Garbage In, Gospel Out

[I hope that the clip I've embedded here from Facebook shows up; I'm trying to find it on YouTube and will replace it if I can. Failing that, I'll transcribe it later.]

I don't think that Brian Cox, who appears to be Britain's moptop answer to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, is fully responsible for this clip, at least not for the computer animations.  But the words appear to be his.

From one perspective I agree with him: he's addressing people who think that we live in an "advanced" society, and pointing out that compared to where human technology may go in a millennium, we're not all that.  But "advanced" is a relative term.  We are advanced compared to societies where human and sometimes other animals' muscles did all the work, where communication consisted of messages carried orally, or in one jump, in written form by human messengers. But what celebrant of Science doesn't know that, or hasn't imagined the far greater glories to come?  It's been a common trope of speculative fiction since the 19th century.

It's hilarious that so many of my fellow atheists jeer at the fantasies of Bronze Age goat herders that theists believe in, and then turn around and say "Look at this amazing imaginary civilization I made up, with computer animation to look real! I even have multiple categories of imaginary civilizations! This proves that I am smarter than Bronze Age goatherds with imaginary friends!" One way to get perspective on this is to look at scientific projections from 1900 or even 1950 of what the year 2000 would look like.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that other people who objected to Cox's spiel in comments under the clip, in the same terms I do. It wouldn't be as funny if Cox didn't talk about Type 3 Civilizations as if they exist. They don't, so he comes across like a Christian revivalist talking about the glories of the Kingdom of Heaven that await those whom God loveth. You think the riches of this world are something special? Compared to the shining garments prepared for you in the world to come, your so-called riches are but filthy rags!  

The fantasy Cox explores here is known as the Kardashev scale, proposed by a Soviet astronomer in the 1960s but boosted by Carl Sagan in the 1970s. According to the Wikipedia article, Sagan "found that the differences between the types Kardashev identified were so great that they did not allow for the best possible modeling of the evolution of civilizations. Consequently, Sagan proposes a more refined classification, still based on Kardashev's types, but integrating intermediate levels using the following logarithmic interpolation formula."  It's probably not fair to theology to say this, but this is theology, like disputing the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.  But then, Modern Science emerged from religion and magic, and it's hasn't left its origins behind.

Ba-ba-ba, Bar-bar-i-Ann

 

I just read this book (published by St. Martin's Press, 2012) and found it very interesting, but thought it missed something. It follows the history of the idea of "the savage" from ancient Greece to the present-day West, and for one thing someone should look at ideas of foreign barbarians in the East; what stereotypes did the Chinese, for example, have of outsiders?

 

The Greeks were of two minds about barbarians, though. On the one hand they were dirty and violent and lawless and hairy; on the other hand they were clean and pure and much happier than so-called "civilized" Greeks. This contradiction runs through the idea's later history. 

 

"Idea" is important because the Greeks knew nothing about distant peoples and just made up what they thought they were like.  According to the Greek historian and geographer Herodotus,

The farther one moved from Greece toward the distant edges of the world, the more strange and different are the lands and life-forms encountered there. Thus, Greece, Herodotus confidently tells his audience, sits at the stable center of the world, with “far the best and most temperate climate.” The most distant lands, he says, will likely have those things the Greeks think the finest and the rarest. He follows this ancient mythic geographic schema of distance determining the degree of cultural and geographical divergence from the comforting Greek norm at the center of the world throughout the Histories. The most remote lands also are where the strangest and most primitive tribes of fierce and ennobled savages are found. Nearer at hand are barbaric peoples, the nomadic livestock breeders, like the Scythians to the north, who are less savage but still practice ritual forms of cannibalism typical of highly uncivilized barbarians. Closest to Greece are those barbarians who are more or less civilized like the Greeks, with more or less sophisticated customs and belief systems.

The Romans took over this schema verbatim, though they knew of distant civilizations like China.  It persisted through the Christianization of the Roman Empire. After the European invasion of the Americas, European thinkers simply carried over ancient stereotypes to the native peoples there. They were lawless and cruel, always at war, and had no conception of property, therefore European Christians were justified in killing them, enslaving them, and taking their land. This was at a time when European Christians were constantly at war with each other, torturing and executing offenders in public, and were busily trying to steal each other's land and property. Down to modernity, they also invaded other civilizations that had laws and property, from the Middle East to the Pacific Ocean. (Just as the Greeks and Romans had.)  By that time, when Europeans had explored the entire world, it was no longer plausible to fantasize one-eyed people who walked upside down, and the main criterion for conquest was that a country wasn't Christian - though again, this didn't stop Christian countries from invading each other.  What's going on here is projection: by describing the savage, the barbarian, we are describing ourselves.  

And the mentality is still with us:

Think of all the different ways twenty-first-century politicians, military generals, and talking heads on cable news programs draw on a language of savagery to describe the West’s violent, dangerously opposed enemies in the “primitive” mountain ranges and “tribally controlled” territories of Afghanistan or Pakistan. People over there are stuck in the “Stone Age”; they are possessed of a “medieval” mentality. A distinctively Westernized language of savagery, dating all the way back to the ancient Greeks and their civilization-defining conflicts with the “barbarian” hordes of the Persian Empire, might have something to do with where these mental pictures in our heads originated.

I did some online searches, and it appears that the Chinese also had a concept that gets translated as "barbarians."  I doubt they got it from Herodotus. I don't believe "these mental pictures in our heads" originated with the Greeks, and I don't think they would have survived if people hadn't found them congenial.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that they're innate, but they're definitely ubiquitous, and probably older than the invention of writing; we just can't trace them farther back in time. It's probably useless to try to find an oridin of the idea in time; we reinvent it in every era.

Savage Anxieties is still a valuable work, though.  It goes well with Stefanos Geroulanos' The Invention of Prehistory (Norton, 2024), which shows European intellectuals and scientists similarly making up prehistoric humans based on fantasy, since they had no real evidence about their lives and cultures, in terms derived from Greek and Roman inventions about savages and barbarians.

Dad Always Liked You Best!

Recently another commenter under a Bart Ehrman video on YouTube told me irritably to read Henri Nouwen's book on the parable of the prodigal son. I don't know what he thought it would prove. The question, if I remember right, was whether Jesus thought that sin had to be atoned for through sacrifice. Ehrman thinks not, and that the material in the gospels which teaches atonement is a later accretion to Jesus' actual teaching. I'm not persuaded, for reasons I'll try to go into some other time, but I kept Nouwen in mind because a gay evangelical Christian article I read a couple of years ago mentioned him as a conciliatory voice on homosexuality and the church. I'd also picked up somewhere indications that Nouwen himself was gay, though closeted. Wikipedia assures us that he never did anything, though.

I didn't try to track down Nouwen's book right away, but one day I was rereading an article by one of my favorite New Testament scholars, Dennis Nineham, rebutting a critique of his work by another scholar.

... Edwards accuses me of ignoring the parable of the prodigal son as evidence for the meaning of Jesus' teaching.  In arguing that the connotations of the word 'father' were different in the time of Jesus from what they are now - a contention with which he seems to agree in his essay on John Bowden - I have, he says, ignored the evidence of the parable.  He must know that a plausible case has recently been made out for questioning whether the parable goes back to Jesus. (See John Drury, The Parables of the Gospels, 1985, which also gives grounds whether the parable of the good Samaritan goes back to Jesus - a question relevant to [Edwards'] p. 194. This book was reviewed by Edwards.)  In any case this is of all parables one of the hardest to interpret; Professor C. F. Evans, for example, has listed a number of conflicting interpretations.  Even if the one Edwards seems implicitly to choose is the right one, it by no means follows that the 'glimpse of home life' it affords is 'typical', or that the teaching of the parable, so interpreted, is 'not untypical' of the teaching of Jesus.  These are simply ipse dixits.*

At this point, let me admit that a plausible case can be made for questioning whether any individual parable goes back to Jesus, though the reverse is also true. Since the person who commended Nouwen's book to me was commenting under a video by a critical scholar who doesn't assume that everything in the gospels goes back to Jesus, however, I think it's fair to bring up the question. Just pointing to one parable that only one of the four gospels contains doesn't settle anything.  That there are numerous conflicting interpretations is also normal in the field; I suspect the other commenter didn't know this and assumed that there could be no question about what the parable means.  Anyway, Nineham's remarks nudged me to find a copy of Nouwen's The Return of the Prodigal Sun and read it.

The parable of the prodigal son is in Luke 15:11-32.  Briefly, a wealthy man's younger son asked to be given his share of his inheritance so he could go and seek his fortune.  Granted his wish, he went away "to a distant country," where he fell into dissipation, drinking and partying with loose women. When his money ran out he had to work tending swine.  Finally he resolved to go home and beg his father to take him in. His father welcomed him and ordered a celebration. His older brother was working in the fields, and no one bothered to tell him of his brother's return.  When he came in he complained, and his father tried to reassure him: "Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.  But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found."  The end.

Now on to Henri Nouwen (1932-1996), a Dutch-born Roman Catholic priest.  I didn't dig deeply into his biography, just looked over his Wikipedia page, so I don't know how he became a celebrity cleric.  He wrote numerous books and traveled widely, taught at Harvard, Yale, the University of Notre Dame. If you're curious, you can find YouTube videos of his rather overwrought preaching style.

The Return of the Prodigal Son, published in 1992, is an odd book. In particular Nouwen focuses more on Rembrandt's painting of that name than on Luke's text. Someone showed him a print of the painting and he became obsessed with it. Eventually in the 1980s he was able to travel to the Soviet Union and see the original in the Hermitage there. Ordinarily tourists weren't supposed to dawdle in front of the painting, but thanks to some personal connections he was allowed to spend several hours looking at it, even getting a chair to sit in.  At this point I began to get annoyed with Nouwen's poor-little-me shtick, as if he was just a nobody who got a special privilege because of his purity of spirit, which the Hermitage guards generously detected. In fact he was a celebrity with an avid support network. Not that there's anything wrong with that!

It's a theme that runs through the book.  The Wikipedia article says that he "was known to suffer from loneliness and a need for interpersonal connection, which he wrote about openly."  Not surprising that it was "known," then, but most people need interpersonal connection.  At one point he writes, "I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found."  I can't take this very seriously, since he reports many people who gave him unconditional love. It seems to me that Nouwen was one of those people who suffer from what one wise writer called a spiritual vitamin deficiency, and who rebuff the kindness and love they are offered; but it's never enough. I sympathize with him, and recognize that his reactions were out of his conscious control, but the constant whining got tiresome as I read the book.**

Much of Nouwen's discussion of the parable centers around his struggle to make Luke's version agree with Rembrandt's. The painting shows the prodigal on his knees in his father's embrace, while a man who seems to be his brother looks on with displeasure. (There's ongoing debate among art historians and critics about who the different figures in the painting are supposed to represent. Is one woman who looks on impassively supposed to be the mother, for example?)  According to Luke, as I mentioned, the brother was at work in the fields when he showed up, and in fact the father saw the youth coming "while he was still far off," so he ran out to embrace and kiss him. Of course it's not unusual to shift things around when adapting a written story to a visual mode, but Nouwen seems very puzzled by it.  He seems to think that if he tries hard enough he can resolve the differences, but also that the painting takes precedence over Luke's original.

Nouwen seems determined to wring every drop of meaning he can from the parable, on every level, which is a traditional Catholic approach to Scripture.  The most obvious, I think, is the idea that Man has wandered wickedly away from his loving Father in order to wallow in sin, but God is waiting to welcome us back and kill the fatted calf for us if only we'll give up our selfish pride. The idea that God is actively looking for us, like a shepherd looking for a lost sheep, turns up elsewhere in the gospels. Nouwen seems much more interested in individual psychology, though: his obsession with finding unconditional love, his personal reluctance to be enfolded in the Father's embrace, and of course trying to join Luke's story with Rembrandt's painting. The most interesting part of The Return of the Prodigal Son for me was Nouwen's move from the prodigal's perspective to his father's to the elder brother's. I don't think Luke had that possibility in mind, but it's a fair approach.

The elder brother is the fly in the parable's ointment, not just for Nouwen but for most Christian interpreters.  If the point was just that God sits up waiting for us to return to him, it would be simple, but Luke complicates it.  It seems to me that the brother has a valid complaint: not only did his father take him for granted, not showing his love for him, but when the prodigal came home, the father forgot to tell him to hurry in and join the celebration: he let him go on working dutifully in the fields. (Nouwen only notices this as a discrepancy between Luke's version and Rembrandt's.) If he hadn't come back at all, would the father have noticed? Nouwen brushes aside the brother's complaint, as the father does. I don't think it's reading too much into the parable to guess that the prodigal was always the favorite.  In a human father, this would be all-too-human, but since the father represents God, he shouldn't get off as easily: he's neglecting those who love him for those who don't.  There's a parable in Matthew of a wealthy man hiring day laborers, who pays those who worked least the same as those who worked all day.  When those who worked more complain, the boss reminds them that he's the boss and he can do what he likes.  The first will be last, and the last will be first!  True enough, but it's not just or fair, and as even some Christian interpreters have pointed out, good luck with hiring workers tomorrow morning, buddy!

So one of the standard Christian readings of the parable of the prodigal son is that the elder brother represents Israel and the younger brother represents the gentiles who are being grafted into the Kingdom by Christ.  But this also implies that God has deliberately neglected his faithful people, fretting for centuries over the ones who got away. It fits with other of Jesus' reported teachings, such as that as a physician he was needed by the sick, not the healthy. But I thought that the Jews, far from being healthy, were the sickest, a bunch of wicked hypocrites, and therefore needed him at least as much. For Nouwen, as for Christian interpreters generally, it seems that the elder brother should have shut up and accepted his second-best status, grateful that his loving father didn't have him thrown onto the trash heap along with the other sinners.

The strangest of Nouwen's excursions is his claim that

I am touching here the mystery that Jesus himself became the prodigal son for our sake. He left the house of his heavenly Father, came to a foreign country, gave away all that he had, and returned through his cross to his Father’s home. All of this he did, not as a rebellious son, but as the obedient son, sent out to bring home all the lost children of God.

I have no idea where Nouwen got this "mystery."  Jesus in Christian mythology and theology was the willing agent of his Father, not a rebel. But this bit of wackery reminded me that the Jesus of the gospels was a rebellious son to his earthly parents. When, as a boy, he stayed behind in the Temple after Passover (Luke 2:41-52) and his parents found him discussing Torah with the "doctors," Mary told him "Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you."  He retorted that obviously he was "about my Father's business."  That was a slap in their faces.  According to the gospels he continued to reject those who'd raised this cuckoo in their nest, and to teach his followers to hate their parents (Luke 14:26).

Which makes me wonder how this theme relates to the prodigal son. I remember one Christian scholar who speculated that Jesus got his teaching about a loving Heavenly Father from the loving example of Joseph. I speculate that Jesus rejected his parents and invented a loving Heavenly Father who sighed to press him to his bosom and would make him feel as special as he wanted to feel. When he said to call no man father, only your father in heaven, I think he meant it.  Maybe his birth parents weren't so loving - we'll never know.  But sentimental fantasies about his upbringing just don't fit with the stories the gospels tell. (For what it's worth, Nouwen admits that his own earthly father was kind and supportive.)

To recap, the commenter who told me to read Nouwen did so under a Bart Ehrman video where Ehrman rejected the doctrine of atoning sacrifice and assumed that Jesus did too. The prodigal son was relevant because no sacrifice was required (what about the fatted calf, though?), just repentance. Ehrman has gone on to claim that Jesus "hated" atonement.  I wouldn't make too much of this myself.  After all, the gospels also show Jesus forgiving sins without demanding repentance (Mark 2:5ff), and some of the calls for repentance may well be later additions, just as the talk about atonement may be. While Nouwen's interpretations aren't without interest, they don't settle anything, especially since they spring from his personal hangups.

* David Edwards et al., Tradition and Truth: The Challenge of England's Radical Theologians 1962-1989 (Hodder & Stoughton, 1989), p. 298. Ipse dixit, by the way, is Latin for "he said it himself," meaning "an assertion made but not proved."

** As another very wise man once said, "Perhaps what you need ... is a good facial."

Gay Christians Still Say the Darnedest Things!

I still haven't seen the documentary 1946, and I think I'll have to, because it's clearly having an effect on gay Christians, whether or not they've seen it.  As I've mentioned before, the film is about the 1946 Revised Standard Version of the Bible and its translators' decision to use the word "homosexuals" in a list of sinners found in 1 Corinthians 6:9. It was the first time that word had appeared in an English translation of the Bible, and the filmmakers apparently present that decision as the cause of antigay bigotry in English-speaking Christendom forever after.  

It was changed in later editions, but it happens that I have a copy of the 1946 edition and can confirm that the word "homosexuals" is indeed there. The 1989 New Revised Standard Version replaced it with "male prostitutes [and] sodomites," which doesn't seem much of an improvement to me, not reassuring to young Homo-Americans anxious about their eternal destiny. In 2021 the Updated Edition chose "male prostitutes" and "men who engage in illicit sex," adding footnotes to both acknowledging that the meaning of the Greek is "uncertain." If you're wondering how one word ("homosexuals") became three or more, look for my discussion of Robin Scroggs's The New Testament and Homosexuality in this post.

Lately I've been seeing allusions to 1946 in video reels and comments on them on Facebook. I don't think the people involved have seen the movie or even know its name; what they know is that something momentous related to LBGTQ and the Bible happened in 1946. One commenter, for example, wrote that the word "abomination" wasn't even in the Bible until 1946. They evidently were thinking of Leviticus 18:22, which calls sex between males an abomination (that is, hateful) to Yahweh. That translation choice appears in the Authorized Version of 1611, known as the King James Version, so the RSV translators had nothing to do with it. One video maker remarked that all the biblical references to sex between males had been altered somehow in 1946. I'm not completely sure about this one, because some of that guy's videos are intended satirically, but I think he was serious that time.

So it looks like I'll be collecting more gay-Christian folklore clustering vaguely around the year 1946. It's another example of oral tradition and its effect on information -- misinformation, rather.  What's different from other cases I've encountered is that this is relatively new, springing up in the past year. I don't blame it on the Internet, because the tendency predates the Internet and social media by decades.  

Frothers on Parade

Wins by democratic socialists in last week's primary elections inspired quite a frenzy among centrist Democrats as well as MAGA. The influence of Second Wave feminism makes me reluctant to call it hysteria, because of the word's etymology, but I think relatively few people know that anymore, so what the hell, I'm going with Merriam-Webster's simple definition: "a state in which your emotions (such as fear) are so strong that you behave in an uncontrolled way."

I thought much of the panic over Zohran Mamdani's election as Mayor of New York City had subsided, though it still rages in comments on Twitter and other social media. he's a communist he's a radical islamist terrorist he was behind the 9/11 attacks he's an antisemite he's going to round up all the Jews and impose sharia law etc. it wasn't just Twitter or Facebook randos who lost it, it was also politicians and party leaders -- the kind of people who we're told are the adults in the room were squalling like toddlers.

When some candidates Mamdani endorsed won in the primaries last week the frothing broke out anew.  Mamdani had forced these communist third-worldists on the voters, as though the voters had no choice but to do his bidding. Mamdani is certainly popular in some circles, but he doesn't have the kind of clout Donald Trump, say, has. And he only endorsed three candidates.  Other lefty candidates won elsewhere without Mamdani's support, though I suppose his sinister third-world tentacles reached out to force them on the voters there too.

And, of course, these were primaries.  As some of the frothers pointed out correctly, turnout in New York City was around 9 percent. The general elections are in November.  I've also seen a lot of people celebrating prematurely, but that's normal. No one thinks they're the adults in the room. It seems likely that some of these candidates will win the general, since they're in safely blue districts, but it remains to be seen. One Dem jeered, "If Socialists want to impress Democrats, go to North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, etc, and flip some seats."  I liked the person who replied, "centrists love to be like 'when are you socialists going to win regions and states that we centrists currently also don’t win'".

One reason I make myself keep this blog going is that it's useful to be able to look back in time a little.  When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unseated a Democratic incumbent in 2018, establishment Democratic reaction was like what I saw last week: how dare she go after an incumbent, she's helping Trump, and so on.  But she won the general and is still in office eight years later despite Democrat-backed attempts to primary her. And then the same establishment, including Nancy Pelsoi, primaried Ed Markey a year later, apparently because he'd become too friendly with Ocasio-Cortez and the other insurgent lefties known as the Squad.

Then, today, the Supreme Court rejected Donald Trump's assault on birthright citizenship.  The MAGA right predictably went bonkers.  This hysteria isn't a partisan thing, and it's good to remember that.

P.S. Just after I posted this and before I went to bed last night, I saw that two more entrenched Democratic incumbents were defeated in Tuesday's Colorado primary by candidates to their left, apparently without help from Zohran Mamdani.  But another Colorado Democratic incumbent defeated a progressive challenger.  That's no surprise, there will be losses as well as victories.  But there are some satisfying moments to savor, as in an item I saw this afternoon.  One of those incumbents posted a video of herself berating a voter last March  ""If ... the only issue that you care about is this issue, then you should not vote for me"-- the issue being Israel's atrocities in Gaza.  Ah yes, that move worked so well for Kamala Harris in 2024.  

I wouldn't assume that Gaza was the only issue that voter cares about.  Last week a self-identified "liberal progressive" and best selling author posted: "As a liberal progressive, I would be fine with the party moving left if these wins were about Medicare for all, reproductive rights, universal childcare, taxing billionaires, and creating affordable housing, But they weren’t." The winners in question are mostly Democratic Socialists, so they have the same wish list this person said she has. Mamdani, for a prominent example, campaigned on much more than Gaza, but his position on Israel obsessed centrist Democrats and the corporate media. The same seems to be true of these other challengers.  But it's also true that unbending support for Israel's crimes and the suppression of dissent about them in the US, not to mention their dependency on AIPAC money, are hurting the incumbents. 

One senior Democrat, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, said he would argue that Mamdani "is the leader of the Democratic Party right now."  I think that's obviously absurd at this moment, but "rising star" feels about right, and Mamdani isn't the only one.  I've been wondering who will fill Bernie Sanders's shoes when he leaves office; suddenly there seem to be contenders.

Moderation in the Age of Faith; or, So Many Heretics, So Few Inquisitors

When the historian Carlo Ginzburg died last week, I decided to look at his early book The Cheese and the Worms.  I'm not sure when I'll read the whole thing, but I was gobsmacked by something in the translators' foreword.

Furthermore, while moral justice was impossible in a context where the Catholic Church felt, together with virtually all other secular and religious authorities on both sides of the Alps, that it had the right, even the duty, to persecute those who differed in their religious beliefs, legal justice in sixteenth-century terms was dispensed by the Roman Inquisition. It was not a drumhead court, a chamber of horrors, or a judicial labyrinth from which escape was impossible. Capricious and arbitrary decisions, misuse of authority, and wanton abuse of human rights were not tolerated. Rome watched over the provincial tribunals, enforced the observance of what was, for the times, an essentially moderate code of law, and maintained, to the extent that a consensus existed, uniformity of practice.

This didn't reassure me.  They conceded that moral justice was impossible in that historical and cultural context, but insisted that the persecution of those who differed in their religious beliefs could be done without capricious and arbitrary decisions, misuse of authority, or abuse of human rights.  This was "an essentially moderate code of law" because people were persecuted uniformly. The Nazis made similar claims, with as much validity; or if that's too extreme for you, so did Dante for his Hell, or the architects of the US invasion of Vietnam.

Then, just a couple of paragraphs later, the translators added:

A permanent and indispensable member of every inquisitorial court was the notary (or a cleric deputized to assume this function), who transcribed in writing as the legal manuals required “not only all the defendant’s responses and any statements he might make, but also what he might utter during the torture, even his sighs, his cries, his laments and tears” (E. Masini, Sacro Arsenale [Genoa, 1621], p. 123).

"During the torture."  Well!  As long as the torture was transcribed by a notary or a properly deputized substitute, the procedure was "not a drumhead court, a chamber of horrors, or a judicial labyrinth from which escape was impossible."  This technocratic amorality is impressive, and what's more, I don't understand why the translators felt it necessary to write this apologia for it in the second half of the twentieth century.

I then opened my copy of Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, a revised edition published in 1970. The book is widely acclaimed and often cited. I read it long ago, in the 1980s, and I'd been meaning to find a passage that made a very strong impression on me back then. It's mainly about the Brothers of the Free Spirit, a movement that spread over much of Europe for more than a century despite the Inquisition's determined campaign to wipe it out.  I found the passage I wanted more easily than I expected:

Brussels continued to harbour Brethren of the Free Spirit. In 1410 the Bishop of Cambrai appointed two inquisitors to extirpate what was still called ‘Bloemardinne’s heresy’; but they found themselves helpless in the face of the popular enthusiasm. Songs were sung after them in the streets and attempts were even made upon their lives.

Songs were sung after them in the streets!  Attempts were even made on their lives!  This demonstrated to Cohn how wicked the Free Spirit were, and how gullible the masses were to fall for their evil teachings, which Cohn presented as the precursors of later Communism and Marxism. (As usual, he neglected to notice that those teachings had their origin in the New Testament.) When The Pursuit of the Millennium was first published in 1957, Nazism was still fresh in adults' memories, the Cold War was in full swing, and Cohn's contemporaries were sure that Elvis Presley's hips were sucking modern youth into the same mass insanity. What I thought when I read it was that it was entirely reasonable and to be expected that torturers and murderers whose methods would later be used by Stalin and the Third Reich would encounter popular resistance when they swaggered into town.  

This long section of Cohn's book consists largely of a litany of heretics who were burned alive by the Inquisition. Here are a couple of examples out of many.

During eighteen months’ imprisonment Marguerite steadfastly refused to purchase absolution by recantation. In 1310 her book was condemned by a committee of theologians; and she herself was excommunicated and sentenced to death by burning. This woman seems to have had many followers, for some months after her death Clement V was bidding the inquisition at Langres to proceed with vigour against the heretics who were multiplying there so rapidly that they were becoming a grave danger to the faith....

The heretics of Cologne had found a remarkable leader in a certain Walter, who came from Holland and who had already been active as a missionary at Mainz. This man was a preacher of great eloquence and persuasiveness; and he wrote various tracts in German which circulated secretly amongst his followers. In the end he was caught; and having refused under the worst tortures to betray his associates or to recant he was burnt. According to one source Walter was an apostate priest, and the head of a large secret group which was captured by a ruse in 1325 or 1327. As many as fifty Brethren of the Free Spirit are said to have been executed on that occasion, some by burning and some by drowning in the Rhine.

But not to worry, a notary or a deputized clerk was no doubt present to record everything Marguerite and Walter said under torture, so everything was done decently and in order.

One more anecdote. These heretics didn't just worry the Roman Catholics, the Protestants agreed that they must be eliminated. 

To counter these activities, the French Protestant community in Strasbourg sent one of their ministers to Tournai, where however he was caught by the Catholic authorities and burnt.

You see, the Inquisition didn't discriminate: all mortal threats to the Christian faith must be extirpated. And I imagine that if the Free Spirit had acquired enough institutional power, they'd have returned the favor.  It was out of this context, and the religious wars that followed, that freedom of religion became an ideal and a founding principle of the American republic. As Ginzburg's translators say, such freedom wasn't a virtue in Europe before that; Catholics and Protestants agreed that it was their duty to punish those who held different religious beliefs. At most each side wanted toleration for itself.

I suppose I should reread The Pursuit of the Millennium and, if possible, Cohn's 1975 book on the struggle against European witchcraft, Europe's Inner Demons.  As I recall, Cohn was as confused about that issue as most academics were at the time - were the witches mentally ill, or were they really worshipping the Devil? it didn't occur to them that if anyone was mentally ill, it might have been the Inquisitors. As far as I remember only the maverick psychiatrist Thomas Szasz made that suggestion.  Not that I think so either: the medicalization of evil is not an improvement on treating it as a sin. As Hugh Trevor-Roper said in his essay on the European witch-craze, the complex demonology that gave the witch-hunters an ideology for their campaign was a triumph of Reason comparable to Aquinas' philosophical work. (Remember: Garbage In, Gospel Out!)  But that's for another day.

The Smell of Burning Cities in the Morning

Look, I know that President Trump has been a bit of a disappointment, but you have to remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good.  If you demand that the President pass all your purity tests, you'll never have a President at all.  Politics is a messy business, and you have to be realistic. Better let the grownups in the room handle this.

... I hope no one reading this will think that I'm being anything but bitterly sarcastic. The mainstream reaction to Trump's memorandum of understanding with Iran hasn't been surprising.  Many of the commentators, in government and in the punditocracy, don't seem to understand what a memorandum of understanding is, and like Schumer, they're lying wildly about the details that were leaked before the text was released. As far as I can tell, the $300 billion for reconstruction is supposed to come from a multinational group that doesn't include the US. Of course it's possible that, like many numbers Trump has talked about that supposedly won't cost US taxpayers anything, the multinational group is a mirage, but Schumer and his ilk seem so far to be misrepresenting it. It's hard to know, given a choice between Trump and the Congressional Democratic leadership, who is lying, but it would be foolish to trust Schumer.

For one thing, similar lies are flying about sanctions relief and the unfreezing of Iranian assets. None of that is taxpayers' money.  The frozen assets belong to Iran, and should have been released many years ago, but both US parties have refused to do it.  The same panicky yelling about Iran's "nuclear program," which is a dogwhistle for "nuclear weapons program," is false too. Iran has the right under international law and the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.  So why believe these guys on the $300 billion?  One can't trust the Iranian government either, but so far they have been somewhat more truthful than the US and Israelis.

As numerous, mostly left-wing commentators have pointed out, the loser in a war normally does and should pay reparations.  Israel, as joint aggressor, should pay reparations to Iran too, but that's never going to happen, and the US should take responsibility for its criminal aggression for once. The words "lose" and "defeat" are, to my mind, not exact here. The US hasn't been defeated as I understand the word.  Our cities haven't been bombed, our leaders haven't been carted off to trial and imprisonment in Iran, and Iranian troops don't occupy American soil.  The same is true of Israel, where similar caterwauling is going on.  US jingoes will always refuse to admit that this country has ever been the aggressor, and if US critics mean by "lose" that the US failed to achieve its objectives, it's fair to rub the jingoes' noses in it.  There's a lot of squalling about Trump's "bad deal."  Maybe it is, but it could be so much worse.

I meant to write this post a couple of days ago, and worried that the situation would fall apart before I got started.  That it hasn't collapsed yet says something about Trump's determination to get out of the mess he's mired in, even as Israel continues killing Lebanese and undermining the ceasefire. On Thursday morning NPR had a fairly good interview with a former Lebanese ambassador to Jordan. For some reason, they didn't post a transcript, just a summary with a few quotations; it's worth listening to the whole thing. By contrast, a Friday morning interview with Richard Haass, a "veteran diplomat ...who served in both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations," and who criticized the memorandum from the right, got a full transcript.  Host Leila Fadel pushed back gently, but let him run on.

By Israeli standards, of course, "ceasefire" means only that the other guys have to stop shooting; Israel will continue its atrocities.  As Avedon Carol noted yesterday, "Not sure where we are in any given minute with the Iran ceasefire deal, during which, as usual, Israel has not done any ceasing to fire, and then complained that Lebanon broke the ceasefire by killing four IDF soldiers who were invading their country at the time. I'm reminded of all the definitions of chutzpah when Hezbollah is called 'terrorists' for defending their own country against invaders."

But our elites will never admit that the US is in the wrong, and Trump's fans are trying to pin the MoU on JD Vance -- anybody but Trump, who to be fair is mainly concerned with his optics rather than substance, as usual.  As I've indicated, the MoU looks much better than anything I'd have expected from this administration, and could be a reasonable beginning. For that reason, it will probably fail, because of Israel and the rest of our government.