The biblical narrative, particularly in Judges, Samuel and Kings, serves as a type of theodicy. The authors of these various books wish to convince the reader that the welfare of God’s chosen people rests on their obedience to God’s will. If things go well it is because the Israelites were righteous and if things do not go well it is because they sinned. While this may be true (And I am certainly inclined to think that there is something to this.), such a notion lies outside our knowledge as historians; historians are not prophets and can claim no knowledge about God’s existence, will, or plan for human history. Thus the biblical theodical model of historical narrative is unusable for the writing of history. Those who attempt to write such history (Be they Rabbi Berel Wein, Rabbi Avigdor Miller or Rabbi Yosef Eisen.) are not historians but intellectual frauds.
The problem is that we have no fixed standard with which to judge whether any given society is living a godly life. Our knowledge of God’s will, even from a religious perspective, is rather open ended so we have no clear-cut means of evaluating a godly society. How many points does a society have to score in order to count as godly and how many points are various actions worth? How many points does a society lose if they allow women to wear mini-skirts; what about if they tolerate club-wielding hooligans beating up women over the length of their skirts? Furthermore, since every society is a mixture of good and bad, we have no way of knowing if a given society is being rewarded for the righteousness of the few or punished for the wickedness of the few. Sodom and Gomorrah being the exceptions, every society can be assumed to have at least ten righteous people. So if a wicked, ungodly society succeeds it can always be passed off as due to the intercession of the righteous few. Conversely, if disaster strikes a righteous godly society it can always be passed off as punishment for the secret sins of the wicked few, hiding their idols/television sets behind their doors.
This sets the stage for radical levels of intellectual dishonesty if one wishes to try writing such a history. Since there are so many movable pieces one can fix the results to suit any desired conclusion. It is a heads I win tails you lose situation. God might have brought the Holocaust in order to punish secular Jews and saved the secular state of Israel in the Six Day War in the merit of the Orthodox minority. This of course may very well be true, but I could play this game to come up with anything that I want. For example, if you would indulge me in a little reductio ad absurdum, I could, with equal plausibility, argue that God is a Nazi, who treasures his German people, and wishes to lead them to greatness if only they would follow his will. In pursuit of this goal, God uses world Jewry to chastise the Nazis.
God gave the German people victory, as of the fall of 1941, over Poland, France, and the Soviet Union as a reward for obeying their divinely sent Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, and to allow them to rid the world of the Jewish race. (God did not allow them to defeat England because he wanted there to remain a threat so that his German people would continue to cry out to him. Alternatively, God was being patient with the British people, also members of the German race, and was giving them one last chance to abandon the rule of Winston Churchill and return to the Germanic fold.) The fact that things turned against Germany can be attributed to the fact that they did not pursue the destruction of world Jewry with the proper zeal and show pure undiluted faith in their Fuehrer. The fact that the Germans had to turn to gas chambers and abandon the use of Einsatzgruppen as their primary mode of killing Jews showed a lack of Jew killing zeal. According to the Wannsee conference, the use of Einsatzgruppen as mobile firing squads was proving ineffective as it was having a negative on its members. Clearly, if Germans had been full of the proper Jew-killing zeal they should have been lining up for the honor of being able to personally shoot Jews and they should have been able to carry out this task with joy and a gladdened heart. Germans should have been able to kill Jews with the same gusto as the Poles and the Ukrainians, who, immediately upon being liberated by Germany, took it upon themselves to slaughter their Jewish neighbors. No German should have suffered negative psychological effects from carrying out such tasks. Later on, at the end of the war, many in the German high command thought that the elimination of Hungarian Jewry should take a back seat to fighting the advancing Soviet forces. There were even those like Himmler who wanted to make a deal with the Allies in order to save the Jews in exchange for protection after the war. It took a mere colonel like Adolf Eichmann to see that Hungarian Jewry was dealt with. Not only did the German leadership not pursue the murder of European Jews as they should they also failed to show the proper faith in their Fuehrer. Over and over it was demonstrated that Hitler was right yet there were those who questioned his decisions to hold the line on the Russian front and in North Africa. The lack of faith was so profound that members of the German high command attempted to assassinate Hitler. God miraculously saved Hitler by causing the bomb to be moved thus allowing for Hitler to survive with only some busted air drums and a withered hand.
Since the German people failed to properly follow God and their Fuehrer, God gave them into the hands of their enemies, the Americans, and the Russians, who put an end to the Third Reich and divided Germany up into East and West. Not only that but God allowed the Jews to rebuild their state and gain victory over the Arabs so that now world Jewry could exercise their power directly and not just through the banks and Hollywood. Next, God allowed for a wave of Jewish-inspired liberalism to sweep the Western world, forcing all proud lovers of the German race and ideals to have to go underground and live in secret. But even in these dark times, God has not abandoned his German people. As a comfort to the German race, he allowed them to kill off a third of world Jewry in the Holocaust. This serves to comfort the German people and as a sign of God’s promise to completely annihilate the Jews, restore the German people to their former glory and bring about the Final Reich.
(To be continued …)
Showing posts with label Elisabeth of Hungary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elisabeth of Hungary. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Female Spirituality in the Late Middle Ages and the Search for a Feminine Christianity (Part IV)
Dyan Elliott: Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages.
Dyan Elliott criticizes Bynum’s positive narrative and, in its place, offers a narrative of a downward decline in woman’s spiritual activity from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. In the twelfth century, clerics seized on woman’s Eucharistic visions as proof of the Church’s teachings on Transubstantiation. Thus the female spirituality, which Bynum sees as a mark of the independent voices of women, was really something created by the male Church hierarchy in order to promote their own power at the expense of populist brands of Christianity, which were labeled “heresies.” Many of these “heretical” groups, such as the Guglielmites, granted women a larger role than in traditional Catholicism and allowed women to preach; women even appear as leaders in these groups.
Elliott makes her case by connecting various holy women to the Inquisition. Gregory IX (r. 1227-41) was the founder of the Inquisition. He was also a major sponsor of various holy women. He supported Mary of Oigenes (1177-1213) and the Beguine movement as well as Elisabeth of Hungary (1207-1231). Elisabeth of Hungary’s confessor was Conrad of Marburg (d. 1233), a close associate of Gregory IX. Conrad of Marburg, soon after Elisabeth’s death and after he successfully pushed for her canonization, became an inquisitor. Elliott argues that Conrad gained an aura of sanctity for himself because of his association with Elisabeth. This protected him from any opposition and allowed him to pursue heretics as he wished.
Elliot connects the very practices associated with female spirituality to the Inquisition. The practice of women torturing their bodies and the veneration of women as living relics was part of a shift away from martyrdom as the ideal to a new ideal that one should be dead to the world. The reason for this was that the Church was in a struggle against heresy and was actively executing heretics. As such the Church did not wish to allow these heretics to be turned into martyrs. Instead the Church created a new ideal of living martyrdom and offered up women as useful manifestation of it.
The culture of the Inquisition played a role in gathering evidence for a pious life. The very processes, which were used to canonize women, reflected an inquisitional mode of thinking:
The somatic nature of female spirituality meant that the requisite proofs of holiness were often of a physical nature. Since a holy person frequently received revelations in the course of a rapture, special care was taken to secure satisfying proofs of this condition. …
Women were believed to have a particular propensity to rapture – premised on the fragility, and hence susceptibility, of the female body. If the confessor could furnish evidence that the rapture was genuine, this was an important step toward establishing that the woman in question was in communication with the divine.[1]
The very act of declaring women to be saints and miracle workers reflected medieval misogynist views on women.
In the long run this process and mechanism for examining women, to see if they were under the influence of the Holy Spirit gave way, in the fifteenth century, to the creation of the process and mechanism for examining women to see if they were under the influence of the devil. The same Inquisition culture that promoted the veneration of women in the end turned around and started hunting down women as witches.
Elliott deserves a lot of credit for offering a multilayered analysis of the connection between holy women and the Inquisition, taking into consideration the ways in which the thought processes of the Inquisition related to female spirituality. She could have taken the easy way out and simply contented herself with playing a game of gotcha, pointing out that many of the people involved with the veneration of holy women were also Inquisitors. Her analysis of the thought processes involved is what I find to be credible.
The problem with Elliot’s work is that she is caught up in the narrative of the “black legend” of the Inquisition, which sees the Inquisition as this dark menacing organization, terrorizing all of Europe. The Inquisition persecuted heretics and many prominent heretics were women. For Elliot this means that the Inquisition was an anti-women organization.
I would be inclined to read Elliot’s material in the opposite direction. The promotion of female sanctity in the later part of the Middle Ages led to Fourth Lateran Council, with its emphasis on the Eucharist and the rise of the Inquisition. The male Church hierarchy, influenced by a lay movement, came to put greater emphasis on the Eucharist. The fact that the Fourth Lateran Council also gave greater power to the clergy does not contradict this thesis. On the contrary one could argue that this move to increase the power of the clergy by declaring that only the clergy had the power to turn the bread and the wine of the Eucharist into the body and blood of Christ, only became necessary with the establishment of Transubstantiation. If the lay believer can consume the body and blood of Christ then he would have no need for a clergy unless that same body and blood could only be gotten through the intercession of the clergy. One could also argue that the adoration of the priesthood was itself part of this women’s spirituality. As Bynum suggests, women may have seen the act of the priest bringing forth the Eucharist as a woman giving birth.[2]
To take this a step further I would raise the possibility that women may have seen their priests, not as a part of the patriarchal hierarchy, but as emasculated men who were therefore, in a sense, women like themselves. Priests were men defined by their exclusion from the two activities most associated with the male gender, fighting and sex. Women, might have therefore, viewed their priests as men who had been made into women like themselves. I grant Elliott that the priests themselves may not have seen things in this matter. Most likely the clergy understood this female spirituality in ways that closely parallel Elliott. This in no way invalidates how women may have understood it.
The doctrine of Transubstantiation forced the Church into the difficult position of having to defend this doctrine. This led to the creation of the Inquisition and the thirteenth century crackdown on heretical groups such as the Cathars. The fact that such a campaign could succeed indicates that there was wide popular support for it. From this perspective the Inquisition becomes, rather than an attempt by the Church hierarchy to impose its will on society, but a manifestation of the Church hierarchy becoming ensnared by popular beliefs and forced to involve themselves with popular concerns. Since women made up half of the population and none of the Church hierarchy, much of popular medieval Christian beliefs came from them. This process reached a climax, in the fifteenth century with the rise of witch hunts. The charge of witchcraft arouse out of a distinctively women’s culture, which saw women as wielders of religious power, important enough to attract the attention of Satan.
[1] Elliott, Proving Woman pg. 182.
[2] See Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast pg. 268.
Dyan Elliott criticizes Bynum’s positive narrative and, in its place, offers a narrative of a downward decline in woman’s spiritual activity from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. In the twelfth century, clerics seized on woman’s Eucharistic visions as proof of the Church’s teachings on Transubstantiation. Thus the female spirituality, which Bynum sees as a mark of the independent voices of women, was really something created by the male Church hierarchy in order to promote their own power at the expense of populist brands of Christianity, which were labeled “heresies.” Many of these “heretical” groups, such as the Guglielmites, granted women a larger role than in traditional Catholicism and allowed women to preach; women even appear as leaders in these groups.
Elliott makes her case by connecting various holy women to the Inquisition. Gregory IX (r. 1227-41) was the founder of the Inquisition. He was also a major sponsor of various holy women. He supported Mary of Oigenes (1177-1213) and the Beguine movement as well as Elisabeth of Hungary (1207-1231). Elisabeth of Hungary’s confessor was Conrad of Marburg (d. 1233), a close associate of Gregory IX. Conrad of Marburg, soon after Elisabeth’s death and after he successfully pushed for her canonization, became an inquisitor. Elliott argues that Conrad gained an aura of sanctity for himself because of his association with Elisabeth. This protected him from any opposition and allowed him to pursue heretics as he wished.
Elliot connects the very practices associated with female spirituality to the Inquisition. The practice of women torturing their bodies and the veneration of women as living relics was part of a shift away from martyrdom as the ideal to a new ideal that one should be dead to the world. The reason for this was that the Church was in a struggle against heresy and was actively executing heretics. As such the Church did not wish to allow these heretics to be turned into martyrs. Instead the Church created a new ideal of living martyrdom and offered up women as useful manifestation of it.
The culture of the Inquisition played a role in gathering evidence for a pious life. The very processes, which were used to canonize women, reflected an inquisitional mode of thinking:
The somatic nature of female spirituality meant that the requisite proofs of holiness were often of a physical nature. Since a holy person frequently received revelations in the course of a rapture, special care was taken to secure satisfying proofs of this condition. …
Women were believed to have a particular propensity to rapture – premised on the fragility, and hence susceptibility, of the female body. If the confessor could furnish evidence that the rapture was genuine, this was an important step toward establishing that the woman in question was in communication with the divine.[1]
The very act of declaring women to be saints and miracle workers reflected medieval misogynist views on women.
In the long run this process and mechanism for examining women, to see if they were under the influence of the Holy Spirit gave way, in the fifteenth century, to the creation of the process and mechanism for examining women to see if they were under the influence of the devil. The same Inquisition culture that promoted the veneration of women in the end turned around and started hunting down women as witches.
Elliott deserves a lot of credit for offering a multilayered analysis of the connection between holy women and the Inquisition, taking into consideration the ways in which the thought processes of the Inquisition related to female spirituality. She could have taken the easy way out and simply contented herself with playing a game of gotcha, pointing out that many of the people involved with the veneration of holy women were also Inquisitors. Her analysis of the thought processes involved is what I find to be credible.
The problem with Elliot’s work is that she is caught up in the narrative of the “black legend” of the Inquisition, which sees the Inquisition as this dark menacing organization, terrorizing all of Europe. The Inquisition persecuted heretics and many prominent heretics were women. For Elliot this means that the Inquisition was an anti-women organization.
I would be inclined to read Elliot’s material in the opposite direction. The promotion of female sanctity in the later part of the Middle Ages led to Fourth Lateran Council, with its emphasis on the Eucharist and the rise of the Inquisition. The male Church hierarchy, influenced by a lay movement, came to put greater emphasis on the Eucharist. The fact that the Fourth Lateran Council also gave greater power to the clergy does not contradict this thesis. On the contrary one could argue that this move to increase the power of the clergy by declaring that only the clergy had the power to turn the bread and the wine of the Eucharist into the body and blood of Christ, only became necessary with the establishment of Transubstantiation. If the lay believer can consume the body and blood of Christ then he would have no need for a clergy unless that same body and blood could only be gotten through the intercession of the clergy. One could also argue that the adoration of the priesthood was itself part of this women’s spirituality. As Bynum suggests, women may have seen the act of the priest bringing forth the Eucharist as a woman giving birth.[2]
To take this a step further I would raise the possibility that women may have seen their priests, not as a part of the patriarchal hierarchy, but as emasculated men who were therefore, in a sense, women like themselves. Priests were men defined by their exclusion from the two activities most associated with the male gender, fighting and sex. Women, might have therefore, viewed their priests as men who had been made into women like themselves. I grant Elliott that the priests themselves may not have seen things in this matter. Most likely the clergy understood this female spirituality in ways that closely parallel Elliott. This in no way invalidates how women may have understood it.
The doctrine of Transubstantiation forced the Church into the difficult position of having to defend this doctrine. This led to the creation of the Inquisition and the thirteenth century crackdown on heretical groups such as the Cathars. The fact that such a campaign could succeed indicates that there was wide popular support for it. From this perspective the Inquisition becomes, rather than an attempt by the Church hierarchy to impose its will on society, but a manifestation of the Church hierarchy becoming ensnared by popular beliefs and forced to involve themselves with popular concerns. Since women made up half of the population and none of the Church hierarchy, much of popular medieval Christian beliefs came from them. This process reached a climax, in the fifteenth century with the rise of witch hunts. The charge of witchcraft arouse out of a distinctively women’s culture, which saw women as wielders of religious power, important enough to attract the attention of Satan.
[1] Elliott, Proving Woman pg. 182.
[2] See Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast pg. 268.
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