The Virtual Stoa

Although it’s impossible to dislike the German team entirely when they have a player called Jansen.

Ever since I started reading the Vatican’s excellent website about ten years ago I always thought it odd that you could get it in English, French, Portuguese, and so on, but not in Latin. Now the BBC is reporting today on the launch of the Vatican’s Latin website and suggesting the Pope’s enthusiasm for Latin might be the reason for its belated appearance. I’m quite pleased with this. Not so pleased that I’ll forgive the Church for its appalling record on child abuse or contraception or for closing down Amnesty International groups in its schools in Northern Ireland because Amnesty thinks rape victims should be allowed to have abortions, or anything like that. But, still, I’m quite pleased.

In her speech to the IPPR this morning, Margaret Hodge said this:

Next year will also see the anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession to the throne. Given some of the less savoury parts of his reign, it’s not an obviously straightforward event to commemorate. But understanding his reign is essential to understanding England. He is an iconic figure, a well-known personality in our history. And whether in separating state and religion, or in instituting English as the common language, or in being the first to clearly define and map our boundaries, a deeper understanding of his reign may help the important debate on England which is emerging.

Emphasis added. Her last contribution to the important debate on England wasn’t such a good one, either.

The reference to “Sir Charles Darwin” is slightly curious, too. His ODNB entry says that “Many thought it shameful that the British establishment signally failed to honour him” with a K, but no doubt Hodge knows better. Unless she was referring to this chap.

So, Mr Blair’s become a Catholic, and there are a billion pop explanations in play — that Blair’s keen to wallow in guilt for his disastrous foreign policy, and nobody does guilt better than Catholics (cf going straight into the Middle East job after doing so much, and in such a well-intentioned way, to bollocks up the region) — that it’s the long-term result of being married to Cherie Booth, once you’ve jumped through all the Carole Caplin papaya-flavoured hoops that have been set up along the way — that you can’t quite keep that much moralism bottled up inside you without letting it spill out all over something, and now he doesn’t have the British people anymore he might as well absorb himself into the Holy Roman and Apostolic Catholic Church. (I’m sure we can always come up with more: if you do, pop ‘em in the comments).

But it seems to me there’s a more interesting, longer-term trajectory at work in what we can usefully for the purposes of this post call Blair’s mind, and I’ll say a bit about that over the fold.

(more…)

There’s a helpful round-up of the recent Martin Amis kerfuffle over at Matt’s place.

All I’ll add is that we need to see the remarks about his urges to stripsearch people who look as if they might be from Pakistan (etc.) in a slightly wider context. Amis is also someone who thinks he can discern murderous intentions towards his family in the glance of an Arab doing his job, who can write things like “the impulse towards rational inquiry is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male”, who seems to absorb Bernard Lewis-like explanations of historical problems when non-crazy explanations are readily available, who recycles inflammatory quotations from Hezbollah’s leader that circulate freely around the internet, but which no-one ever quite manages to trace back to an authentic-looking source, and so on.

(This last one strikes me as weird, because presumably it’s not too hard to find Hezbollah leaders saying offensive things, so why is the very-possibly-made-up quote the one that everyone’s heard somewhere or other?)

We can practice our careful reading skills as much as we like on that particular “urges” passage, and we can be as charitable towards him as we want to be (though we should also bear in mind that there’s a long history of people with really offensive views managing to present them in ways that aren’t quite so offensive on a charitable reading of their words). But Amis also has form here when it comes to saying the kinds of things about Muslims that the real crazies also like to say, and it’d be a shame to lose sight of that fact in the parsing of his words from the interview.

I’m not sure enough about what I really think is going on in Amis’s head (and I’m not interested enough in either him or his books to spend too much time on trying to work it out), but he seems to me to be somewhere on the slippery slope that has Mark Steyn and Melanie Phillips festering at the bottom, and it doesn’t look to me as if he’s too anxious to be stepping off it any time soon. (But perhaps I’m being uncharitable.)

Bishop Graham Dow argued two weeks ago that the floods were sent by God to punish the people of Doncaster for being overly tolerant of gays and lesbians (and then denied that he had said any such thing).

Why might the people of Oxford have incurred the wrath of the Lord?

Acts 17:18: “Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks, encountered him [St Paul]. And some said, What will this babbler say? other some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods: because he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection.”

I’m going to guess that the Stoic philosopher is the one with the beard. (The Stoics liked their beards.)

Full story over here.

There’s a whole bunch of new Bible stories in Lego up at the Brick Testament. Of particular interest to Virtual Stoa readers will be “Accept Communism or Die!”, a rendering (in Lego) of Acts 4:32-5:11.

At least one Stoa-reader is interested in lottery voting; he should also consult this story.

Thanks to the people, mostly called Chris, who’ve been contributing to the thread below. We haven’t had nearly enough discussion of the Church Fathers on this blog over the last few years — most blogs, in fact, are deficient in this respect — and that’s something I’d like to encourage.

So, if we look at the tradition of Protestant fundamentalism that took shape in C20th America, then, sure, it doesn’t look much like what we find in the Catholic church. But what if we’re trying — for whatever reason, and it might be a stupid thing to want to do — to develop a workable concept of fundamentalism that can travel across different religious traditions - Christian, Jewish, Islamic, possibly Hindu?

And then the thought that strikes me is that what we associate with fundamentalism isn’t narrow textual literalism per se, partly because — and I really don’t know much about this — while Islamic fundamentalists are keen on their verses from the Qu’ran I’m not sure that they are textual literalists in the manner of Christian Protestant fundies. Here’s a bit of Sayyid Qutb, who people tell me is pretty important in contemporary Islamic fundamentalism(s). It’s taken pretty much at random, but glancing through it, this doesn’t strike me as overly concerned with narrow readings, resisting interpretation, and so on, and I don’t think that American Protestant fundamentalists talk about verses from the Bible in quite this way.

So I wonder whether we’re best off thinking about fundamentalism(s) in terms of a particular kind of claim to religious authority, which often (not always) involves a re-reading of foundational texts, and that this is what makes the idea of Catholic fundamentalism somewhat paradoxical, because Catholicism just is a claim about authority: what it is to be a Catholic (at least as far as the Church is concerned) is to accept the magisterium and so there just isn’t the space within Catholicism to come out and tell the bishops that you’ve got a more authoritative reading of scripture (or whatever) than they have.

And moving away from the idea of textual literalism may also help to think about the idea of Hindu fundamentalisms. I’m inclined to sympathise with the idea that we’re basically talking about “a bunch of political crazies” here (see Chris Y in the comments), and the malleability and whole invented-traditionness of modern Hinduism must be relevant. But it may be that political craziness and the claims to dogmatic authority are more important to a workable concept of fundamentalism than anything else.

(Andrew Vincent from Sheffield was giving a talk in Oxford yesterday about thinking about fundamentalism, and that got me onto thinking about the Catholics. After all, if the Pope’s got the key to heaven, he’s probably got the key to the concept of fundamentalism, too.)

Insofar as you can give content to the idea of religious fundamentalism, do you think there are or can be Roman Catholic fundamentalists or not? If you think there are, who are they, or who might they be? If you think there aren’t, or that there can’t be, is this because you think fundamentalists are textual literalists, and Catholicism isn’t especially bothered about the Bible, or for a different reason? Sort of relatedly, do you think there are Hindu fundamentalists or not? If you do, what is it about them that makes them fundamentalists? Answers in comments, please. Please don’t be inhibited by any lack of specialist knowledge about any of these subjects.

Happy Christmas. Enjoy what’s left of the Winterval.

[Image from the Brick Testament, of course.]

Jasper Milvain buys the Saturday edition of the Guardian, and has very kindly forwarded to me a discussion of hair that appeared there yesterday, and which was curiously suppressed from the online edition. John Mullan was reviewing Alastair Fowler’s new edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Here’s Mullan:

“So if the longer notes at first appear digressive, they return you to the poem convinced that the editorial digression showed you the very by-ways of Milton’s imagination. Take the long paragraph of Fowler’s small print excited by Milton’s first description of Adam and Eve’s hairstyles — of Adam’s “hyacinthine locks” and Eve’s “wanton ringlets”. We start with Saint Paul’s strictures on when women should cover their hair, then wander through a mini-essay on the significance of hair in epic poetry, a parenthesis on Milton’s own hairstyle and hair-colouring, suggestive examples of the depiction of women’s hair in 17th-century painting and some speculation about Milton’s “special sexual interest in hair”. You might think this is like listening to an engagingly eccentric professor, free-associating, in the library of his mind, yet soon the clinching references to the ways the poem fixes on Eve’s “golden tresses” convince you otherwise. Her “dishevelled” hair signifies what is both lovely and vulnerable about here, and the poet is as fascinated as the devil who gazes at her from his hiding place.”

Here’s what Fowler wrote in the 1971 edition of his book (I think I’ve got a later edition at home, so I’ll post any of Fowler’s subsequent thoughts on hair before too long):

“iv.301-8. The hair-length proper for each sex follows directly from the statement of their hierarchic relation; for, according to St Paul, ‘a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man: for her hair is given her for a covering’ (1 Cor. xi 7, 15; cp. the A. V. marginal glass on 10, which explains the covering is a ’sign that she is under the power of her husband’). hyacinthine locks] When Athene ’shed grace about his head and shoulders’, Odysseus’ hair flower ‘like the hyacinth flower’ (Homer, Od. vi 231). If a colour were implied, it might be either blue, the colour of the hyacinth flower or gem (i.e., the sapphire; cp. l. 237n), or just possibly tawny (the hyacinth of heraldry, near to the colour of M.’s own hair), or black (Eustathius’ gloss on the Homeric passage) or very dark brown (Suidas’ gloss); in fact, almost any colour at all. But it is just as likely that a shape is meant (the idealized treatment accorded to hair in antique sculpture?), or an allusion to the beautiful youth Hyacinthus, beloved of Apollo but doomed to die. The elaborateness of the present passage lends some support to the theory that M. had a special sexual interest in hair. (In this connection cp. 496f, Lycidas 69, 175.)”

And here’s John Milton, Paradise Lost, iv.300-311:

“His fair large front and eye sublime declared
Absolute rule; and hyacinthine locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clustering, but not beneath his shoulders broad:
She as a veil down to her slender waist
Her unadorned golden tresses wore
Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved
As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied
Subjection, but required with gentle sway,
And by her yielded, by him best received,
Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,
And sweet reluctant amorous delay.”

Melanie Phillips, over here (and do read the original post).

The Stroppyblog has prominently displayed on its front page Rebcca West’s famous remark that “I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.” I’ve been reading her short biography of Augustine today, and I rather liked this [from p.101]:

“Involuntary episcopacy is one of the few perils which man has been able to eradicate since the time of Augustine, and it is hard for us to realise that it was then a hovering terror, almost as the press-gang once was in England.”

I think there should probably be more Rebecca West-themed blogging, but that may not be a widely shared opinion.

If there are any Calendar Bores out there, can he or she (but, more likely, he) tell me how often the French Republican New Year and the Jewish New Year coincide? It seems that from sunset this evening until midnight Paris time we have overlapping New Year festivities, which I don’t think I’ve ever noticed before.

(Will French Republican Jews celebrate with especial vigour this evening, or do they worry that that would compromise their French Republican identity? I like to think that they will.)

I read through Martin Amis’s long piece in yesterday’s Observer, and was struck by one thing in particular: he writes in the third part that

The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust that Islam remained indifferent even to readily available and obviously useful innovations, including, incredibly, the wheel. The wheel, as we know, makes things easier to roll; Bernard Lewis, in What Went Wrong?, sagely notes that it also makes things easier to steal.

It’s a while since I flipped through a book called The Camel and the Wheel by Richard Bulliet that deals with the fascinating story of the disappearance of wheeled transport from the post-Roman Middle East, but I don’t remember the story there having much to do with the “intellectual autarky” of the Islamic world, and a glance at this article, in which Bulliet summarises his argument, suggests that my memory’s working along the right lines.

So is anyone seriously making the case against Bulliet that Muslim “intellectual autarky” (rather than the good old-fashioned historical materialist reasons of geography, political economy and camels) was a major cause of the collapse in the use of the wheel (whose decline, in any case, predated the rise of Islam), or is this just becoming something people like Bernard Lewis and Martin Amis can say in order to make the Islamic world sound more unreasonable than it in fact was?

We don’t have enough Victorian sermonizing here at the Virtual Stoa, so I’ve just re-published two of my great-great-grandfather Stopford Brooke’s sermons on this site, Liberty, preached on 25 January 1874, and Liberty at Home, given the following Sunday, 1 February 1874.

I’m sure we don’t get the full effect just by reading them off the computer screen, though. Brooke was apparently quite the performer: Gladstone once found him “a bit wild” when he when he heard him preach “against respectability”, and Bernard Shaw thought that what the socialists really needed in England in order to make headway was “some man who would have something of the religious fervor of Hyndman with something akin to the cultured suasiveness of Stopford Brooke.” Still, what we do have is interesting enough, and I’m very pleased to see his stress on the importance of arguing with one’s daughters in the second piece.

Here’s Jean Meslier (1664-1729):

“Je voudrais, et ce sera le dernier et le plus ardent de mes souhaits, je voudrais que le dernier des rois fût étranglé avec les boyaux du dernier prêtre.”

Alternatively, in English:

“I would like, and this would be the last and most ardent of my wishes, I would like the last of the kings to be strangled with the guts of the last priest.”

Perhaps better known in a variant often attributed to Denis Diderot in something like these words:

“Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

Here’s the Paris 1968 graffiti variant:

“When the last sociologist has been strangled with the guts of the last bureaucrat, will we still have ‘problems’?”

And here’s the Scottish variant by Tom Nairn that I unaccountably hadn’t come across until earlier this week:

“Scotland will only be free when the last Church of Scotland Minister has been strangled with the last copy of the Sunday Post.”

This what some members of Hizb ut-Tahrir have been saying to Harriet Harman, according to Nick Cohen:

‘We’re not a part of British society,’ they told her. ‘We stay here like guests in a hotel.’

If that’s what they think, there’s nothing to worry about at all. Guests have to abide by all the rules of the house.It’s also seems to me to be a less politically subversive position than authoritative Christian teaching on the same subject. Right through City of God, St Augustine�s opinion is that the “civis civitatis Dei“, the citizen of the city of God, must act with respect to the state as if s/he were a �peregrinus�, a Latin word that is usually translated in this context as �pilgrim�. And that makes a certain amount of sense: Christians are, on this view, to treat their time on earth as a pilgrimage through a vale of tears on their way (with God’s grace) to a better place in the hereafter.

But the translation of �peregrinus� as �pilgrim� always seems to me to be a little misleading, bypassing a lot that is most interesting about the word, and it�s worth digging out the major meaning the Latin word bears � a peregrinus is someone who comes from foreign parts, a stranger, or an alien. I�m rather drawn to the identification of the peregrinus with the modern refugee or asylum-seeker, the person who doesn�t feel welcome, or feel they quite belong in the country in which they find themselves � and, of course, there is no asylum which the state can offer to Augustine�s peregrini: they are in search of asylum, of freedom from strife, but this in a world to come.

So on the Augustinian view, the Citizens of the City of God are not to embrace the state or the nation, to internalise its values as theirs, or find any joy in its successes. They put up with it. They tolerate it. They keep it at arm�s length. Harriet Harman would probably disapprove of this attitude. If they are anything as dignified as guests in a hotel, it’s probably the crummy bed and breakfast the local authority put them in while waiting to hear the outcome of their deportation hearing, with rising damp and a hostile local population outside.

But then there’s a further twist. Harman’s question to the chaps from Hizb ut-Tahrir which prompted the reply about the hotel, apparently, was this one: “You’re British citizens. Shouldn’t you try to play a part in British society?” What would Augustine say?

Augustine argued, as I’ve suggested, that Christians should think of themselves as not-particularly welcome foreigners in the political communities in which they found themselves living, but he also argued that that shouldn’t stop them holding offices of responsibility in that society. Indeed, the example he uses is of sitting as a magistrate and authorising torture (a standard practice in criminal investigations back in the fourth and fifth centuries).

In one of the most striking passages in Book XIX of City of God, Augustine tells us that judges can never see the consciences of those they judge (only God can do that), which means that judges are

�often compelled to seek the truth by torturing innocent people merely because they are witnesses to the crimes of other men. And what of torture applied to a man in his own case? Here, the question is whether he is guilty or not; but he is tortured even if he is innocent… For this reason the ignorance of the judge is often a calamity to the innocent… And when the accused has been condemned and put to death, the judge still does not know whether he has slain a guilty man, or an innocent one…�

And then Augustine asks the key question:

�Given that social life is surrounded by such darkness, will the wise man take his seat on the judge�s bench, or will he not venture to do so? Clearly, he will take his seat; for the claims of human society, which he thinks it wicked to abandon, constrain him and draw him to his duty�

The right path is �to acknowledge that the necessity of acting in this way is a miserable one: if he hated his own part in it, and if, with the knowledge of godliness, he cried out to God, �From my necessities deliver Thou me�.What the earthly city is needed to accomplish is to help secure an earthly peace, which, while it is but a shadow of the heavenly peace the �peregrini� will enjoy when they finally reach the place which really can offer them asylum, is still an important good, not least because it enables the Church Militant to preach its mission to the world more effectively. And this is why Augustine also offers an account of a just war in the passages that follow this one, which is a war which is still wretched and miserable and violent and detestable � that�s important, and war should never be romanticised � but one which can nevertheless be a permissible or even necessary means to the valuable end of terrestrial peace.

So his isn�t an argument about how Christians should detach themselves completely from politics. Christ himself may have made such an argument � it�s not really clear � and the earliest Christian Fathers argued strenuously that Christians should have nothing to do with powerful secular institutions, such as the Roman state. But Augustine always set his face against Christians who counselled withdrawal from the world of affairs; he took very seriously the idea that Christ had enjoined upon the Church a mission to the world, and that Christians had to engage with the world and not withdraw into isolated communities of the virtuous in the desert (Donatism). In Augustine�s vision politics is a necessary evil. Real value lies elsewhere � in religion, in good Christian living, in following the divine commandments, and so on. But politics can�t be escaped altogether, and we shouldn�t seek to try.

I wonder what either Harriet Harman or the militants of Hizb ut-Tahrir make of that.

Contradictory Ben has a useful round-up of the current state-of-play regarding exorcism and the churches.

I met the C of E’s Exorcist for Oxfordshire (or, perhaps, for the Diocese of Oxford) not so long ago, I think, but I can’t remember which one he was, and I don’t think he took that part of his job especially seriously.

The Guardian has a piece today on the religious jokes poll (”the Laugh Judgmenet”) run by webzine Ship of Fools. The full collection of jokes is here, and don’t forget to visit the indispensible Fruitcake Zone while you’re visiting the site.

Is it just me, or does this week’s Onion article, “Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory” present an argument eerily similar to everyone’s favourite Augustinian Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche’s metaphyisics of “occasionalism”?

From the splendid, every-home-should-have-one Cambridge History of C17th Philosophy [vol.1, pp.538-9]:

“The occasionalist conclusion drawn by Malebranche and Cordemoy is that an explanation of any natural effect which refers only to matter and motion - that is, which specifies only the shapes and sizes of material particles moving with given directions and velocities in accordance with certain laws - will ultimately fail to account fully for the phenomenon, since physical bodies have no causal efficacy. In fact, there is and can be only one true cause of any phenomenon, namely, the infinitely powerful will of God. God alone has a power to act, and there is a necessary connexion only between God’s will and its effects. All events in the natural world, all motions, collisions, separations, changes, and other effects in bodies have God as their direct and immediate author. Thus, any metaphysically complete explanation of a phenomenon must refer at least to the divine volition which is its efficient cause (although, as we shall see, in physics one need not take explanation to this high a level).”

OK, it is just me. It’s the last, parenthetical clause that gives M. the get-out.

“Interactive, restlessly conscious of its own transient nature”.

Well, he was talking about blogs and other online media, but he could have been talking about a lot of other things, too, including all of our lives in this world (if not in the next, assuming that he’s onto something with this Christianity business).

My copy of Aidan Nichols, OP, The Theology of Joseph Ratzinger arrived in the post today, and I am pleased.

But my copy of Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity has not yet arrived, despite having been ordered ten days ago. I shall make enquiries on Monday.