Month: November 2021

1. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century (24 Jan 2019)

by kurto

Studies currents of 12th-century Christian theology, a period of ferment and reform and also a bridge to the gains made by Thomas Aquinas and contemporaries in the following century. Contemporary theology encompassed practically all of intellectual life: science, philosophy, historiography, literary criticism (and particularly Biblical exegesis). But the conventional sequence of monastic patrism to scholasticism to Renaissance is simplistic. Institutional (i.e., Catholic) history and intellectual history are interdependent; positivism is poorly suited for understanding medieval theology because values drive the era’s fundamental sociopolitical constructs.

Symbolism was the first of two keystones of 12th-century epistemology. It conflated scientific explanation with signification. Monkish academics and the general populace alike believed all real things (i.e., natural objects, as well as historical events) could be portrayed in ways that revealed both their essence and broader meanings (‘signification’). It was metaphor dependent on fixed, transcendent realities, matching examples with Platonic concepts. If math shows the visible form of visible things and physics the invisible causes of visible things, symbolism manifests visible forms of invisible things. Thus history was man’s visible form of god’s will. Augustine’s symbols required pre-acceptance of faith, whereas Pseudo Dionysius’ symbols were autonomous.

The second was the predominance of hierarchy, which was akin to belief in evolution in the 20th. Hierarchy stood athwart Aristotelian concepts of science because the higher body subsumed the lower. In a hierarchical conception of the universe, wherein man predominated, causality and meaning were linked and each being was a ‘theophany’, a revelation of god.

Enter William of Conches, who identified three sources of causation: God, nature, man. The discovery of autonomous nature meant breaking with Augustinian doctrine, albeit God remained at the center. Theology benefited from a new rationality and Christianity (re)discovered nature and man’s place in the whole of the natural universe; of course there was disagreement over ‘natural determinism’ versus divine forces. Alain of Lille’s dictionary assigned 11 meanings to ‘nature’, a broad cast rather than systematic thought, and the distinction between science and nature came into sharper focus in the 13th century (with the help of reacquired Aristotle). Desacralizing the natural produced intellectual crisis for those who thought it was not important to know why, only that things were perfect, as divinely intended.

Yet the rediscovery of nature did not undermine but strengthened belief in value of symbols. Neoplatonic scholars downplayed the causality of man; however, Platonism was conducive to moral values and religion. Plato’s view of the soul as part of the cosmic order and so part of the functioning of order, in contrast to Aristotle who focused on the mind, aligned with Christianity. But there were problems (such as in the Timaeus) which clashed with creation or the trinity.      Avicenna was the preeminent source of Islamic Neoplatonism, Plotonius the premier Latin. The texts were partial and the translations average, so the results imperfect. Neoplatonism was not so influential as Aquinas building on Aristotle. Plato’s religious character attracted contemporary theology. Neos used their new understanding of reason to build up faith in mystery of God. The return to primitive apostolic life (see below) entailed rejecting the feudal cloister and finding God among the people, a neo-Platonist concept.

Over the century, piecemeal explanation (i.e., Aristotelian science) began to replace the generally irreducible meanings of symbolism. Simultaneously, allegory became more important, especially in literary forms. During the religious awakening of the last third of the century, exaggerated allegories were a kind of Judaic leavening of the Christian mysteries. The Roman Catholic church thought of itself as separate and closed, liked the Old Israelites, rather than the encompassing body of Christ. (What Moses concealed, Jesus revealed.) Christian theology drew heavily on Old prototypes. The Old Testament was used to illustrate (refine) the New. For example, the bishop was characterized as an Old Testament pastor, stressing moral governance, rather than in the role of teacher or prophet. Although the past was not left behind, the New came to transfigure the Old in institutional, behavior, temperament. (Only John of Salisbury introduced a new political analysis based on secular concerns.) The Old Testament provided examples of types to follow; but the types were not completely binding on the present.) Further, personification was used to ascribe value to pagan texts (poets) without straying into heresy.

The 12th century discovered history, initially the history of Christ and the church, but later more general affairs. It was to be learned according to a prescribed method, through chronology, not ideology, theology, or another dialectical process. Abelard made the past concrete and understandable, no longer the stuff of allegory or legend. Universal humanity had been an original feature of Christianity: now it added the universalism of time: ‘history was the narrator of events by which these things done in the past were sorted’. It was agreed the Roman Empire was the last of the ancients; the discovery of the Eastern empires in the 13th century pointed to new epistemological problems. John of Salisbury portended the 13th century’s discovery of Aristotle’s autonomy of nature (while also founding the practice of government administration based on function, not allegorical ‘mansion of princes’ from the Bible). Platonic influences (the ideas) tended to minimize events. Again pace John of Salisbury, for the first time secular events were to be evaluated for their own value. The discovery of history worked to strengthen what Chenu frequently calls the ‘economy of salvation’, the powerful role of Christianity in everyday life, as theologians became aware that not all events fit into allegory, symbolism, or church history. ‘Charlemagne was not Constantine’: they became aware of Western society, distinct from the Byzantine empire or Islam. Christendom became aware of its trajectory.

In the 12th century, Christians sought to return to apostolic life as compared to monkish work: the return to evangelism as a source of authenticity. The monasteries were by now responsible for tithing, hospitals, food distribution, travelers’ aid plus administration (such as tax collection). This was inconsistent with evangelism. Its procedures were endowed with sacred functions, but the glamor of ceremony undermined the vow of the mendicant. The monastery was the realization of St. Augustine’s city of God, but sacrificed elements of Christianity’s rejecting the world: it was a theocracy. At the same time, the cloister omitted the confrontation with the world that apostolic life demanded. Whereas the monastic view was Manichean (symbolism or allegorical), the evangelical outlook encouraged the discovery of laws of nature, application of reason, and so on as ‘real world’, as practical illustration of God’s design. The evangelical life encouraged proliferation of the force of worship. Christian life was no longer solely penitential and withdrawn. The rise of towns and the proliferation of non-feudal forms also acted to undermine monastic prestige. Evangelicals naturally found a home in secular institutions, for the gospel requires preaching to a new audience. It was to justify its existence and its truth that the church planted itself in the world. The 12th-century return to gospel guaranteed Christian presence in the world and guaranteed it would be of the world, evidence of Christianity’s ability to adapt. When Aquinas later defined transcendence of grace by invoking Aristotelian nature, he illustrated theological appreciation for nature, apostolic appreciation of man, and humanity’s appreciation of the church.

Lay apostles of the mendicant orders developed among the marginal townspeople of the new urban centers. Unlike monks and prelates, the mendicants were at home with the working poor. This dynamic led to translations of the Bible into vernacular, and also expanded monastic interpretations into apostolic views of scripture. The mendicants were the founders of the universities. This Biblical theology connected the literal and the spiritual in ways the monks of allegory and symbolic idealism had not. The master of the school had three values: to explicate, to dispute (to the resolution of questions), and to preach. The mendicants also developed a ‘scientific understanding’ of scripture by direct study of texts of the Bible.

The popes struggled to bring the mendicants under effective authority of the church, since the mendicants were developing their own rules of order based on theology. Pope Alexander III and Innocent III developed pronounced cultural views of elements of Christendom: ethnic, cultural, and political. But the state jurists were desacralizing the rulers – authority needn’t lie in the church. The mendicants were more at home than the conventional orders with the duality of church-state relations. Again, the model of Constantine was replaced by Charlemagne.

The 12th century saw the rise of the distinction between the cloistered theologian and the scholar (often, to be sure, the scholar of theology). Key steps in the professionalization of theology included faith fashioned into science (i.e., reason used to order faith, or pointed up that which requires faith). Traditional expressions took on an intellectual character. The question required that each competing alternate must have valid arguments. This pointed to independence from texts. Problems and solutions independent of text pointed to the summa. The scholastic quaestiones were different from Socratic interrogation or Platonic reduction and later Cartesian doubt and Hegelian dialectic. But there was no such unity (i.e., completeness) in canon law. The transition from monastic to scholastic theology marked a new intellectual age. The world of monks was a symbolic cosmos; especially post Aristotle (i.e., the discovery of nature), the scholastic world encompassed studies featuring rationally developed views of man and nature. Anselm and Abelard were the fathers of scholasticism.

In sum, the Christian faith and the church of the 12th century provided different currents within monastic, scholastic, canonical, and apostolic milieu. The autonomy of man and nature did not shatter the Christian world; Scripture remained primes inter pares. The balance of tradition and progress, of doctrinal and institutional development, was exemplified by the Fourth Lateran Council. The integrity of Christian faith was not jeopardized by the rationalized basis of theology, the new influence of the apostolic, or changing social mores. The foundations were laid for the great scholastic systems of the 13th century.

2. Beard, SPQR (10 Feb 2019)

by kurto

Sketches the political and sociocultural history of Rome from its putative foundation in 753 BC to 212 AD, when the granting of citizenship to all of empire’s residents changed the empire’s character. This resolution to the question of basic civic rights, a continuing issue since the state’s acquisitive nature engendered cultural ferment, was more important than the doings of the Julio-Claudian dynasts (the ‘biographic tradition’ of historiography). Over the fifth and fourth centuries BC, the Conflict of Orders gradually more or less replaced rule by wealth (i.e., generally by birth) with merit, the highlight being the establishment of the Twelve Tables law code in 451-450. The effect was to establish ambition and competition at the heart of the social order; political reform was typically radical action (e.g., distributing land, offering subsidized wheat) justified as a return to past practice. Meanwhile, Rome’s expansion was built on willingness to incorporate defeated enemies into its army and society, and to manumit slaves, both unlike any other ancient society. Despite the primary political traditions of libertas and republican governance, the logic of the empire created the emperors: the scale of responsibility (e.g., territory, resources, population) could not be managed by a deliberative senate. Augustus, though inscrutable, created the dynasty’s template, but failed to solve the problem of succession. (Meanwhile the senate lapsed into a legislative body.) Making use of archaeology, Beard undertakes lengthy excursions into common life, sometimes betraying Whiggish assumptions, much as she earlier discusses the city’s founding traditions. In the Julio-Claudian era, there were few attempts to impose social controls. Local elites cooperated, doing Rome’s work by adopting its culture even as they retained local traditions. Christianity was the one religion which could not be adopted (suborned) by the empire. In conclusion, Beard holds that Rome’s treatment of basic matters of political philosophy, for example in the conflict between Cataline the radical demagogue and Cicero the traditionalist, remain fundamental to contemporary Western society. But her heart really lies in the sociology of a pre-modern empire and perhaps too its applicability to the 21st century.

3. Hamilton, Roman Way (17 Feb 2019)

by kurto

Literature is the best way to understand ancient Rome: its writers reveal the people’s spirit and values. The Roman way was close to modern Romanticism, premised on sentiment, and its leading lights illustrate simple but grand ideals, in contrast to the austere classicism of the ancient Greeks. The first evidence of Roman-ness is the comedy of Plautus and Terence, who preceded modern Westerns, for example in the division of roles between male and female; Aristophanes and Menander left no imprint. The poets Catullus, passionate and forlorn, and Horace, dispassionate and effete, also establish modern tropes. Later authors — Livy, Virgil, Seneca, Juvenal – are romantic, reacting in part to the ugliness of the empire’s corruption and the city’s sprawl. (Cicero’s letters evince the quotidian affairs of the elite.) Stoicism was a second-rate Greek philosophy turned precept for religious action (of a sort) and seedbed of Christianity. While the Greeks stood for harmony and moderation, Romans preferred discipline and absolutes. Its citizens perpetually sought to return to bygone days of the individual initiative sufficient for military conquer or settlement. The ethical complications of administering an empire were, paradoxically, more the bailiwick of their predecessors.

5. Barraclough, Crucible of Europe (18 Apr 2019)

by kurto

Narrates the emergence of dynastic (neo-nation state) and church institutions in France, Italy, and Germany during the 9th and 10th centuries, contrasting the post-Carolingian order with Anglo-Saxon England. Several persevered into the pre-modern era and later. With the fall of Italy to the Lombards and Spain to Islamists, the center of a truncated Europe had moved north. The lasting importance of the Carolingian Franks lies in the spread of government and civil administration through the northern lands including Poland and Bohemia. In this era the allied Catholic Church became a force to be reckoned with (rather than merely the hallmark of a religious society). Carolingian learning, notably the copying of manuscripts but also innovative epistemology, set down the height of erudition and specifically the legacy of the Latins until the 12th century. The settlement of 812 crowned Charlemagne as a western emperor, fusing two kingdoms in his own right and separating them from the Byzantine lands. But Frankish rule was built on conquest and had already begun to sputter; relying on feudal vassals and missi dominici was too much for contemporary government especially in Lombardy, Bavaria, neo Hungary, and Saxony – even though later peoples would look back upon it as an idealized unity when forging their new state forms. The Danish, Saracen, and Magyar invasions acted as a solvent on the Carolingian state, which was partitioned under Louis, whose legacy is the establishment of the new nation-states as well as primogeniture. In this time, Nicholas I built up the independent role of the papacy.

The raids brought depopulation, agricultural decline, and people seeking protection from local strongmen. They hit hardest in France, hastening retreat to the country castle. Here the tendency to revert to pre-Carolingian traditions was most pronounced, here the author contends we most see the Carolingian breakup did not produce separate countries, but rather they were borne of different regional responses to anarchy. In France, it took more than two centuries for territorial and social restoration of order. Contra Wickham, there was no ‘caging of the peasant’: people willfully surrendered freedom from security from Viking raids. The criterion of nobility was ability to bear arms, not birthright. Vassalage lost stigma of servitude, gaining an ethos of common service and serving to demarcate the political classes. The ca 850 edicts of Charles the Bald required men to choose their lord, sanctioned the vassal’s oath, and sanctioned hereditary succession to the local fief. Thus the country would emerge into medieval feudalism, with 55 counties, up from 27 at the start of the 10th century. But the French rulers’ continued concession of lands to win the support of nobles all but bankrupt the Carolingian and Capetians: the monarchy did not regain really independent strength until 1100. Again the author contends feudalism did not produce anarchy but was an organic reaction. Its principles spread throughout Europe via the Spanish Reconquista, the Norman invasion of England, adoption in Germany and eastward; and would remain the basis of order down to 1789.

The history of post-Carolingian Italy is the struggle for control of the Lombard plain among two Frankish families, from Spoleto and Friuli, and one from Lucca.  As the raids in Italy were piratical, the towns continued to develop, under the tutelage of bishops; the role of counties weakened. Order was restored comparatively earlier, by the German Otto I in 961-62.

The Germans were the first to recover from anarchy, being less impacted by the raids and more inclined to retain elements of Carolingian government including a loyal aristocracy. Henry I prevented the breakup of eastern Frankish lands, his successor Otto I sought not to break the dukes but reasserted control over the royal demenses and the church in the duchies, so as to ally the church with the crown. Vassalage remained an onerous condition, marking another contrast with France. Otto’s crowning by the pope in 962 marked a turning point in progression to dynastic order in German lands under the Saxon dynasty, but its middle-term decline was germinated by its retroactive character.

England did not dissolve by result the Viking raids, as in France, but produced a more coherent, forward-looking response then the Germans: local government via the hundreds and the shires and a single monarchy from several pre-raid kingdoms. Alfred reorganized the military even while on the defensive, forging a mobile, unified force (i.e., not a local levy), a network of forts (burhs), and a navy for forward response. The forts became the basis of civil authority, as in Lombardy, France and to a lesser degree Germany; the hundreds extended the forts in promoting social order (e.g., responses to crime). By assuming responsibility for peace, the monarchy created a machinery for order where none had existed; this was extended beyond the Norman conquest.

The reestablishment of settled government broadened agriculture (notably in Italy), economic exchange, and indeed the purview of civilized northern Europe, most recently centered on Charlemagne’s Aachen but now more dispersed among Hungary and England. Monastic reform, another response to anarchy, also served to extend social order and played a related role in breaking down regional differences; but the church loosed sociopolitical forces which were to challenge the Saxon monarchy in the mid-11th century. Aristocratic hostility to Salian (successor to Saxon) reforms undermined royal authority. After a half century of struggle, a new order in central Europe emerged in 1122.

19. Caldwell, Age of Entitlement (1 October 2021)

by kurto

Contemporary incivility demonstrates a hidden civil war between adherents to the de jure constitution of 1789 and woke proponents of the de facto regime which has grown up since 1964. The latter has captured the establishment and is winning.

Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) undermined the First Amendment’s freedom of association; Griggs vs. Duke Power (1971) next authorized government to address racism where there was no obvious intent; Bakke vs. Univ. of California (1978) sanctioned aspirational ‘remedies’ for hidden racism (i.e., diversity). Extralegally, rioting was part and parcel of the civil rights movement from the late 1960s, while feminism held lieutenancy of the aggrieved cohorts, now led by the homosexual lobby.

Postwar government and society had modeled itself on the military, but the Vietnam War’s unpopularity shifted credibility to the Baby Boomers, also buoyed by demography. Reagan arranged a truce between the new left and Americans unwilling to finance the Great Society via taxation, by converting its basis to debt, thereby handing away the fruits of the 1970s counterinsurgency. But social peace frayed anyway as entitlements grew. Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall, which had acted to preserve capital in local banks, transferred debt financing to the credit markets, ushering government regulation (e.g., Community Reinvestment Act, ESG measures) into the marketplace.

Under the shadow constitution, postmodernism and fellow travelers in the media delegitimize tradition and political institutions; woke institutions champion new orthodoxies on behalf of subversive-cum-favored minorities; and working-class whites see New Deal / union economic benefits reallocated. Once-Republican plutocrats have recast their (inevitably) minority status as one sympathetic to the civil rights protagonists, embracing lobbying via foundations to thwart democratic majorities – a phenomenon which FDR resisted for the very reason. (Caldwell describes he subset of Internet titans as oligarchs of digital natives who cannot opt out.) The Tea Party and Trump reject this arrangement.

Speaking of the Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxembourg observed revolutionary tactics are the way to democratic majorities, not democratic majorities the conduit to revolution. The civil rights partisans supplant popular sovereignty with mandate: ‘biases’ are held to be unconscious, and so government is justified in overriding them. (At the time of Brown, Strauss was among those who observed liberal society ought to condone ‘discrimination’.) Caldwell raises the possibility that the American experiment with democratic self-government has already ended.

Compelling but occasionally careless of fact (e.g., 1986 immigration pact, pace Vin Cannato). A very good first draft of the progressive influence on political thought and government circa 1960-2020.