Islamic Reformation? No and Yes . . .

Martin Luther Burning Papal Bull with 41 Theses Against Him
Artwork by Friedrich Martersteig

Photograph: Rischgitz/Getty Images
Guardian

A friend of mine sent me a link to this article, "Why Islam doesn't need a reformation," by Mehdi Hasan and published in the Guardian very recently (May 17, 2015). Hasan points to Aayan Hirsi Ali's call for a Islamic Reformation and asks if we really want the same kind of religious violence that resulted afterwards as Christianity tore itself apart. I agree with Hasan. We don't want that. Moreover, Islam has already had its Protestant-type 'Reformation' - in the movement led by Ibn Abdul Wahhab:

The truth is that Islam has already had its own reformation of sorts, in the sense of a stripping of cultural accretions and a process of supposed "purification". And it didn't produce a tolerant, pluralistic, multifaith utopia, a Scandinavia-on-the-Euphrates. Instead, it produced . . . the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Wasn't reform exactly what was offered to the masses of the Hijaz by Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab, the mid-18th century itinerant preacher who allied with the House of Saud? He offered an austere Islam cleansed of what he believed to be innovations, which eschewed centuries of mainstream scholarship and commentary, and rejected the authority of the traditional ulema, or religious authorities.

Hasan is exactly right - that Islamic reform contributed to the Islamist mess we're in today. That's why I usually say I'm for Muslim reform, not an Islamic Reformation. I'm not sure about all of these following remarks by Hasan, however:

Don't get me wrong. Reforms are of course needed across the crisis-ridden Muslim-majority world: political, socio-economic and, yes, religious too. Muslims need to rediscover their own heritage of pluralism, tolerance and mutual respect - embodied in, say, the Prophet's letter to the monks of St Catherine's monastery, or the "convivencia" (or co-existence) of medieval Muslim Spain.

The letter might be useful, though of limited use, and I've read that the "convivencia" in Spain was not quite so ideal as often believed. That Spanish era has been subject to selective memory. Moreover, all those centuries of mainstream commentary were not so good for non-Muslims living under the yoke of Islam.

I think what we need - in addition to fighting Islamism on the literal battlefield - is an intellectual fight, one drawing on Western principles and critical scholarship of the sort that Christianity and Judaism have had to deal with.

Islam needs Qur'anic criticism - and criticism of the Hadith and Sira. We might not be able to reform Islam - outsiders that we are - but we can put up an intellectual shield to protect our Western way of thinking, speaking, and living.

Islam and Democracy: Negative Association?

Robert D. Woodberry

Google Images

Through searching the internet for more on Robert D. Woodberry and his work, I came across his doctoral thesis, "The Shadow of Empire: Christian Missions, Colonial Policy, and Democracy in Postcolonial Societies," submitted in 2004 to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for the degree of doctor of philosophy in the Department of Sociology. In that dissertation, I found evidence offered for something I'd been wondering about: the consequences of Islam for democracy:

Past research suggests a strong and consistent negative association between the percent Muslim in a society and the level of political democracy. Muslims societies also have more unstable democratic transitions. (155)

Woodberry cites several scholars on this negative association of Islam and democracy:

Clague, Christopher, Suzanne Gleason, and Stephen Knack. 2001. "Determinants of Lasting Democracy in Poor Countries: Culture, Development, and Institutions."Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 573: 16-41.

Gasiorowski, Mark J. and Timothy J. Power. 1998. "The Structural Determinants of Democratic Consolidation: Evidence from the Third World." Comparative Political Studies. 31(6): 740-771.

Huntington, Samuel P. 1991. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

Huntington, Samuel P. 1993. "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs. 72(3): 22-49.

Karatnycky, Adrian. 1999. "The 1998 Freedom House Survey: The Decline of Illiberal Democracy." Journal of Democracy. 10: 112-25.

Karatnycky, Adrian. 2003. "Liberty's Advances in a Troubled World." Journal of Democracy. 14(1): 100-13.

Lipset. Seymour Martin. 1994. "The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited: 1993 Presidential Address." American Sociological Review. 59(1): 1-22.

Midlarsky, Manus I. 1998. "Democracy and Islam: Implications for Civilizational Conflict and the Democratic Peace." International Studies Journal. 42: 485-511.

Woodberry, Robert D. and Timothy S. Shah. 2004. "Christianity and Democracy: The Pioneering Protestants." Journal of Democracy. 15(2): 47-61.

Woodberry does not analyze the reasons for this negative association between Islam and democracy -- though he rather generously allows that it might be due to the lack of Protestant missionizing in Muslim areas, which might otherwise have motivated Muslims to promote education, literacy, civil societies, and more in order to compete with Protestants, as sometimes happened when Protestants opened mission fields in some places, e.g., Catholic areas.

Perhaps some of the scholars Woodberry cites have made suggestions?

Robert D. Woodberry: "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy"

Robert D. Woodberry
Google Images

In yesterday's blog entry, I noted Robert D. Woodberry's article, "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy," American Political Science Review Vol. 106, No. 2 May 2012). He seems to have proven his thesis, that stable modern democracies are significantly dependent upon the presence of independent Protestants who missionized various places around the world. I won't deal with his statistical data since I have no competence in that area; I will instead quote extensively from his paper in passages where he offers substantive reasons for why Protestant missions led to democracy. Here's his summary of the argument, which describes the role of nonstate, conversionary Protestants (CPs):

I discuss the following arguments in more detail in the history section, but in brief, CPs such as Protestant missionaries wanted people to be able to read the Bible in their own language and wanted to facilitate lay religious involvement. Thus, as CPs tried to spread their faith, they catalyzed mass education, mass printing, and civil society -- hampering elite attempts to monopolize these resources. Protestants themselves did not always provide the most educational, printing, and civil society resources, but Protestant initiatives spurred others to invest heavily in these areas and to pressure governments to create schools that restricted Protestant content. These resource transfers to non-elites helped alter the class structure, fostered the rise of political parties and nonviolent political movements, and facilitated broader political participation.

In addition, Nonconformists (i.e., non-state-supported Protestant denominations) historically suffered from discrimination and persecution by governments and state churches. Thus they fought for religious liberty and against state interference in civil society. In addition, both Evangelicals in state churches and Nonconformists wanted a "converted clergy." Thus in the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries, CPs generally sided with Enlightenment elites against state churches and their conservative allies. When they lacked this religious support, Enlightenment elites had a small power base and typically set up either autocratic or unstable and illiberal democratic regimes.

Finally, nonstate missionaries moderated colonial abuses, particularly when abuses undermined conversions and in British colonies (where CPs had greater influence). To reach their religious goals, nonstate missionaries punished abusive colonial officials and counterbalanced white settlers, which fostered the rule of law, encouraged less violent repression of anticolonial political organization, and facilitated peaceful decolonization. Of course, Protestant economic and political elites were as selfish as anyone else. Protestant slaveowners fought slave literacy, and Protestant settlers exploited indigenous people; however, when missionaries were financially independent of the state, of slaveowners, and of white settlers, missionaries undermined these elite co-religionists in ways that fostered democracy. (246a)

Woodberry's thesis is not entirely straightforward. The particular circumstances, as much as religious beliefs, shaped nonstate, conversionary Protestantism's activities. But the CPs did play a significant role:

Those who doubt the religious roots of democracy typically overemphasize its Athenian, Enlightenment, and Deist roots. However, religious factors are also important. Modern democracy differs greatly from Athenian democracy, and Enlightenment theorists incorporated many legal and institutional innovations from earlier religious movements. In fact, arguments for political pluralism, electoral reform, and limitations of state power were originally framed in religious terms.

For example, Calvinists tried to reconstruct states along "godly" lines and limit sinful human institutions. Perhaps as a result, most Enlightenment democratic theorists came from Calvinist families or had a Calvinist education, even if they were either not theologically orthodox or personally religious (e.g., John Locke, Rousseau, Hugo Grotius, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Patrick Henry, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton), and they secularized ideas previously articulated by Calvinist theologians and jurists. For example, Hobbes' and Locke's social contracts are secular versions of Puritan and Nonconformist covenants, and Locke's ideas about the equality of all people are explicitly religious.

Although stated in secular form, the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights derive most directly from earlier colonial covenants, compacts, and bills of rights that were generally justified explicitly in biblical and theological terms; many were written before Hobbes and Locke expounded their ideas. Only 7 of the 27 rights enumerated in the U.S. Bill of Rights can be traced to major English common law documents. Even between 1760 and 1805, political writings quoted the Bible more often than either Enlightenment or classical thinkers (34% versus 22% and 9%, respectively).

Furthermore, the strength of Calvinism and Non-conformism better predicts where democracy emerged than does the strength of Greek and Enlightenment influence. (248a)

I wonder if these numbers cover the substantive story that needs to be fleshed out. Perhaps the Bible was cited more because it held more authority for most people, not because it contained democratic ideas. In other words, secular and Enlightenment views may have 'borrowed' the cloak of religious authority to make their position more persuasive. This assumes, of course, that the Bible is vague enough -- on the political system it supports -- for democratic ideas to be read into the text. Nevertheless, the impact of CPs was real:

One mechanism through which CPs dispersed power was massively expanding access to printed material and news. Scholars often claim that printing and capitalism birthed the public sphere and that the public sphere in turn enabled democracy. CPs greatly accelerated the development of mass printing, newspapers, and the public sphere for several reasons. First, CPs changed people's ideas about who books were for. According to CPs, everyone needed access to "God's word" -- not just elites. Therefore, everyone needed to read, including women and the poor. Moreover, books had to be inexpensive and in language that was accessible to ordinary people, not in foreign languages or classical versions of local languages. Second, CPs expected lay people to make their own religious choices. They believed people are saved not through sacraments or group membership but by "true faith in God"; thus, each individual had to decide which faith to follow. CPs used printed material to try to convert people, which forced other groups to use such materials to compete for ordinary people’s allegiance. This competition helped give rise to mass printing. (249a)

The principle of free individual choice clearly played a huge role, sometimes by example:

CPs advocated mass literacy so that everyone could read the Bible and interpret it competently. Their attempt to convert people through education threatened other elites and spurred these elites to also invest in mass education. (251a)

These are all plausible explanations, but Christianity in general -- if we include Catholics and Orthodox -- would not seem, in itself, to be obviously conducive to the development of stable democracies. In fact, state-supported Protestantism seems to have been as nonconducive to the development of stable democracies as were Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Two things, I think, remain to be done: 1) detailing the ideological links between stable democracies and the religious beliefs of independent Protestants to show how these religious views supported the secular ones, and 2) explaining in detail how the democratic character of these religious beliefs arose within the context of a Western Christendom that had never been especially democratic. These are important for a bigger question that interests me, namely, whether or not Christianity, in general, was in some way more conducive to the emergence of modernity.

In other words, is there something about Christianity -- in contradistinction to, say, Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism -- that makes its democratic reinterpretation more easily accomplished?

Protestant Missions and Democracy?

Missionary Men
Alice Seeley Harris / Panos Archives
Christianity Today

Andrea Palpant Dilley, writing "The Surprising Discovery About Those Colonialist, Proselytizing Missionaries" (Christianity Today, January 8, 2014), has something of genuine significance to report on the unexpected findings of one contemporary scholar, a sociologist named Robert Woodberry:

One afternoon . . . [in graduate school, Woodberry] attended a required lecture . . . . by Kenneth A. Bollen, a UNC–Chapel Hill professor and one of the leading experts on measuring and tracking the spread of global democracy. Bollen remarked that he kept finding a significant statistical link between democracy and Protestantism. Someone needed to study the reason for the link, he said.

Woodberry knew that he'd found his vocation:

Soon he found himself descending into the UNC–Chapel Hill archives in search of old data on religion. "I found an atlas [from 1925] of every missionary station in the world, with tons of data," says Woodberry with glee. He found data on the "number of schools, teachers, printing presses, hospitals, and doctors, and it referred in turn to earlier atlases. I thought, Wow, this is so huge. This is amazing" . . . . Woodberry set out to track down the evidence for Bollen's conjecture that Protestant religion and democracy were somehow related. He studied yellowed maps, spending months charting the longitude and latitude of former missionary stations. He traveled to Thailand and India to consult with local scholars, dug through archives in London, Edinburgh, and Serampore, India, and talked with church historians all over Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa.

Not just a vocation, but a vacation, too -- albeit a working one -- and an important trip:

In essence, Woodberry was digging into one of the great enigmas of modern history: why some nations develop stable representative democracies -- in which citizens enjoy the rights to vote, speak, and assemble freely -- while neighboring countries suffer authoritarian rulers and internal conflict. Public health and economic growth can also differ dramatically from one country to another, even among countries that share similar geography, cultural background, and natural resources.

In 2001, he noticed something significant in pursuing these differences:

In search of answers, Woodberry traveled to West Africa in 2001. Setting out one morning on a dusty road in Lomé, the capital of Togo, Woodberry headed for the University of Togo's campus library. He found it sequestered in a 1960s-era building. The shelves held about half as many books as his personal collection. The most recent encyclopedia dated from 1977. Down the road, the campus bookstore sold primarily pens and paper, not books.

"Where do you buy your books?" Woodberry stopped to ask a student.

"Oh, we don't buy books," he replied. "The professors read the texts out loud to us, and we transcribe."

Across the border, at the University of Ghana's bookstore, Woodberry had seen floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with hundreds of books, including locally printed texts by local scholars. Why the stark contrast?

The reason was clear: During the colonial era, British missionaries in Ghana had established a whole system of schools and printing presses. But France, the colonial power in Togo, severely restricted missionaries. The French authorities took interest in educating only a small intellectual elite. More than 100 years later, education was still limited in Togo. In Ghana, it was flourishing.

His advisor, Christian Smith, cautioned him:

What began to emerge was a consistent and controversial pattern -- one that might damage Woodberry's career, warned Smith. "I thought it was a great, daring project, but I advised [him] that lots of people wouldn't like it if the story panned out," Smith says. "For [him] to suggest that the missionary movement had this strong, positive influence on liberal democratization -- you couldn't think of a more unbelievable and offensive story to tell a lot of secular academics."

His faith was strong, but he needed proof:

Woodberry was equipped to do something no one else had done: to look at the long-term effect of missionaries using the wide-angle lens of statistical analysis . . . . [He] created a statistical model that could test the connection between missionary work and the health of nations. He and a few research assistants spent two years coding data and refining their methods. They hoped to compute the lasting effect of missionaries, on average, worldwide . . . . One morning, in a windowless, dusty computer lab lit by florescent bulbs, Woodberry ran the first big test. After he finished prepping the statistical program on his computer, he clicked "Enter" and then leaned forward to read the results.

"I was shocked," says Woodberry . . . . "The impact of missions on global democracy was huge. I kept adding variables to the model -- factors that people had been studying and writing about for the past 40 years -- and they all got wiped out. It was amazing. I knew, then, I was on to something really important."

But he wanted to be sure:

Determined to be his own greatest skeptic, Woodberry started measuring alternative theories using a technique called two-stage least-squares instrumental variable analysis . . . . "[The theory] kept on holding up" . . . . Woodberry's results essentially suggested that 50 years' worth of research on the rise of democracy had overlooked the most important factor.

And what do other scholars think of Woodberry's work:

In spite of Smith's concerns, Woodberry's historical and statistical work has finally captured glowing attention. A summation of his 14 years of research -- published in 2012 in the American Political Science Review, the discipline's top journal -- has won four major awards, including the prestigious Luebbert Article Award for best article in comparative politics. Its startling title: "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy."

Similar to Max Weber's thesis on Protestantism and capitalism, but much better grounded! My question is: "Why did Protestantism have this effect?"

Anyway, fascinating . . . to learn that Annie Lennox was wrong!

Michael Totten Interviews Ramez Atallah on Christians and Muslims in Egypt, Part II

Ramez Atallah

General Director

The Bible Society of Egypt

Photo from Urbana

On November 17th, I posted an entry about Michael Totten's interview with Ramez Atallah on "The Christians of Egypt, Part I" (November 15, 2011). Totten has since posted part two: "The Christians of Egypt, Part II" (November 27, 2011). As I noted with my first posting on Ramez Atallah, he is a Protestant Christian and the General Director of the Bible Society of Egypt, and he has some interesting things to say, several of which were counterintuitive to me.

The most surprising thing in part one was his assertion that the West should not focus on human rights specifically for Christians, despite their oppressed condition as second-class cititzens, for Muslims would think that Christians were being favored over Muslims. He also stated that the Christians of Egypt could live with the Muslim Brotherhood, but not with the Salafists, a surprise to me since I figured that both Islamist types were bad for Christians, but Atallah made a distinction. Go read that first interview if you want to know more.

In part two, Atallah also has some interesting things to say. Particularly noteworthy is his remark about the difference between Islam in an Arabic and in a non-Arabic country:

Islam in an Arabic-speaking country is very different from Islam in a non-Arabic country . . . . Like I told you before, Islam is very close to people's identity, like your gender is for you. This is most true in Arabic countries because Islam is Arabic. They are intertwined. The language and the religion are intertwined. Arabic is the only language in the world that has been frozen for 1400 years. If you ask any child here what his hardest subject is in school, invariably he will say Arabic. You as a Westerner may scratch your head and wonder how Arabic can be the hardest subject in school in an Arab country, but it's because the language we speak and read in Egypt is so different from classical Arabic . . . . Exactly. And how many kids did you know who liked Latin in school? . . . And it's only a written language now. That's exactly what kids are doing when they study Arabic. We have this old language that is very far from what we read and speak every day. It is imposed on us. There is this mystique about it, that we have to know it and live it. Arabs are more closely aligned to Islam because their language, their culture, and their faith are all one.

Atallah picks up on a point that he made earlier, in part one of Totten's interview, and clarifies that the West should support human rights in Egypt rather than focusing on the rights specifically of persecuted Christian, and he explains why:

My point is, what will the government listen to more? Will America get a better result by pressing for freedom for Christians or freedom for Muslims? If you pressure Egypt only for Christian rights, Muslims here will say, "if they're your people, take them with you." But if Americans care about my Muslim friend's wife, the Muslims will be tongue-tied. They won't know how to argue with you about that.

Atallah makes some interesting points, and since he's a Christian Egyptian who's lived in both the West (Canada) and the Islamic world (Egypt), he's a man whose opinion should be carefully considered, particularly when he tells us:

I need you to please understand that Muslims hate it when the West speaks up for Christians. They absolutely despise it and we become the victims.

That is a crucial point that would never have occurred to me, and knowing it would make reading this interview worthwhile even if Atallah had said nothing else of importance.

But, of course, he does say other interesting things . . .

Baylor University publishes my opinion . . . sort of.

Baylor Magazine
Fall 2011
Vol. 10, Issue 1

Some time back, I noted that my undergrad alma mater wanted my opinion on a question to which the above statement promises an answer. Apparently, Baylor didn't want just my opinion:

When we asked readers in our last issue to answer one simple question -- "Why does the world need Baylor?" -- we really didn't know what kinds of responses we would get. We were pleased to hear from every part of the Baylor family: alumni (young and old), faculty, staff, parents and even current students. And while many referenced Baylor's distinct place as a university that combines strong Christian faith with rigorous academics and research, that wasn't the only message we heard. The following pages give you a glimpse into how some of your fellow Bears responded.

Somewhat to my surprise, my response was printed in the hard copy. First, however, allow me to remind readers of what I wrote, which ought to be read carefully, with some attention to nuance:

Baylor University can be significant for the world if it successfully accomplishes three things that it's been attempting ever since I studied there in the latter 1970s. It must continue its commitment to the goal of being a great teaching institution. It must strengthen its commitment to the goal of being a great research institution. It must maintain its commitment to the goal of being a great Christian institution. Holding to these three will not be easy, for the tendency of other Protestant Christian universities, as they have developed into significant, respected centers of education, has been to lose their focus as Christian institutions, eventually secularizing themselves. Some might say that the attempt to reach the highest intellectual levels while remaining Christian is like trying to square the circle, for intellectual inquiry is an open-ended search for truth, whereas Christian doctrine is grounded in an unchanging revelation of truth. If Baylor can manage to do this, and also continue as a great center of teaching, then it has something significant to offer the world.

That also appears in the same format in the electronic version of Baylor Magazine, and I find my words factual, even matter of fact, and sedate. On page 24 of the hard copy, however, the same words have a slightly different appearance, a fine-tuning of my tone that subtly re-shapes the implications of what I say:

Baylor University can be significant for the world if it successfully accomplishes three things that it's been attempting ever since I studied there in the latter 1970s. It must continue its commitment to the goal of being a great teaching institution. It must strengthen its commitment to the goal of being a great research institution. It must maintain its commitment to the goal of being a great Christian institution. Holding to these three will not be easy, for the tendency of other Protestant Christian universities, as they have developed into significant, respected centers of education, has been to lose their focus as Christian institutions, eventually secularizing themselves. Some might say that the attempt to reach the highest intellectual levels while remaining Christian is like trying to square the circle, for intellectual inquiry is an open-ended search for truth, whereas Christian doctrine is grounded in an unchanging revelation of truth. If Baylor can manage to do this, and also continue as a great center of teaching, then it has something significant to offer the world.

The large bold font makes me appear to be raising my voice, of course, but more to the point, it puts all four phrases into the same voice, as though there were no nuance of distinction, whereas two different voices are used, the latter voice being that of a somewhat skeptical commenter who awaits to taste the proof in the pudding. As the text stands in this hard copy, I sound like a full-throated enthusiast for this as Baylor's mission to the world. My wife read it and remarked that I sound rather "pious."

I don't mean to complain, though, for I'm always fascinated to see what editors do with texts, such also being one of my own jobs . . .

Michael Totten Interviews Ramez Atallah on Christians and Muslims in Egypt

Ramez Atallah

General Director

The Bible Society of Egypt

Photo from LinkedIn

Yesterday, I posted about Islamist attacks on Christians in Nigeria and alluded to the fact that such attacks occur elsewhere as well. One of these places is Egypt, where Muslims -- presumably Islamists -- have attacked Christians and burned churches. The author and blogger Michael J. Totten, unable to obtain an interview wiith a Coptic Christian leader, recently interviewed a prominent Protestant Christian in Egypt instead, the General Director of the Bible Society of Egypt, Ramez Atallah, who had some interesting things to say, several of them counterintuitive, at least for me. Totten's interview, "The Christians of Egypt, Part I" (November 15, 2011), reports this surprising point of view from Atallah:

The issue in Egypt isn't Christians, it's Muslims. Christians are incidental to the issue. There is too much focus in the West on the Christians here . . . . The real limitations on human rights in Egypt's future will be focused on Muslims. The people here who are most afraid are the Muslims, not the Christians. If we get an Islamically-biased government -- and I’m being optimistic by describing it that way -- Christians won't be persecuted. The Muslim Brotherhood is moderate at least compared with the Salafists. They won't persecute Christians. They will limit Christians, but they won't persecute Christians. The people who will be persecuted are Muslims . . . . Not just secular Muslims. Not all religious Muslims are with the Brotherhood. I just heard a speech from a religious Muslim woman -- she's veiled -- and she said, "please don't take my country away from me. Don't take my freedom away from me" . . . . She was saying this very strongly. A large number of Muslims are intellectual, educated, and liberal-minded. You have to understand that for a religious Muslim, Islam is as closely entwined with his identity and his being as your gender identity . . . .

Westerners think religious freedom in Egypt means Muslims can opt out of being Muslims. But it's a completely false supposition. No Muslim doesn't want to be a Muslim. It's part of their being. So when Egyptians talk about freedom and revolution, it has nothing to do with Islam. No Egyptian wants to be free of Islam. This is the most religious country in the entire world. According to a Gallup poll, between 99 and 100 percent of Egyptians say religion is very important to them.

So Islam is not the issue. What is the issue is the interpretation of Islam. Over the years, a large group of Muslims in Egypt have contextualized Islam in the modern world. They can practice their Islam and live as 21st century citizens. Women can dress modestly, yet also fashionably. They can go the beach in swimsuits. Maybe not bikinis, but swimsuits. They can drink alcohol from time to time. They are modern people.

Muslim society here as a whole has become more religious, but that does not mean they have all limited their lifestyle. So if and when the Muslim Brotherhood takes over, they'll say "Muslims are not allowed to show their body, so the beaches are only for Christians and foreigners." So if Muslim women want to swim, they will have to swim fully dressed. These women will be horrified to have these sorts of restrictions put on them.

Then the Muslim Brotherhood will say, "women will have to do such and such, and men will have to do such and such." Islam is a way of life as well as a belief, so if you don't interpret it in an open-minded way, your life will be very hard.

The Salafist movement is violent. Imagine if the Amish ruled America and used force to make everyone else live just like them. They wouldn't, of course, they are peaceful people, but imagine the Amish using force to rule America and require everyone in the United States to adopt their lifestyle. That's the Salafist movement. They’re the extremists. They adopt old-school Islam and also the old-school Islamic style. The Muslim Brotherhood is less extreme. They will let men wear a tie. But when it comes to women, the Muslim Brotherhood are much more conservative than the average educated Muslim would like. They also impose a lot of restrictions on men . . . .

The problem is that the Muslim Brotherhood will make more restrictions, but they will be tolerable. If the Salafists take over, they will start butchering us.

This is very interesting. Ramez Atallah considers the Muslim Brotherhood relatively tolerable -- compared to the Salafists! I hope that he's right -- and being Egyptian, he ought to know -- but I can't forget that the Muslim Brotherhood was for decades a violent organization that owes its ideological impetus to the anti-Western intellectual Sayyid Qutb, who also inspired Al-Qaeda and some other Salafist groups. In fact, I would consider the Brotherhood to have Salafist elements. At any rate, they are Islamists, and I don't think that Islamists are genuinely peaceful individuals. I think that their 'peaceful' methods -- when they are peaceful -- are merely tactical and that they would turn to violence again as quickly as they claimed to have renounced it.

Atallah has the opinion that if the West wants to defend human rights in Egypt, then it should focus not on the restricted Christians but on those far-more-restricted Muslims who want a more liberal Islam. Otherwise, Muslims will consider the West biased and the local Christian favored. Not a good scenario.

Incidentally, Michael Totten is an independent journalist, so keep in mind that even though he blogs for free, a donation to support his work will always be appreciated, as you'll see if you read the entire article.

Huntington's Clash of Civilizations in Microcosm?

Ethiopian Evangelicals

(Image from Christianity Today)

I see from Wikipedia that Ethiopia is about 33.9 percent Muslim and about 62.8 percent Christian, the latter divided into 43.5 percent Orthodox and 19.3 percent other denominations, mostly Protestant, I suppose. The place is thus one in which to take a glance through a Huntingtonian lens, though of no statistical validity admittedly. Huntington argues that Western Christianity, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam form the basis of different civilizations and that the clashes among civilizations reflect the clashes among religions. He might have therefore expected three-way clashes in Ethiopia, perhaps similar to those in Bosnia.

Let's look at what Matthew D. LaPlante says of the three religious groups in his article "Growing in the Word" for Christianity Today (September 16, 2011):

In 2002, a mob of Orthodox priests and adherents carrying axes and machetes attacked Protestants in the town of Merawi, injuring many and killing Pastor Damtew Demelash of the Full Gospel Believers Church. Just a few years earlier . . . a stone-throwing mob of Orthodox Christians attacked Protestants attending a conference, wounding 51.

But at St. Gabriel's Orthodox Church, priest Aba Mezmur Hawaz tells his parishioners not to quarrel with fellow Christians. If someone is better able to see God through a Protestant lens, he said, so be it. "The whole world of Christians -- we are all going to go up one way together."

He gave a different assessment of the Muslims in his community. "They will go a different way," he said. "And if they want to fight with us, we will fight with them."

This is not a matter of simple religious prejudice. In recent years, both Orthodox and Protestant Christians have been the victims of attacks by Islamic extremists, which killed several people and destroyed scores of Christian homes and churches. Although they are still relatively rare, such attacks have brought Christian leaders together for support, protection, and prayer.

This Ethiopian microcosm of the clash among these three religious groups might appear to illustrate Huntington's views, but not quite to the letter, for attacks by Islamic extremists would seem to be motivating the Orthodox and the Protestants toward religious unity. On a civilizational scale -- if I might be allowed to speculate in a statistically meaningless way -- this could imply that the rise of Islamism in the Muslim world and corresponding attacks upon Christians of all denominations would also give rise to increasing unity between Western Civilization and Orthodox Civilization.

But this, of course, is mere speculation that depends upon Huntington being both right and wrong . . .

John Milton's Sonnet Calling for God's Vengeance

Peter Waldo

Statue at the Luther Memorial

Worms, Germany

(Image from Wikipedia)

Peter Waldo (c. 1140 – c. 1218) was a 12th- to 13th-century Catholic who founded a spiritual movement that came to be called the Waldensians (French: Vaudois) and that was declared heretical for rejecting clerical authority. The movement became a sect and survived in Piedmont under protection of the Duke of Savoy and his descendants, though often persecuted. The sect gravitated toward Calvinism during the Protestant Reformation, and in 1655, the then Duke of Savoy demanded their return to Catholicism. Upon their refusal, he attacked them with a combined Catholic army of Irish, French, and Italians.

Times being what they were (much like today, actually, with our own religious fanaticisms), John Milton wrote a prayer to God imploring vengeance, but perhaps also seeking more mundane sources of revenge since he wrote the prayer as a sonnet for publication:

Sonnet 18

On the late Massacher in Piemont

Avenge O Lord thy slaughter'd Saints, whose bones
Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold,
Ev'n them who kept thy truth so pure of old
When all our Fathers worship't Stocks and Stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groanes
Who were thy Sheep and in their antient Fold
Slayn by the bloody Piemontese that roll'd
Mother with Infant down the Rocks. Their moans
The Vales redoubl'd to the Hills, and they
To Heav'n. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow
O're all th' Italian fields where still doth sway
The triple Tyrant: that from these may grow
A hunder'd-fold, who having learnt thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian wo.

[Thomas H. Luxon, ed., The Milton Reading Room, April 17, 2008]

You can click on the underlined words to read Thomas Luxon's notes. I call attention to "Mother with Infant," for Luxon cites John Carey, and I have an edition of the work cited, John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems (London: Longman, 1971), which on page 410 tells us:

Cromwell's agent, Sir Samuel Morland, in his account of the massacre (History of the Evangelical Churches of the Valleys of Piedmont (1658) 333-384) records that the wife of Giovanni, son of Pol Parise, was hurled down a precipice with her baby in her arms -- the baby survived (363); that Jacopo Pecols's wife and son were thrown down the rocks at Taglioretto (368); and that a woman and her baby were hurled down a precipice in the mountains of Villaro (374).

At least three mother-and-child atrocities are thus recorded. Milton, however, uses the singular. I suppose that the plural would be less effective -- a single death being a tragedy, multiple deaths being a statistic -- but I also wonder if the expression "Mother with Infant" might be a subtle, ironic thrust at the Catholic soldiers who revered the Madonna and Child but killed the "Mother with Infant."

The longer expression "Mother with Infant down the Rocks" reminds me of Leonardo da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks, but there's surely no association to that in Milton's mind.

"Imitation of Christ"

Thomas à Kempis

(Image from Wikipedia)

In a recent Christianity Today article, "The Jesus We'll Never Know" (April 9, 2010), Scot McKnight tells of how he begins his class on that 'historical Jesus' figure known as Jesus of Nazareth:

On the opening day of my class on Jesus of Nazareth, I give a standardized psychological test divided into two parts. The results are nothing short of astounding.

The first part is about Jesus. It asks students to imagine Jesus' personality, with questions such as, "Does he prefer to go his own way rather than act by the rules?" and "Is he a worrier?" The second part asks the same questions of the students, but instead of "Is he a worrier?" it asks, "Are you a worrier?" The test is not about right or wrong answers, nor is it designed to help students understand Jesus. Instead, if given to enough people, the test will reveal that we all think Jesus is like us. Introverts think Jesus is introverted, for example, and, on the basis of the same questions, extroverts think Jesus is extroverted.

Spiritual formation experts would love to hear that students in my Jesus class are becoming like Jesus, but the test actually reveals the reverse: Students are fashioning Jesus to be more like themselves. If the test were given to a random sample of adults, the results would be measurably similar. To one degree or another, we all conform Jesus to our own image.

Since we are pushing this point, let's not forget historical Jesus scholars, whose academic goal is to study the records, set the evidence in historical context, render judgment about the value of the evidence, and compose a portrait of "what Jesus was really like." They, too, have ended up making Jesus in their own image.

I recall as an undergraduate at Baylor University that during a time of depression, I imagined Jesus as a depressed individual, though a happy friend insisted that Jesus was a very happy fellow. We both made Jesus in our own images, so I reckon McKnight is correct. His point is not entirely new, of course, as Albert Schweitzer noted this early in the twentieth century in his critique of the Jesus reconstructed by scholars in their search for the historical Jesus, for these scholars all reconstituted Jesus in their own image. The tendency undoubtedly goes back centuries, for instance to Thomas à Kempis in his famous, fifteenth-century De imitatione Christi, as we perhaps see here, in an English translation by Aloysius Croft and Harold Bolton, The Imitation of Christ (Bruce Publishing Company, 1940), Book 4, Chapter 8:

As I offered Myself willingly to God the Father for your sins with hands outstretched and body naked on the cross, so that nothing remained in Me that had not become a complete sacrifice to appease the divine wrath, so ought you to be willing to offer yourself to Me day by day in the Mass as a pure and holy oblation, together with all your faculties and affections, with as much inward devotion as you can.

What more do I ask than that you give yourself entirely to Me? I care not for anything else you may give Me, for I seek not your gift but you. Just as it would not be enough for you to have everything if you did not have Me, so whatever you give cannot please Me if you do not give yourself.

Offer yourself to Me, therefore, and give yourself entirely for God -- your offering will be accepted. Behold, I offered Myself wholly to the Father for you, I even gave My whole Body and Blood for food that I might be all yours, and you Mine forever.

But if you rely upon self, and do not offer your free will to Mine, your offering will be incomplete and the union between us imperfect. Hence, if you desire to attain grace and freedom of heart, let the free offering of yourself into the hands of God precede your every action. This is why so few are inwardly free and enlightened -- they know not how to renounce themselves entirely.

My word stands: "Everyone of you that doth not renounce all that he possesseth, cannot be My disciple." (Luke 14:33)

If, therefore, you wish to be My disciple, offer yourself to Me with all your heart. (paragraphs 231-232)

Here, we see a Christ who renounced all of his 'self' on the cross and asks his followers to do the same, which would likely appeal to Christians of many varieties of Christianity, but in some of the specifics might appeal only to Catholics, for in references to the "mass" and to Christ's body and blood as "food," we see a very Catholic Christ exhorting Catholic Christians to (distantly) imitate him by offering themselves as "oblations" during the same mass. Thomas à Kempis would thus appear to have constructed Christ as a Catholic.

I offer nothing surprising or profound in this observation, obviously, neither anything original nor purely scholarly. I was simply struck by Scot McKnight's anecdote about students and by the thought that Thomas à Kempis must have done the same sort of thing.

I suppose that some scholar has looked into the point, but this is just a note to myself . . .

Atheist pro deo?

Matthew Parris

(Times Online)

Not precisely pro deo, though self-proclaimed atheist Matthew Parris, writing for the Times Online last December, does state that "As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God," for what he really means is that he has come to believe that Christianity is having a beneficial influence in Africa. Actually, as someone who lived in Africa as a youth some 45 years ago, he had long already noticed a positive effect, albeit with reservations:

It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

A more recent trip to Africa subtly shifted his views, for he tells us that his former position was inadequate:

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

Actually, he says that he first noticed this at age 24, when he traveled by land across Africa:

Whenever we entered a territory worked by [Christian] missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers -- in some ways less so -- but more open.

His more recent trip, several decades later, reaffirmed that earlier impression and added to it, for he noticed something about the NGOs whom he met:

I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. "Privately" because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

Parris offers his theory for how Christianity works its liberating effect and encourages a disciplined individualism:

Anxiety -- fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things -- strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds -- at the very moment of passing into the new -- that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? "Because it's there," he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's . . . well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation -- that nobody else had climbed it -- would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

I take it that Parris is a Protestant atheist (as he elsewhere in fact admits), and he seems to be theorizing about a rural Africa of the past, perhaps of his childhood. Moreover, he overemphasizes the individualist aspect of Christianity, for even Protestantism insists that the believer belongs to the body of Christ, which is the church -- a more abstract concept of the church than in Catholicism, of course, and not to be fully identified with any particular denomination, but a corporate dimension nonetheless.

I do therefore wonder -- and I'm merely wondering, mind you -- just how beneficial for Africans are such churches as the "Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministry" . . . though possibly even a gospel of wealth has its liberating aspects, from a sociological perspective, at any rate.

Jane Austen as Crypto-Catholic Historian?

Cassandra Austen, Portrait of Henry IV

in

Jane Austen's The History of England (c. 1790)

(Image from Wikipedia)

Readers may recall my recent blog entry presenting the opinion of "Jane Austen on Historians," in which I cite some direct discourse by the young Miss Catherine Morland, heroine of Northanger Abbey, as evidence for Austen's own view:

"I read [history] . . . a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all -- it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes' mouths, their thoughts and designs -- the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books." (Austen, Northanger Abbey, chapter 14)

Despite these views expressing what I would plausibly take to be Austen's own opinion as to the veracity of history, "which may be as much depended on . . . as anything that does not actually pass under one's own observation," Austen herself penned a History of England. Moreover, I am cautioned by others not to take Catherine's words as so strictly the views of Jane:

Devoney Looser cautions readers against equating Catherine's simple dismissal of history with Jane Austen's complex response. In his recent biography of Jane Austen, for instance, David Nokes too quickly concludes of Catherine's remarks about history, "These were Jane's thoughts, too." Looser demonstrates that, in contrast to Catherine Morland, Jane Austen found history of "paramount importance."

Or so writes Emily Auerbach in her review of Devony Looser's Novel Approaches to History British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), a review published in JASNA News (Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2001, p. 26). Auerbach takes -- as does Looser -- Jane Austen's view of history to be closer to that of Catherine Morland's interlocutor, Eleanor Tilney:

How much richer the discussion of history in Northanger Abbey becomes if we consider Eleanor Tilney, not Catherine Morland, as a model reader of history. Like Catherine, Eleanor recognizes that history mixes fact with fiction, but she reads with discernment and enjoyment.

Auerbach then cites Eleanor's own words:

I am fond of history -- and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as any thing that does not actually pass under one's own observation . . . . If a speech be well drawn up, I read it with pleasure, by whomsoever it may be made -- and probably with much greater, if the production of Mr. Hume or Mr. Robertson, than if the genuine words of Caractacus, Agricola, or Alfred the Great.

Of course, I cited these myself in my earlier blog entry (and also, fleetingly, above) as more evidence that Jane Austen turned a jaundiced eye upon the writings of historians. But I take Auerbach's point. Austen's perspective on history is closer to Eleanor's than to Catherine's. Nevertheless, Austen distrusts the writings of historians -- and had already done so at 15, when she penned her historical spoof, as noted by Kathryn Sutherland:

[I]n her early spoof 'History of England from the reign of Henry the 4th to the death of Charles the 1st. By a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian', written out according to her own dating in November 1791, when she was not quite 16, JA [Jane Austen] inverted the conventionally approved account of the past (as the gradual, Whiggish progress towards liberty and the defeat of Stuart absolutism) by setting up history as a pro-Stuart tragedy. Its climax and conclusion is the execution of Charles I in 1 649, and its heroine is his grandmother Mary, Queen of Scots, 'one of the first Characters in the World', also executed, in 1587. (See 'The History of England', in Catharine and Other Writings, ed. Doody and Murray, 136; and Christopher Kent, 'Learning History with, and from, Jane Austen', in Jane Austen 's Beginnings, 59-72. JA's contrasted presentation of Mary and Elizabeth I, the one vulnerable, beautiful, and innocent, the other unattractive and severe, resembles that in Sophia Lee's The Recess, or A Tale of Other Times (1783-5). JEAL [James Edward Austen-Leigh] is unnecessarily po-faced in accounting for his aunt's hilarious exercise in political uncorrectness. In MAJA [My Aunt Jane Austen: A Memoir], his sister Caroline presents the same detail with less qualification. (A Memoir of Jane Austen: And Other Family Recollections, by James Edward Austen-Leigh, edited by Kathryn Sutherland, Oxford University Press, 2002, pages 230-231)

In writing such an anti-Whiggish spoof, Austen is implicitly suggesting the biased and partial character of all historical writings. Of Henry the Sixth, she writes:

I cannot say much for this Monarch's sense. Nor would I if I could, for he was a Lancastrian. I suppose you know all about the Wars between him and the Duke of York who was of the right side; if you do not, you had better read some other History, for I shall not be very diffuse in this, meaning by it only to vent my spleen AGAINST, and shew my Hatred TO all those people whose parties or principles do not suit with mine, and not to give information. This King married Margaret of Anjou, a Woman whose distresses and misfortunes were so great as almost to make me who hate her, pity her. It was in this reign that Joan of Arc lived and made such a ROW among the English. They should not have burnt her -- but they did. There were several Battles between the Yorkists and Lancastrians, in which the former (as they ought) usually conquered. At length they were entirely overcome; The King was murdered -- The Queen was sent home -- and Edward the 4th ascended the Throne. (Jane Austen, "History of England from the reign of Henry the 4th to the death of Charles the 1st," in Love And Friendship And Other Early Works)

Austen is writing in the guise of a historian "partial to the roman catholic religion," and thereby as little to be trusted as those Whig historians partial to the Protestant Reformation. Yet, I can't help but wonder where Austen's true sympathies lie. Take her observation on Henry the 8th:

[N]othing can be said in his vindication, but that his abolishing Religious Houses and leaving them to the ruinous depredations of time has been of infinite use to the landscape of England in general, which probably was a principal motive for his doing it, since otherwise why should a Man who was of no Religion himself be at so much trouble to abolish one which had for ages been established in the Kingdom. (Austen, "History of England from the reign of Henry the 4th to the death of Charles the 1st")

Austen writes with fine irony here in suggesting that Henry the 8th had done England a favor in leaving it so many ruined abbeys to grace its landscape, a bequeathment so useful for Romantic poets and Gothic novelists -- even such as Austen herself in her Gothic parody, Northanger Abbey. Her irony is so penetrating that one could imagine that Austen actually had Catholic sympathies and regretted the destruction wrought by the Reformation. But someone more expert than I in Austen will have to inform us as to her actual religious views.

But as for her views on history, we should consider another point raised by Auerbach:

In Austen's era terminology was even more fluid than in our own: "history" could mean either a factual or imaginary narrative; a "romance" might be a biographical account or a fantastical tale . . . . Austen's letters show her awareness that novels and histories were competing for sales and status. She ironically jokes to Cassandra that the "too light & bright & sparkling" Pride and Prejudice might be improved by mixing it with "a long Chapter" about "the history of Buonaparte." (Auerbach, JASNA News, Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2001, p. 26).

Austen is once again being ironic, but she is serious in comparing history to fiction. I'm glad, however, that she didn't bring in Napoleon, for much as I like Pride and Prejudice, I wouldn't want to have seen it stretch like War and Peace to over 1400 pages! Elizabeth and Darcy are long enough in getting together already! I wouldn't be able to sublimate for 1200 extra pages while Darcy unlearns his pride and Elizabeth her prejudice . . . and vice versa.

And we would have even fewer Austen novels than we already have.

Blumenberg's Legitimacy of the Modern Age: Reviewed by Martin Jay (On Curiosity)

Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration

Curious Odyssey through the Pillars of Hercules...

(Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France)

The Christmas season is upon us, the season of giving, and dozens of students are generously giving me their final papers.

Well, I believe in the Christmas spirit of reciprocity, so each one of these same students will soon be receiving something particularly fitting in response.

Merry Christmas, O My Students...

Anyway, due to this holiday cheer, I won't be writing much this morning, nor perhaps for several mornings, though I'll keep posting daily snippets.

Today, a long snippet. First, though, I should inform you that I contacted my old history professor Martin Jay because I wanted to get a copy of his review of Blumenberg's Legitimacy book. I read it some 20 years ago but couldn't recall where I had found it. Jay wrote back:

I was very interested to hear that you are working on Blumenberg, a thinker who definitely repays the effort it takes to read him. I don't know of anything as penetrating on the theme of curiosity as his discussion in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age . . . . As for my own review of the Blumenberg book, it first appeared in History and Theory back in about 1975 [sic: 1985] and then was republished in my collection Fin-de-siecle Socialism a few years later. I don't have an electronic copy to send as an attachment, but if you can't find it anywhere, I would be happy to send a reprint.

Once I knew where to look for it, the search became simpler -- though I could have located it anyway through a Google search but didn't want to deal with logging in to the university's document retrieval system. Well, I had to log in anyway, and I've easily found the review. Jay does such an excellent job of summarizing Blumenberg's thesis that I will simply quote the five central paragraphs on curiosity:

[I]t was the unleashing of curiosity, so Blumenberg contends in the third major section of his book, that marks the modern sensibility. Turning a remarkable amount of erudition on the question of why that unleashing took so long, Blumenberg presents a brilliant account of what he calls the "trial" of theoretical curiosity. Theory in its classical guise was, as we have already had occasion to note, contemplative rather than experimental, which meant that the ancients refrained from doing more than passively "reading" a cosmos whose objective existence they did not doubt. What made it even more inimical to the full unleashing of curiosity was the assumption that such contemplation could produce human happiness, an assumption itself tied to the belief, still held by many medieval thinkers, that knowledge of the Truth was the road to contentment. In this sense, both classical and medieval theory could be called "pragmatic," for its ultimate goal was not knowledge per se, but the happiness its possession would bring. But this kind of pragmatism, which perhaps can be traced back as far as the Socratic quest for the good life, proved hostile to any kind of knowledge that does not translate into personal fulfillment. Thus, Blumenberg concludes, it created an impediment, more passive than active, to the complete valorization of human curiosity no matter what its purpose.

With the Stoics, Blumenberg argues, came a further obstacle to unlimited curiosity. Far more skeptical than their predecessors about the possibility of achieving a human version of divine truth, they preached against the inevitable disappointment that seeking it would engender. Instead of an open-minded and open-eyed contemplation of the world, they counseled a therapeutic form of ataraxia, in which disillusionment is avoided by a preemptive refusal to seek the truth at all. For the Stoics, Blumenberg writes, "intellectual curiosity is now the disastrous drive that misleads us into violating the boundary settlement between the human and the divine sphere" (264). Although Christian thinkers like Augustine had to work their way through the skeptical implications of this doctrine, they nonetheless did not come to accept theoretical curiosity as a viable alternative. For now the road to happiness was understood to be through faith, not philosophy and certainly not science. Augustine was particularly uneasy about worldly curiosity because of its potential to distract man from his proper sacred concerns. Moreover, insofar as legitimate knowledge comes only from its rightful author -- here the Platonic residue was still potent -- the Truth can be grasped not by examining the world through the fallible senses, but rather through the unmediated acceptance of God's word. What Augustine damned as "ocular desire" (312), because it led man into temptation, was thus as far removed from the classical emphasis on contemplative vision as the modern stress on its experimental counterpart.

Although the Scholastics were poised ambiguously between Aristotle's affirmation of a contemplative knowledge of the cosmos and Augustine's warning against all curiosity as a vice, it was not really until the modern age that the verdict of the "trial" was finally rendered in favor of unconstrained curiosity. One major reason for the change was the uncoupling of happiness and salvation from knowledge, which followed the growing popularity of the doctrine of predestination prepared by the nominalists and brought to a head by Calvin. For if man's redemption had nothing to do with his practical life on earth, then it was unnecessary to be so anxious about the distracting effects of curiosity about allegedly superfluous matters. In addition, the growing hiddenness of God in the early modern era meant the world could no longer be passively read as a divine text. A Deus Absconditus meant a "speechless" world lacking the marks of the divine word, a world as a result open to man's own constructs and manipulations.

The vindication of curiosity was therefore closely linked to the emergence of self-assertion as an alternative answer to the still unresolved Gnostic question of the meaning of an imperfect and corrupt world. Only when the qualitative knowledge assumed to be the analogue of divine wisdom was abandoned as a goal and replaced by an inevitably imperfect knowledge expressed in quantitative terms could modern science begin. Only then could man break through the forbidding Pillars of Hercules standing as the image of transgression as far back as the Odyssey and embark, as the famous title page of Bacon's Instauratio Magna implies, on uncharted seas.

Moreover, only when personal happiness was decisively severed from the collective pursuit of a truth that could be sought but never completely won, only when the hope for immortality was displaced from the individual soul to the species as a whole, only then could curiosity be utterly without limits. As such, it could then be extended from nature to man himself by philosophers like Hobbes and projected by others like Feuerbach into a desire to know what is not yet knowable. Faust's famous pact with the devil, an early modern invention that expressed a still ambiguous attitude towards the "vice" of curiosity, could ultimately become a triumphant symbol of modern man's insatiable desire to know, which Freud would later naturalize into a sublimation of an infantile sexual curiosity to see. (Martin Jay, "Review: The Legitimacy of the Modern Age by Hans Blumenberg; Robert M. Wallace," History and Theory, Vol. 24, No. 2. (May, 1985), pp. 190-191. Accessed via JSTOR.)

The irony in Blumenberg's moral tale lies in the way that Christianity liberated the 'vice' of curiosity from its Ancient and Medieval constraints by its dissociating human happiness from any human effort, a feat achieved first through the late Medieval Nominalists but carried forward by the Protestant Reformation, especially by the Calvinists.

In short, Blumenberg argues that modern science emerged not through Christianity's conception of a rational God but through its conception of an irrational one.

Koons Swimming the Tiber

View of Tiber River

Looking Towards Vatican City

But where are the raccoons?

(Image from Wikipedia)

No, this isn't some Ozark dialect referring to Italian raccoons plunging headlong into the Tiber River like lemmings into the sea, which also doesn't happen.

Rather, it's is a reference to a recent but long-developing decision by the philosopher Robert C. Koons, of the University of Texas at Austin, to enter the Roman Catholic Church (h/t Bill Vallicella). His decision follows only a couple of weeks after a similar decision by Baylor University professor of Church-State Studies Francis J. Beckwith.

Beckwith was reverting to Rome after years as an evangelical Christian, but Koons grew up as a Protestant and has spent years as a Lutheran. Prior to his recent decision, Koons had already publicly articulated views favorable to Catholicism, particularly in a paper posted to his website last year on July 13, 2006: "A Lutheran's Case for Roman Catholicism" (pdf).

Note that he specified that this is a "Lutheran's Case," not a "Lutheran Case," for the latter would constitute a contradiction. The former, while no contradiction, also surely implies some inner tensions and could likely only express a momentary stage in a developing theological position.

In his more recent online announcement of an even greater affinity for Catholicism, Koons summarizes his turn to Rome. Previously, he had held that the Roman Catholic Church held to the truth from the first to the twelfth centuries but then departed from the truth by moving toward a view enunciated by such nominalist philosophers as William of Ockham, a view that Koons considered a type of "Pelagian" error, meaning "the notion that human beings can save themselves through the exercise of unaided human reason and will."

He still holds this view about the late Medieval Church, just as he continues to believe that the Church overreacted to Martin Luther's initial attempts at reform. Where he has changed his views is on his opinion concerning the Council of Trent. Previously, he held that Trent merely confirmed the Church in its error concerning salvation, namely, that individuals could save themselves. Koons therefore believed that the Catholic Church had nothing of theological importance to say since Trent. In his own words:

The logic of my position was a simple one: the modern Roman Church clearly embraced an erroneous doctrine of justification, which nullified its otherwise strong historical claim to continuity with the apostles (especially on the matter of ecclesiology, the theory of the Church), depriving modern Christians of any good reason to embrace late-medieval and modern developments in Roman Catholic doctrine (including the immaculate conception and papal infallibility).

Koons then tells us that he had come to alter his views on this point:

My confidence in this position was shaken by three blows: (1) new scholarship (primarily by Protestants) on Paul's epistles, which raised profound doubts about the correctness of Martin Luther's and Phillip Melanchthon's excessively individualistic and existentialist reading of Paul's teaching on justification by faith, (2) the fruits of Lutheran/Roman Catholic dialogue on justification, expressed most fully in the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in 1997, that greatly clarified for me the subtlety of the doctrinal differences between the two bodies, and (3) a more thorough exposure to the writings of the early Church fathers, especially those considered most "evangelical": Chrysostom, Ambrose, and (above all) Augustine of Hippo.

This third point is the most significant for Koons, for it touches upon the central issue of the Reformation, as he notes in his "Case for Roman Catholicism":

The crucial issue is this: is the righteousness by which the justified are justified an alien righteousness, the righteousness of Christ entirely outside of us (extra nos) and apart from regeneration and the new kind of life that results? This I can't find this anywhere before Luther.

The significance here lies in the implications for one's views on the link between grace and works. Through his reading of the Church Fathers, Koons came to the conclusion that by the expression "grace freely given,"

... the Fathers understood 'freely' and 'by grace' to mean that we cannot earn salvation -- that we can give nothing 'in return' for God's gift. They teach that nothing of human merit precedes the gift of grace. However, he does not establish that any of the Fathers thought of justification in terms of an extrinsic or 'alien' righteousness, or that they denied that works are needed to persevere and to grow in grace.

Koons explains that his discovery of the Church Fathers' views concerning salvation held significance for the distinction "between the thesis that faith is necessary for justification and the thesis that faith is sufficient." From his reading of the Fathers, he came to believe that whereas faith is necessary, it is not sufficient. Why not? Because justification is not external but transformational.

This is where things begin to get very complicated, for Catholics and Protestants use the same terms -- justification, grace, faith -- in very different ways. Rather than try to summarize any more, for such a summary would grow very long indeed, I'd suggest that those interested in this issue -- most likely, Protestants struggling with incipient cognitive dissonance over the seeming discrepancy between scriptural passages and Reformation doctrine -- go and read Koons directly (pdf).

You might not like it, but you'll learn something.

UPDATE: For some reason, this post wasn't allowing comments, an error that I've now rectified.

The Pope's Critique of Protestantism

John Duns Scotus

Proto-Protestant Dunce

(Image from Wikipedia)

The Pope's Regensburg lecture has received a great deal of attention for the Byzantine quote about Muhammad bringing nothing new except for things "evil and inhuman" (or: "bad and inhumane"), but less noted has been the Pope's criticisms of Protestantism -- namely, that it sunders the Christian synthesis of faith and reason -- which took up far more of his talk.

Let's take a look at this critique, which begins with an admission about some Medieval Catholic theology:

In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazm [i.e., "that God is not bound even by his own word, ... that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us," and that "we would even have to practise idolatry" if God so willed] and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which -- as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated -- unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul -- "λογικηλατρεία", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).

Note that the Pope asserts the crucial significance of the "real analogy" between God and us, which is ultimately based (though unmentioned here) upon the scriptural statement that human beings are made in God's image (Genesis 1:26-27) and which is interpreted (and explicitly thematized here) in Greek terms as a shared rationality between God and individuals.

The Pope, then, would affirm the analogia entis (analogy of being) over such concepts as the analogia fidei (analogy of faith) emphasized by the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth -- and would perhaps accuse Barth of holding to a variant of fideism, i.e., faith unsupported by, and even against, reason.

The Pope would see Barth's position as a consequence stemming from the dehellenization of Christianity that began with the Protestant Reformation, a point that the Pope begins to make here:

The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenization of Christianity -- a call which has more and more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern age. Viewed more closely, three stages can be observed in the programme of dehellenization: although interconnected, they are clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and objectives.

The Pope then expounds at some length on these three stages, but I will excise portions to summarize in his own words:

Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself. When Kant stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.

The Pope's concern here touches on an unmentioned point, namely, that the principle of sola scriptura entails a rejection of the Catholic Church's authority to speak as the true Church in interpreting scripture. His rehabilitation of reason -- of Greek thought -- for modern Christianity would entail a reassertion of Catholic authority over Protestants. Why so? Because the Greek-Christian synthesis was achieved by the early Church Fathers, and to accept the Church Fathers is already to reject the Protestant principle of sola scriptura. If the Pope can persuade Protestants that they tend in their theology toward the dangerous concept of a capricious God, then he might be able to draw them back to the mother church.

That's the subtext, anyway, that I'm reading here.

Be that as it may, the Pope doesn't stop at this point. There are yet stages two and three to treat. Here's stage two:

The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenization, with Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative .... Harnack's central idea was to return simply to the man Jesus and to his simple message, underneath the accretions of theology and indeed of hellenization: this simple message was seen as the culmination of the religious development of humanity. Jesus was said to have put an end to worship in favour of morality. In the end he was presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message. Fundamentally, Harnack's goal was to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ's divinity and the triune God. In this sense, historical-critical exegesis of the New Testament, as he saw it, restored to theology its place within the university: theology, for Harnack, is something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific. What it is able to say critically about Jesus is, so to speak, an expression of practical reason and consequently it can take its rightful place within the university.

This was the liberal theology most characteristic of 19th-century Christianity, which tended to subordinate Christianity to culture, understood as Western culture but not so much in terms of tradition as in terms of moral progress. This grounding of Christianity in culture left it without an independent position from which to critique that culture. Recovering that independence, the Pope implies, would require returning to the concept of a rational God who made human beings in his own image and rejecting the liberal Christian view that made Christianity -- and therefore the Christian God -- in the image of culture.

Interestingly, one of the most powerful Protestant rejections of liberal theology comes to us in the work of the already-mentioned Karl Barth, whose reaction to the horrors of the First World War led him to articulate a system of neo-orthodoxy through his powerful commentary on Paul's letter to the Romans. From the Pope's perspective, Barth's reaction to WWI -- which led him to reject the validity of all human perspectives in the presence of the unfathomable otherness of God -- would be simply to reoccupy the position articulated by the early Protestant Reformers and thus would not solve the problem engendered by the dehellenization of Christianity.

The Pope doesn't mention all this, but it's on his mind.

But let's turn from our reading of the Pope's mind to a reading of his words concerning the third stage:

I must briefly refer to the third stage of dehellenization, which is now in progress. In the light of our experience with cultural pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was a preliminary inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures. The latter are said to have the right to return to the simple message of the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in order to inculturate it anew in their own particular milieux. This thesis is not only false; it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.

This -- the Pope implies -- would compound the errors of the first two stages by appropriating a sort of sola scriptura even while subordinating Christianity to culture ... or, rather, cultures.

The Pope is especially concerned about this third stage, for it threatens even the Catholic synthesis because as Church growth occurs outside of the West, such that non-Western Catholics begin to outnumber Western ones, even Catholic voices have been raised in favor of the indigenization of theology -- effectively a dehellenization of the sort feared by the Pope.

Some of the Pope's criticism thus takes aim at Catholic developments, but he uses much more of his ammunition on Protestantism ... if my reading is correct.

Therefore, against these insults to our divinely inspired reformed church, I call upon all of my Protestant brothers and sisters to rise up in violent protests (we are "Protestants," after all!) and breathe out threatenings and slaughter (cf. prooftext Acts 9:1: "empneo apeile kai phonos") against Catholics, the Catholic Church, and Pope Benedict XVI.

Nah ... just kidding. I call for further reasonable dialogue on these fascinating issues and hope that I am contributing something.