer searing criticism in their area of specialty. For example, Graeber and Wengrow claim that Europeans, unlike Indians, would often stay with the other culture when given the opportunity. This claim – which will bury itself in many minds like a virus or earworm – is based on a doctoral dissertation which says that there was no difference between the cultures – no matter what culture the person came from, they wanted to go home. The treatment given to Karl Marx is noteworthy. Graeber and Wengrow argue against economic determinism but they never call out Marx on that point. Instead he gets treated with deference as one of the people with courage to say “slightly ridiculous” things. This is the “dog that didn’t bark” inasmuch as most anthropology is “Marxist,” not in the sense of advocating “from each according to the ability, to each according to their need,” but in the sense of a willingness to correlate cultural developments to economic realities. Marvin Harris, who I mentioned earlier, falls into this category. But Graeber and Wengrow have nothing to say about how their discipline got “stuck” by adopting Marx? And what is this “stuck” anyhow? Apparently, in the past, people had the ability the ability to boldly re-imagine their society and make changes if they chose. Obviously, we can’t do that, which is why slavery was not abolished in America in 1965, serfdom wasn’t abolished in Russia in the 1850s, and a virulent form of social organization that subordinated everything to the State didn’t collapse in Europe in 1989. It’s also why no one has ever tried to form communes, some of which have been successful for decades. What are they talking about. This is not to say that there are no virtues in this book There are nuggets of information. I didn’t realize that California Indians did not rely on the “three sisters” form of agriculture, for example. It is clear that the idea of an “agricultural revolution” leading to sedentary communities is not entirely accurate – although there may still be a positive correlation between the two. James C. Scott, who is given deferential treatment by the authors, has a lot of interesting things to say about this in “Against the Grain.” The idea of “schismogenesis” is interesting: Back in the 1930s, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined the term ‘schismogenesis’ to describe people’s tendency to define themselves against one another. Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (pp. 56-57). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. On the other hand, I can see where it applies to direct interactions, but the authors apply it to explain the differences between California Indians and Indians of the Pacific Northwest. Most Indians in these two “cultural areas” would never interact with each other. Why didn’t this effect lead to a checkerboard pattern of cultural differentiation? But on the whole, it didn’t address my interest in “deep time.” Where it moved into things I knew, it was wrong or overly simplistic. I cannot recommend this book ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 09, 2024
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Feb 25, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 1644115743
| 9781644115749
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| Sep 20, 2022
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liked it
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240213 The Occult in National Socialism by Stephen E. Flowers, Ph.D. This is an odd book. On the one hand, it has a lot of solid scholarship about Germ 240213 The Occult in National Socialism by Stephen E. Flowers, Ph.D. This is an odd book. On the one hand, it has a lot of solid scholarship about German culture prior the Third Reich. The author, Stephen E. Flowers, seems to document and footnote his points. He makes some solid observations about a variety of points. On the other hand, he lurches into some weird territory. The agenda of his book seems to be about unlinking National Socialism from accusations about its alleged occultic, pagan, or Satanic antecedents. At times, Flowers seems to come off as a National Socialist (NS) apologist who wants to make sure that they are not wrongly accused of that kind of nonsense. Given what they are accused of this seems like a lawyer claiming victory by exonerating a serial killer of jaywalking. In addition, Flowers goes off on paranoid tangents accusing the Christian Churches of spreading lies about the Nazis occult history. He also blames the Christian Churches of causing the Holocaust by allegedly cultivating anti-semitism, He doesn’t offer an explanation for why the Holocaust happened in Germany, and not anywhere else in Europe, even though he acknowledges that the German culture responsible for the Holocaust was post-Christian. Likewise, Flowers drops in casual references to the “left hand path” as if that was something known to people with no prior knowledge of occultism (or as if it described something real.) He also talks about “magic” as if it were real. He seems to mean something like using rituals, rites, or memes to elicit psychological responses in an audience. In other words, what most people would call “psychology.” Flowers clearly has an agenda. Given his casual references to the “left hand path” of occultism, trusting his readers to understand this “inside Baseball” reference, and the anti-Christian animus, I suspected he was an occultist. Bingo! Wiki reports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen... Stephen Edred Flowers, commonly known as Stephen E. Flowers, and also by the pen-names Edred Thorsson, and Darban-i-Den, is an American runologist, university lecturer, and proponent of occultism, especially of Neo-Germanic paganism and Odinism. He helped establish the Germanic Neopagan movement in North America and has also been active in left-hand path occult organizations. He has over three dozen published books and hundreds of published papers and translations on a disparate range of subjects. Flowers is still an active representative of heathenry and Odinism, and has appeared online in spaces associated with neo-Nazi activity, such as Red Ice TV. It seems like Flowers is not protecting Nazism from paganism; he’s protecting paganism from Nazism , although apparently there is something of a practical overlap between these things according to this article. https://www.spiralnature.com/culture/... Knowing Flowers’ agenda and bias is a useful tool for reading this book. I don’t think anyone should fear contamination by racist ideas because this book is not racist or antisemitic. (It may be more anti-Christian and anti-Catholic, but who cares? Right?) Apart from that, there is nothing wrong with undercutting hysterical tropes that want to explain the cosmic evil of the Nazis with cosmic evil causes. I have read several books on the history of National Socialism and occultism. My interest comes from a perspective 180 degrees off from Flowers. My interest as a Catholic is the Catholic relationship with National Socialism. This interest has a tendency to lead to investigations into German culture and the German counterculture. Flowers takes the reader through 19th century occultism. The reader is introduced to Guido von List, Baron Heinrich von Sebbottendorf, and Lanz von Liebenfels, who are usually identified as mysterious sources that led to National Socialist ideology. Flowers offers some of the best biographical descriptions of these odd figures, although he generally distances them from National Socialism on the grounds that they were not antisemitic or represented some other departure from what would become National Socialism. The nineteenth century occult world is murky and Byzantine with its theosophy, ariosophy, Madame Blavatsky, various occult lodges, and, of course, Aleister Crowley. The characters come and go and change sides in a way that is possible only for fanatics in a tiny community . One of the interesting points that Flowers makes is to explain many of the quirks of Nazi leaders on the Lebensreform (Life Reform)/Reformbewegungen (“Reform Movement.) This was the nineteenth century movement toward health and clean living by practices like vegetarianism and nudity. Why was Hitler a vegetarian? Because he was influenced by the Reform Movement. Flowers points out: The Reform movement is the great-grandfather of the American hippies†23 of the 1960s and must be viewed as a broad and all-inclusive movement beyond the model of partisan politics. The men who made up the Nazi leadership came of age when this movement was in full swing, which perhaps accounts for a great deal of the unorthodox beliefs held by many of these men—for example, why Hitler was a teetotalist, antivivisectionist vegetarian! Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (p. 66). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition. Political developments often lag twenty to forty years behind popular culture. If you want to find out why leaders today are doing something, it is useful to look at what was popular and cutting edge when they were young. Germany prior to the Third Reich had a strong counter-culture. Theosophy and related occult ideas found a culture already manured by the Reform Movement. At the elite level, Germany was not a conservative Christian culture during the nineteenth century: //This changed in the nineteenth century. Rational idealism, practiced by Kant and Hegel, was turned into a materialistic economic political philosophy by Karl Marx. Traditional Christian theology was subjected to widespread rationalistic attacks by the new biblical criticism. At the same time, there was an influx of exciting and apparently effective religio-philosophical conceptions from the East. Ideas imported from the Buddhistic and Brahmanic religions, especially as embodied in the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, all led to a new way of thinking that was ready to wipe away the old established philosophies and theologies. One of the most important figures in popularizing the new revolutionary way of thinking was the artist Richard Wagner, followed by his former acolyte, Friedrich Nietzsche. This package of ideas was a potent mix for cultural change. Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (pp. 38-39). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition. Richard Wagner was the nineteenth century “rock star” who used his influence to make paganism/antisemitism “cool.” Wagner mediated Schopenhauer’s philosophy to a broader culture. He mentored Nietzsche. His son in law was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose “Myth of the 19th Century” was important to the subsequent Volkisch movement. Flowers writes: //The roots of the Nazis’ conception of Positive Christianity lie in the late nineteenth century with the school of Richard Wagner and his son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain. They crystalized a vision of an Aryanized Christianity, devoid of what they considered Judaic elements. Jesus Christ was seen as the Aryan Man, and, commenting on his use of ancient pre-Christian Germanic imagery and myth in some of his operas, Wagner himself identifies Wotan and Christ (Steigmann-Gall 2003, 101). Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (p. 424). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition. Flowers offers an explanation of the NS concept of “Positive Christianity” that I haven’t seen before. The citation of authority for his approach is scant or non-existent, but it does make sense and fits a lot of the facts: Technically, the term Positive Christianity meant a Christianity shorn of its miraculous fables and its Jewish context. It posits the role of the historical individual named Jesus as an exemplary model of the Aryan Man.*96 The foundational documents of Christianity (i.e., the Bible) were subjected to text-critical examination by which all irrational elements were eliminated and the whole message and nature of the religion remade in the image of the philosophical approach of the nineteenth century. The roots of the Nazis’ conception of Positive Christianity lie in the late nineteenth century with the school of Richard Wagner and his son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain. They crystalized a vision of an Aryanized Christianity, devoid of what they considered Judaic elements. Jesus Christ was seen as the Aryan Man, and, commenting on his use of ancient pre-Christian Germanic imagery and myth in some of his operas, Wagner himself identifies Wotan and Christ (Steigmann-Gall 2003, 101). Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (p. 424). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition. Flowers defines “positive” in the sense of “critical”: //Because later mythology about Nazi occultism has focused so much on ideas of paganism and “weird science,” one aspect of the movement that has gone virtually unremarked—although it is the only occult topic that would later be explicitly mentioned in the Party Program of the NSDAP—is “Positive Christianity.” At first glance this formula appears to be a general reference to some sort of “affirmative” Christianity. But this is not the case. In this context, the German adjective positiv (from the French positif) actually refers to the philosophical concept of the application of critical knowledge and reason to the questions of theology and biblical text criticism pioneered by nineteenth-century thinkers such as Emil-Louis Burnouf (1821–1907) and Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891). For some, the practice of what became known as biblical textual criticism among German philologists in the nineteenth century provided a deep blow to the possibility of believing in the doctrines taught by the church over the previous centuries. Such criticism had begun as early as the late seventeenth century, but it reached a high point among German philologists of the nineteenth century. As the Bible was scientifically (linguistically) demonstrated to be a hodgepodge of texts written at different times by various interests and authors, with little underlying coherence, it became harder for thinking men to believe in the mythology constructed by the churches. This, then, opened the door for elite thinkers to engage not only with a burgeoning atheistic scientism but with various forms of neopaganism as well. Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (p. 78). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition. Flowers also notes: German biblical criticism developed an agenda of “deJudaizing Christianity in the name of Reason.” The “grandfather” of German Positive Christianity was Paul de Lagarde, a professor of Oriental languages, who was influential on both Wagner and Chamberlain. “Through the pens of these writers, Jesus was transformed into an Aryan hero struggling against Jews and Judaism.” Generally speaking, early twentieth-century German opposition to Christianity and Christian doctrines was not so much rooted in pre-Christian paganism as it was in hypermodernistic materialism and scientism. The hostility to Christianity and to traditional religion that many leading Nazis felt was largely rooted in the same soil as the opposition to these ideas found among Russian Bolsheviks. In both cases their particular political and economic ideologies were envisioned as replacements for the church and religion. A revived form of paganism, as understood based on scholarly evidence of the past, would have been far too difficult to control over time. Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (p. 112). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition. Given its genesis as a form of Protestant exegesis, “Positive Christianity was mainly anchored in Protestant areas of Germany.” The deJudaizing of Christianity made major inroads into Protestantism in the form of the German Christian movement. A substantial number of German Protestants were associated with the deJudaizing German Christians but ran up against the “Confessing Church” that refused to jettison the Jewish roots of Christianity. Flowers notes that Luther’s antisemitism was a salient point of contact between the NS party and Protestants. The anti-modern trend among conservatives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was well stocked with quotes from the works of Luther. Lutherans tended to vote disproportionately for the NSDAP, as compared to Roman Catholics. Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (pp. 197-198). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition. In contrast, affiliation with the NS party led Catholics to apostasy. There were many apostate members of the NS party, including Himmler and Goebbels, who left the Catholic Church, and Hitler, who did not. This tendency to apostasy had historical roots: Lanz joined the Pan-Germanic political/esoteric movement—and there is even the suggestion that he converted to Protestantism (Goodrick-Clarke 1985, 92). The gravitation toward Protestantism was common among the generally Catholic “conservative” revolutionaries of Austria as they undertook to alter their cultural environment in a radical way. This was done in a spirit of nationalism, to rid German culture of Roman influence, and was known as the Los-von-Rom! (Away from Rome!) movement. The main basis of Lanz’s protest against the church was his belief that it had abandoned its original purpose, which according to him was to serve as an Ariosophical institute for the sacred and heroic cultivation of the race. What Lanz intended to do was to reform this state of affairs by founding his own order of Templars, which would restore the church to its original purpose as an overseer of racial purity. Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (p. 140). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition. Flowers is keen to protect paganism from Nazism. I question the high percentage of pagans he estimates (15 to 20%) but clearly the pragmatic Hitler was not going to alienate the majority of Germans who still remained factually or notionally Christian: In the final analysis, after accessing and studying the original sources in the German language for more than forty years of research, it is my conclusion that the occult, esoteric, and even pagan elements present in National Socialism are almost entirely a matter of something that was present in the individual Party leaders and the rank and file of the membership, not something that was official or overtly promoted by the regime. There was a struggle between the pagan and Christian wings of the Party on a deep ideological basis; Hitler gave the victory to the Christian faction. The pagan faction of the country, almost all of whom did sympathize to some degree with the NSDAP program (in the beginning, at least), accounted for 15 to 20 percent of the population. This was a significant minority, but not numerous enough to constitute “the masses” Hitler was so interested in manipulating. To have sided with that minority, toward which he had no personal ideological sympathy in any event, would have been ideological suicide. The Nazis, and Hitler in particular, were masters of the magic of propaganda aimed as acquiring power and maintaining it. The secrets and ritual of this form of magic are on display in Mein Kampf and in the ceremonial programs of the NSDAP. These methods were not, however, aimed at a revival of paganism or at some worship of anything or anyone other than Hitler, the apparatus of the NSDAP, and the idealized (Nazified) image of the German Volk and state. Hitler’s models were largely taken from those of his rivals, the Bolsheviks of Russia. The Nazis imitated the game of the Sozis, they just looked much better doing it. Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (pp. 595-596). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition. Flowers is definitely correct in describing National Socialism as a hodge-podge of attitudes depending on a particular leader. Himmler, Rosenberg, and Hess were pagans or occultists. Hitler believed in “magic” in the psychological sense used by Flowers. Goebbels and Goring were probably just opportunists who lived like de facto atheists. There was no core ideology like Communism’s official atheistic position that Nazis had to adhere to. This is an exhaustive and exhausting book. At times, I did not know how much stock to give its claims given Flowers’ heterodox – even kooky – beliefs. On the other hand, he may be right about a lot of his claims. If you have an interest in the subject, I would say read other books before coming to this one, but don’t necessarily avoid this book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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it was amazing
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The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man by Alan Fimister This is a difficult book. I’m not sure whether it is difficult because it is dealing with the texts The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man by Alan Fimister This is a difficult book. I’m not sure whether it is difficult because it is dealing with the texts of Christian prophetic literature, which are famously difficult, or because the thesis of the book is novel and surprising. The novelty of the thesis is not – according to author Alan Fimister – because the thesis is new but because it is so old that it has been forgotten. Fimister argues that it proper to call the Catholic Church “Roman,” as in “the Roman Catholic church,” only so long as we understand that the “Roman” being referred to is the Roman Empire which is holding back or restraining the Anti-Christ. See what I mean? The clues are all there in the texts and Fimister’s thesis is supported by various church fathers. It’s really not his fault that no one pays attention to St. Paul’s most obscure prophecy in Thessalonians 2, chapter 2: “Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our assembling to meet him, we beg you, brethren, not to be quickly shaken in mind or excited, either by spirit or by word, or by letter purporting to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you this? And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, and the Lord Jesus will slay him with the breath of his mouth and destroy him by his appearing and his coming. The coming of the lawless one by the activity of Satan will be with all power and with pretended signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are to perish, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (p. 92). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition. Got that? There is a lawless man who will be revealed and slain by the breath of Lord Jesus but this “mystery of lawlessness” is being restrained by “he” until “he is out of the way. In a word, huh? Who is “he”? Why is “he” restraining the “mystery of lawlessness”? Does “he” know “he is doing this? According to Fimister, the “he” has traditionally been considered to be the Roman Empire: According to the majority of the Fathers, “what” and “he” who restrains the “lawless one” (unanimously identified by the Fathers as the Antichrist of whom John speaks in 1 John 2:18–22 and 4:3) is the Roman empire and the Roman emperor.220 St Thomas considers in his commentary on this epistle how it could be that the Antichrist has not come by his own time when it would seem that the Roman empire has perished. “The Roman Empire has not perished,” he explains, “but passed from the temporal to the spiritual order.” The revolt of which St Paul speaks will be against the faith and government of the Holy Roman Church. Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (p. 93). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition. St. Thomas was writing in the thirteenth century, the last Western emperor of Rome left office in the fifth century. There was still a “Roman” emperor on the throne of Constantinople, but it still seems like a stretch to think that the Roman empire was doing much in the West, unless the “Roman empire” had been translated into the spiritual order of the Catholic Church, aka the “Holy Roman Church.” According to Fimister, this interpretation is found in Tertullian (c 160-c 225): In chapter thirty-two of his Apology, Tertullian explains that this teaching of St Paul secures the loyalty of the Christian to the empire—for all their refusal to express that loyalty in pagan rites: There is also another and a greater necessity for our offering prayer in behalf of the emperors, nay, for the complete stability of the empire, and for Roman interests in general. For we know that a mighty shock impending over the whole earth—in fact, the very end of all things threatening dreadful woes—is only retarded by the continued existence of the Roman empire. We have no desire, then, to be overtaken by these dire events; and in praying that their coming may be delayed, we are lending our aid to Rome’s duration. More than this, though we decline to swear by the genii of the Cæsars, we swear by their safety, which is worth far more than all your genii. Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (pp. 94-95). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition. The same interpretation is found in Hyppolytus, Cyril of Jerusalem, Lactantius, and St. John Chrysostom. Fimister points out that this understanding was shared by the leading theologians of the West: St Ambrose (c. 340—397) asserts: The Lord will not return until the Roman rule fails and antichrist appears, who will kill the saints, giving back freedom to the Romans but under his own name.234 St Jerome (c. 340–420) in his Commentary on Daniel 7:8 confirms: We should therefore concur with the traditional interpretation of all the commentators of the Christian Church, that at the end of the world, when the Roman Empire is to be destroyed, there shall be ten kings who will partition the Roman world amongst themselves. Then an insignificant eleventh king will arise, who will overcome three of the ten kings.235 Likewise, in his De Civitate Dei St Augustine (345–430) expounds St Paul in the same sense, although with a little more reservation: For what does he mean by “For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now holdeth, let him hold until he be taken out of the way: and then shall the wicked be revealed”? I frankly confess I do not know what he means. . . . However, it is not absurd to believe that these words of the apostle, “Only he who now holdeth, let him hold until he be taken out of the way,” refer to the Roman empire, as if it were said, “Only he who now reigneth, let him reign until he be taken out of the way.” “And then shall the wicked be revealed”: no one doubts that this means Antichrist. Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (pp. 99-100). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition. This seems surprising. But is it? Shouldn’t we expect the Roman Empire to play a role in Christian prophecy? Fimister points out that Israel’s interaction with Rome began during the so-called “intertestamental period.” Of course, it wasn’t intertestamental at all to non-Protestants since that period left us Maccabees I. In Maccabees I, the Jews engage with Rome in an effort to find an ally against the Greeks. The Romans are depicted quite favorably as an altogether satisfactory ally for the people of God. In the Christian era, the depiction of Rome is equivocal. On the one hand, Rome is “Babylon” and the beast with ten horns. Rome crucified Christ and destroyed the temple. On the other hand, St. Paul tells Christians to support the empire. Josephus identified the destroyer of the temple with a prophecy of rulership. Rome was folded into Messianic expectations by Josephus: No doubt the ability of the Judeans of the first century to make such precise calculations was limited, but as inter alia Tacitus, Suetonius, and Josephus bear witness, messianic speculation was frenetic and this last verse would seem to confirm that the people who would destroy the Temple and the city would be the Messiah’s own people. What could be more natural then than Josephus’s conclusion that Vespasian was the Messiah? Natural but wrong, and hardly compatible with the idea of the Messiah being “cut off” (Daniel 9:26). In fact, the implications are more startling still: that the people of the Prince who is to come, of the Messiah who was cut off in AD 30, who brought an end to victim and sacrifice and confirmed the covenant with the many, are the Romans. Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (p. 56). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition. Over time, the assessment of the Roman Empire became more favorable, particularly after Constantine began using the resources of the Roman Empire to benefit the church. This was a reason why it was such a shock in the West when Rome was sacked, an event which lead St. Augustine to write the City of God, explaining that Rome was not City of God and that Christians should distinguish between the earthly city and the heavenly city. In the East, though, the Roman Empire which continued became the Kingdom of God. In the West, though, Rome fell, and the anti-Christ did not come. The explanation for this anomaly turned on interpretations of Daniel and Revelation which described the beast as having ten horns. The horns were understood to be the successor barbarian kingdoms which continued the Roman empire. Eventually, the Roman Empire was “translated” to the Roman Church, i.e., the Catholic Church, and it was the Catholic Church that serves to restrain the coming of the anti-Christ. In my experience, Rome and the Roman Empire are generally portrayed as villains. If they figure into prophecy, it is as the answer to the decoding of symbols. But it was not always so. Even Jesus’s slighting “render unto Caesar” teaching was coupled with an outreach to the gentiles. This is an interpretation of the “turning over of the tables” narrative, I have not seen: Of course, the real purpose of the Lord’s cleansing of the Temple was precisely what He said it was: to remove from the part of the Temple reserved for the worship of the Gentiles profane activities which implied the exclusion of the nations from the worship of the one true God. It was certainly not to provide the casus belli for a revolt against the Romans. Rather it foreshadowed the sending down of the Spirit to convert those very Romans from their idolatry to the worship of the God of Israel. The idolatrous coins were brought into the outer court not by the Romans but by the Temple authorities who, by their rejection of the Messiah, were soon to bring upon themselves and into the precincts of the Temple far more violent and terrible trophies of the false gods of Latium than a few imperial denarii. Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (p. 86). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition. Rome is the subject of typology from Psalms according to St. Cyril of Jerusalem: Back in the fourth century, Cyril of Jerusalem read Psalm 2 in the same sense. But again you ask yet another testimony of the time. “The Lord said to Me, You are My Son; this day have I begotten You”: and a few words further on, “You shall rule them with a rod of iron.” I have said before that the kingdom of the Romans is clearly called a rod of iron; Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (pp. 106-107). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition. St. John Henry Newman continued the tradition of reading Rome into prophetic literature in the nineteenth century: Indeed, as St John Henry Newman would have it (commenting on 2 Thessalonians), it endured into his own day: It is not clear that the Roman Empire is gone. Far from it: the Roman Empire in the view of prophecy, remains even to this day. Rome had a very different fate from the other three monsters mentioned by the Prophet, as will be seen by his description of it. “Behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it, and it had ten horns.” [Dan. vii. 7.] These ten horns, an Angel informed him, “are ten kings that shall rise out of this kingdom” of Rome. As, then, the ten horns belonged to the fourth beast, and were not separate from it, so the kingdoms, into which the Roman Empire was to be divided, are but the continuation and termination of that Empire itself,—which lasts on, and in some sense lives in the view of prophecy, however we decide the historical question. Consequently, we have not yet seen the end of the Roman Empire. “That which withholdeth” still exists, up to the manifestation of its ten horns; and till it is removed, Antichrist will not come. And from the midst of those horns he will arise, as the same Prophet informs us: “I considered the horns, and behold, there came up among them another little horn; . . . and behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking great things.” Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (p. 108). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition. Fimister discusses prophecy and history. He notes that in 800 AD, Pope Leo crowned Charlemagne as Roman emperor. The implication in this act was that the papacy had the authority to dispense the title of emperor as it chose. This act was coupled with a division of temporal and spiritual authority, with the spiritual authority being higher. The implication, therefore, was that the Church at all time reserved the spiritual dimensions of “Romanitas.” Fimister explains: If, then, the universal imperium is essentially spiritual and the Roman state persists only as an exemplar polity, it is easy to imagine that the papal vision of ecclesiastical Romanitas is simply correct and exhausts the doctrine, and in a sense this is true. The centrality of this concept (of a universal spiritual power) to Western culture is illustrated by the enthusiasm in the second half of the twentieth century for human rights declarations and international and supranational institutions designed to guarantee peace and human dignity, even perhaps by the contrasting enthusiasm in the first half of the twentieth century for the absolute state that enters the heart and mind and demands the whole person. From the perspective of an authentic Catholic analysis of temporal power, such institutions are absurd: towers of Babel that seek by finite effort and power to traverse the infinite.382 As Pius XI asseverates: There exists an institution able to safeguard the sanctity of the law of nations. This institution is a part of every nation; at the same time it is above all nations. She enjoys, too, the highest authority, the fullness of the teaching power of the Apostles. Such an institution is the Church of Christ. Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (p. 160). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition. So, those who assert that Catholics are “Roman Catholics” or merely “Roman” are engaging in a proper attribution of titles insofar as they recognize that Rome played, and is still playing, a key role in prophecy. Insofar as the Church that restrains the anti-Christ is Rome, Roman is Catholic; Catholic is Roman. This is an interesting book. It is also surprising insofar as it is so out of touch with the spirit of the modern world. It may be the case that Fimister’s points were better known to Catholics, at least, prior to Vatican II, but this kind of “triumphalism” is frowned on today. Nonetheless, this is an interesting glimpse into a history that we no longer know. Fimister’s approach also answers questions about biblical interpretation, such as the scourging of the moneychangers and the prophecies in Revelation and Daniel. This book is not an easy read because of the depth of its erudition and its counterintuitive - to modern minds – understanding of ecclesiastical history. However, it is worth reading because it provides food for thought. ...more |
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it was amazing
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This book is an intense and detailed examination of the development of Christian theology between the Cappadocian Fathers and John of Damascus. This w
This book is an intense and detailed examination of the development of Christian theology between the Cappadocian Fathers and John of Damascus. This was a period that the resolution of Trinitarian issues and rise and fall of Christological issues. The author, Johannes Zachhuber, is a professor of Theology at Oxford, who brings an encyclopedic knowledge of the history and the philosophical issues into the discussion. Along the way, he introduces us to the theological players, such as Gregory of Nyssa. John the Grammarian, Severus of Antioch (St. Severus for the Monophysites), and John of Damascus (“the Damascene”) in a way that give reality to people who are either unknown or only vaguely known. This is not a work for the faint-hearted. Having some background in Aristotelian metaphysics is essential, and, even then, for amateurs like myself, the fine distinctions between nature, physis, ousia, enhypostaton, prosopon, hypostasis, idiotes, and other concepts is taxing. However, since I approached this mostly as history, I found the discussion interesting. This review will favor that perspective. There are other reviews of the text that explain the philosophical elements that are vague to me. https://www.academia.edu/101676467/Re... Zachhuber starts with Cappadocian Fathers, the brothers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory, and their friend, Gegory of Nazianzus. The Cappadocians were active in the late Fourth Century. Basil died on January 1, 379. His work was carried on by his brother and friend. The issue for the Cappadocians was the relationship of the Persons of the Trinity. Previous efforts at this had proven problematic. Origen was very influential but offered an explanation that lessened the Son: Origen argued for a slight but important distinction between the two divine persons: the Father, he suggested, was God in the fullest and most proper sense of the word; the source of all being including the Son.32 The Son thus received his divinity by derivation from that source. He was god, but not ‘the’ God. He was not a rival or competitor of the Father. He was not, for example, entirely simple without any participation in the plurality of the created world which explains why he, not the Father, became directly involved in salvation history and, specifically, the Incarnation. Zachhuber, Johannes. The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics: Patristic Philosophy from the Cappadocian Fathers to John of Damascus (p. 21). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition. Zachhuber notes that the “crucial ontological subordination of the Son to the father functioned as a door opener to more radical Arian positions.” After the Council of Nicea (325 AD), Origen’s explanation was seen as incompatible with orthodoxy. Orthodoxy adopted the Athanasian position that the Father and the Son were Homooousias, i.e. of the same substance. The opposition position proposed by Arius was “Homoiousias,” meaning “of a similar substance.” Homoiousians appealed to the authority of Origen, but the authority of Origen was something that the orthodox tradition did not want to entirely repudiate. This is a long review. Please visit my Medium page for the rest of the review. https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/chri... ...more |
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it was amazing
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231205 The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America 1500-1800 by Wayne E. Lee https://www.amazon.com/Cutting-Off-Wa... Readers of th 231205 The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America 1500-1800 by Wayne E. Lee https://www.amazon.com/Cutting-Off-Wa... Readers of this book may be surprised to learn that Native Americans, aka “Indians,” were amazingly like every other hunter-gatherer culture in the world. They were warlike. They fought their wars by ambush and surprise. They lived by the military maxim that “if you find yourself in a fair fight, you’ve screwed up.” This should come as no surprise to anyone who has read “War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage” by Lawrence H. Keeley (1996) https://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civ... Keeley’s book gets a fair number of favorable citations in “The Cutting-Off Way” by author Wayne Lee. I read Keeley’s book nearly thirty-years ago. I remember being fascinated by the wealth of evidence that debunked the “peaceful savage” myth. I don’t know how prevalent the myth is today, but I think I recall being surprised at the wealth of data in the archeological record pointing to the fact that Neolithic hunter-gatherers spent a lot of time killing each other. This archeological record included an abundance of arrows at what were probably “battle sites” and human skeletons exhibiting battle wounds. Keely noted that many archeologists insisted on describing the people they were studying as peaceful, but the “trout in the milk” were all the bodies obviously killed by violence. I remember as a child in the 1960s reading a children’s book on ancient cultures, specifically the ancient Mayans, that insisted that the Mayans did not practice warfare. In the 1970s and 1980s, archeologists began to notice that an awful lot of Mayan artworks involved blood and torture. Eventually, the archeologists acknowledged that the “peaceful” Mayans were every bit as warlike as the Aztecs. Keely offers this nice summary: “Primitive war was not a puerile or deficient form of warfare, but war reduced to its essentials: killing enemies with a minimum of risk, denying them the means of life via vandalism and theft (even the means of reproduction by the kidnapping of their women and children), terrorizing them into either yielding territory or desisting for their encroachments and aggressions. At the tactical level primitive warfare and its cousin, guerilla warfare, have also been superior to the civilized variety. It is civilized warfare that is stylized, ritualized, and relatively less dangerous. When soldiers clash with warriors (or guerillas), it is precisely these “decorative” civilized tactics and paraphernalia that must be abandoned by the former if they are to defeat the latter. Even such a change may be insufficient, and co-opted native warrior must be substituted for the inadequate soldiers before victory belongs to the latter. “ (p. 175) These themes are paid off in Lee’s book. Lee is interested in rebutting the charge that Indians engaged in a “skulking way of war.” In Lee’s view the term “skulking” is derogatory to “Indian courage” and dismisses the “rational calculation behind their mode of combat.” Lee describes the “cutting-off” mode of conduct as follows: The term comes from a common English expression from the period, “to cut off,” because it so accurately describes the tactical and operational goals of an Indian attack, at both small and large scales—indeed its scalability is one of its primary strengths. Lacking deep reserves of population and also lacking systems of coercive recruitment, Native American Nations were wary of heavy casualties. Their tactics demanded caution, and so they generally sought to surprise their targets. The size of the target varied with the size of the attacking force. A small war party might only seek to “cut off” individuals found getting water or wood, or out hunting. A larger party might aim at attacking a whole town, again hoping for surprise. At small or large scales, most often the attackers sought prisoners to take back to the home village. Once revealed by its attack, the invading war party generally fled before the defenders’ reinforcements from nearby related towns could organize. Lee, Wayne E.. The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800 (p. 3). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition. This strategy could be scaled up or down depending on objective. It was also a completely rational strategy for a hunter-gatherer population. The Achilles Heal of hunter-gatherer communities is their small size and precarious grip on survival. If such a community loses too much manpower (or womanpower) it loses the ability to maintain itself economically, demographically, or militarily. So, hunter-gatherers have to husband their human resources. They can’t go in for massive set-piece win-all battles which might leave the winner debilitated. Of course, this consideration works the other way also. The other side cannot afford to lose population either. Lose too many people and the losers face a death sentence. Such losers find it prudent to pack up and leave for more open territories where they might have better luck or they blend into other stronger populations (“Nations”). As Keely established with respect to pre-historic and primitive populations and Lee confirmed for North America, hunter-gatherer populations were in a constant state of low-level warfare. The warfare played out fights over resources, slight, or revenge. In some ways, it resembles the feuding of the Hatfield and McCoys and could last just as long. Such wars would be launched by a surprise attack. A successful first strike could be devastating. If the element of surprise was missing, the attacked community could call on assistance and attempt to counter-ambush the attackers or chase them out of the territory while inflicting casualties. The total number of dead might number in the handful, but over time such small numbers could add up to a demographic tipping point. Primitive warfare had a high lethality – higher than civilized warfare: Finally, the skulking paradigm likely underplays the level of lethality in precontact warfare in North America. There is archaeological evidence for the long continuity of a style of war that could be highly destructive and lethal. Three examples are the large-scale massacre at Crow Creek in South Dakota in the fourteenth century; a cemetery site in Illinois from the same era indicating a persistent series of violent attacks; and a recent reexamination of 119 precontact burials in southern New England showing that a remarkable 15 percent of them had died from violent trauma, 20 percent of whom were women or children.12 Lee, Wayne E.. The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800 (pp. 17-18). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition. If modern America had a death by violence rate of 15% the number would be in the tens of millions. What this means is that Indian populations were in a constant state of movement and change. The current fad for “land acknowledgments” is based on a false ideology of the “peaceful savage” who has been on the land since time immemorial. In fact, whatever nation is being “acknowledged” is simply the last population that drove the prior population off the land and usually shortly before Americans arrived to bring peace to the land, and, ironically, to save the losers from extinction. Indian warfare – the “cutting-off way” – made rational sense. It did keep Europeans mostly penned to the Eastern Seaboard for two-hundred years. It had its successes against the Western Way of War when the Indians could attack the logistics of the Westerners or abandon territory rather than stand and defend villages. Misunderstanding of each sides approach to warfare went both ways. Lee tells the reader about the Powhattan surprise attack that initiated the Second Powhattan War: “The attack came on March 22, 1622. The Powhatans went about their business normally at the beginning of the day. By this time many of them had regular personal or economic contacts within the English settlements, and at the prescribed moment, all around the English colony, the Indians, already intermingled with the populace, picked up various agricultural tools (having come in unarmed) or appeared from the surrounding woods and set upon the English. They killed all those who came within reach that day, probably more than 350 people, completely wiping out some settlements. Tellingly, however, there was no follow-up. Having administered their lesson, the Powhatans went home. They surely expected retaliation, even as they would from another Native society, but they would not be caught unawares, and probably expected to be able to prevent any kind of equivalent damage to themselves. They prepared for the cutting-off war of raid and counterraid but presumed that their initial successful attack would give them the advantage in the long run. Lee, Wayne E.. The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800 (p. 74). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition. What the Powhattan did not expect was that the Europeans would prosecute the war in the Western way, i.e. staying in the field, shock tactics, willingness to absorb casualties, and fighting to the end. “Despite these limits to the attack, the English did not respond to the lesson in the expected manner. They prepared to fight a war according to their own model of continuous campaigning: not raiding, but taking, destroying, and hopefully exterminating—largely in the hope of establishing their control over more land. In this the colonists succeeded to a horrifying degree, usually failing to catch very many Indians, but deliberately and thoroughly destroying their towns and crops. Indian efforts to negotiate a peace were repeatedly rebuffed until the war crept to a close in 1632. Lee, Wayne E.. The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800 (p. 74). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition. Lee also describes the Tuscarora war of 1712-1713. In the first year of the war, the Tuscarora successfully used forts to fend off an English assault. This gave them the confidence to double-down on the strategy of fortification. This time the English brought artillery and Indian auxiliaries. When they seized the fort, they killed or captured 1,000 out of the 5,000 person Tuscarora Nation. This ended the Tuscarora as an independent nation. They emigrated from western South Carolina and became the sixth nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. The lesson here is that civilized nations can go into the field when they choose with more firepower and better logistics and stay in the field longer. With the assistance of native auxiliaries providing the irregular warfare skills the Western forces lack, the Western approach can be essentially unbeatable. Lee provides a chapter comparing the situation of the Irish and the Indians. At the same time that the English were dealing with pacifying Native Americans, they were also dealing with pacifying Native Irishmen. The Irish were unassimilable because of their Catholic religion. Irish forces – the Kerns – were used as native auxiliaries in the same way that the English in North America used Indian forces. Eventually, the Kerns became supernumerary because of technology. Indian auxilliaries, however, remained relevant to the closing of the west. Lee provides insight into the relationship of Indians with European communities. A careful reader of this review might remember how the Powhattans were integrated into the English settlements where they were able to launch their surprise attacks. Native Americans often flocked to English and American forts for protection when they were on the losing side. Indian Nations were often insistent to have forts situated in their territory because of such concerns and because it invited the traders who provided a life-blood of Western goods. The Indians were dependent on western technology, such as gun powder and guns. Guns often broke. Indians lacked the ability to repair the guns on their own and so needed the English and Americans to fix their guns and sell them the gunpowder that had become integral to their way of life. Lee gives an explanation for something that always puzzled me, namely, why did Indians give up the bow and arrow. It seems like gun technology is slower and less reliable than a bow and arrow. The answer is in the ‘stopping power.” A lead bullet would put an animal or human down immediately. Arrows could be dodged by humans or leave lethal but not immediately lethal wounds in animals that would then require lengthy pursuit. History’s relevance is never far removed from modern events. I was reading this book shortly after Hamas’ brutally uncivilized surprise attack on peaceful Israelis where Israeli women were raped, children were killed, and hostages were taken. It does not take much imagination to recognize this as the classic “cutting-off way” of war. Hamas has recreated the surprise raid and run-away style for the same reasons that Hunter-Gatherer populations did, namely, they can’t afford to waste their manpower in a set piece battle that they are going to lose. The Israeli response is classically “western.” Israel has gone into Gaza with sufficient manpower, firepower, and resolve to exterminate the threat of another surprise attack. It may lack the element of “native auxiliaries,” but if Keeley is right, it may have to jettison some or all of the “decorative” tactics of civilized warfare, e.g., giving warning before bombing, not destroying power and water supplies used by the civilian population, etc. If that happens, it shouldn’t be surprising. The Israel-Hamas analogy also allows us to reflect back on the history of Indian-Western interaction. These were two vastly different civilizations. One of them believed that surprise attacks on civilian populations across the border fell comfortably within the “laws of war.” They couldn’t change. For them to adopt a civilized/western perspective would have been idiotic. They could never win that way. On the other hand, the European society could hardly live next to a population that could come boiling across the border at a time of their own choosing and which would then, as a matter of their laws of war, rape civilian women, kidnap civilian children, and murder civilian men. The Western Way of War required a complete and total response to such depredations. These civilizations were in conflict. Some one was going to lose. Someone did lose. ...more |
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Tour in America in 1798-1800 (Volume 1) by Richard Parkinson A scholar should view something that challenges his worldview as a gift. Either the challe Tour in America in 1798-1800 (Volume 1) by Richard Parkinson A scholar should view something that challenges his worldview as a gift. Either the challenge will be refuted or it will cause the scholar to revise his opinions. Either way the scholar learns, which is the goal of scholarship. A case in point was a recent post on Medium about “Life as a Slave At George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate.” https://medium.com/lessons-from-histo... What caught my eye was this paragraph: Based on everything you’ve read so far, you may believe that George Washington, as a slave owner, was merely a product of his time, treating his enslaved workforce just like any other slave master would back then. However, evidence suggests that Washington was especially cruel to his slaves, even by the standards of the other slave masters of the era. One of Washington’s neighbors, Richard Parkinson, claimed that most of his neighbors, him included, felt that Washington was harder on his enslaved workers than any other slave owner. So, the author’s claim is that the “evidence” suggests that Washington was “especially cruel” because a “neighbor” claimed that “most” of Washington’s neighbors “felt” that Washington was “harder” on slaves than other slave owners. This could be true, although Washington freed his slaves on his death, which suggests that he was not entirely comfortable with slavery. The author linked to a web page at the Mount Vernon Society on “George Washington and Slavery.” https://www.mountvernon.org/library/d... That page offers: Various sources offer differing insight into Washington's behavior as a slave owner. Richard Parkinson, an Englishman who lived near Mount Vernon, once reported that "it was the sense of all his [Washington's] neighbors that he treated [his slaves] with more severity than any other man."3 Conversely, a foreign visitor traveling in America once recorded that George Washington dealt with his slaves "far more humanely than do his fellow citizens of Virginia." It was this man's opinion that Virginians typically treated their slaves harshly, providing "only bread, water and blows."4 Washington himself once criticized other large plantation owners, "who are not always as kind, and as attentive to their [the slaves'] wants and usage as they ought to be."5 Toward the end of his life, he looked back on his years as a slave owner, reflecting that: "The unfortunate condition of the persons, whose labour in part I employed, has been the only unavoidable subject of regret. To make the Adults among them as easy & as comfortable in their circumstances as their actual state of ignorance & improvidence would admit; & to lay a foundation to prepare the rising generation for a destiny different from that in which they were born; afforded some satisfaction to my mind, & could not I hoped be displeasing to the justice of the Creator."6 Clearly, the author was spinning the source material, namely there is no agreement in the sources and the criticism of Washington was that he would “more severe.” Really? A former general being more severe with his subordinates than civilians? Unimaginable. The Mount Vernon page cites the following source: 3. Richard Parkinson, A Tour in America, in 1798, 1799, and 1800 (London: Printed for J. Harding and J. Murray, 1805), 420. Parkinson’s book is obscure, but there are copies at the Internet Archive. This is what the cited page said: The curing of tobacco is a nice very process: and, for want of and care, knowledge there are every year many hogsheads spoiled and worth nothing. And, besides all that, the management was of negroes was a great obstacle: for, notwithstanding the great inhumanity" so generally spoken of by those who are not acquainted with them, they will not do without harsh treatment. Take General Washington for an example: I have not the least reason to think it was his desire, but the necessity of the case: but it was the sense of all his neighbors that he treated them with more severity than any other man. (Parkinson p. 418-419 (Not p. 420.) Parkinson then offers his view on the shiftless laziness of the slaves, which, by the way, can you blame them? The lack of incentives for slaves to put effort into labor was a perennial complaint about the slave system as an economic system prior to the Civil War. Parkinson notes this on page 419: They are so lazy by nature, that they would do little or nothing but take pleasure in fine weather, cook victuals, and play on music and dance all winter, if they had no master. I think them as unfit to conduct themselves as a child – thoughtless in the extreme, and therefore requiring a severe master: and a man unused to them, and who is of a humane disposition, is unfit to employ negroes. I had much rather do the work myself than have to force continually others to do it. On page 420, we get to Washington’s “especial cruelty.” Parkinson observes: The first time I walked with General Washington among his negroes, when he spoke to them, he amazed me by the utterance of his words. He spoke as differently as if he had been quite another man, or had been in anger. Or maybe as he would an undisciplined colonial infantry soldier? All things considered, the fact that General Washington barked orders to his slaves as if he expected his orders to be followed and showed anger when they were not, is weak tea in terms of the “especially cruel” derby. As for the “evidence,” it seems to be hearsay and to be undefined. What were the neighbors referring to? Nonetheless, the idea that we had a memoir from an eyewitness of George Washington got me curious. So I purchased volume 1 of Parkinson’s memoirs about his time in America. So, who was Richard Parkinson? Basically, he was a well-connected upper class Englishman who fancied himself as an expert on agriculture. By 1799, he had written a book called the “Experienced Farmer,’ where he gave advice to British farmers about how to take their agricultural practices into the 19th century. His connections led him to communicate with George Washington, who offered to lease 1,200 acres near Mr. Vernon to try out his agricultural theories. Parkinson though this was a good idea, and he might get another book and extremely wealthy in the process. The book is fascinating in providing details about late 19th century life. For example, how long did a Trans-Atlantic crossing take? About a month. Parkinson arrived in November in Virginia and discovered that there was no hay for the livestock he had brought with him. Rather, he was reduced to feeding the livestock with the tops of “Indian corn” – the stuff we pop and eat on the cob. Note that “Indian corn” was not the “corn” he was used to, which was wheat and barley. He also describes Virginia as like a desert; there was nothing green and no grass anywhere in November! The theme about the lack of grass is a constant theme, which makes you wonder what he was seeing since Virginia has lots of greenery when it is not winter. Parkinson only stayed in America for two years. He was not a neighbor of Washington. He rejected Washington’s land as unfit and rented some near Baltimore, which was a long way from Mt. Vernon. Parkinson viewed slavery as an economic burden. In rejecting Washington’s offer, he observes: I must confess that if he would have given me the inheritance of the land for that sum, I durst not have accepted it, especially with the incumbrances upon it; viz. one hundred and seventy slaves young and old, and out of that number only twenty-seven in a condition to work, as the steward represented to me. (p. 51.) He constantly calculates the cost of slavery and concludes that it is more costly than it is worth. On the other hand, labor prices were very high. Parkinson is constantly railing about the labor shortage, which results in him being forced to do his own farming. The condition is intolerable for a gentleman. Servants don’t know their place. White servants insist on the perquisites of the gentry. He couldn’t even get the servants to clean his boots! “It may be necessary to forewarn the reader, that there are some very trivial things introduced in this work ; particularly where I mention myself as doing manual labour, and even my wife and family. I hope this will be excused ; as none but those who have been in America would suppose but there are people to be had for either love or money to do the dirty work; but I have been obliged to clean my own boots and shoes when I have had four servants in the house ; and myself, wife, and family, have risen in a morning to milk the cows when our servants were in bed. I should term such very bad management in England ; but the idea of liberty and equality there destroys all the rights of the master, and every man does as he likes. (p. 30-31.) What surprised me was Parkinson’s description that “indentured servitude” – de facto white slavery – was still alive in 1798: But the working-men that have emigrated have it not in their power to get back; for, if they have not money to pay their passage, the captains of ships will not bring them from America on the terms on which they are taken, because there is no one ready to pay their passage on this side. To explain this. On their first arrival in America, there are men ready to buy them as slaves for a certain time ; and as these people will want clothing, not having the means to purchase it during their stated time of servitude, they are compelled to get the money of their masters, and that keeps them in the same state the greatest part of their life. (p. 17-18.) Parkinson offers this example: It is precisely the same with emigrants in similar circumstances from other countries ; who are in the same manner purchased and treated as slaves. I will mention a particular instance. A Dutchman who had lost all his property, which was considerable, and was reduced to great distress, by the war with France, met with a captain of an American ship, who offered him and his two sons a free passage into America ; but at the end of the voyage the captain offered them all for sale to pay for the passage. They were bought by Messrs. Ricketts, whom I have before mentioned ; who paid the captain ready money for them, and the three emigrants had to repay those gentlemen by labour for a certain number of years. The father, finding himself so wonderfully disappointed in the great expectations held out to him by the captain, proved very obstinate and would not work; and was therefore (as was usual) whipped with the cow-hide, in the same way as the negroes. The old man, nevertheless, in spite of this great punishment, still persisting in his obstinacy, the gentlemen chose to give him his liberty, and kept the two boys to work out the sum. Now I " only blame the captains of ships for holding out such favourable prospects to the emigrants as a persuasion, which they know at the same time to be false ; for it cannot be supposed those captains can give them passage and provisions without repayment in some way or other : but the fact is that they do this by way of profit, and on the other side the water they get the same sum as from passengers to this. As to the gentlemen who bought these three men, I can say, from my own knowledge, that better characters cannot exist : the blame in this case lay on the old Dutchman ; who, when he had brought himself into such a situation, ought with temper to have done his best, and the gentlemen would have treated him with kindness. (p. 22-24.) There is a lot to ponder in that passage. The assumptions are so alien, that it is hard to comprehend what life was like to the average person – even if they were white and free. Parkinson also offers a body blow to partisans of the “America is Stolen Land” thesis: When the British governed America, they used not to take the land without first treating with the Indians and paying them for it, as may be remarked in the LIFE OF GENERAL WASHINGTON ; who was employed by the British to go up into the country to treat with the Indians. He observes " They called the British their fathers, and said they were ready to treat with him, as the British never took their land without paying them for it : but the French did not do so -, they took their land from them and called it their own, and paid them nothing for it." Now the Indians think themselves entitled to the land ; saying the Great Man (as they call him by which they mean God) planted them there, and gave them the lands for their support. (p. 155.) Likewise, Parkinson punctures the notion that Americans were racist as to the Indians: As an apology for having introduced the foregoing narratives, it may be right to say, I did it by way of proving how dangerous it is for the emigrant to venture far into the country. But, although the Indians commit such cruelties on their invaders, it is the general opinion of the Americans that they are not a bad sort of people : just in their dealings, they seldom do those things without a cause, and are seldom known to break their word. (p. 154.) On the other hand, Parkinson offers an extended description of two Americans who watched the death by torture of their fellow soldiers that is absolutely grisly. He also includes a testimonial by a woman whose entire family was murdered by Indians in a surprise attack on homesteaders during the Revolutionary War. American Indians were a sovereign entity that maintained the ethos of the hunter-gatherer culture, i.e., sneak attacks, separation of individual from groups, ready resort to violence, and the death by torture of captured individuals. This is only part of an eyewitness account of the torture execution of Colonel Crawford: " The fire was about six or seven yards from the post to which the Colonel was tied: it was made of small hickory poles, burnt quite through in the middle, each end of the poles remaining about six feet in length. Three or four Indians, by turns, would take up, individually, one of these burning pieces of wood and apply it to his naked body, already burned black with the powder. These tormentors presented themselves on every side of him, so that whichever way he ran round the post they met him with the burning; faggots and poles Some of the squaws took broad boards upon which they would put a quantity of burning coals and hot embers, and throw on him, so that in a short time he had nothing but coals of fire and hot ashes to walk upon. (p. 106-107.) That last point has to be qualified. One of the testimonials was provided by a man who had been kidnapped and enslaved at the age of six when his family was slaughtered by the Indians. Indians did enslave the children of white settlers. He writes: " I was taken from New River, in Virginia, by the Miamese, a nation of Indians by us called the Picts, amongst whom I lived six years. Afterwards being sold to a Delaware, and by him put into the hands of a trader, I was carried amongst the Shawanese, with whom I continued six years ; so that my whole time amongst these nations was twelve years that is, from the eighth to the twentieth year of my age. At the treaty at Fort Pitt, in the fall preceding what is called Dunmore's war (which, if I am right, was in the year 1773), I came in with the Shawanese nation to the treaty ; and meeting with some of my relations at that place, was by them solicited to relinquish the life of a savage, which I did with some reluctance, this manner of life having become natural to me, inasmuch as I had scarcely known any other. (p. 124.) I read this book in October 2023, the same week as Hamas broke out of Gaza and raped and murdered civilians, decapitated and burned some Jewish babies, and kidnapped Jewish Israelis and Americans to take back to Gaza. The similarity of the Hamas way of war to that of the Indians is striking. Parkinson’s book is fascinating not for the parts where he talks about agriculture, but when he discusses his experience. For example, he mentions meeting Vice President Jefferson in Philadelphia, the “Federal City” at that point having less than 300 homes. Parkinson did not like America. The point of his book is to advise his fellow Englishmen not to go there. He warns them that the land is poor, Englishmen might find themselves enslaved, the Indians may kill them, and, worst of all, servants will not clean boots. It is a fascinating gem of a book for those with an open mind and some curiosity. ...more |
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Anselm – A Very Short Introduction by Thomas Williams https://www.amazon.com/Anselm-Very-Sh... This may be the best “Very Short Introduction” I have “r Anselm – A Very Short Introduction by Thomas Williams https://www.amazon.com/Anselm-Very-Sh... This may be the best “Very Short Introduction” I have “read.” As you should know , the “Very Short Introduction” (“VSI”) series offer a fairly short survey on a plethora of topics. The authors are experts in their field who try to dig down to the kernel of the topic. Some succeed; some don’t. I found that this book did a wonderful job of conveying the key points in a way that was eminently accessible for those who may not be trained in Scholasticism. As you must know , Anselm was the most influential theologian/philosopher between Boethius and Aquinas. This is not to slight Abelard and Albertus Magnus, but Anselm staked out more territory in novel ways after the Consolation of Philosophy presaged the coming Dark Ages until the Angelic Doctor became a one-man theological army. Anselm is famous for his Ontological Argument, which is still being dismissed and defended, as well as his “Incarnation of the Word,” and for a theory of atonement to answer “Why did God become Man?,” the fall of the Devil, and other issues. Anselm is so well known as a theologian that very few people realize that his real job was (a) running the Church of England, (b) fighting English kings over “lay investiture” and (c) being repeatedly exiled from England because of fighting the English kings. We read the Proslogion or the Cure Deus Homo today, and we get not a hint that Ansel was involved in the defining political issue of his age. The VSI begins with an opening chapter on St. Anselm’s busy life. St. Anselm was born in Aostia, Italy in 1033. He joined the Benedictine monastery at Bec under Abbott Lanfranc in 1059. He quickly became prior and then abbott. Lanfranc had become Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1092, Lanfranc died and Anselm was tapped by King William Rufus (William the Conqueror’s son) to take over the role as Archbishop of Canterbury over Anselm’s objections. The significance of these dates and location often goes unremarked, i.e., Ah, yes, 1092 in England….yawn. But let’s have some perspective. When Anselm was born and entered the monastery at Bec, England was an Anglo Saxon kingdom. William the Conqueror was recruiting for soldiers when Anselm was thirty-two. Anselm became head of the English Church only twenty-six years after the Norman Conquest. He was living through tumultuous history. Not that we get a sense of that from his writings. This was also the era of the Papal Reform Movement that sought to take back control of local churches from local rulers and end abuses like simony and clerical concubinage. Anselm was a papal partisan…he was an incorruptible papal partisan. He wanted to get along with the king but would not compromise on the issue who got to ordain and invest clerics with clerical offices. As a result, Anselm was invited to leave England three times before his death in 1109. This is a very short part of this Very Short Introduction. The bulk of the book involves a survey of Anselm’s writings. Suffice it to say, that I have dedicated myself to reading that writing lest I miss out on an important element of Christian thinking. The author (Williams) does a great job of making complicated theological ideas accessible. Here is his take on Anselm’s understanding of “divine simplicity.” Divine simplicity is such a counterintuitive doctrine that it is worth looking carefully at why Anselm is committed to it. Why does unsurpassable greatness require a lack of metaphysical composition? One argument Anselm gives is that any composite can be broken up, at least in thought, and clearly what can be broken up is inferior to what cannot be broken up. This argument might well seem like a mere restatement of the general preference for unity over multiplicity, and so it might be less than convincing to someone who doesn’t quite see why divine unity has to be (or even intelligibly can be) carried quite so far as to deny any metaphysical distinctions in God. Anselm has a more powerful consideration available, however, in what philosophers nowadays call divine aseity. ‘Aseity’ is derived from the Latin a se, ‘from himself’ (though no medieval philosopher writing in Latin actually uses the word aseitas—it is odd that it was left to later writers to coin a faux-Latin word for a concept that was so important to medieval Latin writers). The idea is that whatever God is, he is from himself. He does not depend on anything outside himself to be what he is. Now it is easy to see why aseity must characterize a being of unsurpassable greatness: it is greater, better, nobler to be independent than dependent, to have in oneself the fount and source of all that one is, rather than depending on something outside oneself to exist or to be what one is. Once we understand aseity, it is easy to see why God cannot be a composite in any way. A composite depends on its components if it is to exist and to be what it is. If God has parts—attributes distinct from each other or from God himself—then he depends on something other than himself to be what he is. So God does not have wisdom or power or justice; God is wisdom and power and justice, which are all one in God, because they are God, and God is one. Williams, Thomas. Anselm: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (pp. 25-26). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition. A study of Anselm underscores the Scholastic belief in the power of human reason. Williams explains Anselm’s ontological argument ,the response of Guanillo , and Anselm’s response to Guanillo. What cements Anselm’s position as a champion of reason is his order that any publication of his argument must also contain Guanillo’s response. It would be nice if modern scholars would honor their critics in a similar fashion. Anselm also writes in a decidedly Catholic vein in his discussion of the fall of the angels. Williams summarizes a part of the argument thus: But if the angel has both wills—both affections—he has the power to make a choice that isn’t a necessary outgrowth of the nature and powers God gave him, but instead an act that genuinely belongs to the angel as its initiator or agent. In the situation of the primal choice, all the angels have both the affection for justice and the affection for happiness. They can exercise their will-as-instrument by forgoing advantage (‘that something more’) for the sake of justice; they can also exercise their will by choosing advantage and thereby abandoning justice. Nothing about what God does—creating them as they are, revealing to them what they know, placing them in the circumstances in which they find themselves—makes the difference between the angels who remain steadfast and the angels who fall. It is the angels themselves who make the difference by freely willing one way or the other. So it does turn out after all that the angels can answer St Paul’s question, ‘What do you have that you did not receive?’, with ‘Our free choice of justice over advantage’ (or vice versa) rather than the ‘Nothing’ that Paul expects. Anselm sees as clearly as anyone before or since, and much more clearly than most, that if the answer really is ‘Nothing’—if absolutely everything belonging to a creature, including every choice, is received from God—there will be no real responsibility or agency on the part of any creature. All creaturely choices will be ‘the work and gift of God’. Anselm is here making a radical break with the Augustinian tradition, which insisted that everything that is good, including our own good choices, is from God; we can mar the good we receive, but we cannot bring about any good in ourselves by our own powers. Williams, Thomas. Anselm: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (p. 77). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition. Anselm also offered a “satisfaction theory of atonement.” Williams explains: Anselm’s theory of atonement can be summed up in a single sentence: The voluntary self-offering of the infinitely precious life of the God-man repairs the infinite breach that sin had opened up between God and humanity and thereby restores the possibility of eternal happiness that God intended for humanity in creation. Granted, this statement expresses his account without employing the metaphors that Anselm uses in developing it. But it does so without the loss of anything essential to the view, and indeed it thereby opens up possibilities for contemporary thinkers to express the same view using metaphors and imagery that might speak more compellingly today. Williams, Thomas. Anselm: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (p. 92). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition. By this time, the reader should have a sense of Anselm and this VSI. I intend to dive in further. ...more |
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A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich by Christopher B. Krebs There is an interesting book to be written A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich by Christopher B. Krebs There is an interesting book to be written about the rediscovery of Tacitus’s Germania, but this is not that book. I have a high tolerance for technical detail and minutia, but “A Most Dangerous Book” by Christopher Krebs went well past my limits. I think the problem was that I kept waiting for the “most dangerous book” part, which, of course, does not happen until late in the narrative when the Germania becomes a primary source for the Nazis. When that happened, I was not surprised although I was exhausted by Krebs’ efforts to inflate the significance of the Germania. This book is mostly about the reception of the Germania. It reminds me of Stephen Greenblatt’s “The Swerve,” which was about the discovery and reception of the poem “On the Nature of Things” (De Rerum Natura) by Lucretius. Greenblatt’s book promised to describe how De Rerum Natura changed the course of European history, but never came close to making that showing. Instead, Greenblatt’s book, like this book, bogged down into a collection of references to the subject book over the centuries, most of which show that the book was taken out of context or largely ignored. It seems to be a mark of this genre for the author to oversell the importance of the book, probably in an effort to attract readers to what is a book of limited interest for those with an “inside the game” love of books. A problem with both Greenblatt’s book and this book is that we never get an introduction to the text. We are told about what people say about the text. We are told about people’s reaction to the text. There is, however, never anything more than a broad gesture at the major themes of the work. Certainly, the reader can go and read the text for themselves. Readers should do that. However, it seems like a wasted opportunity to bait the hook with a survey of the work in question. What also unites Greenblatt’s book and this book is that both works were the chance discovery of long-forgotten, last remaining texts by Poggio Bracciolini. Krebs writes: SILENCE IS almost all we hear of Tacitus for much of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Then, toward the end of 1425, a year otherwise conspicuous for its lack of conspicuousness, Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) in Rome sat down to compose with “a hasty hand” one of his many letters to his lifelong friend Niccolò Niccoli in Florence. Secretary by profession, humanist by passion, Poggio reeled off letters that detail his life in general and his hunts for manuscripts in particular. This time he had grand news. As a skilled writer, he knew to withhold this tidbit for last for his correspondent, another bibliomaniac: Krebs, Christopher B.. A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (p. 56). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. It stirs the romantic cockles of my heart to think about someone marching into a monastic library and pulling out a lost manuscript. I could die satisfied if I pulled off that trick. The problem is that the next move in disseminating this book is that it wasn’t disseminated. Poggio lent it to another scholar who forgot to return it for decades. The text mysteriously moved from site to site until it resurfaced decades later. If the rescue of Tacitus’s The Germania from a monastic library was miraculous, grace preserved the text from being lost during this decades-long interregnum. Thereafter, the reception of the Germania depended on the prejudices or agenda of the recipient. Italians used it to show that Germans were barbaric. Germans used it to show that their ancestors were noble and that there was something like a unified German culture. A fair bit of editing occurred to remove some of the less attractive descriptions of German ritual sacrifices by some of the German commentators. Krebs walks us through a lot of German history in the guise of talking about the Germania. In a lot of this history, the Germania does not seem to play a significant role. References to the Germania are few and far between. This changed in the Nineteenth Century with the humiliation of the French victory over the many Germanic states. In the later Nineteenth Century, the Volkisch movement started, and interest in the Germania waxed. After the (second) French victory over the German Reich in World War I, revanchist Germans look to the Germania for inspiration. Even during the Nazi period, interest in the Germania is hit or miss. Himmler loves the Germania, particularly with its putative connection of German virtues with the farming class. Other leaders, including Hitler and Goebbels, were less interested in the antiquity that the Germania represented. There was a definite “crank” strand in the Nazi movement who turned to the Germania for inspiration. Krebs argues that Nazi anti-miscegenation laws were putatively rooted in the inspiration of Germania: Though it waned as years went by, Günther’s impact on National Socialist ideology was profound. His doctrine was outlined in handbooks like The ABC of National Socialism and summarily found its way into school curricula. It figured centrally and prominently in doctrinaire booklets authorized by Heinrich Himmler, and it left traces in the second part of Mein Kampf (Hitler’s library contained many of Günther’s writings).60 Rosenberg, who may have initiated the conferral of the NSDAP prize, also noted in his Nuremberg speech the race expert’s legal impact. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor was passed “out of the deep conviction that the purity of German blood is the prerequisite of the survival of the German people.” On the strength of this creed, then, the Reichstag “unanimously decreed the following law . . . : Marriages between Jews and citizens of German or related blood are forbidden.” Just as the Germanen, in Günther’s interpretation, had discouraged mixed marriages in an effort to retain racial purity, National Socialist legislation prohibited mixed marriages between Jews and Germans. It was hardly the only National Socialist law based on an alleged Germanic practice. Shortly after coming into power the Nazis dissolved unions and passed the Law for the Organization of National Labor, which framed the relationship between manager and employees as one of “leader” and “followers,” the former answerable for the common good, the latter obliged to be loyal—just like Tacitus’s Germanen in chapters 14 and 15.61 Similarly, what the Nuremberg race laws chiseled into stone was ultimately an adaptation of the erratic ethnographical stereotype that the Roman historian had taken from Greek sources and applied to the Germanen in chapter 4. As a result ideologically aligned readers of the Germania considered the laws concerning the “Jewish question” as the “most recent effort” to restore the racial purity Tacitus mentioned.62 But there had never been any such thing. Krebs, Christopher B.. A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (pp. 229-230). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. On the other hand, there are books that argue that the Nuremberg laws were based on American precedents, and those precedents were certainly not based on Tacitus. So, as with most of the book, the actual impact of the Germania on history is nebulous. Krebs’s book also contains a surprising passage about the Catholic bishop of Munich, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber’s, attack on the crypto-paganism that the Nazis seemed to be projecting in 1933. Krebs writes: A FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT noted the “breathless silence in the mighty room.”1 When the cardinal-archbishop of Munich and Freising, Michael von Faulhaber, ascended the pulpit of Saint Michael’s Church in Munich to deliver his New Year’s address, he held the heightened attention not just of his audience, with its numerous journalists from around the world: The newly installed National Socialist regime also listened uneasily. It was December 31, 1933. The Weimar Republic was dead but its gravediggers not yet certain of their power, and the cardinal made them nervous. Saint Michael’s, the largest Renaissance church north of the Alps, on the preceding Sundays of Advent had proved too small to host all who wanted to attend, so Faulhaber’s sermons were transmitted by loudspeaker to two other churches, both filled to the last seat. With forthright eloquence “welded in the fiery forge of the . . . prophets of the Old Testament,” Faulhaber had addressed inopportune issues.2 While the National Socialist program contained an article (number 24) that decried the Old Testament as an offense against the “moral sense and the sense of decency of the Germanic race,” he had spoken about its value. And although he was careful to qualify his statements, he “should” have foreseen, in the words of the Security Service (SD), that in praising the people of Israel for having “exhibited the noblest religious values,” he would outrage some and comfort many others.3 Julius Schulhoff, a German Jew, thanked the cardinal in a letter, expressing his hope that God would strengthen his “wonderful courage.”4 Michael von Faulhaber showed courage again in his fifth sermon that New Year’s Eve; he would need more for many weeks after. The telling topic on the last day of the year was “Christianity and Germanicness” (Christentum und Germanentum).* The archbishop worried that there was “a movement afoot to establish a Nordic or Germanic religion.”5 The merits of Christianity were being cast into doubt. But who could possibly take a look at the Germanic existence before Christianization and doubt them? To explain his surprise the cardinal proceeded to rouse a drowsy specter of the Germanic barbarian from 450 years of sleep: Wittingly or not, the picture he sketched was almost an exact replica of the barbaric Germane that Enea Silvio Piccolomini had brought to the fore in his influential treatise in the fifteenth century. Like his predecessor Faulhaber used “a small but valuable historical source,” and with it painted for his congregation an abhorrent picture of polytheism, human sacrifices, and “savage superstition.” He disapproved of the pre-Christians’ warrior existence with its primitive “obligation of the vendetta” and denounced their “proverbial indolence, mania for drinking,” carousals, and “passion for dice playing.” The list of shortcomings was long, and all were substantiated using Tacitus’s text. Krebs, Christopher B.. A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (pp. 214-215). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. And: A secret SD memo reported that all five speeches met with an “enormous resonance,” but none more than the New Year’s address.6 The national and international press—including the Bayerische Staatszeitung, the New York Times, Le Temps (Paris), and Il Lavoro (Geneva)—all covered it. National Socialists of all ages and ranks refuted, scorned, and attacked the address in journals like Germanien, People and Race, and the Vanguard. It was “a political crime,” they said, and its speaker, “a categorical and determined enemy of the National Socialist state.”7 Alfred Rosenberg, the regime’s chief ideologue, charged the cardinal with “severely disgracing the process of self-reflection which [was] under way in the Third Reich.”8 But the German people would not, he added threateningly, “quietly accept such utterances.” Far from acquiescing, Nazi opposition took violent form during the night of January 27, when two shots were fired into the living room of the cardinal’s home. No one was hurt. The book containing the sermons came under fire as well. Members of the Hitler Youth, “with the warrior passion of the ancient Germanen,” tried to disrupt its distribution.9 Just as in May 1933, when the Bebelplatz in Berlin had crackled, ablaze with a bonfire of books, they burned it in the course of a demonstration (to no avail: It sold at least 150,000 copies and was translated into eleven languages). A caricature ominously suggested that a similar fate might be in store for its author. Even though some critics occasionally ventured into the territory of rational argument, all in all the reactions “cast the contemporary cultural sophistication in a less than flattering light,” as the archbishop wryly wrote.10 When he uncovered the barbarian past, barbarity reared up in the present. Krebs, Christopher B.. A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (pp. 216-217). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. Along with Jewish businesses and synagogues, Faulhaber’s residence would be attacked on Kristallnacht. Opposing revanchist antiquarianism can be a dangerous occupation. In sum, like a lot of books of this type, there is a flood of information. Whether that information is interesting or material to the reader depends on what the reader hopes to find. I appreciated the passage about Faulhaber. Was that germane to the topic of the Germania being “a most dangerous book”? Probably not. I’m not sure Faulhaber mentioned the Germania; it seems that he was responding to volkisch romantic stereotypes that were in the air at the time. So, whether the reader will find this book worth the investment depends on what the reader hopes to find. As Krebs concludes: "In the end the Roman historian Tacitus did not write a most dangerous book; his readers made it so." But isn't that true of all books? ...more |
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The Ministry of Truth and the rewriting of history The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past by Jarrett Stepman https://www.amazon.co The Ministry of Truth and the rewriting of history The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past by Jarrett Stepman https://www.amazon.com/War-History-Co... Although Leftists have been rewriting history for decades, the project of anti-American historical revisionism burst into public awareness only recently, particularly with the 2020 race riots where statues of historical figures - initially Confederate statutes but later historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and Father Junipero Serra – were attacked, vandalized, destroyed, or removed from public squares. Leftist Orwellianism has sparked a reaction among historians. Many historians are fighting back by contesting the tendentious, fictional, reductionist, popular Orwellian revisionist history that has flooded the public mind by a host of Leftist institutes, think tanks, and academics. The sad part is that they might be shoveling against the tide. If history is a set of lies agreed upon, then the agreement is in the hands of the cultural elites who are not afraid to use their power to fire dissenters or suppress opposition. And, then, there is just the problem of getting people to read the defense when the Ministry of Truth merely has to repeat its lies over and over again until it becomes common sense. The War on History by Jarrett Sepman falls into the Defending History genre. Sepman’s book was written in 2019, before the War on History went truly asymptotic. Since 2020 acts as a kind of discontinuity when Leftist dysfunction really broke out into the public mind, this book is a reminder that things had been swirling down the toilet for a reasonable time before 2020. Sepman organizes his book into chapters involving the various fronts in the Orwellian war on history. These are the wars on Columbus, Andrew Jackson, Robert Lee, and America’s prosecution of World War II. I listened to this book as an audiobook and I found myself being inspired by a lot of what I heard. For example, I had never been particularly interested in Andrew Jackson but now I get – I understand – why he was important in transitioning America to a mass democracy and why he upset the powers that be that entrenched themselves in power during the “Era of Good Feelings.” I am an amateur historian, and I learned stuff. I can only imagine that others would benefit from this survey of American history without the hate for America. Here are excerpts I found interesting. Concerning the Pilgrims: But although some on the far left have peddled a “National Day of Mourning”—a “holiday” based on racial grievance and animosity—in order to rebuke Thanksgiving as a kind of celebration of white supremacy, the original thanksgiving was actually more of an Indian celebration than an English one. “Countless Victorian-era engravings notwithstanding, the Pilgrims did not spend the day sitting around a long table draped with a white linen cloth, clasping each other’s hands in prayer as a few curious Indians looked on,” according to Nathaniel Philbrick. “Instead of an English affair, the First Thanksgiving soon became an overwhelmingly Native celebration when [Indian chief] Massasoit and a hundred Pokanokets (more than twice the entire English population of Plymouth) arrived at the settlement.”24 The Pilgrims have sometimes been portrayed as charity cases at the original Thanksgiving, being helped along by the good graces of local Indians. This is a misinterpretation. Both sides found that cooperation suited their interests. The Pokanokets saw the Pilgrims as a valuable ally to counterbalance the Narragansetts, a much larger and more powerful local tribe. And the Pilgrims needed local allies and tutors in survival in the New World. This joint celebration between very different kinds of Americans was appropriate, given the holiday’s meaning to our E Pluribus Unum nation hundreds of years in the future. Stepman, Jarrett. The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past (p. 48). Gateway Editions. Kindle Edition. This discussion of how Daniel Webster implanted the idea of the Pilgrims as a symbol for America made me want to look up this speech: For an hour and a half, and mostly without notes, Webster delivered one of the greatest patriotic speeches in American history. He began by noting that the “Pilgrim Fathers” had left their descendants an incredible legacy, then called for his own generation to offer future ones “some proof that we have endeavored to transmit the great inheritance unimpaired; that in our estimate of public principles and private virtue, in our veneration of religion and piety, in our devotion to civil and religion’s liberty, in our regard for whatever advances human knowledge or improves human happiness, we are not altogether unworthy of our origin.”46 Webster made the case for commemorating history: “Human and mortal although we are, we are nevertheless not mere insulated beings, without relation to the past or the future. We live in the past by a knowledge of its history; and in the future, by hope and anticipation.” Stepman, Jarrett. The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past (p. 61). Gateway Editions. Kindle Edition. This is depressing, but not surprising. (Although it makes me wonder why we are spending billions on public education.) After passing out short quizzes to test the general knowledge of his students for over a decade, college professor Duke Pesta of the University of Wisconsin—Oshkosh has observed a worrying trend. A growing majority of his students now believe that America invented slavery and that the institution had no history outside the United States. Worse, slave ownership seems to be just about the only thing students know about the Founders. “On one quiz, 29 out of 32 students responding knew that Jefferson owned slaves, but only three out of the 32 correctly identified him as president,” according to a College Fix article about Pesta’s quizzes. “Interestingly, more students—six of 32—actually believed Ben Franklin had been president.”31 Stepman, Jarrett. The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past (p. 84). Gateway Editions. Kindle Edition. On the War of 1812: The late-nineteenth-century American statesman and historian Carl Schurz explained that “if war is ever justified, there was ample provocation for it” in the actions of the British toward Americans on the world’s oceans. “The legitimate interests of the United States had been trampled on by the belligerent powers, as if entitled to no respect. The American flag had been treated with a contempt scarcely conceivable now.” Americans had to ask themselves whether they should simply allow themselves to be wantonly abused by Old World superpowers—not only “robbed, and maltreated, and insulted,” but also “despised.” All this “for the privilege of picking up the poor crumbs of trade which the great powers of Europe would still let them have.” Ultimately, Schurz wrote, “When a nation knowingly and willingly accepts the contempt of others, it is in danger of losing also its respect for itself.”13 The United States had to go to war for the sake of its own dignity. Inconsequential nations lay down to take the abuse, but while America was outmatched by any objective assessment, it was not created to be an inconsequential nation. Failure on the battlefield would be far less destructive than the crisis that the fragile nation would face if it allowed transgressions to continue with no military response. Young patriotic Americans were having none of it. They would fight regardless of the disparity in power between Great Britain and the United States. They would take their lumps and defeats, for sure, but they would show that abusing the rights of their countrymen would come at a price. And no man personified the “Don’t tread on me,” belligerent underdog ethos better than Andrew Jackson. Stepman, Jarrett. The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past (p. 110). Gateway Editions. Kindle Edition. This parallel to modern times was interesting: When Jackson was swept into office in 1828, he stunned the American political establishment, which had dismissed him as an unserious ruffian at best, a dangerous proto-Caesar at worst, and likely some combination of the two. But they had been blind to some very serious problems that had taken root in Washington, D.C. Following the collapse of the Federalist Party after the War of 1812, one-party rule had developed into a cushy, back-scratching affair among those in power. This era has sometimes been called the “Era of Good Feelings,” but, as historian Robert Remini pointed out, it really deserves to be called the “first Era of Corruption.” Stepman, Jarrett. The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past (p. 131). Gateway Editions. Kindle Edition. Robert E. Lee is vocally condemned, but his role in preventing America devolving into an endless round of hatred and reprisal, as we see in other countries, deserves to be remembered: Though he was a general and not the president of the seceded states, late in the war, Lee was the Confederacy, the man who had the most power to sway the minds of the Southern people. And Lee’s example to a defeated South was almost unique in human history. When some Southerners wanted to keep fighting a guerilla war, he urged them to accept defeat, reconcile with their fellow countrymen, and to abandon animosities and “make your sons Americans.”34 As one writer for the Atlantic Monthly wrote in 1911, “What finer sentence could be inscribed on Lee’s statue than that?” Lincoln, too, was a proponent of reconciliation. He waged the war in a spirit of “malice toward none” and “charity for all,” in the moving words of his Second Inaugural Address. Stepman, Jarrett. The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past (pp. 161-162). Gateway Editions. Kindle Edition. Teddy Roosevelt was a mensch. People forget that 1915 was an era of anti-Catholicism as the Ku Klux Klan was in the middle of its 20th century revival. For Teddy to go to the KKK and give a speech tells you how much he was committed to America: No speech better sums up Theodore Roosevelt’s philosophy than one he delivered on October 12, 1915, to the Knights of Columbus. As we have seen, the Knights of Columbus was no ordinary fraternal organization. Because it was Catholic, groups such as the Ku Klux Klan frequently attacked it as un-American. Hostilities between Protestants and Catholics in that day were far more intense than our own. So it was noteworthy that former president Roosevelt, a fervent Protestant, would make an appearance before the group.29 Stepman, Jarrett. The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past (p. 195). Gateway Editions. Kindle Edition. In 1894, Teddy Roosevelt offered this observation on the “deal” offered to immigrants: Roosevelt then quoted the German-born representative Richard Guenther, who had explained to his fellow immigrants, We know as well as any other class of American citizens where our duties belong. We will work for our country in time of peace and fight for it in time of war, if a time of war should ever come. When I say our country, I mean, of course, our adopted country. I mean the United States of America. After passing through the crucible of naturalization, we are no longer Germans; we are Americans. Our attachment to America cannot be measured by the length of our residence here. We are Americans from the moment we touch the American shore until we are laid in American graves. We will fight for America whenever necessary. America, first, last, and all the time. America against Germany, America against the world; America, right or wrong; always America. We are Americans.43 Stepman, Jarrett. The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past (pp. 202-203). Gateway Editions. Kindle Edition. And how did we get here? Mario Cuomo offers an insight into the leftwing mindset which has metastasized into a cancer: “We’re not going to make America great again. It was never that great,” said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on the campaign trail in late 2018 to an audience of mixed cheers and groans. “We have not reached greatness. We will reach greatness when every American is fully engaged.” It was a revealing moment. Cuomo backtracked after making the comment, acknowledging that perhaps America was great but had failed to meet his laundry list of ideological demands. Despite his later flip-flopping, it’s clear that Cuomo originally thought his line questioning American greatness would resonate with voters. And with some, it probably did. Stepman, Jarrett. The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past (p. 237). Gateway Editions. Kindle Edition. This should give the reader a sense of where this book is coming from. I recommend it as a solid survey of history. You should read it now before history disappears. ...more |
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it was amazing
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The Scholastics and the Jews: Coexistence, Conversion, and the Medieval Origins of Tolerance Kindle Edition by Edmund Mazza Why be tolerant? Seriously, The Scholastics and the Jews: Coexistence, Conversion, and the Medieval Origins of Tolerance Kindle Edition by Edmund Mazza Why be tolerant? Seriously, if you know the answer, and you are faced with ignorant people who are getting in the way of something that is good or necessary because they are foolishly adhering to the wrong answer, why should you tolerate their wrong beliefs, which are getting in the way of everyone’s benefit? Recently, the answer seems to be you shouldn’t. Doubts about the efficacy or prudence of Covid shutdowns or vaccinations, or wearing masks, were not only condemned but arguments supporting the doubts were squelched and the doubters were stigmatized as murderers. Likewise, an entire industry has developed to condemn those who do not swear allegiance to the maximally extreme position in support of what is vaguely called “anti-racism.” It is no longer sufficient to be against racism in order to be an “anti-racist,” but, rather, the person must commit to a variety of ideological positions amounting to taking a position on history, sociology, and economics. Those who do not profess their allegiance to these propositions are fired, shamed, or otherwise removed from the public square. Another belief that permits no dissent is the belief that climate change is an existential threat. When she was California’s Attorney General Kamala Harris threatened to use RICO to punish those who dared to dispute the truth of this claim. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinio... This is an odd turn of events. Traditionally, it was liberals who professed to be tolerant. Admittedly, the people doing this are not liberals. Liberals have long since left the building, being replaced by Leftists. Nonetheless, Leftism, like liberalism, has its genesis from the Enlightenment, and tolerance of religious differences was a core Enlightenment principle. Enlightenment tolerance was based on epistemic humility, i.e., Enlightened people knew that no one possessed the truth or that there may be no truth. Does God exist? Which religion is the true religion? Who knows? Maybe none are. Under such epistemic humility, persecution makes no rational sense. In fact, it might be counterproductive since what people need is more information to slowly make conclusions about the truth. In areas of values, opinions, philosophy, and religion, it is best to let people make their own decision and let all the truths compete with each other in a “marketplace of ideas.” Enlightenment tolerance was based on or benefited from nihilism. If a single truth did not exist or if truth could not be known, then tolerance made more sense since no one could know who was right, or, perhaps, everyone, or no one, was right. One thing that seems clear is that Leftists do not suffer from epistemic nihilism about their beliefs. For them, racism is evil, masks are necessary, and climate change is causing the seas to boil. Faced with this certain knowledge, why shouldn’t Leftists persecute. Edmund Mazza offers a different approach to the idea of tolerance, a Catholic approach based on friendship and sharing the good. “Catholic tolerance” may seem like and oxymoron, but Mazza traces the historical thread of a Catholic concept of tolerance. Christianity, which is to say Catholicism in the West, always accepted the proposition that salvation through Christ had to be freely accepted and that people could not be coerced into believing. Forced baptism didn’t save. Coercion to make people Christian was regularly condemned by Catholic thinkers and leaders. For Catholic Europe, the issue of religious toleration applied to three groups: Jews, Muslims, and heretics. Heretics were a special case because they were Christian. Since they had been baptized, Catholics believed that heretics could be held to their baptismal promises. Jews and Muslims were outside of Christianity. Muslims presented the problem of being an outsider community linked to external threats. Jews were outsiders who were not linked to external threats, and, more importantly, had a special status for Christians. As Paula Fredrikson points out in “Augustine and the Jews” ( https://www.amazon.com/Augustine-Jews... ) , Jews enjoyed a special status for Christians as guarantors of the Christian scriptures. Christians could point to Jews as the source of Christianity, which vouched for the provenance of Christianity. In addition, Christian scriptures had a place for Jews; they were to be converted en masse in the final days. Mazza’s concern seems to be with defending Catholicism in general, and the Dominicans, in particular, against the charge of being a “persecuting society.” This is the dominant modern academic view of medieval Catholicism and is based on the paradigm that Catholicism sought to exterminate everything not-Catholic in the interest of political and cultural uniformity. In this paradigm, the emergence of mendicant orders with a mission of preaching and converting non-Catholics is viewed as a species of persecution and intolerance. Modern academics present medieval Christianity as a fascist police state with Dominicans as storm troopers. For them, the Gospel of John is the doorway to the Shoah. (p. 35.) In criticizing this view, Mazza’s approach is to review the explanations given by the historical actors themselves. What Mazza finds is that these people were not motivated by a desire to persecute but by love, friendship and a desire to share the good with friends. Mazza begins with earliest Christianity for context. He points out that the rhetoric used in the gospels and Christian polemics adopted the tropes and rhetoric of intra-Jewish disputations. Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes vilified each other with a wild abandon. Christianity was just another member of the family. Its anti-Judaism was not remarkable compared to its siblings.(p. 37.) In addition, Christianity could not divorce itself from Judaism. Jewish practices were accepted as a forerunner of Christian practices. Justin Martyr used Jewish scripture as a basis for his friendly dialogue with Trypho. Augustine fashioned a place for a permanent Jewish presence within the Christian polity. Christianity also made its own pleas for tolerance based on the universal human power of reason. Mazza claims that the term “religious liberty” may have been coined by Tertullian: Or as he writes elsewhere: We are worshippers of one God, of whose existence and character Nature teaches all men; at whose lightnings and thunders you tremble, whose benefits minister to your happiness. You think that others, too, are gods, whom we know to be devils. However, it is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature that every man should worship according to his own convictions: one man’s religion neither harms nor helps another man. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion—to which free-will and not force should lead us—the sacrificial victims even being required of a willing mind. You will render no real service to your gods by compelling us to sacrifice.48 (emphasis mine) Though he develops these principles no further, the significance of Tertullian’s testimony can hardly be overestimated. One may search the thousand-year history of Greece and Rome and never find a forerunner to Tertullian’s plea for individual liberty grounded in reason/natural law. He recognized that human liberty is rooted in human nature and Nature’s God, to be used in accordance with His eternal Law, which Nature obeys blindly, but which man—whose nature is fashioned in the image and likeness of God—may rationally choose to obey. That is to say: Liberty is not the right to do whatever you want; it is the freedom to do what you ought. And conversely then, “sin” is defined as “an utterance, a deed, or a desire contrary to the eternal law,” to use the words of that infamous-sinner-turned-saint, Augustine of Hippo.49 Furthermore, we might state that this definition of liberty is not limited to Christians of Late Antiquity or the Middle Ages. In his 1963 landmark Letter From a Birmingham Jail, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. explained in scholastic fashion to fellow Evangelical Christian pastors why he advocated obeying the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in the public schools, while disobeying other so-called “laws” during his civil rights protests in the prejudiced South. Mazza, Edmund. The Scholastics and the Jews: Coexistence, Conversion, and the Medieval Origins of Tolerance . Angelico Press. Kindle Edition. Mazza turns to the early Scholastics. This book made me appreciate that Aquinas did not spring forth from virgin soil. According to Mazza, Anselm was friendly to Jews. His Cur Deus Homo (1094-1098) was a response to objections made by London Jews. Anselm made arguments that appealed to reason, and, significantly, he did assumed that Jews could understand his reasoned arguments as rational human beings: Ultimately then, Anselm believes his non-Christian audience just as capable of analyzing his arguments as Christians. This is surely belief in the mental equality of infidel intellects. Furthermore, he demonstrates that his true goal is to see them united with Christians praising God. This is the development of a theology of inclusion based on Christ’s redemption: Because God made man in his own image, the human mind is capable of grasping reasonable arguments: Christian and non-Christian minds. Because death had entered into the human race through the disobedience of the first man, all are stained with the same sin: Christians and non-Christians. Because God became man and paid man’s penalty for sin on the cross, He is the Redeemer of all and deserving of praise: Christian and non-Christian. With Anselm, we have the beginning of a deeper exploration of the mystery of God’s mercy, of the development of a scholastic theology of sin and redemption and its implications for Christians—and non-Christians. Indeed, it is precisely inquiry into human sin and divine mercy that motivates Anselm to write a work answering the objections of unbelievers—for Anselm’s investigation leads him to believe that salvation is for them also, and how else shall this redemption reach them if he does not supply rational proofs to convince them? Mazza, Edmund. The Scholastics and the Jews: Coexistence, Conversion, and the Medieval Origins of Tolerance . Angelico Press. Kindle Edition. Abelard was more than an amorous teacher. Abelard continued Anselm’s belief in the primacy of reason to persuade all humans. Mazza credits Abelard with establishing that the sacrament of repentance was principally effected by the penitent’s inner act of repentance. Abelard wrote a philosophical dialogue between a fictional Christian, Jew, and philosopher that explored religious issues from a rational perspective and presupposed that humans shared the ability to reason and could find the truth through reason. Abelard was followed by successors who were motivated to reach out to Jews because of a belief that Jews had the same interest in overcoming sin as Christians had. The mysterious Odo continued Abelard’s view that Jews like Christians should pursue sinlessness. Alan of Lille (1120-1202) also developed an interest in penitence. For Alan, the priest who heard confessions was a doctor for the cure of souls. Alan would have “sinners healed through confession and ultimately attain life everlasting.” This included Jews, but since Jews did not accept the Christian scriptures, Alan employed philosophy. Alan also used the Talmud in his arguments. St. Dominic entered history because of his missionary ambition. Dominic wanted to missionize the Cuman, who were then ensconced in what is now Hungary, and who would shortly be crushed by the Mongols. Dominic’s goal shows a total reorientation from Anselm. Anselm believed that salvation could not be obtained outside of monasteries. There was no idea that it would be worthwhile to missionize outside the monastery walls; if anyone wanted salvation, they would need to enter a monastery. By Dominic’s day, this attitude had reversed as devout Christians proposed to go into the world preaching and hearing confession. In order to carry out this mission Dominicans became educated. They learned the languages of the people they proposed to missionize. They learned philosophy, which was virtually the universal language. They went into the field as wanderers dependent on the charity of those to whom they ministered. Dominic was followed by St. Ramon de Penaforrt. Ramon edited the Decretals and asked St. Thomas Aquinas to write the Summa Contra Gentile in order to assist missionaries in working among non-Christians. Ramon de Penafort was followed by St. Ramon Lull. These last two seem to complete the transition of the Dominicans to an outward looking missionizing movement that learned the languages of the people they would missionize and learned arguments based on the language and ideas of those people. Mazza characterizes the motivation of these people as being to share the good of forgiveness with people who were in need of that good. In the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas explains that non-Christians are not sent to Hell because of their unbelief, but they may be sent to Hell because of their unforgiven sins. The implication of this would be that it is essential that Christians provide non-Christians with the means to obtain forgiveness. Aquinas also affirmed that non-Christians were not to be prevented from practicing their religion. In these conclusions, Aquinas was incorporating ideas that Ramon de Penaforte had already explored. This is not to say that there was no anti-Semitism. Mazza points out that the Talmud was put on trial resulting in mass burnings in 1242. However, there was an “about face” by Pope Innocent IV in 1247 when the pope was convinced by Jews that the Talmud was essential for their religious practices. Likewise, Dominicans were given permission to preach in Jewish communities, which resulted in bands of Christian rowdies accompanying them and doing violence to the Jews. This behavior resulted in the crown imposing conditions on the Dominicans to reduce the violence. As “persecuting societies” go, this all seems pretty half-hearted. Although Christians and Dominicans could be cruel, It doesn’t seem that the intent of Christians or Dominicans was to exterminate Jews. If that was the intent, why would they have backed off? It seems that there cruelty was based on ignorance and chauvinism. Why was there any restraint? Do we expect restraint as a normal human practice? Do we see it among, say, Communists? Mazza’s explanation is that in recognizing non-Christians as rational human, the Scholastics recognized that non-Christians were open to learning the truth through reason. Further, in being humans, non-Christians bore the image of God. Therefore, in Catholic sacramental understanding, non-Christians were as entitled to have their religious liberty respected as Christians because they were bearers of the image of God. Further, they were also entitled to be treated with friendship, which meant sharing the good that Christians had, namely medicine for their sins. All of this bears on “tolerance.” “Tolerance” means tolerating the bad for the sake of the good. Sometimes friendship means accepting the bad of a friend to avoid making that person worse. We must exercise prudence in applying fraternal correction. If we think that fraternal correction will cause a friend to amend their ways, then fraternal correction is prudent. If we think that our friend will resent the fraternal correction and dig their heels in and become worse, then fraternal correction should be foregone in the name of friendship. Mazza explains: The Catholic ideal of both proselytism and tolerance was based on the notion of the brotherhood of poor sinners in need of transformation in Christ. It was considered the highest compliment to the dignity of the “Other” to invite him to share in that greatest good, which the Christian already possessed. True, this meant disabusing him of alleged untruths, but always by force of reason, not compulsion. To call this “tolerance” is not to diminish in any way the obvious hardships that the Jewish aljamas experienced as a direct result of its implementation. The Catholic construct, however, actually came with built-in curbs against its own excesses. If the Dominicans in the Crown of Aragon are guilty of anything, it was not adhering to the self-imposed limits of the medieval Catholic conception of tolerance, as elaborated by their own Thomas Aquinas: “Now fraternal correction is directed to a brother’s amendment: so that it is a matter of precept, in so far as it is necessary for that end, but not so as we have to correct our erring brother at all places and times.” (emphasis mine) The Angelic Doctor explains in his Summa theologiae that whereas the Catholic faith obliges men never to commit blasphemy, murder, adultery, or other violations of the Decalogue under any pretext, the converse, never missing any opportunity to practice the virtues (like fraternal correction), is not an obligation: Mazza, Edmund. The Scholastics and the Jews: Coexistence, Conversion, and the Medieval Origins of Tolerance . Angelico Press. Kindle Edition. And: But if admonishing our friend the sinner was only likely to make him more stubborn in his sin, then admonishment was to be foregone. Indeed, God requires that one practice prudence and mercy toward one’s neighbor, not the malevolent vigilance that awaits every opportunity to catch him in his sin: “As Augustine says (De Doctr. Christ. i, 28) … that ‘Our Lord warns us not to be listless in regard of one another’s sins: not indeed by being on the lookout for something to denounce, but by correcting what we see’: else we should become spies on the lives of others, which is against the saying of Proverbs 24:19: ‘Lie not in wait, nor seek after wickedness in the house of the just, nor spoil his rest.’”24 Thus, the medieval practice of preaching to sinners and proselytizing unbelievers came with its own built-in curbs against excesses that degrade the dignity of the “Other.” This is medieval Catholic tolerance, which, as we have said, is not the passive restraint of hatred, but the active practice of love. Mazza, Edmund. The Scholastics and the Jews: Coexistence, Conversion, and the Medieval Origin ...more |
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Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World by Jeff Fynn-Paul. The Woke distortion of history has provoked a hopeful reaction, a Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World by Jeff Fynn-Paul. The Woke distortion of history has provoked a hopeful reaction, a new crop of books looking at the basics of American history. The most recent entry in the field is “Not Stolen” by Professor Jeff Flynn-Paul. Flynn-Paul is a professor of Global History and Economics at the University of Leiden. If you are expecting this book to have been written by a Dutchman, guess again — Flynn-Paul was born in America, educated in Canada, and merely works in Europe. I’ve seen some of the videos featuring Flynn-Paul’s discussion of his works, and he is as American as a homeless vagrant in the streets of San Francisco. This book is a survey of American history — the American history you were supposed to learn in grade school but never learned because they were too busy teaching you to hate America. This book is in the same genre as “War on History” by Jarrett Stepman, which I reviewed last month. However, where Stepman’s survey goes from the Era of Discovery to World War II, Flynn-Paul’s interest is the transition of the New World from terra incognita to part of the Western World. As a result, he covers topics like Columbus, Thanksgiving, and the Trail of Tears. The advantage that Woke History has is that it is so easy to learn and remember. In Woke History, there are good guys and bad guys. The bad guys are always Western oppressors who are motivated by evil impulses unique to Westerners because of Capitalism or Christianity. The good guys are the natives, who are victims who lived in peaceful harmony until the Oppressors shattered their world with a multi-century rampage of persecution and slaughter. If you have that paradigm in mind, you can quickly backfill the details. The problem is that history is complicated. People are remarkably like people. In any group, there are some good, many bad, and most moving from side to side. Oppressors are often Victims, and Victims can be Oppressors in their turn. The Woke Narrative ignores facts that contradict the Woke Narrative. For example, if Americans wanted to exterminate the Indians, why did Thomas Jefferson make an effort to distribute the Smallpox vaccine to the Indians? Jefferson sent the smallpox vaccine with the Williams and Clark expedition. In 1832, the Secretary of War was charged with the responsibility of distributing the smallpox vaccine to the Indians. (American efforts in this regard look a lot like the efforts of the German colonial administration to distribute Rinderpest vaccine to African cattle to save the African population from starvation. [See The Case for German Colonialism.]) Did you know that? I didn’t know that. On the other hand, you’ve probably heard that the American military gave blankets from smallpox wards to Indians to start plagues when, in fact, there is no evidence that any such thing ever occurred. There is a single written document of such a strategy. It occurred During the French and Indian Wars at Fort Pitt, which was under siege by the Indians. The commander expressed reluctance to try it because it could have sparked an outbreak among his forces, some already suffering from smallpox. On the other hand, the Indians in the area were also dealing with their smallpox outbreak. Hence, the significance of this effort at primitive biological warfare — not the first time such a thing was tried in sieges — is doubtful. History is complicated. You have to know it empirically, not infer it based on the Narrative. I want to hit some of the points that stood out for me. Flynn-Paul addresses the issue of genocide. Determining the population of pre-Columbian America involves extrapolation and inference verging on speculation. In recent years, the Narrative has been pushing an extremely high population figure for America. For example, the Narrative claims that 7 million people died on the island of Hispaniola as a result of Columbus. But this population figure is absurd: “Our best guess is that England in 1500 had only 2.1 million people, living on double the area of Hispaniola. (England’s maximum capacity before the agricultural revolution of the seventeenth century was probably less than five million.) If Hispaniola really had seven million people in 1491, that would make its population roughly triple that of England at the time, and its population density about six times higher. Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 55–56). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition. This is unlikely: the natives of Hispaniola had a stone-age technology and no draft animals. The more likely figure is in the tens of thousands: “This is why archaeologists and other specialists believe that the real population of Hispaniola in 1491 was about two hundred thousand people while even the “maximalists” in this subfield argue for only three hundred thousand. Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (p. 56). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition. Of this lower number, were most killed? Not at all. Genetic evidence shows that the populations of Hispaniola were not replaced; they were incorporated into subsequent populations. In places with a heavier population density, the survival of the native population is more noticeable: “Just as in the former Aztec lands, today we find that “white” Europeans make up a tiny minority of the population in former Incan territory, at between about 10 and 15 percent. The rest are either mestizo or Amerindian. In all three of these countries about half the population is “pure” Amerindian. Since these two population nuclei accounted for perhaps 80 percent of all New World people in 1491, the obvious conclusion is that Europeans did not slaughter or displace the great majority of Indigenous people in the New World. Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (p. 66). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition. In North America, population densities were far lower: “The only reason parts of the New World, such as the present-day US and Canada and also Australia and New Zealand, are majority non-Indigenous is because the Indigenous population of these lands was so truly sparse — 1 percent or less as dense as most of Europe at the time. Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (p. 128). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition. And: “For the first two and a half centuries after Columbus, Europeans remained confined to limited enclaves in the New World. Large parts of Mexico and Latin America remained in the hands of Indigenous people throughout the colonial period and beyond. As recently chronicled by Pekka Hämäläinen, most of the actual “dispossession” of Indigenous people in North America occurred quite rapidly, during the nineteenth century, due to a combination of natural population increase and European immigration.65 This land grab happened only after the Indigenous population was outnumbered by a factor approaching one hundred to one. Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 129–130). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition. I’ve played war games where one side starts at a lower level but has a greater production capacity over the long run. Things are nip and tuck until the last few turns, when the production capacity overwhelms the other side. That was the situation the American Indians faced. Approximately 10,000 Commanches controlled all of North Texas — slave raiding into northern Mexico — until the mid-19th century when the far larger American population swamped them. North American population densities were extremely low, which influenced the way that a farming culture moving into industrialization was going to interact with them: In hunter-gatherer societies, which ranged over at least three-fourths of New World land north of Panama, property ownership was always tenuous in the extreme. Property in these vast empty regions was claimed by small bands, who might visit it only every few years. Population density was well below one person per ten acres; often, it was much lower than this. Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (p. 213). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition. And: The Indians’ seminomadic lifestyle made it relatively easy for them sell their lands and retreat farther into New York State and the Green Mountains in the hope of avoiding contact with whites — as long as this could be negotiated with other Indian tribes along the way. Population densities in the region began low — highball estimates suggest that about ten thousand Indians were living in all of Vermont in 1500 — so this meant that by 1680, there was space for Indians to migrate through the region after disease, migration, and assimilation had reduced their numbers. Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 272–273). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition. This data corroborates the historical presentation in “How the Indians Lost their Land” by Stuart Banner. Migration was endemic in North America. Populations were constantly displacing prior populations, often through genocide. The Commanches waged wars of genocide against the Apaches. The Navaho were in the process of exterminating the Hopi until the Americans put a lid on that process. The idea of land acknowledgments is silly since it merely acknowledges the last group of colonizers before the Americans took over. Likewise, Indians were quite capable of managing empires with brutal effectiveness. Native populations sided with the Spanish against Aztecs, for example. And, again, as explained in “The Comanche Empire” by Pekka Hämäläinen , ten thousand Commanches ran a military empire that took slaves and property from as far away as northern Mexico and kept Europeans tied up for over 100 years. Flynn-Paul adds another spike to the argument that Europeans were inherently racist when he points out that Spaniards treated Indian nobility as nobility. They would seek to ennoble themselves by marrying local nobility. This does not speak to any form of White Supremacy argued by the Woke Narrative. Flynn-Paul has an interesting discussion that gauges Indian technological developments. Most were at a stone-age level. The Aztecs and Incas might have approached the same level as ancient Mesopotamia. Factor in low population density, and the population replacement was inevitable. Warfare and massacre were not the cause: “Despite the relative rarity of such massacres in New England history, they feature prominently in popular articles on Thanksgiving. Such portrayals are distorted from multiple angles. First, they are spun to represent one-sided instances of colonist-on-Indian aggression. Secondly, they are spun to appear unprovoked. Third, they are spun as though they were motivated by racial hatred and a desire for ethnic cleansing above all else, based on an underlying greed for land. And finally, they are spun as though this sort of thing was happening all the time — as though they were typical of and “stand for” early New England history. All four of these interpretations are false, or at least misleading. The charge of continuous warfare is a highly embellished view of colonial New England history. According to William M. Osborn, who incidentally is cited on the “Indian Massacres” page referenced above, the total casualties of Indian-settler massacres between 1511 and 1890 were about 7,193 Natives who died at the hands of Europeans, and about 9,156 Europeans who died at the hands of Native Americans. Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 240–241). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition. Massacres may have been more common in California, but that was at the end of the process when population density and technological differentials were at a maximum. From an ecological/environmental perspective, groups that evolve with each other learn to adapt. When a new apex predator is introduced to the ecology, the effects can lead to extinction, such as when the Indians destroyed North American megafaunas while African megafaunas continued to survive. Flynn-Paul observes: “According to our best guess, before the arrival of the Spanish in the 1760s, there were perhaps three hundred thousand Indians living in California. The great majority of these lived in the fertile central valley and certain coastal regions, since this provided the Natives with an abundance of food. Early observers noticed that while California itself provided some of the most bountiful sustenance anywhere in North America, the California Indians were among the most “primitive” of all North American people. The going theory is that the abundance of food, in this case, made life so easy that the Indigenous people of California did not bother to innovate. Instead, they took advantage of the Eden-like conditions to live relatively simple lives. Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 362–363). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition. However, even California raises questions. One question is raised by the fact that the massacre rate doesn’t account for population collapse: Herein lies the crux: Madley’s book gives the impression that in 1849, there were some one hundred and fifty thousand Indians living peaceably in California — but that twenty-odd years later, most of these had been hunted to near extinction for sport by gleefully genocidal white hunting parties, including those organized by Serranus Hastings. This is certainly the impression that the law professor Paul Caron got from Madley’s book, and the figure of “100,000 killed” can be found splashed liberally across less-cautious corners of the internet. The problem is, the number of Indians who were killed outside of active warfare during the entire course of the “genocide” was in reality less than five thousand — meaning that some 97 percent of California Indians were not massacred during this time period. A 3 percent slaughter rate is horrendous enough — but it’s a far cry from the 88 percent slaughter rate that Paul Caron claims in his blog post. Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (p. 360). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition. The explanation is complex: According to the sources we have, it seems that a major downturn in the California Indian population occurred during and after the Wars of Mexican Independence, which broke out in 1810 and carried on until 1821. Soon after independence, the Mexican governors then proclaimed the “secularization” of the mission system in California, although this proved a decidedly mixed bag for the California Indians. Under the Mexican system, California Indians remained subject to forced labor by secular landowners who rapidly purchased the old mission lands. It was the Mexican government, then, that created the custom whereby Indians could be indentured and “sold” for their labor. Under this system, Indian children were often sold outright as slaves. The Mexican custom was carried over into the American period, and it became the grounds for much abuse. What few writers wish to emphasize is that this indentured servitude was outlawed by the California legislature as a follow up to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 — less than fifteen years after the Americans took over in California. It took another decade, partly due to the lack of resources brought about by the Civil War, for this emancipation to be effectively enforced however. In the chaos created by the harsh and anarchic situation left by the retreating Mexican government, a great number of California Indians seem to have disappeared — to the extent that a population, formerly three hundred thousand strong, melted away, mostly during the brief Mexican period between circa 1810 and 1848. By the time the Americans got hold of the territory, the Indian population in California is believed to have been between one hundred thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand people. Of course, modern critics opt for the higher number because this makes the Americans look worse. What happened to the approximately one hundred and fifty thousand California Indians who disappeared during the last few decades of Spanish and Mexican rule in California? No one knows for certain. Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 365–366). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition. Social upheavals can have huge effects through mechanisms other than outright murder. Flynn-Paul explains that social upheaval can mean that children just are not born because of lower birth rates: “In light of these cold, hard population figures, with tens of millions of mestizos and Amerindians living precisely where their ancestors lived five hundred years ago, where then is the “holocaust” of one hundred million dead claimed by Stannard and others? Up to 75 percent of them never existed at all — they are a figment of the Berkeley School’s fevered imaginations. In places such as Hispaniola, the pre-Columbian population is exaggerated by the media and government organizations by several thousand percent. Of those Indigenous people who did “disappear” after 1491, most did not die a horrible death. Many were simply not born, because cultural upheaval tends to cause lower birth rates. Of those who actually died under adverse conditions introduced by Europeans, even Stannard recognizes that some 90 percent of Indigenous casualties of European intervention were due to neutral causes such as disease, rather than war. Nor as we will see in later chapters is there evidence that Europeans deliberately infected Indian populations with smallpox or other diseases. Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 67–68). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition. None of this means that Indians were not murdered or oppressed. They certainly were, but facts matter. History is complicated. The Woke Narrative knows that facts matter. The Narrative has been shaped by many people who have gone out of their way to exaggerate historical events into events of monstrous barbarity. Presumably, that is necessary, or someone might notice that the natives were engaging in slaving and sacrifice on a far larger scale. In the case of the Aztecs, this was genuinely monstrous: ...more |
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The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt The setup for this book is a story about how the last copy of a poem written in the first century B.C. was snatched fr The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt The setup for this book is a story about how the last copy of a poem written in the first century B.C. was snatched from destruction by a humanist in the early 15th century and became the trigger that "changed the course of history" by re-introducing Europe to Epicurean philosophy. This is an exciting setup but it isn't accurate in several ways. First, the poem - "On the Nature of Things" (De Rerum Natura) by Lucretius - did not change the course of history. As author Stephen Greenblatt concedes, some Epicurean ideas were reintroduced and had some influence on some thinkers, but there was no wholesale conversion to Epicurean philosophy. Second, the text that was discovered by Poggio Bracciolini was probably not the only text of De Rerum Natura floating around Europe. Greenblatt notes other sightings of De Rerum Natura prior to Bracciolini's discovery. Nonetheless, we don't know what happened to those other texts. It was an era when precious writings from antiquity depended on a single text; lose that and the thing was gone forever. The era fascinates me. Monastics had been painstakingly preserving texts for centuries, copying a text before it was rendered unreadable by time. These monastics knew what they had on their shelves. They undoubtedly circulated information about their holdings to other monasteries, although this is not mentioned by Greenblatt. To the outside world, though, these texts had disappeared. The last remaining copy of some book by Cicero might have made its way to an obscure German monastery, but to the rest of the world that book was lost. Of course, the rest of the world probably didn't know the book was lost. It would take the emergence of collectors, antiquarians, and scholars interested in the past to start pulling the existing texts together in a single place and noting what was missing. By the early 14th century a culture had developed in Northern Italy that could support this project. Furthermore, this culture was keenly interested in its imperial past, in its Golden Age, that it knew from all the monuments around it existed beyond the "dark ages." This book has three threads. The first thread is the culture of the 14th century, including Poggio Bracciolini. The second is Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. The third is the effect of Bracciolini's discovery on his culture. In all these threads, Greenblatt provides some insights, but for the most part, I thought his presentation had more promise than substance. For example, his description of Poggio's world was a traditionally anti-Catholic/anti-religious sketch. Greenblatt brings up chestnuts like Giordano Bruni and Hypatia. He tells readers that "curiosity had long been rigorously condemned as a mortal sin" without mentioning that this "curiosity" was not the desire to know the truth, which was what Christianity is all about, but a morbid interest in unedifying things, like corpses. Likewise, sure, Catholic monks preserved the texts of ancient thinkers - even "atheists" like Lucretius - but they didn't know what they were doing. Reading was coerced and every effort was made to prevent monks from actually thinking about what they read. Greenblatt explains: "But the actual interest of the scribes in the books they copied (or their distaste for those books) was strictly irrelevant. Indeed, insofar as the copying was a form of discipline - an exercise in humility and a willing embrace of pain - distaste or simple incomprehension might be preferable to engagement. Curiosity was to be avoided at all costs. The complete subordination of the monastic scribe to the text - the erasure, in the interest of crushing the monk's spirit, of his intellect and sensibility - could not have been further from Poggio's own avid curiosity and egotism. But he understood that his passionate hope of recovering reasonably accurate traces of the ancient past depended heavily on this subordination. An engaged reader, Poggio knew, was prone to alter his text in order to get it to make sense, but such alterations, over centuries, inevitably led to wholesale corruptions. It was better that monastic scribes had been forced to copy everything exactly at it appeared before their eyes, even those things that made no sense at all. Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. And: "The Benedictine Rule had called for manual labor, as well as prayer and reading, and it was always assumed that this labor could include writing. The early founders of monastic orders did not regard copying manuscripts as an exalted activity; on the contrary, as they were highly aware, most of the copying in the ancient world had been done by educated slaves. The task was therefore inherently humiliating as well as tedious, a perfect combination for the ascetic project of disciplining the spirit. Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. Is all of this true? Greenblatt is notorious for including his own speculations to tell his story. This part of Greenblatt's book has no footnotes. It doesn't seem implausible, and there is something to be said about these practices and attitudes as a way to ensure quality control, but Greenblatt manages to turn the quintessential intellectual practice of the Catholic past into anti-intellectual torture. Greenblatt is less moralistic when it comes to the copyist slaves of antiquity: "Though the book trade in the ancient world was entirely about copying, little information has survived about how the enterprise was organized. There were scribes in Athens, as in other cities of the Greek and Hellenistic world, but it is not clear whether they received training in special schools or were apprenticed to master scribes or simply set up on their own. Some were evidently paid for the beauty of their calligraphy; others were paid by the total number of lines written (there are line numbers recorded at the end of some surviving manuscripts). In neither case is the payment likely to have gone directly to the scribe: many, perhaps most, Greek scribes must have been slaves working for a publisher who owned or rented them. (An inventory of the property of a wealthy Roman citizen with an estate in Egypt lists, among his fifty-nine slaves, five notaries, two amanuenses, one scribe, and a book repairer, along with a cook and a barber.) But we do not know whether these scribes generally sat in large groups, writing from dictation, or worked individually from a master copy. And if the author of the work was alive, we do not know if he was involved in checking or correcting the finished copy. Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. And: "Large numbers of men and women - for there are records of female as well as male copyists - spent their lives bent over paper, with an inkwell, ruler, and hard split-reed pen, satisfying the demand for books. The invention of movable type in the fifteenth century changed the scale of production exponentially, but the book in the ancient world was not a rare commodity: a well-trained slave reading a manuscript aloud to a roomful of well-trained scribes could produce masses of text. Over the course of centuries, tens of thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of copies, were made and sold. Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. Notice how Greenblatt spares us from gratuitous insights about crushing spirits who might be prone to curiosity when it does not involve Catholicism? That's pretty much the tone that comes through the book. Subtract that, though, and correct for speculation, and Greenblatt offers some insights into Poggio's world. I have similar problems with Greenblatt's approach to Lucretius and De Rerum Natura. Since I didn't know anything about Lucretius, everything Greenblatt provided was "value-added." To be fair, not a lot is known about Lucretius. It is fascinating to see him mentioned in Cicero's letters. Concerning De Rerum Natura, Greenblatt does not provide a survey of the poem. De Rerum Natura is one of the weirdest texts in history. It is a long poem that presents philosophical arguments supporting Epicureanism in verse form. Epicureanism's peculiar doctrines included a belief in "atomism." The idea of atomism was that the stuff underlying everything was not an element but tiny material particles that came in different shapes that combined together in different patterns to form different sorts of matter. For Epicureans, materialism allowed for randomness in the fact that atoms could move in unpredictable ways - or "swerve." Another doctrine was that the gods were indifferent to the plight or supplications of believers. This gave Epicureanism its reputation for atheism. Yet another doctrine was that the aim of life was to obtain pleasure - not in the sense of subordinating everything to pleasure, which really leads to pain, but, rather, in the sense of a life of moderation. Framed this way, Epicureanism is not dissimilar from Aristotelianism which teaches that happiness can be found through virtue. Nonetheless, I don't think I got a clear fix on De Rerum Natura from Greenblatt's text. It may be that he was always "selling the sizzle." Exaggerating the differences between De Rerum Natura and 15th-century Christian culture in order to give his book more significance. Greenblatt's final piece about the impact of Epicureanism suffers the same problem. It is interesting to see that Shakespeare used the term "atom" in a play, but does this mean that Shakespeare was influenced by De Rerum Natura or incorporated Epicureanism into his view of the world? The examples that Greenblatt gives where Epicurean ideas pop up in this writer or this text are interesting but I wasn't sold on the idea that modernity became Epicurean to the degree that Greenblatt was proposing. This is an interesting book about a little-known bit of history. Greenblatt is a good writer and tells an interesting story. I think that he may sacrifice history for the story, but I would recommend this book as a way of getting an introduction to the subject. ...more |
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really liked it
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Read the complete review on Medium https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/is-c... I liked this book as a work of historical research. I didn’t like this book Read the complete review on Medium https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/is-c... I liked this book as a work of historical research. I didn’t like this book to the extent that it begins and concludes with tendentious but traditional polemics against the modern Catholic Church. The polemics are fortunately limited to the first and last chapters, where the author acknowledges that she well out beyond her skis: It is impossible for me, as a medieval historian already chronologically stretched to my limits, to fill in the missing centuries on my own. Elliott, Dyan. The Corrupter of Boys (The Middle Ages Series) (p. 234). University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.. Kindle Edition. In case anyone thinks that I am projecting my perspective into this text, here is how Elliott explains the thesis of her book: “NOTCHES: In a few sentences, what is your book about? Dyan Elliot: It’s really about the unintended consequences of clerical celibacy. The celibate ideal meant that the clergy’s sexual lapses were considered especially damaging to the Church, and very soon the fear of a priest’s public scandal trumped concern over hidden clerical vice. This led to the active persecution of clerical wives and concubines, relations which were generally out in the open, and the tacit toleration of clerical pederasty, which tended to be covert. As a result, countless boys and adolescents suffered clerical abuse. (see Interview.) It may be fair to say that the book is “about the unintended consequences of clerical celibacy” — this may be the best feature of the book — but the rest of her claims are largely unproven given the evidence that pederasty and abuse exist in non-celibate organizations at the same or higher rate as has been found in the American Catholic Church. Elliott doesn’t simply assume that there is a difference, she never mentions the possibility of pederasty outside the celibate Catholic Church, as if Catholicism were sui generis, the only institution that has ever suffered a pederasty problem. This is a problem for the thesis that Elliott thinks she’s proving — although it is a goldmine for people who want to attack Catholicism by citing a book without actually reading it. Elliott’s position is that the practice of celibacy caused the pedophilia that has scandalized the Catholic Church over the last thirty years and that this scandal was assisted, encouraged, and tolerated by the Catholic practice of confessional privacy. The most tolerant kind of causation is “but for” causation, which establishes the “but for test” such that “but for A, X would not have happened.” However, if X happens without A being present, then the “but for” test permits us to ask whether the necessary causal connection is found in something else — perhaps, sinful human nature? On the other hand, I think that Elliott’s book provides an interesting overview of the development of Catholic practices over the Medieval period. She may also offer some insights into how sinful human nature expressed itself opportunistically through some Catholic doctrines. This is the best part of the book. The introduction and conclusion are completely different from the rest of the book. In the Introduction, after handwaving about linking the 2021 Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report to Gregorian Reforms. In Chapter 1, Elliott moves to history proper. (Anti-Catholics can skip directly to the Conclusion to reinforce their prejudices without having to do the difficult part of reading about history.) Elliott begins where Christianity did not begin, i.e, with public confession. (Christianity began and begins with Baptism and the Eucharist; Confession comes later.) In the beginning, baptism was the easy way to absolve one’s sins compared to confession. Confession was a fallback for those who had committed very bad sins after baptism. There were some who argued that Confession was a one-time thing like Baptism. Elliott mentions Tertullian as a proponent of this position. St. Thomas Aquinas notes that this was the position of a heretical group known as the Novatians. (Summa Theologica, Part III, Section 84, article 10.) Like the later Donatists, the Novatian heresy developed after a persecution — the Decian Persecution of the third century — and involved the question of how easily those who had apostatized should be allowed re-admission to the Church. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes “Novatian had refused absolution to idolaters; his followers extended this doctrine to all “mortal sins” (idolatry, murder, adultery, or fornication). Most of them forbade second marriage, and they made much use of Tertullian’s works.” Novatian’s heresy was that he denied the power of the Catholic Church to grant absolution for these specified sins, which denied God’s power to absolve sins and the promise that God had made to the Church. In the early Church, the Rite of Confession was public. Elliott observes that public penance was a spectacle in which “the performers were invariably people of rank.” Rules developed around Confession, which were codified in canons. Elliott advises that the Spanish Council of Elvira in the fourth century was the first convocation of bishops that articulated a series of canons, which included canons about clerical sins. Elvira mandated an excommunication from communion of “sexual offenders.” Elliott argues that in Western Christianity, the clergy began to distinguish itself from the laity. She claims that clerical celibacy was one way of marking this distinction in social status. According to Elliott, preserving this increased social standing created exacerbated the church’s concern about “scandal,” i.e., scandalous penances would undermine the reputation for holiness on which the Church’s power was founded. Elliott argues that the concern over scandal led to the development of the practice of private confessions, which had the unintended consequence of permitting “sodomites” the ability to ply their avocation. Elliott argues: “This new emphasis on the confessor as a direct conduit to God raised the prestige of the priesthood exponentially, simultaneously stoking the potential for sacerdotal scandal. Elliott, Dyan. The Corrupter of Boys (The Middle Ages Series) (p. 121). University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.. Kindle Edition. A Catholic would find this statement to be tone-deaf. It ignores the Catholic understanding that the priest “confects” the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of the Risen Savior in the elements of bread and wine. I don’t know if Elliott is a practicing Catholic, but an overly tight focus on the writer’s ideological narrative is a problem with polemics. Elliott has gone all in on confession as the engine for her narrative, which may have caused her to ignore other factors that might be even more important for prestige.[1] Elliott does a good job of laying out evidence to support the transition from public confession to private confession during the period from the fourth century to the eleventh century. There can be no doubt that there was such a development. Aquinas in the Summa refers to “solemn penance” which is not repeated and seems to be different from the kind of penance which can be repeated. (Summa Theologica, III, 84.10.) Presumably, he was talking about some kind of public penance that was not the “auricular private penance” that his Dominicans provided. I’m not sure about the rest of it. Elliott basically assumes the connection between celibacy as the Catholic sine qua non for holiness. I’m not sure that is correct since Eastern Catholic priests could always be married men. However, asceticism was a mainstay of both Christian and heretical holy men. St. Anthony of the Desert headed out to the wilderness, thereby starting the tradition of monasticism, in the middle of the third century. St. John’s gospel mentions the virgins who accompanied Christ and were the “first fruits” at the beginning of the second century. Sexual asceticism was always wired into Christian religious practices. Further, Elliott ignores the singular fact that EVERYONE was permitted to use private confession when it developed, not just the clergy. This fact would seem to kick out the causal connection between protecting the status of the priesthood and the development of private confession. Elliott might argue that the laity was the unintended beneficiary of something designed to benefit the clergy, but she does not offer any evidence for this conclusion. Elliott leaves out the involvement of Irish monks in the development of confessional practices. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes: “During the seventh-century Irish missionaries, inspired by the Eastern monastic tradition, took to continental Europe the ‘private’ practice of penance, which does not require public and prolonged completion of penitential works before reconciliation with the Church. From that time on, the sacrament has been performed in secret between penitent and priest.” (Catechism, para. 1447.) Elliott also ignores the more likely reason for the development of private confession, namely, the push to have people baptized as early as possible. It is a well-known historical fact that Christians in the early Church put off being baptized until they were dying so that they could take the easy route to the forgiveness of sins. Emperor Theodosius was baptized after a sickness when he was emperor and found himself in the inconvenient position of having to enforce Christianity on paganism. St. Augustine was not baptized until he was an adult. This was the norm of the Church through at least the fourth century. As Christianity became identical with civil society, however, the Church’s desire to have everyone to formally join the Christian community became a priority. This left more Christians after the fourth century in need of the fallback sacrament of Confession. Prior to the fourth or fifth centuries, the issue of Confession was mostly theoretical since most Christians would not be baptized until they faced death. After baptism, the Christians began to receive the Eucharist on a regular basis, which entailed a requirement that they act in a more holy fashion. The “Irish Way of Confession” dovetailed nicely with the concern about continuing individual sanctification and purity, something that was required to approach God in the Eucharist, since it permitted Christians to focus on less serious sins than murder and adultery. In short, a lot of the assumptions that frame Elliott’s narrative fall by the wayside when a larger frame is considered. I’m not saying she’s wrong, but this book should have presented a broader picture rather than narrowly focusing on her narrative, particularly since she uses that narrative to make a polemical point about the contemporary Catholic Church. I think Elliott’s points about the later Middle Ages have a more secure foundation. Elliott argues that Gregorian Reforms communicated to Catholic clergy that sodomy was condoned or, at least, less serious. The Gregorian Reforms were aimed at ending the Church’s subservience to secular rulers and abolishing clerical concubinage. The Catholic Church had preserved the classical tradition of “boy love” in literature. Elliott does a solid job of quoting a number of clergymen who wrote homoerotic poetry with a sick emphasis on boys. She also provides lurid details about accusations and rumors concerning pederasty among the clergy. In addition, she quotes extensively from canons and writings condemning relationships with women. From this evidence, Elliott argues that the Catholic Church downplayed the sin of sodomy in order to play up misogyny against marriage and relationships with women. Elliott argues: The cumulative message was that the eleventh-century clergy had no problem with same-sex relations — only with women. Apart from Leo IX’s initial interdict against sodomy at Reims in 1049, where Damian’s presence probably influenced the agenda, there was no legislation enacted against sodomy at any subsequent reform councils. Elliott, Dyan. The Corrupter of Boys (The Middle Ages Series) (p. 82). University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.. Kindle Edition. She further argues: “The willingness to overlook the issue of clerical sodomy meant that the situation of the child oblate and his vulnerability to sodomitical predators, so poignantly evoked by Odo of Cluny, was never addressed in the reformers’ abundant canonical collections. Elliott, Dyan. The Corrupter of Boys (The Middle Ages Series) (p. 82). University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.. Kindle Edition. This is a feast for anti-Catholics since it suggests that the Catholic priesthood was founded on same-sex relationships and that this orientation has a historical continuity to the present day. Similar arguments equating the celibate Catholic clergy with “unmanliness” have been made by Protestants and others throughout history. Chancellor Bismarck’s Kulturkampf made Catholic celibacy an issue as did the Nazis. Celibacy has not only marked Catholic priests off from society, but it has also provoked a hostile reaction from society which perceives celibacy as a threat. (Ironically, I found this article today on Medium which plays on the same tropes as the Nazis — https://medium.com/belover/christians.... The “men wearing dresses” tope is an evergreen one.) Elliott’s argument is superficially attractive, particularly for people who find celibacy to be unnatural in the first place. Celibacy has long been viewed as a political threat to the secular state. In a January 2014 First Things article, Grant Kaplan offers a different way of considering celibacy. Kaplan refers to an 1824 debate between Catholic laymen about ending celibacy. One layman argued that ending celibacy was vital to integrate Catholicism into the German state. Kaplan summarizes the counter-argument of the other layman, which I will quote extensively for the way it reframes the discussion: “Although he did not agree with the Denkschrift’s argument for abolition, he agreed with it that celibacy was incompatible with the state’s ends. Celibacy is indeed useless to the state — which made it crucial for maintaining the Church’s independence. Married life introduces responsibilities and inclines heads of household to become invested in the state’s system of education and welfare, in addition to its economy. Celibacy disrupts this process of integrating men into the stream of family life and its responsibilities. As a result, unmarried priests remind Catholics of the “non-unity of Church and State,” as Möhler puts it. Celibacy focuses on the heavenly city, and the practice of celibacy indicates an eschatological hope for life in the next world. It is “a living testimony of faith in a constant outpouring of higher powers in this world and of the omnipotent rule of truly infinite forces in the finite.” This focus and hope doesn’t just differ from the concerns of the earthly city, it challenges their claims to be ultimate. “An institution like [celibacy] can never grow on the soil of earthly states and for that reason, as long as it flourishes in the Church, it will form a living protest against all attempts to make the Church lose herself in the state.” It is a massive mistake, therefore, to view celibacy as an ecclesial practice borne of particular contingencies, like feudal laws of primogeniture. Clerical celibacy is an essential dimension of the Church’s existence as a spiritual institution ordered toward ends beyond the competence and authority of temporal rulers. Celibacy does not automatically function this way, of course, just as the married life does not guarantee obeisance to the state. But when it is one expression of a larger vision of the Church as a foretaste of the kingdom of God, it can serve as a sign of contradiction in an age too focused on the present.” .... ...more |
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Murmuring against Moses by John S. Bergsma Jeffrey L. Morrow https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/who-... This is a powerful and surprising attack on the “D Murmuring against Moses by John S. Bergsma Jeffrey L. Morrow https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/who-... This is a powerful and surprising attack on the “Documentary Hypothesis.” The Documentary Hypothesis is the paradigm developed nearly two centuries ago which claims that books of the Torah – the first five books of the Old Testament aka the Tanakh – were stitched together from pre-existing texts written by different unknown authors. When these texts were written is not specified by the Documentary Hypothesis [DH], although it is assumed that the texts were written long after the events of the Exodus. The DH also posits that the actual texts of the Torah – the text we know today – were not assembled until the “Babylonian Captivity” in the sixth century BCE (approx. 597-538 BCE.) The authors of Murmuring Against Moses (MAM) explain that the kernel of the Documentary Hypothesis was in the air long before the nineteenth century. The Roman Neo-Platonic philosopher Porphyry debunked the historicity of the Book of Daniel and took a similar attitude toward the Torah: "The most serious challenge to the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch from antiquity came from the Roman Neo-Platonist philosopher Porphyry. Porphyry’s challenges were the most serious to date and the most direct. Unlike other critics of Judaism and Christianity of the time, Porphyry made careful study of the Bible. He gathered together all of the arguments against the Bible he could find from Gnostic, Marcionite, Manichaean, and other sources. It should come as no surprise that after 361, when the Roman Emperor Julian took control of the Roman Empire, he borrowed his major arguments against Christianity from Porphyry. One of Porphyry’s main points of attack was to detail the portions of Genesis he found to be absurd. Porphyry went further than many other critics of the time in maintaining that the entire Pentateuch was composed over one thousand years after Moses by the scribe Ezra. "(p. 274.) Islamic scholars also took a hand in questioning the accuracy and historicity of the Torah. In their case, the motivation came from the Muslim belief that the texts of the Torah and Gospels had been corrupted. These scholars denied the Mosaic authorship of the Torah. Some Christian scholars followed the Muslim critique. Peter Abelard opined that the true text of the Torah was lost until it was rewritten by Ezra after the Babylonian Captivity. After the Reformation, both Catholic and Protestant scholars noted that there seemed to be anachronistic entries in the Torah. One of these scholars was Cornelius A Lapide: "CORNELIUS À LAPIDE Cornelius à Lapide wrote a number of important biblical commentaries, and his exegetical work became fairly well known across Europe.17 When it came to Pentateuchal composition, he was clearly aware of the basic history of the discussion. À Lapide thought that Joshua may have compiled, or at least organized, the Pentateuch. Joshua seemed to à Lapide to be the most logical candidate. If this is the case, à Lapide suggests that perhaps Joshua utilized and based his work on Moses’s very own notes, which he would have taken during his time leading the Israelites.18 À Lapide was no skeptical scholar and was well-respected by many, and thus his views were understood as significant. In light of both the wide reach of à Lapide’s works as well as the broad respect they earned, Malcolm writes, “Thanks to à Lapide, the idea that there were post-Mosaic materials in the Pentateuch became widely diffused in early seventeenth-century Europe.”19 (p. 315.) The authors particularly credit four seventeenth-century scholars – Isaac La Peyrere, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Richard Simon - for redeploying philological and skeptical traditions about the Pentateuch. The authors argue that the objective of each of these scholars was less about objective scholarship and more about furthering a theological-political goal. In Spinoza’s case, the motivation included a backlash against the Jewish community that had excommunicated him. Hobbes sought to put the power of interpreting scripture into the hands of the monarchy. In the 18th century, Biblical Studies was created along the lines of Classical Studies, which severed the Bible from theology. Classical Studies was in the throes of source criticism and was fixing its attention on the issue of whether prior texts could be discerned in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. The challenge to apply this approach to the Pentateuch was taken up by Wilhelm de Wette, who discerned the DH by an almost religious inspiration. The authors describe de Wette’s importance as follows: "Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette is the next important figure we encounter after Eichhorn.27 Few doctoral dissertations on Scripture have had the effect on the discipline that de Wette’s had, to the point where the impact can still be felt today more than two hundred years later! What is even more remarkable is that the most enduring point was not so much the overall argument of the dissertation, but an aside in a single footnote. De Wette’s 1805 dissertation argued that Deuteronomy was from its own literary source, distinct from the rest of the sources that composed the Pentateuch. His momentous footnote argues that Deuteronomy is likely the book mentioned in 2 Kings 22 that was discovered during King Josiah’s reign. (p. 360-361.) De Wette was both anti-semitic and anti-Catholic: "De Wette also had an aversion to ritual that went hand-in-hand with an anti-Jewish28 and anti-Catholic bias against such distinctively Jewish and Catholic notions about sacrifice. This anti-cult position would continue through scholarship in the nineteenth century and is even prevalent today. (p. 361.) The combination may sound strange, but a great deal of anti-Catholic criticism has relied on configuring Catholicism into a caricature of Judaism: "In Germany—and this becomes even more important when we consider Wellhausen below—anti-Judaism (or, later, anti-Semitism) and anti-Catholicism often went hand-in-hand, and a critique of Judaism in biblical scholarship was often an attack on present-day (or historical) Catholicism. There were political factors at work here beyond simply theological views. In the context of de Wette, Pasto makes some of the most important points linking de Wette’s scholarly views directly with his political context. One of Pasto’s main conclusions is that “de Wette was writing his Biblical past as a metaphor for his German Protestant present, and . . . he thus transformed a unified Israelite-Judean past into dualistic Hebraic and Judaic pasts in order to inscribe and authorize his German Protestant present.”34 The key linking the denigration of Judaism, in light of the ever-present “Jewish Question” in Germany, with Catholicism was the long drive for a unified Germany, which would happen in Wellhausen’s lifetime. These were important political concerns for de Wette. De Wette was staunchly in favor of a smaller unified German state, with a Prussian head, rather than the larger German conglomeration of states that would include Catholic Austria. He feared Catholic influence would undermine the German state. (p. 364.) The Documentary Hypothesis made its full appearance in the writings of Julius Welhausen in the 1870s – which was also the period of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church. The authors explain: "This final form, J, E, D, and P, articulated by Wellhausen, became how the Documentary Hypothesis was taught around the globe. It survives to the present day in classroom lectures and textbook summaries. Other contemporaries of Wellhausen, and later scholars as well, continued to advance other formulations. Today, virtually no source critical scholar follows Wellhausen’s exact formulation. And yet, it is Wellhausen’s exact formulation—minus the complex developmental history he posited—that every student of the Bible has to memorize. (p. 374.) In order to make his J, E, D, and P system work, Wellhausen had to create an occult version of history. Basically, Wellhausen erased Jewish history prior to the sixth century BCE on the supposition that the Pentateuch had been written in Babylon during the sixth century. With this blank slate, Wellhausen was able to create whatever conditions he needed to assume to maintain the consistency of his theory. If the Samaritans had a nearly identical Pentateuch, then that was due to an imagined period where the Samaritans and Jews shared the text. The Prophets took precedence over the Law (Torah); the Torah was rendered a problematic retcon by Ezrah in the view of the Documentary Hypothesis. The authors pay special attention to the Kulturkampf angle. In 1870, Bismarck had put together the mostly Protestant German Reich. Bismarck’s Reich had a substantial Catholic minority and was bordered by Catholic France and Catholic Austria, both of whom had lost power in 1870. The Catholic minority presented the German Reich with the problem of divided loyalties: "In many ways, the anti-Catholicism of the Kulturkampf was the final culmination of nearly a century of anti-Catholic sentiment and measures in Germany. Michael Gross claims in fact that the Kulturkampf’s point was nothing other than “to break the influence of the Roman Catholic Church and the religious, social, and political power of Catholicism.”55 Thus we find the expulsion of religious orders and a host of anti-Catholic legislation erected and enforced. Catholicism became viewed as the enemy, in part, because the Catholic Church represented the paradigmatic transnational authority, and members of religious orders not only circumvented the state-appointed bishops’ authorities but were also often composed of foreigners. Thus, the majority Protestant Prussia viewed the nationalism of Catholics skeptically. As in England after the Protestant Reformation, so too in late-nineteenth-century Germany the loyalty of Catholics was suspect, and Catholics were viewed as potential enemies of the state. This provided the immediate socio-political context for other areas in biblical scholarship beyond Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis. (pp. 375-376). The Catholic allegiance to an international power remained an issue for the Nazis, whose avowed enemies were International Communism, International Jewry, and International Catholicism. The Documentary Hypothesis intuitively mapped Israel onto the German political situation. Wellhausen and his work fit neatly into this political context.57 It is no mere accident that Wellhausen’s developmental theory seems to match a Hegelian evolutionary philosophy—and not merely because of Hegel’s influence. Wellhausen’s theory set Judaism, and Catholicism (its symbolic representation), in the worst light as a corruption of a purer, pristine religion of the heart. He preferred the religion of the Prophets, but his view of the Prophets was inextricably bound to post-Enlightenment Protestant understandings both of Paul and of the Prophets; that is, Paul and Prophets shorn of any resemblance to cultic and priestly vestiges of Judaism and Catholicism. Wellhausen shared another feature with National Socialism, which would appear in fifty years; he prioritized Germany’s mythic pagan past to undercut its real Catholic history: "His history of Israel, not by coincidence, developed along the same lines as Jacob Grimm’s (of the Brothers Grimm, whom Wellhausen long admired) history of Germany, shaped by Enlightened Lutheran sensibilities more than by historical evidence.58 Grimm attempted to get around Germany’s pre-Reformation Catholic past by going back to its pre-Christian past. As George Williamson amply documents, Grimm and others attempted to help formulate a new mythology for Germany wherein pre-Christian pagan roots would be mined for civic and cultural virtues apart from Jewish and even Christian traditions.59 Grimm’s pre-Christian Germany resembles Wellhausen’s patriarchal Hebrew culture, and both appear remarkably the way liberal Lutheran Protestantism looked in Grimm’s and Wellhausen’s post-Enlightenment Germany. The corruption of Israel’s cultic and priestly infrastructure (the Torah) maps onto this history the way legalistic and overly ritualized Catholicism corrupted Europe. Finally, the prophetic return to a family religion and religion of the heart, of morality and faith, is akin to the Protestant Reformation’s liberation of Germany from the vile clutches of Rome. (pp. 376-377.) This history is fascinating in the way that it maps Homeric source criticism to Bible source criticism to anti-Catholicism, which will lead to Volkisch nonsense and “Who wrote Shakespeare” nonsense (both of which are not mentioned in this book but are true.) By my reckoning, the authors have ably demonstrated that the Documentary Hypothesis is damned by a genetic fallacy. All of this is in the third part of the book, in the first two portions the authors raise substantial concerns about the integrity of the Documentary Hypothesis on scholarly grounds. The gist of the authors argument is that the Documentary Hypothesis has been around for two centuries, during which time we have learned a lot that was unknown to Wellhausen. For example, Ancient Near East scholarship has developed such that texts comparable to the Pentateuch are now known to ANE scholars. Those texts show that literary tropes that Wellhausen thought were the clues to the Documentary Hypothesis are found in texts that no one could possibly think were compiled or redacted. Likewise, the Pentateuch has been vetted by ANE scholars who confirm the accuracy of its details. The result is that ANE scholars have criticized the Documentary Hypothesis. Kenneth Kitchen observes: "In another lengthy excerpt, Kitchen summarizes his conclusions based on the massive amount of evidence for the authentic second millennium Egyptian background to the exodus and wilderness traditions, making the figure of Moses, and Moses as author of the Pentateuch, seem more likely than ever before: The particular and special form of covenant evidenced by Exodus-Leviticus and in Deuteronomy (and mirrored in Josh. 24) could not possibly have been reinvented even in the fourteenth/thirteenth centuries by a runaway rabble of brick-making slaves under some uncouth leader no more educated than themselves. The formal agreeing, formatting, and issuing of treaty documents belongs to governments and (in antiquity) to royal courts. . . . So, how come documents such as Exodus-Leviticus and Deuteronomy just happen to embody very closely the framework and order and much of the nature of the contents of such treaties and law collections established by kings and their scribal staffs at court . . . in the late second millennium? . . . To exploit such concepts and formats for his people’s use at that time, the Hebrew’s leader would necessarily had to have been in a position to know of such documents at first hand. . . . In short, to explain what exists in our Hebrew documents we need a Hebrew leader who had had experience of life at the Egyptian court, mainly in the East Delta . . . including knowledge of treaty-type documents and their format, as well as of traditional Semitic legal/social usage more familiar to his own folk. In other words, somebody distressingly like that old “hero” of biblical tradition, Moses, is badly needed at this point, to make any sense of the situation as we have it. (pp. 75-76.) This is positive evidence that the Pentateuch was written when it claims. Likewise, the theory of a redaction in Babylon is problematic. The authors point out that the Pentateuch has a definite slant in favor of northern Israel and against Judah. Further, there are no mentions of Zion or Jerusalem, which would be expected if the Pentateuch was created in Babylon. The Documentary Hypothesis assumes that the authors of the Pentateuch were exiles from Jerusalem who wanted to preserve the glory of Zion, Israel, and Jerusalem. Yet, contrary to this foundational assumption, these redactors never incorporated anything that glorified Jerusalem. Further, there is the problem of the Samaritan Torah, which is essentially identical to that of the Jewish Pentateuch. The Judah-Samaritan split occurred before the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem. How did the Samaritans get an identical copy of the Pentateuch if it was redacted in Babylon? The final compelling point is that the prophets all know the Law. As noted, the Documentary Hypothesis proponents prioritized the Prophets' historicity over that of the Law. But the Prophets regularly quote the law of Moses as it is found in the Pentateuch as if they had actually read the Pentateuch. This contradicts the Documentary Hypothesis’s "Prophets first" timeline. This book is quite accessible for persons interested in the subject but who are not scholars. The authors walk the reader through the arguments without assuming background knowledge. They are not calling for overthrowing the Documentary Hypothesis, but they are pointing out that there are substantial questions. As someone with a more than a casual interest in history, I had been substantially exposed to the Documentary Hypothesis. I had assumed that it was unquestioned. I was surprised to find that there are substantial problems with this theory, and my perspective at this time is that the timeline promoted by the proponents of the Documentary Hypothesis is on a par with the occult phantom time theory of Heribert Illig, until, at least, I get better answers. ...more |
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Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter-Reformation by Dermot Fenlon https://medium.com/@peterseanbradle/r... Cardinal R Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter-Reformation by Dermot Fenlon https://medium.com/@peterseanbradle/r... Cardinal Reginald Pole was born in 1500. He died in London as Cardinal of England on November 18, 1558, the same day that Queen Mary died, thereby ending Catholic hopes for the recovery of England and simultaneously sparing Cardinal Pole from reprisals. In 1546, Pole had been one of three papal legates responsible for managing the early sessions of the Council of Trent. Pole was a leading candidate for election to the papacy in 1550. In short, Pole was a person who seemed to be in the middle of things during the early phase of the Reformation and Catholic Reformation. Dermot Fenlon uses Pole's biography as a way of examining the living issues that split Christendom in the early 16th century. Fenlon looks at the relevant historical events in Pole's life. He also pays acute attention to the relevant theological issues of the Reformation, most particularly the doctrine of justification ("DOJ"). In my opinion, one of the best features of this book was Fenlon's highly accessible description of theological issues. Fenlon's descriptions have the virtue of charity in that I felt that he was putting the Lutheran position in its best light. I have a far better understanding of those positions from this book than I had before. As I noted, Pole was born in 1500 to an aristocratic English family. His family placed him in proximity to the Tudors. Pole was sent to the University of Padua for an education. In the 1520s, while at Padua, Pole found himself among a group of Cathusians in the Orator of Divine Love led by Cardinal Contrarini. These Carthusians and their friends formed the nucleus of the "Spirituali" faction that would advocate for reconciliation with Luther. Many of the Spirituali, including Pole, accepted Luther's Doctrine of Justification as correct. Later, many of them and their allies would defect to Luther and Calvin. Pole and the Spirituali represented the cosmopolitan humanist tradition of Erasmus. The counter to the Spirituali was the Zelanti, who opposed Luther and Lutheran doctrines. Cardinal Carafa became Pole's on-again/off-again antagonist among the Zelanti. At the 1550 Papal Conclave, Pole and Carafa were the leaders in the voting to succeed Paul III, who had called the Council of Trent. Both lost to the candidate who would become Julius III. When Julius III died in 1555, Marcellus II was elected. Marcellus II lasted three weeks, which cleared the way for the election of Carafa as Paul IV. Spoiler - the Zelanti had won. While in Italy, Pole found himself of use to King Henry VIII in the "King's Great Project," i.e., Henry's divorce. However, in 1535, Henry had St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher executed and declared that he was head of the English Church. Writing from Italy, Pole wrote a letter to Henry stating his opposition to Henry's actions. Pole became persona non grata in England. Pole's mother and family were also executed by Henry. The net effect of these tragedies was the Pole's loyalty to the church could never seriously be questioned, notwithstanding his association with people who defected to the Protestants and his acceptance of Luther's doctrine of Justification. Fenlon does a beautiful job of explaining why Luther's DOJ was found to be attractive. The beginning of the 16th century found intellectuals turning away from scholasticism and toward the scriptures. Pole's personal preference in thinking theologically was to eschew scholastic categories and to use scriptural verses as support for his thinking. Luther's DOJ gave primacy to a Pauline interpretation and the insight that salvation was accessed by "Faith Alone." By having faith (alone), God imputed Christ's righteousness - merited in the Passion - to those who placed their faith in Christ. Christ's righteousness was sufficient and so abundant that it did the work of reconciliation by itself, which rendered no role for good works, including sacraments, such as the Eucharist and Penance. It was an axiom of the Reformation that recognizing good works as playing a role in salvation impiously detracted from acknowledging the sufficiency of Christ's saving merits. Luther's DOJ obviated the central role of baptism, penance, and the Eucharist. God called those who became Christian by faith. Having been called by God, Luther's DOJ held that the called were predestined to salvation. "Salvation by faith alone left no room for human cooperation with the merits of Christ." (p. 64.) According to Fenlon, Pole's acceptance of Luther's DOJ placed him in a quandary in that Pole fundamentally accepted the role and authority of the Catholic Church. Luther's DOJ implicitly overturned the Catholic Church's role of authority and the sacramental system. The rest of the Spirituali found themselves in a similar position. The Spirituali advocated for some kind of compromise with Lutheranism in the 1540s. Paul III held off on calling a Council to deal with the issues of reform and doctrine raised by the Reformation to give the Spirituali an opportunity to negotiate a compromise with the Lutherans at Regensburg. The delay was also motivated by the desire of Emperor Charles to win a military victory against the Lutherans so that they could be brought as participants to the proposed council. Fenlon observes that there was a feeling on the Catholic side that the council should not go forward without the input of Lutherans since the hope was that there would be a reunion. A compromise was worked out on the Doctrine of Justification at Regensburg in 1541 by Spirituali representing Catholicism and representatives of Lutheranism. Fenlon says the terms of the compromise reflected the Lutheran position. (p. 55 ("Apart from its concession to an (ineffectual) inherent justice, the orientation of the formula was Protestant.") The compromise acknowledged that man was justified by faith in Christ, not by his own works. Since human works were the expression of the justice inherent within man, it followed that good works and inherent justice did not contribute to salvation. "Man was therefore edged out as a cooperating agent in his own salvation." (p. 55.) Cardinal Contrarini advocated this theory of "twofold justice" but kept the implications sub rosa. The implications were noted by Carafa, who opposed the compromise. Before that happened, however, Regensburg had failed because of other issues. Fenlon notes: "The conference at Regensburg achieved two things: agreement between the delegates concerning the doctrine of justification - followed by a complete impasse and breakdown of communication concerning the sacramental and juridical of the Church. Such limited agreement as the delegates did achieve was discountenanced both at Wittenberg and the Roman Curia: their own internal disagreements explain why." (p. 48.) Another interesting feature that crops up in current discussions has to do with "concupiscence." Concupiscence is the human tendency to be attracted to finite created good, or to sin. Luther identified "the inclination to sin (concupiscence) with sin himself" which had "led him to deny redemptive significance to anything attributable to the human will." (p. 53.) Catholicism does not make that identification. In the interim, the Spirituali were pressing the Lutheran position. Pole's ally, Cardinal Morone prevented the Jesuits from preaching at Modena to prevent an anti-Lutheran program. Pole's personal friend, Flaminio, wrote a pro-Lutheran tract. Various high-ranking prelates in Pole's circle at Viterbo made their way to Wittenberg and Geneva to defect to the Protestants. The sense I got was that Pole and the Spirituali were working as a fifth column at the highest reaches of the Catholic hierarchy. In 1542, Cardinal Contrarini passed away, and the Roman Inquisition was instituted. Many of those who did not defect found themselves in the grips of the Roman Inquisition under Paul IV. Some, such as Morone, suffered no ill effects; others, such as Carnesecchi, were executed for heresy in 1567 under Pius V's renewal of the Inquisition. In 1546, the reform council at Trent went forward. Pole was appointed one of the three papal legates. The first session of Trent dealt with the canon, justification, and original sin. It went from 1546 to 1547. Pole made every effort to stall the council from making a determination on justification. Despite his efforts to stall the council or to have it adopt some version of Lutheranism, the council would not be prevented from announcing a Catholic doctrine of justification. ("CDOJ.") Pole was conflicted and torn by his position and withdrew from active involvement in the council after a few months. Having been told in a few debates about the canon that the deuterocanonical books were not adopted into the Catholic canon until Trent, I found this interesting: "Disagreements arose on the first issue about the manner of establishing the Bible canon. Pole, together with Cervini and a number of others, was anxious that each book of the Bible be examined singly, and its authenticity pronounced upon. In this way, the objections of the Protestants to the book of Maccabees, together with the disputed parts of the New Testament, could be individually countered. The majority however, including Del Monte, was in favour of accepting without discussion the declaration of the Council of Florence, concerning the Scriptural canon. The latter view prevailed, and in a vote taken on 15 February, it was decided to accept the Florentine canon without further reconsideration." (p. 121.) I had never heard of the canon being accepted at the Council of Florence some 100 years before Trent, but there it is. After Trent, faced with the difficulty of reconciling his Lutheran sympathies with his allegiance to the Catholic Church, Pole came around to accepting the Tridentine decree on justification. Pole explained his change of mind by saying that he had reread the Letter of James and now appreciated the scriptural role of works. The final stage of Pole's life was returning to England as a papal legate under Queen Mary in 1553. Pole did not hesitate to persecute in the name of Catholic orthodoxy. His reasons for doing so were the same reasons that Protestants persecuted Catholics where they had power. The idea that the state had to maintain a single religion was undisputed at the time. This book has a lot of merit in explaining the theological issues of the day. I found it quite captivating. I don't think that most people without an interest in the subject would find it interesting, but as you may be able to see, there were a lot of surprising insights that I did not expect from a biography of Reginald Pole. ...more |
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really liked it
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The Jewish Jesus by Peter Schafer Peter Schafer specializes in the study of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity during the early Christi The Jewish Jesus by Peter Schafer Peter Schafer specializes in the study of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity during the early Christian/early Rabbinical Jewish period. Schafer’s general thesis is that the separation of Christianity from Judaism took far longer than commonly thought and that the two sister faiths helped to shape each other during this long period of interaction. Schafer views rabbinical Judaism and Christianity as sister religions: “One final remark: we are talking here about the very early relationship between “Judaism” and “Christianity”—long before they became two distinct communities, let alone religions. Instead of following the old paradigm of the “daughter religion” (Christianity) being born from the “mother religion” (Judaism), I prefer to use the term “sister religion” for Christianity, since, ultimately, I am arguing that once the idea of the Christian Messiah was put forth—with all its ramifications—Judaism could not remain the same.” Schafer’s principal source of information involves a reading of the rabbinical Mishnah and Talmud. In particular, Shafer examines the rabbinical responses to arguments made by unspecified heretics (minim), which echo Christian arguments or positions. An example of this interconnectedness involves Paul justification of the custom of women covering their heads on the grounds that a hierarchy exists, which in descending order ranks Christ/God—man—woman. In this hierarchy man is the “image” and “glory” of God, whereas woman is the “glory” of man.(1 Cor 11:2-16.) This concept seems to come from Genesis 1:27: “And God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him.” (This text is used by the Latter Day Saints to justify their doctrine that God has a corporeal body.) This text was used by Rabbi Simlai to refute the “heresy of two powers” – which maintained that there were two divine powers in heaven, also called “binitarianism.” R. Simlai rebutted a minim argument that used the creation of man in “our image” by teaching: “In the past Adam was created from dust, and Eve was created from Adam, but henceforth: ‘in our image, after our likeness’ (Gen. 1:26). Neither man without woman nor woman without man, and neither of them without the Shekhinah.” Some have argued that the rabbinic midrash is dependent on Paul, but Schafer believes that the more likely explanation is that Paul and Simlair are dependent on a common a common Jewish source. Other minim challenges involve the different names given to God in the Torah. A key point is that the minim’s challenge always involve three names, which suggests that the minim are Christian. Schafer suggests that this identification may not be entirely apposite in that Christian interest in the Holy Spirit was not a strong element of Christian thinking prior to the fourth century. He also suggests that changes in the imperial structure wrought by Diocletian’s collegial imperial system may have fostered thinking in terms of a limited divine rulership. Schafer maintains that Jewish rabbis were aware of Christological debates. Christian concepts originated in Judaism: “It was Christology that most occupied the Fathers of the Church during the first centuries C.E. (up until the mid-fourth century)—and thus worried their rabbinic colleagues. R. Simlai and the majority of the rabbis not only knew these debates but referred to and grappled with them.82 And this is hardly surprising, for reflections about the form and essence of its God were certainly not alien to prerabbinic and rabbinic Judaism. A classical example is the Wisdom theology as developed in the biblical book of Proverbs and in the noncanonical books Jesus Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) and Wisdom of Solomon. In Proverbs (third century B.C.E.?) we are told of Wisdom (hokhmah) that she was created before the creation of the world and was with God as his “confidante” or his “master worker” when “he assigned to the sea its limit” and “marked out the foundations of the earth.” Philo of Alexandria developed a Logos and Wisdom theology: “It would therefore not seem a difficult task to develop from such initial stages the idea of a second divine power next to and with God—as indeed Philo did with his comprehensive Wisdom and Logos theology. Judaism did not choose to go this route—at any rate not the variety of Judaism that would gain acceptance in the centuries to come. Jesus Sirach—written about 190 B.C.E. in Hebrew, translated ca. 132 B.C.E. into Greek, but never accepted as part of the official canon of the Hebrew Bible (although highly regarded by the rabbis)—applies Wisdom of Solomon’s wisdom to the Torah…” Christianity maintained the character of wisdom and logos, particularly in John 1. Judaism identified wisdom with the written Torah, but Judaism could have continued on with the ideas of Wisdom and Logos: “Judaism, too, could have carried on with the ideas of Wisdom and Logos—it is precisely for this reason that the rabbis perceived the developments within Christianity as simultaneously tempting and threatening—it decided, however, under the impact of Christian theology (or rather, under the impact of what would ever more forcefully become the trademark of Christianity), against this option. It would take until the Middle Ages—until the emergence of the Kabbalah as the climax of Jewish mysticism toward the end of the twelfth century—for Wisdom as a person to find her way back into Judaism.” The rabbinical Jews also formed the idea of a young and an old God. This developed from the presentation of God as a war hero at times (Ex. 13:18, 15:3) and as an old man (Exodus 24:10) at other times. (God as an old man needs a footstool.) The latter imagery projected concepts of mercy; the former of strength. This reaches a height in Daniel 7:9 in the “Ancient of Days” motif. These presentations raised the “two powers” heresy, which was battled by rabbinical midrashes affirming the unity of God. (Since the midrash contemplates complementary powers, Schafer rules out a gnostic system.) Because Daniel 7:9 speaks of setting thrones – plural – in heaven, this also suggests the “two powers” heresy. This naturally led to speculation about who was to sit in the other throne. Rabbinical suggestions indicated that the second throne would be occupied by the Messiah-King David. This suggestion was slapped down by other rabbis who saw the Christian danger in it. The Daniel trope led to non-canonical scriptures identifying the messiah-king as the son of God, which led to the canonical gospels identifying Jesus as an heir to David and the son of Man who took his seat on the throne reserved for Him at God’s right hand. Schafer explains: “It is highly probable that R. Aqiva in the Bavli knows of this Jewish chain of tradition and refers to it (yet of course without its Christian implications). And it is little wonder that R. Yose and, even more so, R. Eleazar b. Azariah, both aware of the Christian ramifications, try to immediately defuse any such implications in R. Aqiva’s exegesis, seeing as how they threaten to evoke (in their view) that most dangerous and detested of all heresies—Christianity—and in its most provocative form. Both Jews and Christians shared a belief in the Davidic Messiah, and when Aqiva has his Messiah take his seat next to God in heaven, all rabbinic fences erected against this particular heresy are pulled down—with incalculable consequences for rabbinic Judaism. So I wish to argue that in our Bavli sugya we are indeed confronted with rabbinic polemics against Christianity, that is, Christianity in its very essence, with the Messiah Jesus competing with the Jewish Messiah.” Rabbinical Judaism went in a different direction. One passage in Exodus created a conundrum: “A certain heretic (mina) said to Rav Idith: “It is written: ‘And to Moses he [God] said: Come up to the Lord (YHWH)’ (Ex. 24:1). But surely it should have said: ‘Come up to me!’” Why is God inviting Moses to come up the mountain to see God as if there are two different "gods"? One explanation was that the being giving the invitation was Metatron: “He [Rav Idith] said to him [the heretic]: “This was Metatron, whose name is like the name of his master, as it is written: ‘for my name is in him’ (Ex. 23:21).” “But if so,” [the heretic retorted,] “we should worship him!” Metatron’s identity shifts. At some times, he is an angel. He is identified with the angel who accompanied the Jews on their journey through the desert and was given the incredible power of forgiving sins in Exodus 23:20: “(23:20) I am going to send an angel (mal’akh) in front of you, to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared. (21) Be attentive to him and listen to his voice; do not rebel against him (al-tamer bo), for he will not pardon your transgression; for my name is in him (ki shemi be-qirbo).” This led to heretical speculation that this was Metatron and that Metatron was interchangeable with God. In the Talmud, Metatron assumes the position of the highest angel because his name is like the name of God. Further speculation equated Metatron with Enoch who “walked with God,” i.e., was taken up to heaven and became an angel. Metatron was also identified with Michael, who functioned as the celestial high priest in Heaven. This rabbinic speculation was rife with risks: “On this level, therefore, our passage is still quite “innocent.” It is interested in Metatron’s function in heaven, clearly as an angel, and not in his relationship with God. But one can see how it might give rise to other more dangerous speculations. Once Michael is identified with Metatron and the Metatron traditions sneak in, a Pandora’s box is opened: one might then consider that the plural of “thrones” in Daniel 7:9f. might refer not just to God’s throne but rather to one throne for the “Ancient of Days” and another for David/the Son of Man or Metatron;72 or consider the dangerous implications resulting from the insight that Metatron’s name is like the name of his master.” Another part of the Talmud had God spending time teaching Torah, which was also assigned to Metatron: “The two Babylonian rabbis Aha (bar Ya‘aqov) and Nahman bar Yitzhaq (fourth-generation amoraim, first half of the fourth century C.E.) search for a biblical proof that God stopped laughing after the destruction of the Temple. Having rejected the verses Isaiah 22:12 and Psalms 137:5f., they settle on Isaiah 42:14—obviously undisturbed by the fact that God’s crying is compared to that of a woman in labor. But since the Talmud does not want God to spend all day and night crying (the sugya continues with the question of what God does at night), it reserves the fourth quarter of the day for something more productive: the Torah instruction of schoolchildren (presumably the little children in heaven who have died a premature death). This leads to the further problem (typical of the Bavli’s reasoning) of who instructed the poor children before God took over, that is, before the destruction of the Temple. Answer: You may wish to assign this task to Metatron—or you may conclude that God himself instructed the schoolchildren before the destruction of the Temple as well as after. Here Metatron enters the discussion almost casually. The answer clearly presupposes his presence as a very high angel in heaven, if not as a second divine power. Hence, the seemingly dispassionate or casual answer (whatever you prefer: Metatron or God) reveals that the Bavli editor doesn’t really care and in fact makes Metatron and God interchangeable—as we know by now quite a dangerous attitude.” Thus, Metatron’s image created the risk of the emergence of a potential second divinity in heaven. Schafer notes: “But even the critical approach can hardly conceal the fact that certain (Jewish) circles in Babylonia must have fancied the idea of a second divine power next to God. More precisely, it appears that with the figure of Metatron certain Jews in Babylonia in particular found a vehicle for entertaining—in a remarkably pronounced and undisguised way—ideas that seem to have been unparalleled in other (Palestinian) sources.142 Why were these ideas perceived as so dangerous that they needed to be attacked in the Bavli and even toned down in 3 Enoch? In what follows I will attempt to situate these ideas in the context of the intricate tangle of the two sister religions “Judaism” and “Christianity,” emerging in the first centuries C.E., interacting with and responding to each other, and gradually becoming ever more differentiated in the course of time. There can be little doubt that pre-Christian Judaism developed ideas that helped pave the way to a “binitarian” theology—cases in point are speculations about Logos and Wisdom, certain angelic figures, Adam as the original makro-anthropos, and other exalted human figures143—of which the early New Testament speculations about the Logos Jesus are but one particularly prominent example. The Metatron traditions, as part of the larger Messiah–Son of Man complex, clearly belong to this store of potentially powerful and dangerous ideas, as several scholars have observed.” Schafer denies that the Metatron concept played a role in the development of Trinitarianism. Rather, the thinks that the Metatron concept was an answer to the “the New Testament’s message of Jesus Christ.” The role of response and counter-response is seen in the issue of whether the laws of Moses were given directly by God or were mediated by angels. The Christian position is explicitly the latter, but the Bible suggests the former. However, there was substantial development in the Second Temple period that proposed greater angelic mediation. The Christian claims caused rabbinic backtracking. Schafer notes: " Since Paul and the author of the Letter to the Hebrews are definitely arguing with Jews, we can take it for granted that the “law ordained or declared through angels” reflects a common Jewish standpoint. Hence, when the rabbis of rabbinic Judaism contest this standpoint and claim that God neither needed nor used the angels to carry out his revelation on Mount Sinai and the subsequent salvation history, they are obviously arguing against a (Jewish) view introduced during the Second Temple period and taken up in the New Testament.79 One could even go a step further and argue that they contested this standpoint and insisted on God’s direct involvement because the New Testament used it to propagate the inferiority of the Law of Moses and its abolition by Jesus Christ. Confronted with such a claim, the rabbis could not but insist that the law was given by God himself and that God remains the master of history, including the ultimate salvation of his people—or to put it another way, that the old covenant was still valid and there was no need for a new one.” Schafer also notes a Talmudic story about the death of a baby messiah and an indifferent mother of the messiah. Schafer sees this as a complete inversion of Christian’s nativity story: “On the contrary, in my view the Yerushalmi story is a complete and ironical inversion of the New Testament—the lowing cow versus the star; the Arab versus the angel of the Lord and/or the magi; the Jewish peddler versus the magi; diapers versus gold, frankincense, and myrrh; and the murderous mother versus the murderous king. Quite an impressive list, which, summarized in this way, sounds almost comical, like a parody of the New Testament infant story. And this, I propose, is precisely what our story wishes to do. It is a counternarrative, a parodistic inversion of the New Testament, of the Christian claim that this child Jesus, born in Bethlehem, the city of David, was indeed the Messiah. As such, it is of great theological significance. For it undermines the essence of the Christian message by arguing that no, this child Jesus is not the Messiah, at least not the Messiah who you Christians say lived among us on earth in order teach the new doctrine of the new covenant, and to be crucified and ultimately resurrected and lifted up to heaven. This Jesus cannot be the Messiah for the very simple reason that soon after his birth he was snatched away by whirlwinds and disappeared.” This is a hard book to evaluate. I am not sure that Schafer has made the sale by showing the back and forth of Jewish and Christian thinking. There were certainly examples of polemics and counterpolemics, but a lot of the examples seemed deep in the weeds. The really intriguing aspect of the book to me was the Jewish Talmudic information. Raised on the notion that the Jewish source is the Tanakh, we do not appreciate the intellectual development that went on internally in Jewish thinking. ...more |
Notes are private!
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it was amazing
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The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis. Give me a clap at Medium (Now with jokes) - https://medium.com/@peterseanbradle/b... I really w The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis. Give me a clap at Medium (Now with jokes) - https://medium.com/@peterseanbradle/b... I really want to like The Waste Land. I love some of its parts. I love "April is the cruelest month" and "Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you." But I've been handicapped by not being able to understand the damned thing. Part of the problem is that the search for meaning in this poem is a search for fool's gold. T.S. Eliot never intended the poem to be an integrated, unitary whole. As we learn from Matthew Hollis in The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, Eliot wrote the five parts of The Waste Land - I. The Burial of the Dead, II. A Game of Chess, III. The Fire Sermon, IV. Death by Water, V. What the Thunder Said - as independent units, often taking sections from prior unpublished poems to put into The Waste Land. Sometimes, Eliot would strip a section of vast quantities of text. Another part of the problem is that the poem is deliberately cacophonous. The Burial of the Dead section shifts from voice to voice, creating a kaleidoscopic effect. I think this is the intent as Eliot is communicating that modernity is a jumble of sensory inputs that confuses the modern mind (as of 1920, at least.) In 1920, modernity was funneling the news of the world to the average citizen by movies, radio, and newspapers. Moderns had just gone through a Great War, which was a world war in scope. That war had killed millions. It was followed up by a Great Pandemic that killed millions more on the home front. In 1920, most people probably thought there was too much information to keep up with. The term "Future Shock" would not be coined until the 1960s by Alvin Tofler, but many people were experiencing Future Shock in the 1920s. (In contrast, in the 2020s, we experience Future Shock but don't notice it or talk about it anymore.) With that long wind-up, I am here to tell you Hollis's book will not solve the interpretative conundrum of The Waste Land. There are some clues at a pretty high level, at the level of unit structure, for example. For the most part, Hollis does not touch the meaning of individual lines. There is some discussion of our friend Phlebas and whether his Phoenician background is a stand-in for a Semitic antecedent (and therefore alludes to anti-semitism.) We get no insight into summer over why "Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee" or who "Marie" is. For me, what this book mostly provided was an introduction to the English literary world in the early 20th century. Hollis's is an encyclopedia. His book is well-written and minutely researched. The main figure of the text is T.S. Eliot, which is not a surprise, but Eliot sometimes seems to get edged out in favor of Ezra Pound. At times, it seems like Hollis's real mission is to re-acquaint the literary world with Pound's importance to the world of literature and poetry. In the 1910s, Pound was an indispensable man in the English literary world. Pound acted as editor to influential journals. He also acted as a coach and mentor to those with literary talent. Pound discovered Eliot and rued the fact that Eliot was squandering his time as a bank teller at Lloyd's of London. In the 1920s, Pound befriended and found ways to subsidize James Joyce as he wrote Ulysses. During the same time, Pound had one of the two priceless manuscripts of The Waste Land, which he edited with a heavy hand. Pound was responsible for two of the incomprehensible Great Works of the Twentieth Century. Pound also befriended a young, unpublished Ernest Hemingway: "When Wyndham Lewis visited from London for the first time, the two men were producing such a noise from within the studio that no one answered the bell; he pushed open the door and found them in mid boxing bout. 'A splendidly built young man, stripped to the waist, and with a torso of dazzling white, was standing not far from me,' Lewis recalled. 'He was tall, handsome, and serene, and was repelling with his boxing gloves a hectic assault of Ezra's. After a final swing at the dazzling solar plexus Pound fell back upon his settee.'33 The young man was Ernest Hemingway, and with Pound he would get on like a house on fire: he had 'a terrific wallop', Hemingway would acknowledge, 'and when he gets too tough I dump him on the floor'.34 Hollis, Matthew. The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (p. 318). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. Pound's loyalty to his friends was something that would not be forgotten by some - but not all - of them despite Pound's disgrace after World War II: "For his friends, said Hemingway and Eliot alike, Pound was both advocate and defence. He found publishers for their writing, review coverage for their books, journals to carry their work; he found audiences for their music and buyers for their art. When they were hungry he fed them, when they were threadbare he clothed them. He witnessed their wills and he loaned his own money, and encouraged in each of them a fortitude for life. 'And in the end,' said Hemingway, 'a few of them refrain from knifing him at the first opportunity.' Hollis, Matthew. The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (p. 319). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. I am always fascinated by the way in which historical figures overlap and act like real human beings. For example, Hollis implies that philosopher Bertrand Russell seduced Eliot's wife, Vivian: "Russell had been a cuckoo in the nest of the Eliots' short marriage. He had dazzled and spoiled and harried Vivien, and had taken something very precious in the form of the couple's fidelity to each other. The cottage at Marlow would cast a shadow over the marriage until Eliot was able to release himself from the rent entirely in the summer of 1920. By then, the events had triggered in Eliot a despair that was to reach a crisis while he was in the company of Ezra Pound in France in the summer of 1919. Hollis, Matthew. The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (pp. 49–50). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. Eliot had been Russell's student at Harvard. "Eliot had been an 'extraordinarily silent' postgraduate student in Russell's seminars at Harvard when they met in the spring of 1914, but he made a remark on Heraclitus so good that Russell wished that he would make another.148 On meeting him again in London that autumn, Russell had taken a growing interest in Eliot ('exquisite and listless'), and, in turn, Vivien ('light, a little vulgar, adventurous, full of life'), so much so that by the autumn of 1915, to ease their finances, he had taken the couple in to his flat in Bury Street, London's Bloomsbury. Hollis, Matthew. The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (p. 45). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. This is the kind of detail that rounds out historical knowledge. For example, Hollis mentions Russell's arrest for advocating pacifism, which left Eliot, who was maybe 29 at the time, looking for someone to replace Russell as a tenant in a country cottage. Vivien Eliot does not come off in the best light. Eliot abandoned her in 1932 but remained married to her until her death in an asylum in 1946. Eliot explained: "'To her, the marriage brought no happiness,' wrote Eliot. 'To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.'41 Hollis, Matthew. The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (pp. 9–10). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. That has to be some consolation. This book is a firehose of information. However, I never felt like I got into Eliot's self-understanding. We certainly get information on his personal life, but the overall impression of Eliot is a sense of diffidence. For example, I would have been interested in knowing what Eliot's thoughts were on becoming Anglican. How did that conversion affect him? He seems to have become more conservative and traditionalist as he got older, so it seems that the conversion had meaning to him. But on the whole, I never got any sense of an answer to these questions. Admittedly, Hollis's focus is on The Waste Land, which means that the time period Hollis is interested in is the same period during which The Waste Land was being formed, approximately 1915–1923. This is going to prevent a lot of reflection on a lot of issues. Nonetheless, Hollis makes space for topics that happen after 1923, such as Ezra Pound's disgrace and rehabilitation. I like the book, but would I recommend it? And to whom? I liked the book because I like history, and I got a sense of a slice of history I know next to nothing about, i.e., literary history. That said, large chunks of text meant nothing to me but probably would to someone with more knowledge about "Fusionism" and various poets and writers. So, I would not recommend this book to someone with a casual interest in the subject. On the other hand, if literature is your bag, then this is a good book for you. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 10, 2023
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Jan 22, 2023
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Jan 10, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 1643133126
| 9781643133126
| 1643133128
| 4.34
| 4,288
| May 2021
| May 04, 2021
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it was amazing
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The Anglo-Saxons by Marc Morris https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re... One of my interests is Anglo-Saxon England. It's not an obsessive mania, but mo The Anglo-Saxons by Marc Morris https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re... One of my interests is Anglo-Saxon England. It's not an obsessive mania, but more of a romance, I guess. Anglo-Saxon England seems so familiar and so strange. The Anglo-Saxons inhabited land that students of history are very familiar with and they spoke "English," but their English is a completely different language and the cities and towns we know were just having their foundations laid down. I listened to this as an audiobook. It was a very enjoyable experience. Not unlike the worldbuilding of a fantasy novel. The Anglo-Saxons arrived in the sixth century shortly after the end of the Roman era. They drive the Christian Celtic population west. They set up shop and divide into various powerful kingdoms - Kent, Mercia, Wessex, Northumbria, West Anglia etc. These kingdoms swapped power back and forth until the Danes arrived and did to them what they had done to the Britons. This book does a good job of telling the story. The special "value added" in this book is that I think I got a better handle on the background that led to the replacement of Harald by William the Conqueror in 1066. The childless Edward the Confessor had spent his early life in exile in Normandy. He had come under the thumb of the Godwinson family. He probably had promised his throne to the Duke of Normandy because "why not?" He had no reason to love anyone in England. Author Marc Morris does a good job of explaining the people and circumstances of the era. The characters come to life. I will say that I was surprised to learn how much slavery was a part of the Anglo Saxon culture, but there it was. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Nov 19, 2022
not set
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Nov 29, 2022
not set
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Nov 29, 2022
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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| 4.49
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it was ok
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Oct 2017
not set
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Sep 18, 2024
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| 3.77
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it was amazing
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Aug 05, 2024
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Jul 30, 2024
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| 4.20
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it was ok
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Feb 25, 2024
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Feb 25, 2024
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| 3.90
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liked it
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Feb 13, 2024
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Feb 13, 2024
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| 5.00
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it was amazing
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Feb 13, 2024
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Feb 11, 2024
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| 4.80
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it was amazing
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Mar 27, 2024
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Jan 26, 2024
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| 4.21
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it was amazing
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Nov 19, 2023
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Nov 10, 2023
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| 4.00
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really liked it
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Oct 15, 2023
not set
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Oct 15, 2023
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| 4.44
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it was amazing
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Oct 14, 2023
not set
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Oct 14, 2023
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| 3.67
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liked it
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Jan 10, 2024
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Oct 12, 2023
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| 3.88
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it was amazing
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Oct 07, 2023
not set
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Oct 07, 2023
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| 4.50
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it was amazing
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Oct 2023
not set
not set
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Oct 01, 2023
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| 4.07
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it was amazing
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Oct 11, 2023
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Sep 22, 2023
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| 3.87
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liked it
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Aug 26, 2023
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Aug 26, 2023
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| 4.27
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really liked it
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Jun 27, 2023
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Jun 18, 2023
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| 4.43
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it was amazing
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Mar 14, 2023
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Mar 07, 2023
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| 4.25
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it was amazing
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Feb 19, 2023
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Feb 19, 2023
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| 3.96
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really liked it
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Feb 05, 2023
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Jan 29, 2023
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| 3.92
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it was amazing
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Jan 22, 2023
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Jan 10, 2023
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| 4.34
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it was amazing
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Nov 29, 2022
not set
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Nov 29, 2022
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