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Separation of Church and State

Separation of Church and State

By
Philip Hamburger
Philip Hamburger
Cover 0

Separation of Church and State by Phillip Hamburger

Please read the rest of the review at Medium.

The “Separation of Church and State” is both a legal doctrine and an American piety. It functions as a kind of shorthand expression for the proper role of religion in society. For Americans there seems to be an inchoate fear that at any time religion could jump out of its proper sphere and turn Americans into fanatics. The fear is always the fear of the unknown – the other guy's religion, which is strange and cultish, whereas one's own is restrained, stable, and homely.

For some, the American piety of “separation of church and state” merges with religious pieties. This is the way that God – a proper, High Church Protestant God – set things up. I have in mind President George H.W. Bush's thoughts in a most dire situation:

When he was once asked what he had thought about as a young pilot floating in the Sea of Japan after being shot down during World War II, he answered, “Mom and Dad, about our country, about God ... and about the separation of church and state,” according to columnist Terry Mattingly. It sounded as though he was shoving every religious phrase he could think of into a single sentence.

It seems like an odd moment to be thinking about a legal doctrine. It would have been no stranger than if he had claimed to have been thinking of the separation of power or the supremacy clause, but on the principle that “there are no atheists in the foxhole,” the young Bush was feeling the need for religious support in his vicissitude, which required a worshipful attitude to the Creator, such as knowing the proper role that a citizen of a democracy should take in serving God, which, in turn, means knowing what things to offer God and what things to offer Caesar.

Or it could be that for Protestants, separation of church and state meant a proper American form of religion, which necessarily meant “not Catholic,” who by the 1940s were still feared as a foreign element who might still be looking to force their alien religion on Americans. I am not saying that Bush was intentionally anti-Catholic, but anti-Catholicism has been perennially in the air, up to and including 2020 when Senator Dianne Feinstein told Judge Amy Coney Barett that “the dogma lives loudly in you.”

And with that speculation, we should turn to Separation of Church and State by Phillip Hamburger. Hamburger is a legal scholar/legal historian specializing in the First Amendment. In “Separation of Church and State” (“SOCAS”), Hamburger surveys the history of religious liberty. He describes the evolution of the concept of separation from something ascribed to unhinged radicals to mainstream constitutional law as a result of recurrent American fears about the Catholic Other. Ultimately, we get a lesson in the law of unintended consequences.

Hamburger describes the idea of the separation of church and state as existing apart from the idea of religious liberty. Religious liberty meant the freedom to practice one's religion without penalty. This was a nebulous concept that probably entailed not being required to subsidize someone else's religion, which was what was generally understood by the idea of the “Establishment of Religion.” According to Hamburger, separation of church and state (“separationism” is the term I will use to save time) was an accusation hurled by one group against another. In the colonial era, no one advocated separationism; rather, they would accuse other churches of seeking separationism. Separation of church and state was understood to mean either or both (a) ending all government support for religion and/or (b) ending the role that religion played in exercising moral control over the state.

Early America disputed the issue of whether clergymen could serve as elected representatives. The grounds given for or against this position included a concern that clergymen might find themselves sullied by secular activities and/or that clergymen should keep themselves busy with their religious activities, and/or implicit anti-Catholicism. Hamburger notes:

Notwithstanding that this constitutional exclusion purported to be sympathetic toward the clergy, some exclusion clauses clearly attempted to elicit anti-Catholic support. For example, in 1777 the earlier, New York version of the provision quoted above specified that “no priest of any denomination whatsoever” should be eligible for office. This anti-Catholic Catholic wording came from the document's primary drafter, John Jay, whose preamble to the Constitution's religious freedom clause pointedly declared that “we are required, by the benevolent principles of rational liberty, not only to expel civil tyranny, but also to guard against that spiritual oppression and intolerance wherewith the bigotry and ambition of weak and wicked priests and princes have scourged mankind.”” Yet most Americans hesitated to endorse this intemperate anti-Catholicism, and even when in 1796 the drafters of the Tennessee Constitution copied the anti-Catholic allusions in New York's exclusion provision, they did not adopt New York's diatribe about the “bigotry and ambition of weak and wicked priests.”7

Philip HAMBURGER. Separation of Church and State (Kindle Locations 842-847). Kindle Edition.

On the other hand, generalized attacks on the clergy were avoided. There was also pushback on clergy exclusion:

In 1783, in Virginia and what would become Kentucky, Thomas Jefferson hoped that a new constitution would exclude “Ministers of the Gospel” from the General Assembly. His discriminatory proposal, however, elicited skepticism from James Madison: Does not the exclusion of Ministers of the Gospel as such violate a fundamental mental principle of liberty by punishing a religious profession with the privation of a civil right? Does it not violate another article of the plan itself which exempts religion from the cognizance of Civil power? Does it not violate justice by at once taking away a right and prohibiting a compensation for it? And does it not in fine violate impartiality by shutting ting the dour against the Minister of one religion and leaving it open for those of every other?” This inequality had no justification in the anti-establishment principles shared by Jefferson and Madison, and Jefferson is not known to have defended it.

Philip HAMBURGER. Separation of Church and State (Kindle Locations 849-854). Kindle Edition.

There was no generalized hostility to clergy as such. The arguments for excluding clergy from serving as elected representatives was never presented on the basis of a blanket anti-clericalism or on the grounds of separation of church and state:

Thus Americans barred clergymen from civil office for many reasons, including an odd combination of Calvinism, anti-Catholicism, theories of taxation and representation, solicitude for the clergy, and suspicion of the clergy. Strikingly, however, Americans did not exclude the clergy on grounds of separation.

Philip HAMBURGER. Separation of Church and State (Kindle Locations 859-861). Kindle Edition.

The gist of the point that Hamburger makes in the first section of his book is that no one advocated Separationism at or prior to the framing of the American Constitution or the Bill of Rights. As such, the First Amendment should not be read as incorporating Separationism as the intent of the Framers.

So, where did our adherence to the incantation of “Separation of Church and State” come from?

It should not be a surprise to 21st Century Americans that the doctrine was ginned up for political purposes, specifically by Thomas Jefferson and his supporters after the Election of 1800. During the 1800 election campaign, Jefferson had been attacked by Federalist-sympathizing pastors for being an atheist. Jefferson's Federalists pushed back by arguing, inter alia, that “religion should be kept out of politics.” In other words, it was an example of “your religion is threatening and goes too far.”

In the course of this counter-response after the election, and in anticipation of the next campaign, Thomas Jefferson floated a trial balloon in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association (1802). At the time, in New England, Baptists were sympathetic to Jefferson's anti-Federalist positions because they had to certify that they were members of a religious minority in order to avoid paying taxes to support the Congregationalism religious majority. When the Association wrote to Jefferson, he used it to promote his anti-Federalist project, particularly in Connecticut, which was under the control of Federalist-leaning Established clergy.

Jefferson famously deployed the metaphor of the “wall of separation”:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man Fr his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. [Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.”

Philip HAMBURGER. Separation of Church and State (Kindle Locations 1603-1607). Kindle Edition.

Given how often the “wall” metaphor is repeated today, moderns might be surprised that Jefferson's letter was ignored by contemporaries and the Danbury Baptists distanced themselves from Jefferson's extreme position:

If Jefferson had high hopes that his letter would promptly sow useful truths and principles, he must have been disappointed, for his epistle was not widely published or even noticed. In one respect this is not altogether surprising, for his phrase about the separation of church and state probably seemed to reiterate the Republicans' anticlerical rhetoric. Yet there was another reason the letter eluded the public's attention. Jefferson miscalculated dissenting and especially Baptist opinion.

Philip HAMBURGER. Separation of Church and State (Kindle Locations 1614-1616). Kindle Edition.

And:

Indeed, as William G. McLoughlin points out, whereas the 1801 minutes of the Danbury Association recorded its decision to write to Jefferson, the 1802 minutes remained silent about his response.” This was in sharp contrast to the practice of other Baptist associations. Later in Jefferson's presidency, when several Baptist associations that regularly published their minutes wrote to the great man, they consistently recorded the resulting correspondence and published it with their proceedings.39 The Danbury Association, however, acted as if its correspondence had never taken place.

Philip HAMBURGER. Separation of Church and State (Kindle Locations 1633-1636). Kindle Edition.

The Baptists made clear that they were advocating for the “rights of conscience against laws that made Christianity an object of civil government.” The Baptists were looking for exemptions where appropriate, not for a wall that would prevent the consideration of such exemptions.

So, again, the modern notion that “separation of church and state was baked into the First Amendment is a fable.

What then brought us to where we are?

Catholics.

In the middle Nineteenth Century, Catholics began arriving in America in droves sufficient to have an effect on American politics. Catholicism was the ancient enemy to Anglo-Saxon Protestants. American identity had been forged in colonial times by being sandwiched between threatening Catholic powers – French Canada to the north and Spanish Florida to the south. Expecting Americans to set that aside was asking a bit much.

I thought I had a good knowledge of anti-Catholic history, but Hamburger made me realize how cyclical and enduring anti-Catholicism has been in American history. It seems like every thirty years or so, anti-Catholic attitudes spike to become actively political. In the 1840s and 1850s, the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings threatened to become the opposition to the Democrats. Robert William Fogel in “Without Consent or Contract,” points out that during this period northern opposition could coalesce around opposition to the Slave Power or the Vatican Power. Initially, the latter looked like it would win as the Know Nothings took control of several state governments and had 70 members in Congress. The Kansas-Nebraska Act changed the dynamic of the competition by fomenting open war in Kansas and dividing the country along clear sectional lines. It was a near-run thing that could have gone the other way.

The Civil War and Reconstruction put anti-Catholicism as a political issue on ice until the 1870s when the issue became politically potent again. During that time, President Ulysses S. Grant stumped for a constitutional amendment for separation of church and state and Senator Blaine obtained passage of the Blaine Amendment that forbade payment of tax money to parochial schools. Hamburger writes:

President Grant in December 1875 had appealed to Liberal and nativist sentiment by proposing constitutional amendments in favor of separation. It was Blaine's amendment, however, ever, proposed on the floor of the House a week later, that seemed likely to succeed and that most Liberals feared. Hoping for the Republican presidential nomination, Blaine rewrote the First Amendment to apply it to the states and to specify a single logical consequence of separation-the one most popular with anti-Catholic voters: “No state shall make any law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; and no money raised by taxation in any State for the support port of public schools, or derived from any public fund therefor, nor any public lands devoted thereto, shall ever be under the control of any religious sect, nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided vided between religious sects or denominations. “28

Philip HAMBURGER. Separation of Church and State (Kindle Locations 2847-2852). Kindle Edition.

These measures were aimed at Catholics:

The Liberals regretted this “non-committal” Blaine amendment because cause it conformed to the Protestant or nativist conception of separation. Although it provided that no public lands or public funds devoted to school purposes shall “ever be under the control of any religious sect” or “be divided between religious sects or denominations,” it thereby would “still leave the Protestant sects undisturbed in their present collective mastery over the public school system.”29 In other words, it was an anti-Catholic measure that still permitted a generalized Protestantism in public schools as long as this was not the Protestantism of any one sect. Liberals, therefore, felt that it “ought not to be adopted, unless so amended as to prevent any sect or number of sects from exercising control over the public schools.””) Fearful that the Blaine amendment was “a compromise between the ecclesiastical and the secular theories of government,” and that it would “not have the effect of secularizing the public schools, but [would] leave undisturbed the chief evil to be reformed,” the Liberals proposed their new, 1876 amendment as “an eminently timely measure to bring forward now.”“

Philip HAMBURGER. Separation of Church and State (Kindle Locations 2853-2859). Kindle Edition.

Hamburger concludes that it was during this period that the “wall of separation” and Separationism became acceptable metaphors in America. Of course, separation was in the third person, i.e., “their religion was to be separated.” It was not intended to mean “our religion.”

Anti-Catholicism erupted again during the immediate post-World War I years as the Ku Klux Klan was revived and went national. People know but don't appreciate how important anti-Catholicism and separation of church and state were to the new KKK. Separationism was hard-wired into the creed of the new KKK:

Separation became a crucial tenet of the Klan. When recruiting members, the Klan sometimes distributed cards listing “It]he separation of church and state” as one of the organization's principles.”-‘ Bearing this out, Klan pamphlets declared that “[t]he fathers” and “the founders of our republic” had “wisely provided for the absolute divorce of Church and State.”” Both in the South and the North, members even recited in their “Klansman's Creed”: “I believe in the eternal Separation of Church and State.”“

Philip HAMBURGER. Separation of Church and State (Kindle Locations 3858-3860). Kindle Edition.

Anti-Catholicism was popular. Oregon passed anti-parochial school legislation, which was struck down in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925). Anti-Catholic publications, such as the Menace regaled a million readers with cliché anti-Catholic horror stories and promoted “separation of church and state:”

The rest is continued at Medium.

2023-09-09T00:00:00.000Z
Sleepless City

Sleepless City

By
Reed Farrel Coleman
Reed Farrel Coleman
Sleepless City

Sleepless City (Nick Ryan 1) by Reed Farrel Coleman

This is the superhero origin story of Nick Ryan. It describes how Ryan is plucked out of semi-obscurity as a NYPD detective with a reputation for not honoring the Code of Silence by a mysterious and powerful group of movers and shakers to fight for justice within the NYPD but outside the confines of the justice system.

Basically, Nick Ryan is a Mary Sue.

Ryan has an unbelievable backstory as a grunt in Iraq. He has independent money. His former girlfriend is in the upper 1%. He knows guns. He always makes the right moves. Everyone is always complimenting him on his toughness, insight, intelligence, or good looks.

Nonetheless, the story is fun if at times unbelievable. I can see how this would be a book that fans of Jack Reacher would enjoy.

The story moves along at a good clip. The bad guys are bad and deserve retribution. There are surprises along the way. The author is a very experienced and competent wordsmith.

If this is your cup of tea, then this will be your cup of tea.

2023-09-07T00:00:00.000Z
The Swerve

The Swerve

By
Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt
The Swerve

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.

2023-08-26T00:00:00.000Z
Cover 1

Understanding Civil Rights Litigation, Second Edition

Understanding Civil Rights Litigation, Second Edition

By
Howard M. Wasserman
Howard M. Wasserman
Cover 1

Understanding Civil Rights Litigation (Second Edition) by Howard M. Wasserman

Being a lawyer is sometimes like being one of the blind men describing an elephant. You have a broad overview of a given area of law, but your case may take you deep into the weeds on particular areas. Connecting the pieces into a whole with the pieces in their proper order and proportion does not come easily.

This book provides a nice map of the territory. It also shows how the pieces connect together. Even though I practice Section 1983 law, I put together a lot of pieces that I hadn't put together previously. To that extent, I recommend it to my fellow practitioners who should be interested in continuing education.

For the layperson, my suspicion is that this book is far too deep in the weeds to be accessible. It is in no way a book for entertainment and it presupposes a knowledge of legal topics.

2023-08-26T00:00:00.000Z
The Golden Enclaves

The Golden Enclaves

By
Naomi Novik
Naomi Novik
The Golden Enclaves

The Golden Enclaves (Scholomance 3) by Naomi Novik

This trilogy is “Dark Harry Potter.” Think of Hogwarts with an 70% mortality rate and the main character is more adept with spells that wipe out cities than with cleaning rooms.

But it is sweet.

The first book introduced us to the Scholomance, the school in the void that the magical class ensconces their children in to give them better odds of survival than the real world. The problem is that the Scholomance is infested with the evil product of magic - malia - that lives off the tender and weak lives of young magicians. We were also introduced to Elle, a young witch who seems destined to become the destroyer of the world. We see Elle develop into a player in her class. She meets Orion, a true blue hero, and makes friends.

In the second book, Elle and her friends hatch a plot to save the entire class while ridding the world of malia.

The third book picks up immediately after the closing of the second book, with Elle in the real world but Orion has chosen to remain in the Scholomance to face certain doom. Elle, of course, takes up a plan to return to the Scholomance and kill the malia that she is certain is consuming the essence of Orion.

In this book, we follow Elle as she becomes a player in the politics of the Enclaves that exist half-in/half-out of the void. She meets Orion's parents and discovers a disturbing truth about Orion's mother. She learns something about how malia are created, particularly the vicious maw-mouth, and she learns something disturbing about Orion. Elle learns to fight and destroy maw-mouths. Enclaves are destroyed. War between Enclaves is breaking out. And it all rests on Elle's shoulders to sort out.

Elle comes across as a resourceful hero. Elle is a bit of a Mary Sue in that she always seems to have the right spell at the right time. We do learn that the universe has been set up in a way to create a path for Elle.

A distraction was that Elle's principal emotional setting is “angry.” She's a teenage girl who swings from being angry at everyone for not knowing something she discovered to sulking about her hurt feelings and then back to angry. Novik is not big on emotional nuance, but, then, she certainly knows teenage girls.

All in all, this is a fun, fast-moving book with some big ideas. It is a YA book, but that doesn't mean that it isn't enjoyable reading for older folks looking for some escapism.

2023-08-13T00:00:00.000Z
Good News for Anxious Christians, epanded ed.

Good News for Anxious Christians, epanded ed.

By
Cary
Cary
Good News for Anxious Christians, epanded ed.

Good News for Anxious Christians by Phillip Cary

Professor Phil Cary is a smart, wise, and nice man. You can get a real sense of all three dimensions by watching Professor Cary's The Great Courses lectures [ https://www.thegreatcourses.com/search/Cary ] on “Luther,” “Augustine,” “Philosophy and Religion in the West,” and “History of Christian Theology.” Professor Cary is a philosopher with a deep knowledge of history. As a Catholic, I appreciate his even-handedness when dealing with controversial issues within Christianity; Protestants like to think that Catholics are anxious about “doing enough,” but Protestants are anxious about having enough – or the right kind of - faith. I treasure one of his observations that every Christian tradition has its own inherent anxiety. His Luther course gave me deep appreciation for Luther's erudition and industry.

This book reveals a pastoral side. Professor Cary came to write this book because of his experience with young Christian students who had their own anxiety about having the right kind of faith. As a Catholic, I am not well acquainted with the particular issues that he describes; Catholic religious hang-ups generally slide in other directions. On the other hand, there are commonalities that span the two traditions and, moreover, what Professor Cary describes seems to be the heresy of “modernity” that is a common threat to all orthodox religious traditions.

Professor Cary describes the mindset his students are facing as the “new Evangelical theology” (hereinafter the “NET.”) Even though I am not an Evangelical, what he describes as NET sounded to me like orthodox Evangelical theology, or, to put it another way, the theology I am deficient in not espousing. However, according to Professor Cary, the NET is a new phenomenon. It would not have been known to our parents or even to our younger selves if we happened to grow up in the 1970s (and assuming we grew up in Evangelical culture.)

The Net teaches things like “God is found within you,” “you should hand your life over to God,” and “listen to God's voice within you.” Young evangelicals are told these things repeatedly and actively try to put these ideas into effect. The problem is that these ideas lead to cognitive dissonance because they are not true. If you listen to God's voice within you, you are actually listening to your own voice and not God's. God doesn't want you to turn your life over to him in the sense that God makes all of your decision; God wants you to make your own decisions guided by His teachings. There has always been a way for Christians to find God's guidance; it is called the Bible.

The thread that seems to run through the NET is a turn away from the intellectual. Professor Cary blames this development on Christian marketing. Pastors want to be successful, and they find success in selling new experiences. They don't want their consumers questioning them, which might happen if they were taught to think for themselves. Professor Cary explains:

“Ever feel like you're not being transformed often enough? It's one of those “what's wrong with me?” kind of feelings, essentially a new type of guilt. It's indicated by clichés that didn't even exist when many of us were young: you're unwilling to go “outside your comfort zone,” you're afraid to think “outside the box,” you're unable to “move on with your life.” What's wrong with you? You keep wanting to do the same old thing, the thing you're good at, as if life was about being faithful to what's past, not getting on to something new.

My suggestion is that this is the guilt a consumer culture wants you to feel for not being a good consumer. What makes a good consumer is a short attention span, meaning that you quickly get tired of the same old thing and keep wanting to get new things—lots of new things. People who are content to stay within their comfort zone are not very useful to the many organizations that are intent on expanding their share of the market. So if you're one of those people who likes to be faithful and hang on to old things—old doctrines, old people in your life—then major cultural forces will be marshaled against you.

Cary, Phillip. Good News for Anxious Christians, expanded ed. (pp. 153-154). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Joseph Ratzinger predicted the anti-intellectual turn as one of the moves that Christianity might make in response to modernity:

“Both procedures have something frighteningly contemporary about them. In a situation in which the truth of the Christian approach seems to be disappearing, the struggle for Christianity has brought to the fore again the two very methods that ancient polytheism employed to fight—and lose—its last battle. On one side, we have the retreat from the truth of reason into a realm of mere piety, mere faith, mere revelation; a retreat that in reality bears a fatal resemblance, whether by design or accident and whether the fact is admitted or not, to the ancient religion's retreat before the logos, to the flight from truth to beautiful custom, from nature to politics. On the other side, we have an approach I will call for short “interpreted Christianity”: the stumbling blocks in Christianity are removed by the interpretative method, and, as part of the process of thus rendering it unobjectionable, its actual content is written off as dispensable phraseology, as a periphrasis not required to say the simple things now alleged, by complicated modes of exposition, to constitute its real meaning.

Introduction To Christianity, 2nd Edition (Communio Books) (pp. 81-82). Ignatius Press. Kindle Edition.

“Interpreted Christianity” is modern liberal Christianity which can interpret gay marriage into the Bible. The “retreat from the truth of reason into a realm of mere piety, mere faith, mere revelation” seems to be the NET.

The NET seems to be a retreat into narcissism. Modernity seems to cultivate narcissism, which carries with it a confusion of God and the individual. In the 2020s, this confusion includes the belief that people can be born in the “wrong body,” a difficulty that can be rectified by “identifying” as the selected gender.

Is this very far from the belief that God can be found by turning within themselves? Orthodox Christianity has always insisted on a distinction between God and world, between believer and God. Even mystics caught up in religious ecstasies, who lose themselves in God, still see God as something larger in them that they are joined to and disappear within. They do not see God as a tiny, quiet part of them. The NET turns narcissism into solipsism:

“By undermining your sense of the reality of God—the reality of someone who exists outside you—the new evangelical theology undermines your faith in the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Instead of learning what God says about himself in his word, you have to dance with shadows in your own heart and figure out which of them to call God. And when your experience with the shadows disappoints you, you pretty much have to declare yourself disappointed with God. The new evangelical theology thus sets you up for a kind of consumer disappointment, when the elixir it's selling turns out not to have the magical properties it claims. It doesn't make your life turn out the way you want and it won't make you immune from suffering and sadness. That's not what the man on the cross promised.

Cary, Phillip. Good News for Anxious Christians, expanded ed. (pp. 240-241). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Narcissism keeps us from growing up. We grow up by doing things and using our judgment. God does not want us to turn control of our lives over to him as if we were to be on autopilot waiting for instructions. God wants us to be worthy sons and daughters. How do we know this? Because God has said so:

“To do the good works that God has commanded us to do is obedience, which is the heart of traditional Christian morality. To see the difference between this Christian obedience and the very untraditional notion of “letting God take control,” we can look at our Lord's parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14–30). You know the story: the master is going on a journey and leaves three of his servants in charge of his wealth. The wealth comes in the form of talents. A talent is a measure of weight, about seventy-five pounds. So a talent of silver is a lot of money. And that's the least he hands over to his servants; the most capable servant gets five talents, and another gets three. And when their lord returns they must give an account of what they've done with their talents—just as we must give an account of what we've done with our lives on the day of judgment. So the talents become an image of all the abilities and resources God has put into our hands, which we are responsible to use for his glory.

The first thing to notice here is who's giving control to whom. The servants do not give control to the master, but the other way round. He has put a certain number of talents in their control, and they're the ones who have to do something with what's now under their control. So they're in no position to just “let the lord take control.” That would be getting things completely backward! Just imagine how the master would respond if any of his servants tried to give control of the talents back to him, saying, “I'll let you do it all, Lord. I give control to you. I surrender all—I yield it all to you!” That's not a way to honor him: it's disobedience, an out-and-out refusal of the work he has given them to do. What will the lord do with such foolish servants?

So the parable of the talents gives us a picture of Christian obedience that is the exact opposite of “giving God control.” It's as if our Lord Jesus wanted to tell us in advance precisely what's wrong with the new evangelical theology. If we realize that the parable is about us, we will see that for us to “let go and let God” is to refuse responsibility, to pretend that the work God has given us is not ours to do. The truth is we're not letting God work; he's letting us work. He has let us have a certain number of talents and he expects us to work with them.

Cary, Phillip. Good News for Anxious Christians, expanded ed. (pp. 67-68). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
This is a great point.

The solution is a reorientation that recognizes the truth that God exists outside of the believer. God is an external reality, a person. We don't access other people as “experiences.” We access them as people by getting to know them and learn about them. We access God through the mind, which means knowing doctrines about God. Professor Cary explains:

“Christian faith is about Christ, not about experiencing Christ. There's a difference and it matters. We put our faith in a person, not an experience. I want to insist on this difference because many Christians have been led to believe that what makes faith personal is that it's experiential. In effect, they confuse “experiential” with “personal.” But I think that what makes Christian faith personal is that it's about a person. We do experience Christ in our faith and that's a very good thing, but it's not the really important thing in Christian faith or even in Christian experience. The person in whom we have faith is the really important thing in Christian experience.

That's why Christianity, more than any other religion, makes a big deal about doctrine. “Doctrine” simply means teaching, and Christianity needs teaching because it's about Christ. Most religions are fundamentally a way of life, but Christianity is fundamentally a faith, because it's centered not on how we live but on what we believe about how Christ lives (and died, and rose again, and reigns at God's right hand, and is coming again in glory). Since the focus is on a person, not a way of life or an experience, the crucial thing to say is not how to live or what the rules are, as in other religions, but rather what the story is about this one person, Jesus Christ. And it's important to get the story right, to tell the truth about Christ, or we won't know who he really is. So the soundness of doctrine matters a great deal: without it we can't do a good job telling Christ's story.

Cary, Phillip. Good News for Anxious Christians, expanded ed. (pp. 220-221). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Joseph Ratzinger pointed out that one of the inadequate Christian reactions to modernity, mirroring the defeatism of ancient paganism, was “the retreat from the truth of reason into a realm of mere piety, mere faith, mere revelation.” In modern Christianity, mere piety and mere revelation means the “Christian experience,” which has the salutary value of being non-falsifiable. Professor Cary points out that historically, mainstream Protestantism attempted to hold onto its Christian identity by emphasizing Christian experience:

“Liberal Protestantism has been a failure for quite some time now. It originated as a response to modern crises of faith in the nineteenth century, when many European and American theologians tried to help churches hang on to their Christian identity even after they felt they could no longer hold on to orthodox Christian doctrine. It was a kind of historical delaying tactic, postponing the move to a post-Christian future. Liberal theology is a strategy that develops when you can't believe in Christian doctrine anymore, but you want to keep being a Christian, so you base your faith on Christian experience instead. But the strategy only appears to work for a few generations, and by now the liberal Protestant churches are becoming more and more clearly post-Christian, though not all their members have fully realized this yet.

Cary, Phillip. Good News for Anxious Christians, expanded ed. (p. 224). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

These churches eventually became Unitarian and completely lost their Christian identity.

Evangelicalism is following the same path:

“Although the underlying motives are not exactly the same, evangelical Christians do seem eager to make the same mistake as liberal Protestants. Just think how many Christians you know would answer the question, “What is your faith really about?” by saying something like, “It's about experiencing God working in my life.” It's an answer that does not require Christ or mention his name. In a church where that is the expected answer, Christ is in the process of disappearing from view, so that the experience they're talking about is becoming less and less Christian with every generation.

And I've learned from my students that this is the kind of answer members of the younger generation of evangelicals think they're supposed to give. It's not like they've decided on their own to become anxious narcissists concerned more with their own experiences than with Jesus Christ. They were taught to be that way by their churches and Christian media and various programs and ministries. Or not exactly taught—that would be something like doctrine—but rather, made to feel guilty and inadequate and unspiritual when they didn't feel and talk that way. (Can't you just hear it—devastating words spoken in tones of great concern: “You mean you're not experiencing God working in your life? What's wrong?”) So they've come to feel that if they don't talk this way, there must be something wrong with their Christian life.

Cary, Phillip. Good News for Anxious Christians, expanded ed. (pp. 228-229). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Professor Cary's answer to the problem is to teach – preach – about Christ, about Christian doctrine. People innately want to know things. They want to know about other people. They can learn from repetition. More significantly, people don't thrive on “relevance” or “practical sermons.” Religion is not practical. Going to church on Sunday is not practical. People do these impractical things because of the message and the promise of the Gospel. Professor Cary offers this analogy:

“To see what I mean, try this thought experiment. Imagine you're someone who likes poetry and drama, and you're looking at courses being offered at a local community college. Two courses have caught your attention, one titled “The Poems and Plays of Shakespeare” and another titled “The Relevance of Shakespeare to Our Lives.” Which one would you rather take? I figure that if it's poetry and drama you really want—if you're eager to encounter the beauty and power and wisdom in Shakespeare's poems and plays—then you'll avoid the second course. You want to take in Shakespeare's words, not listen to some professor going on for a whole semester about how they're supposed to be relevant to you. At least that's what I'd choose. When I want to learn something interesting or beautiful, the last thing I want is a series of lectures on how that thing is relevant to my life. I want to encounter the thing itself: literature or history, math or biology, music or the gospel, all of which move me because of their beauty as well as their truth.

Cary, Phillip. Good News for Anxious Christians, expanded ed. (p. 209). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

And:

“Only encountering the beauty of Christ in the gospel is likely to change their hearts so that they learn to love the subject matter of the gospel, which is Christ himself, and thus become like a bride waiting eagerly for her Beloved. Whereas trying to make Christ “relevant” means giving up hope that the people in the pews might come to be interested in something besides their own lives.

Cary, Phillip. Good News for Anxious Christians, expanded ed. (p. 210). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

This is a very accessible book. Professor Cary is a warm and engaging writer. If you want a book that provides an insightful analysis of how things have gone wrong and how you can avoid getting trapped into habits that won't help you, this is your book.

2023-07-24T00:00:00.000Z
The Hollows

The Hollows

By
Daniel  Church
Daniel Church
The Hollows

The Hollows by Daniel Church.

The Hollows by Daniel Church is a solid “monsters attack” story. The story read like it could - and maybe should - be translated to the silver screen for a two-hour horror flick. It has all the cliches and tropes of the monster movie, including a slow start, a quiet community, mysterious deaths/disappearances to ratchet up the tension, violent slaughter to really ratchet up the tension, a villain who just won't die, and a nick of time resolution.

My reference to cliches is not meant as a put-down. These stories have to follow the recipe or they will fail to deliver what they promised.

In this case, the variation from the norm is that the quiet, isolated town is located in the Peak District of England, east of Manchester, west of Rotthertham, and south of York. Apparently, it is an area prone to blizzards and being snowed in, because at the start of the story, that is what is happening, cutting off the quiet community of Barsall from contact with the outside world.

Of course, it is at this point that ancient horrors begin to stir to determine whether it is time to summon what I assume is a huge horror from outside of time. People disappear. Horrors wearing flayed human skins begin to mass. The protagonist, Constable Ellie Cheatham, is the only one trying to figure out what is going on. The local Juke and Kallikak clan - the Harper family - plot to be on the winning side, i.e,. with the monsters after the Dance.

I liked the rural England aspect. The story was sprinkled with unfamiliar (to an American) words and expressions. I didn't like the typically English sneering attitude at religion, albeit the main character does wonder at the end whether something happened because of providence and an Anglican clergywoman is presented as a strong character. I also questioned the gender balance of the story. All the main characters were women, with men relegated to supporting roles. This became problematic to me when the assault team on the nest of ancient horrors was composed of a four-women team, including two teenage girls. It seemed like they might have wanted a male in the group in case upper body strength was called for. That said, though, I didn't get the sense that this was intended as feminist ideological preaching, for which I am grateful.

So, it was an engaging read. If you like this genre, you will like this book.

2023-07-23T00:00:00.000Z
Cover 4

Aloysius X.L. Pendergast

Aloysius X.L. Pendergast: A Mysterious Profile

By
Douglas Preston
Douglas Preston,
Lincoln Child
Lincoln Child
Cover 4

Aloysius X.L. Pendergast: A Mysterious Profile by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Childs

This is a short, fun book for fan service. The inventors of Agent Pendergast dialogue about how they met and how their most successful character was developed. Obviously, it is not a Pendergast novel. It can be read in under an hour.

I have read a couple of Pendergast novels but I have steered clear of reading the rest. Preston and Child are good writers. The books I have read have been compelling page-turners, but my sense is that I reading the equivalent of junk food. Pendergast has seemed to me to be obviously a cliche pastiche of several characters. Yet, I know I'm weak and would not be able to put down the mystery I start reading.

After reading this, I may pick up a few more. I found their description of the process of writing Pendergast to be engaging. What does the “L” in his name stand for? They don't know. Pendergast has grown in the telling.

If you are interested in taking a peak behind the curtain, and you like mysteries, this could be a book for you.

2023-07-06T00:00:00.000Z
Every Heart a Doorway

Every Heart a Doorway

By
Seanan McGuire
Seanan McGuire
Every Heart a Doorway

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

The transition from pre-teen to adult is a time of fantastic possibilities. A child goes from viewing the world at the waste level of his parents to matching them or, sometimes, towering over them. Adolescents uncover new abilities every month as they master music, sports, or human interactions. Young girls metamorphize into swans with the capacity to make boys stutter and create life. Anything is possible at this time. They might think that today I can break the five-minute mile; perhaps tomorrow I will fly.

On the other hand, these changes upset the established order of childhood. The adolescent leaves the security of home and has to find ways to fit into new, different, and uncomfortable societies. They deal with strangers who don't affirm or love them as their parents and siblings have. They experience conflict. They find that their new capabilities mark them out for jealousy and ostracism.

These are the features of life that define Young Adult (“YA”) fantasy. The universality of these experiences is why YA fantasy is perpetually popular. Dystopian Science Fiction series like “Divergent,” “Hunger Games,” and “Red Rising” play on these elements in the themes of selection, competition, and training.

Fantasy also utilizes these universal experiences to tell stories about escape and acceptance. The classic trope is the outcast who goes through a door or falls through a hole into another world where the protagonist learns the new rules, masters them, and finds success and acceptance.

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire takes the fantasy tropes and flips them. She asks what happens to those children who return to the real world after their journey to the fantasy world. Would they forget their experience and thrive in the real world? Or would their experience make them forever pine for the world they've lost?

McGuire paints the picture of those students who have been rejected by their fantasy world but cannot stop looking for a way to return. They are heartbroken and disconsolate. They lost a place that accepted them for their unique characters and shaped them like origami trees to fit into the fantasy world, whether it be the Halls of the Dead or Candy Land or a Hammer horror film.

The protagonist in Every Heart a Doorway is Nancy. Nancy found a doorway into an “underworld” of silence and solitude. She learned to play the role of a living statue. Color was forbidden to her. As cold as her world sounds, Nancy loves it and wants to return to it. She hates the real world where she is forced to wear colorful clothes and go out into the sunlight.

I liked the premise. The story itself is scant and short. It turns into a murder mystery when the mutilated bodies of students are discovered. This feature shows up around halfway through the book and drives the book to its conclusion. Through this conflict, we meet other students and found out about their adventures. A lot of these worlds sound truly bizarre. The twins Jack and Jill lived in a world where Jill was the pet of a vampire and Jack apprenticed to a mad scientist. Although this world is a nightmare, they want to return.

One of the things that I noticed and found disturbing was that the situation of a number of girls would be deemed “unhealthy” in our culture. Nancy is trained to be a living statue, totally passive. Her self-esteem is based on the approbation of her “master,” the Lord of the Dead. Her deepest desire is to return to a reality where she will stand for days, perfectly motionless, barely breathing, not talking, a passive object.

Is this really a fantasy of adolescent girls? Perhaps it is compared to the cruel competitive world of teenage girls.

Jill was the pet of a vampire. She provides this bit of information:

“Jill laughed. “I don't wear these because I want to remember where I've been. I wear them because the Master liked it when I dressed in pale colors. They showed the blood better. Isn't that why you wear white? Because your Master liked to see you that way?”

That these are ideals for any teenage girl seems....disturbing.

This is part of a series on the “wayward children.” I think it could be an interesting read for a few books until it inevitably becomes repetitive. McGuire can develop the worlds that she has been hinting at. Her division of fantasy worlds into “High Logic” and “Nonsense,” “Virtue” and “Wicked” offers an interesting premise for future stories.

This is a slight book without a lot of content, but it was still entertaining.

2023-06-30T00:00:00.000Z
The Corrupter of Boys

The Corrupter of Boys

By
Dyan Elliott
Dyan Elliott
The Corrupter of Boys

Read the complete review on Medium

https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/is-catholicism-the-historical-cause-of-pedophilia-2582290f12d8

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-love-child-drag-queens-they-call-them-altar-boys-cbd681d7df45. 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.”

....

2023-06-27T00:00:00.000Z
Hangman

Hangman

By
Jack Heath
Jack Heath
Hangman

Book Review - Mystery, Crime, and the Most Repulsive Protagonist in Literature.

https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/book-review-mystery-crime-and-the-most-repulsive-protagonist-in-literature-2c1d2fbcaad5

Hangman by Jack Heath

This book tells serial killer/crime-fighter Dexter, “Hold my beer.”

This book introduces us to Timothy Blake. On one level, Blake seems like a decent guy. The FBI calls on him to find kidnapped children. He seems to be very observant and very smart. He puts together bits of information to make clever deductions, leading him to the missing children.

On another level, Blake is sketchy. We soon learn that he doesn't get paid for his consulting work. His income consists of identity fraud and solving puzzles. He lives with a drug dealer. He was in a group home as an orphaned child. His parents were killed when he was a baby.

Then, on a completely different level, we learn - and this isn't a spoiler since it is presented early in the book and described in the Amazon blurbs - that the deal Blake has cut with the local FBI head is that when he rescues a child, he gets a death row inmate to eat.

Surprise! (Or not.) Because of trauma when he was a baby, Blake is a cannibal.

The author, Jack Heath, set out to write a truly awful character and he has. However, as with Dexter, Heath loads the dice to make us sympathetic. Blake knows he's a monster. He has a sense of ethics, such as not allowing his roommate to rape a girl. He has been handed a bad start in life. The people he eats are dangerous scum, etc.

Blake is a “Marty Stu” character. He's too smart - he memorizes credit card numbers at a glance. He shares a house with a roommate and eats victims raw, but he has a way of disposing of bodies that raises no questions about him. He's aware of his pathology but develops habits to control it.

In other words, Blake is a fantasy character in a fantasy world.

Nonetheless, apart from his unfortunate culinary choices, Blake is a sympathetic character, probably because he's not a real person at all. Likewise, the mystery moves along on its invention, artifice, and coincidences. The ending is surprising enough, but, again, it is coincidence and artifice, and many “don't think too hard about this” connections.

I enjoyed the story but didn't like the fact that I enjoyed the story.

Am I going to read any of the sequels? I don't know. This book is a page-turner. Heath can rock a story. Life is short, though, and I'm not sure I want to squander my rapidly evaporating reading life expectancy by being provoked into concern for someone who eats other people raw.

Your tastes, though, may differ.

2023-04-15T00:00:00.000Z
The Prague Cemetery

The Prague Cemetery

By
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco
The Prague Cemetery

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco

https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/book-review-the-occult-truth-of-history-de9bcfff2d65

Umberto Eco loved the occult. His second book, Foucault's Pendulum, was about secret societies. His famous first book, The Name of the Rose, was about Aristotle's lost book on Comedy being hidden in a labyrinth. Even without a supernatural element, these stories about hidden things are “occult.”[1] Anyone who thinks that the world is run by a secret cabal of Jesuits or Jews is an “occultist.”

This interest fits naturally into Eco's career as an expert in semiotics. Semiotics is defined as:

A general philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deals especially with their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages and comprises syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. 

In semiotics there is a sign and a meaning signified by the sign. Meaning is therefore occulted in some way by the sign. Thus, what is most important is not the surface thing we see and know but the thing hidden beneath the sign.

In The Prague Cemetery, Eco develops the Grand Unified Theory of Occultism. The main character is Simone Simonini, born in Piedmont in the early nineteenth century. Simonini is very quickly defined as an unsympathetic and repulsive character. He is universal in his bigotry. He does not limit himself to antisemitism; he despises Germans, Russians, Jesuits, Masons, and virtually everyone he encounters. He is a thoroughgoing misogynistic, despising women as women and shrinking from contact and association with women. The only thing he does not despise is money and food; he is greedy and fat.

Simonini is a forger and police informant. He learns the dark arts of how to befriend and entrap his friends, beginning with his college friends. He learns how to forge documents so that estates can be claimed. He also forges documents so that the state authorities can have conspiracies to blame things on. Eventually, Simonini's life takes him to Paris, where he creates the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and forges the transfer ticket that sends Dreyfus to Devil's Island.

Eco presents his story in an epistolary format. The book is structured as diary entries by Simonini and a correspondent named Abbe Dalla Piccola with whom Simonini had some underhanded dealings. It becomes clear that the response and counter-responses are from the same person. Early in the book, Simonini mentions how he had learned about the “talking cure” from “Froide.” Simonini loses time when Abbe Dalla Piccola writes his entries. In this way, Eco hides the truth from the protagonist. The book is occult on many levels.

Eco is a wonderful writer. His prose is elegant.

The truly amazing thing about The Prague Cemetery is its historical erudition. Apart from Simonini, every character in the book existed. The events described in the book, such as the Taxil Hoax, are historical. Eco adroitly weaves together historical events and historical personages to develop his story. If the reader pays attention, the reader will get an education in obscure, forgotten nineteenth-century European history.

Ultimately, The Prague Cemetery is a satire about secret services and conspiratorial societies. Simonini has connections with the conspiracies that convulsed the nineteenth century, including the Jesuits, the Masons, the Carbonari, the antisemitic, etc., and he is paid by the Piedmont/Italian, German, French, and Russian secret services. Ultimately, the conspiracies are weak affairs that seem to end up in the hands of an old misogynist.

That may be the point Eco is making. At the height of the exposure of the FBI's 2022/2023 efforts to concoct a vast right-wing conspiracy involving planting stories about extremist Catholic groups in the Atlantic magazine and using FBI informants to infiltrate radical-traditional Catholic masses, certain observations made by Eco ring true. For example, in this one, Simonini's handler is explaining how secret services handle conspiracies:

“You should know that the only way of controlling a subversive sect is by taking over its command, or at least having its ringleaders in our pay. You don't find out about the plans of enemies of the state by divine inspiration. Someone said, perhaps exaggerating, that out of every ten followers of a secret society, three of them are working for us as mouchards - please excuse the expression, but that is what they're commonly called - while six are fools who completely believe in what they're doing, and one man is dangerous.

Eco, Umberto. The Prague Cemetery (p. 213). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Apply that to the fake Whitmer kidnapping, which resulted in the exoneration of several defendants on the grounds of entrapment, and Eco's satire scores a point.

[1] A core meaning of “occult” is “secret.”

2023-04-15T00:00:00.000Z
The Handbook of Epictetus

The Handbook of Epictetus

By
Epictetus
Epictetus
The Handbook of Epictetus

The Encheiridion by Epictetus

https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/book-review-we-could-use-a-man-like-epictetus-again-79e2d5636b90


Stoicism has experienced a revival in recent days, particularly among the unhip and the uncool. That's appropriate since Stoicism is the most uncool and unhip philosophy. In a world where men achieve notoriety by dressing up like teenage girls and “celebrating becoming a girl,” a philosophy that counsels patience, the endurance of suffering, and the acceptance of reality will be out of touch.

But for obvious reasons, we need a philosophy that tells people that it is their own choice if their feelings get hurt by what somebody else says. People say things. We hear them. It is our choice about how we feel about what is said. We don't have much control over life, but we have some control over how we react to life.

Epictitus's Encheiridion is one of the most important texts of Stoic philosophy. Epictetus started off life as a slave. He lived from approximately 50 CE to approximately 130 CE.[1] He was purchased for service with Nero and was brought to Rome. He became a philosophy student under Musonius Rufus and became a famous philosopher in his own right with his school and students.

The Encheiridion consists of notes the historian Arrian took from Epictetus's lectures.[2] Epictetus never wrote anything. Everything we know about Epictetus's philosophy is contained in the four-volume Discourses, also by Arrian, the much shorter Enchiridion, and some sayings ascribed to Epictetus in other texts, such as the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. “Enchiridion” means “in hand” and connotes a “handbook.” The Encheiridion intended was portable and could be carried by the owner for reading and contemplation at convenient moments. It was the paperback of its day, and the idea was to provide philosophy students with a ready guide for developing their practice of philosophy as the need arose.

In the Encheiridion, Epictetus divides the world into two - those things that we can control and those things we cannot control:

1. Some things are up to us and some are not up to us. Our opinions are up to us, and our impulses, desires, aversions - in short, whatever is our own doing. Our bodies are not up to us, nor are our possessions, our reputations, or our public offices, or, that is, whatever is not our own doing.
Epictetus. The Handbook (The Encheiridion) (Hackett Classics) (p. 11). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

We have control over our opinions, judgments, and reactions; we don't have control over what other people do, our property, our success, our failures, or our wealth. If we want a tranquil life, we should focus on the things we can control and not on the things we don't.

One of the things we can control is how to understand and judge things. Epictetus suggests generally accepting indifference, particularly to things that tend to frighten us or make us sad. Like death:

5. What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about the things. For example, death is nothing dreadful (or else it would have appeared dreadful to Socrates), but instead the judgment about death that it is dreadful - that is what is dreadful. So when we are thwarted or upset or distressed, let us never blame someone else but rather ourselves, that is, our own judgments. An uneducated person accuses others when he is doing badly; a partly educated person accuses himself, an educated person accuses neither someone else nor himself.
Epictetus. The Handbook (The Encheiridion) (Hackett Classics) (p. 13). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

As Frank Herbert put it, “Fear is the mindkiller.” Nothing is bad except thinking it so. If something bad is going to happen to you, then fear makes it worse and doesn't change the outcome for the better.

In the Encheiridion, Epictetus describes the world as a place of fatalism and predestination. We are not true agents but are players in a play someone else is putting on:

17. Remember that you are an actor in a play, which is as the playwright wants it to be: short if he wants it short, long if he wants it long. If he wants you to play a beggar, play even this part skillfully, or a cripple, or a public official, or a private citizen. What is yours is to play the assigned part well. But to choose it belongs to someone else.
Epictetus. The Handbook (The Encheiridion) (Hackett Classics) (p. 16). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.. Kindle Edition.[3]

The issue of duty comes up later:

50. Abide by whatever task is set before you as if it were a law, and as if you would be committing sacrilege if you went against it. But pay no attention to whatever anyone says about you, since that falls outside what is yours.
Epictetus. The Handbook (The Encheiridion) (Hackett Classics) (p. 28). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Epictetus suggests a form of cognitive behavioral therapy along the lines of St. Ignatius Loyola's spiritual exercises:

21. Let death and exile and everything that is terrible appear before your eyes every day, especially death; and you will never have anything contemptible in your thoughts or crave anything excessively.
Epictetus. The Handbook (The Encheiridion) (Hackett Classics) (pp. 16–17). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

The Encheiridion comes across as a practical manual. Philosophy was supposed to change lives. This is one that we can all use:

25. Has someone been given greater honor than you at a banquet or in a greeting or by being brought in to give advice? If these things are good, you should be glad that he has got them. If they are bad, do not be angry that you did not get them. And remember, you cannot demand an equal share if you did not do the same things, with a view to getting things that are not up to us. For how can someone who does not hang around a person's door have an equal share with someone who does, or someone who does not escort him with someone who does, or someone who does not praise him with someone who does? You will be unjust and greedy, then, if you want to obtain these things for free when you have not paid the price for which they are bought. Well, what is the price of heads of lettuce? An obol, say. So if someone who has paid an obol takes the heads of lettuce, and you who do not pay do not take them, do not think that you are worse off than the one who did. For just as he has the lettuce, you have the obol that you did not pay. It is the same way in this case. You were not invited to someone's banquet? You did not give the host the price of the meal. He sells it for praise; he sells it for attention. Then give him the balance for which it is sold, if that is to your advantage. But you are greedy and stupid if you want both not to pay and also to take. Have you got nothing, then, in place of the meal? Indeed you do have something; you did not praise someone you did not wish to praise, and you did not have to put up with the people around his door.
Epictetus. The Handbook (The Encheiridion) (Hackett Classics) (p. 18). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

What this comes across as is the suggestion of Christian charity. It also has overtones of this passage from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 14:

7 When Jesus noticed that all who had come to the dinner were trying to sit in the seats of honor near the head of the table, he gave them this advice: 8 “When you are invited to a wedding feast, don't sit in the seat of honor. What if someone who is more distinguished than you has also been invited? 9 The host will come and say, ‘Give this person your seat.' Then you will be embarrassed, and you will have to take whatever seat is left at the foot of the table!
10 “Instead, take the lowest place at the foot of the table. Then when your host sees you, he will come and say, ‘Friend, we have a better place for you!' Then you will be honored in front of all the other guests. 11 For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Jesus's advice has a note of social strategy in it, but it also points to the goal of salvation. Epictetus's counsel does not rely on vindication in the afterlife but argues that the individual will be better off in this life without the entanglements that come from desiring status, fame, or glory.
Another cross-over is found in Enchiridion 33 (“Refuse to swear oaths, altogether if possible, or otherwise as circumstances allow.”) and Matthew 5 (“34 But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; 35 or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. 36 And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. 37 All you need to say is simply ‘Yes' or ‘No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”)

Reading this as a Catholic, I was surprised at how much maps onto Christian doctrine. There is a difference, though, in that the Stoic philosophy, presented in the Enchiridion, does not mention God or an afterlife.

As a practical guide to living, the Encheiridion has a lot of merits. The counsel to use reason and reframe things in ways that do not engage the passions is good. It is always better to be charitable than not. I have offered Stoic advice to clients who want to escalate litigation into other venues and forums. A lot of client attention is drawn to how they are being treated by their opposing parties or counsel. My approach is usually to advise the client that engaging in retaliation or merely giving attention to the other side makes their life worse since they have no control over the other side.

Likewise, on the internet or in public engagements, a lot of effort is spent on controlling what other people think or what they say. Under Stoic principles, this effort is doomed to failure. The best way to approach the outrage that people claim to experience from alleged racism or homophobia would be for them to exercise control over their judgment and reactions. If fear of death can be overcome by indifference, then fear of homophobia and racism should be no problem.

Footnotes:

[1] His life spanned from the lives of St. Paul and the early Christian Church to the second generation of the Church, such as Ignatius of Antioch and Clement of Rome.
[2] Arrian is also famous for “The Anabasis of Alexander,” which is considered the best source on the campaigns of Alexander the Great.
[3] There is a hint of Krishna's discussion of duty with Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita.

2023-04-03T00:00:00.000Z
Ninth House

Ninth House

By
Leigh Bardugo
Leigh Bardugo
Ninth House

Ninth House (Alex Stern 1) by Leigh Bardugo

https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/book-review-ya-urban-fantasy-necromancers-at-yale-3c8dd7e6a030

Alex Stern is a street kid from California. She is not Ivy League material: she uses drugs, lives with her loser drug-dealer boyfriend, and, occasionally services the men who her loser boyfriend wants to impress. She also sees ghosts.

Although sharing reality with ghosts has been a burden for her, it turns out that it is a talent that equips her for a full ride at Yale. It turns out that those well-connected “secret societies” at Princeton, such as Skull and Bones, are not just the follies of wealth snobs who make connections that they use for self-advancement for the rest of their life; they are also covens of magicians who trade their talents for influence in the real world.

One of the problems with magic is that it attracts ghosts, which can interfere with the magical rites. Since most people can't see ghosts, Alex is a perfect fit to join the ninth secret society, which ensures that the other eight don't abuse their powers.

Alex arrives as a Freshman and has to learn how to navigate lives as a Yale student and as a Dante - an apprentice in the House of Lethe - under the mentorship of a Vergil, namely, the cultured and experienced upper classmate named Darlington.

Then Darlington disappears, a murder occurs on Yale property, and Alex is pitched into the politics of Yale society and the secret societies.

This is Young Adult Urban Fantasy. It has the required elements of YA Fantasy, e.g., the hero is going through a life transition from childhood and life as an adult; she is put into an occult world that lies just behind the normal world; her quest is to learn what she must learn to survive this occult world; her new society is structured and organized in some way; and she has a special gift. These elements were all there and were presented entertainingly and engagingly.

What I particularly liked was the setting. Bardugo went to Yale and was a Wolf's Head secret society member. Bardugo knows Yale and the secret societies and their tombs. So, she writes with knowledge of the physical geography and backstory. Urban Fantasies should be about the occult - the hidden world lying just behind the mundane. Bardugo's knowledge of Yale allows her to present a realistic picture of the Yale everyone sees and the vision of what might be happening behind the walls.

Alex Stern is a fun character. She has some of the egregious “boss girl” attitudes of girl heroes. On the other hand, Alexa's character arc involves learning and improving rather than gliding effortlessly through troubles.

This books sets up the mystery, solves it, and sets up a second mystery for book two, which I intend to read.

2023-04-01T00:00:00.000Z
Dark Harvest

Dark Harvest

By
Will Jordan
Will Jordan
Dark Harvest

Dark Harvest by Will Jordan

https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/book-review-dark-harvest-is-a-first-rate-thriller-830db1d98c80

This is a page-turner, or, whatever the equivalent is when you listen to it as an audiobook.

Will Jordan offers the Youtube video channel known as the Critical Drinker. He opines about science fiction, fantasy, and gaming offerings. I have found his opinions to be invariably insightful and informative. His usual complaint about modern stories is that they either don't make the character engaging or they don't present the story conflict in a way that captures the readers' attention.

This book shows he can practice what he preaches.

The story opens with a girl returning a crystal to a cave. It then shifts to Cameron Becker, a former American Special Ops soldier turned private contractor. Becker's team is ambushed, the person it was hired to protect is kidnapped. Becker then pursues the kidnappers across the desert where he wanders into a town of zombies. At the same time, Lori Dalton, a WHO communicable disease medical specialist, is investigating the town. The signs are that the zombie outbreak is a virus tailored by terrorists.

From that point, Becker and Dalton are chasing after the virus in an effort to prevent it from being unleashed on the world. The action is high-level, with enough breaks for the reader to get to know Becker and Dalton. We get involved with Becker and Dalton and care about them as they run through the maze to figure out what the virus is, how to stop it, and where to find the antidote. The character moments do not get in the way of the action, which merits this book being a worthy entry in the “thriller” category. My attention to the story did not flag.

2023-03-26T00:00:00.000Z
Cover 1

The Obscurity of Scripture

The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity

By
Casey Chalk
Casey Chalk
Cover 1

The Obscurity of Scripture by Casey Chalk

Author Casey Chalk provides a valuable insight into the Reformation's core doctrine. This doctrine is called the “perspicuity of scripture” (“PS.”)[1] In “Christianity's Dangerous Idea,” Protestant theologian Alister McGrath claims that “private interpretation” — a doctrine closely related to the PS doctrine — is the key concept that underlies Protestantism. For McGrath, Protestantism is explained by “private interpretation” more than the official doctrines of sola fide and sola scriptura because private interpretation explains the changing, fissiparous, almost coreless nature of Protestantism qua Protestantism.

McGrath asks the question, “what is Protestantism.” His answer is that Protestantism is a “method” by which believers constantly examine their assumptions against the Bible and are willing to jettison or modify their beliefs without regard to the conclusions reached by prior generations. As such, McGrath feels, Protestantism is a uniquely democratic engine of adaptation, mutation and evolution. McGrath is quite explicit in his use of biological metaphors, particularly evolutionary metaphors, to describe Protestantism. (See e.g., p. 466 (“The capacity to adapt is the birthright of Protestantism.”); p. 463 (“One pattern that emerges from the development of Protestantism is what seems to be an endless cycle of birth, maturing, aging and death, leading to renewal and reformulation.”); p. 400 (“Protestantism is not a static entity, but a living entity whose identity mutates over time. Yet that mutation leads to a variety of outcomes — among which some flourish and others wither.”).)


This is not the intention of Protestants. If you speak to Protestant apologists, they will explain that the differences between the various denominations are not material and that all agree on a common set of doctrines essential for salvation. However, if that is the case, one must wonder why there are any denominational differences. In my experience with Protestant apologists, the perspicuity of scripture is treated as a faith proposition rather than an empirical fact. Again, this is strange because there is no Christian doctrine with better empirical support than that scripture is not perspicuous; the proof is found in the disagreement over scripture.

At this point, terminology should be explained. “Sola Scriptura” (“SS”) is the doctrine that teaches that all Christian doctrines are to be found exclusively in the text of the Bible accepted by Protestants.[2] A subsidiary doctrine is mentioned by Alister McGrath, i.e., the doctrine of private interpretation. The PS Doctrine is the doctrine that some or most of the Bible — but particularly those portions dealing with salvation — can be comprehended by uneducated people with ordinary means and reason. [3] Chalk mentions correspondence between English Reformer William Whitaker and Cardinal Bellarmine, defining perspicuity of scripture as follows:

In contrast to what he viewed as Catholic misrepresentations of clarity, Whitaker offered three principles of the doctrine: (1) that the Bible is clear enough to be read even by the unlearned with “some fruit and utility”; (2) that all that is “necessary to salvation” is plainly communicated in the Bible; and (3) that the Bible needs “explication” by God's ministers, who are “the men best skilled in scripture [to be] consulted.”[4]

Chalk, Casey. The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (p. 87). Emmaus Road Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Chalk explains that doctrines of private interpretation and perspicuity of scripture are required by the doctrine of Sola Scriptura. Luther claimed that if a doctrine were not clear to him from scripture alone, he would not change his understanding of scripture. Luther ruled out anything but scripture as the basis of determining doctrine other than his personal or private understanding of what the biblical text said.[5] Luther, therefore, established the underlying principle of the Reformation, to wit:

The Reformation, and, by extension, the Protestant paradigm, is predicated on the premise that individual Christians are better judges of scriptural meaning than any higher ecclesial authority. This premise explains Luther's refusal to acknowledge historic Church councils that came to different conclusions from him regarding the interpretation of the Bible, as well as the actions of other Reformers who rebelled from Rome on what they termed biblical grounds. As the Calvinist confessional document, the Westminster Confession of Faith teaches: “All synods or councils since the apostles' times, whether general or particular, may err, and many have erred; therefore they are not to be made the rule of faith or practice, but to be used as a help in both.”

Chalk, Casey. The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (pp. 65–66). Emmaus Road Publishing. Kindle Edition.

In rejecting the institutional church in the name of his understanding, Luther necessarily privileged individual autonomy (as opposed to championing another authority structure.)[6]

The Reformation, at its very center, sought to liberate individual Christians from what was perceived as an overbearing, corrupt, intellectually lazy, and doctrinally erroneous Catholic Church. Against this, Luther, Calvin, and the other Reformers preached the autonomy of the individual Christian, including as it relates to biblical interpretation and the contents of the canon. This individual autonomy only makes sense if Scripture is in some sense perspicuous.

Chalk, Casey. The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (p. 68). Emmaus Road Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Private interpretation and the PS doctrine are entailed doctrines — private interpretation is possible only if scripture is perspicuous; if scripture is perspicuous, then private interpretation is possible, and no one's interpretation can be presumed more authoritative than anyone else's. Perspicuity is primary because if it is true, then it is the basis of the other doctrines, and it is the only one that presumably exists outside the biased and flawed mind of the believer. Chalk explains:

Without perspicuity, Protestants can have no confidence of their salvation. Perspicuity is thus the foundational, if unspoken tenet of Protestantism, a premise that is operative in all other prominent doctrines, including sola scriptura and sola fide. Without perspicuity, sola scriptura is useless, because the individual Christian cannot divine the Bible's clear teachings. Without perspicuity, sola fide is only one of multiple, competing understandings of how the Christian is saved. And if sola fide is not the default, unquestioned soteriological biblical teaching, then ecclesiology, including the Christian's ability to determine which churches are legitimate, also becomes obscured. Without perspicuity, it becomes impossible for Protestants to even attempt a biblical theology that aspires to coherency. Without perspicuity, Protestants cannot identify what they believe to be true, authentic Christianity. It is a way for Protestants to attempt to foist a level of objectivity upon a system that by its very nature descends into subjectivity.

Chalk, Casey. The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (p. 70). Emmaus Road Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The question that needs to be answered is whether scripture is perspicuous in a sense necessary for private interpretation and sola scriptura.

Unlike other doctrines, this one seems to be empirically testable. For example, if scripture were lucid and clear in some sense on some important subject, then we would expect to see no disagreements on those subjects. However, as Alister McGrath points out, agreement is not a Protestant virtue. One ought to conclude that perspicuity is not a substantial feature of scripture.[7]

Given this problem, Protestant apologists resort to various strategies to square the circle. One strategy is to take offense at the notion that God has failed in his ability to communicate. Chalk points out that this approach begs the question:

Sproul rhetorically asks, “What kind of a God would reveal his love and redemption in terms so technical and concepts so profound that only an elite corps of professional scholars could understand them?”12 There are, however, certain unproven premises built into this line of argumentation. The first is that in inspiring the authors of various books of the Bible, God intended His words to be so clear that individuals who read them will require no recourse to an interpretive authority in order to intuit their meaning on essential matters. Yet this is precisely what is debated between Catholics and Protestants as it relates to perspicuity and is thus a form of question-begging. The second has to do with the recipient of God's communication, namely man. Even if one were to grant the unproven presumption that God intends for readers of Scripture to understand its meaning absent an interpretive, arbitrating authority, those readers must be properly disposed to understand it. Yet, as the Reformation-era example of Bellarmine and Whitaker and the modern example of Arendt demonstrate, clarity may still be thwarted by the disposition of the reader or auditor.[8]

Chalk, Casey. The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (p. 101). Emmaus Road Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Another strategy is to rank texts by importance to a central doctrine — sola fide — and find a canon within a canon. Chalk observes:

One option, which is visible in Luther's theology, is to create a tiered, hierarchical structure to Scripture, including the “canon within a canon,” and identify those passages that most “clearly” articulate what he deemed to be the Bible's “evangelical” witness. Thus passages that seem to affirm the reality of human agency are interpreted in light of other passages that seem to prioritize God's sovereignty and diminish man's independent will.

Chalk, Casey. The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (p. 110). Emmaus Road Publishing. Kindle Edition.

This is question-begging and circular argumentation.[9] How does one decide a priori that there is such a canon within a canon? In view of Sola Scriptura, where is that said in scripture? It is something that has to be explained by someone claiming some authority outside of scripture.[10]

A further approach is to cherry-pick the points of agreement among fellow travelers and rule out those who disagree as “fringe” or non-Christian. Chalk observes:

The perspicuity of Scripture cannot be demonstrated or confirmed by creating an ad hoc interpretive “consensus” of like-minded Protestants. Traditionalist Methodists or conservative Presbyterians cannot declare Scripture clear on certain teachings simply by finding like-minded fellow-travelers and re-drawing the boundaries of their ecclesial organisms to exclude progressive Methodists or liberal Presbyterians. To again cite Bryan Cross's analogy, this is simply to draw a target around one's interpretive arrow and call this exegetical uniformity.55

Chalk, Casey. The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (p. 119). Emmaus Road Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Yet another approach is to redefine the scope of perspicuity until it becomes a broad statement about “those things necessary for salvation.” But what does this mean in practice? Does it include sola fide? Catholics deny Sola Fide. So, it seems like that can't be perspicuous.[11]

This conundrum leads to a behavior of Protestant apologists that I can confirm from personal experience, namely, in insisting that something is “clear,” Protestant apologists are often caused to accuse those who deny the points they clearly derive from scripture of being in bad faith, sinners, or corrupted by sin. Chalk writes:

These three allegations — ignorance, sin, and Satan — have remained common from the Reformation to present-day Protestantism. Any rebuff might trigger a rhetorical rant, peppered with angry insults or assertions based on personal experience that often replace textual evidence.29 This is certainly visible in the example of Zwingli, who accused his interpretive opponents of being “so tightly sewn up in their ass's hide.”

Chalk, Casey. The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (p. 171). Emmaus Road Publishing. Kindle Edition.

This approach goes back to the beginning of the Reformation:

Only a few years after Luther's initial protest against Rome, opinions about the Bible and religious practice were already diverging in significant ways, as is evidenced by the German theology professor's increasingly acrimonious relationship with former ally Karlstadt, who was eventually banished from the Electorate of Saxony with Luther's approval.21 Within a few decades, any hope for a consensus among Protestants had already evaporated. What consensus did materialize often had more to do with political realities — namely, that “magisterial Protestants” such as Lutherans and Calvinists enjoyed secular political support that enabled them to marginalize the radical Reformers — than broad-based religious agreement at the popular level.22 Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli offered three allegations against their interpretive opponents which became normative for Protestants in trying to explain the dilemma of why others came to different conclusions over a supposedly simple and clear Bible. The first was to charge their interlocutors with lacking the intellectual acumen to interpret Scripture rightly. This shares much overlap with what Christian Smith calls the “noetically-damaged-reader” option, meaning that sin has affected humanity's ability to grasp intellectually the clear teaching of Scripture.

Chalk, Casey. The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (p. 168). Emmaus Road Publishing. Kindle Edition.

It should be noted that the Protestant and Catholic positions are not symmetrical. Catholics can accept Protestant error more complacently since they don't expect scripture to be perspicacious necessarily. Protestants, though, are obligated to believe that Catholics are denying a clear and obvious interpretation. Chalk explains:

In every debate, both sides presume their foes to be in some sense ignorant, whether regarding the information they know or their ability to make logical connections. However, for those adhering to perspicuity, their interlocutor is ignorant in reference to what should be simple and clear. It is not that one's interlocutor is ignorant regarding something complex or difficult, and perhaps by no fault of his or her own, but that he or she is either intellectually or morally deficient in failing to perceive the obvious. The adherent to perspicuity, according to his or her own paradigm, is arguing with someone who has failed to appreciate that the sky is blue. Suffice it to say for now that if we do not presume Scripture to be so clear that even the simple can intuit its plain meaning on matters of salvation, then we need not presume that those holding erroneous biblical interpretations are stupid or sinful. Rather, those who err in their interpretation may do so simply because they lack the divinely given authority to interpret the Bible properly. Those who interpret Scripture wrongly — even considered from the Catholic paradigm — may still do so as a result of ignorance, sin, or demonic deception. But one need not presume it, because Scripture is not so clear that any person can interpret it properly without recourse to a God-given authority.

Chalk, Casey. The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (pp. 173–174). Emmaus Road Publishing. Kindle Edition.

It seems obvious that whatever “perspicuity” the scriptures have, it is not sufficient to generate consensus.

So, what is the alternative?

Chalk describes the Catholic approach, which involves reading the text within the community of the Church:

The Catholic interpretive paradigm is not, as some Protestant caricatures would suggest, a model where lay Catholics are dissuaded from reading and interpreting Scripture on their own, or where they are told only a single, authoritative reading of particular verses is permitted.31 The Catholic Church holds Holy Scripture in the highest regard and gives her preeminent place among her other authoritative sources (holy Tradition, the magisterium). The Bible, read, heard, and understood in the liturgical practices of the Church, is central to Catholic theology and worship.32 Individual Catholics are exhorted to study the Bible, both in the context of the liturgy and in their personal lives. Yet personal study of Holy Scripture is intimately wedded both to Sacred Tradition and the magisterial teaching of the Church, both of which serve as exegetical guardrails, preventing Catholics from interpreting the Bible in manners contrary to Catholic dogma.33 Catholic biblical interpretation is truly reading the text in community, a community that possesses a veritable authority that guides the individual Christian “in any way concerning the salvation of your soul,” writes St. Thomas More.34 Within these authoritative strictures, there is still the potential to always approach the text afresh, uniting Tradition and the magisterium with the contemporary complexities of the world, and deciphering new spiritual, practical, and even doctrinal insights. Indeed, such has been consistently encouraged over the course of Church history by such churchmen as St. Vincent of Lérins and St. John Henry Newman in their explication of the principle of the development of doctrine. The Catholic concept of text in community offers the best, most coherent means of interpreting the Bible in a manner that remains faithful to orthodox teaching while leaving room for readings that are both fresh and address challenging new questions and crises that arise.

Chalk, Casey. The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (pp. 225–226). Emmaus Road Publishing. Kindle Edition.

This book is logical and well-written. It is clear and lucid. I have been looking for something that would address the issues of private interpretation and perspicuity of scripture in a systematic way. I was not

2023-03-20T00:00:00.000Z
Meditations

The Meditations

By
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius,
Martin Hammond
Martin Hammond(Translator)
Meditations

The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/book-review-the-meditations-by-marcus-aurelius-e8fcf6af943c


Marcus Aurelius (“Marcus”) ruled the Roman Empire from 161 CE to 180 CE. He was born in 121 CE and is considered the last emperor of Rome's Imperial Golden Age.

Marcus was adopted into the Imperial line of succession, but he knew from an early age that he was destined to rule. This destiny may or may not have inspired his interest in Stoic philosophy; most scions destined for rule don't take an interest in a philosophy of self-restraint. Marcus, though, was nicknamed “Verissimus” – the boy who could not tell a lie. It seems that Marcus had a bent toward Stoicism from a young age.

The Meditations consist of Marcus's daily reflections. It is Marcus's philosophical diary. Marcus may have been writing the Meditations from the time before he was emperor as well as during the time he ruled the Roman Empire. His frequent statements that he lacked time to study philosophy indicate that he was writing The Meditations while campaigning as emperor.

It is fascinating and unfortunate that the Meditations may be the most intimate text we have written by a Roman empire, but it is bereft of any details concerning Marcus or his life. There is nothing that betrays the fact that Marcus was ruling an empire and fighting wars while writing the Meditations. I am tempted to think that when Marcus finds a theme to chide himself with – e.g., showing more patience or being a better judge of character – he is probably thinking of a specific event that happened to him that day. However, the text is opaque and does not give a clue about what that event was.

The Meditations are far more religious than the works of Seneca and Epictetus that I've read. Stoicism was more than ethics; it had a holistic approach to the big metaphysical questions such as the purpose of life, the origin of the world, the role of the divine, and other questions. These have a religious feel to them, and, in fact, Marcus refers to Stoic doctrines. A lot of Marcus's philosophical observations on these topics can be compared to Christian doctrines. Whether one drew from the other or both from a common source is not clear to me at this time.

I thought it would be interesting to prepare a compare/contrast of Stoic and Christian doctrines. My definitions in the “doctrine” category are inexact since the Marcus quotations often cover more than one subject and my concern may be with just part of the quotation. Also, Stoicism maps on to Christian variants like Gnosticism, so there is slippage in the concepts. If you have better ways of formulating the issues, let me know.

[Table Omitted] https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/book-review-the-meditations-by-marcus-aurelius-e8fcf6af943c

Marcus's religious views can be summarized as: Ultimate reality is the Cosmos, or the Whole. Everything comes from the Whole and will return to the Whole. Because everything comes from the Whole, Everything has the purpose of serving the Whole and, incidentally, everything else that is part of the Whole. The Whole is rational. Rational beings possess rationality as a part of the Whole. Since everything is a part of the Whole, everything that happens is planned by the Whole and therefore for the good of the Whole. Since the Whole is greater than its parts, anything that happens is for the good of the Whole which is the good of the parts.

2023-03-16T00:00:00.000Z
Murmuring Against Moses: The Contentious History and Contested Future of Pentateuchal Studies

Murmuring Against Moses: The Contentious History and Contested Future of Pentateuchal Studies

By
John Bergsma
John Bergsma,
Jeffrey Morrow
Jeffrey Morrow
Murmuring Against Moses: The Contentious History and Contested Future of Pentateuchal Studies

Murmuring against Moses by John S. Bergsma Jeffrey L. Morrow

https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/who-wrote-the-bible-df268d4f0e28

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.

2023-03-14T00:00:00.000Z
Porphyry: On Aristotle Categories

Porphyry: On Aristotle Categories

By
Porphyry
Porphyry,
Steven K. Strange
Steven K. Strange(Translator)
Porphyry: On Aristotle Categories

Porphyry: On Aristotle Categories (Ancient Commentators on Aristotle)

https://medium.com/market-for-ideas/socialism-is-about-envy-496947dbb166

After reading Aristotle's Categories and On Interpretation, I decided to read a commentary on one or both texts. I wasn't aware of any commentary on these texts written by the Angelic Doctor (although I have learned is one for On Interpretation, which was begun by St. Thomas and finished by Cardinal Cajetan.) I decided to go outre and pick up the one on Categories by the third-century pagan (and anti-Christian) Neo-Platonic philosopher Porphyry of Tyre.

I had assumed that reading Porphyry would be a difficult slog. Porphyry's commentary was accessible and entertaining. The commentary is written as a dialogue between Porphyry and a hypothetical student. This framework allows Porphyry to flag where he is going in nice bite-size pieces. The “student'” contribution usually consists of saying, “you have explained this very well,” but occasionally, the student challenges Porphyry on some topic. If the reader is following, the “student” becomes a quasi-character to access the narrative.

Porphyry is an interesting historical figure. He was born in 234 AD and died in 305 AD., the year of Diocletian's abdication of the imperial throne, an event that would lead in short order to the Christian hegemony over the Roman empire. During Porphyry's lifetime, Christianity became a powerful challenge to the hegemony of paganism. He was alive during Diocletian's persecution of Christianity and died about ten years before Constantine took control of the Roman empire.

Porphyry criticized Christianity. His critiques were very effective. They were based on his knowledge of the text of the Old Testament and his knowledge that Christianity was dependent on the Old Testament. He was an astute literary critic. One of his accomplishments was determining that the Book of Daniel had been written in the second-century BC and not in the sixth-century BC. As such, the “prophecies” of Daniel were debunked as mere history. Porphyry's anti-Christian works were largely destroyed during the reign of Constantine, but extracts survived in Christian rebuttals to Porphyry. Book 19 of Augustine's City of God analyzes and rebuts Porphyry. Augustine described Porphyry as the “most learned of philosophers, although one of the fiercest enemies of Christians.”

Porphyry was a disciple and student of the Neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus. Porphyry collected Plotinus's writings into the Enneads, which are well-known to fans of classic philosophy. Porphyry lived an ascetic lifestyle. Robert Louis Wilken points out that becoming a philosopher involved a conversion process whereby a lifestyle of asceticism and virtue was adopted. In that regard, it seems Christianity and philosophy had much in common.

In his commentary, Porphyry deals with the conflict between Aristotle and Plato casually. Aristotle made particular things primary instances of being; Plato made universal things primary. Porphyry deals with this conflict by treating Aristotle's focus on the particular as a focus on words. Porphyry can thereby ignore Aristotle's contradictory ontological focus as a matter of grammar. (P 74.)

Reading this commentary allowed me to have a second look at the material. Porphyry follows Categories closely but pays attention to some details that went past me on the first read. The details were there, but Porphyry's treatment brought those details into focus.

For example, I had not considered the significance of the title, “Categories.” I assumed that “Category” referred to the ten classes that Aristotle had defined for nouns and predicates. However, “kategoria” denoted the speech the prosecution gives against someone at trial, which is opposed by the defendant's speech (“apologia.”) Porphyry argues that Aristotle “chose to call those utterances in which significant expressions are applied to things “predications” (kategoria.)” A predication is a simpler significant (signifying(?)) expression is employed and said of what it signifies, such as pointing to a stone and saying “this.” So, “category” means “predication” and comes from the prosecutor's speech where the prosecutor points to the defendant, so to speak, and predicates various things about him.

For Porphyry, the ten categories are about words, which are in turn, about things. (“pragmata.”) “Beings are comprehended by the ten generic differentiae.” (p. 34.) “Words are like messengers that report to us about things, and they get their generic differentiae from things about which they report.” (p. 35.) Words are divided into nouns and verbs. Nouns are things; verbs contain an element of time and are about nouns.
Words can also be defined by comparing and contrasting their sounds and definitions into Homonyms, Synonyms, Paronyms, and Heteronyms. These terms become important later when Porphyry discusses the nine accidental categories. The differences can be diagrammed as follows:

Classification Similarity of Words Similarity of Definition/Description

Homonym Same Different
Synonym Same Same
Polyonym Different Same
Heteronym Different Different
Paronym Different grammatical forms Same root

“Common” is a homonym since it can mean something divisible into parts or used by several people without division. “Ajax, son of Telamon” and “Ajax, son of Oeleus” both have the name Ajax in common, but the name “Ajax” has different definitions in both cases. Another kind of homonym involves an image and the subject of the image. We can point to King Charles and a painting of King Charles and say, “that is King Charles.”

Polyonyms have multiple words for a single meaning, e.g., sword, blade, sabre, etc.

Paronyms get their names from a word but use a different grammatical ending, e.g., grammar, grammarian.

Synonyms have a common definition, albeit the definition may not be obvious. Porphyry calls “man” and “ox” synonyms insofar as they are both animals.

Porphyry moves on to the “said of or found in” distinction. His treatment of this is far clearer and more explicit than Aristotle's. Porphyry explicitly defines those things that are “found in” a subject as “accidents and that thing “said of” as universals. Thus, we get a diagram of the “four categories” based on accidents and universals:

The next subject is “differentiae.” Differentiae differ in genus, e.g., the difference between having two feet and four feet for animals. The differentiae are predicated of several different things and, therefore, constitutes a species. (P. 67.)

This takes the reader to the “ten ultimate categories” and the genera, species, and genus in each.

Substance is the single highest genus of substances. Nothing is prior to substance. The remaining nine categories are accidents that exist parasitically on substance. (p. 77, 78.) There is no contradictory/contrary to substance, but substances are receptive to characteristics (Accidents) which are receptive of contradiction or contraries (and affected by the contraries, e.g., Socrates is sick/healthy. (p. 91.) There is nothing intermediate between substances and accidents. (p. 87, 89.)

The nine remaining categories are divided by Aristotle into units of three: “Of things said without any combination, each signifies, either substance or quantity or qualification or relative or where or when or position or having or doing or being affected.” (p. 73; 1b27-8.)

Porphyry discusses the categories in terms of “proprium” and “differentiae.” The nine categories are not susceptible of definition, but they can be classed by “proprium” which are attributes common to a category and only to that category. (p. 91.) Following his methods, Porphyry develops the following points that I've organized into a grid:

Quantity
- No contrary
- More/less not quantity
- Differentiae – Discrete and continuous
- Proprium – to be called equal/unequal
Relation
- Depends on something else.
- Always plural and correlative.
- Defined by paronyms e.g., grammar/grammarian
- Contraries exist.
- Proprium – to be in relation to correlatives.
- Relation exists in the relationship, not in the substance.(p. 133.)
Quality
- 4 species of quality: states/ conditions; capacity; Affected Qualities; shape.
- Affected qualities are permanent.
- Contrariety exists in Quality.
- Negative states exist in Quality
- Proprium: Similarity and Dissimilarity.
Where
- Parasitic upon Quantity. (p. 158.)
- Requires “Place” which is a Quantity. When
- Parasitic upon Quantity. (p. 158.)
- Requires “Time” which is a Quantity. (p. 158.() Position
- “Position” refers to the position of a body as named by paronyms, e.g., to sit, to stand, to lie down.
- Sitting is a Relative.
Having Doing Being affected.
- “Being affected” involves temporary reactions, such as being frightened or shocked.

Porphyry describes the Categories as a beginning text in the class of logic. There is plenty of logical conundrums here. For example, knowledge is a Relation because there has to be someone with knowledge and some knowledge to be known. Some philosophers distinguished between general knowledge as a relation and specific knowledge as a quality. If that is unconvincing, Porphyry allows that knowledge could be both.

Likewise, perception is a Relation since there must be a perceiver and something perceived. The perceived is prior in this Relation since the perceived will exist without a perceiver, but one cannot be a perceiver without the perceived.

And that sounds like an answer to the question of the tree falling in the forest without someone to hear it.

Philosophy can be practical.

2023-03-12T00:00:00.000Z
Beyond the Burn Line

Beyond the Burn Line

By
Paul McAuley
Paul McAuley
Beyond the Burn Line

Beyond the Burn Line by Paul McAuley

https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/science-fiction-and-deep-time-dc11ec8b81a3

I can be entranced by the concept of “Deep Time.” For example, anthropologists now think (or speculate) that human beings were trapped between Siberia and Alaska for “thousands of years,” specifically for ten to twenty thousand years.

We have a tendency to let our eyes glide past numbers like “twenty-thousand years” without any particular emotional reaction, thinking, perhaps, “Hmm....interesting. Now what's the next point I need to know?” But I invite you to meditate on that number. Our recorded history – the history that we can kind of piece together with records and structures – goes back maybe 6,000 years ago. The pyramids were built 4,500 years ago. Tack on another 1,000 years and we wonder what was going on.

Then turn your attention to the Beringerian Standstill – twenty-thousand years! Three times as long as we have history. For three times longer than earliest pharaohs, there was a population of humans that could not leave this godforsaken sliver of land. Eventually, they did, at which time they populated North America.

Or consider human prehistory which goes back 100,000 years. What were people doing in their small bands as they wandered across the face of Europe and Asia? How could they not have settled down sooner and started farming and cities. Why didn't they start ten-thousand years sooner? It seems like a short time, but it is twice as long as the time that brought us from stone tools to spaceships.

I purchased “Beyond the Burn Line” by Paul McAuley because it promised that deep time perspective. The book is set after the extinction of humanity. Another intelligent species (the “People”) have evolved intelligence, but they were not the first since humanity. After humans and before the People, there was a species of intelligent Bears. The People know about humans – who they call “ogres” – from the fossils that lie underneath a layer of burned soil.

With that setting, I assumed that the book was set perhaps several hundred million years in the future, given the amount of time that it would take to evolve human intelligence. I wasn't sure how McAuley was going to work a story set in a completely post-human setting. Stories that are exclusively alien in perspective lack a connection with readers. It can be done if the aliens are anthropomorphized with human virtues that engage the reader, but a story that was really about real aliens would be incomprehensible.

Beyond the Burn Line is organized into two connected parts. In the first part, we follow an apprentice scholar named Pilgrim Saltmire. Pilgrim's master has died at the outset of the book and Pilgrim is turned out by the heirs. Pilgrim makes it his mission to prove his master's controversial theory that UFO's are real. At various places around the known world, individual members of the People have been visited by flying, glowing ships that carry Visitors who bear a resemblance to the Ogres.
The People's society is going through an industrial/scientific revolution. Trains have been invented. Traditional agrarian clan societies are being disrupted. A class of scholarship is sharing information. In this world, Pilgrim returns to his clan, has some adventures, is exiled to the frozen south – which is a clue about where the story is set – and discovers a key to the Visitors.

In the course of this story, we learn that humans have been extinct for “only” two-hundred thousand years and that the intelligent Bears were overthrown by the People eight hundred years before when a plague reduced Bear intelligence and made them feral.

That is a clue that something is going on which is not natural. Two-hundred thousand years is not enough time for the evolution of a new intelligent species, much less two. There is an explanation for this, but I will not spoil it here.

At the end of the first section, the mystery of the Visitors is solved. The second section is set forty years later. The Visitors play the viewpoint role in this section as we discover the answers to the mysteries that Visitors existence are disclosed. This section involves a Visitor who specializes in Visitor-People relations. Those relations have soured. In addition, the question of the plague that overthrew the Bears becomes important.

I enjoyed this book. McAuley is a good writer. I liked the characters. The action kept the story moving along. What kept me involved was the game of trying to figure out what was going on. When I got one answer, another one would be presented. My curiosity kept me turning pages.

I was not completely satisfied. I had hoped for much deeper time, but, obviously, given the answers to the mysteries presented, that would never work. In addition, new mysteries were raised at the end of the book that were not answered. It may be that McAuley intended to write a second book, but that left this book with the sense that some things were left hanging.

On the whole, this is an enjoyable science fiction book, but not a perfect one.

2023-03-07T00:00:00.000Z
In Defense of German Colonialism: And How Its Critics Empowered Nazis, Communists, and the Enemies of the West

In Defense of German Colonialism: And How Its Critics Empowered Nazis, Communists, and the Enemies of the West

By
Bruce Gilley
Bruce Gilley
In Defense of German Colonialism: And How Its Critics Empowered Nazis, Communists, and the Enemies of the West

In Defense of German Colonialism by Bruce Gilley

https://medium.com/@peterseanbradle/colonialism-reconsidered-188fcd7fe0ce

This is not the time to write an apology for colonialism. Western cultural elites have decided that colonialism is the worst phenomenon in human history. In this book, author Bruce Gilley explores the anti-colonialist narrative by examining German colonialism. If there is one nation tainted in the popular mind with every evil done in the name of racism, that nation would be Germany.
So, how does Gilley do? Extremely well. Gilley's presentation is eye-opening. After forty years of focusing exclusively on West's crimes - real or imagined - it is a ray of sunlight to see the other side of the ledger. 

Colonialism was part of the Western liberal agenda and the Enlightenment project. That project includes Voltaire lampooning superstition in the name of reason or the philosophes promoting new ways of doing things that improved hygiene and life options. The Enlightenment made a virtue out of innovation and progress against the tired hand of tradition. We cheer for the philosophes in their battle against superstition, even if it is a form of colonialism of the urban elite against the rural classes. This raises the question of why progress is good for the European peasantry but not for peasants in Africa or Asia.

Colonialism deserves fair consideration. We have to consider the entire record. I'm going to skim some of the hight points of Gilley's book with an emphasis on the points he makes to establish a balance in the lived reality of European colonialism.

One of the facts that anti-colonialists suppress is that colonialism saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of natives. AS Gilley points out, “Without doubt, Germany's greatest humanitarian contribution to Africa during its colonial period was the discovery of a cure for sleeping sickness.” Before German colonialism, hundreds of thousands of Africans would die of sleeping sickness each year. An outbreak from 1901–07 killed between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand people in British Uganda, and two million people succumbed in all of East Africa in 1903 alone. The colonial powers put together expeditions and policies that were unheard of previously to save natives. Gilley explains:

Between 1901 and 1913, fifteen medical-research missions came to Africa to study sleeping sickness. Under the International Sleeping Sickness Commission convened by colonial powers, German scientists under Koch identified the tsetse fly as the carrier of the disease. Next came methods to identify and isolate patients and to eliminate the tsetse fly's habitat. Germany and Britain agreed in 1908 to prevent infected Africans from crossing borders, and in 1911 they signed a cooperative agreement to combat sleeping sickness in West Africa. The Germans got results: in German East Africa between 1908 and 1911, 62 percent of the four thousand cases treated whose outcomes were known were healed using palliative drugs, a worthy achievement against a disease whose mortality rate was 80–90 percent. (p. 122.)

In 1910, Dr. Robert Koch discovered a cure for sleeping sickness, incidentally inventing “chemotherapy.” Koch also taught natives to use the resin of a native tree to caulk their boats. Previously, natives risked their lives to crocodile attacks while journeying across Lake Victory in fragile boats. 

Koch noticed an absence of innovation as a feature of all premodern societies that acted on tradition alone. The West brought the idea of innovation and experimentation to native cultures.
Koch also found a cure for rinderpest, a cattle disease that destroyed native populations dependent on cattle for food.

In 1896–97, a rinderpest epidemic struck the Herero and Nama region's cattle. The German administration drew a quarantine line dividing Hereroland from the northerly section of Ovamboland and built a 550-kilometer string of monitoring stations. Without German settlers to provide employment and food, a large part of the Herero population would have died of starvation and malnutrition. Certainly, the Nama and other groups would not have set up soup kitchens. South Africa's white-owned diamond companies paid for Robert Koch (then a little-known German scientist) to visit, and he quickly discovered an effective cattle vaccine that won him a Nobel prize in 1905.16 Veterinarians assigned to the German military garrison managed to vaccinate most of the Nama and settler herds because they were geographically concentrated. The Herero herds, by contrast, were greater in number and widely dispersed. Half of their cattle succumbed. (p. 46.)
Colonialism brought economic benefits to the colonized:

Islands offer an almost perfect natural experiment in colonialism's economic effects because their discovery by Europeans was sufficiently random. As a result, they should not have been affected by the “pull” factors that made some places easier to colonize than others. In a 2009 study of the effects of colonialism on the income levels of people on eighty-one islands, two Dartmouth College economists found “a robust positive relationship between colonial tenure and modern outcomes.”27 Bermuda and Guam are better off than Papua New Guinea and Fiji because they were colonized for longer. That helps explain why the biggest countries with limited or no formal colonial periods (especially China, Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Thailand, and Nepal) or whose colonial experiences ended before the modern colonial era (Brazil, Mexico, Guatemala, and Haiti) are hardly compelling as evidence that not being colonized was a boon. The people of “liberated” Haiti began fleeing to the colonial Bahamas or to the slave-owning and later-segregated American South almost as soon as they were “free” from the white man. One can applaud their sense of irony. (p. 17.) 

Colonialism brought political benefits to colonized people:

Colonialism also enhanced later political freedoms. To be colonized in the nineteenth–twentieth-century era was to have much better prospects for democratic government, according to a statistical study of 143 colonial episodes by the Swedish economist Ola Olsson in 2009.30 Since Germany's colonies were short-lived, sparse in number, and later folded into British and French colonies, Olsson's research could not identify the precise democratic contribution of German colonialism. However, what explained the democratic legacies of colonialism, he argued, was not particular national strategies but the more common European principles of free trade, humanitarianism, property rights, the rule of law, native uplift, and constraints on political executives, factors certainly present in the German colonies: “All this strongly suggests to us that colonization during the imperialist era, regardless of the nationality of the colonizer or the particular circumstances in the colonies, should be more conducive to current levels of democracy than colonialism under mercantilism.”31 The Danish political scientist Jacob Hariri, meanwhile, found in a study of 111 countries that those not colonized because of the existence of strong premodern state, or only symbolically ruled by Europeans piggybacking on traditional institutions, were more likely to be saddled with a dysfunctional state and political system later on. (p. 18–19.)

Gilley points out that Germany could not have ruled without the willing cooperation of the natives:
In 1904, the entire colonial government of German East Africa - a sprawling territory three times larger than Germany proper and populated by nearly eight million people - consisted of just 280 whites and 50 native civil servants.54 There were an additional 300 German or European soldiers. By 1913, the combined government and military staff of Germans totaled just 737.55 Native elites ran the colony, operating out of thirty government/military bomani.56 In population terms, the numbers are similar to what they would be if New Jersey was run by 320 civil servants (New Jersey had 432,000 state and local employees in 2019). By 1914, the number of German and European soldiers had decreased to 200, alongside 2,500 enlisted native soldiers (askari). (p. 76–77.)

Slavery was endemic to Africa. Germany was committed to the anti-slavery program of the Enlightenment and successfully ended slavery in its territories:

Anti-slavery policies, which had been a key factor in the decision to formally take over the colony, slowly eroded the power of local slaving interests. But there were some unforeseen difficulties. As early as 1891, the then governor Julius von Soden remarked that one of the main obstacles to abolition was that slaves would rather remain in their current state than become “free laborers” on a plantation, where they would have to work harder.32 The German diplomat Heinrich Brode noted that slaves were considered part of the family in most instances and given only light work while “domestic servants at home appear much greater slaves than the natives who bear this name.”33 Therefore, German policy adopted a gradualist approach, eradicating slavery with a combination of incentives and economic development. In 1904, a new colonial policy stated that all children born to slaves from 1906 on were to be regarded as free. Moreover, between 1891 and 1912, 52,000 slaves were freed by legal, social, and financial means.34 Through these efforts, coupled with the growth of the capitalist economy that made it more profitable to hire labor, the roughly one million slaves in the area at the time of German colonization in 1890 fell to two hundred thousand by 1914 and would disappear entirely by the 1920s. (p. 68–69.)

Germany also engaged in helpful social work that makes no sense if Germany was purely about racist exploitation. In public education, Germany taught the natives in Swahili:

Perhaps the most important development was the Africanization of the government through Swahili-language schools that trained native colonial administrators. By 1910, there were 3,494 elementary and 681 middle- and upper-school students in the state schools, compared to only 1,196 in the mission schools. Roughly 6,100 in total passed through the state schools from 1902 to 1914. In neighboring British Kenya and Uganda, by contrast, there were still no state schools. “The Germans have accomplished marvels,” a British report on the colony's education concluded in 1924.27 (p. 67.) 

Germany came into the colonial game late. Germany had colonies in Togo, Tanzania, Southwest Africa (Namibia), and German Samoa. German colonization inspired great loyalty among the natives, who often fought for the Germans or went into exile when Germany lost its colonies.
The “Herrero Genocide” is a potential black mark on Germany's cultural legacy. Gilley denies that a genocide occurred. The Herrero were part of the Bantu expansion that wiped out the indigenous Khoisan tribes. In fights for territory, the Nama had massacred a fifth of the Herero population in 1850. In turn, the Herero replaced and enslaved other tribes. In 1904, after being allied with the Germans, the Herero decided to include the Germans in Namibia's tradition of genocide with the slogan “kill all Germans” as Herero began to kill German settlers. Berlin sent in Lothar von Trotha to suppress the Herero.

Gilley writes:

By the time the rebellions ended in 1906, the officially enumerated Herero population in the colony had fallen by 75 percent from eighty thousand to twenty thousand. The officially enumerated population of the Nama had fallen by half from twenty thousand to ten thousand. In addition to 150 murdered settlers, the Germans counted their losses at 1,400 dead and another 1,000 wounded or missing. (p. 52.)

This is impressive, but the problem is that populations in the area that were not at war also saw their numbers fall by similar amounts. The explanations for these population declines included migration away from the conflict zone, falls in female fertility, increased mortality because of the disruptions of the conflict, epidemics, food supply disruption, and problems with taking a census.
The disappearance of thirty thousand from the census rolls does not explain why those people disappeared.

Gilley argues that Germany's colonial project enhanced German democracy at home. The Reichstag was given a great deal of control over the colonial project. The colonial establishment was home to German liberals.

Gilley also argues that the seizure of the colonies led to Germany's embrace of National Socialism. The Nazis were anti-colonialists. They did not believe that Germany should go to places far removed from Germany to bring progress to other races. Nazi anti-colonialism.[1] Hitler wanted a free hand in Europe. He rejected Chamberlain's offer to return Cameroon and East Africa to Germany. The Nazis forged alliances with other anti-colonial race chauvinists in Inda, Africa, and the Middle East. As Gilley points out:

Parochialism, racism, and illiberalism were after all the natural positions for all anti-colonialists. Hitler referred to nationalists in India like Gandhi as his “natural allies.” (P. 204.) This anti-colonialist alliance had its most enduring impact in the Middle East where Arab political parties were based on fascism and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a devotee of Hitler.

Gilley points out that the anti-colonialists drawn to Hitler were like many later anti-colonialists. The extent of their anti-colonial agenda was “handing over power from reforming, liberal, colonial systems to reactionary fascist ones where they would receive the salutes from the podium.” (p. 213.)

This was a surface skim of the book. Gilley offers details and data that balance the ledger against the prevailing narrative of oppression and racism. He is also an engaging writer. The Leftwing narrative is a moralistic, Manichaean morality play, and Gilley is frustrated with the shallow lies that pass for history. His take-downs of the “narrative” is very engaging.

Footnotes:

[1] The Nazi program of Lebensraum was not colonialism. The Nazis intended to conquer territories for German expansion. Populations in those territories would be exterminated or turned into slaves. Although Leftists want to equate liberal colonialism with Nazi expansion, they are different.

2023-03-06T00:00:00.000Z
Felonious Monk

Felonious Monk

By
William Kotzwinkle
William Kotzwinkle
Felonious Monk

Book Review - Thriller/Adventure

https://medium.com/@peterseanbradle/book-review-thriller-adventure-48544b6e905

Felonious Monk by William Kotzwinkle

This is an engaging thriller with a Marty Stu problem. 

Tommy Martini is twenty-six years old and a Benedictine monk. He is probably a novitiate since that is how things work in Benedictine monasteries. He entered the monastery when he was twenty-one after accidentally killing someone while working as a bouncer. Tommy is big, strong, and gifted in martial arts. 

He also has an anger problem which he probably inherited from his family, who are mafia royalty. Tommy's grandfather, Primo, was the head of a New Jersey crime family. His generation of the family has mostly left “the life,” but they have enough connections to get government contracts and bury bodies in the foundations of buildings.

Tommy differs from the family in being a white knight. He leaves the monastery by helping a teenager avoid enlistment in the town's cartel. He ends up in Arizona because of the death of his uncle Vittorio. As Tommy discovers, Vittorio is a priest who never left the family tradition. 

After Vittorio leaves the bulk of his inheritance to Tommy, Tommy discovers that he also left the entanglement of a surprising number of grifts and swindles with people who think Tommy should pay. That puts Tommy on a journey of discovery as he works at learning what Vittorio was up to and where the loot went.

Not surprisingly, this turns into a showcase of Tommy's gift of violence. The whole thing is very entertaining in a thriller/adventure way. In particular, a scene where Tommy is picked up as a bystander in a gang hit is very exciting as a set piece of the action. I enjoyed this very much, but as an objective reader stepping back, Tommy seems a bit too good in his fights, almost a Marty Stu character in that things are just a tad too easy for him. On the other hand, this is not what I was thinking while I was reading, which speaks to the author making the sale by keeping my interest. 

The story zipped along. I liked the characters. I liked the goofy Italian mafia family stuff. The story
makes for a good diversion which is all it tries to be.

2023-02-26T00:00:00.000Z
The Categories

The Categories

By
Aristotle
Aristotle
The Categories

Aristotle, Grammar, and Reality.

The diagrams are here - https://medium.com/@peterseanbradle/aristotle-grammar-and-reality-6b814efd24be

The Categories by Aristotle

The Categories is an essential text in Aristotle's body of work.[1] This text seems to be prior to and a foundation for Aristotle's Metaphysics. The Categories does not deal with why “primary substances” are “substances,” but it does define “primary substance” and “secondary substance,” which appear undefined and unexplained in material form in Metaphysics. A takeaway may be that one should start with Categories before approaching Metaphysics.[2]

One of the interesting features of Aristotle's philosophy is how grammar seems to model reality. Aristotle's categorization of things into “primary substance,” “secondary substance,” and “accidents”[3] occurs almost as the result of analyzing the grammatical relationship of the subjects of sentences to the predicates of sentences. This is unclear, and Aristotle does not offer an explanation. If we were to speculate, we might wonder if Aristotle assumed that human reason via human language was in sync with the structure of reality. This makes sense from a Christian perspective since reason would be considered “Logos,” and language would be regarded as “the word,” while Logos created and organized the universe. The Logos connect the universe and reason; language reflects reality for Aristotle like mathematics does for modern science.

Since Categories is about subjects and predicates, we should consider what those terms mean. A subject is the sentence's subject, essentially a noun, a person, place, or thing, e.g., “Peter” or “This bird.” A predicate is what happens to the subject or what the subject does, e.g., “Peter kicked the dog” or “This bird has wings. To get a better sense of what “subject” means for Aristotle, we have to read Metaphysics where we learn that subject is a unitary singular thing. “Two dogs” are not a “subject” in this sense[4]; neither is “pile of sand.”

In Categories, Aristotle observes that subjects can be coordinated with predicates in two primary ways:

1. The predicate can be said of the subject, e.g., “Peter is a lawyer” or “Peter has two legs.”

2. The predicate can be in the subject, e.g., “Peter is a lawyer” or “Peter knows how to type.” The “in the subject” criteria pertains to things “incapable of existence apart from the said subject.” [Peter's head can be a subject if separated from Peter's body, and, maybe, grammatically and less violently as part of Peter while still attached.]

In “Aristotle: A Guide for the Perplexed,” John Vella explains the distinction as follows:

“A predicate that is in a subject cannot have its definition predicated of the subject; a predicate that is said of a subject necessarily has its definition predicated of the subject.”

“Being a lawyer” is “passing the bar exam.” Peter has passed the bar exam, but he is not “passing the bar exam.” Thus, “being a lawyer” is something we can say OF Peter, but it is not IN Peter. Similarly, a mammal is warm-blooded and a member of species capable of producing milk. Peter is warm-blooded and a member of a species capable of producing milk. So, “Peter is a mammal” can be said OF Peter, but cannot be IN Peter, since “mammal” is a word for a group and not an individual. (“Mammal” is also not an “accidental” feature of Peter; it is part OF the definition of Peter.)

Put this together and we have this diagram:

This may be less than overwhelming, but it is incredibly insightful when it comes to Metaphysics[5] because it identifies a way of thinking about “accidents” and “subjects.” The “subject” falls into the “double No” category because a subject is not in itself (It is itself), nor is the subject said of the subject. A subject cannot be predicated of anything, according to Aristotle. This seems to make sense - how would we make “Peter” a predicate of some other subject?

Aristotle then moves into a discussion of the categories themselves. Categories are those things that are in a subject in the sense that they cannot exist without the subject but cannot be said of the subject. In my chart, this group - Category (III) is what Aristotle calls “accidents.” Accidents are things that can be changed without changing the essence or substance of the subject. If we say, “Peter is a lawyer,” we are speaking about something that cannot be separated from Peter and made to exist separately. Peter's quality/status as a lawyer lives in Peter; it cannot be carved out and displayed separately from Peter. The classic example is “Socrates is white.” Socrates' whiteness is something that cannot be separated from Socrates. “Whiteness” cannot exist as a free-floating thing separated from the thing it makes white.

However, the definition of these things cannot be predicated directly of the subject. I can't do a better job of explaining this than John Vella does in Aristotle: a Guide for the Perplexed:

“The definition of white is the following: reflected light of a certain wavelength. The definition of a human being is the following: a rational animal. Now try substituting each of these definitions into the sentence Socrates is x. For the latter predicate, this would result in the following sentence:
Socrates is a rational animal. This is a true predication with respect to Socrates. With the former predicate, the following sentence results: Socrates is reflected light of a certain wavelength. This is a flatly false predication with respect to Socrates; he is not light of a certain wavelength. He is a human being whose body reflects light of a certain wavelength. What Aristotle illustrates here are two fundamentally different ways of predicating with respect to any given subject. A predicate that is in a subject cannot have its definition predicated of the subject; a predicate that is said of a subject necessarily has its definition predicated of the subject.

Vella, John. Aristotle: A Guide for the Perplexed (Guides for the Perplexed) (p. 36). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Aristotle offers a list of ten categories - one is “substance” (Group (I)), and the other nine fall into Group (III). The nine are:

Aristotle discusses Quality, Quantity, and Relation quite extensively. He gives a summary treatment of the other categories because they are self-explanatory. The one category that may not be for moderns is “affection.” I think “affection” is contrary to “action.” Subjects take actions to impose effects on other things. Subjects are subjected to the actions of others by which they are “affected.” “Affection” means the things to which subjects are “passive recipients.” The Latin word for this is “Passions.” Aristotle explains:

“Whiteness and blackness, however, and the other colours, are not said to be affective qualities in this sense, but - because they themselves are the results of an affection. It is plain that many changes of colour take place because of affections. When a man is ashamed, he blushes; when he is afraid, he becomes pale, and so on. So true is this, that when a man is by nature liable to such affections, arising from some concomitance of elements in his constitution, it is a probable inference that he has the corresponding complexion of skin.

Aristotle. Aristotle: The Complete Works (p. 50). Pandora's Box. Kindle Edition.

Aristotle then discusses how things can be said to be opposite. There are four - or perhaps five - ways of opposition. They are:

1. Correlative, e.g., Father/Son; Double/Half.

2. Contraries, e.g., Good/Bad; Health/Disease; Black/White.

3. Privation, e.g, Sighted/Blind.

4. Affirmation/Negations, e.g., “Socrates is ill”/”Socrates is well.”

Correlatives have reference to each other; we can't have a son without a father. Privations reference a common subject ordinarily existing in the subject, such as the quality of sight. Privation of sight is blindness. Privations may have intermediates. Contraries are not interdependent and may have intermediate states. Affirmations and Negations are qualities of statements and have the quality of “truth,” unlike the other opposites.

As with other features of the Categories, these distinctions are useful for thinking. Categorizing things correctly into proper oppositions allows for more fruitful thinking.

Aristotle's discussion of movement is like this. Aristotle lists six sorts of movement, four of which are paired. They are:

Aristotle is wonderfully diagrammable. The felicity of this quality is that his key points are more easily memorized. It also provides a structure that permits a fruitfulness of thought. We all know these different aspects of movement but have never structured how we think about motion.
Aristotle is not a light read. His philosophy has much to offer for making one's way. It is a way of unraveling puzzles that we can find ourselves in. It has much to offer those interested in philosophy or understanding the world. However, I don't think anyone reading the Categories would get much out of it. Categories should be read as part of a project of learning Aristotle, preferably with the help of other readers. I read Categories and Metaphysics as part of Online Great Books, which provides a reading schedule and a monthly digital seminar to discuss the reading. If you are interested in Aristotle, think about doing it that way.

[1] But what isn't? Maybe Aristotle's “Meteorology”? Even obscure entries like “The Heavens” get mentioned frequently in subsequent philosophical works, such as St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica.

[2] Also, Categories is shorter and more accessible than Metaphysics. At least, I think so, but that may be because I struggled through Metaphysics before reading Categories.

[3] The Categories does not use “accident,” a word in Metaphysics. Instead, the category of accidents in Metaphysics is the category of “Categories” in Categories, not to be redundant.

[4] Perhaps the clue is in the plural verb (“are”)?

[5] Subjects are indisputable real things. When we say, “The cat is running,” we might wonder about the ontological state of “running,” but that cat is real.

2023-02-24T00:00:00.000Z
Cover 2

Aquinas on Scripture

Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer

By
John F. Boyle
John F. Boyle
Cover 2

Aquinas on Scripture by John F. Boyle

https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/aquinas-on-scripture-how-to-read-scripture-in-the-old-fashioned-way-42bad22eac85

The way we read the Bible today is not how the first Christians (and Christians up until the Reformation) read the Bible. Before a loosely defined “modernity,” beginning around the 17th century, Christians engaged in rampant allegorizing of scriptural text that defied common sense. For example, one Christian teacher taught that the Jewish dietary prohibition against pork had a deeper meaning than not eating a particular kind of food but was a warning to Christians to avoid the sins of gluttony and sloth.

In modernity, we view this as being slightly nutty. Texts usually mean one thing. They mean the obvious thing. They mean the customary sense of the word and not something that seems to make the text a silly putty.

But again, it was not always so. 1 Peter 3:21 analogizes baptism to the ark of Noah as a method of “saving through water.” Was that the intent of the author of Genesis? That seems unlikely.

One modern author has made an effective argument that the Doctrine of the Trinity developed from imaging that certain texts of the Bible involved a conversation between different persons. In The Birth of the Trinity by Matthew Bates, an argument is made that the doctrine of the Trinity developed out of “prosopological exegesis” [“PE”] whereby apparent dialogues in the Old Testament, particularly Psalms, were assigned to different speakers. For example, in Psalm 110:1, the psalmist says, “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I place your enemies as a footstool for your feet'” [Ps. 109: 1 LXX]. The conundrum is “who is the second “Lord” (aka “my Lord.” Jesus pointed out that it cannot be David since David calls himself “Lord.” (Mark 12: 35–7; cf. Matt. 22: 41–6; Luke 20: 41–4) Christian thinkers used the slippage in these persons to imagine that there were two Lords, such that there were two Gods in play.

This is not a typical way of doing exegesis today. Doing a prosopological exegesis today would tend to be labeled “eisegesis” to imply that the reading is begging the question. However, it was accepted in the past and supported cornerstone doctrines.

In this book, Father Boyle looks at how Aquinas read the Scriptures. Father Boyle began with an observation involving Augustine, which clearly clarified the difference between modern and pre-modern, Catholic and Protestant hermeneutics. Boyle discusses Book 12 of Augustine's Confessions, which deals with reading the Bible. Boyle notes:

But what if multiple interpretations of a passage could each be signified by the words and none is in violation of the three criteria? What is one to do then? Augustine's answer is arresting, at least to readers of Scripture formed in a post-Reformation intellectual world. Augustine asks, simply: could not Moses have meant both? Could not all such interpretations of a given passage be true interpretations? And they would be true not only in a narrow sense of fitting the words and criteria but also in a way proper to an authored text: the author meant them. In this case, however, the author meant not simply one thing by his words but many things. But what if Moses did not mean more than one meaning? What if the reader is confronted with not just two or three alternatives but dozens, maybe hundreds of alternatives. Did Moses mean all of them? Augustine is prepared to entertain the possibility. But he need not insist on it and he does not for the simple reason that Moses is not the only author of Scripture and thus his is not the only meaning in question. God is also the author of Scripture. For the Christian, the more important question is what did God mean when he wrote these words through Moses? Could God have meant more than one meaning? Certainly. Could God have meant hundreds? Certainly. Indeed, it might be particularly fitting that a book that has God as its principal author have such ambiguity. For our purposes, two important points are made by Augustine. First, beware the question of “what the author means” divorced from the signification of the words. When the words themselves are ambiguous, “what the author means” is not a way of resolution. Second, why be concerned with a single meaning? There is no intrinsic reason why there should be one and only one meaning of a given passage of Scripture. There could be many. Given this, the checks become very important and these checks are the criteria of truth and charity.

Boyle, John F.. Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer (pp. 28-29). Emmaus Academic. Kindle Edition.

This basic theological point is illuminating. There is a tendency today for Christian theologians to note that the Bible is NOT a book – it is a LIBRARY OF BOOKS.

This is certainly true from a secular standpoint, but is it true as Christian doctrine? From the Christian standpoint, the Bible has either a single author or a single common author, i.e., God. Further, from a Christian standpoint, all Bible books have a single context, i.e., Christ. So, from a Christian standpoint, it should not be controversial to treat the Bible as a single book where the author could plant clues to the ending in the beginning. It also should not be controversial to think that God would write a text that is “polyvalent,” i.e., contains meanings directed to one people at one time and to another at another time.

In this case, it makes sense to be agnostic about multiple interpretations. As Augustine points out, they might all be right insofar as they meet certain criteria, such as not contradicting clearly established traditions.

Aquinas followed the traditional method of considering scripture as having two broad senses, namely, a historical or literal sense and a spiritual sense, which was further divided into various categories such as the allegorical, the tropological, and the anagogical, which are explained as follows:

Thomas stakes a claim but hardly seems doctrinaire about it. He adopts a traditional threefold division: allegorical, tropological, and anagogical. More precisely, he adopts three traditional names. He understands “allegorical” to refer to things that signify Christ, most especially things in the Old Testament that signify Christ. “Tropological” refers to things that signify the moral life in Christ. “Anagogical” refers to things that signify eternal beatitude with Christ.29 Thomas himself gives a handy example of the four senses using Genesis 1:3, “Let there be light.” “When I say ‘Let there be light' and speak of corporeal light, it pertains to the literal sense. If ‘Let there be light' is understood as ‘let Christ be born in the Church,' it pertains to the allegorical sense. If it is understood as ‘let us be introduced into glory through Christ,' it pertains to the anagogical sense. If it is understood as ‘let us be illumined in our intellects and inflamed in our affections,' it pertains to the moral sense.”

Boyle, John F.. Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer (pp. 36-37). Emmaus Academic. Kindle Edition.

One should not be doctrinaire about these categories. The “literal” sense could be a metaphor. The woman crowned by the stars in Revelation is Israel, the Church, and the Mother of the Messiah. Likewise, a verse might have multiple historical/literal meanings:

Thomas may speak of what the author meant, but it is never by way of argument to determine one reading over another. It is by way of conclusion, not by way of premise. As for the possibility of multiple literal interpretations of a given passage, Thomas's answer in practice seems clear enough: he is thoroughly comfortable with multiple literal interpretations of Scripture. In his most carefully prepared Gospel commentary, the commentary on the Gospel according to St. John, Thomas regularly sets multiple literal interpretations side by side, often drawn from the Fathers. He sets them down and moves on. He rarely adjudicates between them. “This can be explained in many ways without error.”20 Perhaps the most striking instance of this in practice is his Catena aurea, his commentary on the four Gospels made up entirely of quotations—sententiae—from the Fathers. Here one sees over and over again multiple literal interpretations from the Fathers for a given passage of Scripture. Thomas does not do this so that he can argue against one or show the preferability of one over another. He does it because he holds them all to be true.

Boyle, John F.. Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer (p. 30). Emmaus Academic. Kindle Edition.

As with Augustine, one should be careful to rule out plausible alternative interpretations:

With regard to the dispute over the meaning of the text, here too one should avoid two things. First, one should not attribute something false to Scripture. There can no more be something false in Scripture than there can be something false in the faith, since both are given by the Holy Spirit.22 Second, one should not so force Scripture to one single meaning (sensus) that other meanings are excluded that are also true (i.e., they meet the first criterion) and fit “the circumstance of the letter.”

Boyle, John F.. Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer (p. 31). Emmaus Academic. Kindle Edition.

Obviously, with this approach, Aquinas did not think that Scripture was perspicuous:

How far St. Thomas is from considering Scripture as being self-evident is seen clearly enough in his frequent practice of adding an explanatory word or two in the text as he quotes the passage of Scripture on which he is commenting.

Boyle, John F.. Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer (p. 33). Emmaus Academic. Kindle Edition.

Thomas followed Aristotle's understanding of how words work. Words are conventional sounds that refer to an idea in the speaker's mind which in turn refers to an external substance. We tend to cut out the middleman and say that words refer to things. When Aquinas said that the spiritual sense had to be based on the literal sense, he meant that while the literal sense made a connection between a word and a thing, the mystical sense would consider the connection between thing and thing. Thus, Deuteronomy says, “don't eat pigs.” The words bring up pigs in a literal sense. But what do pigs represent? Greed, perhaps? This is how pre-modern thinking can end up with what moderns consider fanciful.

I know that modern readers are outraged by mystical sense exegesis, usually for the following reason:

A danger lurks in the mystical sense, for it would seem to give license to every nut with a loony reading of Scripture. One could make Scripture say anything. To put it perhaps more delicately, but no less pointedly, the mystical senses open wide the possibility, indeed the probability, that readers will simply read into Scripture what they want.

Boyle, John F.. Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer (pp. 38-39). Emmaus Academic. Kindle Edition.

Boyle explains the limitation as:

As a second check, although he does not say it explicitly, St. Thomas's criteria for the evaluation of literal interpretations could also be used for mystical interpretations. One ought not claim something to be true that is not, nor insist on one's own reading to the exclusion of others. There would be a possible qualification in that the circumstance of the letter might not directly pertain; we could, in the light of what we have just said, say that one ought to preserve the reality of the thing. Thus we can see there are limits, but they are wide limits indeed, just as the limits on the literal sense are wide. I am inclined to think this is why medieval commentators on Scripture, St. Thomas included, seemed to have so much fun. The playing field is indeed a big one. It has a fence, but the enclosed area is spacious. Or perhaps this might be a better image: Scripture is like a playpen with many splendid toys. It has sides to keep one from falling out and getting hurt, but the area one has is nonetheless a source of fun and joy. I cannot help but think that many of these commentators simply had fun. Of course, this was a serious business, but it was about something so huge and capacious that it was itself a source of great delight.

Boyle, John F.. Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer (pp. 40-41). Emmaus Academic. Kindle Edition.

Another element of Aquinas's reading I had not understood is the importance of Aquinas's division of texts according to an end he attributes to the author. For Aquinas, the central purpose of the Gospel of John is to show the divinity of the divine Word. Aquinas then breaks down the text to the level of verses according to that goal. This division is as important to understanding Aquinas's commentary as the commentary. Boyle explains:

These divisions give the reader St. Thomas's understanding of the order of thought in the book. Because of that, the division is itself a substantive commentary that is presumed in the explicit commentary on a given passage or verse. It is not uncommon for modern students of the Middle Ages to be disappointed by St. Thomas's commentaries. The disappointment tends to follow a pattern. A particular passage of Scripture is of interest to the student who turns to Thomas and finds that he has remarkably little to say in commenting on that specific verse. And so it is. In comparison with the holy commentators, Thomas can have a modest word count. This is in part because Thomas is famously frugal in his prose. It is also because he has already done quite a bit of expository work in getting to this point in his commentary. Because a given passage is articulated in relation to the whole and its parts, one must see the commentary on that passage in those relations to understand St. Thomas's commentary. Thomas is not one to repeat what he has said; he presumes his reader recalls or will reread. This applies not only to what has come before but also to what comes after a passage. If one really wants to understand St. Thomas's commentary on a given passage of Scripture, one would need to appreciate its place in a division that situates it within the book and within the commentary as a whole.

Boyle, John F.. Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer (p. 88). Emmaus Academic. Kindle Edition.

There is a lot in here. If you are a Thomist, as I am, this is a great introduction. If you are a modern Evangelical, you ought to read this to be exposed to how your intellectual ancestors read the Bible.

2023-02-22T00:00:00.000Z
Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter Reformation

Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter Reformation

By
Dermot Fenlon
Dermot Fenlon
Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter Reformation

Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter-Reformation by Dermot Fenlon

https://medium.com/@peterseanbradle/reformations-protestant-and-catholic-8bbac662ae86

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.

2023-02-19T00:00:00.000Z
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