Historians in the Philosophy Department: A Response (Part IV)

(Part I, II, III)


I would like to say a few words about the issue of post-modernism and why I object to it.

This is a picture of me at the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles (MoMA). I am standing next to one of the exhibitions, which consisted of the New York Daily News covered in bird droppings. Now I am not opposed to the message of the work, namely that the Daily News is a load of bird droppings; I agree. I also agree that this work raises a valuable issue in that it challenges us to consider the nature of art; what is the difference between a work of art such as the Mona Lisa and a page of newspaper covered in bird droppings? The problem with this is that, while this is a great point, it is the enemy’s point. The conclusion to be drawn from being unable to distinguish between the Mona Lisa and a page of newspaper covered in bird droppings is not that the page of newspaper with bird droppings should go up in a museum and that we should have a museum of modern art devoted to such work but on the contrary, that we should not bother sticking up the Mona Lisa in a museum and that we should send the Mona Lisa and all the rest of the works housed in the Louvre in the trash bin along with the page of newspaper with bird droppings, thus allowing us to use the Louvre for something that actually benefits people.

At the Barcelona debate in 1263, Nachmonides was forced to respond to Christian charges that the Talmud confirms the truth of Christianity. At the beginning of the debate Nachmonides admitted to being puzzled by this; how it could be that the rabbis of the Talmud, living centuries after Jesus, could believe in Jesus and still reject Christianity? It seemed to be a matter of course for Nachmonides that, if the rabbis of the Talmud believed that Jesus was the Messiah and the Son of God, they would have done the intellectually honest thing and ceased practicing Judaism and converted to Christianity. Obviously, Nachmonides never met a post-modernist.

Post-modernism thrives on people undermining the legitimacy of their own work and still having the chutzpah to ask that society fund them in their endeavors. It is called deconstruction. If post-modernists really believed in what they were doing and were intellectually honest they would admit that the entire humanities field, including their own particular slice, was worthless and they would pack up their things and leave academia. Frank Donoghue wishes to blame our business-oriented society for killing off the humanities and he is right. What Donoghue does not ask is why the humanities have so utterly failed to defend themselves and make their case to society in the face of the business suits and number crunchers. For that, you need Allan Bloom. Bloom, in his Closing of the American Mind, blames the modern left, with its worship of cultural relativism and its deconstruction of values, for bringing about a situation where even the humanities have no value. If all values are relative and there are no ultimate questions let alone ultimate answers then why should someone spend years of their lives studying Plato and Aristotle; why not just go to law school and make as much money as you can. Bloom was a tenured professor at the University of Chicago so his main concern was attracting students. As a graduate student, who made the choice to study history instead of going pursuing law school, my concern is getting a job at the end of the day. If the humanities have no value then why should a university bother to make the investment in hiring me?

I have a suggestion for all post-modernists out there. If you do not believe that the humanities have intrinsic value and if you do not even believe in ultimate questions and in ultimate truths then please have the intellectual honesty to leave the university system; pack your bags and get a job in the real world. There are few enough jobs in the humanities as it is; the least you can do is leave those jobs to those who actually believe in what they are doing.

History 112: Enlightenment I (Q&A)

1. In the Davies text they spoke of Rousseau as a man that overcame a lot and as a man that was a forward thinker about equality and rights. In the excerpt online about his views on women, he sounded like a pompous jerk [for arguing that women needed to be kept in their place]. I was just curious if his views on women were acceptable back then? Was his views typical of the general public, and what about other forward thinkers, did they also agree with his view on women?
2. What were the common folk's opinion on how women should be treated? Also what was the Church's take on this? Were women of "wit" or "letters" looked down upon, as Rousseau thought they should be?
Rousseau was hardly alone in his sentiments even among Enlightenment figures. Not only did they have, by our standards, fairly negative views on women, their advocacy of freedom and reason was built around the premise that women needed to be kept in their place outside of the public sphere. (This is not all that different from Thomas Jefferson saying that “all men are created equal” and still being a slave owner.) This is not a matter of hypocrisy; they meant something very different from what we mean when we talk about freedom and liberty.
I assigned this particular sample of Rousseau’s writing precisely because it is something so offensive to the modern ear. This piece stands in stark contrast to Voltaire’s “Plea for Tolerance” which sounds very modern. Of course as we shall soon see Voltaire is also not a modern. One has to ask was Rousseau really so forward thinking and is it really meaningful to talk about people being forward thinking. You say that Rousseau sounds like a “pompous jerk.” As a product of modern liberalism, I would agree with you. People not trained in the historical method will read Rousseau and pat themselves on the back and think about how “tolerant” and “forward thinking” they are. We, as practitioners of the historical method, on the other hand see this as an opportunity to turn the question on ourselves. Why is it so obvious to us that Rousseau was a pompous jerk; might there be something that we are missing?
The Catholic Church traditionally has a rather funny relationship with women. On the one hand the Church venerates the Virgin Mary along with a slew of female saints. There is, as we have discussed, a long tradition of Catholic female visionaries such as St. Teresa de Avila. This veneration of women, though, has very little to do with real every day women and in fact may have been detrimental to women. If the Virgin Mary is the model of womanhood against which all women are judged, what woman can every hope to come out ahead.

3. Rousseau and Wollstonecraft provide starkly contrasting views on women and their role in society. How did the role of women differ between different social classes in the late 18th century Europe? If a woman wanted to become educated during this time period, what options did she have for doing so?
As we have seen previously “oppressive” societies are not such much oppressive as there being a system that one can play if one keeps from offending the wrong people. (For example Galileo was able to be a heliocentrist up until the moment he made fun of Pope Urban VIII.) If you are an upper class woman, while you would not have direct access to a university education, you would still be capable of getting an education, likely through private tutors and books, and even take an informal part in the public sphere. (In fact much of the Enlightenment takes place in salons hosted by upper class women.)
This was not an option for lower class women. That being said, lower class men also did not have these options either. In a sense lower class women were “freer” since there less restrictions upon them in terms of them being women.



4. How would Rousseau have responded to Mary Wollstonecraft's idea that it is better for everyone when a woman is self-sufficient?
As with most polemical debates, Rousseau and Wollstonecraft are talking past each other. For Rousseau the primary issue is not individual liberty. On the contrary the pursuit of individual liberty is a trap that leads to irrationality and tyranny. One has to submit oneself to the “General Will” and pursue the rule of reason by promoting the welfare of society. Wollstonecraft, like most people in the liberal tradition, thinks in terms of individual liberty.

5. Davies says, "Rousseau and Voltaire were as different as chalk and cheese", but from what I gathered from the reading, they seem quite similar. Rousseau believed that "since the evils of the world are overwhelming, all one can do is to put one's own affairs into order," meaning that you should practice self interest. Voltaire believed that all men should be free, no matter their station. So, in essence, Voltaire wanted common men to practice self-interest through government and Rousseau appealing to the "enlightened elite" encouraged self-interest. In essence, they have the same belief but are applying them to different socio-economic groups...Is this right, or am I missing something?

Rousseau and Voltaire had very different understandings as to the nature of progress and the nature of society. Rousseau believed that the advent of civilization, with the rise of private property, had corrupted human nature. He is the exact opposite of Thomas Hobbes; while Hobbes’ man in a state of nature is a bloodthirsty barbarian, Rousseau’s natural man is completely peaceful and lives at one with nature. Rousseau is critical of the very mechanisms of progress so beloved by the Enlightenment, reason, culture and the state. From Voltaire’s perspective Rousseau was as much an enemy of the Enlightenment as the Catholic Church.

6. How did the Classical Republic form of government not rise in the Renaissance if the Renaissance was a rediscovery of these texts? Were there advocates for this? Why did they not succeed or why weren't there any defenders for Republics?
The Renaissance has Republican governments such as Florence and Venice. And republican governments continued to exist in the eighteenth century in places like the Dutch Republic and the city states of Switzerland. The accepted consensus at the time was that republican governments worked well for small states, but that for larger states one needed a strong central power such as a Monarchy. This assumption has its roots in Aristotle who argued that democracy only works well when you only have a few thousand active participants. The success of the “American experiment” is important precisely because it showed that a republican government could work on a massive scale. This is the underlying theme of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Tocqueville was a French aristocrat who toured American during the early nineteenth century and commented on American life.

7. I did some more research on the Second Treatise and understood that it was best known for popularizing the right of revolution. Some sources also say that the Treatise influenced Thomas Jefferson's "Declaration of Independence". Do you think John Locke would be happy to see his work, his thoughts influenced another document that eventually used against his own country?
8. Reading the Locke text, it reminds me very strongly of the Declaration of Independence, especially in the first few lines and in the method for denying the rights of a king over men as being a good form of government. Being written nearly a hundred years earlier I certainly see it as possible that this document was in mind when the Declaration was written, do we have any evidence as to whether this is the case or no?

The line “life, liberty and property” end up in the Declaration of Independence as “life, liberty ad the pursuit of happiness.” The Constitution puts the word “property” back in. John Locke died decades before the American Revolution. He actually took an active interest in the American colonies and even helped write the constitution for the Carolinas. I must confess that I myself find the use of Locke by the Declaration of Independence to be remarkably unconvincing. (Read past the opening passage of the text and judge for yourself) I doubt if Locke would have found it convincing. This may sound very unpatriotic, but if I had been alive during the Revolution I would have been a Tory, like a third of Americans back then, and would have supported the British. I am a big Anglophile and I consider it rather unfortunate that we separated from England.


9. Norman Davies mentions briefly that "Differences between Western and Eastern Europe were growing" but did not go into details. Can you discuss more about these differences in class?

Davies is actually a specialist in Eastern European history, particularly Poland. So while most textbooks ignore Eastern Europe, he actively tries to incorporate it. Hopefully from reading Davies you will get a picture of Poland that moves beyond the Pollack jokes that we have all grown up with. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries England, France and Prussia (which will eventually come to form Germany) are going to industrialize in ways that other countries such as Spain, the Italian states and Russia do not. As such England, France and Prussia are going to take this tremendous leap forward at the expense of other European countries and eventually much of the world. Why this happens is an open question that I hope to discuss in future lectures.

Historians in the Philosophy Department: A Response (Part III)

(Part I, II)

I see the field of history as consisting of three parts. First, there is the collection and editing of primary source material. Then there is the analysis of the primary source material, creating secondary source material, in order to see what directions the primary sources point. Finally, there is the creation of a narrative, which puts together the conclusions of the secondary sources into some consensus. The history familiar to the general public is really this last stage. For the most part, academic historians devote themselves to the second stage and it is this stage that forms the real heart and soul of the study of history. It has actually very little to do with narrative.

The issue of narrative is a sore spot for historians. It is the part of history that is the furthest from objective truth and the closest to personal opinion. If historians cannot be scientists they still wish to be better than artists or literature professionals. Again, considering the tight job market, this is not an academic question; real careers are on the line. I recommend Hayden White’s Metahistory, where he subversively treats history as a form of literature. What is important to note about White is that he only deals with issues of historical narrative. I suspect that most historians would gladly do away with narrative as at best a distraction and at worst an illusion that undermines "real" history.

Narrative remains in place largely because it is necessary to make one's work relevant, first to fellow historians, then to scholars in the humanities and finally to the general public at large. One of the ways that this is done is by showing how one’s work fits into someone else’s narrative. For example, Dr. Goldish has a particular expertise in early modern Jewish thought and how it fits in with what we see with European Christians. He wrote his dissertation on Isaac Newton and his use of rabbinic sources. Similarly, his recent book, Sabbatean Prophets takes sixteenth and early seventeenth century Jews and shows how it is similar to, for example, Phyllis Mack’s discussion of mid-seventeenth century Quaker women in England. I see almost a caricature of this type of thinking at conferences where presenters rush to list off names of theorists just to force some greater “context.” With Dr. Goldish it never sounds forced; this speaks both to his talents as a historian and as a writer.

Working with Dr. Goldish has been very beneficial to me because of this and has given me a far greater range as a historian. I came to Ohio State with very strong skills in terms of textual analysis. I grew up studying Talmud, plus I have Asperger syndrome so I am naturally very comfortable with texts. (I was not actually officially diagnosed with Asperger syndrome until after I came to Ohio State.) When I came Dr. Goldish told me point blank that the other students do not have my text skills; he did this in order to soften the culture shock for me coming to a secular university and, for the first time in my life, having to deal, on a daily basis, with people not trained on Talmud. What Dr. Goldish then went to work on me was narrative, telling a larger story.

At the end of the day, narrative does have an important role to play in history. If narrative is necessary in order to show some higher relevancy and get a job it is because it is important to do something that is actually relevant. Kenneth Miller has a line: “biology without evolution is stamp collecting.” Evolution serves to take all the bits of information that we have about organic life and puts it together in one coherent “narrative.” Similarly with history; the Civil War buff, like my adolescent self, who can throw out lots of random facts about the Civil War, is not engaging in history. First, he needs to be able to analyze primary and secondary source material through the lens of the historical method. Next, he needs to be able to put everything together into some narrative. Without this, all that we have is a cute factoid machine that is of no practical use to anyone.

(To be continued …)

Historians in the Philosophy Department: A Response (Part II)

(Part I)

What does Goldish mean when he says that your work must fit into "some larger narrative?" Do you fit your work into a narrative that other historians have created?
On a normative level, should historians be creating "narratives?" And who are these narratives created for? The general public? Other historians? Academia in general? Posterity? It seems I would favor your initial desire to just do a textual analysis, and eschew from making your work fit into a larger narrative. The main reasons to fit your work into a narrative would be for personal ends (i.e. career advancement, pleasing your superiors) than for any pedagogical or academic ends. One last thing I'd like to touch on is the relationship between "fitting your work into a narrative" and post-modernism's criticism and skepticism toward such metanarratives. I agree with your general assessment that post-modernism offers interesting analytical tools, but is probably misguided as an end in itself. Could you elaborate your thoughts on this topic?


There is, without question, a pragmatic issue at stake; one day, with the help of God, I hope to find myself, with my dissertation in hand, applying for a job at some university. I will be sitting in a conference room with a collection of professors from both inside and outside the history department, administrators, graduate, and undergraduate students. (I have been one of those "other" people sitting in the room.) It is likely that there will not be a single Isaac Abarbanel scholar, apart from me, in the room. Most of the people will not have much of a background in Jewish studies nor will most of them even be medievalists or early modernists. At some point, a scholar, maybe from the gender studies program or a modern American history person, is going to ask, not necessarily even with words, "why anyone should care?" There is, furthermore, a particular subtext to go with this question; why should anyone care enough about what I am saying to give me a position at this university that could just as easily be given to someone who does gender studies or modern American history?

At a broader level, anyone who wants to work in the humanities is going to have to answer this question in the courthouse of society. The fact is that jobs in the humanities are dwindling; there are not enough jobs for all the newly minted PhDs that our universities produce each year. This situation has only been made worse by the recent downturn in the economy. (For more on this topic, I recommend The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities by Frank Donoghue. Donoghue, coincidently, used to work at Ohio State.) Ohio State recently slashed its search for someone to fill a new position in the women’s studies department. I do not expect the people in the women’s studies department to forget this and it is going to be an issue for anyone, like me, who does “dead white male” history, trying to get a job at Ohio State.

The humanities have no utilitarian value. I know that nothing that I or any of my colleagues, both the ones whom I work with here at Ohio State and the ones I will compete with in the future, do is going to cure cancer, stop Global Warming, or end our dependence on foreign oil. My younger brother is about to start medical school. I joke that he is a modern doctor while I am a medieval doctor; you come to me if you need your humours balanced or some limbs cut off. It is certainly a fair question to ask why society should fund my work and not simply leave it as a hobby for those who enjoy this sort of thing. Last I checked Ohio State is not offering any jobs for people who can beat Super Mario Brothers. (I seem to recall a Farside cartoon on the subject.) This question is particularly acute because up until the nineteenth-century history was merely a hobby for gentlemen of leisure. Edward Gibbon was a member of the British Parliament in the eighteenth century who, on the side, wrote a seven-volume work called The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that we could go back to this state of affairs. There are thousands of accountants and lawyers with an encyclopedic knowledge of the American Civil War. (I used to be one of those people during my adolescence.) Why do you need professional Civil War historians?

(To be continued …)

History 112: Some Thoughts on the English Civil War Readings

The ETEP module “The English Revolution” has been put together by Ohio State’s own David Cressy, who along with Geoffrey Parker forms the foundation of one of the strongest early modern history departments in the country. You would be very hard pressed to find a non Ivy league school with a stronger history department than the one at Ohio State so I encourage all students to take advantage of it. Cressy offers the provocative title of “English Revolution” instead of the traditional term “English Civil War.” I suspect that this is an attempt to plant the English Civil as an event of historical importance on par with the French Revolution. That the English Civil War, despite the fact that ultimately the monarchy would return, brought about certain fundamental shifts in European thought.

In the secondary source reading, Keith Lindley offers a comparison of the Whig, Marxist, Revisionist and Post Revisionist views. The Whig narrative emphasizes the progress toward liberal democracy. It features Parliament as the good guys fighting for freedom and Democracy against the autocratic Charles I, who wanted to return England to Catholic “superstition.” The Marxist narrative emphasizes class struggle. Parliament represents the rise of the bourgeoisie class and their victory represents the victory of the bourgeoisie over the aristocracy of Charles I. This victory has the unintended side effect of helping to create a new conscious working class which then comes to challenge the bourgeoisie Parliament. The Revisionist narrative rejects any claims of meta-narrative and sees the English Civil as simply a series of happen chance events. The Post Revisionists are Revisionists who are attempting to bring back long term causes into the narrative.

We have already discussed the Whig narrative in class (as well as on this blog) at length. This can no longer be considered a legitimate school of historical narrative. The only legitimate reasons for discussing it are that it exerted a tremendous influence during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and it continues to exert a powerful hold on the public conception of history. The English Civil War was a lot more complex than simply Parliament good Charles I bad. Hopefully from reading some of the things that Charles I wrote you have seen that Charles I was a thoughtful and sophisticated individual who did not run around claiming that he ruled by divine right and could therefore act as he pleased.

When dealing with the Marxist narrative it is important to distinguish Marxist historiography from Marxist politics. You should not Marxist history and think Communism or even Liberalism. One can subscribe to the Marxist historical narrative and emphasize the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy without believing that the working class is going to rise and overthrow the bourgeoisie and establish Socialism. One can be a Marxist historian and decide that Capitalism is the greatest promoter of freedom and the public welfare ever created and be a dyed in the wool Republican. I recently took a Facebook quiz to find out what kind of historian I am and the answer I got was Marxist. I do not think of myself as a Marxist historian though that is the one aspect of Marxism that I admire. It was Marxists who played a leading role in moving history away from war and politics in helped bring in the lower classes to the historical narrative. Cressy lists Christopher Hill as an example of a Marxist historian. I have already recommended to you Hill’s Antichrist in Seventeenth Century England. So, if being a Marxist means being like Hill, than I will take the label. Hill unlike traditional Marxist historiography is willing to discuss religion in a serious and non polemical fashion.

Most historians have a contrary streak to them. The natural inclination for a historian is to attempt to take a text take it in the opposite direction of the author’s intent. Revisionist historians are the extreme end of this. The Revisionist historian strives to take the popular understanding of history and show that not only is it wrong but that it is really just the opposite. This is usually put into practice by challenging the existence of any sort of narrative. Norman Davies is an example of this sort of revisionism. I specifically chose him for a textbook because he makes the effort to give the “other side of the story” from what most history textbooks give and he offers a very readable non narrative form of history. I believe that it is particularly important to expose students to this form of history precisely because it is the sort of history that they are not likely to encounter otherwise.

History 112: English Civil War (Q&A)

1. What do you think about Nostradamus' predictions? Wasn't Marie de' Medici the slightest bit angry/suspicious when he predicted her husband and son's death? Are these predictions simply vague enough that they could have applied to anything? Also how did he not get put to death for this kind of stuff?

Predicting the death of ruler was a common practice in astrology and prophecy. Many rulers, such as Urban VIII (the Pope who went after Galileo), had laws against predicting his death. This was part of the political culture of the day. If you are interested in the topic I suggest you look at Keith Thomas’ Religion and the Decline of Magic. The idea that astrological predictions are vague can easily be worked into the system of astrology itself. Astrology deals with the motion of the planets so it makes sense that it should only effect things in a very general way and that other factors (such as free will, prayer, or divine intercession) can play a role. A “scientific” astrologer will thus be very “skeptical” of the power of astrology and openly admit its limitations.


2. Having previously read "Leviathan" for a Political Theory class, both times I read the work, I got the sense that Hobbes considers the social contract to be all but completely necessary for human existence. How then is it said that he is an important architect of the social contract? One of the main features of social contract theory is the ability to void the contract by either party, government or people, and live by other means, as I have understood it.

Hobbes does not deny that people are physically capable of breaking the social contract. Hobbes could point to the English Civil as an example of the social contract breaking down. Hobbes would likely tell you that much of the world lives in barbarism without the social contract. While one could live without the social contract a person who chose not to would have to be insane, wicked or unbearably ignorant to do so. Wouldn’t you rather live under a Hobbesian police state than in 1994 Rwanda?

3. In Davies' book, it says that the Welsh had a much easier transition to becoming part of the greater British empire, and it makes no mention of opposition from the Welsh, so why was it so much easier for the nation of Wales to merge with England than it was for Ireland or Scotland to merge with England?

To this day Wales remains culturally very distinct from England. There is a Welsh language (it is part of the Celtic family of languages and is related to Gaelic, which is spoken in Ireland.) that is still in use, particularly in the rural parts of Wales. This culture clash goes all the way back to the early Middle Ages. The ancestors of the present day Welsh were the Britons, the ancient inhabitants of the land. Starting around the sixth century or so, Briton was invaded by a group of Germanic tribes known as the Anglo-Saxons. The Anglo-Saxons chased the Britons out of the eastern parts of the Island. From the Anglo-Saxons we get the name England (Anglo-land) and the Anglo-Saxon language became the ancestor of our English language. For more about Wales see John Davies’ Wales: a History.
Why did Wales not cause the same sort of problems for England that Ireland or even Scotland caused? The main reason for this is that Wales had no history of self government. Unlike Ireland and Scotland, there never was a country called Wales. Also Wales did not have the sort of religious clash with England that Ireland and Scotland had. Scotland was Presbyterian (Calvinist) so they had some difficulties with the Church of England and even fought some wars with it. Ireland is Catholic so they have been fighting the English up until the present day.

4. In sum, what were the major outcomes of the Glorious Revolution? I found Davies answers a little confusing.

The Glorious Revolution brought William and Mary to the throne and removed Mary’s father James II. Parliament did not like James II, mainly because he was Catholic, so they contacted James’ daughter, Mary, and son in law, the very Protestant Duke William of Orange and essentially told them that if they so chose to invade England from the Netherlands they would not object. William and Mary showed up in England with their army. (If you look on a map you will see that the Netherlands are just across the English Channel. You can get there in a row boat in good weather.) Parliament welcomed their Protestant saviors from the Netherlands. James II took a good look at the situation and fled to France where he died in exile. (I imagine that the family did not have too many Christmas get togethers after this.) William and Mary rule as king and queen though parliament has set a danger precedent; they have shown that they can and will remove monarchs as it suits their purpose. So, in essence, the true victor of the Glorious Revolution was Parliament.

5. The booked talked about the Glorious Revolution as being not so glorious and revolutionary. If that is the case then why is it called the Glorious Revolution?

The important question to ask is not whether the Glorious Revolution was glorious and revolutionary or not but who thought it was glorious and revolutionary and who did not. James II certainly did not think that this was glorious; he was betrayed by his own daughter and had his throne usurped from him. Catholics in England did not think that this was glorious; just when it seemed that a new dawn was breaking for them and they would finally be treated equally a new government has violently seized power on the platform of persecuting them. (Imagine how homosexuals in this country would feel if the Republicans were to run in 2010 on a platform of banning sodomy and win.) Of course if you are an English Protestant and a supporter of Parliament this is certainly a very Glorious Revolution. Things have “revolved” back to how they are “supposed” to be. Parliament is in power, there is a pair of Protestants on the throne and Catholics are having to flee back into the closet.
The dominant view that has come down to us has been that of the English Protestants hence we are in the habit of calling it the Glorious Revolution. As historians we have to recognize that the opinions of Catholics have equal validity. So when we talk about the Glorious Revolution we have to recognize that it was a “Glorious Revolution;” glorious for some people. Norman Davies, as a responsible historian, is bending over backwards to make sure that readers get the other side that has been neglected in traditional history.

6. In the Davies book it mentions the 'Whiteboy' gangs, what exactly where the Whiteboy gangs?

They were Irish radical groups in the eighteenth century, who defended rural farmers. The situation in Ireland is not good; the English are openly trying to stick to the Catholic majority and keep them down in every way possible.

Historians in the Philosophy Department: A Response

In response to an earlier post, a commentator posed the following series of questions which I would like to respond to:

What is the historian’s relationship with philosophy? Is it merely to document which philosopher's were influential and their personal and philosophical effect on contemporary and future society? Should historians comment on the content of a philosopher's works? Does a historians training prepare them to understand philosophy in a manner which could justify any opinions, theories, conclusions they may state? Should historians abstain from analyzing the content of philosopher's work? My questions are focused on getting insight on how a historian conceptualizes his relationship and duties when dealing with philosophy.

The issue of the relationship between history and philosophy is a pertinent one for me since I operate within the gray zone between them as an intellectual historian. For me, the line between the history of philosophy and philosophy is that a historian is only interested in the who, what, when, where and why of an issue. A historian when approaching a given philosopher will, therefore, try to explain what that philosopher actually believed, where did he get those beliefs from and who was influenced by this philosopher. What will be noticeably absent from the work a historian of philosophy is any indication whether the historian actually agrees with the philosopher in question. A philosopher on the other hand, when faced with the work of a philosopher from a previous generation is going to have to voice some sort of judgment about the work of said philosopher. For example, as an undergraduate at Yeshiva University, I took an Intro to Philosophy class where we learned all about Anselm, Aquinas and Descartes and their arguments for the existence of God. The byline for the class, though, was “why you are not going to march up to the blackboard and demonstrate that there is a God in under forty-five minutes.” As a side point, the professor who taught this class, Dr. David Johnson, is, surprisingly enough, a deeply religious Christian and this was one of the best classes I took in college.

There is a story told about Thomas Kuhn and his history of science class. It was his custom to assign his students a primary source text in early modern science for analysis. From the responses, he was able to tell which of his students were history majors and which were philosophy majors. The history majors would just analyze the text, regardless of whether it made sense or not. The philosophy majors would try to make sense of the text even if the end result they come up with was very different than the actual text.

Some people would take a firmer line than I do in regards to history and philosophy, particularly my advisor, Dr. Matt Goldish. When I first came to Ohio State to start work on my Ph.D. I wanted to do a dissertation either on Isaac Abarbanel’s relationship to Kabbalah or his views on Maimonides. Dr. Goldish insisted that whatever I did it could not simply be an analysis of a text but must work to fit itself into some larger narrative. We went back and forth on this issue but in the end, Dr. Goldish prevailed. He is my advisor so his word is law. He is also a far more knowledgeable historian both in terms of the craft itself and also in terms of the politics of the field. Finally, he managed to convince me that, no matter what my views on history, in order to get a job, I am going to have to write something that will speak to people outside my narrow field and that means addressing larger narrative issues.

Certainly, a major part of what historians of philosophy have to do is to document which philosophers were important in a given era. This is important because not every philosopher who we moderns think is important was prominent during his own lifetime or immediately afterward. For example, it is a matter of some debate as to how widely read Enlightenment philosophers were doing the Enlightenment. I think historians are capable of analyzing works of philosophy. The fact that historians have a unique ability to deal with the societal context of a given philosopher gives them an important seat at the table when discussing philosophy.

History 112: Rise of Absolutism (Q&A)

1. In the text it mentions something about Louis XIV's second marriage and then bring up his marriage to Maria Teresa, the Spanish woman, so if I am not mistaken that would mean he had three wives. France was a Catholic nation, so how is it that he had three wives if Henry of England had to make England protestant before getting a divorce?

Louis XIV was married twice the first time, in 1660, to Marie Therese of Spain, who was the daughter of Philip IV. This becomes later on because Louis XIV is going to push the claim to the throne of Spain on behalf of his grandson, Philip V, which sets the War of Spanish Succession in motion. This was a marriage of convenience and, judging from the pictures we have of her, Marie was no beauty. Maria died in 1683. Louis XIV then went and married Mme de Maintenon. So there was nothing wrong with this marriage from the perspective of the Catholic Church. During the twenty three years that he was married to Marie, Louis XIV had a slew mistresses; the most famous of them being Louise de la Valliere and Mme de Montespan. This was, for all intents and purposes, viewed as perfectly acceptable. Imagine of Bill Clinton had gone on national television and told the American people: “This is Monica; she is my mistress and I am now going back to the oval office to have sex with this woman. I am the president and there are thousands of women who would gladly sleep with me. I work hard protecting this country so let me enjoy the perks of the office; as Mel Brooks might say: 'it is good to be the president.” Seventieth century France was a far less prudish society than modern America.

2. The text seems to be conflicting to some degree about Louis XIV by placing him as a great king for France on one hand while on the other listing many shortcomings of his reign. It seemed to me as if it is trying to say that he was great, but that he could have done more given better resources and more sincere conviction over the term of his reign (this referencing the fact that the text mentions several points where he initially reacted one way and years later changed his mind and did the opposite). Is this a matter of the three portions of his reign they outline being not well outlined within the text and these changes occurring in distinct stages of his reign, or was this something that was continuous throughout his rule?

In practice, when studying history there are no good or bad people. People do things for different reasons; some of them succeed at some of the things they try and others are not so successful. Louis XIV was tremendously successful at, domestically, forming a strong centralized government and curbing the power of the nobility and, in terms of foreign policy, in making France the supreme power in Europe. That being said, as it should be clear from the reading, Louis XIV was hardly some ubermensch. He had his flaws and was not as successful as he could have been.

3. I can't help but notice some similarities between Louis XIV and Bush's policy. 1. Frequent and petty wars which often have no beneficial outcome for the countries involved 2. An increasing national debt - increased spending by the nation and decreased product. Do you think that these similarities are coincidence or a result of some common political agenda? What would it imply about the future state of the United States? I thought maybe because ppl today are tending to want more unified power through government, that could be the cause of the similarity...What do you think?

Unless one is looking for analogies, one should avoid making comparisons between historical and present day figures. Remember history has no pedagogic value, there are no lessons that can be learned. Personally I suspect that Louis XIV and the people surrounding him were significantly more talented than those in the Bush administration.

4. After reading about Thomas Hobbes' philosophy in which the people "lose their individual authority, but gain stability and authority," I was wondering if any of the people had problems with this? It seems in those times, there was no real sense of individualism. Were there any common people who expressed their uniqueness?

Worrying about one’s individuality is a luxury that few people outside of modern western cultures had the chance to engage in. Most people throughout history had far more pressing concerns like what were they going to eat and how were they not going to get raped and murdered before the day is out. Hobbes is concerned with how do we solve these issues so we can actually be in a position to start concerning ourselves with such ethereal issues such as "individuality." I find Hobbes to be very useful because of how forcefully he puts forth the issue of government coercion. All governments, even our liberal democratic government, are instruments of coercion. The Federal government has the power to force you to pay taxes, they can throw you in jail, they can even hand you a gun and tell you to go die for your country. If you were really so committed to “individuality” you would be an anarchist. The fact that you are not an anarchist shows that you have compromised you “individuality” and made a Hobbesian bargain.
Hobbes actually was quite controversial. Mainly because people, during the time, thought, probably correctly, that Hobbes was an atheist. Hobbes’ very cynical worldview, that you find so distasteful, comes out of his materialism where everyone acts simply based on their material self interest.


5. Most modern philosophy requires a serious body of evidence to be considered for a theory on human nature. Hobbes just speculates and theory-crafts. How did a skeptic critique such an argument when no evidence is presented in the first place?

Hobbes was a materialist, who believed that everything was physical matter. In his defense one could argue that the burden of proof lies with anyone who would wish to argue against his materialism. Hobbes’ politics comes out of this materialist world view. If there is no supernatural than all that remains is selfish material interest. In the Hobbesian world everyone is acting based on crude self interest. The question then becomes how do we fashion a state out of this mass of people who are only interested in their material welfare and would kill their own mothers if it would benefit them. There is no God to punish me nor is there any heaven or hell awaiting me after I die. So what, besides for a Hobbesian police state, is stopping me from breaking into your house raping you and stealing your jewelry before cutting your throat and proceeding to your wife and kids?

6. What was parliament's response to Charles I's defiance? Did the church support the "divine right of kings" since its justification came from scripture? What caused the shift away from the thought that kings possessed God-given power over their kingdoms and when did it occur?

Well Charles I had William Laud, the archbishop of Canterbury to support his claims. What is interesting about Charles I and his father, James I, is that even they are not simply arguing for the divine right of kings. For them it is almost a side issue in the face of tradition, natural law and the public self interest.
I would see the essential question of the revolution in sixteenth century political thought as, now that the myth of religious homogeny has been forever destroyed by the Reformation, what is the basis of government authority. Charles I is trying to rule two three countries, England, Scotland and Ireland. In these countries there are Calvinists and Catholics, who oppose the Anglican Church. Even the Anglican Church itself is divided; you have all of these Puritans who oppose how he is running the Anglican Church. So why should people not simply rebel against him and chop his head off? And they did rebel and chop his head off. Much of the Enlightenment is devoted to finding a solution to this very problem that Charles I failed to answer.

War and Peace: My First Conference Presentation and My Weekend at Purdue University (Part I)

For the weekend of April 3-4 I was in Lafayette IN for a conference at Purdue University, titled War and Peace: Discourse, Poetics, and Other Representations. This was my first conference presentation and I presented my paper on David Reubeni. The conference was for graduate students so this was certainly a minor league affair, but I am glad that I was able to attend as this summer I will be presenting at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds England, a major league affair. As one might expect from the title, this conference was pretty top heavy in terms of post modernism. Of the presentations I attended Cory Driver’s and mine were the only ones that were not open exercises in post modernism. There was also the issue of liberal politics; as one might expect there was a fair amount not so subtle Bush bashing with some shots at Israel thrown into the mix. All in all it was a wonderful conference, though, and I really would like to thank the people who helped put it together particularly John White and also Jessica Raffelson, who chaired my session.

I was in a bit of quandary in trying to find accommodations for Shabbos. I was in luck and was put in contact with the Aldrich family and was able to spend Shabbos with them. Dr. Daniel Aldrich is a professor in the political science department at Purdue. He and his wife are now on my list (somewhere near the Klappers) of things that are right with Orthodox Judaism. They are one of the few Orthodox people in Lafayette and Dr. Aldrich’s wife home schools their three adorable children. They have also lived in Japan for a number of years, during which time Dr. Aldrich wrote articles, on the side, for the Haredi newspaper Hamodia about living as a Jew in the Far East. I presented on Friday but was thinking of walking back to Purdue on Shabbos to sit in on at least some of the day’s presentations. In the end I did not; I was having too much fun at the Aldrich’s. I had a great discussion with Dr. Aldrich about my favorite polemical topic, Haredim. I was on the offensive, he was on the defensive. This ended up branching out into post modernism; it turns out that he is even more hostile to post modernism than I am. I had to defend my willingness to use such terms as “Imperial Haredism” or “Haredi creation of the Other.” I do recognize the value of certain post modern terms, questions, and concepts as long as they do not become ends in of themselves.

As to the conference itself. The first panel was on Theorizing War and was chaired by Sol Neely. Ethan Sproat of Purdue University spoke on “War and Its Purification.” It was an examination of Kenneth Burke’s views on war within the context of Friederich Nietzsche. According to Burke, war is an object of communication and as a means of communications. This is Burke’s attempt to look at the symbolism of war as a means of getting around the act of war itself. Burke was influenced by Nietzsche. Nietzsche viewed war as the actions of people who already lived condemned lives. Actual war is a disease; it is built around a cult of empire and relies on dissipation and fanaticism. This is a type of reasoning that desires to eliminate all forms of opposition; Nietzsche refers to this as a “diseased form of reasoning.” Burke notes that all organisms live by killing. Move from the hand to the fist. Nietzsche also recognized this need for violence.

Nietzsche felt comfortable only with Heraclitus who said that “things become through war.” Strife is required for cooperation; there is a value in having enemies. Nietzsche self consciously used “war” instead of “strife.” War is a onetime event instead of something continuous. He believed in attacking ideas that have been victorious where one stands alone in opposition. One attacks ideas and not people. To attack is proof of good will. One can only wage war against equals. Nietzsche believed that it was important in preserving the enemy even the Church so in a sense Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity was, from his perspective, a true act of love.

Burke employs Nietzsche’s use of war as a way of establishing community. There is an element of competition; we engage in communion through competition. A pure act is always symbolic. As applied to war this would mean war without actual war, just the symbols of war. Pure war preempts actual war and reverses the relationship between symbols and actions.

Sproat ended his presentation with a nod to those in attendance. This conference is an act of pure war. We engage and challenge others. Despite our differences we still see engagement as something of inherent value. The questions becomes how do we bring these values of pure war to those already engaged in actual war.

Despite the underlying liberal polemic and post modern discourse of this presentation I did enjoy this one. Particularly since I love Nietzsche and it was wonderful to see someone embrace Nietzsche whole heartedly without any concern for being labeled a racist a Nazi or, even worse, a sexist.

(To be continued …)

The Scientific Revolution (Q&A and Quiz)

1. It seems from the "Invisible College" article, that new sciences and philosophies were being studied somewhat publicly. Why then, would they call their Oxford club the invisible college?

One of the important things to consider in the rise of modern science is the creation of an international scientific culture. The invention of the printing press plays a major role in making this possible. This new scientific culture is a new power structure and, while there is nothing secret about it, it is not what most people would think of as a society and would therefore not see it as such. I would recommend Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe if you wish to pursue this topic.
As a way of modern analogy. Think of how the internet with its chat rooms, blogs, and instant messaging has changed how societies are constructed. People, for better or for worse, now find themselves forming relationships with people completely online without ever meeting them in person. So now society is no longer bounded by the people you live near and interact with in your day to day lie.
This new scientific culture is crucial because part of the scientific method is that an experiment has to be able to be duplicated by people in other places and times. We are moving from a model in which knowledge is a secret to be hoarded and guarded by a select few to one where transparency comes to be of ultimate value.

2. I was just wondering what would be the definition of modern sciencewould be with regards to this week’s readings. Is it science as what we would think of today?

The science of the early modern period included things like magic, demonology, alchemy and astrology. This does not mean that these people were bad scientists or irrational or superstitious. These things are better viewed not as counters to science but as failed sciences. To give the example of astrology, technically speaking astrology is true. A heavenly object, the sun, does have a tremendous impact on life on earth. Other objects affect the earth in more subtle ways. The moon’s gravitational pull affects tides. In fact Galileo rejected the theory that the moon affected tide because it sounded too much like astrology to him. Now, considering all this, it is not such a big jump to theorize that Saturn might cause depression. We have failed to find evidence for this so this theory has fallen through. This does not mean, though, that it was a bad theory. One of the flaws in how the history of science is usually taught is that focuses on successes. A major part of science is putting out theories that fail. How many light bulbs did Thomas Edison make before he got one that worked?

3. I wondered, as I read the invisible college, when the average person began to be in any way involved in science, whether it is a product of our public school system, or sometime earlier. I mean by this, science properly called science, because people obviously always practice science, even as we work out problems through trial and error. I mean to ask when people began to learn and participate in experimental science.

To a large extent science is the province of a narrow elite even today. Certainly during the Scientific Revolution experimental science is limited to very few people. That being said a major part of the success of this new scientific culture is its ability to attract popular attention and create a lay scientific culture. We will talk more about this once we come to the Enlightenment.

4. In the Invisible College reading, it says that many of the natural philosophers believed in "faith-ism", meaning what they couldn't explain with science, they explained with faith in religion. Is this thinking the predecessor to the Church of Scientology by chance?

Scientology is a religion created by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard in the twentieth century. To the best of my knowledge it has not been influenced by any of our early modern scientists/religious thinkers.

5. Can you further explain this concept of Fideism ("faith-ism")? It sounds pretty interesting and seems to be a unique way of combining two ways of thinking, science and religion, that one typically doesn't think of as meshing.

Anyone interested in the subject should look at Richard Popkin’s History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle. You might think that a book about skepticism would be about people coming to challenge religious dogma. As Popkin reveals, though, much of the revival of radical skepticism in the early modern period is strongly fideistic. One has all these doubts about the ability of the flawed human mind to comprehend any truth, whether in regards to the natural world or in logic. The solution is to make a leap of faith and accept Jesus as your personal savior. This allows you to in turn have faith that, because you have been made open to these divine truths, you can hope to comprehend, through the aid of the Holy Spirit, the truths of science and logic.
In my experience in dealing with religious fundamentalists (some of whom happen to be relatives of mine) I have found that their religious convictions stem not from naïve incredulousness or lack of skepticism but from radical skepticism. These people are skeptical about the validity of the scientific method, the historical method or even logic. From this perspective the bar to believing in a literal interpretation of scripture is quite low. So your science textbook says that life evolved through evolution over millions of years. This other book, the Bible, says that life was created by God in six days. Why should you accept the former book over the later? The later has the endorsement of hundreds of generations of tradition. (Freelance Kiruv Maniac is a good example of this sort of reasoning.) The difference between these fundamentalists and me is that I have a tremendous amount of faith in the scientific and historical methods. As such I take any claim that results from these methods, such as the world being much older than six thousand years, very seriously. It becomes an intellectual non option to simply go against these claims.

6. I'm confused about the events that led to Galileo's Inquisition trial and shown by the video. At first, Galileo had a supporter in the Pope who allowed him to write about his ideas, given certain stipulations. What was it exactly that turned the Pope against Galileo?

You have hit the nail on the head. Pope Urban VIII was not some anti science zealot as he is commonly portrayed. Galileo was not twice put in front of the Inquisition because of heliocentrism. The Dialogues did not directly support heliocentrism and initially even passed censorship. Galileo was, for decades, the best known supporter of heliocentrism in Europe. If the Church had really been interested in stamping out heliocentrism they would have gone after Galileo decades before they did. Galileo made some really bad political decisions. He made fun of a stance taken by the Pope.
Keep in mind that the Thirty Years War is going on in Europe. At stake here is not science but Protestantism and the authority to interpret scripture. Galileo attempted to defend heliocentrism in terms of scripture and as such offered an interpretation of the book of Joshua that was contrary to that of the Catholic Church. From the perspective of the Church this makes Galileo a bit like the Protestants that they are in middle of fighting a war with.

I gave my students their first class quiz. It consisted of the following questions:

1. What faith do Magdalena and Balthasar belong to? What role does God play in their lives? (2 points)

2. List two of Luther’s “predecessors?” (2 points)

3. List three examples of religion wars in the sixteenth century? What was the resolution to these conflicts? (3 points)

4. Name two people involved with the Scientific Revolution and explain why they are important.

5. What was the common word for scientist before the nineteenth century? (1 point)

Bonus: Who was Mennochio the Miller and why do historians find him to be so fascinating?

History 112: Religion Wars and European Society (Q&A)

1. How unscathed do the mentioned Reformation religions translate to their modern counter parts?

The modern Calvinist (Presbyterians as we refer to them in America) and Lutheran religions are quite distinct from their sixteenth century forbears. For example the modern Lutheran church has officially rejected Luther’s views on Jews. I do not see modern Presbyterians attempting to recreate Calvinist Geneva on these shores. Neither of these groups maintain their forbearers emphasis of Hell and damnation.
This is quite common with religions in general. No religion is the same as the religion that existed centuries beforehand with the same name. A Catholic church run by Pope Benedict XVI, whether you like him or not, is a very different Catholic church from that of Leo X. We are dealing with different people who read texts differently, who interpret traditions differently and make different decisions. There is the lie perpetuated by most religions that they are an unbroken chain of tradition. In order to maintain this lie religious establishments will distort history and pretend that one can draw a straight line of equivalency between themselves and their forbearers.


2. I was reading the section and I noticed how divided up the nations we have today used to be. I knew Germany has been many separate states for most of its existence, but I had no idea the Netherlands was so separate. Also, it says that the Dutch had essentially the first modern Republic, so my question is, how similar was the 16th-17th century Dutch Republic to our own Republic, was it truly an early modern predecessor to American free-market capitalism?
3. What is your opinion on Davies' claim that the Netherlands "had every reason to regard itself as the first modern state"? I've never heard this before and would be interested in your thoughts on such a bold statement.

One of the major shifts in modern historiography is that our narrative of the Enlightenment and pre Enlightenment has moved away from just France. Just as our narrative of the Renaissance has moved away from the traditional Italian centered narrative so to has the narrative of the Enlightenment moved away from being France centered and other Enlightenments and pre Enlightenments have come into focus. The major beneficiary of this has been the seventeenth century Dutch republic. While the Dutch did not have religious tolerance in the modern sense of the term they were certainly more tolerant than anyone else in Europe and they were host to a fairly colorful cast of characters; the most famous of them being Benedict Spinoza. In addition the Dutch were leaders in the development of a merchant class. The Dutch republic, a small insignificant country managed to build a world class trading empire and become a major European power. Davies is certainly on the side of this pro Dutch shift, though he may overstep himself.

4. How was the Dutch education system? If I remember correctly from 111, the early university structure included 3 Lower and 4 Upper Disciplines. Was the same structure applied in the seventeenth century in Dutch Republic in particular, and Europe in general?
Good question. One that I am not qualified to answer. I do know that European universities one the major holdouts of conservative Aristotelians. This is contrary to modern times where we associate universities with being very liberal.

5. Can you go into more detail of the rioting and religious desecrationthat occurred under the regency of Margaret of Parma?

Margaret of Parma was the regent in charge of the Netherlands and she failed to maintain control at the beginning of revolt. Philip II put in a string of people to put down the Calvinist revolt and all of them failed. As with the pervious question I honesty do not have the background in Dutch history to go into much detail.


6. The witch craze is noted to be attributed "to the pathological effects of religious conflict." I can't say I really understand this. If all these changes and knowledge were being brought around by the Renaissance, how did this kind of stuff ever fly?

This is one of the great ironies of the early modern period. The Middle Ages, for all of its supposed “superstition,” did not have witches. All of a sudden, in the fifteenth century, when Europeans are becoming more “rational we have find this obsessions, possessing both the upper and lower classes, with the idea that there are people selling their souls to Satan and having orgies at secret Sabbaths. See Stuart Clark’s Thinking with Demons on this issue. He puts this issue into the context of early modern thought and shows why witches were a logical extension of certain foundational assumptions of early modern thought.

I showed the Return of Martin Guerre after class and offered the following questions to consider in relation to the class:


1. What is the role of family in Martin Guerre’s village? Are marriages made on the basis of love?
2. Are the villagers prudish about sex? Would children growing up in this society be more innocent or less innocent about sex than children growing up in our society?
3. The story in the film takes place in the mid sixteenth century. How relevant is this fact? Could this story have just as easily happened during the Middle Ages?
4. To what extent is the peasant society of Martin Guerre’s village distinct from the “high society” of the investigators from the parliament of Toulouse? To what extent does the film play to the notion of distinct spheres of high and low society?
5. Can we refer to the residents of the village as being oppressed and if so by whom?
6. Where does the priest fit in with this peasant society?
7. What is the role of women in this society? Are women in a subordinate position?
8. What is the role of religion in this society? How does the priest compare with the local wise woman?
9. In a world without fingerprints, DNA, dental records or even photographs how does one establish identity?
10. Using dramatic license, the film has Bernadette being aware of the truth about the man who claimed to be her husband; do you think that she did in real life?

History 112: Renaissance and Reformation (Q&A)

The new quarter has started and my new History 112 class is coming along quite remarkably. I seem to have been given a remarkably strong group of students. Following in the footsteps of Professor Louis Feldman, I am having my students email me questions before class which I then use for my lecture. As part of my effor to continue to post material from my classes in order to give those who cannot be present a chance to take part in my class I thought to post some of these questions and my responses.

1. The text mentions to different sets of writings on the subject of the renaissance, these being writing on the smaller movements associated with change due to humanism on one hand which it says are really only affecting a small portion of society and then a changeover to writing about the lives and lifestyles of the people themselves in a broader context, is there also an element where both of these topics are written about at the same time (other than our book, so is it a large element of scholarship)? Along with this, I see no real reason to split them unless dealing with a very specific region where the prior was not occurring to any significant degree, so was this change in scholarship done because of a feeling that too little was being covered or was it perhaps a feeling that effort could be better spent on the latter topic?

I would say that the most important development in historiography over the past few decades has been the “discovery” of regular people. Traditionally history has been about wealthy male elites who were either literate themselves who could pay someone to write for them. There were certain ideological reason for this, but also pragmatic ones as well; as historians we are slaves or our source material and that usually means written texts. That creates a bias in favor of those who could write. Since in pre modern times most people were illiterate this is a problem. One of the major revolutionary books in this new movement, which Davies refers to, is Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worm (It is on the recommended list for paper topics.). This book is about a miller, Menocchio, with some fairly heterodox ideas. He believed that the universe and God with it came into existence through a process of fermentation not unlike that of cheese and he denied Original Sin. This brought him in front of the Inquisition. Unfortunately for Menocchio, but fortunately for us, Menocchio seems to have had some serious difficulties in keeping his mouth shut. This resulted in the demise of poor Menocchio and several volumes of Inquisition files just waiting for a modern, scholar such as Carlo Ginzburg, to find. Thanks to the Inquisition we now know all about this relatively normal person, Menocchio, the story of his life and of his beliefs even though he was not a member of the aristocracy, a high ranking church official or some great philosopher.
As Davies indicates there is now a tension between the traditional mode of history and this new form. On the one hand we have our traditional history of kings and popes and we have this new history of millers, shopkeepers, healer women/witches etc. They are both operating within their own spheres. One of the big questions facing historians today is how to integrate these two histories; we know that our millers, shopkeepers and healer women were living on the same planet as our kings and popes. I would agree with you that these things should be put together. Considering the nature of present day scholarship it is somewhat difficult.

2. What was the people's reaction to Luther's theses? Did they encourage others to act out their frustrations with the Church as well?

Luther was certainly very popular among the common people in Germany and he even managed to gain the protection of the Elector of Saxony. This is a good example of the importance of low history as opposed to the traditional history of the elites. In many respects the really important story is not Martin Luther but the thousands of regular people who joined him and made it a movement.
Luther, left to his own devices, was not much of a revolutionary. He was just a young theologian with some mildly radical ideas. In the 95 Theses he is still very Catholic. At this point he still believed in the papacy, confessions, the full list of sacraments and even in the value of works. Hand him thousands of followers and all of a sudden you have something far more extreme than just a debate over indulgences or papal power; you have a Protestant movement.



3. Who are "the Canons" that was mentioned in Luther's document? I assumed it was the Church, but not sure.

This is a good question to ask. There are going to be terms in the reading that are going to be unfamiliar. You should not be ashamed to ask. You have every legitimate reason not to know. In thesis five Luther states: “The pope does not intend to remit, and cannot remit any penalties other than those which he has imposed either by his own authority or by that of the Canons.” Canon refers to the Church legal structure. For example we talk about Canon Law and Canon Lawyers. This is important because it is clear that at this point, in 1517, Luther is still committed to working within the Church structure. While he may be on the side for less power to the Pope, he assumes that power lies in the hands of the body of the Church structure; we are talking about elite officials here and not lay believers. Luther is in no way handing people a blank check to simply pursue the dictates of their own Christian consciousness.

4. I am a little confused on how both, Luther and Calvin both contributed to the development of Protestantism. … So I guess for my question, could elaborate on how the two men placed such different ideals into the same religion without creating chaos?


The truth of the matter is that there really is no such thing as a Protestant religion. Protestant is just a convenient term for Christian movements in the Western tradition that are outside of the Catholic Church. (Mormons are in their own category.) Luther and Calvin were very different so there are very good reasons to put them in their own separate categories. Since they were both operating around the same time and were both fighting the Catholic Church we tend to group them together. As we shall see the major religious groups in Europe are going to be Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed (Calvinist).


5. I don't understand why Luther didn't support the peasant political revolts. From what I gathered from the reading assignments, he was challenging the greed of the Church that was manifesting itself through the selling of indulgences. But I thought this kind of greed was also brewing in the ruling elite, so I don't quite understand why Luther wouldn't support a peasant revolt challenging that. My only guess is that it has something to do with Luther's prince. … Luther has been immortalized for challenging the Catholic Church and laying the egg that hatched the Protestant religion and the belief that a personal relationship with God can be attained without needing some sort of middle man. But were his sentiments really genuine? Or was he getting some extra incentive from his prince for challenging something he had banned? Why wouldn't he support a political revolt that challenged exactly the same kind of corruption, just in a different sphere of life? … I just feel like this seemingly insignificant refusal of Luther to support the peasants might be responsible for the later tendency of princes to embrace Luther's ideas.

You have hit the nail on the head. Again we see that Luther was not some revolutionary out to overturn the system. He was very much part and parcel of the established order. This is not to say that Luther was wrong for not supporting the peasants. We have to be careful and refrain from making personal judgments. One also needs to keep in mind that Luther was dependent on the Elector of Saxony. A major part of Luther’s success is that he is able to get support in all the right places. He has the political and popular support to make him untouchable. Unlike with most of the many radical preachers of the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church was never in a position to eliminate Luther.


6. Why did the Christian sects have to fight instead of coexisting? Faith is based on personal choice not force.

In one sense this is a very bad question as it goes outside of the historical method and judges the past by our present day standards. We think of faith as a personal choice. People in the sixteenth century did not. They had their way of thinking, we have ours. That being said this is actually a very useful question when put in the right light. We take it as obvious that faith is a matter of personal choice and that it is not particularly beneficial to have full scale wars over the nature of the Eucharist or things of that nature. Why was this not obvious to them? Keep in mind that Luther, Leo X, and John Calvin were all very smart people; they probably had higher IQs than you or I. So why did they not get it? We will be exploring this issue in future classes. One thing that I will say here is that we think the way we do in large part because Europeans managed to make such a mess out of religion during this time period. For example when the Founding Fathers were writing our Constitution one of the major things that was on the back of all of their minds was we do not want to repeat what happened in Europe here in America so let us figure out some alternatives. So it is not that we are more “enlightened” than they were; we have the benefit of being able learn from their experience.

God for Nazis: A Review of the Aryan Jesus

Ohio State’s eHistory has just put up my review of Susannah Heschel’s The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. I would like to thank Dr. Steven Conn for giving me the opportunity to write the review and the free copy of the book to go with it, for being a wonderful editor and for coming up with the title for the review. As I did go over the requested length, he did have to shorten it slightly. You are free to follow the link to the shorter version of the review or you can read the full version here.

Susannah Heschel is the daughter of the Jewish theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Aryan Jesus is in many respects the historical counterpart of Abraham Heschel’s book, the Prophets. As Susannah notes in the introduction to that book, her father, having gotten his doctoral degree in Germany during the 1930s was in part responding to currents within German Protestantism that sought to move against the Old Testament and remove any Jewish element from Christianity. The Prophets is a ringing defense of the continued relevance of the Old Testament and is unapologetic about its very Jewish character. Like much of Abraham Heschel’s work, The Prophets was written not for a Jewish audience but for people of faith in general. Writing during the era before Vatican II, Abraham Heschel was challenging his Christian readers to confront Judaism as a living organism and not simply as a relic of the Old Testament and to look in on their own Christianity as something very Jewish.

Susannah Heschel seeks to bring out this pro-Nazi Protestant German Christianity, which her father had to confront as a young man, from the obscurity of the archives. Quite reasonably she focuses her attention on the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life, essentially a German Christian think tank that operated during the war, and its head Walter Grundmann, a New Testament scholar and professor at the University of Jena. This is then used as a window into the wider world of German Christianity. Being a German Christian and accepting Nazi anti-Semitism and racial ideology required one to overcome a number of intellectual hurdles. How can one accept Nazi claims of Jewish inferiority if Jesus himself was Jewish? How can one reconcile Nazi claims of a German master race with Christian universalism? What should be done to the Old Testament, a Jewish book? German Christians argued that Jesus was not really Jewish, but someone who fought against Judaism. Jesus was the Son of God so he was free of any Jewish biological taint. Alternatively, many argued that the Galileans were really genetic Aryans as opposed to the Judeans, who were genetic Jews. So the Jewish Judeans crucified the Aryan Jesus as part of their racial war against Aryans. Just as God created a hierarchal order in creation so too did he create a hierarchy in races. The Christian spirit finds its ultimate expression within the Aryan race. Many German Christians wanted to point-blank get rid of the Old Testament. The real source of Christian values for them was not Judaism and the Old Testament but “Aryan” religions such as Zoroastrianism and Buddhism.

As a work of intellectual and social history, Aryan Jesus is quite remarkable. Meticulously researched, Aryan Jesus manages to capture the intellectual milieu of Nazi Germany, offering a fascinating glimpse into academic culture under Nazi rule. As with all good intellectual history, Aryan Jesus succeeds at presenting and analyzing ideas, even offensive ideas, clearly without polemic or judgment. Grundmann and his colleagues may have been anti Semites, racists and bigots, but that is incidental to this work. For Susannah Heschel, they were scholars living under Nazi rule and products of nineteenth and twentieth-century German Protestant scholarship and racial theory.

While Aryan Jesus is first-rate as historical analysis, it does suffer from the lack of a clear argument and thesis. The problem, I suspect, is that Susannah Heschel found herself unable to write the book that she really wanted to write. One gets the sense that Susannah Heschel wanted to write about Christian responsibility for Nazism and the Holocaust. From this perspective, Grundmann and his colleagues should be part of the Christian anti-Jewish tradition, dating back to the Middle Ages if not to antiquity. Their thought should be representative of Nazism in general and they should be favorites of the likes of Hitler and Himmler. Finally there should be a direct connection between the Institute and the Holocaust. Grundmann and his circle should be directly taking part in the planning and the process of eliminating European Jewry. Susannah Heschel was unable to write such a book because the evidence for such claims does not exist. While Grundmann and his circle saw themselves as part of a Germanic tradition of anti-Judaism that included Martin Luther, it is very clear that they were products of nineteenth and twentieth-century German scholarship, something quite distinct from the Middle Ages or even Luther. While one can easily see how the Institute might have been useful in justifying the annihilation of Jews, there is no direct link between the Institute and the Final Solution. German Christianity did not equal Nazism. While the Nazis were willing to use German Christianity to further their own aims, we do not see any heartfelt support or identification with their Protestant ideology. There was even a law passed banning the use of swastikas in churches. The dominant attitude toward Christianity displayed by the Nazi leadership was that of Alfred Rosenberg, that Christianity was a Jewish religion. Throughout the years of Nazi rule, German Christianity was on the defensive, trying to show that “real” Christianity was diametrically opposed to Judaism. The impression one gets about Grundmann and his circle is that of some geeky misfits in school, vainly pleading to be let in and accepted by the in-crowd. They may be tolerated to some extent, mainly out of amusement, but are generally held in contempt.

Susannah Heschel sincerely wants this to be a controversial book that will challenge the consciousness of Christians so she tries to dance around these issues, implying things but making no hard claims. For example, she states:

One cannot prove that the Institute’s propaganda helped cause the Holocaust. However, the effort to dejudaize Christianity was also an attempt to erase moral objections to Nazi anti-Semitism. Institute-sponsored research, by describing Jesus’s goal as the eradication of Judaism, effectively reframed Nazism as the fulfillment of Christianity. Whether the Nazi killers of Jews were motivated by Institute propaganda cannot be proven, but some did express gratitude for Institution publications, apparently for alleviating a troubled conscience. Institute publications were not as widely disseminated as the propaganda issued by the Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, or the publications of Julius Streicher, who was hanged at Nuremberg for editing Der Sturmer, a weekly anti-Semitic propaganda rag. Yet the moral and societal location of clergy and theologians lends greater weight to the propaganda of the Institute; propaganda coming from the pulpit calls forth far deeper resonance than that spoken by a politician or journalist. (pg. 16-17)

This is hardly the sort of damning case to keep Christians up at night. The only time that Susannah Heschel manages to score any serious points is with her discussion of the post war period, during which time the members of the Institute, by and large, managed to do quite well for themselves. They managed to survive the denazification process in Germany and were accepted back into the fold of mainline Protestantism. How someone like Grundmann managed to be accepted by mainline Protestants after the war, I agree, is a good question and should disturb people.

If I were a conservative Christian the story that I would see in Aryan Jesus is how a bunch of “supposedly” Christian theologians tried to reinvent Christianity in order to make it conform to the values of the time and place, 1930s Nazi Germany. They turned Christianity on its head, hoping that secularist Nazis would embrace their Christianity. In the end, all they did was to serve as useful idiots to the secular Nazi regime and failed to do anything for Christianity. My conservative Christian would close Aryan Jesus and think about how liberal Christians who support abortion and gay marriage are morally no better than Grundmann and justifiably go to sleep comfortably with a clear conscience.