Blood of the Martyrs . . . Seed of the Church?

Coptic Christians Protest Persecution

Ed Ou for The New York Times

(Image from New York Times)

The mainstream media might finally have begun to notice the widespread persecution of Christians throughout the world, particularly in Muslim-dominated areas, for I've noticed more articles recently in the New York Times on Christians suffering in Pakistan, Indonesia, and a number of other countries, particularly Iraq, from which Christians are fleeing and which threatens to be emptied of the last remnants of what was once its Christian majority. Now, we're also beginning to hear about Egypt.

David Kirkpatrick, writing for the New York Times, has recently noted that "Egypt's Christians Fear Violence as Changes Embolden Islamists" (May 30, 2011):

"Will Christians have equal rights and full citizenship or not?" asked Sarkis Naoum, a Christian commentator in Beirut, Lebanon. A surge of sectarian violence in Cairo -- 24 dead, more than 200 wounded and three churches in flames since President Hosni Mubarak's downfall -- has turned Christian-Muslim tensions into one of the gravest threats to the revolution's stability. But it is also a pivotal test of Egypt's tolerance, pluralism and the rule of law. The revolution has empowered the majority but also opened new questions about the protection of minority rights like freedom of religion or expression as Islamist groups step forward to lay out their agendas and test their political might.

Crawling out of the woodwork shaken by the revolution are even Islamists as radical as a certain Egyptian Salafi Shaykh Abu-Ishaq al-Huwayni who explains in this You Tube video translated by the site "Translating Jihad":

We are in the era of jihad. The era of jihad has come over us, and jihad in the path of Allah is a pleasure. It is a real pleasure. The companions (of the Prophet) used to compete to (perform jihad). The poverty that we’re in -- is it not due to our abandonment of jihad? But if we could conduct one, two, or three jihadist operations every year, many people throughout the earth would become Muslims. And whoever rejected this da'wa, or stood in our way, we would fight against him and take him prisoner, and confiscate his wealth, his children, and his women -- all of this means money. Every mujahid who returned from jihad, his pockets would be full. He would return with 3 or 4 slaves, 3 or 4 women, and 3 or 4 children. Multiply each head by 300 dirhams, or 300 dinar, and you have a good amount of profit. If he were to go to the West and work on a commercial deal, he would not make that much money. Whenever things became difficult (financially), he could take the head (i.e. the prisoner) and sell it, and ease his (financial) crisis. He would sell it like groceries.

The video of this man's insights into economics breaks off at this point, but I believe that we've heard enough to understand his mentality. Apparently, this statement was made over a decade ago, but in the 'freer' atmosphere of post-revolutionary Egypt, it has recently surfaced, and when the good sheik was questioned about it, he stood by his remarks. I don't know how much support he has in Egypt, but if Islamists of this sort were to take over that country and establish an Islamic state, they might not prove so popular. According to Trevor Persaud, writing "Public Enemy: Iran's Persecution Backfires" for Christianity Today (June 1, 2011), an Islamist state can inadvertently enhance the appeal of Christianity:

Islam is losing credibility after 30 years of theocracy [in Iran]. Resentment against the reigning regime is spreading and deepening -- especially since the disputed 2009 national elections.

"Before the [1979] revolution, the clerics were promising that once Iran becomes an Islamic state, it would be utopia, it would be brotherhood, and everything would be fine," . . . said [Issa Dibaj, an Iranian Christian]. But since then, Iranians "have seen nothing but war and fighting and international isolation and hatred, [and] they are thirsting for change."

"The Iranian public basically doesn't trust the government anymore," . . . said [Abe Ghaffari, executive director of Iranian Christians International], "and they don't trust the Muslim clergy anymore, because they have seen a lot of double standards and hypocrisy."

Converts in smaller communities still risk persecution from their own families, but tolerance is growing in urban areas and among the younger generation. "In fact," said Dibaj, "in places like Tehran and more educated communities, if you say, 'I have become a Christian,' they will respect you because of your courage and your independent thinking."

If anything, government persecution has made Christianity much more attractive, said . . . [Elam Ministries member David Yeghnazar]. "When government officials are on television telling people not to read the Scriptures, that generates more interest in the Scriptures."

I suppose that the Iranian government is worried, for as the article notes:

[M]ore and more Iranian Muslims are converting to Christianity. The house church movement is booming, with converts estimated in the hundreds of thousands. Evangelists are distributing large numbers of New Testaments, and satellite television continually beams Christian programs into the country.

Hundreds of thousands. Impressive, I guess, but out of a population of what, 80 million? That's still a rather minor percentage, so what is the Iranian government worried about?

Or might they have read chapter 50 of Tertullian's Apologeticus and learned of his theory on the growth of Christianity? But then, they wouldn't be persecuting Christians if they had, would they?

Or would they? Think of Iraq, which is being depopulated of Christians as they flee to escape the violence aimed at them by Islamists. Or of Pakistan, where up to 60 Christians each month convert to Islam to escape persecution.

Maybe Tertullian's blood-seed theory is not universally correct. Maybe some kinds of persecution are effective if the violence is brutal enough and if a substitute religion is offered.

I suppose we'll find out . . .

Hans Blumenberg: Complicating the Curiosity-Complex

Apuleius

A curious ass...

(Image from Wikipedia)

In his investigation into the process by which curiositas became a vice, Blumenberg must also explore the Greek side of the Graeco-Roman understanding, which entails drawing links between etymologically unrelated terms.

Blumenberg does so in looking into the Latin work Metamorphoses (aka The Golden Ass), by Apuleius, and its intellectual background in Greek thought:

In the Latin patristic literature, the term curiositas receives its specifically anti-Gnostic aspect of significance from Tertullian (ca. 160-220 A.D.). Here the characteristic imprint that the word had been given in Apuleius's Metamorphoses, which were produced between 170 and 180 A.D., may have had an influence. The process whereby the cognitive appetite was transformed into a constituent element of the catalog of vices took a decisive step forward here, in that curiositas became the dominant trait of a character, of a type. (Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, page 298)

I should here note that Blumenberg will next deal with the Greek background to the curiosity-complex, a point that he has earlier touched upon: "This polypragmonein [busyness, meddling] is the equivalent of periergia [overcarefulness, superfluity, investigation of 'curious' matters]" (p. 288). One will recall that Blumenberg has already noted the denigration of periergia in Greek thought, as expressed in Philos Judaeus's allegory De migratione Abrahami: "Chaldea is the land of curiosity (periergia), . . . understood as the independence of the senses, which have evaded their subordination to the intellect and instead of this deliver man up to what accords with them" (Legitimacy, page 284). I have commented on this passage in an earlier post. According to Blumenberg, this Greek understanding of polypragmonein as equivalent to periergia, both being terms for a disreputable curiosity, stand behind Apuleius's depiction of curiositas as "the dominant trait of a character, of a type":

This [character type] had been prepared for, in the conceptual history of the Greek polypragmosyne [officious busyness, meddling], by Plutarch (ca. 45-ca. 125 A.D.), in a treatise that had described busybody activity as harmful, particularly in the realm of human relations. Plutarch's suspicion of this characteristic takes as its point of departure the assumption that man's supposed 'interest' in other men is directed especially at hidden wickedness, which it seeks to bring to light and publicize through 'gossip.' This gossipy curiosity is directed at the intimate sphere of one's fellow man and penetrates the secrecy (which is, in its own way, humane) of human wickedness. It puts into words, and into the circulation of talk, the unspeakable things that pertain to others, so that, in an extreme comparison, adultery can be described as a sort of curiosity about someone else's carnal pleasure. It is characteristic of Plutarch, the Greek, that he recommends as a means of curing such gossipy curiosity the diversion of interest by other objects, and explicitly mentions the heavens, earth, air, and sea. He assures us, in this connection, that nature has nothing against the cognitive appetite diverted toward it; however, no hidden wickedness is to be found there, and he who cannot do without it will have to stick to history.

In Apuleius's novel, curiositas is radicalized; its magical potency -- which Philo earlier thought he had recognized in its secret drive toward transposition -- is made thematic. One of the ironies with which the author treats Lucius's curiosity -- animallike, credulous, and capable of any indecency -- is that he counts among his famous ancestors not only the author of the treatise on curiosity, Plutarch, but also the Skeptic Sextus Empiricus. For even the hero's immoderate lust for knowledge is exhibited as the degeneration of the philosophical appetite for knowledge when he introduces himself as "not indeed curious but still desirous of knowing everything, or in any event a great deal." Elsewhere he does not shrink from describing himself as possessed by an innate curiosity. The 'ontological' precondition of the hero's immoderate curiositas and of his magical inclinations is the vanished firmness of the contours of the world's constitution, the suspension of the cosmic quality of reality and the resulting explosion of the horizon of possibility, which creates a space in which what man can look forward to is indeterminate: "Nihil impossibile arbitror . . ." [I think that nothing is impossible]. What is unexpected in common experience, happens. Of the voluptuousness of a feast it is said, "Quicquid fieri non potest ibi est" [Whatever could not possibly come into being is there]. Curiosity seeks no longer what is admirable and wonderful in the cosmos but rather the strange, the peculiar, the curious (in the objective sense), that which can only be gaped at, in a structure of reality that is dissolved into transitions and alterations of form. The hero also describes himself as "all too eager to become acquainted with strange and astonishing things." (Blumenberg, Legitimacy, pages 298-299)

One sees from this development of the curiositas complex that a curious concern with cosmic phenomena would begin to be seen meddling in the things that God has created for his own purposes, things that are none of mankind's business, things of which one should not speak lest one fall into the sin of gossip, which would perhaps imply that one is speaking of the things that God has created as though they were the result of improper acts of some "hidden wickedness" and one were a voyeur who had seen (or at least heard) of them. In some Gnostic treatises, the cosmic process of creation was, indeed, a sexual one -- as much birth, or abortion, as creation. The patristic authors critical of curiosity would not consider this to be the actual process by which the true God created the cosmos, but curiosity is credulous, quick to believe in and gossip about such nonsense, and therefore must be curtailed, condemned.

Such are the complications of the curiositas-complex.

A Curious Thalesian Tale

Thales of Miletus

Well might he look down

from time to time...

(Image from Livius.org)

In my recent 'literary' diversions touching upon Christmas, Boxing Day, St. Pugnacious, and Islamist song-and-dance, I've detoured from my serious interest in the trial of theoretical curiosity.

As perhaps became apparent from my Ciceronian post, distrust of curiosity for distracting one from more immediate, serious matters did not begin with the Church Fathers, but those fathers were able to mine the rich, classical veins for nuggets of ancient wisdom either explicitly or implicitly critical of curiosity's distractions.

In Plato's dialogue Theaetetus, Socrates criticizes those philosophers who concern themselves with distant, abstract things but neglect practical affairs closer to hand:

[T]he lords of philosophy have never, from their youth upwards, known their way to the Agora, or the dicastery, or the council, or any other political assembly; they neither see nor hear the laws or decrees, as they are called, of the state written or recited; the eagerness of political societies in the attainment of office . . . do not enter even into their dreams. Whether any event has turned out well or ill in the city, what disgrace may have descended to any one from his ancestors, male or female, are matters of which the philosopher no more knows than he can tell, as they say, how many pints are contained in the ocean. Neither is he conscious of his ignorance. For he does not hold aloof in order; that he may gain a reputation; but the truth is, that the outer form of him only is in the city: his mind, disdaining the littlenesses and nothingnesses of human things, is "flying all abroad" as Pindar says, measuring earth and heaven and the things which are under and on the earth and above the heaven, interrogating the whole nature of each and all in their entirety, but not condescending to anything which is within reach. (Plato, Theaetetus, translated by Benjamin Jowett, Part 1, Page 38)

Socrates illustrates this with an anecdote about Thales:

I will illustrate my meaning . . . by the jest which the clever witty Thracian handmaid is said to have made about Thales, when he fell into a well as he was looking up at the stars. She said, that he was so eager to know what was going on in heaven, that he could not see what was before his feet. This is a jest which is equally applicable to all philosophers. For the philosopher is wholly unacquainted with his next-door neighbour; he is ignorant, not only of what he is doing, but he hardly knows whether he is a man or an animal; he is searching into the essence of man, and busy in enquiring what belongs to such a nature to do or suffer different from any other.... (Plato, Theaetetus, translated by Benjamin Jowett, Part 1, Page 39)

The Church Father Tertullian, brilliant rhetorician and skilled lawyer but somewhat neglectful of details, picked up on this anecdote to disparage curiosity:

Now, pray tell me, what wisdom is there in this hankering after conjectural speculations? What proof is afforded to us, notwithstanding the strong confidence of its assertions, by the useless affectation of a scrupulous curiosity, which is tricked out with an artful show of language? It therefore served Thales of Miletus quite right, when, star-gazing as he walked with all the eyes he had, he had the mortification of falling into a well, and was unmercifully twitted by an Egyptian, who said to him, "Is it because you found nothing on earth to look at, that you think you ought to confine your gaze to the sky?" His fall, therefore, is a figurative picture of the philosophers; of those, I mean, who persist in applying their studies to a vain purpose, since they indulge a stupid curiosity on natural objects, which they ought rather (intelligently to direct) to their Creator and Governor. (Tertullian, Ad Nationes, Book II, Chapter 4)

Tertullian knows the story, but he has 'forgotten' that the one who twitted Thales was a Thracian maiden and has substituted, in her stead, an Egyptian. He has also changed the story from one illustrating the point that philosophers ought to apply their intellectual concentration upon practical affairs to one illustrating the point that philosophers ought to direct their curiosity toward God.

Actually, Tertullian's wording has implied that philosophers ought not to "indulge a stupid curiosity on natural objects" but on "their Creator and Governor" -- as the translator has realized and as the Latin original shows:

qui stupidam exerceant curiositatem naturae quam prius in artificem eius et praesidem (Tertullian, Adversus nationes II 4, quoted in Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 629, n. 68)

Tertullian, however, surely did not mean that one ought to "indulge a stupid curiosity" on one's "Creator and Governor," i.e., God, but (like Homer) had simply nodded off -- and was thus also 'off' his otherwise dependable rhetorical brilliance.

Nitpicking aside, let us turn to Hans Blumenberg, who also notes the Thalesian anecdote and Tertullian's use of it:

The first philosopher to live in Athens, Anaxagoras, could be accused of impiety because he had maintained that the sun was a glowing mass; and even if this accusation was only an explicit formula for the demythologizing of philosophy that he definitively carried out, it was nevertheless certainly not accidental that it became the central charge against him. Perhaps the anecdote about Thales that Plato hands down also has a similar background; the laughter of the Thracian maid over the philosopher who fell in the well while sauntering and observing the stars may represent not only the malicious pleasure of the unfree in observing the consequences of idleness, but also an understanding of the revenge taken by her tellurian gods on the Milesian who devoted his attention entirely to the stars. In the patristic polemics, the gaze upward is still contrasted, as the one capable of transcendence, to the downward gaze of the heathens, who are in the power of material idols. But the Thracian maid's ridicule of the protophilosopher Thales also hints at a further motif, which was to reappear in the course of the process through which the theoretical attitude became questionable: the conflict between the distant and the nearby, between that which has no immediate effect in life and the daily duties of a citizen in a community. He knows his way about the heavens, but he does not see what lies before his feet, sneers the slave girl. (Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pp. 245-246)

Although Blumenberg implicitly acknowledges that he is speculating in suggesting that the Thracian maid inferred that Thales was being divinely punished for his (curious) attention to the stars instead of to the gods closer to hand, the speculation allows Blumenberg more readily to draw out the implications of the tale for Tertullian:

[F]or Tertullian . . . [curiosity] has scarcely anything to do with the Augustinian "pleasure of the eyes" but exhibits a more 'literary' character, comparable to the vanity of education and the pleasure of dialectical activity. To this the simplicity of the anima idiotica [uneducated soul] is contrasted. To the extent that the cognitive appetite directs itself at nature, it is reprehensible not on account of the nature of its objects but rather because it prefers the inferior realm of the dependent and the conditioned to the immediacy of its relation to its author. Thales's astronomical curiosity is reprimanded for this metaphysical short-sightedness. (Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 302)

Tertullian thus draws out the implication of divine displeasure that Blumenberg has imputed to the Thalesian tale and criticizes philosophers for their "stupid curiosity" about contingent things rather than an intelligent curiosity about the ground of all contingent things, i.e., God.

Augustine, as we have seen, suspects that not merely stupidity but something more demonic is at work in the attractions toward which curiosity leads, but unlike Tertullian, Augustine went through a Gnostic phase, and Blumenberg thinks that he carried over into his orthodox Catholicism a continuing Gnostic distrust of the cosmos.

I'm not sure, however, that Augustine's Manichaean brand of Gnosticism would explain this, but more on that another time.

Blood of the martyrs?

Titian, Saint Sebastian (ca. 1570)

But where's that bloody seed of the faith?

(Image from Wikipedia)

Yesterday, in a typically garbled allusion, I typed these words:

It was said -- perhaps by Eusebius -- that the blood of the martyrs watered the seeds of the church.

Joshua Snyder (aka Western Confucian) corrected me:

[I]t was the heretic Tertullian, God bless him, who said it: "sanguis martyrum semen christianorum." (Posted July 26, 2007 at 9:44 pm)

Joshua's passing reference to Tertullian as a 'heretic' is an ungarbled allusion to Tertullian's Montanism, a mid-second-century Christian sect that gathered around the ecstatic prophet Montanus who claimed to be the incarnate Paraclete, or Holy Spirit.

Anyway, I thanked Joshua for embarassing me -- dirty work, but somebody had to do it! I tried to redeem myself by translating the Latin: "The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians."

I then went looking for the exact quote in Tertullian's online works but couldn't find it. I did find that Tertullian says something similar in his Apology: "semen est sanguis Christianorum" (Apologeticum (Apology) 50.13), i.e., "the blood of Christians is seed."

(Yeah, I know, the quote looks like it says that "semen is the blood of Christians," but that's just your ignorance of Latin!)

Parentheticals aside, did Tertullian actually say "sanguis martyrum semen christianorum"? This reminds me of my fruitless search for the first person to utter those even more striking words "The Church is a whore, but she is my mother!" I found that quote attributed to individuals as diverse as Luther and Augustine but always with no source specifically cited. Well, I've also found no specific locus of the words "sanguis martyrum semen christianorum" in Tertullian ... yet.

Now, he may indeed have penned these words (and they surely echo his sentiments), but I have reason to think that the quote is a conflation of the words "semen est sanguis Christianorum" in his Apology and remarks on Christian martyrs elsewhere in his voluminous writings. Why do I say this? For various reasons.

For instance, I found online, in a work titled Dicionário de Expressões e Frases Latinas (compiled by the Henerik Kocher), the following reference:

Sanguis martyrum semen Christianorum. [Maloux 333]. O sangue dos mártires é a semente dos cristãos. VIDE: =Plures efficimur quotiens metimur a vobis; semen est sanguis Christianorum. =Semen est sanguis Christianorum. (Kocher, Dicionário, #219)

The "Maloux" citation refers to this page 333 of Maurice Maloux, Dictionnaire des proverbes, sentences et maximes (Paris: Larousse, 1960), which I don't have but which undoubtedly says the same thing as Kocher's Dicionário. Kocher appears to be a Brazilian who enjoys collecting proverbs in various languages -- though not in English, apparently. If Maloux had provided a specific source, then Kocher would have cited that, for I see from Kocher's other entries that he ordinarily gives specific, original sources.

I also located a scholarly article by J. Petruccione, "The Martyr Death as Sacrifice: Prudentius, Peristephanon 4. 9-72," which appears in Vigiliae Christianae (Vol. 49, No. 3 (Aug., 1995), pp. 245-257) and which notes Tertullian's words "semen est sanguis Christianorum" but says nothing about the putative quote "sanguis martyrum semen christianorum" despite being an article on martyrdom.

Nor does Blake Leyerle's article "Blood Is Seed," in The Journal of Religion (Vol. 81, No. 1 (Jan., 2001), pp. 26-48), cite the words "sanguis martyrum semen christianorum" even though its central theme is on blood as seed.

If Tertullian had in fact penned the words "sanguis martyrum semen christianorum," then surely at least one of these three scholars Kocher, Petruccione, or Leyerle would have quoted them and cited him. But they don't.

I therefore humbly suggest that the quote is bogus.