Tag: history (page 1 of 3)

April 8, 2026

the rest is …

As regular readers of mine know, I have long been a big fan of The Rest Is History podcast: I joined the Club as a Friend of the Show within weeks of its inception. But in the last year or so the show has, or so it seems to me anyway, been declining in quality. Earlier episodes were typically informed either by the hosts’ own expertise or by their thoughtful assessment of the work of excellent historians. Lately, though, I’ve sometimes felt that I am listening to Dominic and Tom working their way through notes prepared by ChatGPT on the basis of Wikipedia pages — sometimes, not always, but often enough that I find myself not finishing series, something that would have been unthinkable for me, say, two years ago. But there’s just not sufficient value-added in such episodes.

I also have a sense that when they’re less intellectually engaged with the material, both hosts lean into the parts they play, Tom doing his (I hope intentionally) terrible accents, Dominic performing his crusty semi-posh scoffer from the era of Stanley Baldwin.

That kind of thing comes and goes, but what has come to stay, I fear, is a kind of compulsive mocking of anything and everything American. Perhaps this is the result of frustration with the current U.S. government that can’t be directly expressed — “We’re not a politics podcast,” as Dominic often says — but that is difficult to suppress. Such frustration is understandable, and if T & D did occasionally shout with anger at the latest imbecility emerging from the White House I would not only forgive them, I would cheer them on. But that doesn’t happen.

What does happen is a low-level but constant sniping and sneering at virtually every element of American culture. For instance: recently, in a series of episodes on the Ku Klux Klan, Tom decided that the Southern accent he wanted to imitate, in reading Klan speeches or newspaper editorials, was that of Cletus from The Simpsons, AKA Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. A more pompous diction would’ve been more appropriate, but Tom wasn’t interested in reinforcing the point that these people were evil (which they were); instead he wanted to indicate that they were stupid (which, alas, they were not). I’m a Southerner, I’m used to this sort of attitude — it’s almost universal among non-Southerners, and especially common among Brits — but when it goes on and on and on, it gets wearisome.

I could cite a number of examples along these lines, all from episodes on U.S. history, of which there are many; and those might have worn me down eventually. But what has really alienated me from the show is the way such sneers make their way into episodes that have nothing to do with the United States. The breaking point came for me just a few days ago, when I was listening to the first episode of a series on Samurai culture in Japan. A passing reference to a group of Samurai visiting San Francisco prompted, for reasons unknown and indeed unimaginable to me, a digression on how terrible cheese is in America. Yes, that is correct: a seething hatred of my country’s cheeses found its way into a story about Samurai.*

When I heard that I recalled several other examples — though none quite as absurd — of sniggering at things American in episodes unconnected to this country. And it occurred to me that such commentary, while it is probably delightful to many listeners, is a kind of toll that I have to pay to keep up with The Rest Is History. If the show were as consistently good as it used to be I might — maybe — pay that toll, but it’s not. So I canceled my membership and deleted the show from my podcast feed.

* In this they did what cultural chauvinists always do: treat the best form of X in their culture as their standard and the worst form of X in another culture as that culture’s standard. Thus what their culture does is always, amazingly, better than what any other culture does.

December 10, 2025

two quotations on historicizing

What If Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do? – The Atlantic:

But as a historian trying to comprehend feelings, [Rob] Boddice can’t stand those cute Inside Out characters. Because not only do we imagine other people to have the exact same set of emotions that we have, but we project this thought backwards through time. Love for us can’t be that different from what it meant to Heloise and Abelard writing letters to each other in the 12th century. The laborers who hauled stones to build the pyramids in Giza felt anger that is our anger. We perform this projection on any number of human experiences: losing a child, falling ill, being bored at work. We assume that emotions in the past are accessible because we assume that at their core, people in the past were just like us, with slight tweaks for their choice of hats and standards of personal hygiene.

Boddice starts with the opposite premise, that we are not the same — that the experience of being human in another era, with all of its component feelings and perceptions, even including something as elemental as pain, is so foreign to us as to live inside a kind of sealed vault. “There is nothing about my humanness that affords me insight into humanity,” Boddice has said.

Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love, at a moment when A. E. Housman as an old, in fact a dead, man (AEH) is meeting his 20-year-old self (Housman):

AEH There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don’t like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical with ours.

Housman But it is, isn’t it? We catch our breath at the places where the breath was always caught. The poet writes to his mistress how she’s killed his love — ‘fallen like a flower at the field’s edge where the plough touched it and passed on by’. He answers a friend’s letter — ‘so you won’t think your letter got forgotten like a lover’s apple forgotten in a good girl’s lap till she jumps up for her mother and spills it to the floor blushing crimson over her sorry face’. Two thousand years in the tick of a clock — oh, forgive me, I …

AEH No (need), we’re never too old to learn.

Gal Beckerman, the author of the Atlantic article on Boddice, treats his claims as revolutionary new ones. In fact, they were the reigning orthodoxy when I was in graduate school forty years ago. We were all reading Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, with its instantly famous opening sentence: “Always historicize!” We got busy historicizing the crap out of everything, and were duly scornful of the very idea that one should — or even, if one’s mind was properly formed, could — be moved by the works of ancient and medieval literature that we read, as though those people were “like us.” Such thoughts were deemed ahistorical.

(People who had read Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind — I knew quite a few — had further means of historicizing. That was a niche view, but interesting; maybe a topic for a future post.)

Only gradually did it occur to me to ask why, if the past is an utterly foreign country, we laugh at the places in Shakespeare that were obviously meant to be funny, and cry when the characters on stage were crying — even yes, even cry when reading something as ancient as the Iliad, for instance when Hector tells his beloved wife Andromache that what grieves him the most about this terrible war is the certainty that someday he, being dead, will be unable to rescue her from enslavement.

Absolute historicizing cannot survive the experience of reading. Lament that if you wish.

Boddice’s view that the past can teach me nothing about my humanity is of course ruled out for me by my Christianity, but it’s worth noting that it is equally ruled out by evolutionary accounts of human experience ands behavior.

One more thing. Beckerman writes,

The universalism that Boddice mistrusts is a relatively new concept in human history. It comes to us from the Enlightenment. The presumption that all people share a common nature was dreamed up by European intellectuals sitting in their salons.

This is nonsense on stilts. It is a character in a play by the Roman dramatist Terrence who says Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. The ancient Israelites believed that “man” (adam) was created in the image of God, and the apostle Paul says that “all” — which is to say, all human beings: he’s not talking about pigs and lice — “have sinned and fallen short off the glory of God.” Later, Christian theologians in particular, working from Genesis 10, would argue that the three sons of Noah populated different regions of the world: Shem in Asia, Ham in Africa, Japhet in Europe. These understandings of humanity — these modes of humanism — underline the emergence of the individual person as the subject of laws and the bearer of rights, as Larry Siedentop has patiently and thoroughly demonstrated.

(This is not, of course, to say that the concept of the human is always and everywhere precisely the same, and it is certainly not to say that claims of universal humanity led to the acknowledgment of universal equality. They did not. For much more on these fascinating matters, see Jonathan Z. Smith’s 1996 essay, “Nothing Human Is Alien to Me.”)

Moreover, if the passage of time so radically distinguishes us from other members of our species, does not space do the same? Maybe we have nothing in common with people from other cultures either. Slaveowners in the antebellum South told themselves that it was acceptable to separate slaves’ children from their parents because “they” — the children of Ham — don’t feel it as “we” — the children of Japhet — do. The mistrust of universalism always has a demonic side, and many of the Extremely Online, on the left and right alike, are making careers out of the rejection of universalism. We don’t need any more manufactured Otherness. There’s already plenty to go around.

By all means historicize, but strive also to know the limits of historicizing. You’re never too old to learn.

September 12, 2025

chaplains in the fire

The starting point for my friend Tim Larsen’s new book The Fires of Moloch is another book, one published in 1917 and often reprinted over the next few years. The Church in the Furnace is a collection of essays by Anglican clergymen who served in the Great War as military chaplains. The chaplains were sometimes thought to be of a modernizing or liberalizing tendency because they were so straightforward about the horrors of the war — and what they believed to be the church’s unpreparedness to minister to people who had been through such horrors, or even those who merely observed them from a distance. It a collective cry for the Church of England to take steps, however dramatic, to prepare itself to minister to a world very different than that which their Victorian ancestors had known.

The brilliant idea that Tim had was to look at the stories of each of the seventeen contributors to The Church in the Furnace. Throughout his career Tim has written books that provide brief biographies of a series of related figures and then show how these figures are related to one another, whether personally, intellectually, or culturally. For instance, his book The Slain God concerns a series of anthropologists and their encounters with Christianity. When imagining Tim’s books, think Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, with a good deal of the humor but without the cynicism and the camp. This group of chaplains is particularly well suited for this kind of treatment, because if you look at their experiences you’ll see that they were uniformly appalled by the war into which they were thrown, and agreed that the Church of England was not prepared to meet the challenges of the war — but they had very different senses of what the key problems were.

It seems to be believed in some circles that these were Anglo-Catholic clergymen, but as Tim points out at the beginning of his account, only some of them were. They really covered the whole spectrum of the Church of England — high church, low church, and broad church — and while some embraced modernist revisions to traditional Christian theology, others were conventionally creedal in their thinking. They also had widely varying ideas about what the primary emphasis of the church should be as it strove to meet the challenges of a bloody twentieth century.

Tim does an exceptional job of contextualizing The Church in the Furnace, first by showing who these chaplains were when they entered the war: what they brought to their work as chaplains, what experiences, what history, what theological formation, what pastoral philosophies. You can see the wide variety of ways in which they were not (as indeed they could not have been) prepared for what they had to face. But then, having shown that, Tim goes on to show how deeply and permanently they were, without exception, marked by their experience as military chaplains. For the rest of their lives — and in some cases those lives were quite long — they continued to think of Christianity and Christian ministry in ways that shaped by their experience in war. For instance, almost all of them became inclined at one time or another to conceive of the Christian life in military terms. This imagery, of course, is is present in the New Testament, though present among many other metaphors; but it becomes central for most of these chaplains. Some of them speak of Christ as “our great captain” who has recruited us into his army, has made us his soldiers. This image becomes the default model of the Christian life for several of these clergymen, and a significant part of the rhetorical and theological equipment for all of them.

Finally, one other noteworthy theme emerges. There’s a general sense that war has the effect of alienating people from their religion. But in fact, what was seen in the Great War was a dramatic increase in prayer, both individual and public. One of the most consistent messages of these clergymen was that they found that, other than the Lord’s Prayer, which most of the soldiers knew, they really didn’t have any idea how to pray, never having been instructed in prayer. And if there was one thing that all of these clergymen agreed on, it was that the church desperately needed to to teach people how to pray. And I suspect that is a message that is as relevant now as it was then, if not more so.

August 11, 2025

the truth in view

One of the finest poems by the great Richard Wilbur is called “Lying.” Says Wilbur: When we make things up, when we claim to have seen a grackle (or some more numinous creature) when we didn’t really, this is a displaced “wish … to make or do.” But when we lie in this way we misunderstand our situation — misunderstand ourselves and our world:

In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light:
Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment
Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural law
Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof,
Then grass and grackles or, at the end of town
In sheen-swept pastureland, the horse’s neck
Clothed with its usual thunder, and the stones
Beginning now to tug their shadows in
And track the air with glitter. All these things
Are there before us; there before we look
Or fail to look; there to be seen or not
By us, as by the bee’s twelve thousand eyes,
According to our means and purposes.

(Job 39:19, the LORD to Job: “Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?”) The key phrase is “All these things / Are there before us.” We must simply discover the will and the wisdom to recognize what is already present to us. “The arch-negator” — that is, Satan — manages only briefly and imperfectly to obscure the radiance of the world: In Eden he was but

… darkening with moody self-absorption
What, when he left it, lifted and, if seen
From the sun’s vantage, seethed with vaulting hues.

Here we might remember one of Wilbur’s earlier masterpieces, “The Undead,” in which he counsels us to recognize the condition of vampires: “Their pain is real, and requires our pity.” Because all they can do is “prey on life forever and not possess it, / As rock-hollows, tide after tide, / Glassily strand the sea.”

Wilbur says that have this desire to make or do, and in our “moody self-absorption” sate it with lies, when we could find what we seek if we look — really look.

Closer to making than the deftest fraud
Is seeing how the catbird’s tail was made
To counterpoise, on the mock-orange spray,
Its light, up-tilted spine; or, lighter still,
How the shucked tunic of an onion, brushed
To one side on a backlit chopping-board
And rocked by trifling currents, prints and prints
Its bright, ribbed shadow like a flapping sail.

Here let me direct you to the second chapter of Robert Farrar Capon’s wonderful book The Supper of the Lamb, in which he teaches you how to look at an onion. But back to Wilbur.

Simply making a simile is a way of seeing — or perhaps the making of a simile is a natural product of seeing. And even the the smallest simile, Wilbur says, is “tributary / To the great lies told with the eyes half-shut / That have the truth in view.” I love that phrase, that way of describing our artful tales and tropes. It’s worthy of being placed alongside Sidney’s Defence of Poesy.

Our eyes are half-shut because we’re partly viewing the world and partly retreating within ourselves to find an a response to what we have already seen — to find what the poet Donald Davie called “articulate energy” — syntax adequate to the thing. Wilbur’s offers three examples of such great lie, and the third is this:

That matter of a baggage-train surprised
By a few Gascons in the Pyrenees
Which, having worked three centuries and more
In the dark caves of France, poured out at last
The blood of Roland, who to Charles his king
And to the dove that hatched the dove-tailed world
Was faithful unto death, and shamed the Devil.

(Re; shaming the devil: this is an old proverb, most famously used in Henry IV, Part I by Hotspur to Owen Glendower, who has been boasting of his power over sprits: “O, while you live, tell truth and shame the devil!”)

Wilbur is talking about The Song of Roland of course, and these words, coming at the end of the poem, tell us of two ways of shaming the devil: to be “faithful unto death” in one’s deeds and in one’s words.

That is my Thought for Today, but I want to add a postscript. For my biography of Dorothy L. Sayers, I have been reading her translation of The Song of Roland — the last work she completed in her life. She begins her long and remarkably helpful introduction to the poem by describing, quite flatly, a minor skirmish in the year 778, an ambush of the rear-guard of one of Charlemagne’s armies in the Pyrenees in which a few people were killed. A chronicler writing in 830 named some of them; another chronicler ten years later mentioned the skirmish but did not name the dead, since, he said, they had already been named.

So goes Sayers’s first paragraph. And when you read the second one you’ll see where Wilbur got his inspiration for the conclusion of his poem:

After this, the tale of Roncevaux appears to go underground for some two hundred years. When it again comes to the surface, it has undergone a transformation which might astonish us if we had not seen much the same thing happen to the tale of the wars of King Arthur. The magic of legend has been at work, and the small historic event has swollen to a vast epic of heroic proportions and strong idealogical significance. Charlemagne, who was 38 at the time of his expedition into Spain, has become a great hieratic figure, 200 years old, the snowy-bearded king, the sacred Emperor, the Champion of Christendom against the Saracens, the war-lord whose conquests extend throughout the civilised world. The expedition itself has become a major episode in the great conflict between Cross and Crescent, and the marauding Basques have been changed and magnified into an enormous army of many thousand Saracens. The names of Eggihardt and Anselm have disappeared from the rear-guard; Roland remains; he is now the Emperor’s nephew, the “right hand of his body”, the greatest warrior in the world, possessed of supernatural strength and powers and hero of innumerable marvellous exploits; and he is accompanied by his close companion Oliver, and by the other Ten Peers, a chosen band of superlatively valorous knights, the flower of French chivalry. The ambuscade which delivers them up to massacre is still the result of treachery on the Frankish side; but it now derives from a deep-laid plot between the Saracen king Marsilion and Count Ganelon, a noble of France, Roland’s own stepfather; and the whole object of the conspiracy is the destruction of Roland himself and the Peers. The establishment of this conspiracy is explained by Ganelon’s furious jealousy of his stepson, worked out with a sense of drama, a sense of character, and a psychological plausibility which, in its own kind, may sustain a comparison with the twisted malignancy of Iago. In short, beginning with a historical military disaster of a familiar kind and comparatively small importance, we have somehow in the course of two centuries achieved a masterpiece of epic drama – we have arrived at the Song of Roland.

That is, a “small historic event” has been magically transformed into one of “the great lies … that have the truth in view.” The idea of a simple story going “underground,” deep into the unconscious lives of a people, and then emerging as something altogether other and more resonant is the image that Wilbur, with his poet’s alertness, picks up from Sayers.

July 28, 2025

Flanagan’s Ireland

Thomas Flanagan wrote three novels about Ireland, so it is inevitably said that he wrote a trilogy, but that is misleading. It’s better to think of the books as (a) an elaborate extended prologue followed by (b) an enormous diptych. It’s best to think of the books this way because it’s best to think of the history of Irish rebellions this way.

The Year of the French (1979) narrates the unsuccessful Irish rebellion of 1798 through the eyes of several characters, most notable among them a poet named Owen Ruagh MacCarthy. After this fiasco, it was many decades before the idea of outright revolt took strong hold once more in Ireland.

The Tenants of Time (1988), the longest of the three novels, also shows us history through the eyes of a few persons, mainly residents of an imaginary West Cork market town called Kilpeder, who participated in the Fenian rising of 1867. A young aspiring historian named Patrick Prentiss — a Dubliner, Oxford-educated — tries to understand what happened in that uprising, and his enquiries lead him from that moment right through to the rise and fall of Parnell and then, a year after Parnell’s death, to a murder in Kilpeder, a strictly local tragedy.

The End of the Hunt (1993) returns us to Patrick Prentiss, whose inability to discover what had really happened in Kilpeder caused him to give up history in favor of his father’s profession, the law. Though an Irish nationalist, he fought for Great Britain in the Great War and lost an arm doing so. He returns to a Dublin that is, as Yeats famously wrote, “changed, changed utterly.” This story covers — with flashbacks to the Easter Rising and a kind of epilogue set in 1934 — the period from 1919 to 1923, that is, the War of Independence and the Civil War.

I call all this a prologue followed by a diptych because no characters from the first book appear in either of the latter two — though Owen MacCarthy is briefly mentioned in The Tenants of Time — while the second and third books are connected by the figure of Patrick Prentiss and the town of Kilpeder. We’re regularly encouraged to remember that the events of 1922 continue, in a condensed and accelerated way, the key events from 1867 to 1893.

All three books are currently published in the U.S. by New York Review Books, but the second and third in electronic form only, which is unfortunate. (And more unfortunate because the electronic version of The Tenants of Time has hundreds of errors: it was clearly scanned and then inattentively corrected.) I’d love to have these wonderful books in a uniform edition, but, as you can see from the photo above, I don’t. In the editions I have the first is 516 pages, the second 824 pages, and the third 627 pages — though because The Year of the French is set in much smaller type than The End of the Hunt, I believe the two books are roughly equal in length. In any event, they’re all very much worth reading and re-reading. I’ve just been through the whole series for the first time in a good many years, and I expect to read them again before my reading days are done.

The major characters of the novels are fictional, though real persons play significant roles in each of the novels: General Jean Humbert and Wolfe Tone in the first novel, Parnell in the second, Michael Collins and Winston Churchill in the third.

The Tenants of Time — like Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, a book Flanagan greatly admired — is set in motion by a young man trying and largely failing to grasp the character of past events; and at the conclusion of The End of the Hunt we hear of another young man who hopes to write a book about the Civil War. So it goes, generation by generation, and Flanagan has considerable sympathy both for youthful enquiry and the resignations of age — resignation to incomprehension, to the mysteries that even those we know best hold for us. Often in Flanagan’s books an older person learns (sometimes from a younger person) something surprising about a dear friend or lover — something hidden and even unsuspected for decades. And if some people grow garrulous in old age, others become more secretive and never tell what could be told. No one knows — this is what Patrick Prentiss learns, this is what turns him from history to the law — no one knows the whole story of an event, or even of one ordinary person.

In 1934 the distinguished judge Patrick Prentiss is listening to an old friend talk about another old friend, one long dead, and as she mentions a dark moment in that man’s life she says, in passing, “You know all about it, Patrick.” But Patrick does not know about it, though, when he hears it, he thinks that he should have guessed. More than a decade after than friend’s death, Patrick’s mental portrait of him undergoes revision. And if he did not know that, what else does he not know? About that friend, about other friends, even about himself?

For some, of course, the appeal of history is to unearth secrets, however carefully hidden — perhaps not to know everything, but to know more and more, even at the cost of digging up old bones (metaphorically and sometimes literally). And for still others, the appeal of fiction is to imagine all that the historian will never discover. This is perhaps why Flanagan wrote novels.

Seamus Heaney, who became friends with the Flanagans when he came to Berkeley — where Flanagan then taught — in 1970, wrote many years later,

I [fell] under the spell of Tom’s strong Hibernocentric mind and imagination. It’s no exaggeration to say that he reoriented my thinking. When I landed in California I was somebody who knew a certain amount of Irish literature and history, but my head was still basically wired up to Eng. Lit. terminals. I was still a creature of my undergraduate degree at Queen’s University, Belfast. When I left, thanks mostly to Tom’s brilliantly sardonic conversation, I was in the process of establishing new coordinates and had a far more conscious, far more charged-up sense of Yeats and Joyce, for example, and of their whole Irish consequence. I was starting to see my situation as a “Northern poet” more in relation to the wound and the work of Ireland as a whole, and for that I shall be ever in his debt.

And I love this portion of the reflection of Flanagan Heaney wrote for the New York Review of Books: “When The Irish Times called him a scholar, they could well have been using the word in the older Irish vernacular sense, meaning somebody not only learned but ringed around with a certain draoicht, or aura, of distinction, at once a man of the people and a solitary spirit, a little separate but much beloved.”

(See also this lovely remembrance, largely of Heaney but also of her father, by Thomas Flanagan’s daughter Caitlin.)

Heaney and Flanagan had something important in common, in addition to their literary interests: Heaney was a Catholic from Ulster, and so too were Flanagan’s forebears. That meant, until quite recently, that their people were in the minority. Complications upon complications; “the wound and the work of Ireland” indeed.

Flanagan — and in this too he is like Faulkner — communicates his sense of an ever-ramifying and ever-elusive historical truth through multiple narrators. It is interesting to note how many readers of Flanagan’s novels think they know which characters he most sympathizes with, which ones he agrees with — interesting because Flanagan himself claimed not to be so sure. In an interview given soon after the publication of The End of the Hunt we get this exchange:

Q. Would you say that your novels are informed by any particular position in the ideological debate on Irish nationalism?

A. I think that in a way I have been cravenly avoiding positions, or my position is spread across the board. I think that one reason why I began with the idea of a variety of narrators is that, obviously, there are a variety of positions to be argued out and presented. I think, to borrow a word from historians, I am more interested in “mentality” than I am in political positions. Employing multiple narrators certainly helped a lot with The Year of the French. And it helped with The Tenants of Time. Now I have become suspicious of the convention because it is a convenient convention, because you have as many perspectives as you have narrators, which means amongst say four or five or six narrators. But in fact in the circumstances of Irish social history, any kind of social history of any nationality, you would need forty or fifty narrators instead of four or five narrators.

That duly noted, all of Flanagan’s major characters are Irish nationalists or closely associated with nationalists; none is a British loyalist. So the political positions that these novels explore from the inside are, basically, the Patient Gradualist and the Urgent Revolutionary, which are, not incidentally I’m sure, the two sides of the Irish Civil War.

Why did I return to Flanagan’s books? Because they move me. Because they attend equally to the shape of great historical events and the shape of ordinary human lives, and do so in ways that seem truthful to me. Because — being partly Irish and married to someone more Irish still (a Collins whose ancestors are from Cork) — I am interested in Irish history. Because certain recurrent themes in Irish history echo very strongly themes in the history of the American South. Because I am perpetually interested in the theory and practice of political revolution — and of the alternatives to it. So look for more along some or all of these lines in future posts.

July 14, 2025

Constantine and Julian

I mentioned in an earlier post how Constantine’s murders of Crispus and Fausta set a kind of pattern — a pattern that would have certain surprising consequences. Here’s Gibbon:

Constantine himself derived from his royal father the hereditary honors which he transmitted to his children. The emperor had been twice married. Minervina, the obscure but lawful object of his youthful attachment, had left him only one son, who was called Crispus. By Fausta, the daughter of Maximian, he had three daughters, and three sons known by the kindred names of Constantine, Constantius, and Constans. The unambitious brothers of the great Constantine, Julius Constantius, Dalmatius, and Hannibalianus, were permitted to enjoy the most honorable rank, and the most affluent fortune, that could be consistent with a private station. The youngest of the three lived without a name, and died without posterity. His two elder brothers obtained in marriage the daughters of wealthy senators, and propagated new branches of the Imperial race. Gallus and Julian afterwards became the most illustrious of the children of Julius Constantius, the Patrician. The two sons of Dalmatius, who had been decorated with the vain title of Censor, were named Dalmatius and Hannibalianus. The two sisters of the great Constantine, Anastasia and Eutropia, were bestowed on Optatus and Nepotianus, two senators of noble birth and of consular dignity. His third sister, Constantia, was distinguished by her preëminence of greatness and of misery. She remained the widow of the vanquished Licinius; and it was by her entreaties, that an innocent boy, the offspring of their marriage, preserved, for some time, his life, the title of Caesar, and a precarious hope of the succession. Besides the females, and the allies of the Flavian house, ten or twelve males, to whom the language of modern courts would apply the title of princes of the blood, seemed, according to the order of their birth, to be destined either to inherit or to support the throne of Constantine. But in less than thirty years, this numerous and increasing family was reduced to the persons of Constantius and Julian, who alone had survived a series of crimes and calamities, such as the tragic poets have deplored in the devoted lines of Pelops and of Cadmus.

The family tree is pretty complicated — you can take a look at it here. And what makes it more complicated is Constantine’s decision, just before his death in 337, to divide the empire among his three surviving sons, Constantine II, Constans, and Constantius, with a few other relatives having a share as well. (The family naming conventions don’t help.) The person most offended by this spread-the-wealth strategy was Constantine II, who fiercely believed in primogeniture and tried to assert it. He was killed in 340 by soldiers under the command of his brother Constans, who immediately took over Constantine’s lands.

So now we had, roughly speaking, Constans the Caesar ruling the Western half of the empire and Constantius the Caesar ruling the Eastern half. By this point Caesar was a title that meant, or was thought by the Constantines to mean, something like “ruler of a large chunk of the Empire but subservient to the One Emperor, the Augustus.” For the Constantines there might not be at any given moment an Augustus, but there should be, and it should be one of them.

Constans lived until 350, when he was killed by a general named Magnentius, who then (a) proclaimed himself the Caesar of the West and (b) tried to conquer the rest of the Empire. But his campaign against Constantius went badly from the beginning, and when his forces were crushed at the Battle of Mons Seleucus in 353, he took his own life.

Now Constantius was sole Emperor, which was what he had wanted all along — and indeed when he first came to power, in 337, he had systematically slaughtered everyone in his family who might make a claim against him, leaving only two young children, the half-brothers Gallus and Julian. Eventually he made both of them Caesars — but when Gallus began taking on airs (i.e., acting like an Augustus) Constantius had him killed … and that’s how we ended up with the situation Gibbon describes: “this numerous and increasing family was reduced to the persons of Constantius and Julian, who alone had survived a series of crimes and calamities, such as the tragic poets have deplored in the devoted lines of Pelops and of Cadmus.”

But was Julian content to be a mere Caesar and leave the stature of Augustus to Constantius? Of course not. In 360 he rebelled, and wrote in self-justification, “Six of my cousins — his cousins too! — he killed without mercy, along with my father, who was his own uncle, and another uncle of us both on my father’s side, then later my elder brother. He had them all put to death not even bothering with a trial.” Which was true.

That self-justification came in a letter to the people of Athens — an odd choice of recipient, for Athens was, and had been for centuries, a mere backwater of the Empire. But Julian had received an excellent education in classical thought — even though he had also been raised a Christian — and had a special reverence for Athens’s philosophical and literary history. That a Christian family should give their sons a classical education should not be surprising, for it was common. If you want to know the reasons, try reading Basil of Caesarea’s “Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature.”

For Julian, the classical education took; the Christian formation did not. Until he became Augustus, on the sudden and unexpected death of Constantius in 361, he maintained the façade of Christian belief, but then he threw it off and announced himself the defender and celebrant of the ancient Roman gods and the enemy of the “Galileans,” as he derisively called Christians. We do not know when he ceased to believe in the Christian religion, or even if he ever believed in it; but almost everyone who has studied the matter believes that his long and close observation of the world-class hypocrisy of the Constantines, who professed a devout faith in the Prince of Peace and yet ruthlessly slaughtered anyone who threatened their grip on power, played a major role in his hatred of the religion.

Julian is fascinating because he’s genuinely determined to see Christianity eradicated in the empire, but he doesn’t want to be seen as a persecutor. So he pronounces a an edict of universal toleration of all religions, and he often writes that he doesn’t want to see the Christians injured in any way. For instance, he writes to one of his provincial governors, “I swear by the gods I do not want the Galileans killed or unjustly beaten or treated badly in any way. What I desire most insistently is to show preference to those who fear the gods.”

But he does three things that are worth noting here. Philip Freeman, from his excellent brief biography of Julian:

Scarcely a month after Julian had taken the throne and made his rejection of Christianity known, the Alexandrians murdered Bishop George, the leader of the Christian church in one of the most important towns in the Roman world. That he was an Arian and not orthodox meant little to the pagan mob. He was a Christian, and that was enough. George had been an important figure in young Julian’s life during his education in Cappadocia, and his excellent library, made freely available to the prince, had given Julian a matchless window into the rich intellectual tradition of Greek philosophy and literature. The new emperor’s response was not one of outrage at the murder of a prominent Roman citizen but only a mild rebuke to the crowd for taking the law into their own hands. In a letter to the Alexandrians he shamelessly pandered to the pagans of the city by casting George as an enemy to the gods who got what was coming to him: “You say that perhaps George deserved to be treated in such a fashion? I’ll grant that and admit that he deserved even worse and more cruel treatment.”

At this moment Julian’s concern is to preserve the pagan books in George’s library, the library he had delighted in as an adolescent, thanks to George’s generosity. Now he writes about the Christian books in the library, “I wish them to be utterly destroyed. But make sure you do so with the greatest care lest any useful works be destroyed by mistake. Have George’s secretary help you. Let him know that if he is faithful in the task he will get his freedom as a reward. But if he is in any way dishonest in sorting things out, he shall be put to torture.”

So that’s one thing: his complicated disingenuousness about his attitude towards Christians.

The second thing, from Freeman again:

His declaration of religious tolerance also included an amnesty and right of return for all orthodox Christian leaders who had been exiled and marginalized under Constantius, who had favored Arian Christians. This was a clever move on Julian’s part. As the pagan historian Ammianus would say disparagingly a few decades later, the Christians were like wild beasts who fought more viciously with each other than they ever did with pagans. Rather than launch a persecution against Christians as a whole, Julian was deliberately fueling a civil war within the church to encourage the orthodox and the Arians to attack and weaken one another, leaving his own hands clean. Most notable of these pardoned orthodox exiles was Athanasius, the former bishop of Alexandria, who had been replaced by an Arian Christian leader in the city. Julian was eager to see what trouble he would stir up when Athanasius arrived back in Egypt.

Clever! First of all, the rival Christians will kill each other. And in so doing, they will discredit the Gospel. (Tertullian, 150 years earlier: “But it is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us. See, they say, how they love one another, for they themselves are animated by mutual hatred. See, they say about us, how they are ready even to die for one another, for they themselves would sooner kill.” Julian: 😂) Julian knows that he doesn’t have to persecute Christians: the different Christian factions will persecute each other.

The third point about Julian: his own paganism is complicated. There are two distinct elements to it. One of them is completely ignored by Charles Norris Cochrane in his otherwise excellent treatment of Julian, because Cochrane is a historian of ideas, and he wants to talk about their effect: his focus is on Julian as a neo-Platonic philosophical theologian, and that’s not wholly wrong, as we’ll see in a moment. But what Cochrane ignores Gibbon emphasizes: Julian’s love of blood sacrifice and his belief in divination and magical power. The Emperor actually becomes a haruspex:

On solemn festivals, he regularly visited the temple of the god or goddess to whom the day was peculiarly consecrated, and endeavored to excite the religion of the magistrates and people by the example of his own zeal. Instead of maintaining the lofty state of a monarch, distinguished by the splendor of his purple, and encompassed by the golden shields of his guards, Julian solicited, with respectful eagerness, the meanest offices which contributed to the worship of the gods. Amidst the sacred but licentious crowd of priests, of inferior ministers, and of female dancers, who were dedicated to the service of the temple, it was the business of the emperor to bring the wood, to blow the fire, to handle the knife, to slaughter the victim, and, thrusting his bloody hands into the bowels of the expiring animal, to draw forth the heart or liver, and to read, with the consummate skill of an haruspex, imaginary signs of future events. The wisest of the Pagans censured this extravagant superstition, which affected to despise the restraints of prudence and decency. Under the reign of a prince, who practised the rigid maxims of economy, the expense of religious worship consumed a very large portion of the revenue; a constant supply of the scarcest and most beautiful birds was transported from distant climates, to bleed on the altars of the gods; a hundred oxen were frequently sacrificed by Julian on one and the same day; and it soon became a popular jest, that if he should return with conquest from the Persian war, the breed of horned cattle must infallibly be extinguished.

That’s one side of Julian’s paganism. But in theory, as Cochrane shows, he is effectively a monotheist — someone who sees all of the gods as a manifestation of the One God. For him the ideal way to worship as a pagan is to worship the Sun. “From my childhood an extraordinary longing for the shining rays of the god pierced deep into my soul. From my earliest years my mind was so completely overcome by the light that rules the sky that not only did I desire to gaze at the brightness of the sun, but also whenever I walked on a clear and cloudless night I abandoned all else and gave myself up to the beauty of the heavens.” Soon after he became emperor he wrote a hymn to the Sun that he hoped would be the model for his people’s religion.

He didn’t get the chance to pursue this ideal programmatically — he died in battle in his early thirties — but he very much reminds me of Akhenaten, who wanted to replace the variegated polytheism of Egypt with a highly impersonal cult of the sun. Akhenaten and Julian alike were frustrated that they had so little success in weaning their people from a miscellaneous polytheism.

The other figure Julian reminds me of is, paradoxically enough, Constantine. Constantine was happy for pagans to be confused and rivalrous as long as Christians — on whose strength and integrity he staked his empire — were unified. Julian, his mirror-image, sowed chaos among the Christians while fruitlessly pursuing unity among his fellow pagans. Freeman once more:

Julian also believed the best way to defeat the church was to end division among the pagans, much as his uncle Constantine had tried to banish disunity among Christians. The followers of traditional religions had to work together in the true spirit of worshipping and honoring the gods, not squabbling with each other while the Christians happily looked on. The problem was that, like most crusaders throughout history, Julian was convinced that only his own particular religious beliefs were the right ones. But his austere form of Neoplatonism was not a belief system that had wide appeal to the pagan masses. The worship of the traditional gods of Greece and Rome had always taken a multitude of forms and had never been unified. It was not even exclusive. A good pagan might celebrate a solemn sacrifice to Zeus at a city temple in the morning followed by an afternoon visit to a shrine at a local spring and a frenzied festival honoring the goddess Cybele that same evening. The concept of a centralized set of doctrines was completely foreign to paganism. Pagans as such had no defining creeds, no universal priesthoods, and no canonical scriptures in the Christian sense. Julian was not only fighting Christianity but promoting a religion that had never existed. The fact that other pagans could not see the world in the same way he did baffled and frustrated him no end.

The Bible tells us, “Put not your trust in princes.” But maybe what princes need to learn is to put not their trust in the peaceable unity of any religious party.

July 11, 2025

Sayers and Constantine: 6

Our attempts to understand the character of Constantine are befuddled by two mysteries, the first of which is: Constantine had his (second) wife Fausta and his (eldest) son Crispus executed, and we don’t know why. Some have speculated that he caught the two of them having an affair; Gibbon, more plausibly and with more deference to rumors current at the time, believes that Fausta falsely implicated Crispus in a plot against his father in order to clear the way for her own sons — Crispus being the son of Constantine’s first marriage — to inherit the throne. Gibbon:

The innocence of Crispus was so universally acknowledged, that the modern [by which Gibbon usually means “medieval”] Greeks, who adore the memory of their founder, are reduced to palliate the guilt of a parricide, which the common feelings of human nature forbade them to justify. They pretend, that as soon as the afflicted father discovered the falsehood of the accusation by which his credulity had been so fatally misled, he published to the world his repentance and remorse; that he mourned forty days, during which he abstained from the use of the bath, and all the ordinary comforts of life; and that, for the lasting instruction of posterity, he erected a golden statue of Crispus, with this memorable inscription: To my son, whom I unjustly condemned. A tale so moral and so interesting would deserve to be supported by less exceptionable authority; but if we consult the more ancient and authentic writers, they will inform us, that the repentance of Constantine was manifested only in acts of blood and revenge; and that he atoned for the murder of an innocent son, by the execution, perhaps, of a guilty wife. They ascribe the misfortunes of Crispus to the arts of his step-mother Fausta, whose implacable hatred, or whose disappointed love, renewed in the palace of Constantine the ancient tragedy of Hippolytus and of Phaedra.

Sayers in The Emperor Constantine more-or-less endorses this interpretation, though she differs from Gibbon in another respect: Sayers has Constantine executing Crispus in a blind rage, whereas Gibbon says that his murder was carefully planned well in advance. It was a settled decision, not a moment of wrath. (As we shall see in a future post, this sets a pattern for his family.) Sayers is not excusing him, but I think she does make him a more impetuous and less coldly calculating figure than the real Constantine was — though Sayers’s Constantine does inform Fausta that he will have her executed, but only after she accompanies him as his consort in a grand public ceremony. Which is pretty cold: The imperial show must go on. (And Fausta calmly plays her part.)

The second puzzle about Constantine: Why did he delay his baptism until he was on his death-bed? One possible answer: it was not uncommon in that era for converts to delay baptism until near death, because they believed that if they died immediately after baptism — without the opportunity to commit more sins — that would allow them to go straight to Heaven. Sayers hints that Constantine may have been aware of this: in the scene in which he orders the death of his son Crispus and others he believes to have been conspiring against him — about which more in a moment — he says, “How fortunate that I was never baptised! I can damn myself with a clear conscience.” As though to say: I am not officially a Christian and so do not betray my Lord by this sin — though I can make amends later.

(FYI: You may now choose to read an exemplary tale, taken from an American novel published in 1964, that illustrates in a distinctive way the theological and moral implications of the once-common theology of baptism that I have just described. Or you may simply continue.)

However we might read Constantine’s murderous gratitude that he is unbaptized, something becomes quite clear in the play’s last scene, when the people whom Constantine has had murdered appear before him as spectral images, horrifying him. It is then that, for the first time in his life, he confronts the true depth and extent of his sins:

Sin is more terrible than you think. It is not lying and cruelty and murder — it is a corruption of life at the source. I and mine are so knit together in evil that no one can tell where the guilt begins or ends. And I who called myself God’s emperor — I find now that all my justice is sin and all my mercy bloodshed…..

How can he be forgiven? How can he not pay the price for his wickedness?

It is Helena, his mother — yes, in fact she predeceased him, but shut up about that — who tells him the terrible and wonderful truth:

HELENA: The price is always paid, but not always by the guilty.

CONSTANTINE: By whom, then?

HELENA: By the blood of the innocent.

CONSTANTINE: Oh no!

HELENA: By nothing else, my child. Every man’s innocence belongs to Christ, and Christ’s to him. And innocence alone can pardon without injustice, because it has paid the price.

CONSTANTINE: That is intolerable.

HELENA: It is the hardest thing in the world — to receive salvation at the hand of those we have injured. But if they do not plead for us there is nobody else who can. That is why there is no redemption except in the cross of Christ. For He alone is true God and true Man, wholly innocent and wholly wronged, and we shed His blood every day.

What Constantine must understand, here at the end of his life, as the waters of Holy Baptism are prepared for him, is that the formulation he himself oversaw at Nicaea — that Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, is also “true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father” — is not just a theologically accurate statement, but the only hope of the dying. Constantine must throw himself upon the mercy of the Crucified One — the one whom he himself, in his sins, helped to crucify. As John the apostle put it: “He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2).

And this is where the two helices of the story of this flawed but remarkable play meet and merge. It is when we grasp for ourselves the truth of what was articulated at Nicaea that the dogma indeed becomes the drama.

July 9, 2025

Sayers and Constantine: 5

I have said that one helix of The Emperor Constantine is the clarification of Christian doctrine at Nicaea, and the other is the personal theological development of Constantine. When we first see him in the play, he demonstrates a religious sensibility — but one totally subordinated to the needs of the Empire. He asks his mother whether Christ is a “strong god,” because “The Empire needs pulling together — a new focus of faith and energy.” As the Emperor Julian — subject of a future post — will later think, Constantine for a time believes that Sol Invictus is the ideal “focus of faith and energy.” But when he starts winning victories under the sign of the Labarum he starts to suspect that his mother may be right when she says that Christ “is the one true God.”

At one point his Christian servant Togi — accompanied by the bishop Hosius — sees an opportunity to put his master to the test:

CONSTANTINE: Here, Togi, is there a table in this blasted barracks?

[TOGI looks at CONSTANTINE, as if wondering how far he dare go with him. Then —

TOGI: Here you are, Augustus! (He sweeps the offerings from the table dedicated to the Lares.)

CONSTANTINE (leaping to catch them): Here, damn it! what are you doing? That’s sacrilege, you little swine! You’ve offended all the household gods. What the devil’s come over you? By Jupiter I’ll — (He checks the blow in mid-air, and looks from the table to the Chi-Ro and back again, while a ludicrous succession of emotions — rage, alarm, shame, irritation, superstitious awe, schoolboy mischief and defiance chase one another across his face. Then he grins, and the tension is relaxed.) Toleration, I said — not religious intolerance. Is that what happens when we stop persecuting you? Must you persecute others and break down their altars? Does your Christ want all the sky to Himself, and all the offerings too? (He laughs a little uneasily, and looks sideways at Hosius. His tone changes.) By the gods, I believe that’s what you do want.

HOSIUS (steadily) There is only one true God, my son, and He cannot be served with half-measures.

CONSTANTINE So! … Well, that’s logical enough, but I hadn’t thought of it that way. … That’s His strength, of course, He knows the secret of rule. One God… one Emperor. (It is the birth of a new idea; he ponders it.) One. (He goes and stares at the Chi-Ro.) You won our battle for us…. One, true, and mighty…. Give us Your favour and protection — and ten more years of life — (He turns away, discovers that he is clutching an apple in his hand, gazes at it in astonishment and takes a large bite out of it.) All right, Togi. But do remember that, Christ or no Christ, I’m still Pontifex Maximus.

Nope his epithets: “By Jupiter,” “By the gods.” Gradually, though, Constantine becomes more and more committed to the belief that the Christian faith is the One True Faith. But even then he is a kind of theological minimalist: when he learns about the Arian controversies, he says,

CONSTANTINE: It really is heart-breaking — after all I’ve done for them — not to speak of what God has done! For two pins I’d knock their reverend pates together! … All this hair-splitting about texts! Why can’t they agree to differ, like sensible people?

HOSIUS (cautiously): Why indeed, Augustus? Unless the difference of opinion is really so fundamental that —

CONSTANTINE: It isn’t. It’s only some obscure metaphysical point — nothing but sophistry. All anybody wants is faith in God and Christ and the simple Gospel message. These theologians are getting swelled heads, that’s what it is. They feel safe, they enjoy the Imperial favour, they’re exempt from taxation, and instead of looking after the poor and converting the heathen, they start heresy-hunting and playing a sort of intellectual catch-as-catch-can to jockey one another out of benefices. I won’t have it. It’s got to stop.

But, again gradually, he comes to realize that there may be more at stake in these debates than he had suspected. And his experience at the Council — long hours listening to to the Arians and the Athanasians going at each other — ultimately confirms the point. So when the Council is struggling to come up with a formal dogmatic statement, he finally intervenes. (Note: Eusebius of Nicomedia is one of the leading Arians, not to be confused with the more famous Eusebius of Caesarea, who throughout this debate sits on the fence.)

CONSTANTINE: Will you give me leave to speak?

EUSTATHIUS: But of course, sir. Pray do.

CONSTANTINE: There was a phrase mentioned earlier in the proceedings which struck me very forcibly. It was, if I remember it rightly, “of one substance with the Father.”

EUSEBIUS OF NICOMEDIA: Oh lord!

That Constantine was the person to introduce this word is not Sayers’s invention: when Eusebius of Caesarea wrote a letter about the Council to his own church, he described what the council articulated as “our faith” — in essence what is now called the Nicene Creed — and then added,

When we presented this faith … our emperor, most beloved of God, himself first of all witnessed that this was most orthodox. He agreed that even he himself thought thus, and he ordered all to assent to subscribe to the teachings and to be in harmony with them, although only one word, homoousios, was added, which he himself interpreted, saying that the Son might not be said to be homoousios according to the affections of bodies, … for the immaterial, intellectual, and incorporeal nature is unable to subsist in some corporeal affection, but it is befitting to think of such things in a divine and ineffable manner. And our emperor, most wise and pious, thought philosophically in this manner.

The other Eusebius, of Nicomedia, cries out when he hears the word homoousios because he knows that it is irreconcilable with the views that he and Arius hold. But those who agree with Athanasius are delighted:

HOSIUS: Why, yes, sir — “consubstantial” — quite a familiar term in the West. The Greek, I believe, is “homosoious”. (He pronounces it to rhyme with “joyous”.)

CONSTANTINE (deprecatingly) “Homo-ousios”, I think.

HOSIUS I told you my Greek was bad. Your Majesty is of course quite right.

[The word has taken everybody rather aback — but since it is the Emperor’s suggestion nobody likes to speak first. Murmurs.

CONSTANTINE (insinuatingly): It seems to me a very definite and unambiguous sort of word.

ARIUS (to ARIANS): And I took that man for a simpleton!

CONSTANTINE: As the Apostle says, I speak as a fool — there may be objections to it.

EUSEBIUS OF NICOMEDIA (to ARIANS): They’ve put him up to it. (Aloud) There is every objection to it.

This is a bold move, but Constantine through his ostentatious humility has invited it — or so Eusebius of Nicomedia hopes. Interestingly, the next person to speak is the other Eusebius, who, as I have said, is fence-sitting. He does not explicitly agree that the term is “objectionable,” but he points out that “It is not scriptural.” Here we might remember that Arius constantly emphasizes that his own views are derived directly from Scripture — and indeed he takes this opportunity to pounce:

ARIUS (with satisfaction): Ah! … Do you think you know better than the Holy Ghost? Which will you have? The Word of God or the word of Constantine?

[Everybody is shocked, except CONSTANTINE.

CONSTANTINE (mildly) Nobody, I hope, would hesitate. But I did not invent the word…. What does Athanasius say?

A shrewd move by the Augustus! He could make the case himself, but why not turn that job over to one who has already shown himself a master of disputation?

ATHANASIUS: Surely it is not a question of substituting our words for those of the Holy Spirit, but only of defining with exactness our understanding of what the Spirit says in symbols and mysteries. And Our Lord Himself set us the example when He interpreted to His disciples the parables which He had taught them.

JAMES: Do not we all do as He did? When I preach to my simple desert folk, I tell them a story, or read them a psalm, and then I say, “this is how we must understand it”.

SEVERAL VOICES: Quite right.

ATHANASIUS: I should … greatly prefer a scriptural word. But our urgent need just now is of a word that nobody can possibly misinterpret — not even Arius.

And if we look at the text of the Nicene Creed that Christians still affirm, we can see how devoted it is to eliminating Arian wiggle-room: “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God” — so far Arius would perhaps agree, but then: “eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light” — did you hear that about his actually being God? In case you didn’t, let’s say it again: “true God from true God.” Did you hear that about his being begotten? Let’s say that again: “begotten, not made, of one Being [ousios] with the Father….” The repetitions are not accidental.

Yet Athanasius is perhaps too hopeful. A little later the Arians whisper among themselves:

THEOGNIS: We can always say that we understood “homoöusios” in the sense “homoiousios”.

EUSEBIUS OF NICOMEDIA: True — between “of one substance” and “of like substance” there is the difference only of an iota.

This anticipates Gibbon’s famous jibe:

The Greek word, which was chosen to express this mysterious resemblance, bears so close an affinity to the orthodox symbol, that the profane of every age have derided the furious contests which the difference of a single diphthong excited between the Homoousians and the Homoiousians. As it frequently happens, that the sounds and characters which approach the nearest to each other accidentally represent the most opposite ideas, the observation would be itself ridiculous, if it were possible to mark any real and sensible distinction between the doctrine of the Semi-Arians, as they were improperly styled, and that of the Catholics themselves.

But Gibbon is imperceptive here, as Constantine was at first when he derided the controversy as “hair-splitting” and “sophistry.” For, as Athanasius explains, if Christ is not God but only in some sense like God, then he cannot redeem us, and we are still dead in our sins. Or else God the Father (whoever He is) redeems us (by some means or another) and the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are irrelevant to this redemption. In either case nothing remains of Christianity.

Constantine now grasps this point — to some degree. But there is one more stage in his development still to come.

July 7, 2025

Sayers and Constantine: 4

In my previous post I referred to the bihelical structure of The Emperor Constantine; today I’m going to discuss one of those helices.

Since the Council of Nicaea was called to deal with the views of Arius and his followers, Sayers rightly gives him a lengthy speech to introduce the debate:

Certainly, I say that the Son is “theos”, that is to say, “divine”, but not that He is “ho Theos”, that is to say, God himself. Our Latin friends who have no definite article in their woolly language may be excused for woolly thinking; but for those who speak Greek there is no excuse. For it is written: “The Lord your God is one God — there is none beside Him: He is God alone.” Are we heathens and polytheists, to worship two gods, or three, or a dozen? The Father alone is eternal, underived Being, that which is — as He Himself said to Moses, “ I AM THAT I AM”. And in His eternity, before all time, He begat the Son, whom St. Paul also calls, “the first-born of every creature” — not a part of Himself, since God cannot be divided, but called forth by Him out of nothing, as the Book of the Proverbs says: “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way; when there were no depths, I was brought forth.” And this is His Logos, that is to say, His Wisdom or Word, by whose means He afterward made all things, and without whom, as St. John writes, “nothing was made that has been made”. And this Logos, being in the fullness of time joined to the body of a man, was — in the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews — “faithful to Him that made Him” — so that, as it is written of Him in the Acts of the Apostles, “God hath made Jesus both Lord and Christ”.

By the way, throughout this part of the play Sayers is drawing on, and often quoting from, the many surviving records of the Council.

Arius’s views are thoroughly grounded in Scripture, and he does not deny, and does not mean to diminish, the Lordship of Christ — though he is making a distinction between Lord (which Christ, he thinks, is) and God (which Christ, he thinks, is not). And if Christ is not God, then he might be venerated but cannot be worshipped: “Are we heathens and polytheists, to worship two gods, or three, or a dozen?” That woolly language Latin allows a distinction between latria (which we owe to God) and dulia (which we owe to the saints); Arius implicitly makes the same distinction, but between the Father and the Christ. It is not clear that he understands the full implications of his argument.

(N.B.: If I were to go into all the ways that the verses Arius cites might be differently interpreted — for instance, I could point out that it’s not the Son who speaks in Proverbs 8, it’s Wisdom — this would be a book-length post. I’m focusing on the essential points of disagreement. By the way, Sayers typically renders the biblical quotations of all parties in the Authorized Version, so if you want to know where a passage comes from, just copy it and paste it into a search engine.)

Arius continues:

This doctrine I received, and the Bishop of Nicomedia also, from the venerable Lucian our teacher, and from the tradition of the Saints: One God and Father of all, and of Him One Son or Word, sole-begotten before all worlds. But that the Son had no beginning, or that He is equal and co-eternal with the Father, this we deny: for it is the nature of a son to be subsequent to his father, and of that which is derived to be inferior to that from which it derives. This stands to reason, and for this cause the Word when He was made flesh said plainly: “My Father is greater than I.”

That is the truth of Scripture, which every sincere mind must acknowledge.

That last note is an important one: Arius believes himself faithful to the plain teaching of Scripture; and indeed, he finds his view so amply and obviously attested by Scripture that it’s impossible for him to believe that any “sincere mind” could see things otherwise. Therefore he treats his opponents as either mindless — he seems to think all Latin-speakers dim-witted — or insincere: he singles out for particular scorn his own bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, whom he suggests is trimming his sails to meet the prevailing political winds.

Alexander is rendered speechless by this personal attack, and allows his deacon, a young man named Athanasius, to respond to Arius. Athanasius is so superior to his bishop as a theologian and a debater than one suspects that Alexander would in any circumstances have found a way to be prostrated. Let’s pick up partway through Athanasius’s speech:

… the Son is God out of God, from the very substance and Being of God; therefore the blessed Apostle, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, calls Him: “the brightness of the Father’s glory and the express image of His person, upholding all things by the word of His power.” And the Apostle John, in the beginning of his Gospel which lies here open before you, declares very well both the distinct Person of the Son and His equal Godhead with the Father, saying: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

ARIUS: Why, then, does the Apostle call Him “the first-born of every creature“?

Notice that Arius ignored the passages from Hebrews and John’s Gospel that Athanasius has just cited.

ATHANASIUS: Because so He is. For when He became Man, He made Himself as one of the creatures; and therefore He said of himself when He was in the body, “My Father is greater than I”, because He had assumed our nature, being made a little lower than the angels. As it is written, “The first man was of the earth, earthy: the second Man is the Lord from Heaven”. Yet He Himself created the nature that He put on; and this was ordained by Him from eternity when time was not, so that He that is second on earth is first in Heaven. Who also went up thither, the first-born from the dead of all that He had created. Him likewise did John behold in his Apocalypse, in form like unto the Son of Man, and saying, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty”.

ARIUS: Spoken like a giant, little mannikin. You are so learned in the Scripture you know more about it than Christ Himself, who said to the rich young ruler: “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God.”

ATHANASIUS: So he did — and the fool stood gaping. But what if he had answered, like Peter: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God“?

Athanasius’s point is that Jesus did not say, “Why do you call me good, since I am not God?” Arius thinks that’s what Jesus means, but, as Athanasius indicates, Jesus says that he should be called good only if he is God — which he may be. He is pressing his interlocutor to make a decision on that point. But Arius doesn’t get it: he reads as a denial what is in fact a genuine question.

ARIUS: He would have earned a blessing — and perhaps have been commended for knowing better than to confuse the Son with the Father.

For Arius, if you say Jesus is the son of God you are ipso facto saying that he is not God himself. Again, a reasonable enough assumption if you ignore the passages that suggest otherwise. But Athanasius is about to play his trump card:

ATHANASIUS: Was Thomas, then, rebuked when, looking upon the wounds of the Redeemer, he cried: “My Lord and my God!“? Rebuked he was, not for belief, but because he was so slow in believing…. And do not forget to remind your Latin friends, with your customary politeness, that he said, not “theos” but “ho theos mou“ — ” the Lord of me and the God of me” — with the definite article, Arius.

A hit, a palpable hit! That young Alexandrian deacon is pretty skilled in disputation.

He is also following one of the cardinal principles of biblical interpretation: passages that are unclear or ambiguous must be interpreted in light of those that are clear and unambiguous. Arius, by contrast, because he assumes that Christian monotheism is a simple thing, has simply ignored the passages (John 1:1, Hebrews 1:3) that in their (terrifying!) straightforwardness complicate what Arius would prefer to keep simple.

And now, by citing the words of Thomas (John 20:28), Athanasius has exploded the distinction that is most essential to Arius’s theology: that between God the Father and Jesus the Lord. Thomas confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord and God, and this, Athanasius reminds us, is indeed the confession of the Church — however distressing that confession might be for the familiar theological categories.

Later in the debate they raise an issue that does not get fully resolved for another 125 years, at the Council of Chalcedon, but the passage points to the incoherence of Arius’s position:

ATHANASIUS: You say that Christ had no human soul?

ARIUS: In Christ, the Logos took the place of the human soul.

ATHANASIUS: Then was He not true man, for man’s nature consists in a fleshly body and a rational soul. There are heretics who deny Christ’s Godhead and others who deny His Manhood — it was left for Arius to deny both at once…. Tell me, how did this compound of half-man and demi-god do the will of the Father? Freely, or of necessity?

ARIUS (hesitating — he sees the trap but cannot avoid it): Freely.

ATHANASIUS: That which is created free to stand is created free to fall. Was the Son, then, made fallible by nature, needing God’s grace to keep Him from sin? If so, the second Adam is no more than the first. Christ is but man or at most an angel — and to worship Him is idolatry.

(The language Sayers gives Athanasius here echoes that of Milton’s God in Paradise Lost, Book 3: “I made [Adam] just and right,/ Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.”) As noted above, I am not certain that Arius has fully grasped that, if the Son is not God, then the Son cannot be worshipped — it would indeed be idolatry to do so. But Christians do worship the Son along with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God. This is why Athanasius says, near the beginning of his first Oration Against the Arians, “Those who consider the Arians Christians are in great error.”

But — you may well be asking — where in all this is Constantine, the Emperor who called this Council? We’ll get to him in the next post.

July 3, 2025

Sayers and Constantine: 3

The Emperor Constantine is not a great play, largely because Sayers, who had done a tremendous amount of reading in preparing to write it, seems to be under some compulsion to share as much of that reading as possible. So we get a lot of backstory and political context hammered into the dialogue in classic “As you know, my Lady” style.

FLAVIUS [Constantinus Chlorus]: Yes. The old man sent me west and kept the boy at court — as a hostage for my loyalty, I suppose. He trusts no one. But when Diocletian retired, I sent to Galerius — who has succeeded him, you know, as Augustus of the East —

HELENA: Yes, yes, I know.

It’s painful, and even more painful when Sayers uses The Common Folk to mediate it:

So old Maximian starts cussin’ and swearin’ and tries to ‘ave the purple off ‘im, see? But the troops only laughs at ‘im, and the old boy runs off to Constantine, ‘owling blue murder. And Constantine treats ‘im very kind, but ‘e don’t give ‘im no power, see? because of upsettin’ Maxentius. Besides, the old boy was past it. But any’ow, Maxentius ‘ad is ‘ands full, because Africa goes and ‘as a rebellion and sets up a new Augustus on its own.

Stop. Please, make it stop. In his columns in the Irish Times Myles na gCopaleen would often introduce the thoughts of The Plain People of Ireland. Sayers seems to have had a similar idea of The Plain People of England and makes frequent use of them — even when she has to disguise them as Romans — from the East End of Rome, no doubt. Fossato di Riva. Or Cappella Bianca. (That was a joke for Londoners.) In general, though, while Sayers knows the shortcomings of the P. P. of E., she has more affection for them than Myles had for the P. P. of I., whom he called an “ignorant self-opinionated sod-minded suet-brained ham-faced mealy-mouthed streptococcus-ridden gang of natural gobdaws.”

But I digress. Back to the play.

There’s another bizarre moment when Sayers is describing the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and she gives us this:

OFFICER: We left the city by the Milvian Bridge, and when we got to the fork —

MAJOR DOMO: Where the Cassia turns into the Via Flaminia?

OFFICER: That’s it — we took the Flaminian Way. About a mile out, you come to a narrow defile between the hills and the river —

CRASSUS: I know it. The Red Rocks.

The Turn-by-Turn Navigation Is Definitely Not the Drama. This could not possibly be less relevant to the essential concerns of the play, and, alas, there’s more like it.

But the story has a strong spine, and if you strip away the irrelevancies, you can see its shape. I’m borrowing the “spine” metaphor from Peter Jackson, who said that when he and Fran Walsh and Philippa Bowens were writing The Lord of the Rings they knew they couldn’t tell the whole story, so they had to find a spine, a firm but flexible narrative line which would hold the movie together. The Emperor Constantine has such a spine, though it’s less like a straight rod than a double helix. It looks something like this:

The complex process by which Constantine moves from a vaguely pious religiosity to belief in the defense of what we could now call Nicene orthodoxy — and, ultimately, achieves a complete existential reliance on the Triune God celebrated at Nicaea.
The complex process by which the Catholic Church came to realize that the account given by Arius and his followers of who Christ is could not be tolerated as a viable option — even if the refusal of the Arian position brought, for a time, increased division in an already-divided Church.

And so the Council of Nicaea itself, presided over by Constantine, becomes the point at which the two helices meet.

The (even more complex) sequence of events and achievements by which Constantine became first a Caesar and then, eventually, the sole Emperor of Rome, however intrinsically interesting it might be, has nothing to do with double-helical spine of this story, and it’s a shame that Sayers did not recognize that. If she had recognized it, this might not be a forgotten play. I wish I had the time to make a reduced and clarified version of this play — an Imperial Edit, as it were, by analogy to the Phantom Edit.

More in the next post about this double helix.

July 1, 2025

Sayers and Constantine: 2

First post in this series.

In her Preface to The Emperor Constantine, Sayers explains why its subject is important:

The reign of Constantine the Great is a turning-point in the history of Christendom. Those thirty years, from A.D. 306, when he was proclaimed Augustus by the Army of Britain at York, to A.D. 337, when, sole Emperor of the civilized world, he died at Nicomedia in Asia Minor, exchanging the Imperial purple for the white robe of his baptism, saw the emergence of the Christian ecclesia from the status of a persecuted sect to power and responsibility as the State Church of the Roman Empire. More important still, and made possible by that change of status, was the event of A.D. 325: the Council of Nicaea. At that first Great Synod of East and West, the Church declared her mind as to the Nature of Him whom she worshipped. By the insertion of a single word in the baptismal symbol of her faith, she affirmed that That which had been Incarnate at Bethlehem in the reign of Augustus Casar, suffered under Pontius Pilate, and risen from death in the last days of Tiberius, was neither deified man, nor angel, nor demi-god, nor any created being however exalted, but Very God of Very God, co-equal and co-eternal with the Father.

The first Christian Emperor was thus, in the economy of Providence, the instrument whereby Christendom was brought face to face with two problems which have not yet found their full resolution: the exterior relations between Church and State; the interior relation between orthodox and heretic within the Church.

We shall return to all this, but at the moment I want to deal with another matter: Why tell this story at the Festival of Colchester?

It turns out that, if certain traditions are to be believed, Constantine has an intimate connection with Colchester, a connection which begins with the simple fact that Camulodunum, as the Romans called it, was the capital of the province of Britannia. More formally it was known as Colonia Claudia Victricensis — colonia, not municipia, which marked it as a kind of extension of the city of Rome itself rather than a mere town in the provinces. The residents of a colonia had the honor of Roman citizenship. (Similarly, Tarsus was the capital of the Roman province of Cilicia, which is how the apostle Paul, native of that city, gained the Roman citizenship that in a difficult situation he made good use of.)

It is said by some that the name Colchester means “fortress of Coel,” Coel being a king in semi-Romanized Britain. (Probably not the “merry old soul” of song, but who knows for sure?) This is the story that Geoffrey of Monmouth tells about Coel and Constantius, AKA Constantius Chlorus:

At that time Duke of Kaelcolim, that is to say Colchester, started a rebellion against King Asclepiodotus. He killed the King in a pitched battle and took for himself the distinction of the royal crown. When this was made known to them, the Senate rejoiced at the death of a King who had caused trouble to the power of Rome in all that he did. Mindful as they were of the setback which they had suffered when they had lost the kingdom, they sent as legate the Senator Constantius, a wise and courageous man, who had forced Spain to submit to Roman domination and who had laboured more than anyone else to increase the power of the State of Rome.

When Coel, King of the Britons, heard of the coming of Constantius, he was afraid to meet him in battle, for the Roman’s reputation was such that no king could resist him. The moment Constantius landed in the island, Coel sent his envoys to him to sue for peace and to promise submission, on the understanding that he should retain the kingship of Britain and contribute nothing more to Roman sovereignty than the customary tribute. Constantius agreed to this proposal when it reached him. Coel gave him hostages and the two signed a treaty of peace. Just one month later Coel developed a most serious illness which killed him within eight days.

After Coel’s death Constantius himself seized the royal crown and married Coel’s daughter. Her name was Helen and her beauty was greater than that of any other young woman in the kingdom. For that matter, no more lovely girl could be discovered anywhere. Her father had no other child to inherit the throne, and he had therefore done all in his power to give Helen the kind of training which would enable her to rule the country more efficiently after his death. After her marriage with Constantius she had by him a son called Constantine.

And now we know why the Festival of Colchester might well feature a play about Constantine. Indeed, the first scene of Sayers’s play is set in Colchester, with Helena as the point of focus. While modern historians believe that Helena was a native of Bithynia — as did Procopius — Sayers treats that as a mere legend: “It was said by some, both then and now, that she was [Constantius Chlorus’s] concubine, a woman of humble origin — a barmaid, indeed, from Bithynia. But an ancient and respectable tradition affirms, on the other hand, that she was his lawful wife, a princess of Britain.” And if Helena were from Camulodunum, it would be no surprise if she were also a Christian, since in her time Camulodunum not only had churches but sported its own bishop.

Whether historically accurate or not, a belief in her British birth makes for a better story — especially in Colchester. We’ll just set aside the inconvenient fact that in 330, just after her death, her son renamed the Bithynian town Drepanon as Helenopolis. Move along, nothing to see here.

So here, in Sayers’s play, we have Helena, whose husband Constantius Chlorus had divorced her for political reasons, though we are reminded that in the eyes of God they remain married. She lives with her aged, exhausted, and mentally incapacitated father Coel, and in this first scene will see her (former?) husband for the first time in a decade — and her son Constantine, now 21. The surprise of this scene is old King Coel emerging from his slumbers to utter a prophecy:

Coel the son of Coel the son of Coel the heaven-born;
I have harped in the Twelve Houses; I have prophesied among the Dancers;
Coel, father of the Light, who bears the Sun in her bosom.

Three times have I seen the Cross:
Air and fire in Gaul, under the earth in Jerusalem,
Written upon water in the place of the victories.

Three times have I heard the Word:
The word in a dream, and the word in council,
The word of the Word within the courts of the Trinity.

Three Crowns: laurel among the trumpets,
A diadem of stars with fillets of purple,
Thorns and gold for the Bride of the Trinity.

I have seen Constantine in the air as a flying eagle,
I have seen Constantine in the earth as a raging lion,
I have seen Constantine in the water as a swimming fish.

Earth and water and air — but the beginning and the ending is fire,
Light in the first day, fire in the last day, at the coming of the Word,
And Our Lord the Spirit descending in light and in fire.

Then he collapses back into sleep. The prophecy is incomprehensible to all, especially to the young pagan warrior Constantine. But the pattern of the story is now established.

P.S. Just a random note, but the Penguin Classics edition of Geoffrey of Monmouth that I quoted is edited and translated by Lewis Thorpe, the husband of Sayers’s great friend, collaborator, biographer, and goddaughter Barbara Reynolds — though he did this several years after Sayers’s death. Small world.

June 27, 2025

Sayers and Constantine: 1

A theme that emerges strongly in Dorothy Sayers’s thought in the late 1930s — and continues to be central to her thought for the rest of her life — is expressed in a phrase that she uses repeatedly: “The dogma is is the drama.” Here is one articulation of that idea:

Let us, in Heaven’s name, drag out the Divine Drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slip-shod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction. If the pious are the first to be shocked, so much the worse for the pious — others will pass into the Kingdom of Heaven before them. If all men are offended because of Christ, let them be offended; but where is the sense of their being offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like Him? We do Him singularly little honour by watering down His personality till it could not offend a fly. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ.

It is the dogma that is the drama — not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death — but the terrifying assertion that the same God Who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realise that here is something that a man might be glad to believe.

What’s especially interesting about this idea, for the biographer of Sayers, is that she seems to have discovered Dogma and Drama at the same time. That is, she started writing and speaking publicly about the Christian faith just as she began a new career as a playwright. Dogma and Drama provided an alternative to a path she had (though she did not admit it for a long time) written her way to the end of, that of the detective novelist.

Now, her first religious play, The Zeal of Thy House, is not fully committed to the dramatization of dogma. The play is more fundamentally concerned with the redemption of William of Sens. It describes how, after an accident that renders him paraplegic, an arrogant artistic dictator who thinks of the cathedral of Canterbury as his own creation becomes a more humble workman, aware both of his need for others to bring his ideas to life and also his subservience to God. That is to say, the play essentially concerns a man coming slowly to see that the human maker is what Tolkien called a sub-creator. (Neither Sayers nor Tolkien knew it, but they had virtually the same theology of work and articulated it very effectively, Sayers primarily in this play and and Tolkien primarily in the story of Fëanor in the Silmarillion and in the essay “On Fairy Stories.” I have sometimes wondered whether Tolkien read The Zeal of Thy House and was influenced by it, though I doubt it. Anyway, if he had, he’d never have admitted it.)

So The Zeal of Thy House doesn’t really test the proposition that “the dogma is the drama,” nor does her series of plays on the Life of Christ, The Man Born to Be King, because there the dramatic interest arises from events: this man’s teaching, suffering, death, and resurrection. There are of course dogmatic implications to this story, and Sayers embraces them … but that’s not the same thing as the dogma itself being the source of dramatic interest.

So did she ever put her idea to a practical test? Yes, she did, a decade after The Man Born to Be King, in a play that she wrote for the Colchester Festival in 1951. This task was a distraction from her chief work at the time, translating Dante, but perhaps a welcome one. Colchester is only fifteen miles from her home in Witham, which made it possible for her to be fully involved with the performance of the play — costumes and staging and rehearsals were her great delight — without demanding too much travel, which as she aged was becoming more difficult for her. She was a gregarious person, and at that time was lonely — her husband Mac Fleming had died in 1950. And perhaps above all, the play gave her a chance to test her great thesis: she decided to write a play called The Emperor Constantine, and to place at the center of her play the debates at the First Council of Nicaea.

And since this year marks the 1700th anniversary of that Council, this might be a good time to talk about Sayers’s play. I’ll be doing that over the next week or two. Or three. Stay tuned! The dogma really is the drama!

June 14, 2025

Buckley

I’ve just finished Sam Tanenhaus’s Buckley, which is magisterial. I have many, many thoughts, only a few of which I’ll share here.

Buckley’s greatest virtue and greatest vice was loyalty. Again and again we see him behaving with exceptional generosity to friends and family, even when that generosity was costly to him in dollars, in reputation, or in both. Once he came to think of someone as belonging in some way, in any way, to “us,” then it was almost impossible to dislodge his loyalty to them — even when they had, by any serious measure, betrayed that loyalty. Having settled on anything — a spouse, a friend, a house, a belief, a political stance — he couldn’t face abandoning him or her or it.

Buckley begins his book In Search of Anti-Semitism by frankly acknowledging that his own father was an antisemite, though he doesn’t go into any detail. (Tanenhaus does, though, and it’s not pretty.) But immediately after acknowledging his father’s views, he goes on to say that “the bias never engaged the enthusiastic attention of any of my father’s ten children…, except in the attenuated sense that we felt instinctive loyalty to any of Father’s opinions, whether about Jews or about tariffs or about Pancho Villa.” Okay … but what is that “attenuated sense”? The passage goes on without a break, as though to explain:

Seven or eight children in Sharon, Connecticut, among them four of my brothers and sisters, thought it would be a great lark one night in 1937 to burn a cross outside a Jewish resort nearby. That story has been told, and my biographer (John Judis) points out that I was not among that wretched little band. He fails to point out that I wept tears of frustration at being forbidden by senior siblings to go out on that adventure, on the grounds that (at age 11) I was considered too young. Suffice it to say that children as old as 15 or 16 who wouldn’t intentionally threaten anyone could, in 1937, do that kind of thing lightheartedly. Thoughtless, yes, but motivated only by the desire to have the fun of scaring adults! It was the kind of thing we didn’t distinguish from a Halloween prank. None of us gave any thought to Kristallnacht, even when it happened (November 9, 1938 — I was 12, in a boarding school in England), and certainly not to its implications. But then this is a legitimate grievance of the Jew: Kristallnacht was not held up in the critical media as an international event of the first magnitude, comparable to the initial (1948) laws heralding the formal beginning of apartheid or the triggering episodes of the religious wars of the seventeenth century.

The is strangely evasive, except in one respect: Buckley bluntly refuses to distinguish himself from his siblings simply because they burned the cross and he didn’t. Loyalty! If they are to be condemned, then he will share in their condemnation!

But should they be condemned? Should they have known that this was something rather more serious than “a Halloween prank”? Does he expect us to believe that the cross-burning just happened to have been done on a site belonging to Jews and that any other place favored by “adults” would have done just as well? (If not, why does he bring in the “scaring adults” line at all? And why does he include it in a paragraph about the relationship between his father’s antisemitism and the beliefs of his children?)

Does he now, at the time of writing, think it something that should have been seen as a serious offense? Or, rather, that no one could have been expected to take it seriously in 1937 but should have done so after Kristallnacht? Or even that it wouldn’t have been seen as serious in 1938 but on that point Jews have a “legitimate grievance”?

Who can say?

But note that every possibility listed reminds us that Buckley is only seeing this from the perspective of the people who had their “lark,” not the Jews who looked out their hotel window to find a cross burning on the lawn. For them he does not spare a thought. (Something similar occurs in his discussion of Joseph Sobran, a blatant Jew-hater whom Buckley allowed for a long time to write for National Review and dismissed only under significant pressure: when Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, protested Sobran’s writings Buckley replied that “you are strangely insensitive to the point that his essay is much more damaging to me than it is to you.” I’m the real victim here!)

Similarly: he knew what Joe McCarthy was, knew what terrible sins and crimes he committed, and he was too honest to deny those sins and crimes; but out of loyalty he minimized them and said — well, what he always said from the beginning of his career to the end: The other side is worse and therefore hypocritical. “They” are worse than “we.” The people unjustly smeared by McCarthy simply don’t show up on Buckley’s radar at all.

He took the same approach to Southern racists who thought of themselves are preserving Southern traditions — people like his parents, to whom of course he was loyal. (His father was a Texan and his mother from New Orleans, and they split their time between a home in Connecticut and one in South Carolina. Buckley grew up in both worlds.) In 1959 he wrote a column for National Review that astounds me:

In the South, the white community is entitled to put forward a claim to prevail because, for the time being anyway, the leaders of American civilization are white — as one would certainly expect given their preternatural advantages, of tradition, training, and economic status. It is unpleasant to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural advantage of white over Negro; but the statistics are there, and are not easily challenged by those who associate together and call for the Advancement of Colored People. There are no scientific grounds for assuming congenital Negro disabilities. The problem is not biological, but cultural and educational. The question the white community faces, then, is whether the claims of civilization (and of culture, community, regime) supersede universal suffrage.

He answers Yes: indeed, “the claims of civilization” justify denying black people the vote. That’s not the astonishing part, though: what strikes me is Buckley’s quite explicit denial of the central claim of the Southern segregationists, which is that blacks are intrinsically and necessarily inferior to whites. Nonsense, Buckley says: “There are no scientific grounds for assuming congenital Negro disabilities.” White culture is superior to black culture because of the “preternatural advantages” granted by “tradition, training, and economic status.” But because it is superior, it should be allowed to rule. Which is no different than saying that a man who steals all my money should be allowed to keep it because he’s richer than I am. The plain old racists have at least the merit of consistency.

Now, in his famous Cambridge debate with James Baldwin in 1965, when a man in the audience shouted that black people in Mississippi should be allowed to vote, Buckley said, “I couldn’t agree with you more.” But then he went on to say “I think actually what is wrong in Mississippi, sir, is not that not enough Negroes are voting but that too many white people are voting.” He then went on to suggest an elevation of the standards of voting — presumably by refusing the vote to those unable to pass a civics test — that would dramatically reduce the number of white people allowed to vote but at the same time, given the racial inequities in the Mississippi education system, would certainly reduce by an even greater degree the number of black voters.

In 2004 Buckley told an interviewer: “I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary.” A pundit admitting error is a remarkable thing, seen but a few times a century. That is admirable. But I do wonder how he could ever have believed, even in 1959, that people whose entire lives were built on the conviction of white supremacy would somehow “evolve” into something different? I doubt that he ever did believe it, though he may have wished for it. Primarily what he was doing in that column was being loyal to his parents and to their social world.

All that duly noted, I came away from this biography admiring Buckley for some things, and maybe most of all for his commitment to debate, especially on his TV show Firing Line. The very first episode of that show featured the socialist Michael Harrington, and at the end of it Buckley commended Harrington for making the most eloquent defense of President Johnson’s anti-poverty programs that he had ever heard.

And as Tanenhaus notes, Firing Line became the place to go if you wanted to hear what the radical black activists of the Sixties and Seventies — Huey Newton! Eldridge Cleaver! Roy Innis! — actually thought:

Buckley interviewed these activists, and opened his microphones to them, at a time when their exposure on mainstream television was limited to footage of violent demonstrations. “Amazingly,” writes the media historian Heather Hendershot, “a PBS public affairs program designed to convert Americans to conservatism [broadcast] some of the most comprehensive representations of Black Power from [its] era outside of the underground press and other alternative sources.”

(Link added.) That’s pretty cool.

I have a great deal to think through after reading this remarkable book. There may be more thoughts later — I feel that I ought to say more about what Buckley got right, because there were a few things. But for now I’m out of time.

February 3, 2025

Areopagitica

Few works are more routinely misdescribed than Milton’s Areopagitica, which is almost always said to be a defense of “freedom of the press.” It isn’t. So what is it?

It is an argument, addressed to the House of Commons and House of Lords, against a proposed law mandating the licensing of any book before it can be published in England. Anyone wanting to publish a book would submit it to a governmental censor, who would read it and either approve or deny its publication. Milton thinks this is a terrible idea, for many reasons:

It imitates Catholic practice, with its inquisitors and Imprimaturs and Nihil obstats;
it has no ancient or biblical warrant;
it would only affect law-abiding people — the truly scurrilous would just print without license and seek to avoid capture;
it would not stop the spread of evil and false ideas, which have a long history of moving through even an illiterate population with lightning speed;
the job of reading everything submitted for publication would be so vast that the government would need an army of censors;
the job would be so tiresome that no one with the wit and judgment to do it well would agree to do it at all;
the law would discourage writers, many of whom would scarcely go to the trouble of writing a whole book when a dim-witted or ill-tempered censor could quash it in an instant;
it would insult the public by presuming them incapable of making their own judgments about truth and falsehood,
and would deprive them of the responsibility of growing in genuine virtue by exercising and testing their discernment.

That last point is expressed in one of Milton’s most famous outbursts of eloquence:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.

Above all, says Milton, such a law presumes that our possession of the Truth is complete, which it manifestly is not and will not be until our Lord’s return. Those who can add to our store of genuine knowledge and understanding will, inevitably, deviate from current opinion as much as will the mendacious and the mistaken, but the censors will be unable to know in advance which deviations are worthy of praise and which worthy of condemnation.

Thus, concludes Milton, there should be no law in England mandating the pre-publication licensing of books.

But what happens then?

Ah, now we’re getting to the good stuff. First of all, if a book is deeply controversial, the contest between Truth and Falsehood is fought out in the public square:

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?

(Another famous passage.To Milton’s question, by the way, I would answer: I for one have often seen Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter.) And if a book is deemed false, or anyway dangerously false? Well, then, of course it is suppressed:

Yet if all cannot be of one mind — as who looks they should be? — this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that may be tolerated, rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate, provided first that all charitable and compassionate means be used to win and regain the weak and the misled: that also which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or manners no law can possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw itself.

Many shall be tolerated, but not Catholicism. Lines must be drawn, and the intolerable not tolerated but rather “extirpate.”

Milton doesn’t explicitly say so, but this would surely be done through the usual legal means in accordance with the laws of England — laws prohibiting blasphemy, for instance, or sedition, or libel (though libel had a rather different meaning in those days than it does today, a topic I explore in this essay). An author accused of crime would be given a fair trial, allowed to submit evidence and to make arguments on his behalf, and so on.

Moreover, while Milton is against government censorship of books, he strongly supports a law requiring that all books to be published are registered with the government. And if they are not?

And as for regulating the press, let no man think to have the honour of advising ye better than yourselves have done in that Order published next before this, “that no book be printed, unless the printer’s and the author’s name, or at least the printer’s, be registered.” Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectual remedy that man’s prevention can use.

Burn the book and hang the printer and/or author. And even if a book is properly registered, what if it then “be found mischievous and libellous”? I think we can guess what Milton would recommend.

September 7, 2024

the smog of unknowing

Peter Hitchens:

I think [Arthur] Koestler is increasingly forgotten because there has never been a time when the past has been such an unmapped mystery to the young and to the middle-aged. Hardly anyone now knows what she or he ought to know, ought to have read, ought to have seen. Around 1989, a great fog descended over the past, not just of human action, but of human thought. From Darkness at Noon, we have come to a world where a thick smog of unknowing lies all around us from first light till sunset. Yet we think we see clearly.

Two thoughts about this:

Hitchens mentions with sadness many cultural productions, major and trivial, that were prominent in his childhood but are unknown by young people today. Is he aware that precisely the same lament could have been, and almost certainly was, made by people thirty or forty years older than him? And yet he does not feel deprived through his ignorance. Time passes.
You can curse the darkness, or you can light a candle. You can lament that people don’t know the value of Arthur Koestler’s work, or you can write an essay that seeks to call readers’ attention to his best writing. If young people today do not know of events or artists or thinkers or works that you think they would benefit from knowing, you can tell them. That’s one of the main things writers are for.

August 19, 2024

metaphysics and history

A follow-up to my recent post on Adam Roberts’s new novel Lake of Darkness. I said in that post that Adam is a metaphysical writer, and that’s something that fascinates me about his fiction. But metaphysics is not my native tongue; I am able to grasp most prominent metaphysical concepts, but not easily, and I don’t employ them comfortably.

One interesting development in Christian theology in recent years has been a resurgence in metaphysical argument after a long period in which theology was governed and directed by an attention to salvation history. David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God has been perhaps the most important and influential book in this regard; I think I see Hart’s influence in the decision by Katherine Sonderegger to begin her systematic theology with The Doctrine of God – God conceived within the conceptual frame of classical metaphysics – before moving on to the specifically Christian understanding of God as Triune. I find this development interesting; but for me personally it is not welcome. I am not a metaphysical thinker but a historical thinker, and in trying to grasp the Christian Gospel, salvation history is where I begin and end. I am strongly more sympathetic with a (Lutheran or Barthian) theology that starts with the Cross and works backward and forward from that.

So I read a book like Lake of Darkness with delight, but its theological framework is essentially alien to my way of thinking about God. I can appreciate and enjoy – and I do, very much – but as a kind of outsider; again, like someone speaking a laboriously acquired second or third language. “No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams said; for me, it’s “No ideas but in people and events.” And no theology except the Theology of the Cross.

August 9, 2024

colonialist owls

This is a fascinating report: “Very soon, the federal government may authorize the killing of nearly a half-million barred owls in the Pacific Northwest in a desperate bid to save the northern spotted owl.” The argument appended to the report is that this proposal is unwise.

The key passage, I think, is this:

Many philosophers, conservation biologists and ecologists are skeptical of the idea that we should restore current environments to so-called historical base lines, as this plan tries to do. In North America, the preferred base line for conservation is usually just before the arrival of Europeans. (In Western forests, this is often pegged to 1850, when significant logging began.) But life has existed on Earth for 3.7 billion years. Any point we choose as the “correct” base line will either be arbitrary or in need of a strong defense.

The authors don’t say this explicitly, but it seems clear that the federal campaign against the barred owl depends on a reading of human political history. The movement of the barred owl westward is analogized to the movement of Europeans into the North American continent and across it.

Without that history in mind, the increasing dominance of the barred owl over the spotted owl would be just One of Those Things that happens in nature. But by using human political history to interpret such events, the government teaches itself to see barred owls as “invasive” — like they’re on the Oregon Trail or something.

It’s silly, but it’s also one of the subtler forms that the politicization of science takes.

July 17, 2024

Hume’s characters

In the Oxford English Dictionary, definition II.12.a. of “character” is: “A description, delineation, or detailed report of a person’s qualities. Now chiefly historical.” As an example, one R. Lucas wrote: “He undertook to write characters of Pitt and Bonaparte.” The originator of this practice — in some formal sense; surely people have been doing it as long as there have been people — seems to have been Theophrastus. He certainly gives us the term.

“A character,” in this sense, is what we might call a “character sketch” — a brief summary of a person’s essential nature or … well, character. (There’s not, it occurs to me, a close synonym.) One of the most fascinating features of Hume’s History of England is his “characters,” that is, his summative accounts of the key figures in his narrative, most of them monarchs. Sometimes Hume can do this briefly, and when he is brief he is often fierce, as in this “character” of Richard III:

The historians who favour Richard (for even this tyrant has met with partisans among the later writers) maintain, that he was well qualified for government, had he legally obtained it; and that he committed no crimes but such as were necessary to procure him possession of the crown: But this is a poor apology, when it is confessed, that he was ready to commit the most horrid crimes, which appeared necessary for that purpose; and it is certain, that all his courage and capacity, qualities in which he really seems not to have been deficient, would never have made compensation to the people for the danger of the precedent, and for the contagious example of vice and murder, exalted upon the throne.

That’s Richard, done and dusted. But other figures are more complicated. One of the most notable in this regard is his summary judgment of Henry VIII:

It is difficult to give a just summary of this prince’s qualities: He was so different from himself in different parts of his reign, that, as is well remarked by lord Herbert, his history is his best character and description. The absolute, uncontrolled authority which he maintained at home, and the regard which he acquired among foreign nations, are circumstances, which entitle him, in some degree, to the appellation of a great prince; while his tyranny and barbarity exclude him from the character of a good one. He possessed, indeed, great vigour of mind, which qualified him for exercising dominion over men; courage, intrepidity, vigilance, inflexibility: And though these qualities lay not always under the guidance of a regular and solid judgment, they were accompanied with good parts, and an extensive capacity; and every one dreaded a contest with a man, who was known never to yield or to forgive, and who, in every controversy, was determined, either to ruin himself or his antagonist. A catalogue of his vices would comprehend many of the worst qualities incident to human nature: Violence, cruelty, profusion, rapacity, injustice, obstinacy, arrogance, bigotry, presumption, caprice: But neither was he subject to all these vices in the most extreme degree, nor was he, at intervals altogether destitute of virtues: He was sincere, open, gallant, liberal, and capable at least of a temporary friendship and attachment. In this respect he was unfortunate, that the incidents of his reign served to display his faults in their full light: The treatment, which he met with from the court of Rome, provoked him to violence; the danger of a revolt from his superstitious subjects, seemed to require the most extreme severity. But it must, at the same time, be acknowledged, that his situation tended to throw an additional lustre on what was great and magnanimous in his character: The emulation between the emperor and the French king rendered his alliance, notwithstanding his impolitic conduct, of great importance in Europe: The extensive powers of his prerogative, and the submissive, not to say slavish, disposition of his parliaments, made it the more easy for him to assume and maintain that entire dominion, by which his reign is so much distinguished in the English history.

One of the most Humean elements of this account — and one of the wisest — is his insistence that circumstances conspire to reveal certain aspects of a person’s character, with the implication that in different circumstances the person’s career could have been very different. And since circumstances are always subject to change — “Events, my dear boy, events” — one cannot safely write a person’s character until he or she is dead.

Among those circumstances is, of course, the very fact of kingship itself. James II, for instance, is someone who could have been admirable if he had not been king: “He had many of those qualities, which form a good citizen: Even some of those, which, had they not been swallowed up in bigotry and arbitrary principles, serve to compose a good sovereign.” (By “bigotry and arbitrary principles,” Hume means, of course, James’s Catholicism.) And:

In domestic life, his conduct was irreproachable, and is entitled to our approbation. Severe, but open in his enmities, steady in his counsels, diligent in his schemes, brave in his enterprises, faithful, sincere, and honourable in his dealings with all men: Such was the character with which the Duke of York mounted the throne of England. In that high station, his frugality of public money was remarkable, his industry exemplary, his application to naval affairs successful, his encouragement of trade judicious, his jealousy of national honour laudable: What then was wanting to make him an excellent sovereign? A due regard and affection to the religion and constitution of his country. Had he been possessed of this essential quality, even his middling talents, aided by so many virtues, would have rendered his reign honourable and happy. When it was wanting, every excellency, which he possessed, became dangerous and pernicious to his kingdoms.

If he had remained Duke of York, his vices or shortcomings would have been regrettable but not especially consequential; but when he became King, they ended the dynasty of the Stuarts. I find myself remembering, in this context, a comment Northrop Frye makes in his discussion of tragedy in Anatomy of Criticism:

Aristotle’s hamartia or “flaw,” therefore, is not necessarily wrongdoing, much less moral weakness: it may be simply a matter of being a strong character in an exposed position, like Cordelia. The exposed position is usually the place of leadership, in which a character is exceptional and isolated at the same time, giving us that curious blend of the inevitable and the incongruous which is peculiar to tragedy.

“Inevitable” because of the circumstance, the position; “incongruous” because one can easily imagine circumstances in which that particular person had been not cursed but blessed, not ruined but flourishing. Hume is exceptionally attentive to this irony of human life.

July 15, 2024

Hume puts his cards on the table

I mentioned in an earlier post Hume’s purpose in writing this history — or what anyway I believe to have been his purpose: To account for and celebrate (a) the diminishment of the rule of superstition and enthusiasm and (b) the corresponding rise of “civility and sciences.” This purpose can only be fulfilled if Hume follows certain practices in assessing evidence.

Look for instance at his account of the rise and fall of Joan of Arc, in Volume II. Hume writes long paragraphs, but they consistently manifest a beautiful architecture, so I will here quote the whole of the first paragraph of his account:

In the village of Domremi near Vaucouleurs, on the borders of Lorraine, there lived a country girl of twenty-seven years of age, called Joan d’Arc, who was servant in a small inn, and who in that station had been accustomed to tend the horses of the guests, to ride them without a saddle to the watering-place, and to perform other offices, which, in well-frequented inns, commonly fall to the share of the men servants. This girl was of an irreproachable life, and had not hitherto been remarked for any singularity; whether that she had [not] met with an occasion to excite her genius, or that the unskilful eyes of those who conversed with her, had not been able to discern her uncommon merit. It is easy to imagine, that the present situation of France was an interesting object even to persons of the lowest rank, and would become the frequent subject of conversation: A young prince, expelled his throne by the sedition of native subjects, and by the arms of strangers, could not fail to move the compassion of all his people, whose hearts were uncorrupted by faction; and the peculiar character of Charles, so strongly inclined to friendship and the tender passions, naturally rendered him the hero of that sex, whose generous minds know no bounds in their affections. The siege at Orleans, the progress of the English before that place, the great distress of the garrison and inhabitants, the importance of saving this city and its brave defenders, had turned thither the public eye; and Joan, inflamed by the general sentiment, was seized with a wild desire of bringing relief to her sovereign in his present distresses. Her unexperienced mind, working day and night on this favourite object, mistook the impulses of passion for heavenly inspirations; and she fancied, that she saw visions, and heard voices, exhorting her to re-establish the throne of France, and to expel the foreign invaders. An uncommon intrepidity of temper made her overlook all the dangers, which might attend her in such a path; and thinking herself destined by Heaven to this office, she threw aside all that bashfulness and timidity, so natural to her sex, her years, and her low station. She went to Vaucouleurs; procured admission to Baudricourt, the governor; informed him of her inspirations and intentions; and conjured him not to neglect the voice of God, who spoke through her, but to second those heavenly revelations, which impelled her to this glorious enterprize. Baudricourt treated her at first with some neglect; but on her frequent returns to him, and importunate solicitations, he began to remark something extraordinary in the maid, and was inclined, at all hazards, to make so easy an experiment. It is uncertain, whether this gentleman had discernment enough to perceive, that great use might be made with the vulgar of so uncommon an engine; or, what is more likely in that credulous age, was himself a convert to this visionary: But he adopted at last the schemes of Joan; and he gave her some attendants, who conducted her to the French court, which at that time resided at Chinon.

The key point to be noted here is Hume’s refusal even to entertain the possibility that Joan was indeed inspired by God. He unhesitatingly gives a psychological account: “Her unexperienced mind, working day and night on this favourite object, mistook the impulses of passion for heavenly inspirations.” It is noteworthy that he doesn’t accuse her of lying, nor suspect that she was in someone else’s control. That, I assume, is because her subsequent conduct — especially when tried, convicted and burned at the stake — is hard to reconcile with either of those explanations.

But in any case, here is where he pulls back the curtain to explain to his readers one of the fundamental assumptions of his historiography:

It is the business of history to distinguish between the miraculous and the marvellous; to reject the first in all narrations merely profane and human; to doubt the second; and when obliged by unquestionable testimony, as in the present case, to admit of something extraordinary, to receive as little of it as is consistent with the known facts and circumstances.

This is carefully put. To understand Hume’s point here, we need to make a distinction that I learned from the philosopher Alvin Plantinga, between metaphysical and methodological naturalism.

Metaphysical naturalism is the belief that the “natural world” is all there is. No gods, no spirits, no secret causes, just the material cosmos.

Methodological naturalism is agnostic on the question of whether there is something beyond the material cosmos — as philosophers like to say, it “brackets” that question, and pursues its intellectual and scholarly inquiries without reference to any spiritual or trans-material cause. For instance, I wrote for a general audience a biography of C. S. Lewis, and while I might in my heart believe that God raised up C. S. Lewis to confute the infidels and persuade the uncertain to follow Jesus, that thought could play no part in in the story I told. It might well be that a non-Christian would be unlikely to write the kind of book I wrote, but a non-Christian could have. There’s nothing affirmed in that book that requires, for its composition or its acceptance, religious belief. And that was intentional on my part: I strategically adopted methodological naturalism.

Hume’s argument in the “business of history” passage cited above is not that the divine inspiration of Joan is impossible — though in fact Hume believed it impossible, or at least so improbable that the idea should be ignored — but only that it is not the job of the historian to deal in such matters. At least, this is true if the historian is narrating political and social history, i.e., “merely profane and human” matters.

But why should Hume adopt this methodological naturalism? I have my own reasons for doing so, when I do so, but what reasons had Hume?

Because he thinks that societies which are free from the enthusiasm and superstition that characterize religious belief are happier societies. That is, setting aside the question of whether religious belief is true or not, Hume thinks that less religious societies are happier ones. Hume seems to think that even if God exists, which in his view is almost certainly not the case, there is no reason to think that God’s interests are compatible with the interests of human beings who must live with one another.

In the concluding passage of his history’s second volume that I wrote about in my last post, Hume says of the “barbaric” millenium-and-a-half that he has just described,

Nor is the spectacle altogether unentertaining and uninstructive, which the history of those times presents to us. The view of human manners, in all their variety of appearances, is both profitable and agreeable; and if the aspect in some periods seems horrid and deformed, we may thence learn to cherish with the greater anxiety that science and civility, which has so close a connexion with virtue and humanity, and which, as it is a sovereign antidote against superstition, is also the most effectual remedy against vice and disorders of every kind.

The superstition and enthusiasm that accompany religion bring with them “vice and disorders of every kind,” which is why even the “marvelous,” as opposed to the “miraculous,” needs to be credited only grudgingly. (Don’t let people get excited about strange events! It’s bad for them and bad for the rest of us.) But when those powers are replaced by “science and civility,” then you get “virtue and humanity” and therefore a stronger, better grounded, more just social and political order. And a better social and political order is the object at which the philosophic historian aims.

July 12, 2024

Hume and literature

As previously indicated, I will eventually return to Moonbound, but I need to think some things through first. For now, let’s go back twelve thousand years or so and revisit David Hume’s History of England.

When Hume was writing his History of England, the word “literature” only occasionally referred to a body of texts, or a kind of text; instead, it typically meant something like “learning.” For example, Samuel Johnson in his Life of Milton says that Milton’s father “had probably more than common literature,” because Milton addressed a complex Latin poem to him. The meaning here is not far from our “literacy.” When a person not only read but wrote, especially for publication, then that person would be “a man of letters,” or “devoted to the life of letters,” etc.

Today “literature” means something more like “poetry, fiction, drama, and sometimes essays” — what might have been called in some earlier time belles lettres, fine letters, though the correspondence in meaning is rough rather than exact. Insofar as the learned had any concept of what we now call literature, it would certainly have included poetry, fiction, drama, and essays but also history and biography. Historians and biographers were composers of artful narratives and in that sense no different than the composers of novels and tragedies. Their material was different, but their objects and purposes often very similar.

Academic historians today distinguish what they do from “narrative history,” a genre practiced by non-academics — and they do this even on the rare occasions when they admire the narrative historians. See for instance Anthony Grafton’s forward to C. V. Wedgwood’s history of the Thirty Years War: it is obvious that he reveres Wedgwood but equally obvious that he understands what she does as something quite distinct from what he does. But in the 18th century, readers and writers alike would not have had such clear distinctions in mind. They would have evaluated Hume’s History of England and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall by ways and means quite close to those they would employ in evaluating a novel by Samuel Richardson.

And Hume and Gibbon expected that kind of attention. They worked very hard to get their facts right and to assess them accurately, but they also strove to achieve the virtues that novelists and dramatists and epic poets pursued: to portray vivid characters, to generate narrative momentum and tension, to resolve such tension satisfyingly.

Moreover — I have suggested this in my earlier posts — they saw the writing of historical narratives as a means of pursuing philosophical ends: the events and persons of the past serve as models, exemplars, and warnings. Historical figures enact philosophical positions and in so doing test them.

Has historical knowledge progressed since Hume? Do historians today have a sounder understanding than Hume did of the facts and events of the past? Of course. But our historians today have neither the literary nor the philosophical ambitions that drove Hume. And it is because he had those ambitions, and fulfilled them, that I am reading him now.

July 8, 2024

the arc of Hume’s history

I’ve been reading David Hume’s massive and magnificent History of England, and it’s generally fascinating — though there are, it must be said, extended passages in which he’s just dutifully relating what his researches have been able to discover about events which are not as well-attested as he would like. At the end of Volume II, when he has completed his narration of the Wars of the Roses with his account of the life and death of Richard III, he heaves a great sigh of relief:

Thus have we pursued the history of England through a series of many barbarous ages; till we have at last reached the dawn of civility and sciences, and have the prospect, both of greater certainty in our historical narrations, and of being able to present to the reader a spectacle more worthy of his attention.

That is, he’s about to enter the era in which increased political and social order (“civility”) and the invention and adoption of the printing press (“sciences”) yield far greater documentation of events.

In a famous essay, Arnaldo Momogliano argued that Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, sought to unite two kinds of historiography that previously had been quite distinct: the antiquarian history of les erudits and the philosophical history of writers like Voltaire. Gibbon was a great fellow for archives and inscriptions and ruins, but he was also determined to tell a story that enlightened and instructed. Hume — writing roughly a generation before Gibbon: the History of England was published between 1754 and 1762, while the Decline and Fall appeared between 1776 and 1789 — is very much the philosophical historian. His virtues, in his own estimation, are those of critical judgment rather than antiquarian assiduity. When he has more documentation, documentation that needs to be sifted and assessed with a shrewdly philosophic eye, his distinctive excellences come into play.

In one important sense his orientation is almost identical to that of Gibbon. Gibbon, famously, begins his history thus:

In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle, but powerful, influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence. The Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period of more than fourscore years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines. It is the design of this and of the two succeeding chapters, to describe the prosperous condition of their empire; and afterwards, from the death of Marcus Antoninus, to deduce the most important circumstances of its decline and fall: a revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth.

That the first centuries of the Empire marked the high point in human history is a view that Hume had already articulated, though he places the apex a little earlier. But the sweep of his account is somewhat larger:

Those who cast their eye on the general revolutions of society, will find, that, as almost all improvements of the human mind had reached nearly to their state of perfection about the age of Augustus, there was a sensible decline from that point or period; and man thenceforth relapsed gradually into ignorance and barbarism. The unlimited extent of the Roman empire, and the consequent despotism of its monarchs, extinguished all emulation, debased the generous spirits of men, and depressed that noble flame, by which all the refined arts must be cherished and enlivened. The military government, which soon succeeded, rendered even the lives and properties of men insecure and precarious; and proved destructive to those vulgar and more necessary arts of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce; and in the end, to the military art and genius itself, by which alone the immense fabric of the empire could be supported. The irruption of the barbarous nations, which soon followed, overwhelmed all human knowledge, which was already far in its decline; and men sunk every age deeper into ignorance, stupidity, and superstition; till the light of ancient science and history had very nearly suffered a total extinction in all the European nations.

“Ignorance and barbarism” is Hume’s version of what Gibbon calls “Barbarism and religion.” But while Gibbon is content to describe what happened to the Roman Empire, ending with the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, Hume wants to describe the fate of “all the European nations.”

Gibbon but briefly gestures at renewal. In his final chapter, having declared that his narrative describes “the triumph of Barbarism and religion,” he adds: “But the clouds of Barbarism were gradually dispelled; and the peaceful authority of Martin the Fifth and his successors restored the ornaments of the city [of Rome] as well as the order of the ecclesiastical state.”

Hume, though, wants to do much more in this line. So, to return to the conclusion of his second volume, he writes:

But there is a point of depression, as well as of exaltation, from which human affairs naturally return in a contrary direction, and beyond which they seldom pass either in their advancement or decline. The period, in which the people of Christendom were the lowest sunk in ignorance, and consequently in disorders of every kind, may justly be fixed at the eleventh century, about the age of William the Conqueror; and from that aera, the sun of science, beginning to re-ascend, threw out many gleams of light, which preceded the full morning, when letters were revived in the fifteenth century.

Fascinatingly, Hume believes that the key event, the one that more than any other turned the descent into an ascent, came when the Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian was rediscovered, in (Hume believes) Amalfi. That provided a direct link to the wisdom of the ancient world: the Justinian Code, which was itself a summary and codification of much older Roman laws, became a standard against which the legal practice of the present day could be measured, found wanting, and, slowly, remedied.

(Gibbon was so strongly committed to his narrative of decline that, though he wrote extensively about Justinian’s reign, he could not grant strong praise to anything that emperor did. If Justinian expanded his empire, that’s a sign of corruption and failure: “The fortifications of Europe and Asia were multiplied by Justinian; but the repetition of those timid and fruitless precautions exposes to a philosophic eye the debility of the empire.” Likewise the attempt to deal with moribund traditions: “Justinian suppressed the schools of Athens and the consulship of Rome, which had given so many sages and heroes to mankind. Both these institutions had long since degenerated from their primitive glory; yet some reproach may be justly inflicted on the avarice and jealousy of a prince by whose hands such venerable ruins were destroyed.” As for the great Code, there’s too much of it and it was badly administered: “The government of Justinian united the evils of liberty and servitude; and the Romans were oppressed at the same time by the multiplicity of their laws and the arbitrary will of their master.” Hume is always more generous.)

As already noted, Hume thinks that the ascent is due to the increase in power and influence of “civility and sciences,” which are both disciplinary: “civility” disciplines the passions of men and thereby brings increasing order to the political system and civil society alike, while “science” is a synonym for the disciplined, the methodical and orderly, pursuit of knowledge. Hume deplores religion because religion — coming as it does in two varieties, the superstitious and the enthusiastic — is consistently antidisciplinary. Superstition refuses the discipline of science, enthusiasm refuses the discipline of civility.

(By the way, I have written about how Hume’s superstition/enthusiasm binary helps to explain our current politics.)

In the first two volumes of his history, Hume covers around 1500 years; in the last four, fewer than 200. And increased documentation is only one reason for that disproportion: more important, for Hume the philosophical historian, is the fact that those 200 years reveal an inconsistent but unmistakable diminishment of enthusiasm and superstition and increase of civility and sciences. To discern the means by which that ascent occurred is, for Hume, the primary reason for studying that history. We know that we rose from barbarism — but how did we rise? If we know that, then we may be able to avoid sinking back into the mire; and should it happen that we do sink again, well, at least we can know the way out.

November 2, 2023

beyond belief

Last month I published a piece over at the Hog Blog on biblical and theological illiteracy among scholars — basically a summary of some recent work by Tim Larsen. I thought I had noted a few distressing examples there … but wow, did I just have a you-ain’t-seen-nuthin’-yet moment.

This review in the WSJ of a new book on the hymn “Amazing Grace” set my spidey-sense a-tingling — or rather, one passage from it did. I’ve been on the wrong end of reviewers’ careless dispensing of misinformation, so when I read this:

Mr. Walvin is compelling in his description of the deep presence of “Amazing Grace” in Anglophone, especially American, culture. He is less persuasive in some of his theological observations: I find it vanishingly unlikely that the famous 19th-century evangelist Dwight Moody “portrayed Christ himself as a sinner . . . with whom armies of ordinary people could identify.” The 18th-century Church of England did not consist of a “Latin-based priesthood” conducting “impenetrable Latin-based worship” — that had been decisively seen off 200 years earlier.

— I thought, That can’t be right. The author, James Walvin — a pretty eminent historian (primarily of The Atlantic slave trade) from the University of York — simply can’t have said those things. But lo and behold, here he is describing the D. L. Moody and Ira Sankey revival meetings in England:

Their down-to-earth style filled the largest of city venues wherever they appeared. They held 285 such meetings in London alone. Theirs was a style which, inevitably, was heartily disliked by the more solemn corners of British worship. When Ira Sankey performed in the parish church in the small Derbyshire town of Chapel-en-le-Frith, one parishioner was so outraged that he thought the local bishop “will have something to say” to the curate who had invited him.

Throughout, Moody portrayed Christ himself as a sinner, a person with whom armies of ordinary people could identify. If Christ could be saved, so too could the humble and ordinary people in the audience. Salvation was there for all. This simple, seductive point, a potent message for the poor in the late nineteenth century, was exactly what John Newton himself had pressed home, in his letters and hymns a century before. Salvation was available to all who repented.

And about Latin in the Church of England? Yep:

Throughout his teenage years at sea, John Newton had been an avid reader, buying books wherever he landed and struggling with the religious principles imparted by his devout mother. Elizabeth Newton had instilled in her son a highly disciplined love of reading — and worship. She read Bible stories to him, teaching him to respond to the catechisms and to memorize hymns and psalms, especially those written for children. Elizabeth loved the hymns of Isaac Watts and her son inevitably followed. They were hymns noted for their simplicity, using ordinary, comprehensible language and were quite unlike the impenetrable Latin-based worship of the Church of England at that time. Watts’s hymns were an aspect of the ongoing Reformation that wrenched worship free from an exclusive, Latin-based priesthood and relocated it among ordinary people, simply by using the common vernacular.

A few comments, typed with quivering hands:

The reviewer, Priscilla M. Jensen, calls these “theological observations,” but they are no such thing: they are historical statements that are catastrophically, outrageously wrong — the equivalent of saying that Benjamin Franklin was a Buddhist and that Frederick Douglass was a native speaker of French. They are so wrong, and wrong about facts so elementary, that I couldn’t possibly trust one word of Walvin’s book. Nor should any of you.
If Walvin thinks that “Christ could be saved,” by whom might that be accomplished? If Jesus Christ is one of the saved, who is the Savior? Perhaps Walvin could reflect on that name “Christ” — does he think that it’s Jesus’s surname, and that especially respectful people would refer to him as Mr. Christ?
If “throughout” his evangelistic sermons D. L. Moody called Mr. Christ a sinner, I would love to see just one example of it. But there isn’t one. It is not, as Jensen said, “vanishingly unlikely,” it is impossible. Moody’s entire theology — like that of every other orthodox Christian — was completely governed by his belief that, as the letter to the Hebrews says, “We have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.”
James Walvin appears to be a Briton, in any case has certainly lived a number of years in Great Britain, and moreover has received a doctorate in history. How can he not know that the English prayer book was composed, issued, and mandated — with the Latin Mass correspondingly forbidden — nearly two hundred years before John Newton’s birth?
As Tim Larsen noted in the essay that got me onto this subject, “It takes a village” to disseminate ignorance this gross: James Walvin wrote the sentences I have quoted, but no peer reviewer noticed anything wrong, no editor, no copy editor — not one person in the whole complex process at the University of California Press knew enough even to question the claim that an evangelical preacher regularly proclaimed that Jesus Christ is a sinner, or that the average Church of England parish in the eighteenth century featured priests mumbling prayers in Latin. Never at any point was it thought necessary to have a manuscript on an English Christian hymn looked at by someone with an elementary knowledge of English Christianity.
Finally: Why — why, oh why, oh why — do people (scholars especially!) insist on writing books on subjects that they cannot be bothered to learn the basic facts about? Write on something you’re sufficiently interested in to learn about, for heaven’s sake!

P.S. People often ask, “Don’t these presses have fact-checkers?” No. No, they don’t. Many magazines have fact-checkers — the ones at Harper’s, for instance, work me like a dog to justify my every claim — but publishing companies, even academic presses, typically don’t. They hope that their copy-editors — almost always freelancers — will catch howlers, but that’s about it. Certain kinds of books, biographies for instance, will get read by lawyers, but that’s not about avoiding statements that are wrong, that’s about avoiding statements that are actionable. (When I was writing my biography of C. S. Lewis a lawyer-reader flagged a comment I made about Charles Williams’s habit of asking pretty young women to sit on his lap so that his eros could be transformed miraculously into agape — Might Williams take exception to this statement, I was asked. I replied that, since he died in 1945, I didn’t think it likely.)

October 19, 2023

But even at night …

Tom Johnson:

Clockmakers, flush with commissions, let their horological imaginations run wild. They mounted every last thing they could think of on their clocks: trumpeting angels, wheels of fortune, planets and stars wheeling around in epicycles – take that, astrolabe – and panoplies of bells to add to the din of holy clanging. The still-extant clock of Wells Cathedral, constructed about 1390, is a carnival of time. A face of three concentric circles shows the 24 hours, the position of the sun and the phases of the moon, all decorated with stars, angels and depictions of the four cardinal winds. Every fifteen minutes, four knights come out to joust. Above the clock an automaton (‘Jack Blandifer’) kicks his heels on bells every quarter hour. In the 15th century an exterior clock was geared onto it: two axe-men stand and strike two more bells on the hour. Nequid pereat, runs the inscription – let nothing perish, no matter how whimsical.

Here is the marvelous clock of Wells Cathedral:

Wells clock

(Larger version, well worth inspecting, here.) And here, at least as admirable, is Simon Armitage’s glorious poem “Poetry”:

In Wells Cathedral there’s this ancient clock,
three parts time machine, one part zodiac.
Every fifteen minutes, knights on horseback
circle and joust, and for six hundred years

the same poor sucker riding counterways
has copped it full in the face with a lance.
To one side, some weird looking guy in a frock
back-heels a bell. Thus the quarter is struck.

It’s empty in here, mostly. There’s no God
to speak of — some bishops have said as much —
and five quid buys a person a new watch.
But even at night with the great doors locked

chimes sing out, and the sap who was knocked dead
comes cornering home wearing a new head.

July 4, 2023

patriotic effusion for Independence Day

I have always, I feel, been somewhat deficient in patriotism — I just don’t have the instinct for it, somehow — but listening to the recent Rest Is History series on the American Revolution got my red-white-and-blue blood up. (I say this, by the way, as a fully paid-up Wang — i.e., member of The Rest Is History Club.) George Washington had wooden teeth (ha ha ha) — Benjamin Franklin went around London “dispensing his wisdom” (ha ha ha) — Aren’t the colonists’ complaints obviously bogus? (ha ha ha) — Why do Americans have a holiday celebrating a press release? (ha ha ha) — Thomas Jefferson is a “phrasemaker” and the American Robespierre … wait, what? I don’t seem to recall Jefferson’s presiding over a Reign of Terror.

In general, I think Brits are the least trustworthy commenters on the United States — in any venue, from the left or the right, I avoid such commentary, because I know it will be filled with overconfident generalizations and smug condescension. Both of those faults arise from the writers’ belief that they have as it were a Special Relationship with the U.S.A. and can therefore interpret it authoritatively. (People from other nations might be even more critical but they are less likely to write or speak from that particular variety of smugness.) I think it telling that when Tom and Dominic did a series on the Irish quest for Home Rule they got an Irishman to guide them — Paul Rouse, who was great — and were highly deferential to his judgments, but when it came time to cover the American Revolution they saw no need for an American perspective.

At the very end there was a brief acknowledgment that George Washington did not become a tyrant when he had the opportunity to do so, and that that’s admirable, but then they immediately went on to talk about his owning of slaves. The overall tone of the episodes converged on a kind of ironic mockery, which I found disappointing not just because I’m an American (I think) but mainly because of its inaccuracy. The leaders of that Revolutionary generation were extraordinary men — it’s almost unimaginable that one moment in history, in so small a nation, would produce figures as prodigiously and variously gifted as Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the ever-underrated Madison. (Though Madison was a little too young to have much of a role in the Revolution proper, he was essential thereafter.)

For a better, clearer, juster view, I would recommend John J. Ellis’s excellent Founding Brothers, but even more than that an extraordinary book that is unaccountably out of print: Garry Wills’s Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment. No other work that I know of so fascinatingly illuminates the character of George Washington – and the way he was understood by his most thoughtful contemporaries. Thus this statue on the Lawn of the University of Virginia:

Note the fasces, which Washington is about to set aside – you can’t quite see it, but behind him is a plow. If, looking at that statue, you were to turn 180º, you’d see across the Lawn a companion statue, this of a seated Jefferson, gazing contemplatively at Washington — perhaps to admire, but perhaps to make sure Washington does indeed follow the example of Cincinnatus. For it is a model easier to invoke than to imitate.

In this spirit, we might also read an essay from 2021 by my friend Rick Gibson on Washington’s Farewell Address.

Let’s conclude by delivering to these unrepentant monarchists some home truths, as articulated by Jefferson in a letter to John Langdon (1810):

When I observed however that the king of England was a cypher, I did not mean to confine the observation to the mere individual now on that throne. The practice of kings marrying only into the families of kings, has been that of Europe for some centuries. Now, take any race of animals, confine them in idleness & inaction whether in a stye, a stable, or a stateroom, pamper them with high diet, gratify all their sexual appetites, immerse them in sensualities, nourish their passions, let every thing bend before them, & banish whatever might lead them to think, & in a few generations they become all body & no mind: & this too by a law of nature, by that very law by which we are in the constant practice of changing the characters & propensities of the animals we raise for our own purposes. Such is the regimen in raising kings, & in this way they had gone on for centuries. While in Europe, I often amused myself with contemplating the characters of the then reigning sovereigns of Europe. Louis the XVIth was a fool, of my own knowledge, & in despite of the answers made for him at his trial. The king of Spain was a fool, & of Naples the same. They passed their lives in hunting, & dispatched two couriers a week, 1000 miles, to let each other know what game they had killed the preceding days. The king of Sardinia was a fool. All these were Bourbons. The Queen of Portugal, a Braganza, was an idiot by nature & so was the king of Denmark. Their sons, as regents, exercised the powers of government. The king of Prussia, successor to the great Frederic, was a mere hog in body as well as in mind. Gustavus of Sweden, & Joseph of Austria were really crazy, & George of England you know was in a straight waistcoat.

And so on that note: All praise to the Founders, and confusion to degenerate monarchies!

P.S. This is unrelated to the diatribe above, but I can’t resist adding it. Adam Smith, the scholarly guest on the podcast, comments at one point that Benjamin Franklin’s only interest in George Whitefield was in determining the range at which he could project his voice. Franklin was certainly interested in that, but not in that only. Here’s my favorite passage in the whole of Franklin’s Autobiography:

Mr. Whitefield, in leaving us, went preaching all the way thro’ the colonies to Georgia. The settlement of that province had lately been begun, but, instead of being made with hardy, industrious husbandmen, accustomed to labour, the only people fit for such an enterprise, it was with families of broken shop-keepers and other insolvent debtors, many of indolent and idle habits, taken out of the jails, who, being set down in the woods, unqualified for clearing land, and unable to endure the hardships of a new settlement, perished in numbers, leaving many helpless children unprovided for. The sight of their miserable situation inspir’d the benevolent heart of Mr. Whitefield with the idea of building an Orphan House there, in which they might be supported and educated. Returning northward, he preach’d up this charity, and made large collections, for his eloquence had a wonderful power over the hearts and purses of his hearers, of which I myself was an instance.

I did not disapprove of the design, but, as Georgia was then destitute of materials and workmen, and it was proposed to send them from Philadelphia at a great expense, I thought it would have been better to have built the house here, and brought the children to it. This I advis’d; but he was resolute in his first project, rejected my counsel, and I therefore refus’d to contribute. I happened soon after to attend one of his sermons, in the course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me asham’d of that, and determin’d me to give the silver; and he finish’d so admirably, that I empty’d my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.

May 31, 2023

Cities 4: Secondary Epic

My previous post discussed the way Augustine sets up his City of God as antithetical to the Aeneid. Auden’s witty poem “Secondary Epic” may be seen as a kind of pendant to Augustine’s critique. It focuses not on the prophetic narration of Anchises in Book VI, but rather on a complementary moment, the description in Book VIII of the Shield of Aeneas. About this description Auden has some questions:

How was your shield-making god to explain
Why his masterpiece, his grand panorama
Of scenes from the coming historical drama
Of an unborn nation, war after war,
All the birthdays needed to pre-ordain
The Octavius the world was waiting for,
Should so abruptly, mysteriously stop,
What cause could he show why he didn’t foresee
The future beyond 31 B.C.,
Why a curtain of darkness should finally drop
On Carians, Morini, Gelonians with quivers,
Converging Romeward in abject file,
Euphrates, Araxes and similar rivers
Learning to flow in a latinate style,
And Caesar be left where prophecy ends,
Inspecting troops and gifts for ever?
Wouldn’t Aeneas have asked: — ‘What next?
After this triumph, what portends?’

And then the poem concludes, returning to Anchises:

No, Virgil, no:
Behind your verse so masterfully made
We hear the weeping of a Muse betrayed.
Your Anchises isn’t convincing at all:
It’s asking too much of us to be told
A shade so long-sighted, a father who knows
That Romulus will build a wall,
Augustus found an Age of Gold,
And is trying to teach a dutiful son
The love of what will be in the long run,
Would mention them both but not disclose
(Surely no prophet could afford to miss,
No man of destiny fail to enjoy
So clear a proof of Providence as this)
The names predestined for the Catholic boy
Whom Arian Odovacer will depose.

The names of that “Catholic boy”? Romulus Augustulus. What poet could resist the irony?

Auden borrows the title of his poem from A Preface to Paradise Lost, in which C. S. Lewis distinguishes primary epic — poems like the Iliad and Beowulf that show no obvious awareness that what they’re doing is, you know, epic — from secondary epic, which is always aware of its tradition its inheritance. Poems like the Aeneid and Paradise Lost are always gesturing towards their predecessors to make sure you know they are indeed epics. Secondary epics tend therefore to be at least somewhat polemical, in tension with their predecessors, because after all if those predecessors has said everything and said it perfectly there would be no need for later poems. Virgil has therefore set himself up to make an argument through his narrative, an argument about the destiny of Rome and the nature of heroism, and Auden joins Augustine in pointing out that the argument doesn’t work: No poet writing in the midst of history can plausibly convince us that a historical city is eternal and that heroic service to it can therefore have eternal consequences. The Pax Romana is not a telos, it’s merely an event among other events, subject to varying interpretations and to the power of change. “No, Virgil, no.”

May 29, 2023

Cities 3: hypothesis

Here’s the hypothesis I’m working with now: The problem with every theology of culture is that “culture” isn’t a biblical concept — isn’t clearly rooted in salvation history. And that is why I’m turning to Augustine. The idea of the two cities is deeply rooted in the biblical story and may be generative of certain important ideas that we can’t get through the use of a term like “culture.”

I think this is especially true because, as David Knowles points out, Augustine really isn’t interested in political theology, or for that matter in ecclesiology. In Book XV he says, “I classify the human race into two branches [generis]: the one consists of those who live by human standards, the other of those who live according to God’s will. I also call these two classes the two cities, speaking allegorically [mystice]. By two cities I mean two societies of human beings [duas societates hominum].” Two societies — this is what we might call a sociological or an ethnographic inquiry, and that’s much of what we’re after, or anyway I’m after, in a theology of culture. But, as James Davison Hunter says, with an emphasis on the symbols by which a given society is constituted and sustained. This is also where — see my previous post — Augustine’s application of rhetorical strategies to salvation history is especially imaginative and potent. I find remarkable and stimulating the idea that God’s providential shaping of history is a rhetorical act. For one thing, it implies that cities are in a sense rhetorical acts, saturated with symbolic and even archetypal meaning.

Also: it’s somehow typical of Augustine that when he’s trying to think sociologically he looks first at the city that Cain founded and then at the City of God in Revelation 21, and hangs his whole inquiry on a line suspended between the two. What a peculiar and fascinating mind, and that’s why, I suppose, we keep returning to him.

P.S. I wrote a bit about why I’m pursuing this project here over at my Buy Me a Coffee page.

March 28, 2023

Jenkins

Forthcoming from my friend and colleague Philip Jenkins. A kind of intro or overview here. I’m excited that this is coming.

January 2, 2023

Dominic Sandbrook:

There’s no way our podcast, presented by two white Oxbridge-educated middle-aged men, would be commissioned by the BBC these days. Instead of just letting us talk, they would bring in some alleged comedian to make it ‘accessible’ to younger audiences.

And not a single week would pass without the appearance of some ultra-woke U.S. academic to lecture us about slavery or to flagellate us about the imagined sins of the British Empire.

The great irony is that while the average age of Radio 4 listeners is 56, more than half of our listeners are under 34. So if the BBC want to know what’s happened to its younger audience, the answer is that they have signed up to The Rest Is History.

That’s about the size of it.

November 25, 2022

ark head

Venkatesh Rao:

One mental model for this condition is what I call ark head, as in Noah’s Ark. We’ve given up on the prospect of actually solving or managing most of the snowballing global problems and crises we’re hurtling towards. Or even meaningfully comprehending the gestalt. We’ve accepted that some large fraction of those problems will go unsolved and unmanaged, and result in a drastic but unevenly distributed reduction in quality of life for most of humanity over the next few decades. We’ve concluded that the rational response is to restrict our concerns to a small subset of local reality — an ark — and compete for a shrinking set of resources with others doing the same. We’re content to find and inhabit just one zone of positivity, large enough for ourselves and some friends. We cross our fingers and hope our little ark is outside the fallout radius of the next unmanaged crisis, whether it is a nuclear attack, aliens landing, a big hurricane, or (here in California), a big wildfire or earthquake. […]

… it’s gotten significantly harder to care about the state of the world at large. A decade of culture warring and developing a mild-to-medium hatred for at least 2/3 of humanity will do that to you. General misanthropy is not a state conducive to productive thinking about global problems. Why should you care about the state of the world beyond your ark? It’s mostly full of all those other assholes, who are the wrong kind of deranged and insane. At least you and I, in this ark, are the right kind of deranged and insane. It’s worth saving ourselves from the flood, but those other guys can look out for themselves.

I think this is largely true, but I think some other things as well — primarily that any such retreat-to-the-ark is an inevitable response to the inflexible limits of our Dunbar’s Number minds.

“That’s perhaps the way out — keep trying to tell stories beyond ark-scale until one succeeds in expanding your horizons again.” Nope. We don’t need our horizons expanded, we need our attention narrowed and focused.

November 24, 2022

A German map of the Valley of the Kings, from the Bodleian Map Room Blog.

September 16, 2022

Ken Burns’s ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’ – Dara Horn:

Burns has a soft spot for Franklin and Eleanor, the subjects of one of his prior films, and here he treats them with kid gloves, blaming most of the missteps on State Department antagonists. The series makes a point of establishing the bigoted, racist atmosphere of the U.S. at the time, showing Nazi rallies in New York, clips of the popular anti-Semitic broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin, and colorized footage of a Nazi-themed summer camp in New Jersey. But the film goes out of its way to outline the pros and cons of Roosevelt’s decisions, leaving his reputation intact. To be clear, Roosevelt is an American icon and deserves to remain one. The problem with this approach is less about Roosevelt (there are plenty of convincing arguments in his favor, not least that he won the war) than about how it contradicts the rest of the film’s premise. The goal of the series is seemingly to reset America’s moral compass, using hindsight to expose the costs of being a bystander. But every bystander, including Roosevelt, can explain his choices. The film’s refusal to judge the commander in chief plays into a larger political pattern: offering generosity only toward those we admire.

Or whom we perceive to be on Our Team. The whole essay is excellent, but I especially appreciate the unpacking of this point: “Democracies, for all their strengths, are ill-equipped for identifying and responding to evil.”

September 13, 2022

how history doesn’t work

This is great from Freddie:

The bigger thing for me, beyond the death of art and criticism I mean, is just how easy it is to inspire identitarians, just what they’re willing to consider a major political success. They are the cheapest dates imaginable.

Then he quotes the headline of an article: “Disney’s black Ariel isn’t just about diverse representation. It’s also about undoing past wrongs” — and asks:

Is it? Is it really? The article is profoundly unconvincing on this score. Yes, Disney did some racist portrayals in the past. That’s bad. I don’t see how you’re evening up the score by putting more Black people in your films, really; history doesn’t work that way.

This is the key: “history doesn’t work that way.” History doesn’t work that way. History doesn’t work that way! Can we just grasp this point?

August 6, 2022

“One Manner of Law,” by Marilynne Robinson:

Hugh Peters, most disparaged of Puritans, wanted to exclude poor artists from taxation. He proposed that there be peacemakers appointed to settle disputes before anyone could be arrested or imprisoned. Writing as someone who was forced to flee England under the threat of persecution, and whose fellow dissenters had experienced prison and worse, he does not call for any equivalent punishment or any punishment at all for his (temporarily) defeated persecutors, but instead for an alleviation of the punitive bent in the assertion of public authority.

A fascinating historical essay.

August 4, 2022

The New York Times:

Born in Birmingham, Ala., Dr. [Freeman] Hrabowski came of age in the thick of the Jim Crow era. The notion that Black children didn’t deserve a quality education brought out the fighter in the self-described “fat, nerdy kid who could only attack a math problem” at a very young age.

He was 12 when he participated in the historic Children’s March inspired by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. He was among the hundreds of boys and girls arrested while they marched for equal rights, and spent five days in jail.

Dr. Hrabowski has largely declined to discuss the details of what he saw and experienced in the Birmingham jail. Some of it will forever remain unspeakable, he said. But in an interview, he recalled a visit from Dr. King.

“What you do this day will have an impact on children not yet born,” Dr. Hrabowski remembered him telling the jailed children.

I was five at the time, living about two miles from the site of the march. Children just a few years older than me were thrown in jail. God bless Dr. Hrabowski. He has fought the good fight for a long time.

July 31, 2022

R.I.P. Bill Russell, one of the greatest Americans of our era — the best team athlete in American history, and an icon of Black Americans’ quest for full civil rights. One not-so-random fact worth remembering: Bill Russell’s father Charlie — raised in Louisiana, as his son would be until age eight — in his childhood knew people who had been enslaved. As I keep saying: The past is not dead etc.

June 29, 2022

The Best and the Brightest

71EJ8Iv6KEL

I’ve been reading David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest for the first time in 40 years or more, and returning to it after all this time my primary response is that it has been somewhat overrated.

To be fair, Halberstam has an incredibly difficult task, because in order to pursue his main goal, which is to explain how it is that “the best and the brightest” of American society, the intellectual elite of the nation – highly educated, exceptionally intelligent, shrewdly perceptive – nevertheless managed to immerse us in a quagmire in Vietnam, he has to give us huge chunks of the history of Southeast Asia in the 20th century. He chose to to do this by introducing each chunk of history only when it appears to be necessary to the stage of the narrative that he is in. The relevant history gets doled out in bits and pieces – a little bit when we’re hearing about LBJ, a little bit when we’re told about the appointment of an ambassador, a little bit when we’re learning about the relevant figures in the State Department or the Department of Defense. We hear a lot about the French in Indochina and how that involvement shaped the later American involvement before we hear about the Communist takeover in China, which was the very event that made the U.S. so willing to intervene in Southeast Asia. This kind of historical mosaic can be an effective technique – it’s what Rebecca West does in what I have said many times is the best book of the twentieth century, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon – but it is exceptionally difficult to pull off, and I don’t think Halberstam does it well at all. As I read I struggled to assemble all his little chunks of historical narrative into a coherent arc or structure.

There are also a good many errors, mostly minor. For instance, Halberstam writes of “the great English novelist Joyce Carey,” but his name is spelled Cary, he was born and mostly raised in Ireland and is therefore better described as Anglo-Irish, and I doubt anyone ever called him great. Another problem is repetition: we are twice told, in detail, the story of how General Maxwell Taylor was thought by the Kennedys to have resigned from the Eisenhower administration when in fact he retired at the end of his term.

This is a book whose thesis is strong, original, and highly significant, and whose weaknesses in exposition and development have therefore been perhaps too readily excused. I don’t totally quarrel with that perspective. The great strength of the book is the same as that of Breaking Bad: it shows how you can get from one moral condition to another radically different moral condition without ever planning or even wanting to go there. Halberstam is especially good at character sketches: he shows how people of vastly different personality types – Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, JFK himself – can nevertheless all be caught up, in their different ways, in a situation that seems to have its own momentum, a momentum that could only be arrested by people of exceptional self-awareness and even more exceptional courage and decisiveness.

That’s a lesson worth learning, though, of course, no one in politics ever learns it.

McGeorge Bundy John F Kennedy 1962

June 2, 2022

Friday 4 July 1662 (The Diary of Samuel Pepys):

Up by five o’clock, and after my journall put in order, to my office about my business, which I am resolved to follow, for every day I see what ground I get by it. By and by comes Mr. Cooper, mate of the Royall Charles, of whom I intend to learn mathematiques, and do begin with him to-day, he being a very able man, and no great matter, I suppose, will content him. After an hour’s being with him at arithmetique (my first attempt being to learn the multiplication-table); then we parted till tomorrow.

That’s right: Pepys — a graduate of St. Paul’s School in London and a Bachelor of Arts from Cambridge University (Magdalene College) —, when he began his career as a civil servant, had to hire a tutor to teach him the times tables.

May 22, 2022

a story

In my first years at Wheaton College I had a colleague named Julius Scott. (He retired in 2000 and died in 2020. R.I.P.) Julius was a New Testament scholar, but earlier in life, in the 1960s, had been a Presbyterian pastor in Mississippi. He was raised in rural Georgia and loved the South, but he knew a good deal about our native region’s habitual sins also, and as the Civil Rights movement grew stronger and stronger, he understand that he had a reckoning to make. So he did.

After much prayer and study of Scripture, he decided that nothing could be more clear in Scripture, and nothing more foundational to Christian anthropology, than the belief that each and every human being is made in the image of God; that every human being is my neighbor; and that to “love your neighbor as yourself” is required of us all. Julius could not, therefore, avoid the conclusion that the Jim Crow laws common to the Southern states were incompatible with the Christian understanding of what human beings are and who our neighbors are; but even if those laws proved impossible to dislodge, and even if his pastoral colleagues thought them defensible, it was surely, certainly, indubitably necessary for all churches to welcome every one of God’s children who entered their doors, and to welcome them with open arms, making no distinction on the basis of race. When his presbytery — gathering of pastors in his region — next met, Julius felt that he had to speak up and say what he believed about these matters.

He did; and thus he entered into a lengthy season of hellish misery. He was prepared for the condemnation and shunning he received from almost every other member of the presbytery; what he wasn’t prepared for was what happened when word of his speech got out to the general public, I believe through a newspaper article: an ongoing barrage of threats against his life and the lives of his wife and children. For years, he told me, he had to sleep — and sleep came hard — with a loaded gun under his bed; the fear for his family didn’t wholly abate until he left Mississippi. (“I was afraid for my babies,” Julius said, and with those words the tears filled his eyes.) Of course he remained a pariah to most of his colleagues — and even the ones who respected him told him so in private, expressing their agreement with his theological conclusions only on condition that Julius never share their views with anyone else.

Think about that story for a while. Please understand that it’s not an uncommon one; and please understand, further, that Julius escaped with no worse than shunning and terror because he was white. (If you want to know more about Christians in Mississippi in that era, the persecuted and the persecutors alike, I recommend Charles Marsh’s book God’s Long Summer. And if you want to know what life in that era was like in Birmingham, Alabama, where I grew up, read Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home.)

Now: the next time you’re tempted to say that American Christians today experience hostility unprecedented in our nation’s history, and can escape condemnation only if they bow their knee to the dominant cultural norms; that it didn’t used to be like that, that decades ago no American Christian had to be hesitant about affirming the most elementary truths of the Christian faith — the next time you’re tempted to say all that, please, before you speak, remember Julius Scott.

March 30, 2022

John Gallagher:

The judges asked Thiess why he had become a werewolf – what benefits did it bring to a poor man like him? He explained that many decades ago he had accepted an enchanted drink offered to him in a tavern by a ‘scoundrel’ from Marienburg. The same man had taught him a blessing invoking the sun and the moon and how to cure sick people and animals. Thiess’s knowledge of herbs and charms had made him well known among his neighbours. He recalled that he took on his new identity calmly, but ‘hadn’t thought it would involve so much evil’.

I know, right? Same with me and being a professor.

March 2, 2022

from the TLS:

On my first visit to Moscow, I met one of Lenin’s embalmers. “When I began, the body was in a poor state”, said Styopa, whose expertise was the use of electricity. Skin grafts and a new partial-vacuum glass sarcophagus had helped to inhibit decay, but Styopa’s shock treatment had reversed it. “Once every two or three months, a high-voltage charge was applied to keep up the tone. But the first time we tried it I overestimated the power needed. Lenin suddenly sat up from the table, his arms shook, and his lips started to quiver. I thought he was going to speak. It was quite a shock. After that, we reduced the voltage.”

January 9, 2022

Sidney was right

Sir Philip Sidney:

I conclude, therefore, that [the poet] excels history, not only in furnishing the mind with knowledge, but in setting it forward to that which deserves to be called and accounted good; which setting forward, and moving to well-doing, indeed sets the laurel crown upon the poet as victorious, not only of the historian, but over the philosopher, howsoever in teaching it may be questionable. For suppose it be granted — that which I suppose with great reason may be denied — that the philosopher, in respect of his methodical proceeding, teach more perfectly than the poet, yet do I think that no man is so much Philophilosophos as to compare the philosopher in moving with the poet. And that moving is of a higher degree than teaching, it may by this appear, that it is well nigh both the cause and the effect of teaching; for who will be taught, if he be not moved with desire to be taught? And what so much good doth that teaching bring forth — I speak still of moral doctrine — as that it moves one to do that which it doth teach? For, as Aristotle says, it is not Gnosis but Praxis must be the fruit; and how Praxis cannot be, without being moved to practice, it is no hard matter to consider. The philosopher shows you the way, he informs you of the particularities, as well of the tediousness of the way, as of the pleasant lodging you shall have when your journey is ended, as of the many by-turnings that may divert you from your way; but this is to no man but to him that will read him, and read him with attentive, studious painfulness; which constant desire whosoever has in him, has already passed half the hardness of the way, and therefore is beholding to the philosopher but for the other half. Nay, truly, learned men have learnedly thought, that where once reason has so much overmastered passion as that the mind has a free desire to do well, the inward light each mind has in itself is as good as a philosopher’s book; since in nature we know it is well to do well, and what is well and what is evil, although not in the words of art which philosophers bestow upon us; for out of natural conceit the philosophers drew it. But to be moved to do that which we know, or to be moved with desire to know, hoc opus, hic labor est.

January 6, 2022

361 years ago today

Later they “affirmed to the last that if they had been deceived, the Lord himself was their deceiver.” Let the reader understand.

December 30, 2021

the mirror

The good folks at Plough have produced an e-book featuring two early Christian texts, and Rowan Williams has written an introduction to it that I believe essential reading for Christians in our moment. I love this kind of piece — a clear and patient exposition of ideas from the past that never once mentions current events but brilliantly illuminates the questions that face us. Please do read it all, but here are some choice nuggets:

“If you look at the eyewitness accounts of martyrdom in these early centuries – documents like the wonderful record of the martyrs of Scilli in North Africa in AD 180 – you can see what the real issue was. These Christians, most of them probably domestic slaves, had to explain to the magistrate that they were quite happy to pray for the imperial state, and even to pay taxes, but that they could not grant the state their absolute allegiance…. What made their demand new and shocking was that it was not made on the basis of ethnic identity, but on the bare fact of conviction and conscience. For the first time in human history, individuals claimed the liberty to define the limits of their political loyalty, and to test that loyalty by spiritual and ethical standards.”
“The early Christian movement … was not revolutionary in the sense that it was trying to change the government. Its challenge was more serious: it was the claim to hold any and every government to account, to test its integrity, and to give and withhold compliance accordingly. But it would be wrong to think of this, as we are tempted to do in our era, in terms of individual conscience. It was about the right of a community to set its own standards and to form its members in the light of what had been given to them by an authority higher than the empire. The early Christians believed that if Jesus of Nazareth was ‘Lord,’ no one else could be lord over him, and therefore no one could overrule his authority.”
“The theology of the early centuries thus comes very directly out of this one great central conviction about political authority: if Jesus is Lord, no one else ultimately is, and so those who belong with Jesus, who share his life through the common life of the worshiping community, have a solidarity and a loyalty that goes beyond the chance identity of national or political life…. Humans love largely because of fellow-feeling, but God’s love is such that it never depends on having something in common. The creator has in one sense nothing in common with his creation – how could he? But he is completely free to exercise his essential being, which is love, wherever he wills. And this teaches us that we too must learn to love beyond the boundaries of common interest and natural sympathy and, like God, love those who don’t seem to have anything in common with us.”
“One of the lasting legacies of the early church, then, is the recognition that doctrine, prayer, and ethics don’t exist in tidy separate compartments: each one shapes the others. And in the church in any age, we should not be surprised if we become hazy about our doctrine at a time when we are less clear about our priorities as a community, or if we become less passionate about service, forgiveness, and peace when we have stopped thinking clearly about the true and eternal character of God.”

November 17, 2021

against the state

Justin E. H. Smith:

Who among these groups is “Indigenous”? We might in this case feel this is the wrong question to ask, but this feeling may in turn help to prime us for the further realization that the encounter zone of the Slavic, Turkic, Tungusic, and Paleo-Siberian peoples is in fact fairly representative of every corner of the inhabited globe, even those we take to be the most hermetic and (therefore?) the most pristinely representative of humanity in its original state. In their half-posthumous new book, the anthropologist David Graeber (1961-2020) and the archeologist David Wengrow (1972-) suggest that “even” the pre-contact Amazonian groups we generally take to conform most closely to the definition of “tribe” or “band” were likely aware of the Andean empires to their west, and may also have had, at an earlier time, relatively complex state structures that they consciously abandoned because they were lucid enough to come to see these as inimical to human thriving. The groups Europeans first encountered in the rainforest, in other words, may also have been splinters that broke away from tyrannies, just like the Sakha fleeing the Mongols, and to some extent also like the Mountain Time Zone libertarians grumbling about the tax agents from the mythical city of Washington.

It may be that more or less all societies that appear to us as “pre-state” would be more accurately described as “post-state” — even if the people who constitute them are not in fact fleeing from the center to the margins of a real tyranny, they are nonetheless living out their statelessness as a conscious implementation of an ideal of the human good. […]

This is the sense of Pierre Clastres’s “society against the state”: societies that lack state structures are not in the “pre-” stage of anything, but are in fact actively working to keep such structures from rising up and taking permanent hold.

I’ll be starting Graeber and Wengrow’s book soon, but I suspect that — like much I have been reading in the last couple of years — it will further incline me to the suspicion that there is no remedy for technocracy that does not rely heavily and consistently on the best practices of the anarchist tradition. It’s time for a renewal of Christian anarchism — one that begins by accepting the clear fact that Anarchy and Christianity is Jacques Ellul’s worst book, by miles.

October 16, 2021

bad dispensations

The idea that we must choose between two intolerant illiberalisms, one on the Right and one on the Left, is, it seems to me, increasingly common today. It was also quite common in the 1930s. For instance, in 1937 the British House of Commons was debating whether or how to intervene in the Spanish Civil War, and a number of M.P.s insisted that it was necessary to choose between the Fascists and the Communists. But one Member of the House replied,

I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazi-ism, I would choose Communism. I hope not to be called upon to survive in the world under a Government of either of those dispensations…. It is not a question of opposing Nazi-ism or Communism; it is a question of opposing tyranny in whatever form it presents itself; and, having a strong feeling in regard to the preservation of individual rights as against Governments, and as I do not find in either of these two Spanish factions which are at war any satisfactory guarantee that the ideas which I personally care about, and to which I have been brought up in this House to attach some importance, would be preserved, I am not able to throw myself in this headlong fashion into the risk of having to fire cannon immediately on the one side or the other of this trouble…. I cannot feel any enthusiasm for these rival creeds.

The Member who so refused to make that choice was Winston Churchill. When many thought that liberalism and democracy were unsustainable, were not long for this world, he stood up for liberalism and democracy anyway. That was the wise course then, and it’s the wise course today.

October 1, 2021

taverns and churches

Nicholas Orme:

Looking at the rows and rows of seats in an English church, some of them dating back to the 15th century, invites questions. Why so many? Were they ever all filled, apart from an occasional wedding or funeral? The assumption is that they were full on Sundays, at least up to 1689, while parish-church attendance was compulsory. We tend to visualise an age of faith, especially up to the Reformation: a “world we have lost.”

There were, indeed, larger medieval congregations than today. Churchgoing was a valued social occasion when, especially in the countryside, there were few others. But the rows of seats are also misleading. They were put in so that people would have their own seats rather than take whatever was available. The congregation was laid out in an order of social precedence: gentry or merchants in the chancel or side chapels, yeomanry or citizens in the front of the nave, and lesser folk behind them.

They were almost all there on Easter Day, which, up to 1549, was a compulsory day of attendance to receive one’s single annual communion. Christmas and Whit Sunday were also obligatory days, although their congregations seem to have been a little smaller.

Attendance on an ordinary Sunday in medieval England was another matter, however. Contemporaries were clear that many people were absent. A succession of archbishops and bishops raged about the fact. The poet Alexander Barclay wrote in 1508: “the stalls of the tavern are stuffed with drinkers when in the church stalls [you] shall see few or none.”

September 24, 2021

waiting

I made an interesting discovery yesterday. (I’m sure others have already noticed it, but the insight is new to me.) Many readers will know this famous passage from Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”:

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “n****r,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

I have taught this essay many, many times over the years, and I have always zeroed in on this passage as an excellent illustration of the use of imitative form. King wants his (largely white) readers to know what it feels like to wait … and wait … and wait … — so he makes those readers wait … and wait … and wait … for the conclusion of the 316-word sentence that’s at the heart of this paragraph.

Here’s my discovery. Right now I’m teaching Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, and in the final chapter of that mesmerizing book he writes this, an account of his experience as an escaped slave in the North when the Fugitive Slave Act was in effect:

I have been frequently asked how I felt when I found myself in a free State. I have never been able to answer the question with any satisfaction to myself. It was a moment of the highest excitement I ever experienced. I suppose I felt as one may imagine the unarmed mariner to feel when he is rescued by a friendly man-of-war from the pursuit of a pirate. In writing to a dear friend, immediately after my arrival at New York, I said I felt like one who had escaped a den of hungry lions. This state of mind, however, very soon subsided; and I was again seized with a feeling of great insecurity and loneliness. I was yet liable to be taken back, and subjected to all the tortures of slavery. This in itself was enough to damp the ardor of my enthusiasm. But the loneliness overcame me. There I was in the midst of thousands, and yet a perfect stranger; without home and without friends, in the midst of thousands of my own brethren — children of a common Father, and yet I dared not to unfold to any one of them my sad condition. I was afraid to speak to any one for fear of speaking to the wrong one, and thereby falling into the hands of money-loving kidnappers, whose business it was to lie in wait for the panting fugitive, as the ferocious beasts of the forest lie in wait for their prey. The motto which I adopted when I started from slavery was this — “Trust no man!” I saw in every white man an enemy, and in almost every colored man cause for distrust. It was a most painful situation; and, to understand it, one must needs experience it, or imagine himself in similar circumstances. Let him be a fugitive slave in a strange land — a land given up to be the hunting-ground for slaveholders — whose inhabitants are legalized kidnappers — where he is every moment subjected to the terrible liability of being seized upon by his fellowmen, as the hideous crocodile seizes upon his prey! — I say, let him place himself in my situation — without home or friends — without money or credit — wanting shelter, and no one to give it — wanting bread, and no money to buy it, — and at the same time let him feel that he is pursued by merciless men-hunters, and in total darkness as to what to do, where to go, or where to stay, — perfectly helpless both as to the means of defence and means of escape, — in the midst of plenty, yet suffering the terrible gnawings of hunger, — in the midst of houses, yet having no home, — among fellow-men, yet feeling as if in the midst of wild beasts, whose greediness to swallow up the trembling and half-famished fugitive is only equalled by that with which the monsters of the deep swallow up the helpless fish upon which they subsist, — I say, let him be placed in this most trying situation, — the situation in which I was placed, — then, and not till then, will he fully appreciate the hardships of, and know how to sympathize with, the toil-worn and whip-scarred fugitive slave.

A brilliant paragraph ending with a 239-word sentence that does exactly what MLK’s still-longer sentence would do more than a century later. I can’t help but think that MLK had this passage from Douglass in mind, if only unconsciously. Where Douglass uses dashes MLK uses semicolons; where Douglass uses “let him” MLK uses “when” — but the strategy and the effect are the same: holding the reader at a point of tension that the writer will offer release from only when the point is well-made. (The ultimate example of this strategy is Wagner’s use of the Tristan chord, which he resolves after fours hours or so, but only a madman would take the business that far.) “Notice how tense you were as you were waiting for the conclusion to that sentence? Imagine that intensified and prolonged by a factor of ten thousand.”

August 2, 2021

unknown unknowns

In the first printing of my biography of the Book of Common Prayer, I say that Thomas Cranmer was a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. This is incorrect. It was Jesus College, Cambridge.

Now, I knew perfectly well that Cranmer was a Cambridge man. I just had a brain fart when I put him in Oxford. But the error has still nagged at me. I keep thinking: Would I have done that if I were English? That is, would the difference between Oxford and Cambridge be so vivid in an English person’s mind, especially an educated English person, that such a brain fart would be impossible? Or was it just a brain fart? Maybe in other circumstances I could with equal ease write that, say, Clarence Thomas’s J.D. is from Harvard or that FDR attended Yale.

I can’t be sure. But the whole episode has made me more aware of all the things natives of a country know that foreigners, even affectionate and well-informed foreigners, have no clue about. My Cranmer error has had me musing about the fact that, while my academic speciality is 20th-century British literature, I may be completely, blissfully (or not so blissfully) ignorant about all sorts of matters concerning the world my writers grew up in that would be obvious to natives of their country.

Indeed I know I have such blanks in my knowledge. When I produced a critical edition of Auden’s long poem The Age of Anxiety, I annotated this passage:

Listen courteously to us
Four reformers who have founded — why not? —
The Gung-Ho Group, the Ganymede Club
For homesick young angels, the Arctic League
Of Tropical Fish, the Tomboy Fund
For Blushing Brides and the Bide-a-wees
Of Sans-Souci, assembled again
For a Think-Fest …

Here’s what I wrote:

These titles are only partly explicable but are meant to suggest, ironically, that the four new acquaintances are the sort of people who would create social organizations devoted to good cheer and moral improvement. Ganymede was a beautiful young mortal who was abducted by Zeus to serve as the gods’ cupbearer; Auden may also have remembered the Junior Ganymede Club frequented by Jeeves and his fellow valets in the novels of P. G. Wodehouse. “Bide-a-wee” is a Scots phrase meaning “stay a while.” “Sans-souci” means “without care.”

None of this is wrong … but: that excellent writer (and biographer of Auden) Richard Davenport-Hines wrote me to say that

Sans Souci (in addition to being Frederick the Great’s summer palace at Potsdam) was together with Bide-a-Wee a common name, snobbishly mocked, given to cheap bungalows at down-market English seaside resorts to which lower-middle-class people might retire after a working life as a bank-teller, clerk in a town hall, supervisor in a small workshop, station-master on a small railroad, etc. This would be an immediate association to English readers of the 1940s, or to anyone of my generation.

I wanted to smack myself for forgetting, or neglecting, Frederick’s summer palace, but that other stuff? I had no idea. And that is extremely distressing to me.

Which leads me to my recently completed summer reading project:

Five thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine pages later, I know so much more than I did about the social history of postwar Britain: random people of brief notoriety, appliances, food products, radio and TV shows, catchphrases etc. etc. The dark question remaining, though, is: How much of it will I be able to remember?

Indeed: Will I even realize, when coming across an item unfamiliar to me, that I could look it up in these books? I am often haunted by a shrewd point C. S. Lewis makes in his Studies in Words: sometimes words change their meanings in ways that don’t call themselves to our attention. Using the current meanings of those words, we can make sense of old sentences — just not the sense that the authors intended, or that readers of their era would have readily identified.

Still, I am making progress, and Sandbrook’s books, while perhaps less scholarly than Kynaston’s in some respects, are wonderfully well-written and perfectly paced. They were a joy to read.

There’s one more problem, though. Sandbrook’s project is ongoing — he wants to keep drawing closer to the present day. But …

The first book in the series appeared in 2005 and covers seven years in 892 pages;
The second book in the series appeared in 2006 and covers six years in 954 pages;
The third book in the series appeared in 2010 and covers four years in 755 pages;
The fourth book in the series appeared in 2012 and covers five years in 970 pages;
The fifth book in the series appeared in 2019 and covers three years in 940 pages.

At that rate of progression I will be long dead by the time Sandbrook gets to Tony Blair.

June 20, 2021

giving breath back to the dead

Justin E. H. Smith:

History in general is easily manipulable, and can always be applied for the pursuit of present goals, whatever these may be. It has long seemed to me that one of the more noble uses of history is to help us convince ourselves of the contingency of our present categories and practices. And it is for this reason, principally, that I am not satisfied with seeing history-of-philosophy curricula and conferences “diversified” as if seventeenth-century Europe were itself subject to our current DEI directives.

One particularly undesirable consequence of such use of history for the present is that it invites and encourages your political opponents likewise to marshall it for their own present ends. And in this way history becomes just another forked node of presentist Discourse — the foreign and unassimilable lives of all of those who actually lived in 1619 or 1776 are covered over. But history, when done most rigorously and imaginatively, gives breath back to the dead, and honors them in their humanity, not least by acknowledging and respecting the things they cared about, rather than imposing our own fleeting cares on them. Eventually, moreover, a thorough and comprehensive survey of the many expressions of otherness of which human cultures are capable in turn enables us, to speak with Seamus Heaney in his elegant translation of Beowulf, to “assay the hoard”: that is, to take stock of the full range of the human, and to begin to discern the commonalities behind the differences.

Anyone who happens to know what my most recent book was about will not be surprised at how vigorously I nod my head at this.

June 4, 2021

Berlins

SPYberlin2

One of the best stories in Michael Ignatieff’s biography of Isaiah Berlin involves a luncheon hosted at 10 Downing Street in 1944. Berlin had been for almost the whole of the war living in the USA, socializing and schmoozing and conspiring in his inimitable fashion and then sending back briskly incisive weekly reports on American attitudes towards the war effort and towards Great Britain in general. Churchill appreciated those reports very much and was pleased to have the opportunity to meet the man who had written them.

But when he started asking his guest questions about America, he was surprised and puzzled by the vagueness and diffidence of the answers. Eventually, having gotten nowhere and feeling a bit desperate, the Prime Minister asked him what he thought was the best thing he had written.

Came the reply: “White Christmas.”

Isaiah Berlin was in Washington. The P.M.’s luncheon guest, it turned out, was Irving.

Irving Berlin jpg