Back when I was in grad school, I once attended a talk given by a fellow member of the Semitics department on . . . Ugaritic, maybe? (I was in the Christian-era side of the program so I had only a passing interest in the pre-Christian semitic languages, honestly.) I recall that the talk was given by one of the more brilliant students in the program, and was correspondingly deep and technical. I could appreciate the depth of what was being said without actually being able to follow all of it in detail.
After the talk, there was some light applause, delivered with genuine respect (funny how you can *tell*, isn't it?). Then the department chair stood up to give his comments, and he started by chiding the presenting scholar: there was a serious deficiency in his paper. He had forgotten to draw out all the implications of his study . . . what would be the impact of his research on women's issues?! We all had a hearty shared laugh, and the rest of the evening went on pleasantly.
What was the joke? What you have to understand about the field of Early Christianity (which is the umbrella under which our department kind-of, sort-of rested), is that there is quite a lot of interest and funded research on women's issues in the early church. (I think this is true for a lot of liberal arts, actually, but I *know* it's true for early church history). There aren't a lot of conferences on Ugaritic, or paid seminars on cuneiform in early Mesopotamia; certainly not compared to the number conferences on the status of women in early Judaism, or oppressive patriarchal structures in early Christianity, etc., etc.
An example of this in Christian-era Semitics is recent trends in studies on Appa Shenoute, a most important early Coptic monk. The *only* recent, popular book published on Shenoute is from a scholarly feminist viewpoint: "Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery" by Rebecca Krawiec. (http://www.amazon.com/Shenoute-Women-White-Monastery-Monasticism/dp/0195129431). More hard-core Coptic scholars see books like this and shrug philosophically--since there's a ton of work that needs to be done in Coptic studies, and precious little interest and money to go around to get it done, the more exposure and interest the better. They just need to rewrite their papers a little bit to build off of or respond to issues raised by Krawiec, and they get a ready-made excuse to have their papers read by a wider crowd and to get into more conferences.
And *this* was the joke--this is the little dodge that arises from the basic realities of academic life, and that all academics become familiar with over time. You do the work you want to do, but you keep an eye on the winds of fashion (and of funding!), and you learn to tap into them to achieve relevance in your field, as much as you can. Sometimes it results in some rather absurd stretches to connect two things that are not really connected, but that's just academics. Everyone does it, or at least everyone knows about it; it's forgiven and then laughed about.
This is the origin of what I like to call the "Funding Hook", found in many (if not most) scholarly papers. There's often a very recognizable part of a paper that aims at this "tie-in" to what's currently relevant. Oftentimes, (unless the topic as a whole is already obviously "in style") it's easily identifiable in how it stands out from the rest of the paper--it's the part that says, "hey, this line of research is relevant and important! Someone should totally pay me to write another one!" Now, I say "funding" and use the word "pay", as if there was always literally money that was at stake. This isn't always the case. Oftentimes, what is asked for by the "Funding Hook" is not so much money as it is recognition of relevance and importance. But these may as well be money, because those things are what constitute the real currency of academia anyway.
What does this have to do with global warming? Quite a lot--it is something you absolutely should keep in mind when reading academic papers in the field of climate science. Because it's easy to see, if you pay attention, that global warming has given everyone in the climate science fields the *mother* of all funding hooks:
"So in conclusion, we need to continue my research in this area, or else maybe the whole world will burn and die. The end. P.S. My research assistants now take PayPal and coupons to Starbucks."
If there is *any* tie-in to global warming, then a paper can instantly claim relevance and importance of an (almost literal) earth-shattering scale. And almost any research having to do with the weather at all, or geological processes that might affect the weather, or anything that may have an effect on the biosphere, meaning anything to do with plan or animal life, can be spun plausibly as having something to do with global warming. So this happens a lot.
The problem is aggravated by the structure of an academic paper. All academic papers have the following three parts:
1) The introduction. Pretty straightforward, really--it's what you (and your adviser, if any) come up with initially. You tweak it at the end after the rest of the paper is done to whatever extent the research didn't go as you expected it would.
2) Presentation of research / arguments. This is the meat and potatoes of the paper. Here you have to be rigorous and definite. You don't use words like "could" or "maybe". If you have something to say, you say it and you defend it with evidence. If you can't come up with enough evidence for a point you wanted to make, you cut it from the body. (Or, you should.)
3) Conclusion. Here you do two things. First, you simply sum up the argument of the paper. But *then*, you also discuss relevance and application. *Here* is where you can relax on the rigor of academic argument, because here you can do things like pose possibilities (that could be followed up by future rigorous argumentation) and reflect on the importance of what you've just covered, even if the importance is subjective. You can even be poetic and flowery here, if you want. You can sneak in those points that you had to cut from the main body because you couldn't get enough hard evidence for them. And, of course, the funding hook fits perfectly in this section as well.
The upshot here is that the global warming funding hook is pretty much always found in the *least* academically rigorous part of the paper, the part of the paper that *academicians* know is to be read with a somewhat cynical eye. What happens, then, is that you have all these papers in climate science written in which the dire possibilities are raised, but with the minimum of scientific rigor. "Sure, maybe the temperature could raise 4 degrees C in the next century . . . who's to say it couldn't? It's a possibility. That'll make them think twice before cutting funding for my series of studies on wheat growth in Argentina."
This problem is compounded *again* by the way in which the media reads academic papers. To a media person, the same three sections I outlined above look like this:
1) Summary information. A very sketchy (and probably distorted) version of this is going to go in the body of the article to explain what's going on.
2) Blah, blah, blah.
3) Blah, blah *HEADLINE*, blah blah.
So there you have it: a prefect recipe for the very least dependable parts of academia being constantly presented to the public as the state of research.
Now, I don't want to say that *all* dire warnings of global warming catastrophe are just poorly understood "maybe's" that scientists have thrown out. There are plenty of papers in which the elements of risk regarding climate are the meat-and-potatoes part of the paper itself. But in my experience of watching a parade of climate-scare headlines over the years, more often than not when I click through to the actual article I find that the take-away point being trumpeted is really just a "maybe". I encourage everyone who cares about the actual state of the earth, and who doesn't want to be led away into irrational panic by the never-ending stream of alarmist headlines, to start clicking through more often and reading the actual articles.
You should start seeing that at least *part* of what is actually endangered in this world is really just the academic budget.
Sunday, June 28, 2015
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
Laudato Si, the Environment, and Beauty
There's a point in the new encyclical that I think is quite profound. It's the section in which the Holy Father talks about the ugliness of city life in some modern mega-cities (pp. 44 and 45, and then 150 and 151). In some ways, it seems like an odd juxtaposition; in an encyclical where dire warnings of planet-wide crisis are given, exhortations to build more parks in inner cities seem a little anti-climactic.
But I think there's a deeper point to be made here. I think there is a profound connection between the cultural environment and the impact on the ecosystem that man has. There is a connection between respect for the beauty of dignity of man and respect for the beauty and dignity of the earth.
It's fair to say that the worst environmental disasters so far have occurred in communist or socialist countries. For a great rundown of some of the disastrous highlights of Soviet destruction of the environment, here's a post from The Federalist: http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/13/if-you-think-communism-is-bad-for-people-check-out-what-it-did-to-the-environment/. There are also plenty of links to learn more, and the author also reflects on three reasons he thinks communism resulted in such ecological destruction. But I think he missed an important reason.
When I look at pictures of blasted natural landscapes from Soviet Russia, I find a striking resemblance to Soviet-planned cities, another type of blasted landscape. Here are some great pictures to peruse: http://calvertjournal.com/features/show/2473/suburbs-in-contemporary-russian-visual-culture#.VYllv0ZUR-A. Is it much of a stretch to think that people who create and live in cities such as these wastelands of aesthetics might easily fail to see what's wrong with turning one of the largest seas in the world into a desert wasteland?
I think there is a common idea between ugly Soviet architecture and the wastelands that the Communists created in nature, and I think it is materialism. Materialism rejects the transcendent dimension of existence and focuses only on measurable, material goods. In architecture, this means that efficiency only becomes the rule, while beauty is continually sacrificed. The needs of man are reduced to sustenance and satisfaction of animal needs only--they become so much cattle, rather than full human beings. In the same way, the goods of the Earth become reduced to so much raw material: cities are nothing more than factories of humans, and the goods of the Earth are simply the inputs.
Under materialism, higher goods are not valued; only mundane things are considered real. The transcendent is not revered; only the immanent is considered. The horizon of man having thus been shrunk, it makes sense to me that long foresight--the ability to defer the fulfillment of present desires because of long-term consequences--is also curtailed. So the reckless use of currently available goods of the Earth in such a way as to destroy them, to the detriment of future men, seems much more likely in a materialistic society.
The Holy Father mentions consumerism many times in Laudato Si. I think his point could be broadened and improved somewhat by replacing "consumerism" with "materialism", because I think it is really the materialistic character of consumerism that causes environmental issues. I think doing this replacement connects multiple threads in the argument of the encyclical beautifully, and it explains why so many great ecological disasters have been wrought in explicitly anti-consumerist societies.
The opposite of this sort of materialism is to value beauty and to live with dignity. And I think you can see the power this sort of philosophy can have in the history of American environmental movements.
The United States has a long history of pride in the natural beauty of its land. The beauty of nature has inspired almost religious fervor in many Americans over the years. "America the Beautiful" is essentially our national religious hymn, and many if not most Americans really mean it when they sing it. This fervor for natural beauty expressed itself also in the establishments of many societies for the appreciation of this natural wonder or that natural beauty. John Muir's Sierra Club is probably the most well known of these, but there were countless other local groups or individuals who had similar passions. One great example from many: if you've been to Skyline Caverns in Front Royal, then you've heard the odd, quasi-religious recorded speech from Walter Amos they play for all the tourists at the end of the tour, and you've experienced an example of this peculiarly American piety toward nature.
The enormous popularity of the pastimes of hunting and fishing is another important locus of this natural piety. As pastimes, hunting and fishing are really more about communing with nature than about catching game, so although it may go against some stereotypes of people who don't hunt or fish, the typical hunter or fisher is a nature enthusiast and a lover of the beauty and harmony of the wilds. It was really these people who kickstarted the environmentalist movement in the US, and they did it out of love and respect for the beauty of America. This is why I'm proud to be a member of the Izaac Walton league, even though it does have some obnoxious and incorrect views (specifically, on population control and fracking). In its origins, the League was founded with reverence for the transcendence that is in nature, and I still see that attitude in its current members that I talk to.
It's also worth noting that much of the *real* success America has had in local environmental issues came initially through these grassroots groups: the Clean Water Act, for example, came about because of the Izaac Walton League. The environmental movement in the United States has since been hijacked by radical anti-humanists who are primarily interested in acquiring power at the Federal level in order to fundamentally transform society, but the original environmentalism in America was grassroots, sane, and practical.
And they achieved real change *not* by attempting to force change upon an unwilling populace. Again, the issue of respect for the dignity of man comes into play. A very frequent question you will find on the lips of the radical environmentalists is, how do we get our desired policies into effect, when the people as a whole are against them? Disdain for the stupidity of the masses is rampant in these circles. It really is akin to the old Communist attitude that people are cattle, and that the intellectual elite need to trick or bully them somehow into doing what they know is best for them. This attitude is fully on display, for example, in the German climatologist Schellnhuber, who invented the magical "2 degree C" limit for climate change. There was no science involved in this limit, but after he came up with it, it became accepted fact somehow that we *must* limit global warming to 2 degrees C or less, or disaster would come on the whole world. Schellnhuber frankly admits that this limit was invented as a purely political ploy in order to get the kind of political action he wanted: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/climate-catastrophe-a-superstorm-for-global-warming-research-a-686697-8.html.
The American experience, however, proves that this approach does not have to be taken. If you can instill a love of beauty, a respect for transcendence, and a desire for dignity in life and in culture, then you can get people to make the right choices for the environment for themselves. So in the end, the health of the human ecology--culture--really does turn out to be of radical importance for the health of the world ecology.
This area of thought is where, in my opinion, all the best moments of the encyclical can be found (chapter 6, for example, on "Sacramental Signs and the Celebration of Rest", is sublimely beautiful). To my mind, the most productive use to which we can put this new Encyclical is to meditate on our culture, and try to find ways to make beauty and dignity things which are more widely cherished.
But I think there's a deeper point to be made here. I think there is a profound connection between the cultural environment and the impact on the ecosystem that man has. There is a connection between respect for the beauty of dignity of man and respect for the beauty and dignity of the earth.
It's fair to say that the worst environmental disasters so far have occurred in communist or socialist countries. For a great rundown of some of the disastrous highlights of Soviet destruction of the environment, here's a post from The Federalist: http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/13/if-you-think-communism-is-bad-for-people-check-out-what-it-did-to-the-environment/. There are also plenty of links to learn more, and the author also reflects on three reasons he thinks communism resulted in such ecological destruction. But I think he missed an important reason.
When I look at pictures of blasted natural landscapes from Soviet Russia, I find a striking resemblance to Soviet-planned cities, another type of blasted landscape. Here are some great pictures to peruse: http://calvertjournal.com/features/show/2473/suburbs-in-contemporary-russian-visual-culture#.VYllv0ZUR-A. Is it much of a stretch to think that people who create and live in cities such as these wastelands of aesthetics might easily fail to see what's wrong with turning one of the largest seas in the world into a desert wasteland?
I think there is a common idea between ugly Soviet architecture and the wastelands that the Communists created in nature, and I think it is materialism. Materialism rejects the transcendent dimension of existence and focuses only on measurable, material goods. In architecture, this means that efficiency only becomes the rule, while beauty is continually sacrificed. The needs of man are reduced to sustenance and satisfaction of animal needs only--they become so much cattle, rather than full human beings. In the same way, the goods of the Earth become reduced to so much raw material: cities are nothing more than factories of humans, and the goods of the Earth are simply the inputs.
Under materialism, higher goods are not valued; only mundane things are considered real. The transcendent is not revered; only the immanent is considered. The horizon of man having thus been shrunk, it makes sense to me that long foresight--the ability to defer the fulfillment of present desires because of long-term consequences--is also curtailed. So the reckless use of currently available goods of the Earth in such a way as to destroy them, to the detriment of future men, seems much more likely in a materialistic society.
The Holy Father mentions consumerism many times in Laudato Si. I think his point could be broadened and improved somewhat by replacing "consumerism" with "materialism", because I think it is really the materialistic character of consumerism that causes environmental issues. I think doing this replacement connects multiple threads in the argument of the encyclical beautifully, and it explains why so many great ecological disasters have been wrought in explicitly anti-consumerist societies.
The opposite of this sort of materialism is to value beauty and to live with dignity. And I think you can see the power this sort of philosophy can have in the history of American environmental movements.
The United States has a long history of pride in the natural beauty of its land. The beauty of nature has inspired almost religious fervor in many Americans over the years. "America the Beautiful" is essentially our national religious hymn, and many if not most Americans really mean it when they sing it. This fervor for natural beauty expressed itself also in the establishments of many societies for the appreciation of this natural wonder or that natural beauty. John Muir's Sierra Club is probably the most well known of these, but there were countless other local groups or individuals who had similar passions. One great example from many: if you've been to Skyline Caverns in Front Royal, then you've heard the odd, quasi-religious recorded speech from Walter Amos they play for all the tourists at the end of the tour, and you've experienced an example of this peculiarly American piety toward nature.
The enormous popularity of the pastimes of hunting and fishing is another important locus of this natural piety. As pastimes, hunting and fishing are really more about communing with nature than about catching game, so although it may go against some stereotypes of people who don't hunt or fish, the typical hunter or fisher is a nature enthusiast and a lover of the beauty and harmony of the wilds. It was really these people who kickstarted the environmentalist movement in the US, and they did it out of love and respect for the beauty of America. This is why I'm proud to be a member of the Izaac Walton league, even though it does have some obnoxious and incorrect views (specifically, on population control and fracking). In its origins, the League was founded with reverence for the transcendence that is in nature, and I still see that attitude in its current members that I talk to.
It's also worth noting that much of the *real* success America has had in local environmental issues came initially through these grassroots groups: the Clean Water Act, for example, came about because of the Izaac Walton League. The environmental movement in the United States has since been hijacked by radical anti-humanists who are primarily interested in acquiring power at the Federal level in order to fundamentally transform society, but the original environmentalism in America was grassroots, sane, and practical.
And they achieved real change *not* by attempting to force change upon an unwilling populace. Again, the issue of respect for the dignity of man comes into play. A very frequent question you will find on the lips of the radical environmentalists is, how do we get our desired policies into effect, when the people as a whole are against them? Disdain for the stupidity of the masses is rampant in these circles. It really is akin to the old Communist attitude that people are cattle, and that the intellectual elite need to trick or bully them somehow into doing what they know is best for them. This attitude is fully on display, for example, in the German climatologist Schellnhuber, who invented the magical "2 degree C" limit for climate change. There was no science involved in this limit, but after he came up with it, it became accepted fact somehow that we *must* limit global warming to 2 degrees C or less, or disaster would come on the whole world. Schellnhuber frankly admits that this limit was invented as a purely political ploy in order to get the kind of political action he wanted: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/climate-catastrophe-a-superstorm-for-global-warming-research-a-686697-8.html.
The American experience, however, proves that this approach does not have to be taken. If you can instill a love of beauty, a respect for transcendence, and a desire for dignity in life and in culture, then you can get people to make the right choices for the environment for themselves. So in the end, the health of the human ecology--culture--really does turn out to be of radical importance for the health of the world ecology.
This area of thought is where, in my opinion, all the best moments of the encyclical can be found (chapter 6, for example, on "Sacramental Signs and the Celebration of Rest", is sublimely beautiful). To my mind, the most productive use to which we can put this new Encyclical is to meditate on our culture, and try to find ways to make beauty and dignity things which are more widely cherished.
Saturday, February 1, 2014
Catholicism vs. Islam on Violence, Part 3
This is a continuation of a series, which (as a reminder) has the following planned outline:
1.2.1 Given that Catholicism is by essence and foundation a spiritual religion without worldly ambitions, how did it manage to acquire so much worldly power and prestige later on in its history? The shortest answer to this question is "by accident (or Providence, if you will)", but there is a lot of history behind this. I want to summarize this history by focusing on just a few pivotal historical figures. (For this section, I should acknowledge my debt to Eamon Duffy's "Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes". It's a great "birds-eye" view of the history of the Papacy).
1. Constantine (272-337). Emperor Constantine's conversion was a bolt from the blue. Christianity was already a widely spread and practiced religion before he converted, but after he converted he poured money and property into the Church. Religion had always been part of the traditional way Rome had cemented its civic unity (as the Christians who had been compelled to sacrifice to the official gods or suffer martyrdom had experienced!), and it seems clear that Constantine intended for Christianity to take over this role in his empire. While he did not *mandate* Christianity, he promoted it as heavily as was politically possible for him to do. Because of Constantine, almost overnight the Church had wealth and proximity to the emperor, both of which meant power and influence.
More intangibly (but in some way even more importantly), because of Constantine the Catholic Church came to become globally associated with the *idea* of Rome, which for centuries past had been and for centuries still to come would be a symbol of empire and global order. Even after the actual power of the Roman empire to govern most of the known world was long gone, the idea of Rome as a governing body for all the nations of the world was durable--so durable that the many barbarian kings who were to conquer Rome later typically preferred to give up their own cultural identities and become (essentially) the new "Romans" after their conquest, in order to legitimize their dominion. For good *and* for bad, after Constantine the Church was associated with this vision the world over.
2. Pope Gregory the Great (540-604). The next important step in the "entanglement" (if you will) of the Catholic Church with political power once again came about by historical accident. Pope Gregory lived in time of devastation for Rome and for Italy. The Emperor had gone to Constantinople and had left a void behind. Rome was in shambles, and in fact all of Italy was crumbling in the face of plagues, famine, poverty and devastating wars.
Into this gaping hole came Pope Gregory. A monastic man with zero worldly ambition himself, he responded to the great needs of his time with incredible energy and efficiency. With no will or ability on the part of the empire in the East to negotiate peace with the invading Lombards, Gregory took on the role of ambasador and politician and did it himself. With no one else to help the poor and the myriads of war refugees, Pope Gregory mobilized all the resources of the Church in Rome into a massive relief campaign. The end result of Gregory's pontificate was that the Papacy became the de facto political power in Italy. As the wikipedia article on Gregory's life concludes,
3. Pope Hadrian (700-795). This is really the coda to the previous point. Again out of necessity, (in this case to protect Italy from Lombard invaders), Pope Hadrian formed an alliance with Charlemagne. Once victorious in Italy and elsewhere, Charlemagne then codified the extent and borders of the Papal States (making official what had been de facto the case) and was in turn crowned by the Pope (actually Hadrian's successor) as the new Holy Roman Emperor. The break with the old empire in the East was completed, and new life was breathed into the old ideal of Rome as the trans-national arbiter of nations. In the eyes of Christians in the West (including himself), Charlemagne was the new Constantine. So after this point, in the centuries to follow, the political history of the Papacy has a tripartite character, because the Pope had three often conflicting roles:
- First, dealing with Catholicism:
- Catholicism from its very beginning was a spiritual religion that did not wish for worldly domination.
- Catholicism has had a troubled relationship with Catholic rulers over the centuries, so that actions of Catholic rulers are often not fairly ascribable to the Catholic religion.
- The historical origin of the Church's temporal power is accidental to essential Catholicism
- Political powers have frequently sought to use the Church for their own ends throughout history
- The specific history of the Age of Exploration is complicated, and not all actions of Eurpoean kingdoms of the time that are condemned nowadays necessarily deserve condemnation. Nor are all actions of Popes in that time period indicative of essential Catholicism (unfortunately).
- Catholic theology of the time actually had the correct view on the relationship between religion and force.
- Then, dealing with Islam:
- Islam from its very beginning endorsed the spread of religion by force and the domination of the political sphere by the religious.
- Evidence for this from the Quran.
- Evidence for this from early authoritative supplements to the Quran.
- Modern fundamentalist Islam draws inspiration and justification from these early principles and ideas.
1.2.1 Given that Catholicism is by essence and foundation a spiritual religion without worldly ambitions, how did it manage to acquire so much worldly power and prestige later on in its history? The shortest answer to this question is "by accident (or Providence, if you will)", but there is a lot of history behind this. I want to summarize this history by focusing on just a few pivotal historical figures. (For this section, I should acknowledge my debt to Eamon Duffy's "Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes". It's a great "birds-eye" view of the history of the Papacy).
1. Constantine (272-337). Emperor Constantine's conversion was a bolt from the blue. Christianity was already a widely spread and practiced religion before he converted, but after he converted he poured money and property into the Church. Religion had always been part of the traditional way Rome had cemented its civic unity (as the Christians who had been compelled to sacrifice to the official gods or suffer martyrdom had experienced!), and it seems clear that Constantine intended for Christianity to take over this role in his empire. While he did not *mandate* Christianity, he promoted it as heavily as was politically possible for him to do. Because of Constantine, almost overnight the Church had wealth and proximity to the emperor, both of which meant power and influence.
More intangibly (but in some way even more importantly), because of Constantine the Catholic Church came to become globally associated with the *idea* of Rome, which for centuries past had been and for centuries still to come would be a symbol of empire and global order. Even after the actual power of the Roman empire to govern most of the known world was long gone, the idea of Rome as a governing body for all the nations of the world was durable--so durable that the many barbarian kings who were to conquer Rome later typically preferred to give up their own cultural identities and become (essentially) the new "Romans" after their conquest, in order to legitimize their dominion. For good *and* for bad, after Constantine the Church was associated with this vision the world over.
2. Pope Gregory the Great (540-604). The next important step in the "entanglement" (if you will) of the Catholic Church with political power once again came about by historical accident. Pope Gregory lived in time of devastation for Rome and for Italy. The Emperor had gone to Constantinople and had left a void behind. Rome was in shambles, and in fact all of Italy was crumbling in the face of plagues, famine, poverty and devastating wars.
Into this gaping hole came Pope Gregory. A monastic man with zero worldly ambition himself, he responded to the great needs of his time with incredible energy and efficiency. With no will or ability on the part of the empire in the East to negotiate peace with the invading Lombards, Gregory took on the role of ambasador and politician and did it himself. With no one else to help the poor and the myriads of war refugees, Pope Gregory mobilized all the resources of the Church in Rome into a massive relief campaign. The end result of Gregory's pontificate was that the Papacy became the de facto political power in Italy. As the wikipedia article on Gregory's life concludes,
These and other good deeds and charitable frame of mind completely won the hearts and minds of the Roman people. They now looked to the papacy for government, ignoring the rump state at Constantinople, which had only disrespect for Gregory, calling him a fool for his pacifist dealings with the Lombards. The office of urban prefect went without candidates. From the time of Gregory the Great to the rise of Italian nationalism the papacy was most influential in ruling Italy.In seed form (though not in actuality yet), this was the beginning of the Papal States: the political rule of the Popes over large portions of the Italian penninsula. It began from the very noblest of intentions, from compassion and from dire necessity. It brought many good things into being as well . . . but at a cost. After this point, the papacy was a ripe target for the power hungry in Italy, and when later you begin seeing Popes in the pocket of powerful Italian families, you have to look back to this point as a seminal cause.
3. Pope Hadrian (700-795). This is really the coda to the previous point. Again out of necessity, (in this case to protect Italy from Lombard invaders), Pope Hadrian formed an alliance with Charlemagne. Once victorious in Italy and elsewhere, Charlemagne then codified the extent and borders of the Papal States (making official what had been de facto the case) and was in turn crowned by the Pope (actually Hadrian's successor) as the new Holy Roman Emperor. The break with the old empire in the East was completed, and new life was breathed into the old ideal of Rome as the trans-national arbiter of nations. In the eyes of Christians in the West (including himself), Charlemagne was the new Constantine. So after this point, in the centuries to follow, the political history of the Papacy has a tripartite character, because the Pope had three often conflicting roles:
- Spiritual ruler and father to all of Christendom
- Prince of the Papal States
- Source of spiritual legitimacy for the Holy Roman Empire
Sunday, January 12, 2014
Catholicism vs. Islam on Violence, Part 2
This is a continuation of a series, which (as a reminder) has the following planned outline:
In the Eucharist, the priest uses the words of Christ at the Last Supper (following His command to "do this in memory of me"), in order to transform the bread and wine into the Body of Christ, which is then fed to the Church as the sacrament of unity in order that it may become the *mystical* body of Christ (a good collection of quotes from various Church Fathers on this is here).
Although the celebration of the Sacraments has a social and external aspect, it was always clear that the end and purpose of the Sacraments was the interior life of the soul--the life of Christ that comes to the Christian believer through them.
As Christianity has been compared with Islam on this point as well, it would be good to understand the specifically Christian notion of martyrdom. This is well exemplified in the very early (and short and readable) account of the martyrdom of St. Polycarp (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0102.htm). The main characteristics of Christian martyrdom that you can see here are:
It is quite simply impossible to reconcile this ideal of the Christian martyr as the fellow suffering servant with Christ with the imposition of the Christian faith by force.
One interesting example of this is the early Egyptian monasteries, because it shows just how far the early Church took the spiritual understanding of the New Covenant. The Egyptian monks left the world in order to live in communities in the desert outside of Egypt, and in this they thought of themselves as the spiritual successors to the Jews who left Egypt with Moses and wandered in the desert for forty years before reaching the Holy Land. In Shenoute's White Monastery, this parallel was lived so specifically that they actually took many of their community laws straight from the book of Deuteronomy, thought to be the book that Moses wrote to the Jews during this period of exile in the desert. The difference was that while the Jews were in exile looking forward to entrance into the Holy Land, the Christians were looking forward only to the next life and the New Jerusalem in heaven. Egyptian monasticism is thus a sort of lived typology in itself.
The example of early monastacism shows that the Christian ideal was never the conquest of the world in the sense of causing earthly powers and principalities to submit to the Church *in this life*. The Second Coming of Christ was always expected, and it was Christ Himself who would cause the final definitive Kingdom to come. In the meantime, the Church on earth was principally fighting a battle with the world *as it existed as an influence on the sould of the Christian*. In other words, Chrisian conquest of the world happened by Christians freeing themselves of the tyranny of worldly influences on their own actions.
Indeed, from the point of view of archaeology alone, there is little evidence that early Christianity consisted of anything *but* these elements I have identified. We know from the extensive manuscript tradition that Scripture was always very important to Christians. There is even speculation that the book (as opposed to the scroll) was an invention of early Christians to make reading of Scripture at home more convenient (though this may be simply a coincidence of time).
Meanwhile, the importance of the Sacraments of the Eucharist and Baptism are evident from early Christian artwork that revolved around those two institutions. More than almost anything else, we have sanctuary art surrounding the altars at which the Eucharist was celebrated and baptistry art from the early baptistries. And the veneration of martyrs and prayers to saints form some of the very earliest physical evidence of Christianity that we have in the form of graffiti on tombs of the martyrs and their shrines.
While the emergence of the life of consecrated virginity was a bit later historically, the immense and immediate popularity of the Egyptian monasteries is hard to overstate. Pilgrims came to the monks in Egypt from all over the Catholic world in huge numbers (mini cities were built just to accommodate them), because the life they were leading was celebrated everywhere as the pinnacle of Christian piety and virtue.
Justin Martyr, one of the earliest Church fathers, gave a classic defence of Christianity drawing a distinction between belief in pagan gods and loyalty to the State, emphatically denying the first while maintaining that Christians were very loyal to the legitimate government of the Romans (following Christ's injunction to Peter to pay the Roman taxes), and that the kingdom that they sought was not of this world and hence not competitive with Roman Empire.
The fact that Justin is now known as "martyr" shows how successful his argumentation was with Rome, but the fact that his writings were saved and revered by Christians ever afterwards shows how successful they were among the early Church. Despite accusations, Christians were never working towards the overthrow of secular rulers.
As a sort of side note, I'd like to mention the early Church's relation to the pagan world of ideas: pagan literature and philosophy. On this there were mixed views among the Church fathers--some were very antipathetic towards all pagan culture, which they regarded as corrupt and even demonic. (And these people had a point, as the corruption of Roman culture in its decadence was in many cases extreme.) However, the consensus view of Christian teachers was conciliatory, expressed here by St. Basil, urging Christians to take what was good from pagan culture and discard what was evil.
Overall, the attitude of the Church to the secular world was coexistence. The world was created by God and ultimately governed by Him, but the existence of the Church in the world is special and different. The Church is the physical presence of an other-worldly reality within the world, interacting with it but not tied to it. The great Church Father St. Augustine wrote a book entirely about this, the City of God. This work is especially important here, because St. Augustine can be considered the bridge from the early Church to the medieval Church, so influential were his writings to become in the West. Key ideas in the City of God include:
Overall, I think this is a good survey of early Christianity supporting my thesis that it was, from the beginning, a spiritual religion. Next we will go on to look at how Christianity became more and more entwined with secular powers through history, having both good and bad effects.
- First, dealing with Catholicism:
- Catholicism from its very beginning was a spiritual religion that did not wish for worldly domination.
- Evidence for this from Scripture
- Evidence for this from the early Church Fathers
- Catholicism has had a troubled relationship with Catholic rulers over the centuries, so that actions of Catholic rulers are often not fairly ascribable to the Catholic religion.
- The specific history of the Age of Exploration is complicated, and not all actions of Eurpoean kingdoms of the time that are condemned nowadays necessarily deserve condemnation. Nor are all actions of Popes in that time period indicative of essential Catholicism (unfortunately).
- Catholic theology of the time actually had the correct view on the relationship between religion and force.
- Then, dealing with Islam:
- Islam from its very beginning endorsed the spread of religion by force and the domination of the political sphere by the religious.
- Evidence for this from the Quran.
- Evidence for this from early authoritative supplements to the Quran.
- Modern fundamentalist Islam draws inspiration and justification from these early principles and ideas.
1.1.2 Evidence from the early Church reinforces the premise that Christianity was a spiritual religion without worldly ambitions.
In Scriptural Theology
Typological understandings of salvation history continue to be extremely important; the Old Testament was read in this same typological fashion by theologians. Examples of this typological interpretation are too common to even summarize. To include just one, I'll point to a Persian Church Father, St. Aphrahat. His treatise on Faith is a revealing example of how the Christians went back through the Old Testament and saw their religion revealed in it, after the fact. Expanding on the thought of St. Paul, he goes through all of Jewish history and picks out how the characteristically Christian virtue of Faith was manifest in the primary figures of the Old Testament. Whereas the Jewish patriarchs had been founders of a physical kingdom in Jewish thought, they are re-thought as precursors to the Kingdom of God, the central element of which is an interior movement: personal faith.In Religious Life
Catholicism was always a religion oriented towards high personal aspirations. Christ said, "be perfect as my heavenly Father is perfect," and the early Church took this to indicate a call to struggle to overcome the tendency to sin and to work for personal sanctity. In part, this personal sanctity consisted in the virtuous life, understood in much the same was as by the better contemporary pagans. However, the Christian ideal of sanctity always had a distinctively Christian characteristic in that it always revolved around the person and example of Christ. Three key elements of this are the Sacraments, veneration of the Saints, and the life of consecrated virginity.Sacraments
In the Sacraments, the clearest examples of how the imitation of Christ was central in Christian religious life are Baptism and the Eucharist. Most primarily, baptism was seen as a washing away of the "old man" (Adam, and hence the original sin that came from him) and the "putting on" of Christ, the new Adam. The imagery of the sacrament itself was intended to recall also Christ's death and resurrection: you go down under the water to symbolize Christ's going down under the earth in the tomb, and you rise up out of it as Christ rose again from the dead.In the Eucharist, the priest uses the words of Christ at the Last Supper (following His command to "do this in memory of me"), in order to transform the bread and wine into the Body of Christ, which is then fed to the Church as the sacrament of unity in order that it may become the *mystical* body of Christ (a good collection of quotes from various Church Fathers on this is here).
Although the celebration of the Sacraments has a social and external aspect, it was always clear that the end and purpose of the Sacraments was the interior life of the soul--the life of Christ that comes to the Christian believer through them.
Veneration of the Saints
Veneration of the saints is the oldest historically attested practice of Christianity, the first inscribed prayers to saints being older than any existing manuscript of the Scriptures (some examples described here). Although the practice of venerating saints would expand over time, originally it was almost exclusively about venerating the martyrs.As Christianity has been compared with Islam on this point as well, it would be good to understand the specifically Christian notion of martyrdom. This is well exemplified in the very early (and short and readable) account of the martyrdom of St. Polycarp (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0102.htm). The main characteristics of Christian martyrdom that you can see here are:
- It is considered the final and highest form of *preaching*. The martyr is a witness to the truth of the message that he proclaims. He proves how sincere and deep is his belief in his own message by suffering publicly for it.
- It is considered an imitation of the example of the Apostles, who all went about preaching the Gospel and were all martyred (except for John) confessing Christ's name.
- It is considered a participation in Christ's own life and sacrificial death: a sharing in the "cup of Christ". Just as Christ preached the Gospel and was sacrificed for it for the redemption of mankind, so the martyrs preach the Gospel and offer up their own bodies as co-sacrifices with Christ for the same sake. They are the "companions of Christ."
It is quite simply impossible to reconcile this ideal of the Christian martyr as the fellow suffering servant with Christ with the imposition of the Christian faith by force.
The Life of Consecrated Virginity
Aside from martyrdom, the other early lived ideal of Christian life was the consecrated virgins. It is revealing of the ideals of early Christianity that the Christians they lionized were not the ones successful in the political or worldly sphere, but the ones who were either destroyed by the world or who separated themselves from it.One interesting example of this is the early Egyptian monasteries, because it shows just how far the early Church took the spiritual understanding of the New Covenant. The Egyptian monks left the world in order to live in communities in the desert outside of Egypt, and in this they thought of themselves as the spiritual successors to the Jews who left Egypt with Moses and wandered in the desert for forty years before reaching the Holy Land. In Shenoute's White Monastery, this parallel was lived so specifically that they actually took many of their community laws straight from the book of Deuteronomy, thought to be the book that Moses wrote to the Jews during this period of exile in the desert. The difference was that while the Jews were in exile looking forward to entrance into the Holy Land, the Christians were looking forward only to the next life and the New Jerusalem in heaven. Egyptian monasticism is thus a sort of lived typology in itself.
The example of early monastacism shows that the Christian ideal was never the conquest of the world in the sense of causing earthly powers and principalities to submit to the Church *in this life*. The Second Coming of Christ was always expected, and it was Christ Himself who would cause the final definitive Kingdom to come. In the meantime, the Church on earth was principally fighting a battle with the world *as it existed as an influence on the sould of the Christian*. In other words, Chrisian conquest of the world happened by Christians freeing themselves of the tyranny of worldly influences on their own actions.
The Importance of These Elements
I want to stress that these elements in which I have identified a spiritual, non-worldly focus in Christianity were not merely incidental to early Christianity; they were central to it.Indeed, from the point of view of archaeology alone, there is little evidence that early Christianity consisted of anything *but* these elements I have identified. We know from the extensive manuscript tradition that Scripture was always very important to Christians. There is even speculation that the book (as opposed to the scroll) was an invention of early Christians to make reading of Scripture at home more convenient (though this may be simply a coincidence of time).
Meanwhile, the importance of the Sacraments of the Eucharist and Baptism are evident from early Christian artwork that revolved around those two institutions. More than almost anything else, we have sanctuary art surrounding the altars at which the Eucharist was celebrated and baptistry art from the early baptistries. And the veneration of martyrs and prayers to saints form some of the very earliest physical evidence of Christianity that we have in the form of graffiti on tombs of the martyrs and their shrines.
While the emergence of the life of consecrated virginity was a bit later historically, the immense and immediate popularity of the Egyptian monasteries is hard to overstate. Pilgrims came to the monks in Egypt from all over the Catholic world in huge numbers (mini cities were built just to accommodate them), because the life they were leading was celebrated everywhere as the pinnacle of Christian piety and virtue.
Early Christian Writings on the Relationship between the Church and the World
That Christianity is a religion without worldly ambitions is shown by its early history in the world as well as its early theology; that is, some early Christians wrote specifically on this question. The fact is that Christianity lived for its first centuries without any State approval (quite the opposite on occasion), and it was basically fine with that. Early Christians, in fact, often had to answer accusations that they were not loyal to the State and were trying to overthrow it. One should remember that in those times, State and religion were not necessarily considered separate things. Romans considered it fairly uncontroversial to elevate the emperor to the status of a god and to demand sacrifice to him, as religious piety and devotion to the patria were considered intensely related by most.Justin Martyr, one of the earliest Church fathers, gave a classic defence of Christianity drawing a distinction between belief in pagan gods and loyalty to the State, emphatically denying the first while maintaining that Christians were very loyal to the legitimate government of the Romans (following Christ's injunction to Peter to pay the Roman taxes), and that the kingdom that they sought was not of this world and hence not competitive with Roman Empire.
The fact that Justin is now known as "martyr" shows how successful his argumentation was with Rome, but the fact that his writings were saved and revered by Christians ever afterwards shows how successful they were among the early Church. Despite accusations, Christians were never working towards the overthrow of secular rulers.
As a sort of side note, I'd like to mention the early Church's relation to the pagan world of ideas: pagan literature and philosophy. On this there were mixed views among the Church fathers--some were very antipathetic towards all pagan culture, which they regarded as corrupt and even demonic. (And these people had a point, as the corruption of Roman culture in its decadence was in many cases extreme.) However, the consensus view of Christian teachers was conciliatory, expressed here by St. Basil, urging Christians to take what was good from pagan culture and discard what was evil.
Overall, the attitude of the Church to the secular world was coexistence. The world was created by God and ultimately governed by Him, but the existence of the Church in the world is special and different. The Church is the physical presence of an other-worldly reality within the world, interacting with it but not tied to it. The great Church Father St. Augustine wrote a book entirely about this, the City of God. This work is especially important here, because St. Augustine can be considered the bridge from the early Church to the medieval Church, so influential were his writings to become in the West. Key ideas in the City of God include:
- Earthly kingdoms come and go as ordained by God's providence.
- The Kingdom of God embraces all nations, and lives within them but is unified by a common spiritual life and a common goal, which is the life of paradise.
- Not only is the Church, the Kingdom of God, dispersed throughout the world and intermixed with the Kingdom of Satan, the Kingdom of Satan is interspersed within the Church, as both the bad and the good are taken into the fold. The good and the bad will never be clearly delineated in this life, but only in the final judgement.
Overall, I think this is a good survey of early Christianity supporting my thesis that it was, from the beginning, a spiritual religion. Next we will go on to look at how Christianity became more and more entwined with secular powers through history, having both good and bad effects.
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Catholicism vs. Islam On Violence, Part 1
In his recent exhortation on evangelization, the Holy Father stated:
Faced with disconcerting episodes of violent fundamentalism, our respect for true followers of Islam should lead us to avoid hateful generalisations, for authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.I took exception to the second part of this sentence, as I believe violence is indeed recommended by authentic Islam and a proper reading of the Koran. A friend, however, challenged me by claiming that although violence may be part of Islam now, it was just as much a part of Catholicism earlier. In particular he pointed to the spread of Christianity by force during the 15th century and the Age of Exploration. From this he concluded that Fundamentalist Islam today is simply trying to impose its worldview onto an unbelieving world in just the same way that the Catholic Church tried to impose its worldview onto an unbelieving world by force six centuries ago. We can, then, hope that Islam will evolve into a peaceful religion eventually in the same way Catholicism did.
I don't believe that Islam and Christianity are in any way parallel in this regard, so I don't accept that argument in either its premise or conclusion. I'd like to show why here. This will be a multi-part series of posts, which I will structure as follows:
- First, dealing with Catholicism:
- Catholicism from its very beginning was a spiritual religion that did not wish for worldly domination.
- Evidence for this from Scripture
- Evidence for this from the early Church Fathers
- Catholicism has had a troubled relationship with Catholic rulers over the centuries, so that actions of Catholic rulers are often not fairly ascribable to the Catholic religion.
- The specific history of the Age of Exploration is complicated, and not all actions of Eurpoean kingdoms of the time that are condemned nowadays necessarily deserve condemnation. Nor are all actions of Popes in that time period indicative of essential Catholicism (unfortunately).
- Catholic theology of the time actually had the correct view on the relationship between religion and force.
- Then, dealing with Islam:
- Islam from its very beginning endorsed the spread of religion by force and the domination of the political sphere by the religious.
- Evidence for this from the Quran.
- Evidence for this from early authoritative supplements to the Quran.
- Modern fundamentalist Islam draws inspiration and justification from these early principles and ideas.
1. Catholicism and Political Domination
1.1 Evidence from Scripture
Christianity is a spiritual religion. This is true in a number of ways, but there is one very particular way I'd like to highlight now, which is that Christianity has at its foundation a spiritual interpretation of history, especially with regards to the Old Testament and Judaism. Christianity sees history as a story planned out by God, and the most important event of this story as a divine plot twist. It goes like this:Throughout the Old Testament, God built up a relationship with the Jews, making them His chosen people and giving them the Holy Land, the Law and the Propets, the Kingdom of David and the Temple of Solomon. Because of the sinfulness of the People, the Land and the the Kingdom was taken away from the Jews, but with a promise that the exile would not be forever. Therefore at the time of Jesus, the major preoccupation of faithful Jews was the expulsion of the Romans and restoration of the Kingdom, and it was expected that this was to happen through the coming of a promised Messiah.
The Christian twist is that the Messiah comes, only to reveal that the Holy Land and the Kingdom of David were never the *real* point after all--that all the things that happened to the Chosen People was preparation for and symbolic of the New Covenant. The Kingdom of David was not going to be restored, but rather replaced by something incomparably higher and better: the Kingdom of Heaven. All the worldly expectations of the Jews at the time were turned on their heads and replaced by spiritual expectations, and all the history of the Old Testament was radically re-read in the light of Christ as a foreshadowing and prophecy for the new reality, which is the Church. So the Old and the New Testaments are read as paralleling each other, with the second including but also transcending the first.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of this doctrine of "transcending parallelism" (which is known traditionally in Catholic doctrine as "typology") to Christianity. It is everywhere in the New Testament. To pick a few examples:
- The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus deliberately presenting Himself as a new Moses presenting a new, more perfect law than the ten commandments from a mountain top ("you have heard it said . . . but I say to you . . .")
- Parables are given that emphasize the importance of the life to come over the present life (parable of the pearl of great price, the parable of Lazarus and Dives, the parable of the 5 five and 5 foolish virgins, the parable of the tares in the wheat, etc. etc.)
- Twelve apostles with no wordly power or majesty are chosen to replace the twelve tribes of Israel and are sent out to spread the Kingdom of God with preaching rather than warfare.
- Jesus is captured and suffers an apparent humiliating defeat at the hand of pagans and through the intermediate cause of sinful Jewish (thus paralleling the humiliating history of the Jews first in exile and then oppressed by pagans, a point that is often overlooked), only for it to turn out that His Crucifixion is actually His great triumph over evil and the very inauguration of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth (and note that he makes clear even during His passion, "My Kingdom is not of this world", thus making the theme explicit).
- Moving beyond the Gospels, this transcending parallelism is everywhere in Paul. The pattern of "if it was this-and-such in the Old Covenant, so much the more will some-such-thing be true in the New" is constantly coming up in Paul's writings.
- The idea that our citizenship is not of this world and that a Christian should therefore live a life higher and more exalted than an ordinary life is also constant in Paul.
This doctrine has a very important implications for the relationship between the Christian and the world. Whereas the Jews were seen as attached to a particular political structure they saw as divinely mandated (the Holy Land), the Christians were focused on the "New Jerusalem", a homeland that was in heaven, not in any earthly country. Consequently, when the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by Romans drew nigh, Christians were instructed to leave. Jersusalem was no longer the focus of religion: Christ was, and Christ could be worshipped anywhere.
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