Yuku free message boards

misterpessimistic: But much of what I have read so far in the book suggests to me that the church either collaborated with or tolerated the actions of those who would persecute groups not conforming to the church doctrine.

I think that's a fair accusation, and one of the points on which I would hold the Church culpable is that it did so much to contribute to the social situation and so little to curb violence and unrest as it had prior to the turn of the millenium.

Where I probably differ is in my estimation of how some other institution would have fared in the Church's place. Part of the underlying problem, as I see it, is that the Church was attempting to perform double duty, attending not only to the souls of its constituency, but also serving as the social and political foundation of the feudal system. And if you look at specific instances during which the Church collaborated in and tolerated violent repraisal, those repraisal's almost always do more to to benefit the feudal structure of society than they do to further any theological goal.

Had a secular institution in the same position tried to do what the Church did (that is, solidify and maintain the social structure of medieval Europe -- and on a scale that rivalled the Roman Empire), it would have behaved in much the same way. There would have been some differences in methodology, of course, and those differences probably would have resulted in some vast historical differences, but I doubt that they would have resulted in less violence or persecution. What the Church was always fighting with the Inquisition was revolutionary thought, and revolutionary thought is no less threatening to a secular government than it is to a theodicy.

He mentions the Jews, the Albigensians and Vaudois. The witches were just the latest craze of persecutions that drew the attentions of the church, and specifically of the Dominican order.

It seems he implies a continuation of those earlier persecutions, not by directly tying witchcraft to those sects, but as a new form of heresy which they wanted the authority to persecute. But for what reason were these persecutions desired? To convert the heretics and spread the religion as I see it.

First off, there was, so far as I know of, no persecution of Jews organized by the Church. Anti-semetic persecution was (and has continued to be) a continual phenomenon in Europe, but it's almost always the result of a popular outbreak. As with the other cases, difference of religion is, at best, one factor among another. Jews often formed their own communities within communities, kept aloof from the Gentiles, and that aloofness was a continuing cause of distrust among the Gentile populations of Europe. But probably more to the point are the economic differences between medieval Gentiles and Jews. Jewish custom permitted economic practices that were legally and morally barred from most Gentile citizens -- usuary, for example (cf. "The Merchant of Venice"), and the fact that Jews could practice certain forms of banking and hold Gentiles in debt was a source of hostility that often broke into violence.

The witch-crazes differ from the Inquisitional persecutions and the Albigensian crusade in a number of significant ways. Duration and extent are two of them. The use of judicial torture and the prosecution of a population that did not openly avow a heretical doctrine is another. Yet another is that the witches were not an organized body, where as the Vaudois and Cathari (of which the Albigenses were a branch) were both centralized and evangelical. In fact, prior to the Albigensian crusade, the Cathari had held several councils in expectation of eventually replacing the Church. Moreover, the suppression of witchcraft began with a reversal of the Church's opinion on the reality of witchcraft -- there's nothing comparable in the history of the Inquisition. That doesn't justify the methodology of the Inquisition, but the differences do, I think, complicate any attempt to draw conclusions that are applicable to both the Holy Office and the witch-crazes.

Trevor-Roper's point, I think, is not that the witch-craze is a direct continuation of the Church's struggle against heresy. The witch-crazes have their origin in the Inquisition, but it isn't the same phenomenon carried over to a different era and applied to a different crowd.

me: And, again, I think we can go back to the fact that the same religion was dominant for more than a thousand years before the witch-crazes. Why, then, weren't there witch-crazes before the 16th century?
Mr. P: Why were there no Crusades before the 11th Century? This aggression by a religious establishment is not restricted to the Witch Craze is it?

The principle I named before is applicable to the second question. This aggression isn't the unalloyed product of religion. Political considerations almost always played a strong role, and indeed, the actual execution of the Crusades and the Inquisition usually points to politics as the dominate motivating factor. Cui bono? If the Church's real interest is to spread religion and save souls, do the Crusades and the witch-crazes make sense? But they do make a certain kind of macabre sense if your goal is to unify Europe, to secure economically and politically signficant territory, to limit the power of another empire, to stoke the economy, and to consolidate power.

As for the first question, very little in religion itself explains the eruption of the Crusades after the 11th century. There are quasi-religious explanation for how it was possible to organize a Crusade -- the precedent was set by the Peace of God and the Truce of God -- but as for the actual impetus to organize a Crusade, I think that's explicable mostly in terms of social, cultural, and political changes. Which was my point in asking the same question about the witch-crazes. The Church was changing during both periods, but those changes tended to be directed by social and political changes that were taking place, and almost none of the theological adaptations in themselves can explain the outbreak of a Crusade or a witch-craze. Social and political changes seem to serve much better as explanations for outbreaks.

Ayn Rand huhthis does not help me appreciate Aquinas any more!

Me neither, but it is an example of a secular thinker who regards Aquinas highly. And Rand is, by no means, the only one.

Do you hold that the church's oppressive dogma did NOT prohibit humanity from conceiving of these paradigms sooner than we did?

I think the matter is more complex than that. Do I wish that the Church had been more willing to consider the work of Galileo and his contemporaries? Yeah; of course. But do I think that we'd have gotten to modern science more quickly had it not been for the Church? By no means. The Church was the patron of nearly all scholarship and learning during a period when most people would have been just as willing to spend their time bashing one another over the head with cudgels. While the Church was later hostile to Renaissance philosophers and astronomers, it also fostered and maintained the work of some of the cornerstones of modern science, without whom I'm not entirely sure we'd have made the progress that we did.

But it is also true that at the time, NOT being part of the Church was pretty much deadly to a person, either physically or socially. What choice did we have but to start from a church or faith? I have said before that much of the credit for art, philosophy and even science has been granted to the church, but that this is by default.

The Church was pretty much the only institution in medieval Europe that allowed an education and the potential for upward social mobility to a person not born of noble blood. If the Church has been given much of the credit for medieval and Renaissance art, philosophy and science, it is in part because no other institution, secular or otherwise, was affording opportunity to talent.

Was there any defined line between the church and 'secular' authority at all?

There was at least one. The Church itself wasn't allowed to inflict punishment or execute condemned criminals -- including heretics. That honor fell to the secular authorities, to whom the Church routinely remanded criminals. There are numerous instances, in fact, of clergy attempting to intercede on behalf of condemned heretics, though their intercession wasn't always successful. That isn't to say that the Church was wholly innocent of such executions, but merely that they couldn't have done it without the aide of someone consciously acting as a secular authority.

What matter was that? The church applied it to what they defined as heresy, no?

Yeah, and actually, I have no problem with the Church defining some doctrines as heretical and proclaiming those who preach those doctrines as heretical. The terminology is particular to the Church, but that's essentially how any institution draws a line between its own ideology and the ideology of another institution. The problem with the Inquisition isn't that they investigated heresy, but a) that their solution to the problem of heresy was persecution, civil punishment, forced recantation and, ultimately, execution, and b) that, more generally, Catholic orthodoxy had been made so integral a part of social inclusion that to depart from orthodoxy was inherently damaging in ways that aren't related to religion.

But would science have grown quicker if not for the counter productive efforts of the church and the out right suppression of ideas that contrasted with the dogma of the church?

Later on, it probably would have. The problem, so far as that goes, is that the Church had integrated Aristotelian cosmology into its doctrines, and the new scientists of the Renaissance were overthrowing Aristotelian cosmology. The Church had put its later doctrines at risk by tying them so tightly to an outdated scientific model of the universe. But that has little to do with the heretics of the 8th-15th century. They weren't interested in science but in theological and clerical reform, and their neglect of other topics was so complete that it's unlikely that any of them would have been capable of contributing to the growth of science. The Vaudois and the Cathari, who were the main heretical bodies throughout the Middle Ages, preached doctrines of poverty, martyrdom, moral perfection and chastity -- all of which might be commendable in some degree, but which were practiced with so zealously that, if embraced as widely as Catholicism, would likely have resulted in depopulation and economic collapse, neither which are really conducive to the growth of science.

There were no scientists no, so the focus was on Cathars & Witches & Jews (oh my!) and other challenges to the 'proper and true' faith.

So what you're arguing is, that by persecuting the Cathari, the Vaudois and supposed witches, the Church was just practicing for the eventual appearance of scientists?

me: You'd be surprised at how aloof from the Church some of these secular authorites could be. I'm still surprised at it sometimes.
Mr. P: Any suggestions on where I might learn a bit more?

I'm currently reading an abridged version of H.C. Lea's "The Inquisition of the Middle Ages". It's an impressive source of information, but even abridged, it's almost a thousand pages. If I come across something more succinct I'll send the title your way.

In the meantime, I've got another book about the Crusades on deck ("The Fourth Crusade and the Fall of Constantinople"). That's much shorter, more recent, and received some strong reviews, so if you're interested, you could find a copy, and we could discuss the book as we read.

Actually T-R compared McCarthyism and the Holocaust with the witch hunts.

As outbreaks of popular hysteria -- not as instances of covert religious aggression.

He set the terms and people followed suit for a minor witch hunt, based on the language of religion.

McCarthy may have included Christian ideology as part of his rhetoric, but that doesn't mean that others followed suit as part of a religious agenda. They didn't have to latch on to religion to feel suspicious of Communism -- the Cold War provided plenty of cultural and political reasons.

(acutally, according to T-R, the witch craze was preceeded by a smaller, more local witch craze in the mountain regions themselves for about 200 years prior to the Malleus authors requesting the Bull and then writing the Malleus, so we are talking about 400 years at the height).

But the earlier years were not related to the Church, and were instances of popular hostility directed against supposed witches, specifically against the Church's prohibition against belief in witchcraft.

I am enjoying the work and thanks for pointing it out.

Glad to hear it.

I tend to see much of the basis for the witch craze as religious in nature...not divine revelation, for that simply does not exist, but my the writings and machinations of the religious establishment...from the bible's mention to Augustine to Aquinas to Sprenger & Kramer...all acting toward the construction of what they thought or wanted the canon of their faith to be.

And I think that's the point: what they wanted the canon to be. Because they were looking for some form of moral sanction for what they wanted to do anyway. If it hadn't been the sanction of the Church, it would have been the sanction of whatever body served as the foundation of feudal society at the time. They had social and political reasons for wanting to turn the hostility of society against some segment of itself.

And I say that the development of writing could absolutely contribute to this. It could gather all the old tales and help disseminate these ideas...and it could also allow for a Malleus to be as effective as it seems to have been.

The old tales weren't really part of the new evidence. But I do think that the effectiveness of the Malleus was directly dependent on the advent of literacy and printing. I just don't think that the Malleus motivated the witch-crazes. It provided a point around which to organize the persecutions, and in that sense it facilitated the crazes, but I don't think it would have been effective at all if there hadn't been some spark of hostility already kindling in society.

But did not Rome 'give it's blessing' as T-R puts it? Was not the Bull issued at the behest of the Malleus authors so that they could write their 'response' to it?

It was, and that's a point that I'm trying to find out more about now. I just read a chapter today that fleshes out my understanding of the relationship between the Mendicant Orders (of which the Domincans were a major part) and the ecclesiastical foundation of the Church. In effect, the Mendicants had become so powerful by the end of the 13th century that they could, depending on the specific circumstances of the moment, force the Pope's hand. Everything T-R writes about Innocent VIII leads me to suspect that that's what happened with the bull in question. And what made the Dominicans so potent as the administators of the Inquisition is that the Order worked so close to ground level. I'm going to have to do some more reading to confirm or disconfirm it, but the picture that I've developed from recent reading is that the Dominicans had slipped their leash, and that their motives were divided by an express loyalty to the Holy See on one hand, and by their connection to local cultural and political concerns. Dominicans living in the Pyranees and embroiled in local conflicts between the feudalists of the plains and the half-pagan non-feudalists of the mountains could very well have found their own interests diverging from the interests of their religion. That, at least, would explain why members of the order would decide to persecute a segment of society whose existence the Church officially denied, and how they could exert their influence in order to make the Church tacitly recognize the validity of witchcraft.

None of which exonerates the Church, but I do think it's important to be clear on what precisely happened and what forces moved events along.

Frank: I have to direct my post to you because Mad will not answer me (on this subject) anymore.

I'll be glad to discuss this, or just about any other subject, with you Frank, when I feel confident that it isn't just a pissing contest. You like to argue; I like to think that the discussion is moving towards some middle ground.

Have you noticed that whenever Mad cannot change someone's mind in one of these threads he generally announces that its because they are prejudiced about the subject and closed minded to his point of view.

If I meant to say that Mr. P was inalterably biased, I'd say so. I think the provisional definition of religion he's offered cuts off any chance of us reaching some common ground on the issue of how and how much religion was responsible, but that isn't to say that Mr. P is incapable of re-examining the evidence in light of another view of religion. I'm not even asking that he accept my view; I just think that we're capable of working out a more neutral definition. And even if we can't (or don't), that doesn't end conversation about the book. We'd probably be better off not bothering with the issue of religion's responsibility, but there are plenty of details and issues that are still worth talking about in relation to this topic.

misterpessimistic: I am really trying to NOT elevate this to a battle...

I can see that, and I really do appreciate it.

That said, yes Frank I do notice that Mad tries to structure the dialogue of any conversation to his terms and definitions.

I realize it frustrates you, but I do think it's useful to check in every once in a while and make sure that we're talking about the same thing. Frank ought to appreciate the value of that, since my attempt to clarify a term that I had been using in another thread seems to have deflated the contention between us. And in this particular case, I'm not talking about peripheral terms or quibbling over semantics. I'm trying to get us to agree on the terms of the central matter: "religion" and "responsibility".

That said, I do want to know from Mad the definitions he thinks would be best.

Generally speaking, I find that it's best to assess religion according to two factors: motive and function. So when you're looking at a thing and trying to determine whether or not it's a religion, you ask why it's doing a given thing (which isn't always the same as, what does it claim to be doing) and how it's doing it. Looking at function alone can be misleading, because a lot of things can look like religion that aren't necessarily religion -- a political rally, for instance, or a sporting event. Function's easier to see though, because function is a matter of external characteristics, so that's usually the easiest place to start. So we say, here are two institutions. Both involve certain proscribed modes of dress, both have a procedure that is mostly ceremonial, and both organize groups according to status and the role they play in regular meetings. But one is a Catholic church and the other is the Senate. The way you distinguish between them is that you try to discern what their motive is in employing those functions. The Senate has an apparantly secular motive -- the administration of some segment of American government -- while the church ostensibly has a religious motive. Although, the church doesn't always have a religious motive (and sometimes, we suspect, the Senate doesn't always have a secular motive). So we can't take it for granted that, because an institution resembles religion that it is; and to take it a step further, we can't always assume that an institution that normally is religious always acts religiously.

So far, so good. I assume you don't have any major objections to what I've written so far. My answer may be more debatable when we get to the question of what motivations qualify as religious. That's an idea that I'm constantly revising for myself, but a fairly safe expression of it would be something along the lines of: religious motivations are those geared towards either a) improving the relationship between humans and the world they inhabit, or b) securing transcendence. If you can't solidly tie a set of functions to those motives, then it's probably prudent to look for a different set of motivations. Cui bono?

Some points of clarification.
1) The two forms of motivation I listed are usually (though, maybe not always) related;
2) You might have some objection to the phrasing on a) "improving the relationship between humans and the world they inhabit". Specifically, it seems likely to me that it will strike you as odd that I say "the world they inhabit" rather than "the supernatural world". My answer is that the hard division between a natural and supernatural world is a relatively recent fixture, one that was apparantly suggested by Enlightenment atheists, and which, even where rhetorically adopted by religious believers, doesn't very accurately express the ways in which their beliefs and actions seem to take shape. In other words, it isn't that religious believers posit the existence of a world in addition to the natural world, but that they view the natural world as a compartment of a larger scheme. In terms of defining religious motivation, it doesn't much matter whether or not that enlarged view of the world is correct; it's the fact that it's regarded as correct by the religious believer that makes it religious.

So getting back to the initial question, if we look at an event like the witch-crazes, we can look at it functionally and say, okay, the Church is involved (though, just because the Church often acts as a religious institution doesn't mean that it's acting that way in this case), and that it has, in some part, adapted the policy and methodology of one of its offices (meeting, to some degree, the functional criteria). But does it make sense to say it's acting from a religious motivation?

For starters, we can say that it isn't acting from its explicit motivation: the salvation of individual souls. Very few of the events in the witch-craze make sense if that's the agenda. So maybe there's an implicit, maybe even subconscious motivation that would qualify as religious. That's a possibility, but applying the cui bono? and looking at the historical context gives us so many social and political motivations that would serve, that I don't see much reason to look for covert, sub-conscious religious motives.

Tell me what you think.

Yes, there are other societal facets that also reflect this dark light of human nature, but to me religion is the most accessible.

I'm a bit neutral on that matter. I'd say that religion is just as capable of distortion and perversion as any other cultural or social form, but not necessarily moreso.

Can you admit that pretty much all religions require some sort of credulity in order to properly follow it?

I'd prefer the term belief. I wouldn't mind the word "credulity", actually, if I felt that you were willing to apply it across the board. For instance, I think most people accept political and scientific beliefs from a similar kind of credulity.

You defend your position and that is fine, but sometimes, you seem to reject the positions that tend to throw harsh criticism on religion.

Religion certainly needs to be criticized. I just think that the points normally harped upon are more rhetorical than evidential. And that isn't to single you guys out. Even some fairly reputable figures (particular the New Atheists embodied by Dawkins, Dennet, Harris et al) have a party line that seems reasonable so long as you're willing to generalize. And that strikes me as doubly dangerous because it allows the points that really do need criticism to slip by while everyone is expending a lot of effort concentrating on the distortions.

That the McCarthy witch craze did not last very long is a testament to a secular society.

I'd have to look more at the historical particulars. Are sure there aren't other reasons that McCarthyism died out early on?