Avdat

Rodney Stark preachin' to the choir

Was visiting the in-laws over the Thanksgiving holidays, and Missus Avdat called my attention to this article in the hometown paper profiling a new book by Rodney Stark titled God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades. I am always leery of mainstream journalism's coverage of religion, but if they've got this one right, then readers ought to be equally leery of Stark's acumen as a historian. In short, the Muslims had it coming, and the Crusaders were motivated by pious zeal, not a desire to loot and pillage.

From the article:

"I suspect that Muslims will hate the book, and I'm sorry about that," Stark said. "That's just the way the world is. I make no apologies or real accusations."

This is a non-apology apology worthy of our best politicians and celebrities. And from an academic! Yeah team!

Stark has a small point, but I'm afraid it may be lost in an attempt to write a quotable and contrarian best-seller. George Marsden wrote that for Jonathan Edwards, "Hell was as real a place as China," and the same was true for Medieval Christians. A plenary indulgence was a powerful inducement to march on the Holy Land, one that modern people have a hard time wrapping their heads around.

On the other hand, one cannot ignore the economic forces at work. It's no coincidence that the Normans conquered England and Sicily in the same century that the first Crusade was launched. The warrior class was running out of turf to fight over in western Europe.

But a book sub-titled The Case for the Crusades would appear to do more than emphasize religious factors neglected in current scholarship. According to the Amazon reviews Stark argues that the Muslims were worse than they're made out to be (an argument in search of a target; seriously, how many apologists for Medieval Islam can you come up with?), and that the West owes them nothing, not even Arabic numerals.

With certain egregious exceptions (i.e., Nazi Germany)I get really impatient really quick with arguments about which culture, religion, society or era was better or worse than another. I mean, who has a computer and a moral compass up to crunching that data?

But what most people don't know is that the current arrangement between a technologically advanced West and a natural resource rich Orient was reversed in the Middle Ages--the difference being that that the natural resource was European wood, rather than Middle Eastern oil. When scholars inform the public that when London and Paris were towns of 25,000, Baghdad boasted a million residents, and that European intellectuals had to relearn Aristotle from the Arabs, and that cynical popes preached Crusades against political enemies within Western Europe as well as Muslims, they are educating people.

But I suspect that Stark's book will just confirm the ignorant in their biases.

A bit of Gnosticism

Gnostic scriptures are as esoteric as advertised. But the wild ride they take you on is worth the tedious struggle of making sense of them! Unfortunately, Irenaeus's rejoinder to the Gnostics, that our hope is in the renewal of creation, not in our escape from it, seems lost on many contemporary Christians. A lot of people who got all bent out of shape at The Da Vinci Code are, ironically, crypto-Gnostics without realizing it. My paper on one Gnostic text, The Gospel of Truth, is below the fold:

Church and state in the high middle ages

Periodically I have to write 4-5 page papers on my seminar readings. The purpose of these papers is to jump-start the seminar conversation. One seminar has me doing a bunch of these shorter papers instead of a final term paper, so that's what I've spent much of my fall composing. Not blog posts. But since I'm one of these bloggers who, A. Gets anxious when I'm not posting a lot, and B. Doesn't have time to blog a lot, I've decided to put some of these class papers up here. This one, on Church-State issues, is where this earlier post about wrestling over the mantle of John Howard Yoder came from. These might not be everyone's cup of tea, but if they suit, you are welcome, as usual, to comment.

Can kissing this bone clear my blocked duct, or should I try the sage again?

We kicked off our Medieval Christianity class with Peter Brown's The Cult of the Saints. A classmate who moonlights as a humanities teacher at a parochial high school said he appreciated the book because Brown rather forcefully pushes back against the CWthat the transition from Patristic to Medieval Christianity basically amounts to a re-paganization of the Church. That's the point of view he sees articulated in a lot of western civ textbooks.

Brown's argument, in short, is that both Jews and pagans regarded cemeteries as places of cultic pollution, and viewed with askance the Christian move to build churches over the graves of the martyrs. When Christianity moved into the Roman and post-Roman countryside, they erected shrines as monuments to the saints out there too. It wasn't so much the Church shrewdly co-opting the pagan pantheon--the goddess Brigit morphing into the nun who founded the Church at Kildaire, for example. It was instead the triumph of a Christianized urban patronage system over a rural healthcare system based on herbal remedies and magic. The sick in the countryside were convinced/compelled to seek healing from the martyred saint's relics at the shrine in the way that pagan urban Romans once sought relief from their patrons at the Forum. (The bishop here acts as the saint's authorized representative).

So, yea! No pagan-Christian syncretism! And Boo on all those Protestant historiographies that say as much about everything that happened between 325 and 1519.

But the problem with what did happen-assuming Brown's argument is correct--is that Christians engaged in an act of gross cultural imperialism as they evangelized the rural West. In terms of healing, it was probably a wash. The placebo effect from seeking a cure from an especially efficacious relic was probably as good as the trial by error herbal remedies rural Celts and Gallo-Romans had arrived at. But why not investigate whether or not the roots and herbs had any healing power apart from the incantations said over them, and run with it? Alas, it was an age of scientific and technological stasis.

Long story short: Christianity obviously changed a whole lot between, say, Irenaeus (3rd century) and Gregory the Great (7th century), and there's a bit fight in the scholarly community as to whether the Church conceded too much (see Russell's The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity) or too little (see any neo-pagan revisionist European history or any of the laments that Celtic Christianity got squashed by the Roman bureacracy) as it ensconced itself among the barbarians invaders and the rural populace.

It's a fun period to study because Christianity always has to sail between Scylla of syncretism and the Charybdis of imperialism in its missionary journey, and you get these issues in spades in the late antique-early medieval period.

Plot by numbers

A Facebook friend directed me to Slate's interactive Dan Brown plot generator! Plug in a city and a sect and voila! Page-turning, conspiratorial fun. And you don't have to wait through those interminable pauses between publication. As I told my friend, long have I suspected that the US Postal Service's presence in Buenos Aires wasn't altogether benign. But I had no idea of the evil they were prepared to unleash...

If it weren't for the Reds, we wouldn't have Tang

One of the curiosities of western intellectual history is that the scientific revolution didn't happen before it did, says Norman Cantor's The Civilization of the Middle Ages. The reintroduction of Aristotle to the West planted the seed, but Thomas Aquinas, the most adept exploiter of Aristotelian thought, only used Aristotelian thought to confirm Christian Platonism. Cantor views Thomism as something of an intellectual cul-de-sac.

Proving Christian Platonism with Aristotelian method is a tour de force, but a lot of people at the time (the Franciscans) were unhappy with Thomism because they thought that religion was a matter of the heart and will, not reason and intellect. So to secure the revelatory basis for religion, they turned away from Aristotle, but they did use his methods for science. In the 14th and 15th centuries thinkers unknown to us were positing theories of inertia and gravity, but their theories never gained wide circulation because nobody was interested in funding their work. It was only when European military leaders started experimenting with artillery fire that anybody got interested in physics, because they needed reliable rules to predict how shells would fly through the air.

The more things change...

We visited the spectacular Smithsonian Air and Space Museum at Dulles Airport last December. It really brings out the little boy in you. Walking down the corridor to the gigantic hanger containing the exhibits, you're looking down the nose of an SR-71 Blackbird. Cool. Intimidating. The museum also contains a Concorde (a frakking Concorde!), the Space Shuttle Enterprise (the prototype that never flew), and all kinds of space capsules.

There's also plenty of military aircraft, including the Enola Gay. As you walk through the exhibits, it's quite striking how quickly aerospace technology evolved during the wars. The stuff that was flying before 1914 is primitive compared to what was in the air just four years later.

Which makes me sad. If kids like it, it's cool, right? Dinosaurs, planes. Stuff that's bigger and faster is cool, especially to those who are slower and littler, and kids are the slowest and the littlest. It's just too bad that the leading reason why all this cool stuff is on display is that 20th century Europe was hell-bent on self-destruction.

Decline and fall II

Cantor cites other reasons why Rome "fell." In a time of economic decline, localism reigned, and Romans everywhere resented the central government's increasing demands and increasing inability to deliver basic services. "Rome" was not an entity that many Romans were wholly committed to, and some hard-pressed aristocrats welcomed the Germans because they thought they'd cut their taxes!

But they deserved to be hard-pressed. Drawing a comparison to high Mandarin Chinese culture in the first millenium A.D., Cantor speculates that Roman aristocrats had become so culturally ossified, that they couldn't and wouldn't look for technological or economic solutions to a changing world. All they knew was how to live off slave labor and read Cicero--because reading Cicero helped you win lawsuits!

Failing to effectively manage the inevitable migration of people from south to north certainly poses problems. The greater danger, however, is a refusal to adapt to a changing world. The world is getting hotter. New diseases are constantly appearing. The population is growing and aging. The global flight of a deadly new flu, or the forced evacuation of tens of millions of people from low-lying coastal areas make our current illegal immigration problem look like small beer indeed. These problems need to recognized as such, as real problems, and we need new technology, new forms of community, and ways of defining and generating economic development to deal with these problems.

We also need a new commitment to the common good. The culture of cars, cul-de-sacs, and starving the beast is ill-equipped to deal with pandemics or a changing climate. And the public sector needs to demonstrate an ability to provide a good return on what the public invests with it

Decline and fall I

George Santayana famously said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Or something like that.

But those who study the past are condemned to keep their mouths shut about any "lessons learned from history," at least when writing for professors and peer-reviewed journals. It's understandable. You have to demonstrate competence in understanding the past on its own terms and for its own sake before you can jump into the deep water of application.

But this blog is not peer-reviewed!

So I will say that it's been fun reading Norman Cantor's Civilization of the Middle Ages while watching the far right's war against comprehensive immigration reform sublimate into conspiratorial mutterings about the new President's birth certificate. Rome fell because of illegal immigration--that's what the barbarian invasions were! Why they even had a "guest worker program"--Goths in the Imperial Guard, and look where it got them!

On the other hand...

Cantor argues that Rome did not fall so much as, like the Cheshire Cat, it gradually disappeared. Plague decimated the late Western Roman Empire, leaving vacant land and making the entire region poorer. Nature abhors a vacuum, so in came the barbarians, drawn by Roman culture, consumer goods and available land, and driven west by other victorious barbarian tribes. Attila the Hun struck fear in the hearts of the entire civilized world, but you'd hate to tangle with the Mongolian warlord who sent him and his people west in the first place.

Cantor estimates that the Empire would have needed an army of five million men to secure the entire border. No mean number considering that the entire Empire topped off at fifty million. The U.S. put that percentage of its population in uniform during World War II, but it would be nearly impossible to do that on an indefinite basis. The Romans withdrew to secure bases, conceded territory that wasn't worth saving, and conserved their military assets for the biggest threats. That meant protecting the urbanized, wealthy East from the Persians rather than holding the Franks back from the swamps and forests of Gaul.

The Romans would allow barbarians to settle within the Empire, in exchange for their policing the border against their cousins. But the Romans dealt duplicitously with their Germanic guests, and the guests revolted. They didn't want to destroy Rome; the wanted a slice of the pie, but prejudice and corruption made conflict inevitable and in the end Roman and barbarian inadvertently killed the goose that laid the golden egg.

Human migration is a fixture of world history, and will continue to be so until there are no more great disparities in the wealth of nations, and the last chapter is written on man's inhumanity to man. Poverty and perfidy south of the border will ensure a steady stream of men, women and children headed north, and we can no more secure our southern border than the Romans could. (We could, I suppose, but at a cost that we, like they, weren't willing to pay).

What we need to do is manage the inevitable flow better. There needs to be generous opportunities for those who want to come here to do so legally, and they need to enjoy equality under the law once they arrive here.

What I read on vacation: Watchmen

(Spoiler alert, naturally)

It's not a story with a whole lotta love for liberals. Adrian Veidt, whose distaste for both Nixon and the war in Vietnam is atypical of crime fighting superheros, turns out to be the bad guy, and bad in that Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, What's A Few Million Dead People If You're Building Utopia way. Plus, because Rorshach's search to find the superhero killer drives much of the plot, the reader winds up looking at the world through Rorschach's eyes. And Rorschach would just as soon break your fingers one by one as listen to you explain to him how all evil is structural, and how the petty criminals who fill our prisons are really victims, not perpetrators, victims of unjust and oppressive systems.

Rorschach would fit in well in a Martin Scorsese movie. He has a strong (shall we say, Reformed?) doctrine of sin, but no correspondingly strong doctrine of grace. Rorshach's abhorrence at the spilling of innocent blood and his uncompromisingly pessimistic assessment of human nature make him both more principled and realistic than Veidt, but his loss of faith and his frankly nihilistic view of life (no God and no meaning other than what we impose on life--hence the name and the mask) make his principles arbitrary, and he winds up skating dangerously close to the abyss that he's fighting so hard to keep society from falling into.

I understand that the movie minimizes the Black Freighter subplot. For those of you who haven't read the book but are reading this post in defiance of all the spoilers, a minor character reads an old comic titled Tales from the Black Freighter, whose narrative intersects in uncanny ways with the ongoing  Watchmen dialogue and plot. Maybe a comic book panel is better equipped than film to highlight the contrapuntal rhythm of Watchmen and The Black Freighter, but I'm guessing that the absence of The Black Freighter would be a deficit in the movie version.

I finished Watchmen the night I watched Stephen Colbert interview this crazy birther chick, Orly Taitz:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Womb Raiders - Orly Taitz
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Meryl Streep

Did you notice how she compared Barack Obama to both Stalin and Hitler in under five minutes? I thought that the conclusion to Watchmen--in which both the truth and untold millions slain have been buried under the foundation of Adrian Veidt's Brave New World and only the John Bircher types at The New Frontiersman are the wiser--looks eerily like what movement conservatives have deluded themselves into believing a second Obama term might look like. Foreigner Muslim terrorist Obama's socialized medicine kills all the old people, and only World Net Daily knows the truth! Although Watchmen was written in the '80s and is preoccupied with Cold War politics, it's surprisingly contemporary.

It's not my politics, but it's quite well-written and well-drawn and I can't wait to see the movie.

What I read on my vacation: The Shack

Technically my vacation isn't over. I'm lollygagging at the 2008 Comfort Inn location of the year in lovely Sturbridge, Massachusetts. (And it is lovely! New England's rolling, nearly mountain-sized hills covered in birch trees and balsam firs are lovely. At least they are in the summer.) Anyway, I can't watch TV because I want the kids to go to sleep, so why not blog a little bit before hitting the road tomorrow?

OK, what I read. The Shack. It was on the living room table with the other detritus that made it in from my family's convergence on The McKinley House in Bass Harbor, Maine. I'd heard of the book but literally knew nothing about it, other than that it was of a religious nature. My mother-in-law brought it with her, but she didn't like it. So I decided to read it.

Quickly into the novel I realized I had ventured into the dread regions of inspirational fiction, where plot, character development, credible dialogue and a nice turn of phrase are all sacrificed on the altar of doctrinal truth and point-scoring. But I pressed ahead because I knew that you, my legions of adoring readers, were starving for new material from me, and I had to provide it for you in the form of this book review!

Until I got to the middle of the book when the protagonist, a bereaved father, chills out with the Triune God for a weekend in a log cabin in the woods. I just had to set it aside then, not because I object to the book's iconography of the Holy Trinity as Queen Latifah, Lucy Liu and a swarthy, middle-eastern carpenter. I mean, I'm a mainline Christian. I read Beyond God the Father as an undergraduate! Back in the day, everybody I knew was calling the Almighty "she." I had to set it aside because the book was so late 1980s, you know?

But that's what the conservative Evangelicals do. They ridicule "liberal" Christians for both capitulating to culture and for being irrelevant to the culture (a contradictory argument if there ever was one). And then they pick through the best mainline scholarship of the previous generation and regurgitate it. So Open Theism is conservative evangelicalism stoned on process theology, and I'm guessing The Shack is a little Moltmann, a little feminist theology, and assorted theodicies ground up into a sausage of awful prose. I swear, if liberal Protestantism didn't exist, evangelicals would have to invent it.

I'm saying I'm guessing because I didn't finish the book. I read the plot summary on Wikipedia. Is that unfair? Augustine put off converting to Christianity for a long time because he was such a literary snob that the idea that the New Testament was divine revelation scandalized him. Am I a snob?

Well, not enough of a snob to not be a Christian. But like P.D. James, I detest it when cynics mock excellence as elitism. Here's the thing: after Dostoyevsky penned Ivan Karamozov's devastating takedown of all attempts to justify God's power and love in the face of natural and man-made cruelty, the only solution to the "problem of evil" is his brother Alyosha's rejoinder, also penned by Dostoyevsky: he kisses his brother on the cheek. There is no good explanation for why evil exists if God is sovereign and good. There are only acts of love grounded in resurrection hope. By the time I was a third of the way through The Shack I had a pretty good feeling that the author wouldn't be able to demonstrate that in an artful manner.

So, onto a better written book, whose myriad of (theological?) anthropologies, while not Christian, were far more entertaining and thought-provoking. Yes, I'm talking about Watchmen. In the meantime, I googled I Hate The Shack, and the White Zombie song Shack of Hate was the third hit. That inspired me to create a White Zombie channel on Pandora. So all is not lost!