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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

P.S.....You forgot the "Great Red Scare" of the 1920's, the Dies
 Committe of the 1930's and Joe McCarthy of the 1950's.  I mean, all
them Commies out there.  We gotta do something!!!  yrs, t. ault

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004 08:46:03 -0400
  Richard Landes <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and
>culture
>
>At 05:43 PM 6/17/2004, you wrote:
>
>>medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and
>>culture
>>
>>With respect, despite Tom's and George's and others' call for ending
>>this thread, I believe a response is required.
>
>agreed.
>
>>The inquisition has a bad reputation for good reason: it defies every
>>aspect of our modern culture -- the one in which we get to write our
>>free opinions in public.
>>
>>r
>>
>>Every aspect?  Stalin, Hitler, Saddam, Pol Pot, Mao, Idi Amin, the
>>Ayatollas of Iran, the governments of Vietnam and North Korea, . . .
>>the
>>last time I checked, these were phenomena of our own age.  Some of
>>them
>>had, in the 19820s and 1930s, highly placed, Pulitzer-Prize-winning
>>apologists writing for the New York Times and other defenders
>>entrenched
>>in the universities.  All of the tyrants listed above suppressed free
>>speech with oceans of blood.    Some did so in the name of religion,
>>some in the name of "scientific hsitory," others in the name of
>>racial
>>destiny, but all in the name of one ideology or another.   And
>>hate-speech laws in a number of western countries look suspiciously
>>like
>>efforts to suppress unpopular traditional religious beliefs.
>
>agreed.  i shd clarify.  My definition of "modernity" is the effort
>to live
>according to the principles of equality before the law.  Such
>principles
>exist well before the modern (the ten commandments and biblical civil
>and
>criminal legislation apply equally to all, the Athenians tried it,
>calling
>it isonomia, the apostolic communities tried radically egalitarian
>variants, etc.).  What you describe in the anti-modernism of say the
>fascists, or the hyper-modernism of the communists, represents a kind
>of
>toxic abreaction to the consequences of trying to make principles of
>freedom and (legal) equality work (Fromm called it Fear of Freedom).
> I
>think the same thing is going on in the MA after the tenth cn, and
>that the
>inquisition of the high MA also represents a violent reaction on the
>part
>of the religious elite to the prospect of losing control.  Modernity
>seems
>like chaos to those who believe that social order can only come from
>the
>top down.
>
>as for the intellectuals who covered up for stalinists (Shaw and
>Sartre),
>maoists, and khmer rougeniks (Chomsky), i agree with you that they
>represent one of the great moral failures of our time -- esp of the
>left
>which claims to have such high moral standards, a scandal which the
>left's
>failure to really acknowledge may account for its current
>romanticization
>of religious fascism of the islamic variety.  but then, that really
>is off
>topic.
>
>>It is precisely this kind of blindness to the bad reputation of our
>>own
>>era that can lead to distortion when we study the Middle Ages.
>
>i don't think so.  the point about our era, so far, is that these
>efforts
>to impose salvation on an unwilling population regularly fail (altho
>the
>damage they do in trying is immeasurable), and the dominant voice,
>the one
>that produces the kinds of intellectual, scientific, technological
>advances
>that characterize our age, come from "liberal" cultures.  Some of the
>scholars who care about these matters connect the inquisition to
>these
>modern forms of madness (Cohn, RI Moore).
>
>>Nothing
>>I wrote called for a whitewash of the inquistions and I resent the
>>implication (see below) that I did so.  The Vatican press release
>>expressly called for an honest and balanced assessment.  The unargued
>>assumption that nothing coming from the Vatican can be balanced or
>>honest, the assumption that the Borromeo book, because it was
>>Vatican-sponsored, could only be a whitewash is rank anti-Catholic
>>prejudice.
>
>now now, let's not get polemical.  i don't think the Vatican's
>incapable of
>serious self-criticism, and i don't assume that whatever they produce
>is a
>whitewash.  But i'm not a Jesuit, so when the Vatican says see light
>grey
>and i see charcoal grey, i'm not ready to jump thru that hoop.
>
>>  Would not the same pre-judgment about a publication from a
>>Jewish or Muslim institution--that the publication could only be
>>self-serving whitewash--elicit an outcry from the defenders of
>>"tolerance"?   I don't get it--you assume automatically, in
>>pre-judgment, that things emanating from the Vatican can only be
>>pre-judiced.
>
>this is not automatic.  i just think that rather than jumping on
>revisionist scholarship to trumpet how many fewer people the
>inquisition
>burned (and by the way, witches were never a major issue in the MA --
>it's
>an "early" modern thing), i think we shd be hearing about the scandal
>of an
>inquisition that tortured and burned people for their faith surviving
>and
>thriving for so many centuries.  When i see that, i'll say, it's not
>a
>whitewash, but serious self-criticism.  Your rhetoric ends up making
>any
>form of criticism, intolerance.  Come on, the Church is above all an
>institution with claims to moral significance, no?  Let's hear some
>moral
>discourse, not damage control.
>
>>I did not say "this stuff was okay back then" and I do not appreciate
>>having that sentiment attributed to me.  Frank Morgret has, in
>>another
>>post, filled in much of what I meant by "context,"namely that beliefs
>>about truth and the consequences of falsehood then were different
>>from
>>what many "enlightened" people today claim to believe--except when
>>their
>>own ideological ox is really being gored and then, not surprisingly,
>>violaters of the Truths of their own modern ideologies can find
>>suddenly
>>themselves being crushed by legalized violence.  Yesterday it was the
>>Buddhists of Tibet, right now it is Falun Gong and Evangelical and
>>Catholic Christians in China and the Sudan and Saudi Arabia or
>>Pakistan
>>or the Copts in Egypt, tomorrow it may well be . . . .
>>
>>As noted above, given the secular and religious inquisitions of the
>>20th century, some of them alive and well as I write this, I am not
>>at
>>all sure that we have made that much progress and that is why I
>>cautioned against a self-righteous air of modern superiority and
>>urged
>>reading medieval phenomena as much as we can within a medieval
>>context--at the very least, being aware of how we both differ from
>>and
>>resemble medieval people.
>
>this is a critical argument.  As the scholar who edited a volume on
>"tolerance in the reformation" put it: "tolerance was a loser's [ie
>minority] creed."  This is very much akin to what both Thucydides'
>Athenians and Nietzsche argued, that people only want fairness when
>it's to
>their advantage, and as soon as they have power, forget it.  I
>understand
>jewish and christian principles as arguing against that
>'gravitational
>pull' as it were "Do not oppress the stranger for you were strangers
>in
>Egypt.".  That is, one can and shd resist the tendency to abuse
>power, if
>not always, much more often than the vicious players of a nasty
>con-game
>do.  So the idea that because you held divine truth to be so crucial
>that
>you could torture and burn people to death to assure its dominion was
>"the
>medieval context" then i'd say you're creating a straw man of
>"understandable but be(k)nighted" folk who just don't get what we
>moderns
>do.  in the inquisition the "bad guys" won (by our standards), but
>that
>doesn't mean everyone just assumed, that's how you behave with truth
>claims.
>
>the american revolution is the first time in xn history that
>tolerance was
>the winner's creed.  it demanded much, and yielded much.
>
>before we assume that everyone had to behave the "medieval" way, let
>me
>suggest that within the jewish community, altho there were similar
>notions
>about how important divine truth, and certain specific verbal
>formulations
>of divine truth, there was a far more developed culture of
>"machloket"
>(disagreement, see M. Fisch, Rational Rabbis) that had a far greater
>capacity to absorb differing interpretations than did xnty.  (cf.
>rabbinic
>discussions (mishnah/talmud) with church father exchanges, 2-6th cns
>CE).
>Now you can say that that's because they didn't have sovereignty, and
>it's
>partly true.  But most cultures that lose sovereignty rapidly lose
>their
>cultural resilience as well.  Whatever the reason, this devt of a
>culture
>of dispute in which contradiction was prized, shd inform our judgment
>of
>both what constitutes "anachronism" in matters of religious
>tolerance, and
>our understanding of the high correlation btw inquisitorial xnty (if
>i
>might use that term to describe those who put their backs into these
>religious persecutions) and anti-judaism.
>
>r
>
>
>
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