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..
1.
>>> [log in to unmask] 6/17/2004 7:30:58 AM >>>
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and
culture
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.
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. 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. 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.
*****
2.
At 02:27 PM 6/16/2004 -0500, you wrote:
>You are misled by the IHT/NYTimes editorializing, smart-aleck
headline
>about "Downsizing the Inquisition" and the distortions found in
>Horowitz's statements in the article. If yuou look at the quotation
>attributed to Henry Kamen and at the quotations from the various
Vatican
>officials, gross numbers are only part of the issue. As with the
>revisionist literature in general, among the questions addressed are
the
>purpose, procedures, percentages of various sentences and
punishments,
>percentage of commuted sentences etc. Above all, the revisionist
>scholarship appropriately places the question of coercion in
religious
>matters in the context of its times rather than assuming an air of
>self-righteous modern superiority.
you mean, "this stuff was okay back then, don't project modern values
back."?
are you seriously going to tell me that the people whom the inquisition
was
crushing didn't think it was a grotesque distortion of xnty to coerce
faith? that we only discovered modern principles in the modern world
(when
they finally became the rule rather than the exception). that there
were
no xns in the 11th-13th cns who viewed the growing resort to legalized
violence by the church as anti-christian? were they anachronisms?
r
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.
*****
3.
I wrote:
>The Vatican conference presumably involved scholars working along the
same
lines as those who have produced a body of revisionist studies on the
various
inquisitions (Peters, Kamen, Tedeschi and others) over the last three
decades.
The revisionism was long overdue because of the distorted and
exaggerated view
of the inquisitions that had become conventional in the 18th and 19th
centuries and is now endemic in popular culture. WIthout having seen
the
papers, why mock the conference or its proceedings?
To which Christopher Crockett replied:
"i don't know the work of the scholars you mention, but assume that
these
"revisionists" are seperate from the "revisionists" whom the *Vatican*
assembled for this conference which is resulted in the present,
self-serving
drivel which is the subject of the NYT piece."
You simply "assume" that the Vatican would only assemble a group of
self-serving revisionists. My presumption was based on the evidence of
what I have seen of proceedings of earlier Vatican conferences on a wide
variety of topics. To label Vatican conferences as invariably
self-serving defies the evidence and can only be called what it is,
sheer prejudice.
Christopher Crockett wrote:
"all i know about the "scholars" at the Vatican conference is what i
read in
the NYTimes article :
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Vatican-Inquisition.html
which i took the trouble to find on-line because i suspected that it
might
contain more of the story than the snippet which Al Magary sent to the
list,
his source being the International Herald Tribune (which publishes a
lot of
abridged NYT articles).
only two conference members are mentioned by name :
"Agostino Borromeo, a professor at Rome's Sapienza University."
clearly an unbiased source."
Because he teaches at a Catholic university in Rome he has to be
biased? Your statement itself seems a tad biased.
Dennis Martin
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