“Wars of Religion:” A Reply to a Critic

Richard Sale author of Clinton’s Secret Wars   

     Certain qualities of mind are irksome. When we encounter a writer and hear the careless approximation of a complicated array of facts, and the speaker portrays it as the product of considered thought and persevering application when it is only empty and glib -- that is irksome. When an interpretation of intricate events is put forward on the pretense of being authoritative when it only embodies inadequate hearsay or defects of knowledge -- that too is irksome. But when certain smug, sweeping prouncements are made with a presiding, complacent air, aimed at self-display that clearly  show a disdain of solid knowledge --  that is not only irksome, it is deeply nettling.  

     Recently I did a posting about the Arab-Israeli dispute.  It likened it to Wars of Religion.  In response, the reader quickly contradicted my thesis:

      “I'm afraid I do not agree with Mr. Sale that religious wars exist. Wars are about power. Religion is merely the excuse.”  My critic follows:  “As for the bestiality, Sir Isaiah Berlin paraphrased Bakunin: ‘Religion allows people to commit unspeakable cruelties against other people, then sleep well at night, safe in the knowledge they are doing the Lords work.’”

       This is curious. It is also facile. My critic claims that historically, the unspeakable cruelties, mass slaughters, and dispossession of huge populations can be solely attributed to power using religion. I would ask how such atrocities which use religion as a pretext are different from the unspeakable horrors committed by the Nazi’s, the Stalinist purges or the stolid, remorseless murder programs of a Serb like Mladic, is not addressed.   According to this writer, the chief difference between secular and religious murders is that the latter slept soundly at night.

Marx and Religion

     The paraphrased quote from Isaiah Berlin, used by my critic, is odd. Bakunin was a Russian nihilist, the founder of the Anarchist movement.   In his God and State, Bakunin early reveals that his outlook on spiritual matters was decisively shaped by Marx, which should alert us to the fact that Marx is no more a competent guide to explaining spiritual life than Huge Hefner.

      
     As a good Marxist, Bakunin plainly does not believe in religion. The idea of young Iranians, who, time after time, charged well-trained Iraqi troops and died by the millions in the Iran-Iraq War, has no relevance for him.  Bakunin says of religion: “Who is right, the idealists or the materialists? The question, once stated in this way, hesitation becomes impossible. Undoubtedly the idealists are wrong and the materialists right. Yes, facts are before ideas; yes, the ideal, as Proudhon said, is but a flower, whose root lies in the material conditions of existence. Yes, the whole history of humanity, intellectual and moral, political and social, is but a reflection of its economic history.”

  In E.H. Carr’s biography of Bakunin, he remarks that the Russian had a lot of energy but no common sense. Perhaps this is why Bakunin calmly asserts that we have no ideas except those that reflect economic conditions, making the religious belief not only absurd but stupid. Bakunin, the anarchist, asks us: “How comes an intelligent and well-informed man ever to feel the need of believing in this mystery?”( Bakunin ‘s italics.)

    Yet history has proved that it was not the “idealists” who were wrong but Bakunin and Marx. Bakunin ‘s thought was related in kind to that of Ludwig Fuerbach, a German critic of religion, who once said that human beings had to eat before they could think.  Marx’s doctrine of the pitiless struggle between classes as the agent of progressive development in life, his conviction that somehow the vilest conflicts would spew up a harmonious future with human beings living in cooperative and undisturbed peace has been proved to be irreclaimably wrong.

     I admire Marx (I mean his character) and always will, but Marx had no religious sensibility, no capacity to reflect quietly about the transcendent elements of life. Marx was a poor psychologist and, outside of economics, never asked key questions about what in history had acted to make human beings what they were. Marx seemed deaf to the ability of human beings to use their beliefs to develop imaginative sympathy, or expand their field of human obligation, or even to refine their compassion. He was deaf to the sensibility that has led all kinds of people in all stages and conditions of life to feel a yearning for a faith where they could cherish, safeguard or be faithful to their gods or Gods.  

      Reinhold Niebuhr once said that the basis of all religion is worship. The Egyptians worshiped.  The Hittites worshiped, the Greeks and Etruscans and Babylonians and the Carthaginians worshiped.  They worshipped the stars, or the religion of Baael or the fires of Vesta or the cults of Gaul or the Zoroastrians and even Christianity.  The historian Christopher Dawson  said  that worship makes clear that there is bond between God and man. It therefore is fatuous to assert that religions in history have been the most brutal, violent, and murderously homicidal of human associations.  Of course, one has to take into account that every religion is held hostage by its most crass, gross. Ignoble followers, the loud or most self-satisfied believers, but that doesn’t impugn the existence of religion itself and never has. 

   How to separate power from religion? You can’t. The existence of religious feeling can be far from noble or selfless in its followers.  The mixture of personal ruthless and a belief in the power of faith can be seen in any study of early history.  Constantine the Great, for example, used religion as a way to organize the Roman military at a time when it was increasingly menaced by enemies to the north and east of Rome.  Constantine became a Christian mainly because of his hunger for military glory, yet in his character there still remained an urge to believe in religion’s healing powers. Constantine had murdered his son and smothered his wife in a steam bath, and when he went to pagan priest and asked for forgiveness, he was refused.  By becoming a Christian, Constantine got the forgiveness that he craved because even he believed in religion as an agent of  forgiveness.

    I would certainly agree that all religions seem to have a life span. The great human systems have all begun with radiant prospects which were slowly dragged and degraded by some ineradicable flaw in human nature so that the current version of their faith hardly bears any semblance to the original. One can see that today in the Christian Right in America. 

  The Reformation:

     What blew the doors off the Vatican were) the corruption, venality and abuse of power that even their own clergy could no longer ignore (Luther et al)

    So says my critic. Wonderful.  How can we  account for so many errors in such a brief statement ?

     My critic’s portrait of the Catholic Church before the Reformation has the crudity of a cartoon.  In fact, the Catholic Church was not a monster of corruption as he asserts.  The Church before Luther was in fact easy-going. It was accommodating. It did not try to suppress novel ideas from being circulated, not even “atheist” blasphemy. The Church had even allowed reformist elements to emerge without persecution.   (The Inquisition was a Spanish institution, not a Roman one.) If anything put the Catholic Church on the defensive, it was the behavior of certain of the Popes, not its own dogmas and beliefs. In other words the Church was not inflexibly dogmatic but many sided.

     The revolt of Luther was single-minded and uncomplicated – his mission was to eradicate Catholicism.  He abominated the Church. Church  property was already lying under the covetous eye secular rulers long before those rulers would prove to be Luther’s key supporters, and they used Luther’s revolt to gain power and riches for themselves. But the key fact remains that Luther’s hatred of the Church was visceral, intolerant, one-sided, and it unfortunately would turn loose the worst instincts of human nature.

     The corrupt indulgence industry of Leo X was used to pay for many magnificent buildings and startling, wondrous works of art in Rome, including some which, to this day, represent the imperishable glories of our civilization. Before Luther, most ordinary Catholics used penance as a way of recognizing and atoning for their sins, and some cases, imposing asceticism as payment for their transgressions.  But to Luther, in Germany, the idea of a sinner buying his way out of his sins to shorten his or her time in Purgatory incensed him. The very vulgarity of the concept incensed him. And it should have.

    But it was not simply indulgences that caused Luther to rage. Burkhardt, echoing historian R.L. Woltmann, asserts that Luther was driven by an implacable determination not to simply bring about the reform of the Church but to bring about “the complete demotion and eradication of everything old.”  His conscience was absolutely clear in trying to ruin the Church as one who feels satisfaction in ending an unpatrolled injustice and acting from the certain conviction that he was the stronger power. But in his campaign to destroy the Church, Luther unfortunately abolished the church’s doctrine of good works. In fact,  he abhorred good works in the widest sense. The great force that carried the Reformation forward was a general defection from good works – alms, tithes, indulgences, fasting.  The “reformers” not only rejected any sense of obligation to good works, but embraced a new principle of action. “The Reformation is the faith of all those who do not have to do something anymore,” said Burkhardt.

     I am in no way ignoring the revolution caused in the Printing Press as part of this upheaval. The eloquence of Erasmus, More, PIco della Mirandola and other Renaissance authors, had gained them thousand of readers.  And there is no doubt that there existed a growing, gnawing impatience among thoughtful Christians who viewed the doctrines, the hierarchy, and Church traditions as standing in the way of the individual’s direct acquaintance with the Faith.  It was clear to many that the Bible was a higher authority than the Church. In  Spain,  before Luther, under the reformer Cardinal Ximenes, a polyglot Bible was printed in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic. And  clearly there is little doubt that the Printing Press especially in the hands master debater like Luther,  proved to be  his secret weapon in his war against the Church.

     But as ordinary people enjoyed their new freedom, there was a break in Church traditions, and the worst and socially most dangerous elements surged into the foreground. (It’s worth nothing that the age, like ours, was under the sway of “the spirit of rhetoric.”)  When the storm of the Peasant’s War was over, the general licentiousness and egotism had spread from Germany even into the areas that had remained Catholic. People took their own discontents and biases for the Wrath of God, and in Germany and elsewhere, higher education did not advance, thought stood still, and the era produced no great art or literature. The Renaissance Humanists fell silent.

     As the years passed, both parties, the Catholics and the Protestants, became more rigid, intolerant and murderous.  Persecution was the new rage, and the idea that human freedom was advanced dramatically by Luther’s revolt was a romantic notion, put in after the fact. The age was miserable. Burckhardt notes how from the beginning the reformers “conceived of (their) own dogmatism as the condition of the soul’s survival,” thus replacing an old despotism with a new one.  And in any age, human intelligence is just like water -- it cannot rise above its own level.  The freedom of reading the Scriptures produced in some new converts irresponsible self assertion. You had the unlettered parading around pretending they were self appointed prophets able to proclaim to anyone the meaning of practically everything.  One historian, Glapion, said that the Bible was like a soft wax which anyone could pull or stretch at will. Anyone who read a Bible passage could attribute any meaning anyone wanted with the utmost self assurance no matter how stupid it was. It pays to remember that while today Protestantism is commonly regarded a liberal, it became that only after it was no longer regarded as Protestantism.    

    I have worn out my welcome.  There is an old saying that if you try and speak exhaustively about any subject the only thing you will exhaust is your reader’s attention.  But by talking a bit about the Reformation I simply am trying to get rid of the simplistic myth that the Luthers and the John Calvins were the “battering rams” of a new freedom, as is often maintained.  

  My critic’s other sweeping statements strike me as grotesque:  When he asserts that in the War Religious war

     “what occurred was a contest to remove the filthy, rotten, fat, bejeweled, bloodstained hands of a bunch of corrupt pederasts from the levers of power and their replacement with something hopefully less inimical to ordinary people that was based on truth as revealed by scientific experiment, not mysticism - what we call today Humanism, of which I am a devotee, etc.” This  sounds to me much like an old Marxist pamphlet.

    In closing, I would only say that in writing this, I do not think myself infallibly right in such grave matters or that my critic is infallibly wrong. I don’t think  that, deep down, either of us pretends to be infallible, I have simply tried to use my reading to be less wrong than I believe him to be.  But in any case, authoritative irresponsibility, such as his, is not only very irksome, it is nettling.

 

 

 

Comments

[optimax]

Richard Sale

You have not "worn out your welcome" with me. Your essays are always thought provoking.

Just having reread John Stuart Mill's "Liberty of Thought and Discussion," I am even more impressed with your arguments. You show, by taking dissenting opinions head on, the importance of differing opinions in clarifying thought. One of JSM's central points is that those who censor dissentiousness place their ideas, therefore themselves, in a position of being infallible, resulting in the atrophy of moral beliefs.

LOTAD should be required reading for our politicians who have made the nation ungovernable by the intractability of their ideas. The number of pledges Bachmann and other presidential candidates have signed , in my opinion, makes them unfit for any public office.

[ked]

Yeah, it is a commonplace to conflate religion & power - but it is a flawed (even false) approach to the matter. Religion is typically an institutionalized expression of meaning & power dynamics in a culture (& not the only one wherein humans express meaning & power).

"Religion" doesn't get a pass for its role in warfare just because it is one of numerous channels for expressing human will - au contraire, the style of the religious component to warmaking is quite revealing... & often quite central. Yet religion is not (simplistically) the sole source of the urge to engage in war. One might argue religion has (had?) differential influence in the West because Christianity supplanted other religions by conquest - at first via the soul, then the mind, then by arms.

Dialectic analysis is a nifty tool, but don't confuse the tool with the work.

[Jose L campos]

The first Tribunal of Inquisition was established in France in 1229. It eradicated the Cathars. Episcopal inquisitve tribunals had been established in France in the xii century, there was Roman inquisition and a Venetian one and a Portuguese one. There was one in Spain also.

[Lars]

In one aspect, Mr. Sale is right on the money. Once in my native Sweden, Gustaf Wasa used confiscation of Catholic church properties to hire the mercenaries who helped him consolidate political power. His grandson would then fight on the Protestant side in the 30 Year War and in the process loot much of the remaining Catholic areas in northern Europe.

Much that can still be found in museums in Stockholm.

[walrus]

Walrus

It is my misfortune not to have the eloquence or learning to build great rhetorical structures such as Mr. Sales elegant creation.

Instead I must rely on what little learning and experience I possess. Some of that experience, sadly was the result of a death in the family, exposing me by chance to the work of Sir Isiah Berlin - a brilliant scholar of the history of ideas, starting with his magisterial collection of essays on the history of ideas; "Against The Current".

I had the misfortune to start by reading the First essay - "The Counter Enlightenment" which chronicles the reaction of Mr. Sales intellectual forbears against the: "Proclamation of the Autonomy of reason and the methods of the natural sciences" as Isiah Berlin put it. It was depressing to read. Still more depressing to remember after studying a little European history and the truths revealed in its architecture. Depressing yet again when one sees the same tired arguments trotted out in 2011.

In this and subsequent essays, we learn that Mr. Sales arguments are not new, nor original. There is no point in me supplying copious footnotes. The counter enlightenment continues, and Mr Sale is one of its foot soldiers. This is obvious by his reaction to my categorizing current conflicts in the middle east, and elsewhere, as grubby little geopolitical power plays, and not the soaring, transcendental conflicts of glittering systems of ideas that Mr. Sale would have us believe.

The behavior of Jewish settlers in occupied territories is despicable. As is the behavior of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Trying to dress either activity up with high moral purpose is like putting lipstick on a pig. Period.

In answer to Mr. Sale's observations about the differences between the bloodiness and cruelties of Stalin, Hitler and religious wars, I say there is no difference. Stalin and Hitler both operated on principles of revealed truth that had no basis in fact. Stalin dissembled that the failures of Marxism must be due to enemy action "reactionaries" since pure Marxism was infallible. Religions likewise proclaim infallibility and demonise the holders of opposing views as Bakunin observed. Hitler of course didn't even apply a coherent system of reason at all, which is why as Robert Paxton observed, Fascism doesn't export like Marxism did.

The fact that various peoples worshiped in the past is irrelevant to today. It is a simple response to failing to explain the unexplainable - Volcanic eruptions, crop failures, eclipses and personal tragedy - invoke the great spaghetti monster. Is it also any wonder that the minute after the aforesaid irrational belief system has taken hold that its practitioners would identify with the ruling class? Why do you think Sarah Palin alternately wears a Star of David and a Crucifix?

"Luthers mission was to eradicate Catholicism"

???????

"The corrupt indulgence industry of Leo X was used to pay for many magnificent buildings and startling, wondrous works of art in Rome, including some which, to this day, represent the imperishable glories of our civilization. "

??

"Burkhardt, echoing historian R.L. Woltmann, asserts that Luther was driven by an implacable determination not to simply bring about the reform of the Church but to bring about “the complete demotion and eradication of everything old.”"

?? Shades of Giambattista Vico. He tried that line as well.

"I am in no way ignoring the revolution caused in the Printing Press as part of this upheaval. The eloquence of Erasmus, More, PIco della Mirandola and other Renaissance authors, had gained them thousand of readers. And there is no doubt that there existed a growing, gnawing impatience among thoughtful Christians who viewed the doctrines, the hierarchy, and Church traditions as standing in the way of the individual’s direct acquaintance with the Faith."

Lets face it, the Catholic Church missed the bus when the printing press was invented. (quoted in Cranes biography of Mercator P 147)

As for "Gnawing impatience" of the laity to read the bible and commentaries in the vernacular; the punishment of Two old ladies for doing so in the Netherlands in 1543 was execution by being buried alive. (Mercator P149)

To put it another way: The Catholic Church held the keys to the kingdom of heaven and they didn't let go without a long bloody cruel, unchristian, fight; and if they could reimpose their power over Western humanity tomorrow they would be right back to their old ways (if in fact they ever changed to newer ways, I note that the Church is not a democracy.).

As for the "eloquence" of Thomas More, and the measured response to the reformation of the Catholioc Church; I think it speaks for itself:

"Come, do not rage so violently, good father; but if you have raved wildly enough, listen now, you pimp. You recall that you falsely complained above that the king has shown no passage in your whole book, even as an example, in which he said that you contradict yourself. You told this lie shortly before, although the king has demonstrated to you many examples of your inconsistency ....

But meanwhile, for as long as your reverend paternity will be determined to tell these shameless lies, others will be permitted, on behalf of his English majesty, to throw back into your paternity's shitty mouth, truly the shit-pool of all shit, all the muck and shit which your damnable rottenness has vomited up, and to empty out all the sewers and privies onto your crown divested of the dignity of the priestly crown, against which no less than against the kingly crown you have determined to play the buffoon.

In your sense of fairness, honest reader, you will forgive me that the utterly filthy words of this scoundrel have forced me to answer such things, for which I should have begged your leave. Now I consider truer than truth that saying: 'He who touches pitch will be wholly defiled by it' (Sirach 13:1). For I am ashamed even of this necessity, that while I clean out the fellow's shit-filled mouth I see my own fingers covered with shit.

--Sir Thomas More, Responsio ad Lutherum"

Yes, these are weighty matters, and they are best dealt with via secular humanism, not invocation sof the flying spaghetti monster, no matter in what guise: Christian, Islamic, Jewish, etc.

[walrus]

..and thank you to Col. Lang for providing this opportunity.

[LeaNder]

Thanks Richard Sale, I liked your first article a lot, it was brilliantly written, but this is very, very powerful.

What your critic attacked was ultimately not religion which conserves thousands-of-years-old human wisdom, instead he should have attacked fallible man. But men were as fallible than, as they are now.

But ultimately the winners (the powerful) will die just as the losers (the weak).

***************************
Jose L campos, the Cathars were on my mind too, and the Waldensians. But you have always this outward struggle against the diverse others/heretics and an inward reform struggle, e.g. the Cistercians versus powerful Cluny. The problem was that the combination of Ora et labora automatically produced wealth, maybe mainly by the lay brothers but not only. But there were also mendicant orders the Franciscans e.g.

[optimax]

Mill was not seeking synthesis but condemning censorship. Truths without opposition become fat, lazy dogmas people accept without knowing why. He did think erroneous opinion could contain kernels of truth that could modify accepted beliefs, but even if they didn't, debate still strengthened truth.

[Fred]

I don't think the butchers, bakers, masons or any of the peasants who helped build Saint Michel de la Mer Del Peril or Chartres or any of the other churches of Middle Ages were too concerned with the opinions of the bishops or popes - but certainly they found inspiration for their souls that energized their entire civilization. Those symbols, the entire structures themselves, spoke to Man. It seems now that the religious symbols of our civilization - the Star of David, the Cross, the Cresent, or even the sickle & hammer; have been replaced - by the $ sign. I wonder what the symbol for Renminbi is?