[Peace-discuss] Moon eclipse vs Church eclipse

[Ricky Baldwin]

Ah, the good ole Medieval days, eh?  Cholera, typhus, plague, not to mention the
Inquisition and a Crusade or two ...

But seriously, folks.  Most of us in this teapot probably agree that the ‘liberal’
interpretation of history Carl describes, with the genocidal ‘Age of Exploration’ as
its high point, is way off.  And we aren’t the only ones.  I haven’t had a Western Civ
class in awhile, but that view of history has actually been out of fashion for quite a
few years in academia (they even stopped calling it the ‘Renaissance’ for awhile, in
favor of ‘Early Modern’, but since people at the time called it ‘Renaissance’ [before
Burkhart], some folks are going back to that now).  And Medieval folks certainly did
invent some wonderful things, some very useful tools among them.

The footnote, that the later ‘Enlightenment’ was and is not all it’s cracked up to be,
is also pretty clear.  But of course the idea of challenging dogmatic authority
(including, but by no means limited to, the Church) isn’t married to that
interpretation, any more than all who criticise Stalin are ‘capitalist running dogs’ or
whatever. 

In other words, that outdated ‘liberal’ dogma that teaches, or preaches, the dawn of a
fresh liberation with the rise of capitalism and the modern age – during a later phase
of which German racists fabricated the ‘Greek miracle’ – is definitely worthy of
challenge.  But that's not the whole story.

The literal witch hunts of the ‘Renaissance’, which Carl suggests are such a telling
example, are not the only sins of the Church and their ilk.  Various churches,
Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, etc., are rightly known for persecutions of various
kinds, against heretics, Jews, Muslims, homosexuals, one another, and so on.  Islamic
authorities have lately become famous for these kinds of things, very conveniently of
course but nonetheless often with some accuracy.  More humane defenders of these faiths
can always argue, thankfully, that these crimes are not representative of their real
religion in some sense.  Fine, and more power to them.  

Let them speak up for the basic goodness of their communities, and I support them, but
the fact of people in religious authority advocating such abuses remains,
unfortunately.

A handful of Christian and Muslim authorities were fairly recently trying to persuade
their flocks in the ‘Global South’ not to use condoms, because the prophylactics were
allegedly laced with AIDS and possibly just as intentionally poked full of microsopic
holes as part of some vast conspiracy – or at the very least ‘interference’ with the
natural order, including AIDS.  Better to die of AIDS than interfere with God’s holy
plan, one of them claimed.  This is of course not to say that such monsters represent
official Christian or Islamic doctrine, but they are authorities in their respective
spheres, and as such these proclamations are more damaging than, say, a bunch of
obnoxious remarks at parties.  People believe them because of who they are.

Not to mention religious prohibitions against divorce, abortion, masturbation,
drinking, dancing – music of any kind for some – marriage across caste or racial or
religious boundaries (a rabbi once told friends of mine they were participating in the
‘Second Holocaust’ because one of them is Jewish and the other is not), men and women
shaking hands in public, women driving, etc. and the longstanding battles over
evolution (right up to the 20th century and the ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’, etc.), and on
and on.

Of course powerful narrowness isn’t just religious.  I mentioned Stalin.  Volumes have
been written about witch hunts by other sorts of thought-control authorities, some of
whom like Stalinists and Nazis and various Maoists have attempted to suppress
scientific inquiry as efficiently as the Church in that quote attributed to Magellan. 
Some of these accounts, as we know, have their own bones to pick, anti-Communist or
evangelical or whatever.  That doesn’t mean these crimes didn’t happen.  They continue
to happen.  I’d argue something like it, on a minor scale, went on in Haiti and in the
Haitian diaspora recently concerning the infallibility of Aristide.  But that’s another
long argument.

I think we all probably share a deep distrust of such authoritative controls on the
workings of the human brain, even if we sometimes miss particular examples.  We’ve
debated on this very list the value of peer-reviewed journals in the scientific world. 
But, I have to say, conservative as we may believe such institutions can be, I haven’t
yet heard of anyone burned at the stake for submitting heretical scientific research
papers.

Back to the Church and its witches, since Carl brought it up.  Again, literal witches
were far from the only victims (I mentioned Galileo, who managed to dodge the bullet –
or the firebrand) – and I think the Inquisition alone is probably sufficient evidence
of wholly (did someone say ‘holy’?) backward repression, but nevertheless.  While it
may be true or even relevant that Medieval canon law didn’t recognize the existence of
witches, that’s different than saying the Middle Ages didn’t believe in them, or that
belief in them was necessary for conviction on charges.  

First of all, there were accusations and ‘trials’, even executions, in the Middle Ages
as there had been before the spread of Christianity in Europe.  My understanding is
that the early Church tried to put an end to witch hunts because the *belief* in
witchcraft was considered a heresy (witches’ magical powers would contradict the
absolute power of the Christian god), but the Church also supported laws against the
*use* of magic for similar reasons.  Altho I think the penalty the Church suggested
wasn’t orginally death, I think we could argue a prescription like this from the Church
didn’t exactly help overcome the prejudice.  

Also, European executions of witches were on the rise by the 9th century, altho not yet
the kind of mass hysteria that peaked later in the “Renaissance” as Carl mentions.  

There was of course always the verse in Exodus 22 often cited during the Renaissance
witch trials (“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” in the locally familiar King
James Version.).  The admonition against users of magic or sorcery survives relatively
intact from the original Hebrew, I understand, and does remain in various and sundry
versions of the Christian Bible today (along with verses advocating the execution of
homosexuals, the keeping of slaves, the massacre of anyone unlucky enough to find
themselves living in someone else’s ‘Promised Land’ [Boy, there’s a history to that
one!], etc. – why don’t more religious authorities advocate revisions to these by the
way, preserving the historical texts for reference and study of course?)

But probably more important, ‘Saint’ Augustine and others influential in the Church
had, I believe, declared at least some pagan gods to be servants of Satan who could be
employed by sorcerers, and since so many Europeans believed in witches anyway – and the
Church was obviously okay with trying and executing heretics (and wasn’t ‘witchcraft’ a
heresy?), well 


I tend to think witch-hunts surface when someone needs them.  During the “Reformation”
in Europe, the English Civil War, or other times of conflict and upheaval, rulers or
leaders of factions need to motivate and encourage their troops (and here I’d
definitely include leaders on a lower, more local level who tend to be the ‘grassroots
organizers’ - so to speak – of the mass hysteria of the moment).  An appeal to old
prejudices seems to usually work pretty nicely (e.g., the current US wars, the US
Pacific and Asian wars in the 1940s-1970s, the Nazi Holocaust, the slaughters in Rwanda
and Sudan and elsewhere, on and on).  

And that’s why it’s so very  important to challenge not only prejudice but the
lemming-like obedience to authority, including ideological and religious authority:
less because it can lead to ‘magical thinking’, which is bad enuf, and not because
authorities are somehow always wrong (which is not only demonstably false but probably
not even possible), but because of the brutal, deadly or just plain wasteful or
inhumane ramifications in the real world that are still very much in effect.  It’s a
centuries-long battle that is by no means over, and it has definitely had its ups and
downs so to speak, but I think there has been some worthwhile progress and it’s a fight
worth fighting.

My 2c.  Thanks for reading this far.
Ricky


--- "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:

> I meant "liberal" in the sense of the account of Western history that we 
> all learnt tacitly, in refutation of Marxism (tacit refutation being so 
> much more effective that open discussion).  The etymological root of 
> "liberal" is of course "free," and it's been asserted since at least the 
> 19th century that European history is the history of freedom, of the 
> progressive emancipation of humanity -- intellectual, at least, if not 
> so often political or social. (Note how the myth is being used in 
> justification of killing Muslims these days.)
> 
> We all learnt it in Western Civ classes: first there were the benighted 
> religious ages, followed by the dawn of the Renaissance, and the full 
> flowering of the Enlightenment, which led on to modern speculative and 
> practical omniscience in Clinton-Bush America...  (Classical antiquity 
> is a problem here, as it was in a different way for Marx, but we deal 
> with it by ignoring it and not learning Latin and Greek anymore.)
> 
> In fact, to some extent the opposite is true.  In contrast to the 
> optimism and intellectual openness that characterized the High Middle 
> Ages (12th-14th centuries) -- whose typical invention was the university 
> --  Magellan's age, the Renaissance (15th-17th centuries) was one of 
> terror, magic and, as a symptom, the fear and persecution of witches 
> (which the Middle Ages didn't believe in).
> 
> I'd suggest the source of the colossal loss of nerve in the European 
> Renaissance is to be found in the demographic and social catastrophes 
> that accompanied the break-up of the medieval mode of production in 14th 
> century, and the concomitant attempt to reestablish European society by 
> force of will (absolutism).
> 
> The liberal myth was well under way by the time Jacob Burckhardt 
> essentially invented the Renaissance in 19th century Basel with his 
> great and influential book THE CIVILIZATION OF THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY:
> 
> "In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness-that which turned 
> within as that which was turned without-lay dreaming or held awake 
> beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and 
> childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen 
> clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a 
> race, people, party, family, or corporation-only through some general 
> category. In Italy this veil first melted into air: an objective 
> treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this 
> world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted 
> itself with corresponding emphasis: man became a spiritual individual, 
> and recognized himself as such" -- and much more in the same vein, along 
> with some good accounts of the age.
> 
> A more just account of Magellan's age (which you suggest) comes from 
> someone often taken to be a prophet of the liberal view -- but Adam 
> Smith is not the man the WSJ takes him to be. In the year of American 
> independence he wrote that "The discovery of America [and the work of 
> other earthbound explorers --CGE] ... certainly made a most essential 
> [change in the state of Europe].  By opening up a new and inexhaustible 
> market ... A new set of exchanges ... began to take place which had 
> never been thought of before, and which should naturally have proved as 
> advantageous to the new, as it certainly did to the old continent. The 
> savage injustice of the Europeans rendered an event, which ought to have 
> been beneficial to all, ruinous and destructive to several of those 
> unfortunate countries."
> 
> On the manifold uses of "liberal," it would take more bandwidth to 
> connect this liberal myth to Mr. Obama -- but I don't think it would be 
> hard.  --CGE
> 
> Ricky Baldwin wrote:
> > 
> > ...why we would assume it's "liberal" myth-making is far from clear.
> > The original source of the quote is unknown.  Nowadays it has
> > traction across several political positions that I know of due to the
> > Church's history of similar dogma in the face of reality, most
> > notably geocentrism (Earth at the center), which is what got Galileo
> > in hot water (or nearly did), and more recently other religious
> > authorities concerning the teaching of evolution in public schools.
> > Poking fun at such authorities, even inaccurately, is not necessarily
> > "liberal".
> > 
> > Frankly, I still like the quote, whether the source is literary or
> > historical, for more general reasons: it expresses a basic skepticism
> > in the face of stubborn authoritarian dogma and/or ignorance, a
> > sentiment that resonates with many people because dogma and ignorance
> > of one kind or another is still very real.  (This includes
> > Flat-Earthers, literal and figurative.)
> > ...
> > 
> > Ricky --- "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:
> > 
> >> Liberal myth-making, I'm afraid (which is not unknown in our own
> >> time).
> >> 
> >> I doubt Magellan ever said any such thing, because educated
> >> Europeans (including church officials) of Magellan's time (and long
> >> before) did not think the earth was flat.
> >> 
> >> The standard model (as in Dante) was of a round earth at the center
> >> of a series of concentric spheres, each one (except the ninth)
> >> holding the the moon, sun, or one of the planets.
> >> 
> >> A quite brilliant book on the model of the world from ancient times
> >>  through Shakespeare and Milton is C. S. Lewis, THE DISCARDED
> >> IMAGE.  I used to insist my grad students in Renaissance studies
> >> read it. --CGE
> >> 
> >> Ricky Baldwin wrote:
> >>> Hope you saw it, it was a nice one - and early enuf that even 
> >>> Catharine stayed up for it.
> >>> 
> >>> We were reminded of a quote attributed to a famous, and famously
> >>>  deeply flawed, earthbound explorer who despite his many
> >>> barbarous acts and allegiances was able to look up from the muck
> >>> and blood of brutal history and come up with this one:
> >>> 
> >>> "The Church says the Earth is flat, but I have seen its shadow on
> >>> the Moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church."
> >>> - F. Magellan (not the first man to circumnavigate the globe)
> >>> 
> >>> Ricky
> 



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