Antisemitism revisited

One other detail which has stayed with me from this conference, from a paper by Rebecca Peterson on how the Lutheran theologian Philip Melanchthon wrote about the Jews. Melanchthon was (in this as in many things) much more moderate and softly-spoken than Luther himself. But apparently, when he wanted to say something positive about the children of Abraham, he tended to call them Hebrews or Israelites; when he wanted to criticise them, even if he was talking about the same time period, they became Jews. The implication is that there really were good and admirable Jews: but they'd all been dead for more than two thousand years.

None of which makes Melanchthon implicit in genocide. But it does make him implicit in something.

Sixteenth Century Studies at Cincinnati - II

Another day, another batch of papers. Two I'd flag up today, in addition to various others which were as good as I knew they'd be. Paula McQuade of De Paul University did a great piece on catechisms written by mothers for their children, using a wonderfully rich Northamptonshire manuscript that no-one has ever come across before, and painting a delightful picture of how tender and intimate this business could be.

But (in a day which has been dominated by literary stuff) the one which most struck me was Hannibal Hamlin's piece on how George Herbert's poetry drew on Robert Southwell's. That may not sound too exciting, but stay with me. He was talking about Herbert's 'Love (III)', the final poem in his sequence 'The Temple':

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew backLove bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back compare Song of Solomon 5:6. "I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had with drawen himself" (Authorized Version, 1611). "Bade" is past tense of "bid," and in Herbert's time was pronounced like "bad."

        Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slackslack hesitant. Compare Herbert's use of the word in his poem The Church-Porch: "Who keeps no guard upon himself, is slack, / And rots to nothing at the next great thaw." (Perirrhanterium 24, lines 139-140)

        From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,

         If I lacked any thing.If I lacked any thing. echoes a version of Psalm 23, which begins: "The Lorde is my shepehearde: therfore can I lack nothing" (Psalms in the Version of the Great Bible, 1539)

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:

         Love said, You shall be he.

I the unkindunkind undutiful., ungrateful? Ah my dearAh my dear Hopkins adopts this phrase in "The Windhover". As Norman H. MacKenzie notes, "Hopkins as an undergraduate was strongly attracted to George Herbert, an anglican divine and poet, and traces of that influence can be found throughout his writings".,

         I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

         Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marredmarredto mar: "to do fatal or destructive bodily harm" (OED, 4a) them: let my shame

         Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?

         My dear, then I will serveI will serve compare Luke 12:37. "Blessed are those servants, whom the Lord when he commeth, shall find watching: Verily, I say unto you, That he shall gird himself, and make them to sit downe to meat, and will come foorth and serve them." (Authorized Version, 1611) Compare also to the second stanza of Herbert's poem "Faith": "Hungry I was, and had no meat: / I did conceit a most delicious feast; / I had it straight, and did as truly eat, / As ever did a welcome guest.".

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: compare Luke 12:37. "Blessed are those servants, whom the Lord when he commeth, shall find watching: Verily, I say unto you, That he shall gird himself, and make them to sit downe to meat, and will come foorth and serve them." (Authorized Version, 1611) Compare also to the second stanza of Herbert's poem "Faith": "Hungry I was, and had no meat: / I did conceit a most delicious feast; / I had it straight, and did as truly eat, / As ever did a welcome guest."

         So I did sit and eat.

 

 

Which I knew and loved before. But what Hannibal proved, to my satisfaction, is that this poem contains conscious and deliberate echoes of Southwell's poem St Peter's Complaint, which was very well known in the period. Which left me thinking that Herbert wants to allow us to read his poem as being spoken by St Peter; and not by the despairing Peter who has just denied Christ, like in Southwell's poem, but by the Peter who cannot dare believe that the risen Christ is forgiving him and is asking him to sit and have breakfast on the beach. And now that you have that in your mind, can you read Herbert's poem the same way?

So I did sit and eat. compare Luke 12:37. "Blessed are those servants, whom the Lord when he commeth, shall find watching: Verily, I say unto you, That he shall gird himself, and make them to sit downe to meat, and will come foorth and serve them." (Authorized Version, 1611) Compare also to the second stanza of Herbert's poem "Faith": "Hungry I was, and had no meat: / I did conceit a most delicious feast; / I had it straight, and did as truly eat, / As ever did a welcome guest."

Sixteenth Century Studies at Cincinnati

A half-time report on this always amiable conference. In amongst seeing old friends and eating a lot of seafood, I have also made it to a few papers. Megan Hickerson and Margo Todd gave excellent papers on, respectively, how the fact that Henry VIII was fat has affected the way we've understood him, and on the genuine popularity of the comprehensive moral policing that sixteenth-century Perth enjoyed.

But the fun of these conferences is hearing people you've never heard of speaking on subjects you never thought of. I'd pick out two so far as especially good:

Yesterday, I heard Rosemary Lee, a doctoral student at the University of Virginia, speaking about the Carmelite missionaries in Persia in the early 1620s; and in particular about their housekeeper, a woman whom they nicknamed 'Teresa'. 'Persian Teresa' apparently converted to Catholicism or something which she understood to be Catholicism - and not because the missionaries tried to convert her, but of her own initiative, since they were clearly surprised. And then she took it on herself to become a wandering preacher, until the surprised friars realised what was going on and reined her in. But she was a preacher in an apparently traditional Shi'a Muslim mode; this combination of homegrown Catholicism and Persian Shi'ism seems to have been very much her own concoction. It's a great story and she presented it very engagingly: it should make a terrific article.

And today, I heard Bruno Feitler of the Universidade Federal de Sao Paulo in Brazil talking about the Inquisition in Goa, the Portuguese colony in India, in the late sixteenth century. I've always told students that the Inquisition only had jurisdiction over baptised Christians, but I now discover that's not exactly true. Even in Portugal, it occasionally claimed the right to try Jews who were pretending to have converted but had in fact never been baptised. In Goa, the Inquisition was initially felt to be a hindrance to missionary work (since baptism meant subjecting yourself to it). But then it discovered an ingenious workaround. It claimed the right to try non-Christians who were luring Christians into error; which meant, in practice, sentencing these people to death and then pardoning them on condition that they converted and were baptised. This trick was by 1580 producing so many converts that the Jesuits queried the practice - but the king of Portugal backed them up. By the early 17th century the Goan Inquisition was using this wholesale, even on indigenous peoples who hadn't threatened converts' religion at all. And it worked ... who says persecution doesn't pay?

Auckland Castle

I spent much of yesterday at Auckland Castle, as part of the advisory panel to the massive redevelopment planned there, which will eventually include big exhibitions on the history of the Church in the region, and also on the history of religion in Britain from the earliest days to the present. All very exciting, and some of the fun tech-y possibilities for the use of smartphone apps in the museum context which Dee Dyas from York's Centre for Christianity and Culture was showing us were really impressive.

But the star of the day was obviously the building itself. I'd been there before, chiefly to photograph this item for my forthcoming book:

 

It's a memorial painting for Bishop James Pilkington, the first Protestant bishop of Durham and arguably the most Puritan bishop ever in the Church of England; and it's also the most realistic contemporary image of a Protestant family at prayer which I know of.

 

But there's lots more there, naturally, and we got shown to all the nooks and crannies normally hidden - including whole sections desperately in need of some love, attention and money. Highlights included the memorial in the chapel to Bishop Richard Trevor (1752-71), known cruelly in his own time as 'The Beauty of Holiness' - and while the sculptor clearly tried to improve on the original, you can still see why:

 

Rather more specially, this lectern-box which, like so much else, dates from Bishop Cosin's time, in the 1660s. It's in the bishops' private chapel which isn't normally open to the public:

More of this kind of stuff will eventually come out into the light of day as the Castle is progressively opened up over the next five or more years. The hope is not only that it'll be a superb exhibition; but also that it'll bring an economic boost to Bishop Auckland, which has yet to be seriously touched by the economic regeneration that some other parts of the North-East have seen.

 

Harmonising mice

Everyone who has ever seen Babe already knew that this was true ...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19898947

Protestant transubstantiation

Busy week, so not much posting. Just time for a bonkers theological idea of the week. Apparently the Lutheran theologian Flacius Illyricus, at a debate in 1560, argued that the Fall was a kind of transubstantiation, in which the Aristotelian substance of humanity was totally altered from God’s image into Satan’s at the fall, despite preserving the outward image of God only damaged in the visible person. So while it might appear outwardly that humanity is capable of good as well as evil, this is an illusion: behind and beyond all verifiable evidence is a brute fact, namely that we are totally depraved.

            Or to put it another way: a certain kind of Protestant needs to believe in human corruption so badly that they will reconstruct the whole of reality, if necessary, to assert it.

'Famine'

Another sermon, this one from a couple of months back: but a few people have asked me for a text of what I said. It was a departure for me, doing one in this narrative style. And this one has nothing to do with the Reformation at all.


'The truth is that no-one knows how it started. There are the stories: some people talk about the bookshop in Leicestershire that found itself unable to get a shipment of Bibles, or about the church in London where the vicar became so tongue-tied during the prayers that the service had to be abandoned. But the nature of the episode which became known as the Famine was that it crept up on us. As a country, we only really noticed it when it had us firmly in its grip. There are those who would argue that, if we had noticed it sooner, it would never have come to the point it did.

            The Bibles were the most visible sign that something was wrong. For decades England had been awash with unwanted Bibles. They gathered dust in every second-hand bookshop, and lots of houses had one mouldering on a top shelf somewhere. But now it seemed that they had all crumbled to illegibility, or been turned to mush by leaks or floods. Bookshops couldn’t get hold of them. Churches found that their copies had been eaten by mice. When publishers tried to print new ones, they came off the presses as gibberish. When they tried to import them, they found that the shipping crates leaked, or that they arrived safely but turned out to be entirely in Korean, or – in one particularly ominous case – that every page was blank. People tried to download the text from the Internet, but the files were corrupted and broadband connections kept crashing. There was a high-profile attempt by a consortium of scholars to try to reassemble the Bible from the quotations that could be found in other books, but all that emerged was a disconnected string of nonsense. Some people started arguing that the Bible had never really existed at all. The very idea of a book which contained the Word of God was obviously a metaphor, and it was only the crass literalism of our own age which would imagine that such a thing had ever physically existed.

            The prayers weren’t so obvious. It started in those churches where the ministers prayed extempore; they found themselves increasingly unable to do it. Where they followed an order of service, it was easier, but soon enough those churches began to struggle too. And what they experienced in public was, it soon became clear, widely shared in private. People could still read the words off a page in front of them, of course, but the difficulty in concentrating on doing so became so intense that it was only by sheer brute force that people could hack their way through the words of a prayer. There was no hope of actually praying it. Churches began to be boarded up. One of them provided the iconic image of the whole affair: the church in Manchester where someone spray-painted across the boards ‘CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE HOLY SPIRIT’. Of course, by then no-one knew who or what the Holy Spirit was any more. But it was around that time that people stopped calling it the Famine and started calling it the Blockade.

            There was considerable interest in what it would mean for us as a nation. Some commentators argued that it would be a liberation, and we’d be free to celebrate our true nature; yet the people inexplicably failed to party in the streets as they were supposed to. Other columnists were lugubriously apocalyptic, and warned of a country on the verge of slipping into feral chaos. But the reality was different. Rather than moral anarchy, we were overtaken by a certain listlessness and withdrawal. People stopped speaking to each other. They spent more time indoors, alone. TV viewing figures crept up. You began to see people in the open simply sitting and gazing into the distance. Some gathered around the boarded-up churches: not doing anything, merely being there for a little while and then moving on. There was a drifting lassitude, which lulled and numbed us even as it tightened its grip.

            But if no-one knows how it started, everyone knows how it ended. The story bears retelling. A raw, cold winter’s evening in a village in the Northumberland hills. A young couple driving home: sitting in their car in silence, as had become the way. And they passed an elderly woman waiting at a bus stop. The two of them looked at one another: both knew that the last bus had gone. They stopped, reversed, offered her a lift. She accepted enthusiastically. Indeed, as soon as she was in the car, they noticed the vibrancy and sense of life about her; it was unfamiliar. She noticed them, too: the nothingness which filled the car. What was the matter, she asked?

            ‘Are you the only person in England who doesn’t know what’s been happening?’ they replied, and told her a little of what had been going on. It was evidently new to her, but she did not seem taken aback by it.

            ‘Can you be surprised?’ she asked. ‘That if we scorn God’s gifts and take them for granted for so many years, finally he should choose to take them away?’

            Then they reached their home village. Their passenger said she lived only a little further on and would be happy to walk. But they pressed her to come in and have something hot to eat first, and she agreed. And as they warmed up some soup and bread, they continued talking.

            ‘So’, they asked, ‘why this emptiness? It’s not as if we prayed before.’

            She fished in her handbag, pulled out a small, battered book, and found a page in it. ‘When he said he was the bread of life, do you think he was joking?’

            Both of her hosts stood still and stared. ‘Is that …,’ the wife asked, ‘… is that a Bible?’

            They served up the food in silence. Eventually, the husband asked, ‘So what can we do?’

            Their guest tapped the book again. ‘We can do as he said.’ And she picked up a bread roll: ‘We can break this, and eat it, in remembrance of him.’

            And their eyes were opened; and they never saw her again. But as it turned out, they did not need to.'