##Church and State in the Great Patriotic War
Although from their earliest involvement in politics the Bolshevik party had expressed anti-religious views, and within mere months of taking power, followed through with this in passing the “Decree on the Separation of the Church from the State and the School from the Church”, it wouldn’t be until after the Civil War that they were able to begin a concerted campaign to remove religion and its expression from public life within the Soviet Union. In the face of this, the Russian Orthodox Church shriveled, by 1939 reduced to approximately 6 percent of its pre-Revolution size, many of them killed or sent to the Gulag during the Purges, which saw 50,769 priests and believers arrested in 1937-’38, many never seen again.^1
The Metropolitan Sergei, nominal head of the church, had in 1927 attempted to save it with his Declaration of Loyalty to the state, but that had only split the faithful, many seeing it as an abandonment of principle and going underground. Some slight pause came about in 1939 and 1940 as the USSR annexed Polish and Baltic lands with large, practicing populations, requiring some minor concessions to ease assimilation, but especially within the pre-’39 borders, the impact was minimal. Although the majority of Soviet citizens likely retained their religious beliefs by that point, most heavily in rural areas, only a small number were able or willing to give voice to them publicly.
Then, in the summer of 1941, the war came.
Invasion
Appeals to the suppressed religious feelings in the period came from the invaders. With the arrival of Germany and her Axis allies, spontaneous resumption of religious practice erupted in almost every settlement that the Soviet forces were pushed out of, and generally allowed by the local commanders who saw it was a way to foster goodwill in occupied territory, even attending services sometimes. Hundreds of churches reopened during the occupation period.
The German invaders didn’t entirely embrace the movement though. In the long run, their end goal for the Orthodox religious institutions were little different than Stalin’s, so support was only a temporary expedient. By 1942, a somewhat cohesive policy was formed to give guidance to commanders, which forbid the reforming of Russian Orthodox churches aside from some schismatics, while allowing those such as Belorussian and Ukranian Orthodox, as the latter was seen as useful in cultivating anti-Russian nationalist sentiments. But the result was simply splits within those groups of pro- and anti-Russian factions, the former often being the larger, and the Germans doing little to intercede in practical terms until 1944, when it was far too late.
Early Shifts
Within the territory still held by the Soviet Union, a religious revival was also under way, and one which would have far more lasting impact, of course, given the ultimate culmination of the conflict. From the earliest days of the war, Metropolitan Sergei saw in the conflict an opportunity to revive the fortunes of Russian Orthodox. Although in fact a violation of the law, on June 22nd, 1941, he sent out a pastoral letter calling on the faithful to defend the state, crying out in patriotic terms that:
The Church of Christ confers its blessing on all Orthodox believers in their defense of the holy borders of our Motherland.
The Mass he held that next Sunday was attended by over 10,000 people, and the call was similarly echoed by other high Church figures who still remained active. As the flood tide of German arms continued to push back the Red Army, the Church beat the drum of war, but importantly, coached in patriotic terms that spoke to the Russian homeland, rather than the Soviet state.Unable, and unwilling, to endorse the godless Communists, the Church nevertheless saw an avenue to restake its claim in public life by reminding the people of its place in historical Russian identity. The state cautiously returned the favor, through late 1941-42 removing anti-religious rhetoric from official publications, and even offering positive comments on the work being done by the Church in support of the war effort, which began not only making stirring statements, but leading fundraiser efforts raising millions of rubles to found hospitals, supply food on the home front, or sponsor tanks and airplanes, most famously the 40 T-34s known as ‘Tank Column Dmitrii Donskoi’.
Not everyone within the Church got the memo though. Just like in German occupied territory, some of the faithful saw the invasion as the end of the godless regime. Ignorant of the ultimate fate that awaited the Slavic peoples in Hitler’s plans, some believers made the mistake of voicing such opinions, resulting in arrests and executions of Orthodox clergy and laypersons for treason even as the state began relaxing its censure of the institution. Oddly though, strong shows of support often came from Orthodox emigre communities in Western countries, people generally with little love for the Soviets. Some were driven by similar motives as the Church in Russia of earning reprieve, while others responded simply to the patriotic call of the Motherland. In any case though, Soviet authorities were often flummoxed by the unexpected show of support from these corners. The ranking Naval Commissar felt the need to include mention in a report to Malenkov, for instance, of what had occurred during the loading of aid raised by the Molokan community in San Francisco in 1941:
The captain and the assistant political officer reported the following: at the moment these gifts were to be loaded onto the vessel a vehicle arrived, from which a Russian priest in full clerical dress got out. He made the sign of the cross over the Soviet flag flying from the stern of the ship. After this they started to unload the presents from the vehicle and to load them onto the ship.
All of these factors together presented an interesting picture for Soviet authorities to contemplate. The Church had made a strong case for its relevance as a tool in stoking the fires of nationalism, and the awareness of suppressed belief held by much of the population, expressed not only by those given allowance in German-held territory but also in questions coming from the Red Army itself, couldn’t be ignored entirely. For the first two years of the war, the Soviet’s official policy was in essence to turn a blind-eye to the Church, allowing it to increase its visibility without any real, official recognition of what was going on.
But tacit approval was slowly creeping up. In rural villages, some churches began to reopen illegally, soon to be followed even by cities, such as Leningrad, which increased from 5 in 1941 to 221 in 1942, and aside from mentions of the Church’s deeds in pravda, Church officials themselves began to be given a voice through state media, such as via radio broadcasts. When Metropolitan Sergei approached Stalin in 1942 about the Church being allowed a bank account to manage their donation funds, the request was granted. That year as well, Sergei was allowed to lead a public Easter service near the Kremlin, the largest religious gathering yet seen in the USSR.
Foreign Pressures
All of this had gone a long way in harnessing the power of the Church as a conduit for patriotism, but nevertheless the official Soviet position on religion was one of great intolerance, and one which was particularly vexing to her Western allies for whom religious liberties were a viewed as a bedrock principle. In a survey conducted of British intellectuals, for instance, 72 percent considered “treatment of religion as the chief difficulty” between the UK and USSR. Although strong, direct pressure was avoided, the British Foreign Office nevertheless saw value in more subtling signalling their desires, as summed up by the Anglican priest Herbert Waddams of the Religions Division:
The paramount consideration is that confidence should be established in the minds of the Soviet authorities that Christians outside Russia have no counter-revolutionary intentions of any kind [...]The Soviet authorities must first be convinced that a spiritual alliance with worldwide Christianity is entirely to their advantage. When that conviction is established everything else will follow as a matter of course.
Although not the only pressure on Stalin, it nevertheless strongly played into Stalin’s thinking as the conflict entered its third year and he contemplated regularizing the Church’s position within society. It is also one that can’t be underrated. After all, if the concessions were to be made out of sheer desperation, they likely would have happened quicker, and more forcefully in 1941, or ‘42. But it was only in 1943, when the tide had begun to turn, and the mobilizing power of the Church less direly needed that the final, most official gestures were forthcoming, on the face recognition of their work up to then, but fueled by more calculated politics underneath.
Not that the actions of the Russian Orthodox Church can be downplayed in making their case for relevance, but it also is important in understanding Stalin’s motivations. It was a strong gesture to make toward his allies, and as we will revisit, it spoke to his foresight in the kinds of pressures needed to pacify and Russify the western populations who might not always be entirely pleased by Soviet ‘liberation’. And of course as well, not being a gesture out of marked weakness, it was one that, as time would tell, could be revoked as needed.
I wrote this a little while ago for the /r/askphilosophy open discussion thread. Hume is one of the most important philosophers ever, but he wasn't really read during his own life. This is usually told as a fun anecdote, but his life story is the one of an intellectually brilliant hustler trying to get by - and much more interesting than the usual "he wrote the same book twice" story. I should add that this is mostly written for entertainment and it's not meant as a full biography of Hume, since it pretty much leaves out the less funny parts.
What follows is a short write up of his life:
He was a child prodigy, starting university at age 12 rather than the normal 14.
At 18, he made some kind of philosophical discovery, but it's unclear what it is. Consequently he had a mental breakdown caused by reading too much philosophy
At 25, he became a merchant's assistant and travelled through Europe.
At 28, he wrote the Treatise. No-one cared about it at all.
To make the Treatise more successful, he wrote the so-called Abstract anonymously (we are almost certain he wrote it himself). No-one cared again.
At 31, he published the *Essays Moral and Political". He tried to become a professor, but was denied because of alleged atheism.
As a plan B, he became a private tutor, after a fall-out became a diplomat . In this time, he also wrote the Enquiry, famously pretty much the same content as the Treatise, which had 0 success too.
Since the diplomacy didn't work out, he moved in with his brother, was charged of Heresy, again didn't become a professor
At age 40, he became the librarian of the law faculty in Edinburgh, which didn't pay much but enabled him to research history for...
... the The History of England, which took him 15 years (started at around age 30) but made him famous (and I think well-off too)
at age 52, he once again became a diplomat and chilled with Rousseau. They had a fall-out so bad that Hume wrote A concise and genuine account of the dispute between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau to save his reputation.
A year before his death at 65, he wrote a remarkable autobiography of 5 pages.
To sum it up, Hume was a hustler when his philosophy proofed unsuccessful. He was a diplomat at times, a historian at others, and in his time famous for his History of Britain, which, ironically, no-one cares about now.
(Ages as per his wikipedia article)
So I just discovered recently that my flair is under "History of Religion," so I kind of feel obligated to post for this one!
I don't have a huge amount of time so I'll do a quick one, but a significant one, I think. It's a little bit of a rant, but I hope you'll find it interesting nonetheless. WARNING- it is extremely dark and contains references to disturbing acts of violence, including against children.
I'll start off by quoting, in part, a comment I made on a thread in the flair subreddit (see, guys, become flairs so that you can post in the flair subreddit!) after I read a book called "Why? Explaining the Holocaust" by Peter Hayes, a generally excellent book. (Since it was written in a casual setting, it's a bit more casual and, um, profane than it would have been had I written it here first...)
But I had one major issue with one paragraph- literally, one paragraph- of the book.
For background, I'm an Orthodox Jew, which is one of the reasons why I'm especially interested in Orthodox Jewish history, which is generally either 1) understudied in general, 2) hagiographized (to coin a horrible word) by Orthodox Jews ourselves, or 3) discussed somewhat misrepresentingly and condescendingly by secular Jews. But that's mostly another story.
So I was reading Hayes and he's talking about the horrible choices that Judenrat officials had to make, including one who told a German official about his dilemma- he could either choose Jews to be gassed or be killed, but he knew that if he were killed then the Germans would end up choosing the Jews anyway. He says that he consulted with rabbis who said he was doing the right thing.
Hayes then says this (and I quote): "Rosenblatt, Asscher and Cohen may have thought that they were adhering to Jewish religious law, but they were not. According to David Daube's careful examination of pertinent passages of the Talmud, handing over a person specifically demanded by name by an oppressive power is permissible as compliance with a threatening order, but handing over 'simply any odd person for execution' is not because that involves choosing the victim and thus amounts to taking on personal guilt."
This made me seriously pissed off, for a number of reasons.
Now at the time I was more concerned about point 1- what right does Hayes have to judge rabbinical decisions? I still feel strongly about that, but I'd prefer to discuss here point 2- or at least the idea behind point 2, that Orthodox Jewish life and quandaries of Jewish law continued even during the horrors of the Holocaust.
Now, this is a popular topic in some ways in the Orthodox Jewish community today. When the Holocaust is discussed/remembered- which is essentially constantly- there are often stories of the Jews who did their best to only eat kosher food, who prayed every morning with contraband prayer books and tefillin (phylacteries), Jews who recited Vidui (confession) before being murdered, etc. My own grandfather would tell the story of, at age ten, being beaten by Nazi soldiers while trying to go to the synagogue to say kaddish (the memorial prayer for the dead) for his recently deceased father, who had been murdered when the Nazis had invaded his hometown. It sounds weird saying that it's a popular genre of story, because these are real experiences, but it is. The observance of Jewish law is so fundamental to Orthodox Jews that it's seen as an extremely important part of the Holocaust narrative and, in a sense, a way to link current observant lifestyles with those in the past, those lived by people now seen as martyrs.
But often these stories don't include something that's just as fundamental to Orthodox Jews as observance of the commandments- the deliberations in Jewish law that underly them. I'm not going to go into a detailed thing about why that is, because it's mostly speculation, but I believe it's just because it's easier to focus on "wow, this person did a great thing in refusing to eat non-kosher meat in the soup in the concentration camp" and let that be it than it is to think, "so how does Jewish law balance the obligation to watch over one's life vs the obligation to eat kosher food, and was this person really doing the right thing to risk his life for this?" It's something along the lines of the mental gymnastics which some rabbis did to justify parents who killed their children so that they would avoid forced conversion to Christianity during the crusades. These are just such complicated and painful issues that you shouldn't really think about them too hard.
That said, it's still impossible to avoid just how important the deliberations of Jewish law, or the halachic process, are in Orthodox Judaism (and a HUGE number of people imprisoned, enslaved and murdered by the Nazis were fervently Orthodox Jews). There are millennia-old traditions which are still consulted today, a rabbinic literature which has been building upon itself for just as long, debates between rabbis separated by hundreds of miles and/or hundreds of years, thousands of books containing lists of commandments and explanations of Torah concepts and, perhaps most importantly for our purposes, responsa, or compilations of halachic questions asked to rabbis along with the answers with which they replied. Responsa are an incredibly valuable tool today when it comes to the study of medieval Jewish history because of how much both the questions and answers tell us about the little details of Jewish lives; but this is only true because they were important to them in their own lives, because Jews would in fact send even the smallest question to a rabbi, and reasonably expect a response, if the question pertained to Jewish law. While the modern era brought increased secularization to the Jewish world, fewer Jews who cared about halacha and the opinions of the rabbis, there were still millions of Jews worldwide to whom halachic deliberations were key in terms of how to live their lives.
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Adding an earlier answer of mine that seems to fit here (though less than one might think!).
How did the Day of the Dead celebrations evolve?
I'll mostly draw from Stanley Brandes work for this who's written a lot about the celebration's development. He posits that traditional research often described a continuity from pre-Hispanic beliefs to the modern-day Day of the Dead, but without going into more detail on this. Brandes contrasts this with a few points :
I'll look at these three points, with the 3rd one most directly relevant to your question. As a heads up, this got a bit longer.
#Antecedents to the Day of the Dead (Mesoamerica & Europe)
In much popular and also academic literature, the main antecedents for the festival are tied to Aztec feast days, which were then adapted by the Spanish to fit with the Christian All Souls' and All Saints' Day, in order to aid with conversion. Usually mentioned in this pretty easy narrative are Aztec feast days for the dead. While there existed at least three different such celebrations, two are esp. Highlighted here : Miccailhuitontli (« Feast of the Little Dead Ones ») and Miccailhuitl (« Feast of the Adult Dead »), with the names giving some indication whom they were meant for. Together both feasts were known as Tlaxochimaco (« The Offering of the Flowers », with flowers holding special ritual significance), and were held in the ninth and tenth months of the Aztec year.
As mentioned, the Spanish then moved these feast days to coincide better with the Christian festivals, since pre-Hispanic beliefs and rituals were to be substituted by their Christian counterparts. This substitution, briefly put, did not work out as planned, with elements of Aztec (and other indigenous) beliefs carried forwards and transformed until today – I'll come back to this.
A more traditional interpretation of the Day of the Dead can be summed up thus, from an encyclopedia from 2012:
As a result, All Souls' Day and All Saints' Day merged with the harvest rites of Miccailhuitontli into the syncretic rituals we are familiar with today. The Folk Catholic traditions of bringing food offerings meshed well with the Indigenous practice of offering grave-goods for the departed's use in the afterlife. The Catholic belief in heaven and hell added a new dimension to the Aztec belief in Mictlán, an afterlife that was determined by how an individual had died, not by how he or she had lived. [Celebrating Latino Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Cultural Traditions 3, 2012, 403-404]
I should add only one of a few simplifications in this (since this isn't the question's main focus), that Mictlán was only one of several afterlives that for Mesoamericans depended on one's type of death. In this explanation which seems pretty neat we can see some overall merging of Mesoamerican and Spanish-Christian traditions – but little concrete mention of actual Day of the Dead rituals, which we'll turn to now with a focus on iconography. Since your question focuses on modern developments I'll keep these parts a bit briefer.
##Mesoamerica/central Mexico :
When looking at possible parallels from Mesoamerican iconography to that of the Day of the Dead, we have to keep in mind that pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica was very diverse and spanned a variety of cultures, population groups and states over huge time spans. For example, Brandes looks at Mayan iconography and notes that except for human skulls and bones, no Mayan death symbols are present in current popular Mexican art. More generally regarding skull and skeletal art was unevenly distributed : It looks like Teotihuacán (in the Valley of Mexico) and western Mexico used death iconography rarely, whereas for the Mayas and ancient Toltecs it was more important. Skull and skeletal iconography was not clearly connected to mortuary rituals.
What about central Mexico, where much of the Dead of the Day traditions originated from ? Specifically the Aztecs were the dominant power there at the time of conquest, so that some influence of theirs would seem logical. Here again we can see major differences in iconography of death between cultures. Regarding burials, there are virtually no representations of skulls and skeletons. There were at least three elements of Aztec art connected to death –
a) the well-preserved tzompantli (a wooden rack or palisade used for the public display of human skulls, including those of war captives or other sacrificial victims ) at the Great temple of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan ; b) skull offerings found at the Great Temple and c) the many examples of stone sculptures of deities with skull-like features, incl. that well-known one of the goddess Coatlicue.
Brandes concludes from this that only from these examples it would be hard to clearly show iconographic continuity. While the clearest antecedents might be the skulls and skeletons from Tenochtitlan, the humor of the current celebrations is lacking. After all these artworks were tied to ritual sacrifice that was central esp. to Aztec culture. So that
Given the diversity and complexity of skull and skeletal representations in ancient Mesoamerica, it is impossible to discount their cumulative impact on colonial and postcolonial art. … At the same time, it is impossible to draw clearly defined lines of stylistic and thematic influence from ancient times to the present day. [Brandes, 1998, 194]
Then again, we can find some clearer antecedents in Aztec culture : ritual food. The Aztecs formed images out of wood, covered with tzoalli or amaranth seed dough, and shaped them in human form. These dough forms were used to commemorate only specific groups of people, those who had died by drowning or in such in such a way that they were buried (again tied to specific afterlives), as described by the Franciscan chronicler Bernardino de Sahagún. This use of anthropomorhic food in the Valley of Mexico probably made it easier to use silimiar figures in the colonial era. But such antecedents to Day of the Dead are not limited to Mesoamerica as we'll see.
##Europe/Iberia :
The Spanish brought Christianity to their American overseas possessions, but they also introduced a large number of cultural elements from Europe : including architecture, clothing and, well food of course. Having just mentioned the Aztec anthropomorhic sweets, there was something similiar in late medieval Castille and other parts of Europe.
In one Castilian region from the 1500s onwards, All Souls' Day celebrations required a catafalque (supporting the casket) that was encircled by candles and twenty-five rolls of bread. In Majorca bread was put on tombs for this festivity. In other regions such breads were made of marzipan – such breads and sweets were using during all Souls' Day in many parts of Southern Europe before and during the colonisation of Mexico. So it seems very likely that this tradition was brought to Mexico from the 16th c. onwards, and taught to native converts who where already used to anthropomorphic sweets. Both traditions merged in this way. Since sugar by then had become an important part of the colonial Mexican economy these sweets started to be made from sugar – a unique feature of the Day of the Dead.
We've already seen the use of skulls and skeletons in Mesoamerican art. Brandes also discusses these as important features of European iconography, esp. in the Baroque period but before as well. He highlights the influence of another European art form, the Dance of Death. This was popular in European literature and drawing for a few centuries, but starting in the later 15th c., in countries including England, France, Spain and Germany. These images would show animated skeletal figures often together with humans, featuring a wide spektrum of emotions : from happiness to hostility and insolence. (This virtual museum has some nice images of this tradition)
These skeletons would have symbolized the dead, showcasing the equality of all in death. This was important in medieval Europe due to the all-encompassing presence of the Black Death at the time. With no one safe from the pest, skeletal art could serve as a way to show some humor in the face of tragedy. While the Mexican sweets have a different, more whimsical kind of humor, the parallels are nonetheless clear from the Dance of Death to the Mexican depictions. In Mexico these images were not meant to « mock » death but rather to pay loved ones respect on a single celebratory moment, the Day of the Dead. The connection to epidemic disease would have held special resonance in early colonial Mexico.
I often get questions from students in some version of, “Mr. dromio05, if the Protestant Reformation happened because the Catholic Church was selling indulgences, but the Catholic Church stopped selling indulgences shortly after the Reformation, then why didn’t the churches come back together?” What follows here is an expanded version of my answer.
It wasn't just indulgences. That was the issue that first really caught public attention, but the disagreements were always more complicated than just that one issue. Others within the Catholic Church had called out the “abuses” related to the sale of indulgences, so much so that these sales were ultimately outlawed. These other complaints didn’t cause the church to split apart.
(To clarify, an indulgence in traditional Catholic teaching is essentially spiritual credit for good works that reduces or cancels the time a soul is expected to spend in purgatory before going to heaven. So a notorious sinner who repents and confesses might still be looking at thousands of years in purgatory to be cleansed of all their sins, but by doing good works now they can start reducing their sentence. Note, though, that an indulgence could not save a soul that was destined for hell; only someone who was in a state of grace at the moment of death, but still had the penalty of sins to atone for before they could enter heaven, could receive any benefit from indulgences. During the Middle Ages it was widely accepted that donating money to the Church was a good deed that would earn the donor an indulgence. Additionally, there was a longstanding belief in the Catholic Church that there was a "treasury of merit" built up in heaven. Think of it like a bank account of all the good deeds that the saints, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus had done above and beyond what was necessary to get them into heaven. They did enough to achieve salvation, and then they did more. These extra good deeds were on deposit in heaven, and the Pope, as keeper of the keys, had a debit card. He could draw on this account to essentially pay off the debt someone incurred by sinning. Now, there is a very, very fine line between these beliefs and the Church openly selling indulgences to raise money. Some indulgence sellers even claimed that people could get their dead relatives out of purgatory, though this was never an official Church teaching. Johann Tetzel, who ran afoul of Luther, famously sold indulgences with the rhyme: "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs." Luther alleged, though Tetzel denied, that Tetzel at one time claimed that the indulgences he sold could even forgive future sins, and could forgive a man for the sin of raping the Virgin Mary. Indulgences were also, incidentally, a major source of income for the early modern Church; the construction of Saint Peter's Basilica, begun in 1506, was largely financed by the sale of indulgences. The office of “quaestor of alms,” or indulgence seller, was banned by the Council of Trent in the 1560s. Indulgences involving any sort of financial transaction between people were also forbidden around the same time.)
The issue that initially sparked the Reformation was not the sale of indulgences per se. It was the question of papal power. The real problem with indulgences, in Luther's mind, was that the very concept relied on the belief that the Pope could forgive sins. He stated in the 95 Theses, "The Pope...cannot remit any penalties other than those which he has imposed either by his own authority or by that of the Canons" (Thesis 5). In other words, the only punishments the Pope could pardon were the punishments he himself had given in his role as an earthly ruler, not any punishments that came from God. So the Pope could punish you or forgive you for committing a crime in the city of Rome, which he ruled, but could not unilaterally speak for God and declare that you were forgiven for the sin of adultery, for example. Also, Luther said, "They will be condemned eternally, together with their teachers, who believe themselves sure of their salvation because they have letters of pardon" (Thesis 32).
This was a direct contradiction of Catholic teaching outlined in the 1302 papal bull Unam Sanctum: "It is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff." This goes all the way back to Matthew 18, where Jesus tells Peter, "Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." The Pope was considered to be the successor of Saint Peter, so by this understanding, the power to bind and loose still rested with him.
At first, Luther tried to be conciliatory and deferential towards the Pope, Leo X. He said in the 95 Theses that it was merely some unscrupulous indulgence sellers who were to blame, and that "if the Pope knew the exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that St. Peter's church should go to ashes, than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh and bones of his sheep" (Thesis 50). As the controversy spread and Luther began to realize the danger he was in, he sent a letter to the Pope. He assured Leo that he was fully subject to the Pope and had never meant to spark such controversy, only having sought to set up an academic discussion.
Leo X would have none of it. It was impossible for the Church to be in error, because that would mean that God had allowed it to fall into error. In the bull Exurge Domine, Leo condemned 41 beliefs attributed to Luther as heretical, including the belief that "The word of Christ to Peter: 'Whatsoever you shall loose on earth,' etc., is extended merely to those things bound by Peter himself," and that "They are seduced who believe that indulgences are salutary and useful for the fruit of the spirit."
But if Luther was correct, that doing good deeds and/or "donating" money could not earn someone a ticket to heaven, then what could? How would people get into heaven if not by the Pope’s authority acting through the Catholic Church? Luther hit on "justification by faith alone," or the understanding that faith in God would save a person. Importantly, "faith" here means "trust," not "belief." As an example, in his Commentary on Galatians he says,
Faith presupposes the assurance of God's mercy. This assurance takes in the confidence that our sins are forgiven for Christ's sake. (Commentary on Galatians 3:7, emphasis mine)
Justification by faith alone was later condemned by the Catholic Council of Trent in 1547:
If any one shall say, that man is absolved from his sins and justified, because that he assuredly believed himself to be absolved and justified; or that no one is truly justified save he who believes himself justified; and that, by this faith alone, absolution and justification are perfected; let him be anathema. (Canon XIV)
But in Luther's time the issue had not been officially decided. His position on faith was not typical of Catholics, but there was nothing inherently wrong with it in the eyes of the Church. Except, of course, that it was connected with Luther's teaching that the Pope had no power to forgive sins.
This thread has been live for 8 hours now, and except for another of my answers, women have been mentioned a grand total of three times. Two of those describe a woman's murder in graphic terms. All of them involve men's opinions about women's lives.
I also don't see anyone even mention gender, sex, or sexuality. This should strike us all as very weird. People assigned as women at birth are more than fifty percent of humanity, and the number of actual women is presumably somewhere around there. Sex, sexuality, and gender rules are a MAJOR component of religious systems--when men presenting as cis and heterosexual are in the business of controlling the lives of women or of LGBTQ people (however that looks at different points in history).
In 1425, Duchess Jacqueline of Hainaut borrowed men's clothing to escape from captivity in Ghent; later that year, John Tirell was arrested for walking around in women's clothing in London and released once he simply promised not to do it again. In 1471, Thomas a Wode and Charles of Tower Hill were both accused of committing adultery with women dressed as men--no effort was made to track down or even identify the women.
And yet--Articles 1 and 5 of the formal twelve assertions of which Joan was convicted revolve in part on how she wore men's clothing (another briefly alludes to it), and it is the sole focus of quite a few of the original seventy-eight accusations. After the initial conviction, Joan recanted all her earlier testimony and behaviors (by her own account, understandably desperate to avoid death at the stake) and switched to women's attire in prison. Her return to men's clothing wasn't just part of the declaration of relapse, it's what catalyzed the judges even to consider investigating.
So if medieval Europeans were...not exactly comfortable with cross-dressing, but also not chasing down people to burn them for it, what gives with poor Joan?
Let's look at the official articles of condemnation. From Article 1 (trans. Daniel Hobbins):
Again, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret instructed her in God’s name to wear men’s clothes, which she has worn and still wears, steadfastly obeying this command to such an extent that she said she would rather die than set aside this clothing. She stated this openly at various times, adding on other occasions: "except by God’s command."
Article 5:
This woman states and affirms that by God’s command and at his good pleasure, she took and wore men’s attire, and still does...She refused, and still does, to put women’s clothes back on; and though she has been asked and warned kindly on this point many times, she says she would rather die than abandon men’s clothes, sometimes stating this simply, other times adding "except by God’s command."
The problem wasn't the cross-dressing in isolation. It was Joan's insistence that God told her to do it.
In the eyes of the theologians who wrote her condemnation, this was a problem for two reasons. First, the entire question of Joan's "voices" (revelations) was a core component of her understanding of her mission and sanctity, and their understanding of her deception by the devil. When Joan adjured (swore off) men's clothing, she was simultaneously swearing that God had not in fact commanded her to wear them "until her mission was finished." In line with what the accusers wanted to here, she was declaring her revelations false and diabolical. Thus, donning men's attire again--for reasons that remain obscure thanks to competing witnesses and ambiguity in the record of Joan's testimony--was perceived as a denial of her recantation. In other words, as a relapse into heresy.
Secondly, the medieval Church (and medieval society) was in fact not comfortable with women dressing as men. There was the whole Deut 22 problem: "A woman shall not be clothed with man’s apparel," on one hand. On the other, even theologians recognized that there were occasionally practical reasons for it. Christina of Markyate wore men's clothes and even rode her horse "like a man" (e.g. astride, not sidesaddle) to escape a marriage in 1116; she ended up a venerated holy woman.
But perhaps the best illustration of the complexity and ambivalence of women cross-dressing in late medieval society comes from the Book of the Knight of the Tower and variants. An adulterous woman is caught by her husband when he finds her lover's clothes on the floor. The woman has no trouble justifying this: "They're mine," she says. Her friend explains: "Truth it is that she and I and many others of this town, good women and true, have taken each of us a pair of breeches and wear them for these lechers and pimps that force and will do their wills of good women."
Women in men's clothing can be a symbol of promiscuity and everything that is wrong with women on one hand; they can be a defense of chastity and morality on the other. How perfectly fitting it is that a significant percentage of the women arrested for sexual crimes in London and accused of cross-dressing as part of it were dressed as priests or friars! (generally in order to reside with an actual priest without arising suspicion)
So (violations of Italian sumptuary laws aside) cross-dressing wasn't a pursued crime. But it wasn't unambiguously good or neutral. And I want to bring up something here that I've not seen commented on in scholarship, but I stress that doesn't mean it's not there--the historiography on Joan of Arc is bigger than Titanic's iceberg, and I study Germany. :P
A running theme throughout the interrogation, accusations, formal condemnation, and relapse visitation is whether Joan can receive or has received the Eucharist while wearing men's clothing. There's a real urgency on the part of the theologians to investigate this very specific act. I think we're dealing with a core anxiety about the Eucharist, salvation, and deception--the idea that you need to be your entire 'natural' self when receiving the Eucharist, 'natural' encompassing here a gender/sex essentialism. (In the primary sources, it's really sad--Joan is deprived of the sacraments and seems so desperate to receive them that she weaves back and forth on whether she'll put on a woman's dress just for that.)
And this, I think, plays into why Joan's accusers laid a specific accusation against her. According to the record, they read her the verse from Deuteronomy and compared it to her claim that God commanded her to wear men's clothing. Claiming that God says something against God's word is blasphemy, as the archdeacon informed Joan:
Not satisfied with wearing such clothing under these circumstances, Joan even wished to claim that she was doing right in this, and not sinning. Now, to say that someone is doing right by contradicting the teachings of the saints and the commandments of God and the apostles and by scorning the teaching of the Church out of a perverse desire to wear unseemly and disgraceful clothing is an error in the faith. And if someone were to defend this obstinately, she would lapse into heresy.
Further, she even wanted to assign these sins to God and the saints, whom she therefore blasphemes by assigning to them what is improper. For God and the saints wish all virtue to be preserved, and sins, evil desires, and other such things to be avoided. Nor do they wish the teachings of the Church to be despised on account of such things. He therefore urged her to stop repeating such blasphemies, and to stop presuming to assign such things to God and the saints and defending them as permissible.
So it's not exactly that Joan was burned at the stake for cross-dressing. There is a reading of the case--a popular one during the 19th century making of her into the great savior of France and also England, for real--in which the condemnation is for the greater religious crime that the cross-dressing signifies. And reading the trial record, it's clear that (a) Joan was condemned no matter what she did or said, and (b) they had plenty of revelation-related and other evidence to prettify into a conviction even without considering her cross-dressing. However, the social and religious discomfort with women not just using organized religion to perform some tasks of men (as holy women had done for centuries) but almost becoming men deeply permeates the historical record.
So, this thread has been posted for 7 hours, and currently contains the word "woman" once and "women" twice. Two of those three uses are in the context of women being murdered, described in graphic ways. All three involve men making decisions about women's lives.
Organized Christianity, while running the gamut from mildly sexist to wildly misogynist, has long provided space for women to emerge as public authorities, even at times when this was, supposedly, outright forbidden.
The European Middle Ages was a big one of those times. Non-priests were not allowed to preach or teach religion in public. And, of course, women could not be ordained. But in the later Middle Ages, a handful of women exploded onto the Western public scene as celebrities and religious authorities.
I want to talk about the other women of the later Middle Ages--the female-centric, female-specific religious culture that could produce a Hildegard of Bingen, a Marie d'Oignies, a Catherine of Siena.
From an earlier answer, a look at the twelfth century:
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Hildegard of Bingen was probably the most famous and influential woman in the twelfth century, and along with Eleanor of Aquitaine, the most famous woman of the twelfth century today. Although she was not the first medieval person to claim prophetic visions, she used her revelations to build a public career for herself on an unprecedented scale.
She fought both the Church (including her old abbot) and the local nobility to establish her own monastic community that she could run according to her own religious and political standards. She wrote reformist, apocalyptic sermons on her authority as prophetic mouthpiece of God that she preached to the public on "preaching tours" throughout Germany in an age when women were banned from preaching and teaching religion in public; she wrote and preached biblically-based sermons on her own authority as magistra ("teacher") to the nuns of the Rupertsberg.
Her three sweeping treatises incorporate key developments of the twelfth century schools in Paris (incubators of modern universities) filtered through a prophetic/visionary idiom, reflecting her ties to international intellectual culture: systematic theology, consolidation of Church teachings into canon law.
Her original musical compositions were apparently the first thing that made a name for her on the international scene. She invented her own language (or, claimed that a "lingua ignota" had been revealed to her) and its alphabet. Her two proto-scientific treatises, which may originally have been part of the same text, focus on healing physical and spiritual ills with physical and spiritual causes, including a fascinating look at the uses she finds for different plants and herbs.
She composed first-person autobiographical sections of her own hagiography, the foundational document in any bid for sainthood! And she engaged in a massive, protracted epistolary correspondence with the glitterati of the twelfth century Church and secular elite; with fellow monastics struggling to balance their duties to others with their own spiritual lives; with no-name lay people wondering whether their deceased children had made it to heaven. And she did this all in/with/for/against a Church that increasingly treated monastic women as a group to constrain and control.
Basically, Hildegard of Bingen is one of those people of the past who lives up to the hype. (Caveat: Unless the "hype" is the 1970s "feminist neopagan earth mother" version of Hildegard, which, no.)
She's never been the only eminent, educated woman of the twelfth century. Heloise always comes with the moniker "and Abelard", and while she is known primarily for that stormy love affair, it's not forgotten that they met when he was her tutor in philosophy, theology, and physical education. Fellow visionary prophet Elisabeth of Schönau, who actually wrote to Hildegard for advice in dealing with opposition, ended up the more famous prophet in the later Middle Ages. And the only nun-intellectual mentioned in Charles Homer Haskins' foundational The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century isn't Hildegard, it's Herrad of Hohensburg.
Scholars have spent the past fifteen years filling in the starfield behind this constellation of clarae mulieres. Although the source survival from the twelfth century, especially related to women, is extremely spotty, they've found ways to either situate these eminent women in the context of their female monastic communities or uncovered surprising manuscript/library survivals from other houses. And the general picture that emerges, as you can already see from those examples, is that Hildegard frequently did things grander, bolder, and more famously, she rarely did them only.
Elisabeth of Schönau was a fellow German Benedictine nun a bit younger than Hildegard who started her own prophetic career a bit later. Unlike Hildegard, Elisabeth never left the confines of her own abbey to preach--her sermons were sent to others (men) for reading and possibly delivery. Elisabeth's visionary corpus doesn't bear nearly the diversity or intellectual sophistication of Hildegard's, either. What we do see from her, however, is a similar intimate and extensive involvement in international political-ecclesiastical culture. Hildegard and Elisabeth lived in an age of schism in the Church and incubating fear of "heretics"--rumored/presumed organized movements of renegades who threatened to deceive more and more people away from Christianity/the Church.
Elisabeth is actually braver about her involvement in politics than Hildegard! While Hildegard talks vaguely of "schism" and the need for the Church to reconcile, Elisabeth has no qualms about claiming that God has chosen a side and the people of Earth need to get with the program. "It does not please God that I should pronounce myself on the schism of the Church," Hildegard writes, perhaps playing both sides in an effort to maintain parity of support for the Rupertsberg.
Elisabeth, on the other hand, has a dog in the fight: "And you should know," she writes to the archbishop of Trier as the mouthpiece of God "that the [antipope] who has been chosen by Caesar [Holy Roman Emperor] is more acceptable to Me."
When it comes to preaching against the cathari, which Elisabeth along with other Church leaders of the later twelfth century believed to be an organized threat against the Church, she again displays her familiarity with contemporary culture. Elisabeth talks in the same prophetic idiom that Hildegard uses in her own apocalyptic preaching. This type of language, as Kathryn Kerby-Fulton argues, was shared among Elisabeth, Hildegard, their audiences, and also their sources--an international, elite, politically astute "textual community," to use the scholarly parlance.
In Elisabeth's case, it's easy to see the driving influence and involvement of her brother Ekbert both in promoting her work and in linking her to that broader culture. What makes Elisabeth so interesting for a picture of women's intellectual life in the twelfth century more broadly, however, is her position as abbess.
Hildegard founded the Rupertsberg and there is no doubt she was its driving force during her lifetime, but she (probably) never achieved that official status. Elisabeth did, suggesting both her success in negotiating wider ecclesiastical politics and her popularity within her community. Through her, her sisters were likewise engaged, albeit a step removed, in contemporary political currents.
When it comes to literary-intellectual education, Hildegard is a surprisingly frustrating figure. She claimed not to have any book-learning, to have learned everything through the "Living Light". As a result, she never quotes or cites the work of any ancient or contemporary theologians. Modern scholars are left to find "similarities" between her works and that of others. The lists, which you can find in at the end of the Corpus Christianorum critical editions of her visionary treatises, are stupendously long and impressive--but the most scholars can do is assume she had either read those works or had come across excerpts and quotes from them in other works (a very good hypothesis in a lot of cases--florilegia, catenae, and other compilations were standard medieval literary practice).
Herrad of Hohenburg's Hortus deliciarum is a different story.
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I wish I were surprised that this thread has been live for 8 hours, and nobody has mentioned Africa--even as a continent. I wish I were surprised that no one has mentioned the Nation of Islam, or the tradition of black American Christianity.
After all, the one time I've been able to talk about it on AskHistorians before, the person asked why there is no real African-American missionary tradition.
Against the odds, there totally is.
Okay, the actual historical answer will probably get buried at this point, but why not. It's awesome to have a black history question about something besides slavery!
Black Americans were actually very prominent in 19th century efforts to evangelize Africa. Before the Civil War, when true missionary efforts to Africans were less enthusiastic, the vast majority of black missionaries were sponsored (financially and institutionally) by white organizations. Famous early evagelists like Lott Carey sailed the Atlantic on ships of the (white-founded, white-run) American Colonization Society, which mobilized to establish Liberia as a colony for emancipated American slaves. Most of these missionaries ended up serving the Liberian community, although a few, like Carey, seemed to view it as a place from which to reach out to local Africans.
The high point of black American missionary efforts to Africa was after the U.S. Civil War. Initially, some white mission boards continued to be huge proponents of supporting black missionaries. White America's "gift" was the way it had divorced newly-arrived slaves from separate identities and lumped them all as black Africans. Black missionaries were seen as uniquely able to minister to Africans and physically equipped to handle tropical diseases better (which was not overall true, since they'd been raised in America).
But in this period, especially after 1870, black churches also mobilized to support their own missionaries. Jacobs and Martin list a few reasons for this date. First, black churches had to absorb the impact of emancipation. Second, the end of Reconstruction and ongoing racism in the U.S. convinced some black Americans that repatriation to Africa was still the solution. Third, the racist attitudes of many white missionaries were becoming ever more apparent to black missionaries sponsored by those mission boards and societies.
In the decades around the turn of the 20th century, however, black American missionary presence in Africa basically fell off a cliff. This was certainly not due to lack of interest among black American Christians.
The Civil War and its aftermath had had the result of creating closer trans-geographic ties within black church traditions than white ones (which had frequently been divided by viewpoints on slavery). Initially, this was to their great financial benefit, having a wider basis of support. But the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow laws were disastrous for southern blacks financially as well as in all the other ways, a catastrophe which reverberated in black church denominations. Very little money could be spared on missionaries.
Sandy Martin suggests that black missionaries were also confronted with a unique problem: the psychological costs of understanding black Africans as spiritual and physical kin, yet perceiving themselves as superior and civilized (black American missionaries' descriptions of black Africans are as colonial as whites': backwards, heathen, dark continent, etc). There isn't really evidence to suggest this became a particular problem that reduced black American missionary presence after 1890, though.
The larger problem was white mission boards' racism. They refused to send black missionaries of their own--and they even outright impeded the efforts of black mission boards to sponsor evangelists to established missions, for several reasons.
Evangelization of Africa became closely tied in with an mindset of imperialism and colonization. White Europeans very nervously watched African rebellions, especially in eastern Africa, and worried that black Americans would "naturally" side with black Africans. They pressured the mission boards to quit sending black missionaries. The rise of pan-Africanism and Black Nationalism in the U.S. (think Marcus Garvey) only added to white Americans' desire to add to (or give in to) the pressure. There was also a good dose of straight-up white racial superiority. Black missionaries, they argued, simply weren't good at their jobs. Why take the risk that they would incite or contribute to rebellions, if they weren't even any good?
By the 1920s, black American missionary presence in Africa was tiny. There were a couple of big roadblocks for black American involvement. First, financial. Black churches were simply not as well-funded as white ones, thanks to ongoing American institutional racist policy (in the north as well as south). Second, recruitment. Mission societies trawling for potential missionaries targeted young people--at colleges. So they could just exclude HBCUs altogether.
Today, of course, the situation is beautifully reversed: African Christians view America as missionary ground in desperate need of moral and spiritual help.
One of the things that makes studying the Taiping quite fun is that the amount of English-language secondary material is quite limited, such that it doesn’t take that long (in relative terms) to basically read all of the works on a particular area, or at least the ones published since 1960. An added benefit is that because books on the Taiping are written relatively far apart, there are quite marked differences in perspective, which is quite nice grounds for discussion. In this particular instance, befitting the theme of the Floating Feature, I’ve elected to give a little overview of how historians’ views of the Taiping’s unique religion has evolved over time.
The historiography of Taiping religion can to some extent be further subdivided into the historiography of Taiping theology in itself, and that of the place of religion within the Taiping movement. Unless the historian in question was a hardline Marxist writing under the auspices of the Communist Chinese regime, the Taiping movement has more or less never been decoupled from at least some sort of religious roots, and grappling with those roots has played a greater or lesser part in most scholarship on the subject.
While I’ve read most of the works under discussion in full, in contextualising them I’ve drawn mainly on two recent literature reviews. One is found in the introduction to Carl Kilcourse’s Taiping Theology (2017), which unsurprisingly discusses the evolution of opinions on the theology in itself, and the other in that of Thomas Reilly’s The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Religion and the Blasphemy of Empire (2004), which focusses on views of the role of religion. What I aim to do is take these two together, and all consider how the development of views on Taiping religion fit into wider trends of the historiography of the Qing period. For this, I’ll be mainly drawing on Paul A. Cohen’s landmark Discovering History in China (1984), and the literature review in William T. Rowe’s China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing (2009).
While a degree of academic study of China had been active since the days of the Jesuit missions that began in the Late Ming and the Orthodox mission under the Qing, this was to a great extent monopolised by France and Russia for those above said religious connections. Academic study of China in the Protestant Anglophone world, however, largely had to wait until the first decades of the 19th century, when translators working with the East India Company in Canton began publishing sundry works on China, such as Company taipan George Staunton (who among other things translated the Qing law code) and the Rev. Robert Morrison (who compiled the first English-Chinese dictionary).
Nevertheless, the majority of output would continue to be from missionaries. While civil servants did send reports back to their home countries, and some would even write some Sinological texts, notably Thomas Taylor Meadows with The Chinese and Their Rebellions (1856), the international missionary project ultimately produced much more published material. In part, this was thanks to the large number of journals publishing correspondence, and in part to the ability of missionaries to get memoirs, diaries and travelogues published through the religious press. Crucially, missionaries themselves were more willing to take risks and penetrate into the interior during the period before freedom of movement was conceded in the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin, and continued to have a much larger (in terms of personnel) and broader (in terms of geographical coverage) presence than government agents in China. As Cohen argues, early Anglo-American writers of Chinese history were thus predominantly such people on the ground, whose perspectives were heavily influenced by direct experience in contemporary China. Academic study of China back home was by comparison largely philological.
Rather logically, then, early assessments of Taiping religion were written largely by strongly interested parties, both contemporary and subsequent. Augustus Lindley, a volunteer for the Taiping rather than a missionary himself, championed the idea that the Taiping were motivated by a genuine conviction for Christianity, whilst more cynical contemporaries, missionaries like Elijah Bridgman, Samuel Schereschewsky and William Armstrong Russell, denounced Taiping ‘heresy’.
Decades down the line, scholars with strong religious interests continued to dominate the conversation. Being what they were, Kilcourse argues that their perspectives were distorted by highly essentialised views of Christianity, where it was believed that there was a single way of reading scripture that would lead to a single set of essential conclusions, but the fact is that denominational differences of the authors played a large part in what they considered those essential conclusions to be. To paraphrase, Baptist scholar Kenneth Scott Latourette, writing in 1939, blasted the Taiping for a fundamental misunderstanding of the New Testament on the basis of their confused Christological and soteriological notions, but Quaker scholar Eugene P. Boardman in 1952 argued that the Taiping did absorb key theological precepts about the nature of god and of salvation through Christ, but personally focused on the Taiping’s failure to absorb the lessons of the Golden Rule and notions of love, charity and humility. Reilly similarly argues that Boardman failed to acknowledge Taiping religion as a distinct and legitimate religion, but rather viewed it as a pale imitation of the ‘real thing’ of Anglo-American Protestantism. Bringing it back round to the broad trends of China historiography, this aligns pretty much exactly with Cohen’s characterisation of early history writing on China being dominated by specific interested parties with mainly contemporary concerns.
Arguably the central figure in Cohen’s overview of China historiography is John King Fairbank, the titan of 20th century China studies. Based out of Harvard, Fairbank was a prolific writer, editor and teacher, and consequently had a huge impact on the field, including several of its key theoretical underpinnings. Central to Fairbank’s approach, which Cohen refers to as the ‘impact-response framework’, is the idea that the key paradigm shift in Chinese history was the beginning of active contact with the modern West, symbolised by the conclusion of the Opium War in 1842. An offshoot of Fairbank’s school was what Cohen terms the ‘modernisation approach’, with the key figures being Joseph Levenson and Mary C. Wright, which saw the essential nature of modern Chinese history as being a conflict between the diametrically opposed forces of Chinese tradition and Western modernity. It is this latter approach, the idea of a tradition-modernity dichotomy, that is most significant for the post-Boardman, pre-Cohen period of discussion.
Placing Vincent Shih squarely within the Fairbank framework would be flawed. While his sprawling The Taiping Ideology (1967) aligns somewhat the Fairbank view of 1842 as an epoch-defining moment of modern Chinese history, it does not do so entirely, and although it accepts the notion of a sort of sliding scale of tradition to modernity, it does not suggest outright incompatibility between Christianity and Confucianism. On the matter of Western contact, to quote via Reilly, ‘The Taipings were consciously or unconsciously looking for something that would replace the traditional ideology… Just at this moment came Christianity.’ According to Reilly, Shih’s position was that religion was merely a pretext for fundamentally political motives, and ‘and political and religious motivations were seen to be mutually exclusive.’ However, Reilly perhaps misses a key reason for this that Kilcourse does hit on – his suggestion that ‘in many respects the Taipings were thoroughly traditional.’ Over a fifth of the book’s 500 pages of core text is occupied by a discussion of classical and Confucian influences on the Taiping, and a further 60 pages are devoted to pre-Taiping rebel ideologies, with an eye to what it was that the Taiping shared and what they did different. For Shih, while Christian theology prompted the emergence of the Taiping’s political ideology, it was not fundamental to it. There is, I believe, more nuance at work than Reilly or Kilcourse suggest. My reading is that for Shih, Christianity helped galvanise an ideology built on classical concepts – exactly what Reilly himself argues – and that while the Taiping’s chief ideological influence still derived from the classics, it was a mixture and not a hard dichotomy – which is Kilcourse’s key argument.
This is a short version of some of my research of this past year. It's somewhere on the crossroads between philosophy and religion:
#Samuel Clarke’s rejection of the clockwork analogy in the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence
In the first letter of the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence, dated November of 1715, Leibniz accuses the Newtonians of believing that God had made the world imperfectly. This is what he writes to Caroline:
“Sir Isaac Newton, and his followers, have also a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to their doctrine, God Almighty [needs] to wind up his watch from time to time : otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Nay, the machine of God’s making, is so imperfect, according to these gentlemen ; that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as a clockmaker mends his work ; who must consequently be so much the more unskillful a workman, as he is oftener obliged to mend his work and to set it right. According to my opinion, the same force and vigour remains always in the world, and only passes from one part of matter to another, agreeably to the laws of nature, and the beautiful pre-established order. And I hold, that when God works miracles, he does not do it in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace. Whoever thinks otherwise, must needs have a very mean notion of the wisdom and power of God.” (Lz 1:4)
The above quote is one of the central objections Leibniz raises against the Newtonian philosophy. According to Leibniz, the Newtonians, by rejecting the possibility that God had made a perfect and self-contained clockwork, in so doing undermined God’s perfection and wisdom. To be a perfect creator, Leibniz argued, the world machine has to be perfect – in other words: not in need of any repairs, adjustments, amendments or winding up. For Leibniz, like for so many other early modern philosophers, the clockwork analogy stands at once for the constant law-like functioning of the world, for its purposeful design, and for its ability to be opened up, examined, and comprehended by the human intellect. Clarke, on the other hand, commits himself to a very different analogy. In his response to Leibniz, he compares God to a king, for whom it would be entirely inappropriate to be absent and uninvolved in the affairs of his kingdom.
What I want to convince you of in this post, is that this disagreement reflects Clarke’s very different account of perfection. Acknowledging the existence of certain pre-existing notions of right and wrong, Clarke constructs an account of perfection in which perfection means nothing else than finding a correct (and fitting) relation between different things. This can be derived philosophically from his doctrine of eternal differences and relations, and it is exemplified in the case of God by Clarke's frequent use of the king analogy. Thus, rather than defining perfection by certain notions such as unity, multiplicity, harmony, etc. – divine perfection consists according to Clarke in accounting for the eternal differences and relations between God and his Creation. Perfection, in other words, is to have a perfect fit or correspondence between all the things in the world. I will first establish why Clarke feels inclined to reject the clockwork analogy. Then I will move on to what he offers as his alternative; namely, the analogy of the king, and I will show that from this analogy Clarke is able to derive some conclusions regarding what makes for a best of possible worlds.
##Rejection of clockwork analogy Like all discussions regarding analogies, Clarke’s initial aim is to question the applicability of the analogy in the first place. According to Clarke, the relationship between God and World is simply so very different from that between a clock and its maker that the analogy fails to apply:
“with regard to God, the case is quite different ; because [God] not only composes or puts things together, but [he] is himself the author and continual preserver of their original forces or moving powers” (Cl 1:4)
Clarke is arguing here that it was never even a possibility for the world to be independent from its maker. Consider the case of the clockmaker; this ‘maker’ has merely taken pre-existing chunks of metal and slapped them together. With respect to the clockmaker then, these objects and their sources of energy are indeed all legitimately said to be external, and we correspondingly judge a clock’s perfection by the extent to which it can be made to operate independently from us. But with respect to God, the case is different; nothing is external to or independent from God. He is the author and continual preserver of all creatures and their powers. At every moment the world depends on God’s volition to continue to exist, and creatures depend on God’s active concurrence for their activity. In the next letter Clarke elaborates:
"this wisdom of God appears, not in making nature (as an artificer makes a clock) capable of going on without him: (for that’s impossible; there being no powers of nature independent upon God, as the powers of weights and springs are independent upon men ;) “(Cl 2.6)
In other words, insofar as the powers of nature continually depend on God’s activity, this aspect of clockwork analogy has to be rejected. That is to say, God’s wisdom cannot consist in the world being made independent from him. But what about the clock's pre-established order; the idea of a mechanism ticking away according to a perfect pre-conceived plan, without requiring interventions? Two things can be said about this:
That Clarke accepts that God had a perfect plan for creation, is evident from what he says in the remainder of Clarke 2.6:
“the wisdom of God consists, in framing originally the perfect and complete idea of a work, which begun and continues, according to that original perfect idea, by the continual uninterrupted exercise of his power and government.” (Cl 2.6)
According to both authors actually, God is continuously involved in the world through his concurrence – on this they seem to agree. And so their difference must lie elsewhere. I think the salient difference here is that, according to Clarke, God works out his plan in time by pushing around all his creatures continuously. Whereas for Leibniz, all creatures have received their instructions at the beginning of time and are thereafter themselves responsible for unfolding this plan according to how it was given to them. We may call Clarke’s position here a dynamic understanding of God’s plan: God has a perfect plan, which never changes, but, contrary to Leibniz’ static account, this plan is not programmed into the universe at creation, but instead carried out through God’s own activity in the world. Crucially then, Clarke does not reject that God’s plan is perfect and unchanging. God’s plan was indeed worked out in its entirety before the world was created; and everything is happening according to that original plan – but God’s own involvement was always already part of his plan.
So, how should we understand Clarke’s own account of perfection? Clarke’s position here ultimately comes down to what he calls the "eternal differences and relations between things, which necessarily lead to certain fitnesses, unfitnesses, agreements or disagreements of the application of different things one to another". Crucially, these rules do “not depend on any positive constitutions, but [are] founded unchangeably in the nature and reason of things, and unavoidably arise from the differences of the things themselves.” To give some basic examples: it is contained in the relation parent-child that children ought to pay respect to their parents; and likewise that parents have to take care of their children until adulthood; that citizens ought to obey the king; and that humans ought to admire God. Even God himself, in this picture, cannot act contrary to what is good – because doing so would contradict his infinite wisdom and intelligence. For God to behave immorally, is as impossible as it is for him to create a stone he cannot lift, or even for him to not exist. In other words: from the eternal relations of things, we can derive how God ought to relate himself to this world. And consequently, the best of all possible worlds, on Clarke’s account, is going to be one that is most fit and proper considering the relations and differences between all things.
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When we think of medieval religion we normally think of Islam and Catholicism, often as relatively monolithic entities. However medieval religion, and perceptions of medieval religion are more complicated. I'd like to share an answer I did about non-Christian religion and the survival, or lack thereof, of these traditions:
Europe, like Italy, is in many ways a geographic expression. There are whole hosts of communities and places that are not traditionally considered "European" while being a part of Europe. For example the far North of Scandinavia where the Sami make their homes, but there are other areas as well. Indeed part of Kazakhstan is technically part of modern Europe and I'm willing to bte no one thinks of that part of Europe when their mind conjures up images of castles, churches, pastry shops, opera houses, cofee houses, and palaces. For the purposes of this answer I'm going to ignore those more marginal parts of Europe, not because they aren't interesting and important to study, but firstly because I don't know anything about them, and secondly, I think an answer focusing more on what is broadly familiar in a European context will be of more interest to most readers.
These are the pagan groups that are also the most familiar to modern audiences. I imagine most people here are broadly familiar with Zeus, Hades, Aphrodite, Thor, Odin, Freya, and maybe a few of us here even have heard of Perkun, Teutatis, Nerthuz, or Bellona. By the high middle ages these pagan groups were definitely on the retreat. The Kievan Rus and their offshoots had converted to Christianity under the influence of the Byzantines, the Norse were converted by and large before the end of the 1100's, and Graeco-Roman paganism had been confined to the dustbins of history long before that. The Baltic area as OP notes was a hold out for paganism, but they too converted under pressure from other European powers. Indeed in places like Scandinavia and England the conversion process took on a level of violence that would preclude any communities from surviving. Bede for example tells us of how the last pagan Anglo-Saxon Kingdom, on the Isle of Wight, was utterly destroyed and its inhabitants and king kileld. The zeal with which the two Olafs christianized Norway is also pretty widely known, even if specific examples in the sagas are literary embellishments. Iceland for example is often pointed to as another area where pre-Christian practices could survive, pointing to modern Icelandic folklore about elves for examples. However, Iceland officially converted in 1000 and while provisions for private pagan practice were allowed, it was soon outlawed in its entirety.
So one aspect that often comes up in these discussions are the roles of patron saints in supplanting native deities. Famously St. Brigit in Ireland, but there are examples world wide of similar cases of Christian appropriations of native deities into Christian contexts. However, and I cannot stress this enough, adherence to a Christianized pre-Christian religious figure does not mean that the Christian belief of their worshipers is all of a sudden invalid. This is borne out in other aspects of newly converted life. Christian intellectuals in the early middle ages had no shortage of hand wringing over still pagan practices still on going in their midst. Whether it was amulet wearing in Anglo-Saxon England, beseeching local spirits for aid with offerings of grain, and if memory serves Southern France was also a bit of a hotbed for these sorts of local traditions that caused no shortage of headaches to heterodox Christian authorities, however these practices did not necessarily jump into the territory of paganism (or heresy). For an Anglo-Saxon person in the 8th century there was nothing incongruous between wearing an amulet to ward of evil and disease and calling oneself a Christian.
By the 14th century all of what a western audience would think of as Europe was Christian, at least officially, but how deep was conversion? After all folk traditions die slow deaths and there is ample evidence of accommodation and some limited syncretism between indigenous religious practices and Christianity. While it may be tempting to believe that in some remote corners of Europe, such as islands off of the British coast, or in the deep of Iceland, or the forests of Russia, the old religion survived continuously down to relatively modern time, there is precious little evidence to support the notion.
However that has not stopped people from trying to point at fire beyond the little puff of smoke that occasionally rises up.
Most famously this takes the form of Margaret Murray's...let's charitably call it an eccentric... idea, that underneath the Christian veneer much of Western Europe was still pagan in thought and practice up until the 15th Century, and in France and England of all places! She even proposed that Joan of Arc and Gille de Rais were practitioners of this religion. No really, Joan of Arc was a pagan according to her, and no, there aren't any other Joans of Arc. I really cannot stress how utterly ridiculous her ideas are (I don't know about her earlier academic contributions, I'm strictly talking about her pagan cult in Europe nonsense). However she's important to discuss when talking about "modern" survival of paganism because she was extremely influential, if not on academic history, at least on modern folklore movements and hugely important to the neo-pagan movements such as Wicca.
If you aren't already familiar with her work, I'll sum it up for you to spare you actually having to look it up. The tl:dr is that she proposes that in Europe there survived a pre-Christian religion with a focus on ritualized sacrifices of the two faced horned god at semi-regular intervals. Christianity existed uneasily in the face of this vast religion and only with the advent of the early modern era could it strike out, hence the infamous "witch hunts", which were in actuality targeting members of this pagan cult, and not Christians who had dealings with the devil. This idea has long been utterly discredited, to put it mildly. However her popularization of ideas about a witch cult spurred on the formation of a variety of neo-pagan movements which also claim legitimacy from being ancestral practices extending back to time immemorial.
The idea of surviving pockets of pre-Christian belief in marginalized areas of Europe is a popular one. It has found its way into academic discourse, reconstructionist movements for pagan religions, and of course pop culture (The Wicker Man anyone? no not that one, the original). However there is little evidence to suggest it, and a great deal of contrary evidence. Now this is different from the survival of traditional religion among groups such as the Sami who were never Christianized extensively, despite strong efforts, to begin with.
I'm just happy to see Strasbourg! =)
Zarathushtra Mythicism
Some time ago I answered a question pertaining to the question of whether Zarathushtra existed, and I wrote that you'll find "essentially nobody who disputes [that he existed]". And I've since been reminded when reading some other articles that this is not exactly true, because there is actually a school of thought that considers Zarathushtra a character constructed in oral tradition. It's very much a minority view (so much that I am comfortable calling the existence of Zarathushtra a consensus view), and mostly popular among philologists and some old-school orientalists, but it's not as fringe as my assertion in that thread makes it sound. I will therefore go over this view, assuming some familiarity with Zoroastrian tradition (otherwise, see my wiki page), and consider its appealing qualities, strengths and weaknesses.
The school is exemplified by Jean Kellens (whose work has mostly not been translated from French, hence why I'm not as familiar with it) who follows a track established by the late, great German philologist Helmut Humbach. The essential idea is that one should not read the Gathas, the seventeen hymns of Zarathushtra, in light of later Middle Persian (or even Younger Avestan) tradition, instead, one should entirely interpret it in light of the Rgveda. The idea that "good" and "bad" refer to moral distinctions is herein rejected, and instead entirely read in orthopraxic terms, i.e., as referring to performing correct ritual. Denunciations of "destructiveness", "violence", and so forth are understood to instead refer to spiritual or cosmological injuries to the world which are mended by performing the correct ritual. The figures mentioned by name in the Gathas, like Kauui Vishtaspa, Zarathushtra and so forth, are understood as being identical to the literary characters alluded to in e.g. the Yashts, thus put on the same level as legendary heroes like Karashaspa and Thraetona.
The principal strength of the approach is that it is easy enough (just tedious) to construct a case for it on a purely literarily comparative and philological basis, using the Rgveda to decipher the Gathas. The flipside to this is that the sheer vastness of the Rgveda, consisting of tens of thousands of lines of verse, massively overdetermines your case. The sheer volume of Rgvedic text means that no matter what the 17 hymns that are the Gathas say, you are likely to find something that parallels them among one of the 1024 hymns of the Rgveda.
Perhaps the biggest weakness of the approach is that it is almost insultingly reductionistic. It is, essentially, built on an assumption of a primitivity inherent to prehistorical civlizations. Whereas classicists generally don't have much trouble admitting that a work like the Theogony straddles several genres, we're expected to assume that any teaching in Iranian tradition can be reduced into the mechanical performance of ritual sacrifice. Moreover, it reduces our understanding of the features developed in Zoroastrianism almost entirely into "oh, they misunderstood the Gathas at some point". This is an incredibly unsatisfying explanation, and one that doesn't mesh well with even the slightest allowing for reading theology into younger Avestan texts (e.g., hymns alluding to eschatology). We're left completely without explanatory power for the peculiar developments of Zoroastrian theology.
The approach still has some use, in that it highlights the danger of excessively historicist readings of Avestan material (notoriously done by e.g. Mary Boyce), and that we cannot rely on Middle Persian tradition as our only source, but there is not really any clear argument for why we should not be allowed to consider Zoroastrianism as a living, continuous tradition, as long as we're careful about the inferences we draw. But allowing us to read the Old Avestan texts as at least in part concerned with moral teaching and proper conduct, and understanding spiritual warfare as more complex than a mere matter of ritual, makes for a very convincing explanation for the origin of Zoroastrian peculiarities, which are intimately tied with the argument for a historical Zarathushtra. If we read the Gathas as describing a society undergoing large structural changes, resulting in warfare, turf disputes, and so forth, disrupting traditional ways of life, this permits us to understand the condemnations of violence, the emphasis on good words, good thoughts and good deeds, and the apparent eschatology. If we permit ourselves to infer a centering on a spiritual-material division, we are given a framework where the seeming parallels between personal and universal eschatology can be easily understood as representing spiritual vs. material salvation. The emphasis on choice and personal responsibility becomes clear as well (the material can be corrupted and distorted by outside forces, but the spiritual is good or evil purely by choice and nature).
Perhaps one of the strongest arguments against a "fictional" or mythical Zarathushtra is precisely that the underlying theological structures as outlined above lend themselves very well to a logical and coherent reading. Conversely, in later traditions formed by the kind of iterative and collective efforts Kellens and those who follow him suggest, we find a lot of diversity and often irresolvable contradictions. The establishment of the tenets by a foundational authority also helps explain why we don't see in Zoroastrianism the almost revolutionary change and diversity that is evident as Vedic tradition evolves into Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism.
In concluision, to be perfectly honest, in the little I've read of Kellens I get the feeling that he doesn't actually think his "Rgvedic sacrificial reading" is the most likely one. Rather, you almost get the impression from his writing that he gets a kick out of seeing how far he can take his thesis (which has grown more radical over the years by his own admission!). It's also a symptom of the fact that the Gathic material, consisting of only some 3000 words, has been practically exhaustively studied from a philological point of view. This is also a point Kellens concludes with in his contribution to The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism - any productive research to come out of studying Old Avestan material will have to try and find new angles to read it from and see what it yields.
(This is actually an abridged version of a paper I submitted to a journal this year and which will be published due November. Also, warning: lots of numbers ahead!)
[1/2]
Early modern historians often arrive at the same problems when researching demographics, either of the general population or of certain subgroups: There is simply not enough data. Statistics and censuses (censi?) were for the most part something that only really came up in the very late 18th century and then in force during the 19th. There were exceptions, of course, but the fact remains that often it is quite hard to leave the realm of guesstimates and arrive at numbers that are at least somewhat reliable. This applies even more to those who try and study clerical demographics during the Baroque. Research into this topic has been rather sparse with few exceptions, and then there is the added problem of most contemporary statistics being compiled during a time when the "Baroque Boom" of the Church and of the Catholic religion altogether was already way past its peak.
This background is why the "Schematismus" (you could translate it as "ecclesiastical yearbook") of the diocese of Augsburg is such an important and valuable source. Published in 1762, its author Johann Leonhard Meyer tried to list nothing less than the entire diocese's clerical personnel. For the 38 rural deaneries alone he arrived at 1,599 individuals. It was not the first of its kind - about twenty years earlier, the neighbouring diocese of Konstanz had first published a Schematismus which as far as I know might have been the first altogether in all of Germany - but it was nevertheless one of the first few ones, and it presents a lot more information that its "siblings". As 1762 is still firmly within the Catholic Baroque, the sheer density of information presented by Meyer allows us a deep dive into who the people were who became priests during the Baroque, and where and how they worked.
But let's maybe talk about this so-called "Baroque Boom". I use "Baroque" here following the definition presented by Peter Hersche: this was a time during which Catholics all over the world firmly placed the cultural-religious sphere as dominant over the political-economic one. In this time we see an enormous amount of churches being (re-)built, religious practices like pilgrimages, processions, confraternities, devotions, rosaries, the veneration of relics, various sacramentals etc. enjoy an enormous popularity, vast amounts of money are being spent for religious purposes and hundreds of thousands (and maybe even millions) of Catholics choose religious life over the world, both because of the deep religiosity of the times and because the high demand and sheer amount of money made it a viable career for many. Depending on where you look in Europe it started and ended at different times; for Central Europe you can generally say that it started roughly after the Thirty Years' War had ended and that it went on until the last third of the 18th century, when increasing regulations by the state, a changing public attitude in form of Enlightenment ideas and of course the wars following the French Revolution dramatically altered the face of Catholicism in Europe within only a short few years.
For my paper I looked at the rural deaneries of Rain, Aichach, Friedberg and Bayermünching (=today’s Merching) in what was then the very west of the Duchy of Bavaria. This was an area that was dotted by a small number of cities and market towns, none with more than 2,000 people. Most of the area and most of its people were living off the land in hundreds of small villages or isolated farmsteads. It was also characterised by its proximity to Augsburg, the large right across the river Lech. Back then Augsburg was a foreign country (within the larger framework of the Holy Roman Empire, that is). The city was a strong economic and cultural influence on the lands surrounding it, our area included. For the good Catholics of Bavaria it also was the “other”: Even though in the 1760s the number of Catholics in Augsburg long had surpassed the number of Protestants again, the city still was bidenominational, i.e. the city’s constitution and political makeup was carefully structured as to provide the two denominations with perfect balance. Augsburg had always been an important site for Protestants. Here, Martin Luther publicly defended his theses in 1518; here, the “Confessio Augustana” was written which still serves as the primary confession of faith for millions of Lutherans all over the world; and here the Peace of Augsburg between Catholics and Protestants was signed in 1555, which the latter would lavishly celebrate each year. The area east of the Lech was therefore border country not only in the political sense, but also in a religious one: The final frontier of Bavarian Catholicism against its Lutheran nemesis.
In 1762, only Catholics were allowed to permanently settle in Bavaria; the Schematismus therefore also doubles as a primitive census for the Bavarian parts of the diocese. About 48,500 people lived in the four rural deaneries we’re looking at, which comes up as a population density of roughly 36 people/sqkm (today it’s more than 160). About 80% of them lived outside of the four cities and five market towns, which correlates nicely with the 83% that have been calculated by historians for the entirety of late 18th century Bavaria. The exact percentage could be quite different between the four deaneries, however. The deanery of Bayermünching for example didn’t have a city at all; more than 90% lived in villages and farmsteads there, whereas the deanery of Aichach with its two cities and one market town saw this number plummet to less than 75%.
Johann Meyer counted a total of 112 parishes within the area, which were led by 105 parish priests (some parishes were traditionally administered to by a single priest). The differences between the individual parishes were vast: The largest one, Mering, numbered 2,714 Catholics and was more than 36 times the size of the smallest parish Ebenried with its paltry 75 congregants; if we look at the median size, we arrive at about 300 people. The different sizes also became apparent in sheer territory. Many parishes only consisted of a single village, whereas other covered large swathes of territory which sometimes made it necessary for its congregants to walk long distances when they wanted to attend Mass or talk to their priest (the aforementioned Mering for example was so large that for its easternmost Catholics it took three full hours of walking just to get to “their” parish church). A complex system of vicariates, chaplaincies and benefices however made it possible so that almost nobody in the four deaneries would have needed more than one hour to visit the next priest. Difficulties like the rough terrain of the Alps or the almost endless size of some parishes in Eastern Europe, where Catholics might go for months or even years without ever seeing a priest, were unheard of in this part of Bavaria.
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard might have been more than faintly aware of the Deadly Sin of acedia (or "sloth"). In fact, it may permeate his entire thinking and change the way we think about Kierkegaardian notions including, but not limited to, despair, melancholy, and boredom.
Not only does Kierkegaard in his pseudonymous writing--Judge Wilhelm, speaking to A, in Either/Or Vol. II--mention acedia explicitly (almost by name!),
Nero’s nature was [Tungsind]. In our day, it has become somewhat prestigious to be [tungsindig]; as far as that goes, I can well understand that you find this word too lenient; I hold to an ancient doctrine of the Church that classifies [Tungsind] among the cardinal sins (EO II:185, emphasis added).
But there is very good reason to think also that Kierkegaard uses other terms to refer elliptically to the deadly sin of acedia. Some authors, like Josef Pieper[1], claim that one of the forms of despair (Fortvivlelse) in The Sickness Unto Death is best understood as acedia, whereas others identify the vice as the melancholy or depression (Tungsind) discussed in Either/Or[2]. Still others see a connection between acedia and Kierkegaardian notions like boredom[3] or spiritual trial[4].
Interestingly, Kierkegaard uses an unusually strong word for "boredom", instead of “Kjedsomhed” (“boredom”) or “kjedelig” (“boring”) (words which he uses elsewhere in his authorship), probably to evoke the existential feeling, rather than simple boredom: "Kjedsommelighed". If we are allowed to speculate, this word might be related to the “ked” phonetic root in “acedia”: as Norwegian philosopher Lars Fredrik Svendsen (2005: 24) writes, “it is conceivable that the Danish ked is etymologically related to the Latin acedia.”
If this is right, then not only Kierkegaardian notions like despair, but also his own autobiographically described "congenital melancholy"[5], may be in for a re-evaluation as possible candidates for instances of acedia ("sloth"), one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Notes:
[1] Pieper (1935/1986; 1948/1952) and DeYoung (2015).
[2] Cappelørn (2008) and Ferguson (1995).
[3] Kuhn (1976), McDonald (2009), and Pattison (2013).
[4] Podmore (2011; 2013).
[5] “I have been bound, as if in the service of a higher power, by a congenital melancholy and a tormenting thorn in the flesh, as well as by being personally a penitent.” (“...og deels har jeg været bunden som i en høiere Magts Tjeneste, saavel ved et oprindeligt Tungsind og en qvalfuld Pæl i Kiødet, som ved at være mig personligt en Poeniterende.”) (JP 6:153 entry 6396 (Pap. X1 A 322 n.d., 1849)).
Sources:
Cappelørn, Niels Jørgen (2008). “Spleen Essentially Canceled—yet a Little Spleen Retained.” Translated by K. Brian Söderquist. In Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard: Philosophical Engagements. Edited by Edward F. Mooney. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 129-46.
DeYoung, Rebecca Konyndyk (2015). “The Roots of Despair” Res Philosophica 92:4, 829-854.
Ferguson, Harvie (1994). Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Soren Kierkegaard's Religious Psychology. New York: Routledge.
Kierkegaard, Søren (1843/1987). Either/Or (EO). Two volumes. Kierkegaard’s Writings 3 and 4. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Enten/Eller I-II, ed. Victor Eremita, 1843.)
Kierkegaard, Søren (1967). Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers (JP). Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by G. Malantschuk. Volumes 1-7. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Kierkegaard, Søren (1909–48/1968-78). Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (Pap.). Vols. I to XI3, edited by Peter Andreas Heiberg, Victor Kuhr, and Einer Torsting. København: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1909–48. Second, expanded edition, Vols. I to XI3, by Niels Thulstrup, Vols. XII to XIII supplementary volumes, edited by Niels Thulstrup, Vols. XIV to XVI index by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn. København: Gyldendal 1968–78.
Kuhn, Reinhard (1976). The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
McDonald, William (2009). “Kierkegaard’s Demonic Boredom” In Essays on Boredom and Modernity. Edited by Barbara D. Pezze and Carlo Salzani. Rodopi.
Pattison, George. (2013). Kierkegaard & the Quest for the Unambiguous Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pieper, Josef. (1935/1986). On Hope. Translated by Mary Frances McCarthy. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
Pieper, Josef. (1948/1952). Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Translated by Alexander Dru. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
Podmore, Simon. (2011). Kierkegaard and the Self Before God. Indiana University Press.
Podmore, Simon. (2013). Struggling With God: Kierkegaard and the Temptation of Spiritual Trial. James Clarke.
Svendsen, Lars Fredrik (2005). A Philosophy of Boredom. Translated by John Irons. London: Reaktion Books.
Welcome to the seventh installment of our Summer 2019 Floating Features and Flair Drive.
Today’s theme is Religion and Philosophy, and we want to see everyone share history that fits that theme however they might interpret it. Share stories, whether happy, sad, funny, moving; Share something interesting or profound that you just read; Share what you are currently working on in your research. It is all welcome!
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