The Emperor's New Cloths: the Atheist Version

By way of Underverse, I just came across an interesting defense of Richard Dawkins, written a few years ago, by PZ Myers of Pharyngula, titled the courtier’s reply.

Myers retells the story of the Emperor's New Cloths in the following fashion:

I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots, nor does he give a moment's consideration to Bellini's masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor's Feathered Hat. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor's raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion; Dawkins cavalierly dismisses them all. He even laughs at the highly popular and most persuasive arguments of his fellow countryman, Lord D. T. Mawkscribbler, who famously pointed out that the Emperor would not wear common cotton, nor uncomfortable polyester, but must, I say must, wear undergarments of the finest silk.
Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity.
Personally, I suspect that perhaps the Emperor might not be fully clothed — how else to explain the apparent sloth of the staff at the palace laundry — but, well, everyone else does seem to go on about his clothes, and this Dawkins fellow is such a rude upstart who lacks the wit of my elegant circumlocutions, that, while unable to deal with the substance of his accusations, I should at least chide him for his very bad form.

Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor's taste. His training in biology may give him the ability to recognize dangling genitalia when he sees it, but it has not taught him the proper appreciation of Imaginary Fabrics.

While this argument should give one pause before replying to Dawkins type attacks on theology with a simple” how dare he,” I think Myers, like Dawkins, misses the point. It is one thing to attack theism; intelligent people acting in good faith are going to have different opinions as to the validity of the cosmological, the teleological, the ontological and other such arguments for the existence of God. Apart from this, there is also the separate issue of how one treats the various theologians throughout history, who have argued for the existence of God and have built systems of thought around the hypothesis that there is a God. One can reject the claim that God exists, yet still treat those who believed in God with respect.

As a historian it is of the upmost importance to me that we treat that we study with respect. This applies even to people whose values we disagree with. I do a lot of work dealing on medieval and Early Modern Christian mysticism and scholarship. I have no interest in attacking mystics such as Bridget of Sweden and Teresa de Avila or scholars such as Adrian Reland and Johannes Meyer. Nor do I have any interest in explaining them away through some cheap patronizing form psychological analysis. I want to understand them on their own terms and I will always treat them respectfully as equals. If I believed anything less about them I would not be studying this field.

In this respect Dawkins is a threat not just to theism but to any form of credible intellectual history. Like the clergyman who believes that his high school science education qualifies him to talk about science, Dawkins seems to believe that his high school history education qualifies him to talk about history.

I would recommend to Myers and to the rest of Dawkins’ followers that they read the late J.L Mackie’s the Miracle of Theism. Mackie was an atheist and this book is a scholarly attack on traditional arguments for the existence of God. That being said Mackie treats the thinkers that he attacks, from Anselm to Aquinas to Maimonides to Hans Kung, with respect.

Humans Battling Mind Controlling Aliens: A Struggle of Cardian Proportions (Part II)

(This is a continuation of an earlier post. For Part I see here.) 

Stephenie Meyer’s Host has been advertised and hailed as a story about the triumph of the human spirit. This would be in keeping with the impression that one would get just from glancing at the book jacket. The humans are going to defeat the aliens, right? Wanderer is going to be won over by the individualism of the free humans and reject the communal structure of the Souls, right? The truth is that Meyer has something very different in mind. Rather than a simple freedom triumphing over slavery story, Host is a tale about society-building and of conflicting societies. The Host starts off as being a society-building story about Wanderer and Melanie. They are two strangers thrown together by chance and forced to share not a piece of land but a single body. They have every reason to hate one another. For Melanie, Wanderer is a parasite, who has stolen her body and her life. For Wanderer, Melanie is a voice in her head that should not be there and is an unneeded and potentially dangerous complication in her life. That being said Wanderer develops a strange affection for Melanie even to the point of protecting her from her fellow Souls. Wanderer covers up the full extent of the problem so that the Souls do not simply take her out of Melanie’s body and kill Melanie. In essence, Wanderer chooses her troubled, schizophrenic existence with Melanie over a less problematic existence in some other body. Not only does Wanderer accept Melanie as a part of her life, but she also risks her life in an attempt to find Melanie’s family, a task that has no possible good ending for her. Tracking off into the desert lands of Northern Arizona might get her killed. If the Souls find her they will view her as a traitor. If she succeeds and finds the group of free humans, that she is looking for, the humans will take her what she is, a hostile enemy and a threat. Wanderer’s search for the free human hideout is only the prelude to the main part of the story. 

Not to give too much away but she finds them (they actually find her) by page 117. (This is a 619-page novel.) The rest of the book is devoted to Wanderer’s struggle to become part of this free human society and how she comes to relate to the various residents of this society. Meyer puts Wanderer into a Stephen Donaldson type dilemma. Wanderer cannot play her most valuable card to protect herself and tell any of these humans the truth that Melanie is still alive and well inside her own head. This society survives on the belief that those humans taken by the Souls are gone; that the Hosts are no longer human and that there is no hope of bringing them back, no matter how much they would want to believe otherwise. If Wanderer were to tell the truth they would believe that she was lying to them by playing on what they would most desperately want to believe and kill her. Therefore she must lie and hide the truth even from the people she loves most in the world, Melanie’s younger brother Jamie and her boyfriend Jared. 

The free humans are led by Melanie’s Uncle Jeb. He rules this society as a benevolent dictator. The caves they are living in are his house and therefore he makes the rules. He knows what Wanderer is yet he stops his people from killing her not because he has any delusions that the person he sees is in any way his niece but because he wants to get to understand these alien life forms that they now have to share the Earth with. From this perspective Jeb and, later, other characters, come to form their own bound to Wanderer, or Wanda as she comes to be called, even though she is and remains the physical embodiment of everything they hate. 

This society that Jeb is running is made up of people thrown together by the fact that they are among the last humans not taken by the Souls. These people do not necessarily like each other nor are they particularly virtuous. Furthermore, they are riding against the tide of history; the war is long over and the Souls won while hardly even having to fire a shot. 

Parallel to this small gritty, problematic free human society is the society that the Souls have created. The Souls are also part of this societal building narrative; they are also thrown together by events and must form bonds with people they have no particular reason to care about. At the beginning of the novel, Wanderer meets one of the first Souls to come to Earth. She and another Soul took the bodies of people who were husband and wife. These two souls, despite the fact that they had no previous connection to each other, took on the relationship of their hosts and fell in love with each other in a very human sense. Later in the novel, Wanderer sees a couple who are Souls with small children who are clearly not occupied. So you have Souls with human children, created through the agency of their hosts, and who have taken on human connections to their own human children and have therefore kept them human. 

In this tale of society building, Wanderer must choose the society in whose building she will take part. Neither society is good or bad; if anything it is the Souls who have the moral edge. Wanderer, though, chooses her flawed humans over her own kind. Wanderer’s reason for this is emblematic of this whole notion of society building. The bonds that she forms with the free humans have meaning precisely because they came out of an active choice, made by people who had every logical reason to turn her away. The Souls are beings who love naturally. While they may lack the flaws of human beings and their society may be a lot more moral and less problematic, their bonds are meaningless as it was something that never came out of any active choice.

The Haredi World and Asperger Syndrome

Mishpacha, a Haredi magazine, published an article on Asperger Syndrome. It is sympathetic, if a bit patronizing, and it manages to convey the basics about Asperger Syndrome and how it is relevant to the Haredi community.

Curiously enough the article did not consider any of the specific difficulties that people with Asperger Syndrome face in trying to adapt to the Haredi world. I would see Asperger Syndrome as presenting a specific challenge for the Haredi community; in certain respects, the Haredi educational system and Haredi society are particularly ill-suited for handling children and adults with Asperger Syndrome. While those with Asperger Syndrome may, in theory at least, have a tremendous advantage over neuro-typicals when it comes to Talmud study, conforming to the dictates of the Haredi educational system and Haredi society is bound to prove problematic since they operate around very specific conventions and demand strict obedience their structure of authority.

Living in the Haredi world requires much more than ritual observance of Orthodox Jewish practice. For better or worse, to operate within the Haredi world one must be willing to conform oneself to a very specific lifestyle. The Haredi world, unlike the secular world, does not even have the pretense of valuing individualism. There is a very specific dress code. For boys, it is a hat, a black velvet yarmulke, a jacket, dress pants, and a button-down shirt. Girls have to wear skirts below the knee and their shirt sleeves must go past their elbows. Depending on which sect of Haredi Judaism you belong to the dress code is going to be even more specific. Being in the Haredi world requires that one have very specific interests. For example, a guy who is not particularly interested in the study of Talmud or who has other strong interests is going to clash with the system.

People with Asperger Syndrome have difficulty following even the conventions of a regular society, which is more flexible and has fewer penalties for failing to conform; how can one expect someone with Asperger Syndrome to handle a system with such specific requirements and where the penalty for failing to keep to these requirements is rejection not just by one's own peers, but by the authority system itself? In the secular world, someone with an Asperger type focus on history, music, science or mathematics is not going to be faced with the sort of existential crisis that being in the Haredi world would inevitably bring about. People with Asperger Syndrome, by and large, do not do well with authority figures. To ask someone living in their own heads and by their own rules to submit their will to an authority is to ask them to go against their very being. It is difficult enough when we are talking about a boss; how much more so when we are talking about a gadol, who, in theory, has a claim over every aspect of your life.

In dealing with members of their community with Asperger Syndrome, the Haredi world is up against a group whose very brains set them against the system. In a society that demands conformity to a very specific social pattern, Asperger Syndrome presents a thought structure that is profoundly individualistic and that sets forth its own lifestyle.

Humans Battling Mind Controlling Aliens: A Struggle of Cardian Proportions (Part I)

A few months ago I did a series of posts on Orson Scott Card and his influence on Stephenie Meyer. (See posts I, II, and III.) Their stories are built around the issue of society building; groups of people are thrown together, who may not have any particular love for each other, yet come to form a bond with one another and, from that bond, create a small society or even a family. This issue could have been explored further though I moved on to other things. Little did I know that Meyer would thrust me back into this issue by making her next book even more explicitly “Cardian” than even Twilight. There are things on the surface of Meyer’s new novel, the Host, that call attention to Card. This is a work of science fiction and the back cover of the book has a blurb from Card, praising Meyer. At a deeper level though Meyer has, once again, studied Card and has proven herself to be a most diligent and worthy student.

In what has now become her trademark, Meyer takes a stock horror story and fashions it as a charming and utterly captivating romance. The Host deals with an invasion of Earth by aliens, known as Souls, which insert themselves into the bodies of human hosts and take control of them. This type of story has been done many times before. Such aliens have appeared as the villains in Robert A. Heinlein’s Puppet Masters and more recently the Animorphs series by K. A Applegate, to name some examples off the top of my head. For those of you who do not remember, the Animorphs was a series of children’s books that dominated the field of children’s literature back in the late nineties, before the rise of Harry Potter. In Meyer’s telling of the story, these parasitical aliens are not evil beings out to conquer and enslave humanity. On the contrary, they are creatures with highly developed moral sensibilities. They follow a strict code of Utilitarian ethics; their actions serve to create the greatest level of happiness for the greatest amount of beings. By taking over Earth, they have created a better, more ethical humanity in which people love one another and strive to serve the common good. The Souls, having conquered Earth, have not destroyed human culture. On the contrary, they continue to live as a human society, albeit a perfected one. Their hosts continue to live their human lives, holding down human jobs and raising human families.

The main character of the novel, Wanderer, is a Soul inserted into a young woman named Melanie Stryder. This should have allowed Wanderer to live a perfectly happy life inside Melanie’s body and with Melanie’s knowledge and memories. The problem for Wanderer is that Melanie has refused to go away and continues to live on. Worse, Wanderer finds herself inundated with memories of Melanie’s former life particularly of her younger brother, Jamie, and the man she loved, Jared, both of whom are now living in one of the last hidden free human holdouts. Haunted by these memories, Wanderer finds herself taking on Melanie’s connection to them and searching for them.

In a sense, this is a story about three different characters in one body. There is Wanderer, Melanie, and Melanie’s body. The lines between these characters are blurred, creating a fourth, completely different character. Wanderer is now living in Melanie’s body but has to deal with Melanie speaking in her head, which of course used to be Melanie’s head. Furthermore, Wanderer is affected by the fact that the body she lives in is Melanie’s. This places certain constraints on Wanderer; by taking on Melanie’s body she is no longer Wanderer as she was but another version of Melanie. The conqueror, by the very act of conquering, has been conquered.

(To be continued …)

Toward Formulating a Jewish View of Jesus (Part II)

(This is a continuation of an earlier post.)

While all that I have said previously is true, it does not really address the core issue. The very question of what role does Jesus play within Judaism or how do Jews view Jesus is predicated on the assumption that Jesus plays some sort of role within Judaism. The truth of the matter is that Jesus, from a strictly theological perspective,[1] plays no role within Judaism. This, it should be pointed out, is different from Islam where Jesus, even though he is not viewed as divine, is venerated as a prophet.

While this notion that, from the perspective of Judaism, Jesus is irrelevant may seem to be almost a tautology, internalizing this concept, in practice, would require many Christians to rethink how they approach Judaism. Traditional Christian thought views Jews through the lens of their rejection of Jesus; Jews are people who do not accept Jesus and therefore continue to practice Mosaic Law. A more helpful way of looking at Judaism would be to say that Judaism believes in the Old Testament and Mosaic Law. This strict adherence to the Old Testament has had a profound effect on how Judaism has evolved; one such effect is that Jews do not accept the divinity of Jesus nor do they believe that he superseded the Law.

Viewing Judaism from the perspective of their rejection of Jesus makes it very difficult to understand Judaism as it forces one to always view Judaism within the context of Christianity. This leads to a rather unhelpful line of discourse. Why do Jews reject Jesus? Why would someone continue to practice Mosaic Law; don’t they know that it has already been fulfilled by Jesus? Don’t Jews know that the Old Testament predicted the coming of Jesus? How can Jews simply believe in the God of the Old Testament, who judges and punishes, and reject the love and forgiveness that is Jesus? This line of questioning ultimately leads to a caricature of Judaism as this inflexible, close-minded religion, built around law and judgment, with no sense of love and forgiveness.

In order to understand Judaism, one must be willing to understand it on its own terms. In order to do this one must come with a very different set of questions. How do Jews read the Old Testament? What role does Mosaic Law play within Judaism? How do Jews understand God? What does Monotheism mean for the Judaism? How do Jews understand Messianism? Most importantly one has to ask the question: how have Jews throughout the ages understood their Judaism and how have they struggled with each other over this matter? Such a line of questions would allow a person to formulate a more nuanced view of Jews and Judaism. Judaism can become something more than just a straw-man for Christian polemicists, something that exists in its own right and has its own legitimacy.

An excellent example of such an inquiry is Judaism by Hans Kung. This book, by a Catholic theologian, has to be counted as one of the best one-volume works about Judaism out there. As I Jew I must acknowledge that Kung treats Judaism with near perfect fairness. I challenge any Jew out there to write a book about Christianity that treats it with equal fairness. Kung wrote this book to teach Christians about Judaism in order to further the cause of ecumenical dialogue. He also wrote a book on Islam.

[1] The figure of Jesus has traditionally played a very important cultural role for European Jews. Many Jewish customs have elements in them that were meant as social polemics against Christianity.

Toward Formulating a Jewish View of Jesus (Part I)

A question that I am often asked by Christians is how do Jews view Jesus? This is a rather difficult question to answer. Not because the question itself is so difficult, but because this is one of those questions that is not really about the given question, but is about larger issues; to answer such a question one most first come to terms with the very framework from which it arose.

What do Jews think of Jesus? As with most of Judaism, there is a wide spectrum of opinions. The Talmud, if we are to assume that the Yeshu that it speaks of is in fact Jesus, views him as a sorcerer and a heretic, who was justifiably executed by a Jewish court for his crimes and is now burning in excrement in hell. This view of Jesus finds its most coherent expression in an early medieval text known as Toldot Yeshu. Toldot Yeshu can be read as a Hebrew counter Gospel or even as a satire on the Gospel accounts. According to Toldot Yeshu Mary was a whore and Jesus was a bastard. In other words Toldot Yeshu is filled with the sorts of things that Christians today, unless they want to be accused of being Anti-Semitic, are not allowed to accuse Jews of believing. The fact that these accusations are grounded in Jewish sources is irrelevant; multiculturalism has nothing to do with telling the truth.

There are alternative Jewish views to this. Toldot Yeshu is hardly an authoritative source and there have been those, such of R’ Yechiel of Paris, who have denied that the Yeshu in the Talmud is Jesus. (See Hyam Maccoby, Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages.) The late fourteenth century commentator Profiat Duran referred to Jesus as a Hasid Sotah, a pious fool. Duran wrote a commentary, in Hebrew, on the New Testament, Kalyimot Hagoyim, offering a non Trinitarian reading of the New Testament and arguing that Jesus, the apostles and even Paul, for whatever faults they might have had, were good practicing Jews, who never intended to start another religion; it was their followers, who came afterward, who twisted their words and created Christianity. Moses Mendelssohn claimed to admire Jesus as a moral philosopher. This view was also shared by R’ Jacob Emden. (See Alexander Altman, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study pg. 204-05.)

Strictly speaking, from the standpoint of traditional Jewish thought, there is nothing to stop one from being a “believer” in Jesus. One can believe that Jesus was a righteous man; Judaism believes in the concept of righteous men. One can believe that Jesus performed miracles; Judaism believes that God will sometimes perform miracles, particularly if they are through the hands of a righteous person. One can even believe that Jesus was born of a virgin; a virgin birth is simply a type of miracle. In fact there is a tradition that Ben Sira was the son of Jeremiah’s daughter, born through a “virgin” birth. One can believe that Jesus was crucified; Judaism does not believe that righteous people are invulnerable. One can even believe that his death brought about some sort of atonement; there are Jewish sources that speak of God taking the righteous as atonement for sins of the world. One can believe that Jesus arouse from the dead and ascended to heaven alive; Judaism believes that Elijah the prophet and Enoch ascended to heaven alive and well as numerous other people. One can believe that Jesus sits at the “right hand” of God and is the fulfillment of Psalms 110; it is no different than saying that King David, Abraham or the Messiah sit at God’s right. Ultimately if one wants to one could say that the suffering servant passage of Isaiah 53 is about Jesus; it is no different than saying that the passage refers to Moses, Jeremiah or R’ Akiba. This may be pushing things, but, in theory, one could hold that Jesus was the Messiah provided that you define the Messiah simply as a mortal human being who is the subject of Isaiah 11; there are Jewish sources that say that this chapter refers to King Hezekiah.

There are really only three Christian beliefs that Judaism could never accept. One, that Jesus was, in some sense, God incarnate and part of some sort of Trinity. While in theory this belief might not be worse than the Kabbalistic notion of sephirot, any traditional notion of Trinity or an incarnated God is unlikely to pass through the strictures posed by the Jewish philosophical tradition, particularly as exemplified by Maimonides. From the perspective of Maimonides’ theology any discussion of divine attributes is problematic. Two, that Mosaic Law is no longer valid. Mosaic Law defines Judaism; if there is no Mosaic Law then Judaism ceases to exist. The final belief that Judaism could never accept is the idea that a belief in Jesus is somehow necessary for ones own personal salvation. Accepting such a claim would mean placing Jesus at the center of the religion and reorienting it around this singular concept.
(To be continued …)

Time Magazine Article on Twilight

Time Magazine has an article out on Stephenie Meyer and the Twilight series. It has a nice analysis of Meyer’s style of writing and how it differs from that of J.K Rowling. While the author of the piece acknowledges that Twilight is not high literature he clearly respects Meyer as a writer and does not turn his nose down at her for writing "teen lit."

Ben Stein’s War: A Review of Expelled

I am a practitioner of Orthodox Judaism and a believer in evolution. My view as to the role of religion and science has been heavily influenced by the work of Rabbi Natan Slifkin and Dr. Francis Collins. Because of this I am fairly hostile to intelligent design and its promoters. So I came into Ben Stein’s documentary, Expelled, with apprehension. I think Win Ben Stein’s Money was the greatest game show in the history of television, featuring Ben Stein’s dry wit and the spectacle of him putting his money where his mouth was, matching himself against the show’s wining contestants. I have tremendous respect for Ben Stein’s intelligence and the thought of him taking the stand on behalf of intelligent design was disconcerting to say the least.
Expelled is a film that will have a lot of people saying a lot of different things about it. Religious conservatives will likely declare it to be a stunning refutation of Darwinism and pretty much everyone else will see it as a pile of rubbish. Be careful about accepting at face value what you hear about this film; this is one of those films that one must see for oneself. The film is very open ended and one can imprint almost anything you want onto it; this is a weakness of the film, but also just might be its saving grace.

Judging just from the film, I am not certain were Ben Stein stands on the issue of intelligent design. He is clearly critical of what he sees as a Darwinian establishment that, from his point of view, has used strong arm tactics against all those who would dare to challenge Darwinian orthodoxy. Proponents of intelligent design are portrayed sympathetically as scientists who are the victims of a totalitarian Darwinian establishment, which seeks to quash all dissenters. This point is emphasized by frequent cuts to footage of the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. To be fair to Ben Stein he specifically denies that the theory of evolution caused the Holocaust. He just believes that evolution was a key enabling factor in the rise of the Nazis. Further than this I am not certain. Is Ben Stein an actual supporter of intelligent design or is he simply defending their right to dissent? For that matter what does Ben Stein mean when he uses the terms intelligent design and Darwinian evolution; does intelligent design mean that evolution came about through a creator and does Darwinian evolution mean that evolution happened without a designer?

This lack of clarity severally weakens the film, turning it into a hodgepodge of vague generalizations. We are given a parade of people representing either “Big Science” on the one hand or who are dissenters from it. The film never really clarifies what each of these people hold. I think the film would have benefited if each interviewees were asked if they believed in God and if so what sort of God they believed in and to what extent they were willing to accept the theory of evolution.

I believe that this film, despite itself, is useful precisely because it illustrates the problem that has plagued the whole debate over evolution, which unfortunately, all too often, has descended to rhetoric, vague generalizations and accusations. While Expelled has all of these same flaws, I did not find it to be mean spirited and Ben Stein, to his credit, conducts himself with a high level of class.

This ambiguity over what the intelligent design debate is supposed to be about plays itself out very nicely over the course of the film. In the film, the head of the Discovery Institute, which has spearheaded the intelligent design movement, denies that there is anything religious about his group’s work and that they are simply critical of certain elements of traditional Darwinism. Advocates of intelligent design claim that they are not arguing for the existence of God. Believing in some sort of High Power, might offer a solution to some of the issues they raise, but that is simply speculation and has nothing really to do with their work as scientists. On the other side, Richard Dawkins, one of the most outspoken opponents of intelligent design, when interviewed, is perfectly willing to acknowledge the possibility that life was seeded by some being of “higher intelligence,” but that this being must have also come into existence by some sort of naturalistic process. So what is everyone arguing about? I guess it is that intelligent design advocates claim that Darwin is flawed. But there are a lot of ongoing debates within the scientific community as to many of the details of evolution via natural selection, such whether it happened gradually or whether it happened through relatively sudden shifts. The advocates of intelligent design do not seem to be actually rejecting Darwinian evolution so what is all the fuss about?

Despite the fact that I disagree strongly with what I think the film is trying to say, Ben Stein still manages to be entertaining. Maybe this is just me trying to see the good in what Ben Stein has produced here, but I do think that he has accomplished something worthwhile.

Medieval Reading and Chaucer: A Review of Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France

Joyce Coleman’s book, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France, is an attack on Orality/Literacy theory, that the technological shift from an oral to a literate culture was accompanied by a revolution in how mankind viewed the world, and in particular the work of Walter Ong. According to Ong western society evolved from an oral society toward a literate one through a number of stages. Western society started off in a state of primal orality, exemplified by Homer. As society evolved and literacy spread literary type thinking began to become more prominent. That being said “oral” residues remained. An example of this is the prominent role during the Middle Ages of oral reading, reading texts out loud, either to oneself or to others. The move to silent reading marked one of the final transitions into the literate society and hence to the birth of modernity. An oral mode of thinking focuses on tradition and the community. The bard of an oral society passes on traditional narratives to his community. Even in terms of language, there is an emphasis on repetitiveness and the familiar. Within such a system there is no space for critical analysis nor is there any space for an individual. Even under the model of oral reading, which dominated the classical and medieval periods, which had written texts, the act of reading was still a communal affair that served to strengthen the cause of tradition and left no room for the individual. Literacy allows for man to take a critical view of himself and the world around him and hence allows for the rise of rationalism. The silent reader has a personal relationship to the text that is not bound by the authority of community and tradition. Coleman objects to this paradigm because it treats the Middle Ages as one static period and fails to take into account the sifts within society that occurred. Moreover, when historians attempt to locate this mysterious sift from orality to literacy they come up with different periods. Did this shift occur during the Carolingian period with the scholarly circle surrounding the court of Charlemagne? Was it in the twelfth century with the rise of scholasticism and the medieval university? Did the literate society come into being as a result of the cultural changes of the fourteenth century? Did orality survive even the rise of the printing press? Above all Coleman sees the discussion of orality versus literacy as being hopelessly entrapped in a progressive view of history. Man is supposed to have progressed from the primitive mode of orality to literacy, which allowed for the rise of modern rational man. For Coleman, an oral mode of communication is in no way inferior to a literate mode. The decision to switch to a literate mode does not imply that one has become more sophisticated or that one is all of a sudden more capable of engaging in the rational inquiry into the nature of man and the universe. Coleman presents medieval literacy as being aural based; that people read aloud either to themselves or to others even when they could do otherwise because they preferred hearing texts. Aurality serves Coleman as a bridge between the oral and literate society. By talking about aurality she avoids the pitfall of having to deal with different “rises” of the literate society. Coleman offers examples of different types of aurality that differ from each other not in a progressive sense but merely pragmatically. There were different types of readers who read for different purposes. The recreational reader, the religious, and the professional reader might in different situations have read silently to themselves or had someone read to them. Having a text read out loud did not imply any lack of literacy on the part of the listener. Running through the book and tying it all together is an analysis of Chaucer. Chaucer has traditionally served as an example of the rise of a silent reader. At various points in his famous Canterbury Tales, and his less well-known work such as Troilus and Criseyde, talks about reading and addresses himself to a reader. This has traditionally been interpreted as Chaucer writing with the assumption that his work would be read by privately by an individual. The fact that Chaucer also talks about people listening to stories is brushed aside as Chaucer giving a nod to traditional forms of narrative. Coleman rejects this interpretation of Chaucer and offers her own analysis of Chaucer using her theory of aurality. According to her reading of Chaucer, when he talks about a reader he is referring to someone either reading his work aloud to a group or someone having his work read to him. This reading of Chaucer has the advantage over more traditional readings in that it takes into account his references to the telling over of his work and the reading of it. While I agree with Coleman’s main argument, that orality not a deficiency, and I find her analysis of Chaucer to be quite interesting, I do not think that her argument about aurality marks a real break with Orality/Literacy theory. She has overplayed the groundbreaking nature of her work by creating a straw-man out of Orality/Literacy theory in general and of Ong in particular. I do not read Ong as rejecting any of Coleman’s major assertions. Ong was not trying to create a ranking system between orality and literacy. On the contrary, by analyzing orality he was trying to present an oral mode of thinking as an equally valid alternative to a literary mode. In the end Coleman does not deny that the rise of mass literacy affected how people thought and Ong is not advocating a progressive understanding of history.

A Slightly Polemical Discourse Which I, For Good Reason, Left Out of My Eulogy for My Grandfather.

Last November there was a major dinner in honor of my grandfather, Rabbi Yitzchak Chinn of Blessed Memory. The dinner was held in a hotel in downtown Pittsburgh and people came from across the country to pay their respects to my grandfather. In attendance were many city officials and civic leaders, the vast majority of whom were not Jewish. In short, it was a beautiful though not the sort of event you would expect to be hosted for an Orthodox rabbi who spent his life avoiding the spotlight. The guest speaker for this event was Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky. This was a great honor as Rabbi Kamenetsky is the head of a prominent Yeshiva in Philadelphia and is recognized as one of the leading Haredi rabbis, a Godel. Also, it should be said that Rabbi Kamenetsky is a busy man so the fact that he came was incredibly kind of him.

Rabbi Kamenetsky gave a speech built around a story found in the Mishna in which Rabbi Yossi ben Kisma refused to live in a specific city, even when offered great wealth, with the reply: "Even if you give me all the silver and gold, precious stones and pearls in the world, I will dwell only in a place of Torah..." (Pirqai Avot 6:9) Rabbi Kamenetsky used this story to talk about building cities devoted to Torah. He spoke well but in Yeshivish English. It was the sort of speech that would not have been out of place in a gathering of Yeshiva students. I suspect that Rabbi Kamenetsky has, in fact, given versions of this same exact speech to his students. Despite Rabbi Kamenetsky’s talent as a speaker, the speech went on for more than a half an hour, stretching my patience.

After the dinner, to my shock, my father commented that the speech was inappropriate considering the audience, as a large percentage of them were not Yeshiva students, not Orthodox and not Jewish. My father then proceeded to commiserate with those people there who were forced to listen to a speech that they could not have understood and must have made absolutely no sense to them. My father is one who will usually go out of the way to defend the Haredi world so to see him be more critical of something than I warmed my heart.

I think this incident is useful in that it demonstrates how clueless Rabbi Kamenetsky is when it comes to the world at large. And Rabbi Kamenetsky is usually held up as an example of a Haredi Rabbi who is moderate and open. He had no idea how to speak to an audience that was not Yeshiva students. I can do a better job at changing how I speak based on my audience and I have Asperger Syndrome. My brain, at a basic level, processes information differently than normal people. The only difficulty Rabbi Kamenetsky has to work under is that he is from a different socio-religious group. Of course, a mark of a great intellect is the ability to cross over such divides and reach people from different backgrounds.

The difference here is that I have spent a lifetime being told that I have to consider the social conventions of the society around me. I may earnestly resist this but, at the end of the day, I do make the attempt to work within societal conventions, particularly when it is clearly in my interest to do so. Rabbi Kamenetsky, it would seem, has spent his life being toadied to by those around him and has never had to seriously consider the general society at all. In the end what we have is a person who, despite his great intellect, is unable to communicate with anyone outside his narrow group even when given the chance.

The Haredi world likes to claim for itself the authority over, not just Orthodox Jewry, but all Jews. They wrap their leaders in the mantel of Gedolei Yisroel, the great ones of Israel. The fact that they claim this should obligate them to at least be able to give a coherent speech in the language of the country they live in that can be understood by the people of the country they live in. Since Rabbi Kamenetsky cannot be bothered to live up to this simple standard why should anyone, Orthodox or not Orthodox, even make the attempt to listen to what he has to say?

Female Spirituality in the Late Middle Ages and the Search for a Feminine Christianity (Part VII)

Conclusion:

There is a need, for scholarship, to separate the study of medieval women, from the modern day political issues that confront women. For me, this would mean that the study of medieval women could be carried in the same fashion as one would study medieval peasants, and merchants. In many respects the study of peasants and merchants could serve as a useful model for those who study women. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the study of peasants and merchants was hopelessly intertwined with the present day issues of Socialism, Capitalism and the rights of workers. Since then the field has matured. While the issues of Capitalism and the rights of workers have not gone away, it is possible to write about such issues in various historical contexts while completely divorcing what one writes from having anything to do with the modern incarnations of these issues. Medieval merchants and peasants were not proto-capitalists and proto-labor movements; they were their own entity and must be studying on their own terms.

Similarly, while I do not expect the issues of women’s empowerment and women’s spirituality to disappear, one should be able to write about medieval female visionaries in a way that is not a commentary on women’s empowerment and women’s spirituality in modern times. The women we have dealt with here were not some nascent women’s movement, waiting for the dawn of modernity to come out into the open. They existed within the context of late medieval Catholic theology; the issues they dealt with and their thought structures came from that world. To understood them we must remove ourselves from the equation and humbly and enter their world on their terms.

I would see the whole question whether or not female spirituality was a form of empowerment for women in the Middle Ages as a trap. The very wording of the question bespeaks of modern concerns. Today most historians would find the question of whether or not merchants in the Middle Ages demonstrated true class consciousness to be quant, silly and ultimately meaningless. It creates a false dichotomy in which one must choose between equating medieval merchants with moderns or creating straw-men out of them. The only intellectually honest response is to say that medieval merchants had a class consciousness, but not in the way that moderns would use the term; this effectively makes the term, and hence the whole question, meaningless. I would hope to see the day when the question of whether women were empowered or really created their own form of spirituality during the Middle Ages will be treated with the same scorn. To ask this question is to create a false dichotomy between saying that medieval women were like moderns or turning medieval women into straw-men for the prejudices of moderns. All one can say in response to such a question is that the whole issue of empowerment meant something very different for people in the Middle Ages, rendering the original question meaningless.

The question that should guide research is how does female spirituality fit into the larger narrative of the evolution of Christian thought in the later Middle Ages. The goal being to integrate medieval women into medieval intellectual history. One should not be able to get away with the traditional narrative of medieval religious history, going from Francis of Assisi and Bonaventure to Albert the Great and Thomas Thomas Aquinas to William of Ockham without talking about Hildegard of Bingen, Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena. This has nothing to do with empowering women. This is a matter of our narrative of the Middle Ages being incomplete without them.

Female Spirituality in the Late Middle Ages and the Search for a Feminine Christianity (Part VI)

John W. Coakley: Women, Men and Spiritual Power.

John Coakley in Women, Men and Spiritual Power, like Bell and Elliott, analyzes medieval female spirituality from a male centric point of view. Unlike Bell and Elliott, though, Coakley has a more positive view of the women involved; they are more than mere puppets hanging of their clergymen. In this sense Coakley serves as a useful bridge to Bynum’s position. Coakley focuses on how male clergymen looked at the female mystics in their charge and integrated them into their spiritual worldview. As with Voaden, Coakley sees the subjugated state of women in the later Middle Ages as ironically serving to empower them:

Yet the very exclusion of women from the realm of priestly authority ironically endowed them with a new significance outside it. For there were desirable aspects of Christian experience that the institutional authority could not guarantee to clerics and indeed often seemed to block them from: the deeply affective elements of faith, the Spirit that blows where it will, the immediate presence of God. These became the particular province of holy women. Precisely as the clerics claimed ecclesiastical authority over the women who by definition lacked it themselves, they tended to invest those women with the potential to symbolize, and to provide for them, even if only vicariously, what remained beyond that authority – what the men themselves wanted but found to lie beyond their grasp.[1]

Women, Men and Spiritual Power unfolds as a series of case studies of such relationships between female mystics and their male collaborators.

The first relationship that Coakley deals with is that of Elisabeth of Schonau (1129-1164) and her brother Ekbert (c. 1120-1184). Ekbert was careful to show his control over Elisabeth. He inserted himself into his writing. It is he who decides what should be revealed to others. Ekbert was concerned with theological matters and used Elisabeth as a research assistant of sorts to help him get answers from above. For example at one point he asks her if the Church father Origen was in Hell or not. Throughout the account of Elisabeth’s visions we find that the angels tell her to ask the learned doctors to explain to her what her visions mean. Elisabeth thus becomes a mere cipher, with which men of the Church could communicate with heaven.

Hildegard of Bingen and Guibert of Gembloux (c. 1125-1213) had a very different sort of relationship. Guibert was different than Ekbert in that Guibert did not put himself forth as the gatekeeper for Hildegard. Guibert only came into contact with Hildegard at the end of her life. For the most part she managed to operate outside the model of female visionary male confessor champion. Guibert serves merely to record Hildegard’s actions and is of no real consequence.

Coakley sees James of Vitry’s (1170-1240) vita of Mary of Oignies as the “first thoroughgoing attempt by the confidant of a holy woman to explore the idea of her charismatic authority as something discrete from his own priestly authority.”[2] While Elliott viewed James’ portrayal of Mary of Oignies in terms of being a supporter of priests with her Eucharistic devotions, Coakley sees James as granting Mary a level of power parallel to that of a priest. She did not deal with doctrine rather she was given knowledge about specific individuals. This allowed her to aid priests by letting them know about the states of the souls of the people in their care. Elliott sees this role of aider to priests, cynically, as pawns of the priesthood. Coakley sees this as a sign of independent power.

The relationship between the Beguine Christine of Stommeln and the Dominican friar Peter of Dacia strongly paralleled that of James of Vitry and Mary Oignies. In Peter of Dacia we see a further development of the theme of separate authority:

He regards Christine’s supposed access to God as the object of a deep desire of his own that his theological studies have left unfulfilled. He considers himself to benefit from her experience vicariously through the devotion she elicited in him, which however also represents a sort of consolation prize, which has accepted in lieu of that greater object of his own desire. He presents Christine as possessing a greater grace than he has himself, a foretaste of glory that has eluded him but might have been his; and thus he explicitly roots his fascination with her in a sense of his own spiritual deficit.[3]


Peter seems to have interpreted Christine’s vision through the medium of bridal mysticism; he portrays her as experiencing the joyous rapture of being swept up in Christ. This theme does not appear in Christine’s own writing. Christine focused more on the suffering she underwent at the hands of demons. The demons would interrupt her prayers, tempt her to commit suicide, to deny Christ and turn the host into snake and toads. Ultimately the picture we get of Christine, from her own writings, is much darker and from the perspective of orthodox theology, more problematic from how Peter described her.

The Memorial of Angela of Foligno by an anonymous Franciscan friar can be read as having two voices, Angela’s and the Franciscan’s. The Franciscan portrays Angela in the traditional trops, writing of her devotion to the passion, the Eucharist and her prophetic visions. When we come to Angela’s voice we find that she does address theological matters in her work. One is struck by the directness of her encounter with the very being of God. Angela interprets her own visions, which blurs the line between her authority as a visionary and the priestly authority.

She speaks ultimately from a sphere of authority that is her own as a charismatic visionary. As for the friar, he proclaims the experiences of Angela the visionary saint to be beyond his comprehension, while at the same time articulating the substance of these experiences to the reader in words whose inadequacy becomes permissible on the basis of what Angela the theologian says about the essential inexpressibility of the experiences.[4]

The relationship between Catherine of Siena and Raymond of Capua (1330-99) offers an excellent example of the final stage of evolution in the relationship between clergymen and female visionaries. Raymond consciously put himself forward as Catherine’s defender against those who doubted her prophecies or who questioned her refusal to eat. He is a witness to her life but is also an active partner in her labors. As Coakley sees it:

… Raymond shows himself acutely aware of the distinction between the institutional powers of clerics and the informal powers of holy women, and he explores the relationship between the two through the medium of his own personal experience, like those other writers but, ostensibly anyway, in a manner more precise and calculated than anything discussed so far.[5]


Coakley, like Elliott, sees a downturn in the Church’s acceptance of female visionaries in the latter part of the fourteenth century. The fact that Raymond had gone as far as he did to defend Catherine’s sanctity demonstrates a growing skepticism on the part of the Church hierarchy. If the Church was beginning to show a greater level of interest in such women it was not in a way that boded well for them.

For Coakley, female visionaries and their priests held separate realms of power. While the priests had to place the informal authority these women claimed to posses within the context of their own authority, derived from the church structure, “the approach that was to prevail, rather, was one that treated the official authority of the man and the extraordinary charismatic authority of the woman as discrete entities: each appeared effective in its own right without trumping, or being trumped by, the other.”[6]

While Coakley does not see these male-authored texts as being particularly useful for the understanding of how these women understood themselves, he does view these texts as offering a form of female empowerment. For Coakley:

… that idea [of female spiritual power] is not a mere solipsism or fantasy, nor is it merely a tool to subordinate the women to the men. It is rather an attempt to take seriously – to articulate the significance of and in this sense to imagine – what were, in their devotees’ view anyway, the real powers of the women. The men accomplished this by thinking in terms of partnerships that, to be sure, did not undermine clerical authority yet that also acknowledged and explored the limits of the authority.[7]


The male authors focus on what they lack. Women are seen as the other.

To speak, therefore, of an idea of female sanctity in the male-authored literature … is to speak not simply of the women’s virtues but also of an economy of powers in which both the women and their male collaborators have a part. The texts propose a picture of cooperation or partnership between monks or clerics on one hand and holy women on the other, and thus a productive interaction between the institutional and informal powers that were their respective domains.[8]

Despite the fact that there is little that is new in this book, Coakley does an excellent job of bringing together a wide range of issues to form one coherent whole. I find Coakley’s work to be superior to Voaden’s in that Coakley deals with more people and that offers a broader context with which to understand them, not just discretio spirituum. He presents the relationships that he deals with as being varied and complex. He does attempt to force his case studies into a particular model. Rather he allows them to speak for themselves.

[1] Coakley, Women, Men and Spiritual Power pg. 2-3.
[2] Ibid pg. 214.
[3] Ibid pg. 90.
[4] Ibid pg. 129.
[5] Ibid pg. 171.
[6] Ibid pg. 214.
[7] Ibid pg. 221.
[8] Ibid pg. 227.

Female Spirituality in the Late Middle Ages and the Search for a Feminine Christianity (Part V)

Voaden, Rosalynn. God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries.

Rosalynn Voaden sees prophecy as representing one of the very few areas in which women could be empowered even within a patriarchal system such as the Church. This empowerment depended on having access to the discourses found in the formal Church structure. Educated women could form useful alliances with members of the Church hierarchy and could translate their experiences in ways that men would understand. In the texts that Voaden deals with, she finds evidence that these female visionaries “co-operated with the prevailing ideology in general, and with certain representatives thereof, in the persons of spiritual directors and scribes, in particular, thus participating in their own empowerment.”[1]

The focus of Voaden’s work is on the concept of discretio spirituum. This was a methodology developed by clerics in the later Middle Ages to differentiate between people acting under the influence of the Holy Spirit and those acting under the influence of the devil. There were seven signs. One, that the person led a virtuous life under the guidance of a proper spiritual director. Two, the vision should inspire the soul with an overwhelming love for God and reverence for the Church. Three, that the visionary should feel a deep inward understanding of the truth. Four, that that only true things are revealed to the visionary. Five, that the vision bore good fruits. Six, that the visionary should be able to predict the hour of their death. Seven, that posthumous miracles be performed. According to Voaden:

… the doctrine was, in effect, a discourse, developed and elaborated by ecclesiastical authorities, a discourse which provided both a vocabulary to articulate visionary experience and a set of criteria to evaluate the vision and the visionary. In addition, discretio spirituum supplied a pattern for self-fashioning which extended to behavior, demeanor and modes of expression. Familiarity with, and skill in, the discourse was a vital factor in the textual – and physical – survival of the visionary. Facility with discretio spirituum empowered medieval women visionaries and enabled them to fulfil[l] their divine mandate to communicate revelation.[2]

The majority of the book is devoted to a case study of two female visionaries, Bridget of Sweden and Margery Kempe and how they were received by the Church; Bridget of Sweden was successful at navigating the discourse of discretio spirituum, while Margery Kempe failed at it. Margery comes across, in her writing, as a very forceful and independent personality while Bridget of Sweden comes across as a blank cipher. As historians, we might find Margery Kempe’s work to be far more interesting and worthy of preservation than Bridget of Sweden’s work for precisely the same reasons why the Church did not approve of her and approved of Bridget of Sweden. Margery Kempe took a strongly independent role for herself; even though she attempted to gain the approval of the Church, she failed to hold on to a spiritual director. While she gained the respect of many ecclesiastical authorities, she constantly quarreled with her spiritual directors and hence could not hold on to one. Bridget of Sweden succeeded in maintaining the aid of Alfonso of Jaen, who went on to advocate for her canonization. Margery Kempe seems to have been fairly unlearned, particularly in matters related to discretio spirituum, while Bridget of Sweden was relatively well educated and, in particular, understood discretio spirituum. Margery Kempe’s visions tended to be more corporeal, while Bridget of Sweden’s visions were of an intellectual nature. Margery Kempe was a married woman, who had abandoned her husband for life as a wondering pilgrim. Furthermore she engaged in activities that seemed to veer rather closely to preaching. Bridget of Sweden, though she was originally married, became a nun after the death of her husband.

Despite the fact that Bridget of Sweden was portrayed by Alfonso of Jaen as a meek passive servant of the Church, her status as a visionary made a major power. Kings and popes alike heeded her advice. She involved herself in the Hundred Years Wars, supporting the English. She played a crucial role in bringing the papacy back to Rome from Avignon. She did live as a cloistered nun, but traveled about, working to create her own order of nuns, the Bridgettines.

Voaden offers a fascinating analysis of the specific cases of Margery Kempe and Bridget of Sweden. My problem with this work, though, is that Voaden does not offer a broader context for the material she deals with. This work does not discuss the situation of men; how did the Church apply discretio spirituum to men? This is crucial because if the Church handled men in the same manner then discretio spirituum ceases to be a women’s issue. At the end of the day I am not convinced that discretio spirituum was a coherent ideology that was ever put into practice by the Church. It is too vague. The two male theologians that Voaden deals with, Alfonso Jaen and Jean Gerson, are perfect examples of this. Alfonso Jaen wrote on discretio spirituum to promote the veneration of Bridget of Sweden. Jean Gerson wrote to argue against her canonization. Did their respective decisions have anything to do with Bridget’s success at handling the discourse of discretio spirituum? In the case of Jean Gerson it is clear that he opposed her in large part because she supported the English in the Hundred Years War.[3] In the end discretio spirituum would seem to have simply been a discourse to be used to justify whatever one was inclined to believe from the beginning. The most a female visionary could hope to do in order to navigate the discourse of discretio spirituum was to tie herself to the right clergymen and hope that he would come through for her.

[1] Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices pg. 3.
[2] Ibid pg. 4.
[3] Jean Gerson would later go on to write a book defending Joan of Arc. This would suggest he was less motivated by misogyny or the technicalities of discretio spirituum than by politics. See Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman pg. 264-96.