medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Richard,
Whether it was an "imposition of unity from above" is itself a value judgement based on your presuppositions about power. If one naively believed that Christian stuff about the Church being the _communio_, Body of Christ, then the bishop is within and unity is not mposed from above.
That you simply axiomatically assume that what I wrote about bishops' concern for unity and resolving divisions as imposition (power move) from above and that you assume that this will "compute" for most everyone indicates to me how widespread power-assumptions are. And of course those who hold them could be more right than those who think love makes the universe hold together.
That this sounds utterly ludicrous to most people today doesn't mean it may not have been true. We just don't believe that stuff about a God dying out of love etc. But how would one know what people back then believed, what their motives were?
Incidentally, I did allow for both options: some leaders in the Church certainly were into nothing but power trips, but not necessarily all. Your response set up an either/or and by implication associated me with one side alone.
Dennis Martin
>>> [log in to unmask] 04/11/03 09:02AM >>>
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
At 09:17 AM 4/11/2003, you wrote:
>medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
>
>Richard, why don't you stop beating so subtly and nuancedly around the
>bush and tell us what you really think?
responses below.
>Anyone who has spent much time in the major manuscript collections in
>Munich, London, Paris, Vienna, Rome etc. knows that vernacular
>translations of the Bible were common in monastery libraries. A German
>Lutheran bibliographer compiled a list of vernacular Bible translations
>before Luther sometime in the 1950s, as I recall (Volz?). It's a long list.
but is this "long" list much shorter than it might have been had there not
been such extraordinary resistance to vernacular translations within
clerical circles whose monopoly on exegesis might thereby be
challenged? after all the New Testament is itself a translation (Jesus did
not preach in Greek), and the earliest periods of xnty were marked by a
zealous desire to speak the gospel into all 72 languages.
>Vernacular translations intended for circulation among the populace were a
>different matter--for the very reason raised by the Waldensian refusal to
>submit their preaching to episcopal oversight: the Church _did_ insist on
>"control" of what was preached (and all preaching in the vernacular was a
>form of "translation" and interpretation of the Scriptures) because (1)
>controversies over the interpretation of Scripture (= over doctrinal
>matters) would lead to schism and division, hence needed to be resolved
>and (2) the manner of resolving them since the very early days of the
>Church had been apostles (later bishops) meeting in council, apostles
>writing letters (SS. Paul, John etc.) etc.
>
>If unity matters, then some means of maintaining is essential and
>ultimately, since even bishops meeting in council can end up hopelessly
>deadlocked, some means of resoloving those sorts of disagreements is necessary.
the question of unity, like honor, is "at what price?" the exegetical
tradition among jews from well before xnty and long after was that there
were as many interpretations of the texts as there were letters. the
desire to achieve unity thru control of exegesis is a peculiar (if not
unique) characteristic of the latin medieval church, and the lengths to
which it would go to achieve this gives us the not unjustifiable image of
an ecclesiastical hierarchy willing to stop at little (arrest, torture,
execution) to enforce this "unity" from above.
>Those who claim to be pluralistic and to have given up on the possibliity
>of unity
societies can reach "unity" in a number of ways. the least fruitful,
historically, seems to be the effort to impose it from above. theological
unity strikes me as a particularly dangerous expression of what i call
iconic monotheism -- one god, one king, one religion. theological
diversity strikes me as a particularly felicitous expression of what i call
aniconic monotheism -- no king but god and god is too great for any one
religion. my concern for social unity derives more from the moral behavior
of myself and my fellow citizens, that their theological
uniformity. moral, not credal soteriology. but then again, i'd have been
burned as a heretic were i living in the good old days of theological unity.
>(although more subtle means of Inquisition survive in our day--tenure
>review committess, peer reviews to decide whose work gets the stamp of
>approval and whose does not, shifting hegemonic consensus about what is
>"sexy" and "groundbreaking" and "prizewinning" scholarship, journalism,
>political parties etc.)
i'd hardly call these (subtle forms of) inquisitorial behavior. all
societies exert pressures for some kind of conformity. what's nice about
ours is that even if you don't win the prizes, or get tenure in one place,
or have your ms accepted somewhere, you can still go on and hope that
someone else with enuf integrity not to follow the fashions will
listen. to try and assimilate modern scholarly conditions to those of the
high (inquisitorial) middle ages strikes me as, at best, polemic.
> and who believe that beliefs have no eternal consequences have little
> standing to dismiss reductively -- as merely being efforts to suppress
> political challenges to power -- the work of those who understood
> themselves to be preserving the faith handed to the apostles intact and
> in unity.
now that's interesting. first, i'd never reduce any belief to a mere, and
certainly not a mere power play. on the other hand, i wd not be so naive
as to imagine that power did not play, and when i see clerics making the
dreaded decisions to torture and kill people on the basis of their beliefs,
i have to believe that power had an enormous role in their decision
making. when walter map says about the waldensians, "they seem meek and
mild now, but if we let them in they will push us out", i hear clear echoes
of what sagan has called the dominating imperative -- "rule or be
ruled." surely you would not want to reduce the beliefs of people manning
the inquisition to a mere "concern for the salvation" of a population in
whom they systematically injected devastating levels of paranoia.
>That for some of them it may have been about nothing but power and
>political suppression is likely. But that for all of that that's all it
>was is prima facie doubtful
i think it's a safe bet to say that while the inquisitors may have
convinced themselves that they acted out of "love" for their laity, there
was a lot more going on. indeed, could not one argue that the very notion
that credal formulas have overriding "eternal" importance (eg extra
ecclesiam nulla salus) is itself a form of political theology.
>Of course, behind this, as I have pointed out on this list before, lies
>one's worldview--is life (and politics, and history) all, in the end,
>about power or not?
for those who believe that truth and salvation can only be achieved by
imposing unity from above (at any cost), i'd say it is in the end about
power. i personally believe that "it" (life, politics, history) is not
(despite the efforts of those driven by libido domindi), indeed that the
best in life comes from allowing others to be free and learning to tolerate
diversity within a framework of responsible behavior. but again, i'd have
been burned thrice over in the HMA.
richard
**********************************************************************
To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME
to: [log in to unmask]
To send a message to the list, address it to:
[log in to unmask]
To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion
to: [log in to unmask]
In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to:
[log in to unmask]
For further information, visit our web site:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html
**********************************************************************
To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME
to: [log in to unmask]
To send a message to the list, address it to:
[log in to unmask]
To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion
to: [log in to unmask]
In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to:
[log in to unmask]
For further information, visit our web site:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html
|