From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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History: Humanism to Holocaust

In his The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation, David Levin briefly traces the line from humanism to 20th-century terror.  Early moderns developed a vision “derived from an egological and essentially anthropocentric vision of reason: reason as instrumental, pragmatic, practical.  And people slowly began to lose sight of the difference between reason and power: reason, increasingly asserting itself in self-destructive ways, began to think of itself as the will to truth.”

Essentially, subjectivity inverted into objectivity, and objectivity meant the destruction of subjectivity:

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History: Nestorians and Islam

In his recent God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades, Rodney Stark challenges the conventional notion that Islamic civilization was more advanced than Christendom’s in the early middle ages.   One part of his case is to show that much of Islamic civilization depended on the contributions of Jewish and Christian dhimmis.  Nestorian Christians in Syria and elsewhere, for instance, “acquired a reputation with the Arabs for being excellent accountants, architects, astrologers, bankers, doctors, merchants, philosophers, scientists, scribes and teachers.  In fact, prior to the ninth century, nearly all the learned scholars in the [Islamic areas] were Nestorian Christians.”

Stark also argues that when the Muslims took up the culture of conquered peoples, they often misused it.  They read Aristotle the way the read the Qur’an, as an infallible text: “This eventually led the philosopher Averroes and his followers to impose the position that Aristotle’s physics was complete and infallible, and if actual observations were inconsistent with one of Aristotle’s teachings, those observations were either in error or an illusion.”

He runs through a number of technical areas – transport, military technology, agriculture – and shows that the early medieval West was far more innovative than early medieval Islam. Most startling is his observation that “following the Muslim conquest of Egypt, the rest of North Africa, and Spain, the wheel disappeared from the whole area!” – replaced by camels, donkeys and horses.

History: Buying Loyalty

In his excellent Theopolitical Imagination, William Cavanaugh points out that during the Reformation Catholic princes remained Catholic in those areas where the power of the Papacy had already been restricted.  Because the princes could have their way, they didn’t need to change religions: “In France the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges had accomplished this in 1438, eliminating papal collection of the Annate tax, taking away the Pope’s right to nominate candidates for vacant sees, and giving the crown the formerly papal prerogative of supplicating in favor of aspirants to most benefices.  The Concordat of Bologna in 1516 confirmed the French kings’ control over Church appointments and revenues.  In Spain the crown was granted even wider concessions between 1482 and 1508.  France and Spain remained Catholic.”

Once the Concordat of Bologna was secured, “the French kings and Catherine de Medici saw no advantage to the Reformation in France.”  As a result, the Reformation was regarded as a political threat, which the French kings suppressed.  French nobility, fearing the centralizing powers of the king, became Calvinists.

By contrast, “where such concordats were not arranges, as in England, German, and Scandinavia, conflicts between the Church and the secular rulers – which, it must be remembered, predated Luther – contributed in every case to the success of the Reformation.”

History: Wrapped Culture

Margaret Visser has done it again. Author of The Rituals of Dinner, and The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church, she has now added The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude, an anthropological and philosophical study of gratitude, an examination of the gestures and rituals of thanks. Her latest is the book I’ve been hoping to write someday; now that Visser’s done it, why bother?

Visser recognizes that, for all the obsession with gifts and gift-giving since Mauss, nobody has paid much attention to the other end of the exchange, to gratitude and its obligations.  She notes too that Seneca’s de Beneficiis has been, quite astonishingly, all but ignored in contemporary discussions.  Her book ranges widely, covering verbal expressions of thanks, the reciprocities of giving and receiving, the meaning of gratitude and the emotional dimensions of thanks.  The book is cross-cultural, and Visser is as familiar with evolutionary studies of gratitude as she is with Shakespeare and (I was happy to find) Aquinas.

One illustration: Why do we wrap gifts?

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History: Republic of Letters

In his recent The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future, Robert Darnton suggests that the development of information technologies brings the Enlightenment aspiration to democratize learning closer to realization.  In his TNR review of Darnton’s book, Anthony Grafton quotes Darnton’s description of the philosophes‘ “Republic of Letters”: It was to be “a realm with no police, no boundaries, and no inequalities other than those determined by talent.”  In fact, the Enlightenment philosophers, Grafton says, “rarely, if ever treated the impoverished hacks of Europe’s Grub Streets as their equals,” but with the spread of electronic books we come closer: “For the last generation and more, the traditional realms of information have experienced new and frightening pressures.  Great libraries – those of American research universities, for example – have amassed mountains of printed material.  But these collections have been accessible only to the small group lucky enough to have the keys of the kingdom: students, faculty, and others who can afford to pay for the privileges.”

That’s all changing.

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History: Secularization

The folks at First Things published an article of mine on secularization in their “On the Square” space yesterday, September 30.

Economics History: Medieval economics

Henri Pirenne, in his Economic and Social History of medieval Europe, describes the regulation of economic life in medieval towns during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Pirenne is admittedly old news, and perhaps more recent studies have corrected some of his claims.

The town government had two main aims: “publicity of transactions and the suppression of middlemen.” Later, Pirenne adds that economic regulations in the towns were “governed by the spirit of control and by the principle of direct exchange to the profit of the consumer.”

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Economics History: Byzantine economics

History: End of Aristocracy

In a TLS (August 14) review of William Doyle’s recent Aristocracy and Its Enemies in the Age of Revolution, David Armitage made some intriguing comments about the sea change in the fortunes of aristocracy that took place in the 18th century.

For the French, he points out, nobility was not just a class, but a race question: “Many French nobles, supported by their ideological allies among historians, had long argued that they were literally a race apart from other Frenchmen, decendants of the conquering Franks, not of defeated Gauls.  To strip them of fiscal privileges was one thing; to extinguish heredity in the name of equality was, ‘in noble eyes . . . nothing less than an attempt to change biology.’”

Thus, the story of the “end” of aristocracy is not just about aristocracy:

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History: Querelle des Anciens et Modernes

In an article from the 1950s, Paul Kristeller traced the development of the system of the fine arts that everyone since at least Kant has taken for granted.  He notes that this system, which considers some specific endeavours as “fine arts” separated from mere “crafts” or “artisanship,” was given a strong impetus by the quarrel of ancients and moderns launched in response to Charles Perrault’s poem Le Siecle de Louis le Grand.

What was at issue was the problem of progress: Clearly, remarkable progress had been made in a number of technical areas; but that raised the question of whether the seventeenth century had seen similar progress in other areas.  As the controversy developed, ancient/modern overlapped with static/progressive.  In some areas, soon identified as the arts, the ancients remained standards; in other areas, the sciences, they did not.

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History: All Israel Saved

A friend, Jim Rogers, sends along this quotation from the late Richard Neuhaus:

“Scholars generally agree that in the first century there were approximately six million Jews in the Roman Empire . . . That was about one tenth of the entire population. About one million were in Palestine, including today’s State of Israel, while those in the diaspora were very much part of the establishment in cities such as Alexandria and Constantinople. . . . Some scholars have noted that, by the fourth or fifth century, there were only a few hundred thousand, at most a million, people who identified themselves as Jews. What happened to the millions of others? The most likely answer, it is suggested, is that they became Christians.”

History: Catching the clerics, again

Feminists, rightly, attack the nymphet/Lolita treatment of incest, in which middle-aged father figures are victimized by precociously sexualized teens or pre-teens, as well as by their bitchy, frigid wives.  This is the initial setup for the film American Beauty, though in the end the father figure refuses to consummate his desire and reverts to a father-figure when he discovers the object of his lust is a virgin.  But the film invests so much style into making the nymphet captivating and the father-figure sympathetic that his final enlightenment seems cheaply won.  He has his fantasies and his fatherhood too, and doesn’t really have to sacrifice either.  He gets to be both of the things his daughter calls him at the beginning, both a “horny geek” and a “role model.”

In attacking this account of father-daughter incest, feminists are simply catching up with the medieval clerics.  According to Elizabeth Archibald’s book on incest in medieval imagination, the clerical writers of the middle ages consistently blame men as a initiators and perpetrators of incestuous relations with daughters and daughter-substitutes.  Medieval literature had plenty of room for seductresses, but not for nymphets.

History: Catching up to the clerics

In her study of Incest and the Medieval Imagination, Elizabeth Archibald notes that medieval clerical writers were far more open about incest and incestuous desire than moderns have been until very recently:

“On might have expected that the medieval church would have avoided telling stories about incest for fear of putting dangerous ideas into people’s heads.  On the other hand, to be plausible and powerful, cautionary tales should bear a strong resemblance to real-life situations, must be recognizable as within the bounds of possibility.  The frequent use of the incest theme by clerical writers shows that incestuous desire was not regarded as a rare and barbaric perversion, but rather as a constant danger for all, rich and poor, powerful and humble, male and female.  Some writers went so far as to acknowledge the possibility of consensual incest between close relatives who love each other deeply, though of course this was no excuse for sin.  By insisting that even this heinous sin could be absolved through contrition and grace, Christianity put a new spin on the incest theme, and on plots which must have been circulating a long time in oral literature as well as in written sources.”

History: First Moderns

William Everdell’s The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought is one of the most satisfying and insightful books of cultural critique and history that I’ve read in a long time.  It is impressively broad.  Everdell writes with easy and often witty grace about quantum mechanics, the foundations of mathematics, “pantonal” music, cubism, stream of consciousness narrative, vers libre, etc.

His central thesis is that modernism (beginning in the last decades of the 19th century) broke with a fundamental 19th-century premise, the premise of continuity.

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History: Euhemerist typology

RPC Hanson notes an “ingenious” application of the euhemerist theory that the pagan gods originated from human beings: The god Separis “who was represented as having a bushel for a headdress, was in reality the patriarch Joseph whom the supertitious Egyptians had deified after his death out of gratitude for his supplying them with corn.”

History: Savage Miracles

Carlin Barton closes a brilliant article comparing concepts of honor, sacrifice, and sacramentum found among martyrs and gladiators with some observations on the wider cultural import of her work.  One of her main aims is to overcome the perception that Christians and Romans were working in completely separate symbolic universes, a perception that fundamentally shapes the historical work of Gibbon and Nietzsche’s genealogy:

“For Edward Gibbon, like Friedrich Nietzsche, the Romans were the strong and the noble.  Both saw a sanguine, virile, joyfully predatory Rome attacked and infested by a mode of being foreign and alien to the Roman spirit that subverted the valuation of the proud and noble with the positive valuation of the humble and base. . . .

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History: Orientalizing revolution

Warwick Ball’s Rome in the East is a treasure trove.  Instead of telling the story of Rome from an occidental standpoint, he goes east and looks back.  What does Roman history look like from Arabia, Syria, Edessa, India?  One of his remarkable conclusions is that before the triumph of the west the west had itself been conquered by the east.

Commenting on Constantine’s found of Constantinople, he observes:

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History: Monastic conformism

In reaction to the lax respectability of the majority church, many hardy souls retreated to the desert or the frontier.  So the story goes.

Only the monastery was another form of cultural conformity.  RA Markus (The End of Ancient Christianity) says that “the ideal of the philosophical life was among the most important of the sources which nourished Christian monasticism. . . . In contrast to Judaism, where asceticism played only a minor role and one confined to the fringes of orthodox circles, the whole Hellenistic and Roman philosophical tradition offered a rich store-house of commonplaces extolling the ascetic life.”  Christian monks “were not the first to combine the notions of self-denial and of the life of contemplation; even communal dedication to these ideals had been anticipated in Antiquity.”  Athanasius was on the right track in describing Antony’s as a “philosophic” life.

History: Linguistic Girardianism

Florence Dupont points out in her Daily Life in Ancient Rome that in Latin enemy (hostis) andguest (hospes) “were formed from the same root, which had the meaning ‘the other who is similar to you.’”

History: Carthaginian Tophet

In her study of Roman gladiatorial combat and arenas (Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power) Alison Futrell describes the Phoenician practice of human sacrifice transplanted to Carthage: “The young victim was placed in the arms of the bronze image of Ba’al Hammon, arms that sloped downward toward a pit or large brazier filled with burning embers.  Once the child had been cremated, the ashes were removed and placed in an urn, which in turn was placed in a pit, sometimes lined with cobbles, and then covered over.  A burial marker, a cippus or stela, was often placed above the urn.”

Carthage belies the theory that cultures outgrow this barbarism as they become more educated and sophisticated: “At Carthage . . . expansion of political hegemony, cultural sophistication, and child sacrifice simultaneously peaked, in the fourth and third centuries B.C.”  When Syracuse invaded in the early fourth century, “the nobles of Carthage sacrificed some two hundred of their children.”

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