medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Since I am the one who sent the original post about historical method and the argument from silence, let me clarify.  Of course Dr. Jone's argument can be made and has been made.  My point was simply that gaps in the historical record must be filled in by suppositions or we must suspend any conclusions.  Practically speaking, we all draw conclusions after filling in the gaps.  And we fill in the gaps in part based on our pre-suppositions, beliefs and worldviews.  (There are, of course, scraps of evidence floating around in the gaps.  A historian rightly takes account of them, but must be careful not to overinterpret them.  In the original case, the question of the Virgin Birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the direct references to Mary as a _virgin_ of Nazareth and "how can this be since I know not [carnally] a man" in Luke, which everyone acknowledges predates the Protoevangelium Jacobi, must be taken into account, though they can be interpreted philologically merely as referring to a young woman rather than a physical virgin; they can, of course, also be interpreted as indeed referring to a physical virgin; they are thus to some degree ambiguous--the record before the PJ is silent but has these ambiguous scraps floating around in it).

Everyone recognizes that the traditional interpretation of the historical record, which fills in the gaps by assuming a trustworthy tradition (handing on, both orally and in now-lost writings) prior to the first surviving written records along the lines of what is found in the surviving canonical and quasi-canonical (e.g., Protoevangelium Jacobi) tradition, everyone recognizes that this filling in of the silence requires belief in the general credibility of the catholic (Latin and Greek) tradition.  What is less often realized is that filling in the gaps with an alternative (e.g. Celsius, drawing in turn on earlier rumors: Mary got pregnant by a Roman soldier wink wink, or, in the case of John the Baptist, what Graham Jones suggests: that John the Baptist may have originally loomed larger and Jesus smaller, which was reversed as the Jesus-Christian-catholic tradition gained hegemony) also rests on beliefs and pre-suppositions.  Privileging the "minority" or "alternative" (Walter Bauer: the "heretics" were originally the majority but were pushed to the margin) tradition assumes not only that victors write history but that victors qua victors are villains, that is, history is really a chronicle of the struggle for power and hegemony is gained through at least some form of oppression, pushing someone to the sidelines and covering up the nasty business by cloaking it in claims of a Provident God who governs history.

One can go the other way, of course, startring from a history-as-power-struggle philosophy/religion: the Hegelian-Whig progressivist view that, yes, it's all about power but victors have a divine Zeitgeist right to rule by virtue of their power itself.  (Keep in mind that this is not the same as traditional catholic providential history, though, if you have a "history as mere power struggle assumption, you will deny the possibility of traditional providential history and lump it in with either the Hegelian Zeitgeist-hegemon-as-savior or post-modern hegemon-as-villain approach--curiously, the newly arrived hegemony of the God PoMo is not villified by Postmodernists!  Perhaps Hegel was right after all!  Is PoMo-ology really that different from the triumphalist worship of the Progressive Present characteristic of Enlightenment, Whig, and Hegelian religion?)

I have surely ruffled a lot of feathers by now.  I am not arguing that one or the other of these is prima facie true, merely that one cannot escape a dogmatic, religious, philosophical basis for filling in the silences of history, not even Postmodernists can.  (I can hear PoMoers responding, but all we are doing is saying "let a thousand flowers bloom" and "down with all hegemonies"--my point is that to insist on dethroning any or all hegemonies is itself a hegemonic move, since it places on the throne the thesis that it is wrong to accept any single hegemonic worldview.  Who says it is?  Enlightenment folks didint'.  Traditional Christians or Jews don't.  Who's really right?  Isn't it rather arrogant of PoMo-ers to insist on the truth of their de-hegemonizing?  Isn't insisting on the truth of their de-hegemonizing in fact simply a new hegemonizing?)

Almost everyone today recognizes that the Enlightenment (Rankean in terms of philosophy of history) claim to objective interpretation devoid of presuppositions is unsustainable.  However, the philosophical underpinnings of the postmodern challenge to Enlightenment claims to fill in the gaps one way are not the same as the traditional, premodern providential, ecclesial filling in of the gaps (by trusting the ecclesial tradition).  If one truely adhered to a level playing field of interpretations after the demise of Enlightenment hegemony, one would have to admit the providential, traditional, catholic explanation to the table as a _ful partner_, given the silences of history.

I don't think this usually happens.  Postmodern and Enlightenment (such as it still survives) segments of the Academy usually assume that that providential, traditional, ecclesial, catholic interpretation of the historical record and its gaps has been definitively laid to rest. 

My original point is that historical method (modern historical method) does not permit that because the record is silent prior to a certain point and all the silence tells you is that no records survived prior to point X.  Whether some written records were suppressed, whether the transmission was entirely oral, whether some oral transmissions were suppressed etc., cannot be known _for sure_, only postulated (argued, as Dr. Jones puts it), based on one's assumptions about how movements emerge, instituitonalize etc.

Now, all that I have said is based on modern historical method,which privileges written sources that have been vetted for credibility by the canons of Enlightenment critical method.  Based on that method, one cannot use the argument from silence to draw definitive conclusions about what happened before the era of the surviving records or about whether the surviving mainstream records accurately record Ranke's history as it really happened.  By their own critical canons, modern and postmodern scholars should surround their filling in of the gaps with disclaimers and humble modesty.

The canons of critical method for premodern, traditional, providential history are not quite the same though they are not entirely different either.  It may surprise people to realize that premodern folk were critical thinkers!  They knew that testimony could be false, that tradition could be falsified and that it was crucial to distinguish true from false testimony.  They also knew that written records could be falsified and distorted and that even when unfalsified, written records require interpretation and that presuppositions enter into one's interpretation of written records.

Faced with this immense problem, recognizing the danger of the tyranny of the present (that I am X number of generations removed from the events I'm trying to know the truth of and, if I come to the text naked, alone, without any attention to the intervening tradition I'm quite likely to distort the facts of history as I interpret them), they opted to put their trust (faith, belief) in a chain of testimony, interpretation of testimony, and reinterpretation of testimony stretching from the present to the distant past and the events whose truth is being sought.  In this case, of course, everything depends on the trustworthiness of that chain of testimony and interpretation.  They recognized competing chains of testimony and interpretation.  Thus the issue became for them whether there was any authoritative guaranteeing of one of the chains.  This they understood the Church to provide.  Their trust in the authoritative interpretation of the Church was not a naive, uncritical move, but a critical move, although very different from modern and postmodern critical moves.  And yet, it was quite similar: it depended on presuppositions.  The modern and postmodern critical moves vis-a-vis the Church are based on moodern and postmodern skepticism and antipathy toward the Church, for which adherents of modern and postmodern theology-philosophy firmly believe they have good reason.  But so too did and do those who make the traditional providential _critical_ move of judging the ongoing chain of interpretation more trustworthy than a modern reconstruction at a 1800 or 2000 year remove.

That what I have just written will probably seem absurd to many of its readers only underscores, I think, the degree to which certain presuppositions (against the traditional belief in revelation, in God's providence in history, against God's incarnation in history in Christ which is the basis for the trustworthiness of the traditional-catholic-orthodox chain of testimony and interpretation) are truly hegemonic.  This was no problem in the Enlightenment, when it was assumed that hegemony was unavoidable and good and when scholars rejoiced that the hegemony of antipathy toward the traditional providential view of history had triumphed over the hegemony of providentialism.

But we are supposedly wiser now than those Enlightenment naifs.  We know that they sat on the hump of dogmatically hegemonic skepticism vis-a-vis the providential tradition.  Supposedly we postmoderns want to avoid that hegemonic trap.  The problem is that truly avoiding hegemony would have to admit once more to the table the providential, tradiitional, ecclesial, catholic way of filling in the gaps (e.g., on the Virgin Birth).

True postmoderns would simply have to say, "I just don't know what actually happened.  It could have been as the classic Christian tradition says--a virgin birth and John the Baptist as second-fiddle to Jesus, or it might not have been that way.  If that is all that Graham Jones intended, then he is a true postmodern.

I wonder, however, whether the playing field is truly that level.  The subtext that often is assumed when one introduces "but it might have been this way (Y, the non-traditional)" is not that "it might have been Y or it equally might have been X, the traditional interpretation), but rather, that introducing Y in some sense really discredits X.

My point is that one _credits_ X or Y or Z on the basis of one's beliefs, since that is what "credit" means.

In my original post, I was _not_ arguing that X (the traditional virgin birth doctrine) was factual, merely that one cannot _prove_  it unfactual by the argument from silence.  Since it is no secret to readers of this list that I adhere to the traditional Catholic viewpoint, it might have been easy to suppose that I was trying to prove its facticity (which facticity, of course, I do believe in, but on the basis of my pre-modern historical methodology that believes that "crediting" tradition as a means of accurate historical knowlege is quite credible).  Instead, I was simply trying to remind us that the argument from silence cannot _disprove_ (in terms of _modern_ historical criteria) the facticity of any interpretation.

That is why, if I may be so bold,I find it odd that this list prohibits the entry of "religious" or "confessional" convictions into the discussion and defines "scholarly discussion of medieval religion" as just about anything as long as it excludes the poster's religious or confessional beliefs.  Since I was under the impression that postmodernism recognized that everyone is operating from some set of beliefs and that these beliefs inevitably affect how one assesse historical and contemporary evidence, I don't see how any contributor would not be at least implicitly enunciating his confessional and philosophical and religious presuppositions.

Oh, but some beliefs are really BELIEFS (are really RELIGIOUS) and others are not, I hear people saying.  And we all know which are the former and which are the latter.  But do we?  Why isn't a Nietzschean or Marxist assumption that life is really all about power struggle (which will have a tremendous impact on how one assesses, say, medieval "dissent" or gender relations) just as much a dogmatism as traditional Christian or Jewish belief? Why isn't the assumption that history just is, the cosmos just exists every bit as dogmatic in its skepticism about the traditional Jewish or Christian or Islamic dogma of a loving Creator of the Cosmos who remains providentially active in the cosmos?  What one assumes, presupposes, yes, believes, about this question (loving, provident Creator versus either a Hegelian or an ancient Greek "the cosmos is self-existent" or even constitutes the divine) will have a tremendous impact on how one views "victors" and "losers" and "hegemony" in history.

I hope I have not offended by venturing into this forbidden territory, that is, I hope that pre-judgments can be laid aside long enough to examine the logic of what I have tried to lay out.

We do all fill in the gaps in the record, often not so much by being fairly sure what did happen as quite sure what did not--in this case, taking the silence of the records up to a certain point to _discredit_ the traditional interpretation.  My point is that strictly speaking, the silence neither credits nor discredits any one interpretation.  We abhor the vacuum, of course, so we do fill it in, based on our beliefs and disbeliefs.

Dennis Martin



>>> [log in to unmask] 05/25/01 02:32AM >>>
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Torie Reed writes of John the Baptist, 'he was, really, the first _alter
Christus_'.

Indeed, though could it not be argued that Jesus was, at first, the _alter
Johannes_?

Our attention was drawn, earlier in this discussion, to the evidential claim
that oral transmission in the first two centuries implicitly supported a
tradition among his contemporaries of Christ's virgin birth. What seems to
me equally interesting is that other evidential threads appear to complicate
the picture seriously.

For example, how long after the death of Jesus did the Johannine and
Christian parties run in parallel, or indeed in competition? What was the
role of Jesus' family (on both sides), and particularly of Mary, in shaping
emerging traditions? Was there a contest between groups around Mary and
Peter and what effect did that have? What was the interplay arising from
tension between Samaritan and Jewish groups (not to mention Judaeans and
Galileans)? - about which we hear much less than the tensions between Jews
and Gentiles.

The textual and iconographic references discussed here over the last several
days can be seen on one level to support 'traditional' interpretations; on
another to reflect subtle uses of such material to set up particular claims
as to who Jesus was and how others were to be regarded in relation to him -
John the Baptist crucially, perhaps.

It's likely that medieval studies have much to offer towards such questions.
But I write from ignorance, sensing only that if I was more knowledgeable
about the early church, I would understand so much better the medieval
material I work with.

These are interesting discussions. Thanks, folks!

Graham

****************************************
Dr Graham Jones
Lecturer in English Topography
University of Leicester
        Centre for English Local History
Marc Fitch Historical Institute
5 Salisbury Road
Leicester LE1 7QR
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)116 252 2764
Fax: +44 (0)116 252 5769

e-Mail: [log in to unmask] 
Web pages: http://www.le.ac.uk/elh/grj1 

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