The Little Red Blog

Wednesday with Pascal: The Roots of Our Problem

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has just watched the Netflix documentary series, ‘Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror’. That experience, along with his recent ruminations on Marcion, may explain his interest in Marilyn McCord Adams’ book ‘Christ and Horrors,’ an attempt at theodicy that is simultaneously, and refreshingly, an indictment of God.}

What sort of world do we live in, and who is responsible for its (and our) condition? As Marilyn McCord Adams notes, the traditional Christian answers are, “The human condition generally and Divine-human relations in particular are non-optimal,” and “We brought this condition on ourselves, and we have only ourselves to blame.” Humans are incorrigible sinners, and “being a sinner is the worst scourge with which a human being can be tormented.” Our failures and imperfections, however venial, gnaw at us if we allow ourselves even a moment’s introspection, which is why, as Blaise Pascal observed, we find ourselves unable to sit quietly alone in a room for any length of time—we must have distraction from our guilty and shame-ridden selves.

But our unease with our culpability is merely the tip of an existential iceberg, because, as Adams says, “Human history is riddled with horrendous evil,” by which she means the stuff of nightmares: “Paradigm horrors include the rape of a woman and the axing off of her arms, psycho-physical torture whose ultimate goal is the disintegration of personality, schizophrenia, severe clinical depression, cannibalizing one’s own offspring, child abuse, parental incest, participation in Nazi death camps, etc. Participation in horrors,” she writes, “furnishes reason to doubt whether the participant’s life can be worth living. Worse, virtually every human being is complicit in horrors merely by living in his/her nation or society, because of economic or social systems we allow to persist and from which most of us benefit.”

In today’s vernacular, we tend to use the word ‘trauma’ for what Adams calls ‘horror’. That being the case, who decides what counts as ‘trauma’ or as ‘traumatic’? Is trauma in the eye of the victim? Adams concedes that “what counts as horrific may to some extent vary from society to society,” but she insists that “the victim’s estimates of how bad the suffering is are among the most significant data to be considered.” After all, in the wake of trauma the existential “life project” is shut down, aborted, and/or distorted beyond the individual’s power to reclaim or to renew it; “what makes horrors so pernicious is their life-ruining potential, their power to degrade the individual by destroying the possibility of positive personal meaning.”

Against life’s horrors, regardless of their source, we find ourselves helpless. “Our ability to cause horrors unavoidably exceeds our powers of conception,” laments Adams. “In a very real sense, perpetrators of horror ‘know not what they do’. Meanwhile, our feeble attempts at justice are actually futile exercises in revenge: “Retributive justice—imposing horror for horror upon human beings—deepens the tragedy by multiplying the ruin.” An ordained Christian minister, Adams does not shrink from the logical conclusion: “God has created us radically vulnerable to horrors by creating us as embodied persons, personal animals, enfleshed spirits in a material world of real or apparent scarcity. Sin,” she writes, “is a symptom and a consequence” of our having been placed (or “thrown,” as the ancient Gnostics termed it) into such a world. Adams continues, “The real roots of our problem are systemic and metaphysical.”

Her elaboration of that point is worth quoting at length:

There is a metaphysical mismatch within human nature: tying psyche to biology and personality to a developmental life cycle exposes human personhood to dangers to which angels (incorruptible pure spirits) would be immune. The fact that human psyche begins in groping immaturity and dependence, stumble-bumbles by trial and error towards higher functioning, only to peak and slide towards diminishment—makes our meaning-making capacities easy to twist, even ready to break, when inept caretakers and hostile surroundings force us to cope with problems off the syllabus and out of pedagogical order. Likewise, biology, by building both an instinct for life and the seeds of death into animal nature, makes human persons naturally biodegradable. Biochemistry, too, can skew our mental states and cause mind-degenerating and personality-distorting diseases which make a mockery of Aristotelian ideas of building character and dying in a virtuous old age.  

There is also a metaphysical mismatch between human nature and the material world as we have it, one in which the necessities of life and of flourishing seem and often are difficult to access and in short supply. If human psyche and biology, personality and animality, mind and body, are odd couples that interfere with one another, scarcity triggers fear and animal aggression and drives us into Darwinian struggles for existence!

“It is God,” Adams admits, “who decided to include such mismatches in the world as we know it. We may ask: whatever for?”

To her credit, and unlike many Christian apologists, Marilyn McCord Adams does not minimize the difficulties faced by finite, fallible, vulnerable creatures struggling to survive in a world they (we) did not make. In Christ and Horrors, she valiantly argues that God, recognizing our plight—and his responsibility for it—has provided the solution. Her argument may not persuade everyone (it does not persuade me), but her willingness to acknowledge “the real roots of our problem” is admirable.

Just Another Day in Paradise

Saturday Lecture: Do You Know the Way to Modernity?

{I remain fascinated by the transition from pre-modern Christendom to Modernity, facilitated as it was by the Age of Discovery and by the Protestant Reformation. In what follows, historian Steven Ozment discusses the views of Joseph Lortz, a 20^th-century German scholar who vehemently disapproved of the Reformation and its modern consequences. Mr. Ozment does not here mention that Joseph Lortz was, from 1933 until at least 1937, a member of Germany’s Nazi Party who sought, allegedly, an unlikely alliance between Catholicism and Nazism. That biographical fact may not be essential in this context, but it seems worth noting.}

Steven Ozment (from The Reformation in Medieval Perspective):

Of various evaluations of the late Middle Ages written with an eye to the Reformation, none has been more impressive in scope, persistent in influence, and challenging in assessment than Joseph Lortz’s two-volume study, ‘The Reformation in Germany’. Lortz’s yardstick for assessing the late Middle Ages was the havoc he felt was wreaked on western civilization by the Reformation, a revolt which, in his opinion, supplanted basic medieval attitudes. Lortz wrote:

“Seen as a religious and ecclesiastical event, the Reformation was the denial of the visible Church, rooted and grounded in the objective teaching authority and in the sacramental priesthood; it was the acceptance of a religion of conscience erected upon the judgment of the individual with regard to the Biblical word. That is to say: along these two lines of development, the Reformation replaced the basic medieval attitudes of objectivism, traditionalism, and clericalism by those of subjectivism, spiritualism, and laicism.”

Lortz was especially sensitive to those ideas, events, movements, alliances, and personages which promoted, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, the conditions requisite for the overthrow of medieval commitments. For the Reformation to occur, a question had to be posed: was the papal Church the true, authoritative representative of Christendom? Lortz saw this doubt about the objective validity of the institutional Church being raised throughout the late Middle Ages by such diverse men and movements as Philip the Fair, the Spiritual Franciscans, nominalism, William of Occam, Marsilius of Padua, the Waldensians and Cathari, the conciliarists, John Wyclif, John Huss and the widespread Hussite revolt in fifteenth-century Bohemia.

Lortz considered the spirit of humanism to be the ‘conditio sine qua non' of the Reformation. This spirit was displayed, for Lortz, in a paradigmatic way by Pico della Mirandola, who argued in his ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’ that every man has been created formless, as it were, so that he may choose to be exactly what he wishes. Man is the creature who legislates by free volition what he will be. His nature is not fixed. Among German humanists and theologians this was expressed in terms of dedication to and expectation of the truly novel. In addition, humanists launched very effective, albeit often exaggerated, satires against popes, scholastics, monks, and clerics. In these attacks, the traditional and institutional were ridiculed, according to Lortz, by a predominantly ‘worldly, naturalistic, anthropocentric’ concept of freedom. Renaissance humanism became the first classical period of criticism in Europe—a preview of greater doubts to come.

Lortz noted that, on the eve of the Reformation, humanists were already harvesting the fruit of their work. They exposed the ‘Donation of Constantine’ as a forgery and demonstrated the lack of historical justification for other precedents of ecclesiastical authority. They pointed out discrepancies between the official Latin Bible and the original text. Lortz viewed the bold realism of Machiavelli as a typical product of the critical humanist spirit which held nothing immune from the most uncompromising analysis. He believed that humanists achieved by satire what was accomplished by William of Occam with the philosophical separation of faith and knowledge. Humanism and nominalism introduced profound doubt and skepticism into late medieval society. Lortz also found religious life on the eve of the Reformation no less hostile to the traditional medieval attitude. The teachings of John Huss were widespread and, in Lortz’s judgment, prepared the way for Luther’s ideas. The fires of religious fervor were fanned, Lortz acknowledged, by legitimate social discontent, but they were also fed by the ideal of poverty in the Bible, now increasingly available in the vernacular, and by apocalypticism (e.g., the work of Joachim of Fiore).

With these pieces in place, Lortz saw the late Middle Ages culminating in a relativization of traditional, objective, doctrinal Christianity, aided and abetted by nominalism, humanism, and mysticism. Erasmus was the most eloquent representative of this development—Erasmus who taught that peace was more important than doctrinal truth and who pleaded for a relativistic ‘via media’ which could affirm without deciding. Lortz concluded, in agreement with Etienne Gilson, that ‘theological unclarity’ within the late medieval Church made the Reformation possible; it was ‘vagueness’ about religious truth and authority that permitted Erasmus to go without rebuke and allowed Luther to establish a firm beachhead before the peril he represented was recognized. Vagueness and lack of clarity thus prepared the soil during the late Middle Ages so that the Reformation was able to take root and thrive.

---------------------------------------------------

Joseph Lortz - Wikipedia

Erasmus - Wikipedia

The Halcyon Days of Yore (Yore Welcome)

Wednesday with Pascal: My Favorite Marcion

{I made it very clear to Pascal the existential Russian blue cat that his proposed title for this post was unacceptable. Did he listen? No, he did not. I have allowed it to stand, but with my disapproval noted.}

“The problematics raised by heretics played a large and positive role in the discerning of the fullness of truth for the churchly Christianity itself.” (N. Berdyaev)

Christian theology, as is well known, started with Paul, in the decades immediately following Jesus’ death. It took nearly a hundred years more, however, before Christianity had its next important theologian, who also happened to be its first notable heretic. Marcion of Sinope, preaching to Christians in Rome, claimed that the Christian God (Jesus’ Abba) was not the same as Israel’s God, the YHWH of the Hebrew testament. Marcion’s reading of Jewish scriptures convinced him that YHWH was a petty tribal god afflicted with delusions of grandeur, which delusions led him to claim to be the only God in existence. ¹ According to Marcion, Jesus had been sent not by YHWH but by a hitherto unknown God, whose intent was not to save mankind from Satan, sin, and death, but to save it from YHWH, the true source of those evils. To call those views “unorthodox” is understating the case. Even so, it is hard to deny that “Elements of Marcionism can be discerned in the Fourth Gospel, in the epistles of Paul and in his hostility to the "world", in his teaching about redemption and about the surmounting of the Law, i.e. in the very essence of Christianity.”

However plausible his exegetics may have been, Marcion’s conclusions were not widely accepted. Naturally, having made those views public, Marcion was expelled from the good graces of the Roman church, leading him to form his own “Marcionite” sect. His heresies, however, by forcing apologists to think through Christian claims about God, Jesus, and salvation, were invaluable in the development of Christian theology; at the same time, Marcion’s creation of a corpus of “acceptable” Christian writings (ten letters attributed to Paul and an edited version of the Gospel of Luke) led in time to the Church’s canonical New Testament. ²

Two thousand years later, Marcion is all but forgotten, but anyone interested in post-Pauline Christian thought ignores him at their peril. The study of Marcion’s beliefs has been hindered by the fact that none of his writings have survived; we have only excerpts cited, for polemical purposes, by his theological opponents. We cannot know how accurate the excerpts are, or whether they were unfairly taken out of context, much less what was omitted that might have been germane to Marcion’s argument.

The 20th-century Russian theologian/philosopher Nicolai Berdyaev linked Marcion’s heretical thoughts to a perennially vexing issue: “Marcionism,” he wrote, “signifies a [radical solution] to the problem of theodicy.” Theodicy is the attempt to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with the providence of a God said to be infinitely good, loving, and compassionate. Berdyaev acknowledged that the problem of evil “never had a rational theological resolution, one that is acceptable for the moral consciousness of man.” He also noted that “Modern man, when he approaches religion, becomes struck and shaken by the problem of evil and suffering.” The greatest of Russian writers, Dostoevsky, repeatedly grappled with the issue: “Ivan Karamazov does not accept ‘God's world’ because of the tears of a little child. He spurns both the Creator and the creation, in which there is pestilence and plague.” Theodicy would also be the underlying theme of Albert Camus’ novel The Plague.

Like the Gnostics of his time, “Marcion rose up against the God of the Bible, the God of the Old Testament, against the Creator and Fashioner of the world, responsible for having created evil and suffering, and against this he set in opposition Christ, the revelation of another and unknowable God, foreign to the world and not responsible for having created the world.” Marcion was not himself a Gnostic, but he shared Gnostics’ resentment at the suffering woven inextricably into existence itself. In Marcion’s mind, and despite his critics, he was a Christian; he believed that “Christ came to set free from the power of the evil God, the Demiurge, such as had created this evil world. If atheism is set in opposition to the belief that this world was created by an All-Good God, as revealed in the Bible, then Marcion was an atheist.”

For all the genuine exegetical and theological issues involved in the Marcionite controversy, we should not lose sight of the fact that more than orthodoxy was at stake. Early Christianity was reviled for being (among other things) a novelty, a new religion with no historical or socio-cultural foundation; pagans found the very idea of religious innovation to be offensive. Christians responded to such charges by associating themselves with biblical Israel, by expropriating Israel’s scriptures, and by insisting that their religion was the legitimate continuation of the centuries-old worship of YHWH. When Marcion proclaimed a new and hitherto unknown God, he was inadvertently confirming the accusations against Christianity; for that reason, if for no other, he and his heretical views had to be disavowed.

And there you have, in brief, the story of my favorite Marcion.

--------------------------------------------------------

¹ To be fair, Marcion’s reading is not indefensible, merely unpopular.

² Needless to say, Marcion’s “bible” did not include Israel’s scriptures (aka the Christian “Old Testament"), though he acknowledged those scriptures contained much that was of value.

Marcion and His Amanuensis

Wednesday with Pascal: The Virus of Nominalism

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat weighs in on the debate between philosophical realists and their bitter antagonists, the nominalists. Existentialist that he is, Pascal clearly privileges existence over essence; he also rejects any suggestion that earthly arrangements, political or otherwise, point toward some transcendent order.}   

According to the late Julius Friend:

The rise of nominalism was a cryptic attack on the supreme authority of the Church; it was the intellectual echo of the vague, almost inaudible murmur of the common man against his unchangeable earthly destiny; it was the manifesto of the growing attention to common earthly things and satisfactions as against the inhumanly remote; it expressed dissatisfaction with static and fixed conceptions.

If it was “a cryptic attack,” it came, as Friend acknowledged, from “within the citadel of authority—the Church. As a philosophical doctrine, it was formulated two hundred and fifty years before any concerted organization appeared against the Church, and four hundred years before the attack gained any headway; but Catholicism sensed the virus in nominalism from its inception and condemned it as heresy.” The earliest advocates of nominalism were monks and priests, which should come as no surprise—in the Middle Ages, who else had access to books or to education? Dun Scotus, Roscellinus, William Occam, Gabriel Biel: none of these nominalists were ever denounced outright as heretics, though certain of their teachings were condemned. ¹

In any case, nominalism began as a minority, even fringe, doctrine. Eventually, “it emerged triumphant with William of Occam in the first part of the fourteenth century, and the Church had to make terms with it as best it could.” In time, those terms would become more and more onerous:

Once it was believed and accepted that the individual mind originated universals and classifications, then it followed that God did not put order into the world, but that man read order into the world. Thus, it came to be believed that the individual, not God, conferred or vested power, and having conferred power could take it away or deny it. The representation of God on earth claimed by the Church became then a picturesque figure of speech, not a reality; and private communion with God, without intermediary, became a logical procedure. ²

The Church was not alone in being disrupted by nominalism. The elevation of the individual did not bode well for hierarchy:

Furthermore, an overlord now held his tenure purely by the consent of individuals; if the contract between him and his vassals should become one-sided, only force of arms and not the decree of the universe could keep it so. If all ideas, and consequently the power of order, issued from the individual and not from God or His eternal Ideas, any man was the master of his own fate and could carve out a career for himself; he no longer had to acquiesce in the misery of his earthly lot while looking forward to another world of heavenly bliss.

It was not that nominalism necessarily led to the last king being strangled with the entrails of the last priest; but ideas have consequences, right?

Speaking of ideas:

In the intellectual sphere, acceptance of nominalist beliefs brought freedom from the authority of old conceptions. Aristotle, the hitherto absolute word on the subject of natural science, was not necessarily right. The particulars of sense experience, "hard stubborn facts,” and not abstract speculation, were the touchstone of truth. Men of genius began to scoff at cloistered theories, and to favor experimentation. Observation, not reason, was hailed as the correct method in science. ³

Empiricism was one of the many products of nominalism, “the development of which required hundreds of years; not only was it stubbornly fought at every stage in its progress by the tradition of realism, but time was needed for its ideas to leave the cloister and seep down to the masses.” Thanks to nominalism, those "masses" now had access--widespread, if not universal--to education and to advancement; a person’s status at birth (including gender, race, social rank, or material wealth) no longer set limits on their possibilities.

No fan of nominalism, Julius Friend grudgingly acknowledged that “On the one hand, nominalism was the great liberating force of modem civilization. By removing the static order of Platonic realism, nominalism showed the individual man that he was the creator of conceptions and that his ability to make these conceptions actual had no limit. If this were all that needed to be said, a discussion of nominalism could be only a paean to Progress.”

So far, so good: several cheers for nominalism! But what else, in the estimate of Julius Friend, hath nominalism wrought? What happened when people ceased believing that language—including words like, say, “God,” “Satan,” “Heaven,” “Hell,” "Good," and "Evil"—was linked to some metaphysically transcendent realm? If words were only products of human invention, and if they expressed human ideas rather than eternal verities: what in the world (literally) was sacred?

Perhaps nothing?

----------------------------------

 ¹ Some of almost everyone’s teachings were condemned in the Middle Ages, including those of such academic stalwarts as Thomas Aquinas and Peter Abelard. In those days, prudent scholars kept their more controversial manuscripts hidden or wrote them in jargon sufficiently convoluted that authorities would either not notice or not understand.

² It is not a coincidence that Martin Luther was educated by teachers sympathetic to nominalism.

³ Let us not forget the impact of the “Age of Discovery” on the European mind. The revelations of hitherto unknown continents, hitherto unknown cultures, and hitherto unknown natural wonders went a long way toward discrediting received authorities.

Reality, What Even Is It?

{Some say that a nominalist is someone who cannot see the forest for the trees. In fact, the nominalist denies that such a thing as a ‘forest’ even exists—there’s nothing but trees out there for the nominalist. Why does this matter? What exactly is at stake? Oh, nothing much: just our understanding of reality.}

Julius W. Friend, writing in the 1930s and trying to make sense of the ongoing trainwreck that was the 20^th century, concluded that “Modern civilization can be most comprehensively understood as stemming from the root idea of Nominalism.” Friend was writing more than a decade before Richard Weaver (Ideas Have Consequences) made the identical claim, and, to his credit, Friend provided a more substantial and more balanced explanation of the topic:  

Nominalism was a doctrine held by certain scholastic philosophers, which came to the fore in the last part of the eleventh century. The doctrine was bitterly contested for two centuries by the opposing scholastic doctrine of realism; at the beginning of the fourteenth century, under the able championship of William of Occam, nominalism came to be accepted.

What was the big deal, the philosophical bone of contention?

The point at issue between realism and nominalism was: are classifications and general types (universals) figments of the mind or are they real? The realists held that they were real, existing in the world independent of the mind. The nominalists held that particular objects alone were real and that universals were merely names given to classify and relate particulars. For example, in the opinion of a realist the generic word "horse" corresponded to a reality in the outer world affecting each particular horse, while in the opinion of a nominalist only particular horses were real and the word "horse" corresponded to nothing in the outer world, but was merely a mental concept, a convenient way to talk of particular horses collectively.

To put it differently: philosophical realists held that each particular horse was an instance of “horse-ness,” which in turn was an ontological essence existing in the realm of Platonic (or divine) perfection. That essence could be shared (partially) with imperfect creatures. No particular horse could be perfect; each was an inferior copy of the Platonic form “horse-ness” and each possessed various "accidents" (color, size, etc.) as well. Similarly, dogs shared the defining quality of “dog-ness,” and humans shared the attribute of “humanness”; but no particular dog and no particular human could realize the perfection of its ideal, Platonic prototype. ¹ Even though creaturely "accidents" were all that could be observed, philosophical realists insisted that unseen "essences" were the fundamental reality.  

The obvious implication of realism—aside from its claim that an undetectable realm of perfection existed—was that existence itself was a defect. Whether “horse-ness,” “dog-ness,” or “humanness” existed somewhere in the metaphysical cosmos or whether they were Ideas in the mind of God: they were real, and they were incomparably superior to any mortal instantiation. Gnosticism, which was a form of Platonism, believed the physical world to be an inferior, degraded imitation, almost a parody, of true, spiritual reality.

As Friend emphasized, “Platonic Ideas are not to be understood as ideas in the commonly accepted meaning; they are not ideas in any man's mind, but external real essences. Therefore, the ideas which a man might conceive would not be created by his mind but would be impressed on his mind by the transcendent real Ideas.” The notion that “real Ideas” could be impressed upon (or impress themselves upon) the human mind also led to the suspicion that demonic entities might exploit that mental vulnerability for their own evil purposes.    

Nonetheless, and for a variety of reasons, Christianity and Platonism got along well, for the most part. Although Christian apologists were always quick to deny being influenced by Platonic dualism, the resemblance was striking:

For Christianity, which stressed the Kingdom of Heaven and condemned the temporal satisfactions of the world, the Platonic doctrine of realism came made to order. Earthly things were merely divine reflections; but at least they derived their nature from the divine and so possessed a certain symbolic authority from on high.

Nor was the Church’s authority merely symbolic:

Therefore, the hierarchy of clergy held power by divine sanction, and to question that power would be questioning the authority of God. In secular affairs, power was likewise believed to be vested from Heaven; each vassal held his fief from a superior, until the most powerful held his fief from God. Consequently, the lowliest serf, no less than the greatest noble, had obligations, duties and, be it noted, privileges, by divine sanction. For him to blame his ills and discontents on the constitution of society would again be to blame them on Divinity. Each man's lot was bound up not only in the social scheme, but in the scheme of the universe. Thus, no class in medieval society could possibly have questioned the justice of the social order. The effect of Platonic realism on the Middle Ages was to fix a static pattern for Church and State. ² 

The belief that the visible, material world reflected the invisible, spiritual world was akin to (though not identical to) the ancient Hermetic expression “as above, so below,” which is not to impute Hermetic esoteric beliefs to mainstream Christianity. The point is that the existence and the superiority of the Platonic realm, as posited by philosophical realism, provided justification for earthly hierarchies which were, after all, merely imitations (slightly flawed) of that higher realm.  

What would happen, though, if people stopped believing in the Platonic realm? To make a long story short, Modernity would happen, and it did.

----------------------------------------------

Biographical information on Julius W. Friend is hard to come by. Characterized as an early 20th-century "culture critic," Friend co-founded and edited a literary journal called "The Double Dealer" which lasted from 1921--1926. His essay on nominalism appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review in 1933. He co-authored a book, What Science Really Means, which was published in 1937.

¹ Platonic realism asserted that “essence” preceded (and outranked) “existence”; modern existentialism reverses that order.

² Less pejoratively, one could characterize Christendom as having represented “a stable order” rather than “a static pattern”.

Wednesday with Pascal: The Invention of Genocide

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat remains trapped in 13^th-century France, a place which was either the zenith of Christendom or, if you happened to live in the Languedoc region, a veritable circle of Hell. The subject would be of merely academic interest, but, as we are so frequently reminded, we are the heirs of Christendom, and it helps to be familiar with our patrimony.} 

In his book A Most Holy War, Mark Pegg endeavors to puncture what he views as long-standing myths, both popular and academic, about the 13^th-century crusade launched by Pope Innocent III against the Albigensian heretics of southern France. For readers unfamiliar with that episode or with its significance, Pegg summarizes:

The Albigensian Crusade is one of the great pivotal moments in world history, if for no other reason than the fact that a very distinct Christian culture in [the south of France] was accused of being heretical by the Catholic Church, accused of being an apocalyptic plague threatening to destroy Christianity, and that these accusations led to an irrevocable moral obligation for mass murder. The crusade ushered genocide into the West, changing forever what it meant to be Christian, what it meant to be like Christ. This most holy war is a story of grand expeditions, heroic sieges, village insurgents, kings trampled to death, children set on fire, heaven and earth remade—it is the epic story of the battle for Christendom.

Later in the book, Pegg repeats the accusation: “The Albigensian Crusade ushered genocide into the West by linking divine salvation to mass murder, by making slaughter as loving an act as Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. This ethos of redemptive homicide is what separates the crusade massacres from other great killings before the thirteenth century: a crusader not only cleansed his soul by cutting the throat of a pestilential baker from Toulouse, he cleansed the very soul of Christendom.” Moreover, writes Pegg, “The Crusade, far from being a Christian aberration, epitomized the sanguine beauty and bloody savagery of thirteenth-century Latin Christendom. The threat from heresy and the necessity of eliminating that threat were fundamental in creating the Christ-like world that Pope Innocent III struggled all his life to achieve.” ²

Lest we think that Mark Pegg has an axe to grind against the medieval Church, let us jump forward a few centuries and see how the Christ-like world of Christian Europe was getting on. Michael Allen Gillespie, in The Theological Origins of Modernity, describes the destruction of the German city of Magdeburg in 1631 by “Catholic League” troops led by a Count von Tilly, intent on exterminating Protestant heretics:

“The slaughter was unstoppable. Fires were set throughout the city, children were thrown into the flames, and women were raped before being butchered. Fifty-three women were beheaded in a church where they sought refuge. No one was spared—twenty-five thousand Protestants were massacred or incinerated, and of the five thousand survivors some few were noblemen held for ransom, but all the rest were women who had been carried off to the imperial camp to be raped and sold from soldier to soldier.”

Another “Christian aberration”? Hardly; “Beginning in the early sixteenth century and lasting until the middle of the seventeenth century, the Wars of Religion were conducted with a fervor and brutality that were not seen again until our own times. Indeed, the ferocity of the combatants may even have exceeded our own, for almost all the killing took place at close quarters, often in hand-to-hand combat, and thus without the emotionally insulating distance that modern technologies make possible. The slaughter at Magdeburg, for all its horror, was not the first nor the last such event.”

For those who like their history lessons bolstered by numbers, Gillespie adds:

“By conservative estimates, the religious wars claimed the lives of 10 percent of the population in England, 15 percent in France, 30 percent in Germany, and more than 50 percent in Bohemia. By comparison, European dead in World War II exceeded 10 percent of the population only in Germany and the USSR. Within our experience, only the Holocaust and the killing fields of Cambodia can begin to rival the levels of destruction that characterized the Wars of Religion.”

As one of the 13^th-century French crusaders quipped before the conquest of the city of Beziers, “Kill them all and let God sort them out.” ³ Nor was this an idle threat. In a letter to Pope Innocent III, the French commander Amalric related that, “While discussions were still going on with the barons about the release of those in the city who were deemed to be Catholics, the servants and other persons of low rank and unarmed attacked the city without waiting for orders from their leaders. To our amazement, crying “to arms, to arms!”, within the space of two or three hours they crossed the ditches and the walls and Béziers was taken. Our men spared no one, irrespective of rank, sex or age, and put to the sword almost 20,000 people. After this great slaughter the whole city was despoiled and burnt …” ⁴

“If there is no God, everything is permitted,” say today’s defenders of theism. Pray tell, what could be worse than the things that were done throughout history in the name of God, the gods, or of one god or another? If God did not permit the nightmares of history, neither did He prevent them; and, while Christians like to take credit for having introduced moral values into Western civilization, they should take a closer look at the blood-soaked ground on which they stand and in which their “moral values” took root.

 -------------------------------------------------------------------------

¹ I assume that Pegg intended to mention “cognitive hardwiring,” though I find the “hotwiring” option to be intriguing.

² Pope Innocent III, we may note, before he assumed the papal throne, wrote a book destined to become a classic of its genre, De Contemptus Mundi (On Contempt of the World), which detailed the many slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to which humans were vulnerable, and the many reasons for despair.

³ Alternatively rendered as “Kill them all. God will know His own.”

⁴ The Catholic History Behind “Kill Them All and Let God Sort Them Out” | uCatholic The provider of this anecdote (at www.uCatholic.com) adds drolly, “What an incredible true story from history!”  

 

Wednesday with Pascal: History as Theology

{Apparently, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat recently took a wrong turn in the stacks of the Mansfield Library (University of Montana) and ended up in 13^th-century France. Fortunately, he was thus able to learn about the halcyon era of King Louis IX, by which he was duly impressed.}

Western civilization, according to Andrew Willard Jones and Edmund Waldstein, reached its zenith in 13^th-century France during the reign of the sainted (literally) Louis IX (1214—1270; reigned from 1226 until his death). Reviewing Jones’ Before Church and State, Waldstein endorses Jones’ rosy view of medieval Christendom:

Historians have too often distorted our view of the Middle Ages by projecting modern constructions back onto them. But Jones is not merely making a historical claim. He is also making a normative claim: The construction of modern society with its system of separations between different social spheres was a bad development that inscribes false ideas into our very way of life. Conversely, the integration of spiritual and temporal corresponds to the truth about humanity as revealed in Christ and is therefore demanded by Christian orthodoxy. ¹ 

Jones’ thesis is that, in 13^th-century France, “‘church’ and ‘state’ did not exist as separate institutions; rather, spiritual and temporal authority cooperated together within a single social whole for the establishment of an earthly peace, ordered to eternal salvation. Nor was there an ‘economy,’ in the modern sense of a relatively autonomous system based on private property and contract. Rather, the use of material goods was thoroughly integrated into the peace. “‘State,’ ‘church,’ and ‘economy’ were not merely underdeveloped, waiting to be discovered. They did not exist and would have to be invented.”

I am in no position to dispute such claims, both because I haven’t read Before Church and State and because I am not an historian of medieval Europe. Andrew Jones, however, is eminently qualified; according to his publisher (TAN Books), he holds a PhD in Medieval History from Saint Louis University, specializing in the Church of the High Middle Ages. “His work,” the biographical blurb continues, “treats history as a theological discipline and not as a secular archaeology,” which suggests that Jones privileges Louis IX’s saintly character over whatever grubby historical details that might be uncovered by “secular archaeology”. To borrow, and to paraphrase, a political maxim: for Andrew Jones, “It’s the theology, stupid.”

Theology aside, the merely historical details about Louis IX include the fact that he “expanded the scope of the Inquisition in France. He enacted harsh laws against blasphemy, setting the punishment to mutilation of the tongue and lips. Louis also “launched actions against France’s Jewish population, including ordering them to wear a yellow badge of shame. Following the Disputation of Paris (1240 CE), Paris's Jewish leaders were imprisoned and forced to admit to anti-Christian passages in the Talmud, the major source of Jewish commentaries on the Bible and religious law. ² As a result of the disputation, Pope Gregory IX declared that all copies of the Talmud should be seized and destroyed. In 1242, Louis ordered the burning of 12,000 Talmudim, along with other important Jewish books and scripture.” Such behavior did not interfere with Louis’ canonization or his veneration as France’s holiest king. Indeed, scholars agree that “Louis IX's reign is often marked as an economic and political zenith for medieval France, and he held immense respect throughout Christendom. His reputation as a fair and judicious ruler led to his being solicited to mediate disputes beyond his own kingdom. Louis' admirers through the centuries have celebrated him as the quintessential Christian monarch. His skill as a knight and engaging manner with the public contributed to his popularity.” ³

Louis became king at the age of 12, though his mother effectively ruled until he came of age. However, in 1230, at a still youthful 16, Louis “forbade all forms of usury, defined at the time as any taking of interest and therefore covering most banking activities.” That possibly admirable act was somewhat compromised by the fact that “Louis used these anti-usury laws to extract funds from Jewish and Lombard moneylenders, with the hopes that it would help pay for a future crusade.” Louis IX took a great deal of interest in crusades; in 1249, he took his army to Egypt for the Seventh Crusade. Alas, “On 8 February 1250, Louis lost his army at the Battle of Fariskur and was captured by the Egyptians. His release was eventually negotiated in return for a ransom of 400,000 livres tournois (roughly 80 million USD today) and the surrender of the city of Damietta.” ⁴ Where the 400,000 livres tournois came from is not specified.

Louis was undeterred. There were still Muslims to kill. “Upon his liberation from captivity in Egypt, Louis IX devoted four years to fortifying the Kingdom of Jerusalem. He generously utilized his resources to aid the Crusaders in reconstructing their defenses.” He returned to France, but then got the crusading fever again many years later, joining (briefly) the Eighth Crusade: “The crusaders landed at Carthage 17 July 1270, but disease broke out in the camp. Louis died at Tunis on 25 August 1270, in an epidemic of dysentery that swept through his army.” At least he died doing God’s work.

Louis was canonized as a saint in 1297, and who am I to say he was not deserving of the honor? He was, sources tell us, the very model of a Christian monarch; and, as Andrew Jones makes clear, it has been all downhill for France—and, really, for Western civilization—since his death.

The silver lining is that this line of thought may take William of Ockham off the hook. 

---------------------------------------------------------------

An Integralist Manifesto by Edmund Waldstein | Articles | First Things

Louis IX of France - Wikipedia What reputable scholar would rely on Wikipedia for research? I have no idea, but I also make no claim to be a reputable scholar.

¹ Was the “integration of spiritual and temporal” what Jesus had in mind when he said, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s”? Because it sounds like the exact opposite.

² Disputation of Paris - Wikipedia

³ Although not, we may assume, among Jews, infidels, or heretics.

⁴ Could this episode mark the origin of the expression “a king’s ransom”?

The zenith of Western civilization?

Wednesday with Pascal: Modernity's Dark God

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat fancies himself something of a theologian, a philosopher, and an historian. No matter how often I remind him that he’s just a cat, he persists in thinking he can navigate deep intellectual waters; with today’s post, I fear he is once again in way over his head.}

Michael Alan Gillespie, from Nihilism before Nietzsche:

“Medieval Nominalism emphasized the supremacy of divine will. Modernity sought to construct a bulwark against the chaos that this will entails. Cartesian rationalism and the modern world present themselves as a new beginning, as enlightenment, but behind this bright dawn of reason stands the dark and mysterious form of the omnipotent God.”

The Christian God’s “infinity and incomprehensibility” had been clear from the earliest days of Christianity (and, before that, in the scriptures and traditions of Israel). God also possessed, in theory at least, “radical freedom,” that is, He was free to do whatever He wanted. He could, for instance, change His mind and alter his plans, as He did in Genesis when He despaired of His human creations and killed most of them in a flood; as soon as the survivors gathered their wits and began working together to build something, God confused their language and scattered them to the winds. A God with that degree of power and that degree of freedom was troubling; as a result, Christian theologians increasingly shied away from the deity’s “radical freedom” and sought to emphasize “the priority of reason within divine omnipotence.” God was, among other things, rational, and, with that in mind, early medieval Christians could breathe a sigh of relief; their God was a mighty God who could of course smite them at any moment, but that God had given them assurances as well as explicit instructions which, if dutifully followed, would protect against God’s wrath. All-powerful and radically free, the God of medieval Christianity could nonetheless be trusted not to do anything rash or irrational.

Dissenters, however, insisted that God was not limited by anything at all, including His own covenants and commandments. William of Ockham, whose nominalist philosophy and “divine command” ethics would eventually replace Scholasticism, said that God could not only turn night into day, reverse the movements of the stars, or suspend the ‘law’ of gravity; He could even change the past, without warning or explanation, and without any creature so much as suspecting the change had been made. ¹ Ockham, of course, never said that God would do such a mischievous thing; he merely said that God could do so, and that God had every right to do so if He chose. In short, God was not bound by reason, logic, consistency, time, space, or even by His own promises—since He could, if He chose, change the past so that those promises had never been made in the first place.

Michael Alan Gillespie summarizes:

Scholasticism rested on the assumption that God and the cosmos are essentially rational. Nominalism argued that it contradicts God’s divinity to claim that he is subordinate to nature or to reason. Nominalism’s effect was to sever reason and revelation; it liberated natural science from the constraints of religion and opened the door to empiricism, but it also established an omnipotent divine will unrestrained by any rational notion of the good. The rise of natural science was concomitant with the rise of doubt; to secure himself and his science, man first had to build ramparts against divine caprice or malevolence.

The God of the scriptures was anything but reasonable; He raged, He cursed, He lamented and regretted His own choices. He could also be persuaded, implored, argued with, wrestled with, negotiated with, laughed at, and more. He allowed Satan to savage Job’s life and to reduce the man to despair, and He flatly refused to explain His actions to Job. He was, by His own admission, a jealous God, and a vengeful one; somewhere along the line, He or some of His acolytes even invented Hell. 

In essence, William of Ockham acknowledged YHWH’s behavior and said, So what? We have no business judging God, Ockham proclaimed, and His freedom is not bound by human ‘morality’ or human ‘logic’. Ockham forthrightly answered the ancient philosophical/theological chestnut: is ‘the Good’ objectively good on its own merits, or is it ‘the Good’ simply because God deems it so? Ockham chose the latter—whatever God does, or commands, is ‘good’ by definition. That logic suggested that God could make torture and even murder ‘good’ if it served His mysterious purposes: Take your son Isaac, your only son, whom you love, and make him unto Me a burnt offering. Such divine freedom, unanchored as it was by any stable and predictable morality, allowed men in turn to commit atrocities in God’s name. Who, after all, was to say that God would never countenance such things? Did YHWH not order genocide against Israel’s enemies? Did He not suspend the sun in the sky so that Joshua’s armies could continue killing? Did He not harden Pharaoh’s heart so that Egypt would be devastated by plagues? Did He not, by proxy, torture Job? Did He not sacrifice His own Son?

Gillespie explains:

The late medieval conception of an omnipotent God inspired and informed a new conception of man and nature that gave precedence to will over reason and freedom over necessity and order. The modern world arose out of a crisis of late medieval Christianity; the nominalist idea of an omnipotent God is the source of the notion of an absolute will, and this notion lies behind Descartes’ project for the conquest of nature.

The Ockhamist God was an unlimited and therefore terrifying God. Ockham’s successors then set about finding ways to protect themselves from that God (while still worshiping Him). Having disconnected Scholastic reason from Biblical revelation, late medieval philosophers concluded that, while God was free in His own realm, the material realm was, at least provisionally, given over to man; and modern man seized power over nature with a zeal previously reserved for religious causes. The advances of science gave man confidence that he could unravel the puzzles of nature and of nature’s God; the advances of technology convinced him that he could bludgeon the world itself into submission. ²

It makes perfect sense: if God is Infinite Will, and if we are made in God’s image (though, alas, not omnipotent) then our Will is limited only by our ability to impose it, and neither Reason nor Morality need stand in our way. The more powerful humans have become, the less we have feared God; instead, we have come to fear ourselves and to fear each other. Modern man, says Gillespie, “bears a surprising resemblance to the omnipotent God of Christianity,” the God who had supposedly died or at least abdicated His throne. “Like that God, modern man is beyond reason, beyond nature, and beyond good and evil. He calls into question all that is stable and certain. He is a god of terror and of joy. He is everything’s creator, everything’s destroyer, and everything’s redeemer. At the end of modernity, we are thus brought face to face with the dark God that modernity was constructed to constrain.”

More precisely, we have become that dark God: we make weal, and we make woe, and we ask no one’s permission, not even God’s. In short, we are the deity our parents warned us against.

==============================================

¹ The Russian theologian-philosopher Lev Shestov argued a century ago that God could decree that “2 + 2= 5,” a notion also advanced by Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man”.

 ² Cf. Stephen Hawking’s musings on “knowing the mind of God,” and cf. Robert Oppenheimer on “We have become Shiva, Destroyer of worlds.”

Saturday Lecture: The Worm in the Bud

“The disappearance of evil as a concept is one of the most extraordinary features of modern society.” (Alan Macfarlane)

“Money changes everything.” (From the eponymous song written by Tom Gray)

Alan Macfarlane (from The Culture of Capitalism):

Traditionally, the essence of evil lies in a combination of several features. First, it is shadowy, mysterious, covert, hidden, not fully understood, hence the association with night, darkness, black, secrecy. Secondly, it is an active, aggressive force. Evil tries to destroy the integrity, the happiness, and the welfare of ‘normal’ society. It is aggressively, if insidiously, undermining, the worm in the bud. Witches are evil because they attack society, causing illness and death. These attacks are not justified; either they are motive-less or the motives are perverted. God or the ancestors are not evil when they afflict man, for their ends are good: to improve the afflicted. They correct mankind as a loving father corrects a child. Evil is an inversion of good; the moral standards of society are turned upside down. Thus, when havoc falls out of a clear sky and strikes down an individual or a society, evil is at work.

The moral economy of peasant societies included the economy of evil. Life and happiness were thought to be constantly threatened, by women (witches), by death, by secret evil, by diffuse and invisible powers. There was a never-ending war, both within the individual and against external dark forces. In Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, and Confucian societies, a great amount of energy was spent in trying to hold back and defeat evil through the use of that ‘magic’ that is built into practical religion.

An archetypical example of such a world can be seen in much of continental Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout Catholic Europe, the Holy Office of the Inquisition set up an elaborate machine for seeking out and destroying evil. There was believed to be a vast conspiracy of Evil abroad: relapsed Jews, gypsies, freemasons, witches, Lutherans—all were sought out as agents of Evil, which was then purged from them by fire and the rack. The Devil was alive and well and hovered over much of Europe; few doubted the daily reality of Evil, the Evil One, and of evil beings. There was a Holy War for four centuries.

Contrast this with the world of industrial capitalism in the later twentieth century. Though ‘evil’ titillates in the films, television, science-fiction, and children’s stories, in ordinary life the concept and the reality have largely been banished. Most people live in a one-dimensional world that has expelled Satan, witches, the Evil Eye, and fairies. The supernatural dimension is dead, except as fantasy. How has evil, even temporarily, been banished?

Both the answer and the problem are encapsulated in St. Paul’s warning that ‘The love of money is the root of all evil.’ This dismissal of avarice is one of the central pillars of the Judeo-Christian tradition upon which western civilization is based. Yet it could also be argued that the love of money—the famous propensity to trade, barter, and accumulate—is an equally important part of this civilization. Adam Smith most famously exposed this foundation of modern society, a feature without which capitalist societies would immediately collapse. Modern economies are built on a propensity that is, in the ethical terms laid down by Christian theology, evil. The foundations are laid on individual acquisitiveness, the love of money, and the pursuit of profit. Good and evil are mixed in the roots of modern society.

Money, and all it symbolizes, is the root of all evil in an even deeper sense. It subtly and insidiously eliminates the very concept of evil, or, rather, it makes it impossible to discriminate between good and evil. Money—which is a shorthand way of saying capitalistic relations, market values, trade and exchange—ushers in a world of moral confusion. Money disrupts the moral as well as the economic world. Money complicates the moral order, turning what was formerly black and white into greyness. Money, markets, and market capitalism eliminate absolute moralities. As Georg Simmel wrote:

‘By being the equivalent to manifold things in one and the same way, money becomes the most frightful leveler; it expresses all qualitative differences of things in terms of ‘How much?’ Money becomes the common denominator of all values, it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific gravity in the moving stream of the economy.’

It became clear that what was considered to be the root of all evil was also the root of all that was good—the marketing, bargaining principle of Adam Smith. This paradox was so horrifying in its implications that, when it was pointed out, there was fierce condemnation. Out of vice and evil came forth wealth and goodness; evil lay at the heart of good in a capitalist society. Private vice, passions, and interests merged into public good.   

[All this] represented the culmination of a trend towards ethical relativism which argued (from growing evidence) that every civilization had its own appropriate moral system. Pascal had summarized this view in the seventeenth century: ‘We hardly know of anything just or unjust which does not change its character with a change of climate. Three degrees of polar elevation overturn the whole system of jurisprudence. A meridian determines what is truth. There is not a single law that is universal.’

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alan Macfarlane - Wikipedia

Saturday Lecture: On the Nature of Demons

{Demonology and angelology are sadly neglected subjects in our modern woke universities. It’s no wonder that, as Richard Weaver pointed out, it has been all downhill since the 14^th century.}

"I saw Satan fall like lightning from heavens." (Luke 10:18)

Norman Cohn, from Europe’s Inner Demons:

Throughout the history of the early church, Satan and the lesser demons continued to be imagined very much as they were in the New Testament; with the elaboration of a Christian theology, however, their theological significance became more clearly defined. Gradually they were integrated into the central doctrines of Christianity, the fall of man, original sin, and man’s redemption through the crucifixion of Christ.

In the first century before Christ, the Book of Enoch hinted that it was one of a number of “Satans,” conceived as followers of the chief Satan, who had led Eve astray. In the first century after Christ, Satan was at last brought explicitly into relation with the serpent in the Garden of Eden; either the serpent was Satan disguised, or Satan acted through the serpent. The Books of Adam and Eve, composed late in the first century, elaborated on the part played by Satan in the fall of man. To deceive Eve, Satan hung himself on the walls of Paradise, looking like an angel and singing hymns like an angel. ¹ He persuaded the serpent to let him speak through its mouth. ²

This same Satan had once been one of the angels of God, but he disobeyed God’s commands and led other angels to disobey, with the result that he and his followers were cast out of heaven. In the main, this view of the fall of Satan and the fall of man was adopted by the Fathers of the Church, from the second-century apologist Justin Martyr onwards. The only point of dispute concerned the fall, not of Satan himself, but of the lesser angels. Earlier sources held that these angels had fallen because they desired the daughters of men; it followed that, unlike Satan, they had not fallen until well after the fall of man. This difficulty was circumvented by the third-century theologian Origen, who proclaimed that the passage in Genesis about the sons of God and the daughters of men must be taken allegorically; the true fall of the angels had taken place before the creation of the world. ³

By the end of the fourth century, it was generally accepted in East and West alike that the fall of man was part of a prodigious cosmic struggle which had begun when some of the heavenly host had revolted against God and had been cast out of heaven. As for the habitat of the demons, there was never, in those centuries, any doubt about that. Whereas the angels dwelt in the highest heaven, near the throne of God, the demons were confined to the dark air immediately above the earth. This is the meaning of Paul’s famous phrase about ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’  The Fathers shared his views. Augustine, for example, maintained that ‘the Devil was expelled, along with his angels, from the lofty abode of heaven, and was cast into darkness, that is to say, into our atmosphere, as into a prison.’

It was also agreed that, since angels possessed ethereal bodies, composed of air and light, demons must be similarly equipped. According to Augustine, these ethereal bodies give demons extraordinary powers of perception and enable them to transport themselves through the air with extraordinary speed. From their airy habitat, Satan and his demons wage incessant war upon the Christians; for the Devil, who never knows peace, cannot leave men in peace. Together with his demons he causes both the sickness of individuals and collective disasters such as drought, bad harvests, epidemics among men and beasts. They also seduce Christians to abandon the true faith, to fall into schism and heresy. St. Cyprian even held that, save for the activity of devils, there would be no heresies or schisms at all. ⁴

Not for a moment do demons cease from their plaguing and tempting of mortals. Demons are filled with such hostility towards mankind that it is a miracle that any human being survives. 

----------------------------------------------------

¹ Paradise had walls? Apparently so.

² Ventriloquism having been, in the day, one of Satan’s many talents.

³ The creation stories in Genesis do not mention either Satan or angels. It is only after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden that we are told “On the east side of Eden, God placed cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.” The cherubim, whatever their original function(s), were quite literally deployed as guardian angels.

⁴ Norman Cohn notes that “In the days of the Fathers, the church was still full of optimism, still sure of its faith and of the triumph of that faith. Satan might be strong, but it was within the power of any Christian to resist him.” However, he adds, “Gradually, over the centuries, new and terrible anxieties began to make themselves felt in Christian minds; by the later Middle Ages, Satan and his demons had become far more powerful and menacing.”