The Pope's speech to the German Parliament

[fpb]

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_listening_heart
As ever, the man is worth listening to. But the responses in the comments thread just show how bloody useless it is to deliver intellectually distinguished and morally valuable speeches in a world where most people know no history but are stuffed full of out-of-context factoids and believe themselves entitled to judge.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

"...I find nothing intellectually worthwhile in faith itself..."
Even the faith that there is such a thing as yourself and such things as the world outside you?
"....I don't believe in free will [or] natural law..."
Wow. I take it you have a few issues with the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence.
"...Roman, Greek and Chinese traditions had a number of secular systems that believed in human equality and dignity..."
I won't take you up on the Chinese - except to say that any egalitarianism in their intellectual traditions seems to have been pretty effectively denied by their political institutions, but there was NOTHING that Plato and Aristotle shared so completely as their joint certainty that Greeks - especially upper-class Greeks - were born to be masters, and barbarians to be slaves. And until Paul of Tarsus, acting as interpreter of the views of Jesus of Nazareth, nobody, but nobody, explicitly refused them ("no slave or free, no Greek or barbarian..."). As for the Jews, I suggest you have a look at the apocalyptic war of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in which God would lead His Chosen People to conquer the rest of the world in a very physical, very material war which would reduce all non-Jews to slaves or corpses. And in case you thought this was a wish-dream, I would point out that Bar Kochba's revolt can only be interpreted as a determined attempt to actualize it. As for Rome, the certainty that Rome existed to rule the rest of the universe was as rooted in Roman culture as the ceremonies of the Vestals. Just as the God of the Dead Sea Scrolls promised the Jews triumph over every nation in the world, the God of Virgil said in so many words: "To them I place no end in space, in time;/ To them I've given empire without end." And let's not even speak of India or of the civilizations of the New World. No, the equal dignity of every human being, not as a vague speculation, but as a principle of action and law on which political systems are built, is firmly culture-specific. And guess which culture we're talking about?

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

I act under the belief that there are things such as myself, and things outside myself, because I observe them and because it makes the most sense; it is self evident. This could all be some sort of delusion hoisted upon me by a Cartesian demon, but appeal to such is sophistry, and could easily be applied to any faith I have as well. We don't need belief without proof at all to presume the existence of the world. It may not be 100% certain, but there is enough certainty and likelihood through the intersubjectivity of human observation means it is probably the case. Faith has no influence upon my thinking or life, but that does not mean I confound it with trust, probability, or hope.

-----

As to the origin or rights, sure: I don't believe in the existence of natural rights like Platonic motes of essence imbued in our beings. However, the Constitution is the governing document of my country and we adhere to that as our shared guidelines, not the Declaration of Independence. I'm not about to believe something just because Jefferson thought it so. Although it is worth noting that many of the signatories of the Declaration also wrote scathing attacks on the Church, feeling their philosophy to be superior to the clergy's.

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

Paul's quote was historically interpreted as giving spiritual equality but was not given its spin of political equality until recently. Slavery was still around and was both supported and opposed on religious grounds, especially in my own country's history. Beyond that, the middle ages were full of serfs who were essentially enslaved to the land via their landlords...and religious thinking at the time dictated that God had ordained everyone's proper place as serf, freedman or noble, so mobility was difficult if not impossible. Likewise the divine right of kings prevented any meaningful participatory government and held the monarch as the divinely ordained autocrat, and hence political speech against him was punished severely.

The idea of 'all men are my brothers' was also in evidence during pre-Christian Rome amongst the cosmopolitanism of the cynics and stoics, many of whom argued against slavery. Likewise Solon the Athenian also advocated for the abolishment of the practice before the rise of Rome, Jesus or Paul. The Pope specifically cites Stoic natural law as something the Church carried on regardless.

Europe has had its own struggles with inequality: Catholic Spain had the concept of "Cleanliness of Blood" that ranked 'blue blooded' European aristocrats higher than the Sephardic Jews and Moors who remained and converted to Christianity post-Reconquista, and antisemitism was justified along religious grounds for centuries. The Inquisition, even if not the torture-fest as commonly perceived, still saw people being punished for thought and speech that the local authorities felt was heretical, not helped by the papal bull "ad extirpanda", issued by Pope Innocent IV, which authorized certain types of torture. The crusades against the Cathars is another example of Europeans behaving badly on account of religion towards each other.

This isn't to say that I think Christianity directly leads to torture and murder (just like atheism does not lead to Nazism), but that the antisocial views and abuses you and I have brought up, as well as their remedies, are HUMAN activities as opposed to religious: people can and have used religion to justify both the social and antisocial tendencies of their personalities.

Modern rights that we take for granted are formulated upon, and assume, modern institutions, and things like freedom of religion, expression, education and such were nonexistent until recently in their current form. Only with the Enlightenment (most of the philosophers of which were highly unorthodox in their religion or else critical of the Church, especially the founders of America) did things start gaining steam...and even then, it's still unfinished. The Magna Carta, while pre-Enlightenment, was borne out of legal disputes between nobles, not a fiat of church edict. Christianity and other religions can certainly be compatible with them as evidenced by the re-interpretation of Paul's quote you referenced, but we should not retroactively apply our viewpoints to assume that the Church gets credit for modern ideas of egalitarianism other than being another (valuable) link in the chain of Western thought.

One

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You are wrong about slavery: by the year 1000 it had been effectively abolished in Christian countries (by the transformation of slavery into serfdom, with limited and definite rights and duties), and the only state that dealt in slaves proper was Venice, because it was the only one that had wide-open borders with non-Christian countries. In 1437, I think, the Portuguese asked for and received from the Pope, as ultimate authority in law, a permission to trade in African slaves (a trade that already existed in West Africa - the Portuguese only wanted a piece of the action) in order to finance a crusade against Morocco. At the time, nobody imagined such a place as America existed, and the disastrous consequences of what seemed like a very minor leave could not possibly be foreseen. (The crusade actually did take place in about 1510, and was an unqualified disaster.) But when the Iberian powers discovered America, the minor issue of a few slaving boats between African harbours slowly grew into a major trade which skewed the social composition of the coming European colonies in America in ways that had been utterly unknown in Europe since the end of the Roman Empire. Even so, the real catastrophe was the Protestant Reformation, which removed several involved parties from the Pope's jurisdiction and weakened his hold on the rest. The Dutch threw themselves on Portuguese trade routes like vultures, and the British started settling colonies with slaves bought first from the Dutch, then from their own ships. Furthermore, the immediate softening and legal correction imposed by the Church on slavery in CAtholic colonies through the advocacy of such men as Bartolome' de las Casas and St.Peter Claver was wholly absent in the Protestant powers; indeed, slavery did not actually begin in the English colonies with imported Africans, but with tens of thousands of enslaved Irish Catholics - the Africans only came later. (In the first half of the seventeenth century, as I pointed out elsewhere, England suffered from a serious shortage of valuta and might not have been able to pay Dutch prices for them anyway. But she could and did drag tens of thousands of wretched Irishmen and women to be treated worse than the Portuguese and Spanish treated their Africans.) Even so, the poison of slavery, having been reintroduced into the body of European colonies (there never was slavery in the mother countries) was eventually spat out again, in one case at a very high cost in lives and treasure. Western civilization could not live with it. China, India, and the Muslim world, on the other hand, lived happily with it for millennia.

Re: One

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

So Christianity ended slavery after 1000 years...except when it didn't...and serfdom was hardly a great leap forward for human rights, even if it was relatively better than slavery: you still had an unequal rendering of basic rights in society. I also find the notion that the Pope granted some leeway to be inexcusable for something supposedly as basic as the right to be free of bondage.

I can't speak to India, not being as familiar with its history, although the Islamic Mughals were responsible for much of its mainstreaming. Likewise in China, slavery came in and out of favor, often under the auspices of the authoritarian philosophy of Legalism (which opposed Confucianism and Mohism; in fact Confucian tales abound of scholars trying to convince cruel kings to be benevolent), and even then it was mainly a punishment for criminals or war captives. Slavery was limited in east, however: for example, Yu Hyongwon was a Confucian scholar who argued for abolition, as did Mohism in China and later the Emperor Wang Mang. Buddhism specifically prohibited engaging in any slave trade.

Re: One

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Try not to equivocate. Christianity abolished slavery among Christians, because all Christians, including the slaves, had rights which the Church recognized and which neither nobles nor kings could deny, since their very same rights also depended on Church recognition. In theory, non-Christians could be enslaved. In practice, as soon as a large body of slaves began to build up - in the New World - its presence proved troublesome, and ultimately intolerable, for the very same reason: slaves became Christians, and Christian public opinion - Catholic first, Protestant much later - started asking "is he not a man and a brother?" It was the primacy of the Christian doctrine of the equality of all believers that killed slavery again and again.

Buddhism prohibited engaging in any slave trade. Prohibited who? And some intellectuals in China did not much like it. With what result? The war between the states wasn't fought in China.

Re: One

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

Buddhists believed that no one should engage in the slave trade - their proscriptions were, and are universal. They also rejected the Indian caste system. Slavery came and went out of favor throughout China's long history, depending on the rulers involved.

That abolition during the middle ages extended only to non-Christians upon their conversion is better than nothing, and better than previous conditions, but is clearly not the same as later conceptions of rights, that exist for people regardless of their religious belief. Same for serfdom which was not abolished fully until the 19th century in some places, mainly due to economic and population pressures.

Two

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There was no such thing as "the divine right of kings" in mediaeval Europe; it is a French invention, dates about 1500, and was justly dead by 1792. All the European rulers, apart of course from those who were full-blown republics, were flanked and limited by representative parliamentary bodies. It is significant that every single historical European language has a native word for "Parliament" - English, French (Etats-Generaux), Spanish (Cortes), German (Diet, Tag), Italian (Maggior Consiglio, Arengo), Sardinian (Corona de Logu), Serbo-Croat (Skrupshtina), Russian (Duma), Scandinavian languages (Thing, Folketing, Althing), Welsh (Senedd), not to mention a few defunct ones - Longobard (Gairethinx), Anglo-Saxon (Witangemot). Representative government is native to the Christian West, and was theorized as early as St.Thomas Aquinas in 1200. "The divine right of kings" is a fallacious invention in the service of the creeping usurpation that was the modenr French monarchy, which continously bent and broke its own legal support.

Re: Two

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

Representative democracy of the kinds you listed only came into being around the Enlightenment. Thomas Aqinas was certainly inspired by the representative ideals of the Roman republic but his was a minority viewpoint at the time. In the end all that the middle ages manage to cough up were nobles who advised the king, who still had the ultimate authority. It certainly primed the people to accept representative democracy later, but it was not the same thing.

Re: Two

[fpb.livejournal.com]

What you say is factually wrong. IN European practice, the King has always been made by Parliament; the predatory and illegitimate behaviour of the French kings was an imposition; and the spread of French practice and influence was constantly disastrous. For instance, George Garnett shows, in the opening chapters of his Conquered England, that the failure of French-speaking Normans and native English to understand each other on this fundamental point was the cause of an immense amount of violence and effective illegality. Quite simply, the English believed that once their leaders had made an act of recognition to the prospective king, as a collective body - Garnett uses the term Witan - that man was the King, end of discussion; whereas the French-speaking, French feudatary William (however much he might owe culturally to his Viking ancestors) was sure that he would only be King once he had been anointed. Hence he ignored their act of recognition and continued savaging the country until the desperate Londoners rushed to some sort of ceremony. But the tradition was on the side of the appointment of the king by the Witan, and William was the (brutal) innovator. It did not last, either; within 250 years, Parliament had reasserted its right to nominate and dethrone a King (Richard II). For that matter, laws could not be passed except with the approval and support of a parliamentary body; 250 years before William, Charlemagne and his successors legislated in the form of Capitularies, orders and laws emanated in the presence and with the support of assemblies of nobles and priests; and 250 years before them, King Rothari of the Longobards emanated his great code of laws with the advice and approval of the Gairethinx, or assembly of nobles. The Parliamentary institution was as universal in mediaeval Europe as it was utterly unknown elsewhere: you will dig forever in Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, Aztec history without finding any such body of elected representatives, not only advising kings, but making and unmaking them. And in spite of the French poison, the practice remained in Europe: as late as 1861, the victorious King of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel II, did not wear the title of King of Italy until he had summoned an elected Parliament to Turin to vote him in.

THERE WAS NO SUCH THING AS REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT IN THE ANCIENT WORLD. The very principle was unknown. There were some elected magistracies, but they could as easily be appointed by lot; the important principle being, not the idea of representing the people in any way, but of fulfilling a public office in a way that prevented it being monopolized. The Greek cities were governed by assemblies of free citizens, with no elected grouping of any kind; Rome, by a Senate whose members were not selected but appointed by a magistrate, the Censor, who had no other duty but to appoint, control the behaviour, and if necessary dismiss, Senators. The relationship of the Roman Senate to the Roman people was precisely this, zero, and that is why the famous name of the Roman state, SPQR, emphasized both, "The Senate AND The People of Rome": they were two separate components of the State. The elected Parliament is a mediaeval invention, and through most of the middle ages it was the dominant institution in the Christian West, the more dominant the more rich and advanced were conditions - for instance, openly republican "communes" or city states dominated the rich landscape of Italy and of the Low Countries. Monarchy by divine right was invented by French theorists in the late fifteen hundreds, and had a short and ultimately catastrophic ride.

Three

[fpb.livejournal.com]

All the factoids you quote to the dishonour of Europe are minor and local. You are probably not aware that when the Jews were driven out of Spain, many of them fled straight to... Rome. The Pope's own capital. Why? Because that is where the most ancient Jewish community in the world has resided and resides still, under the Pope's protection. I am told that some Roman Jewish families can trace their descent, son to father, to 250AD and the Roman Empire. Indeed, the whole idea that there is a special hatred between Christians and Jews is due to a Muslim peculiarity. Christians expel unwanted minorities. Muslims, if they have such a problem, bury it. And if it was otherwise, ask yourself: why is it that, by 1800, nine Jews out of every ten lived in Christian Europe?

Re: Three

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

Antisemitism existed in France, Austria, Iberia and England where pogroms and expulsions were common. It was hardly "minor and local", no more than German, Polish or Italian beneficence towards Jews were "minor and local" either.

I'm not trying to "dishonour" Europe, only to show that their Catholicism in the middle ages did not necessarily mean they behaved in the whitewashed manner you claim. Most probably did, some didn't, but you cannot take credit for people behaving well from your religion and inspiring later beneficial ideals, while ignoring those who used it as a pretex for abuse. It is hubris to believe that any human culture or religion is somehow perfect (or utterly wretched), or that the past was some golden age compared to today.

Re: Three

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Rubbish. The whole dimension of behaviour to the Jews was different. The worst thing that Christian governments and authorities ever did to Jews (the Nazis weren't Christian and were planning the destruction of Christianity) was to expel them; the pogroms were the result of the typical kind of popular hatred of different neighbours which happens all over the world. What is more, in the twelve and thirteen hundreds, both Popes and Emperors published several Bulls threatening with excommunication and with charges of lese-majesty - that is, with the worst kind of penalty possible - anyone who assaulted or slandered the Jews. That they could not control the mobs does not mean that they did not try. At any rate, that is wholly different from Muslim practice, where governments regularly led pogroms. There has to be a reason why, by the nineteenth century, nine-tenths of the world's Jews lived in the Christian West.
(In fact, the relative moderation of the West is the reason why it is being so constantly slandered. Expelled Jews could hug their grievances close and go on about them; dead Jews could not. So they remembered the Spanish expulsions, but not the massacres by Mongols and Turks. There was nobody left to remember. And so, with this meme stamped on their minds, the early leaders of Israel tried hard to make friends with the local Muslims while treating the Christians like dirt. The result has been a series of vicious wars and diplomatic disasters; and some Jews still haven't learned.)

Four

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The crusade against the Cathars was started by the Cathars. They murdered a papal ambassador. Anyone who starts a war has only himself to blame for the results.

Re: Four

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

That might be justified if they didn't kill noncombatant Cathars en masse for the death of one ambassador, especially since the majority of Cathars practiced pacifism. Even St. Dominic had to intervene to spare Cathar noncombatants from being killed by other Catholics. I'm not about to grant moral equivalence to war crimes by anyone, regardless of the initial causus belli.

Re: Four

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And here, without noticing, you have got yourself stuck on your own argument. As it happens, after a few years of crusade, the Pope declared the crusade over and ordered the crusaders home. They ignored him and kept up the war and the violence. You can blame the Pope for what was his part - which was strictly limited - but not for the war being continued against his express order; you can't blame him for the war, because you yourself recognized that the Albigensians started it with their treacherous murder of an unarmed emissary - something that has been a casus belli at any time and place in the world.

Five

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The Declaration of Independence was not some sort of personal effusion of Jefferson's. It was an official document released in the name of the legal authorities of thirteen colonies - which were also legally states, something that is not very clear to modern minds but on which the signers were perfectly correct - and embodying their reasons to dethrone their former sovereign and go to war against him and his supporters. You are quite right that Jefferson and a few others were anti-clericals of a rather foolish and provincial stripe, and I have castigated Jefferson for his personal silliness on a couple of occasion. But it is just in the kind of personal effusion which this document is NOT that Jefferson indulges his silly prejudices; in this document, written as the spokesperson of thirteen free peoples, he and his fellow-founders declare their reliance on Divine Providence and build their claim on the rights bestowed on them by Him. If you deny validity to this claim, I expect you to say that the Founders were wrong in their principles and in their reason to act, and that their war was therefore nothing more than illegitimate and cruel revolt.
Incidentally, two of the Founders were not just Christian but Catholic. One of them was the cousin of the USA's first consecrated Catholic Bishop, later archbishop, John Carroll - a member of the first great Catholic dynasty of America, who provided the country with two more centuries of fine servants and sons before ending, alas, very much in piscem with the ghastly James Carroll.

Re: Five

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

I go where my reason and observation lead me: so if I come to the conclusion that the founders were incorrect in believing in natural law and a creator (regardless of religion), then so be it.

That does not mean I must disagree with them as far as the value of representative government, or legal rights, or that they did not have genuine disagreements with Britain that warranted breaking away. Many of their enlightenment contemporaries ascribed rights to being granted by the State, such as Spinoza, Kant and Durkheim, so there was hardly a unified idea of the origin of rights to begin with. Yet we have common ground on the end results. And of course, I should mention Jefferson's best line:

"As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

Re: Five

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Which, considering that representative government was an idea seven hundred years old, would have meant that Jefferson should have supported the up-to-date tyrannical ideas of the most advanced rulers of the age, the likes of Frederick of Prussia and CAtherine of Russia, whom all progressives in their time loved and admired and tried to follow. That was the progressive party: the United States were trying to cling to an armoury of mediaeval notions with mediaeval names - county, council, alderman, sheriff, habeas corpus, militia, etc etc. But then Jefferson could be quite silly if he put his mind to it.

Six

[fpb.livejournal.com]

A few Stoics and the odd Cynic (and the Cynics weren't taken seriously as philosophers) may have argued against slavery as a piece of clever talk, in the certainty that society would do nothing to change something so fundamental to it. Christian Europe abolished it TWICE. When it was reintroduced by Venice, they had to invent a new word to describe it ("Slave", from the ethnic Slavs who were the first to be conqured and sold by marauding Venetians), because the old Latin word seruus had been wholly emptied of meaning and reduced to a kind of contractual relationship. No other society has ever even tried to abolish slavery. None other. Enslavement and sale was still a regular government-mandated punishment in nineteenth-century China, and the slave markets flourished in India and the Muslim world until armed European invaders shut them down by force.

Re: Six

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

Dismissing pre-Christian anti-slavery arguments of the entirety of the stoics and cynics as "clever talk" or lip service seems to be unsupported (unless you want to assume such for the convenience of your position), nor does their lack of popularity mean the ideas were not in the air...again, the fact the Pope mentions them as early influences of natural law and such means the church at least took them seriously.

Re: Six

[fpb.livejournal.com]

No, sir, it's up to you to prove that anyone anywhere except in Christendom ever came even close to abolishing slavery in practice. And you can't, because nobody ever did. With one exception: the Jews.

Seven

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Modern ideas which we take for granted existed nowhere but in the West. It is the worldwide triumph of the West that has made them universal. Ataturk learned nationalism and secularism in the military school in Berlin, and Gandhi got the idea of an Indian-flavoured nationalist movement from GK Chesterton.

Re: Seven

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

The key term is "the West"...which includes pre-Socratic Greece through the Enlightenment and beyond, up to modern times with modern rights such as contraception and non-procreative sex, which I applaud while the Pope does not.

The Church is one of many dominos that fell in this hisotry, and my issue is not with the Pope mentioning the church's role in Wetern civilization, rather with how he marginalizes the other Western contributions before and after. In fact, the Western journey is still a work in progress, as evidenced by civil rights and women's suffrage, or the right to be gay and not burned at the stake coming within the past century.

I also think he conflates origin with principle when he implies we must be religious just because we inherited ideas that religion influenced. I mean, I like Gregorian chanting, but it doesn't mean I have to believe in transubstantiation: we can, and do, separate the notion of legal rights from the unsupported metaphysical danglers of Platonic forms and natural law.

Re: Seven

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Half of Greek civilization became part of Christianity. The other half became part of Islam. Do tell me where all the wonderful Greek contributions can be found in the Muslim world.