A Tough Roe to Hoe

I almost feel obliged to comment on the remarkable leak of what seems to be a draft of a majority opinion of the Supremes reversing Roe v. Wade, and the remarkable nature of that opinion.  It's not something I enjoy doing.  Abortion is something to be taken seriously, and given serious consideration.  It isn't clear to me that serious consideration is possible in our times.  In this post, my comment will be limited to what I think is remarkable about the opinion, rather than its impact or its conclusion.

It's unusual for long-standing precedent to be reversed by a court, but it happens, and is possible in certain limited circumstances.  So I don't think the fact this opinion would if adopted reverse Roe v. Wade is remarkable in itself.

What is remarkable to me is the tone of the opinion and the nature of the argument made, in certain respects.  Its tone is angry and contemptuous.  The decision reversed, and therefore those Justices who made the decision, are ridiculed.  It seems a kind of rant; its author pontificates.  He seems to have a rather enormous axe to grind, and he makes a display of grinding it.  There's a kind of exhibitionism involved in writing of this kind.  It's unusual for a Justice of the highest court to write in this fashion, and it's especially unusual for a majority opinion on a very serious subject to be infused with such self-righteousness.  Sometimes, the author of a dissent will indulge in sarcasm.  But majority opinions make law.  Bismark famously commented that its best not to see how laws and sausages are made.  It seems that may be true of case law as well as law adopted by legislatures.

It's also striking that the author of the opinion goes to such lengths to support the claim that abortion has never been considered a right, and instead has been considered a crime.  The law as it existed centuries ago, and the writings of commentators on that law who also existed centuries ago, are seldom pertinent to any lawyer or court and are generally disregarded in the actual operation of the law.  They're the concerns of historians of the law.  Nobody cites Blackstone or Hale in court proceedings.  One may as well cite Ulpian or the Code of Justinian, if not that of Hammurabi.

It's remarkable that the author of the opinion failed to understand that engaging in such a rhetorical exercise would merely make him appear silly, or pedantic, or a crank, or antiquated, or prejudiced.  It can't be denied that the laws of the past were in many cases cruel and the result of injustice, bigotry and superstition which at least ostensibly have no place in the modern world .  Why bother referring to them in reversing a decision on the grounds that the right it relies on doesn't appear in a document so clearly the work of men of the Enlightenment--men who claimed rights the existence of which was denied, or at least thought subordinate to that of a King?

It's possible that this first draft in the normal course would have been modified to be less of a rant and more like a reasoned decision.  My guess is it certainly will be now that it's been exposed.  If not, then I suspect we'll see concurring opinions that are somewhat less virulent and less dependent on antiquated law and thinkers.

 

An Escape Into Another Dark Time

I find that I'm overwhelmed by the urge to comment on things which have nothing to do with the increasingly grotesque politics of our Great Republic and the bizarre person soon to become its enormous, orange head.  So bear with me if you please as I turn from one kind of darkness to another.

I've heard since I was in college (that is a long time ago, alas) that what is called the Dark Age of Europe wasn't nearly as dark as commonly thought.  Unsurprisingly, I've heard this claim from scholars of the Dark Ages, both professors and students.  I happened to hear a lecture to that effect by a learned professor while driving home one night.  What the professor referred to, though, were events and persons which took place and lived from roughly the 11th century to the 14th centuries.  If those are unjustly considered the Dark Ages, I wonder what we call, or should call, when considering the history of Europe (the Latin West) the period from the end of the 5th century to the 11th century.  In other words, the period from the fall of the Western Roman Empire traditionally thought to take place around 475 C.E. to the bright, brilliant, not at all dark period commencing sometime in the 11th century, when, as the professor noted, Aristotle was rediscovered in Europe, Abelard and Heloise loved and thought, etc.

Do those 5 or 6 centuries constitute something different from what are called the Dark Ages according to learned academics of our time?  Are they, for example, the Really Dark Ages, or the Very Dark Ages?

I can understand that it's appropriate to note that some good and interesting, and indeed admirable, events took place from the loosely defined Fall of Rome in the West to the Renaissance.  There were significant achievements during the Medieval Period and significant people lived during those times.  We have a tendency to identify as significant persons--as worthy of note--the influential thinkers, rulers, artists who appear in history.  Events we tend to identify as significant are usually military battles and conquests, political revolutions, inventions, and laws.  Especially during what are delightfully referred to as the "High" Middle Ages, (usually considered the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries) it's easy enough to identify "significant" history.  What of that part of those Ages which wasn't High?

Identifying what and who were significant in that period isn't as easy, unless it's easy by virtue of the fact that there are few events and people typically considered significant to history during those times.  Again, I refer to Europe and specifically Europeans, not Byzantines or Muslims.  Augustine of course didn't live to see the traditional End of the Roman Empire.  The next significant philosophical figure would, I suppose, be Boethius.  Boethius had a wonderfully Roman name:  Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius.  He's sometimes called the Last of the Romans.

Boethius served as minister to Theodoric the Great, an Ostrogothic king, but one of several of what I think can fairly be called the quasi-Roman rulers in Europe who reigned after the Western Empire fell.  These kings and their kingdoms are justly considered Roman successor states, I believe.  They mimicked the Empire in various respects, even in the manner of their administration.  Boethius served until he was imprisoned by Theodoric and later bludgeoned to death by his minions.  While in prison he wrote his famous Consolation of Philosophy, and it's to be hoped he was consoled by it, particularly as he was beaten to death.

The Europeans seemed to have busied themselves primarily  by fighting off the infidels and fighting among themselves until the Frankish kings came along and, eventually, one Frank in particular, Charlemagne, became the (first) Holy Roman Emperor.  While he ruled, the Holy Roman Empire may not have been holy, but was in fact an empire and was in fact rather Roman.  The ghost of Rome certainly was regularly seen in those times and haunts us still today.

It was during Charlemagne's relatively benign and enlightened rule, and the fitful peace that resulted, that what is considered dark became less dark.  So we see such thinkers as Duns Scotus appearing, a greater appreciation of learning and writing (needed for administering a large territory).  We may owe to Charlemagne what there is of Latin Christian learning, knowledge and art during the less-than-high Middle Ages.

Naturally, Europe was impacted as well during the time of the less-than-high or darker Middle Ages by the incursions of the Byzantines while Justinian was Emperor of the East.  Justinian aspired to be Emperor of the West, and due to the ability of his generals Belisarius and Narses actually conquered portions of the old Western Empire, but only for a relatively short time.  The Arabs of course had taken North Africa and the Spanish peninsula, and held Spain until the Reconquista. 

Just what is "Dark" and how dark were the Middle Ages in Europe?  It seems there can be no question that something very bad happened after the Western Roman Empire fell, no matter what is said regarding those times.  Even what we today consider simple things, such as the provision of flowing water to people and the handling of their waste, disappeared.  Such things didn't reappear in cities like Paris until Napoleon's reign. 

It must have been a remarkably dirty world after the Roman baths stopped functioning. Roman moralists used to claim that the baths, which were frequented by many who relished soaking in the hot and cold water rather than merely washing themselves hurriedly, sapped the strength and weakened the sense of stern morality fostered by their ancestors. I think it's likely, though, that even the most censorious moralist would have been more appalled by people who either didn't bathe at all or did so only rarely. The effect on health and hygiene must have been profound. The poor have always been poor and miserable, but it's likely that they became more miserable during the Middle Ages, and less of them were educated and more died by hunger, disease and war.  Urban life was almost nonexistent for a time.

People no longer knew how to do certain things. The legions were gone, and the work they would do to build and maintain infrastructure when not making war was not done by anyone else. People began to borrow stone and marble from old buildings in order to construct anything new, not having the knowledge or skill--or perhaps even the opportunity--to do otherwise. Knowledge of the natural world wasn't encouraged, the world being less important than it was to those of the past.

It may be that the Renaissance led many to think of the Middle Ages as being Darker than they were in fact.  But it's difficult to think they were not darker times than what came before and what came after, in many important respects.  Why and how they were darker is an important question to be addressed.

The Magic Christians

Some of us remember the film The Magic Christian, a very silly bit of anti-capitalist, anti-greed satire (using that term broadly) which starred Peter Sellers, Ringo Starr, and a host of others in cameo appearances, including some of the members of what was to be Monty Python.  The title was the name of an ocean liner on which the protagonists eventually sailed.  I saw it while in high school,  and it appealed to the adolescent in me.

I don't mean to comment on the film here, but use the title to draw attention to those who in the third to fifth centuries CE (somewhat broadly speaking, again) managed to make of Christianity something which was magical, or which I think may be called magical.  "Magical" I mean to refer to something based on a mysterious, extraordinary supernatural power associated with certain equally mysterious rites.

Of course I'm aware of the fact that even the Gospels ascribe miracles to Jesus, and these may count as magic--though not, I think, magic of the remarkable kind to come.  There were several men and beings which the ancients felt were capable of working wonders; even early Christians felt the pagan gods to be demons with supernatural powers.  Also, it's clear that even shorn of the Gospels' occasional, very cursory, references to Jesus being the Son of God and worker of wonders, the belief in the existence of a supernatural, creator god--that of the Jews, in any case--is presumed and manifest in them.  So, Jesus' early followers, if in fact they wrote the gospels, which doesn't seem likely, may be called "magic Christians" to a certain  extent.

But there was nothing unusual in this given the times and the culture.  For example, John the Baptist reputedly did much the same things as Jesus, and though honored in Christianity is not God or his Son.  Something very unusual occurred in the case of early Christianity as it became the Christianity we know of now and throughout subsequent history (at least the Christianity recognized by most of the established churches).  What happened distinguishes Jesus from the run-of-the-mill saviors and magicians who roamed the Roman Empire in those times, and required magic of an unusual sort.

What took place was, I think, necessary in order to maintain that Jesus was God; the only God, in fact.  Not merely God after he was crucified, or before he took human form, but God even while he was human and was killed.  The nature of Jesus was of course a subject of fierce and even violent disputes in the history of early Christianity and even into the Middle Ages and beyond.  Some found it impossible to accept that God, the Supreme Being, could suffer and die on a cross.  So, they thought Jesus must have been human or something less than wholly divine while on Earth, at least.  And so we see controversy of the kind which involved whether Jesus as Son was of the same or similar substance as God the Father.

These and other disputes resulted in the heresies we hear so much of in Christianity.  There was of course the famous dispute between the followers of Arius and Anathasius.   But there was also Nestorianism, which was the belief that Jesus had two natures, one divine and one human;  Monophsyitism, which held that Jesus' divine nature wholly overwhelmed his human nature; Monothelism, which taught that Jesus had two natures, one divine and one human, but only one "will."  This is not even to get into the controversies which came about once the Holy Spirit was in the mix as God as well, and Trinitarianism arose.  A heresy which followed was called Monarchiansm, which held that God the Father predominated over the Son and the Holy Spirit in the Trinity.  As they say, the list of Christian heresies goes on and on, though certainly not all of them involved the true nature of Jesus.

The controversies were deemed so significant that emperors of the Christianized Roman Empire felt it necessary to become involved in an effort to resolve disputes through the use of Councils over which they presided or at least sponsored.  They probably first rose to a governmental concern because the disputes were physical in nature in some cases.  People were killed or injured; property destroyed.  But some emperors were concerned about doctrine as well.  Indeed, emperors favoring a particular kind of Christianity persecuted other Christians in the same manner as pagan emperors are claimed to have persecuted Christians before them, and the Christians persecuted by other Christians believed themselves to be martyrs.

Constantine is generally considered to have been a great unifier of Christian doctrine, but Justinian, a peculiarly dubious emperor, was even more avid in his efforts.  Councils condemned certain views, accepted others.  Excommunications were made and then rescinded.  This went on for centuries.  The Council of Nicea was probably less important in the history of Christianity than that of Chalcedon, held by the Emperor Marcian.

These Christological disputes had the result that the Latin Western Church became disassociated from the Greek Eastern Church and had other significant ramifications.

What is remarkable is that these great controversies have nothing at all to do with the preaching of Jesus; with what he said was right or wrong, what he said one should or should not do.  They are wholly amoral.  Christianity became a matter of definition, and the truth and goodness in Christianity came to be determined by what a person thought Jesus' nature to be and the manner in which he was to be worshiped.  All resulted because it was deemed that Jesus was or should be construed to be the one God.

These disputes, and efforts at their resolution as they appear in written records of the time, resemble philosophical and legal disputes, in that their focus is on abstract concepts and their application as rules to circumstances.  Their legal nature may be understood as resulting from the fact that Christianity became in every significant sense a government as well as a religion.  Their philosophical nature may be the result of the desire early Christians had to give Christianity a basis which would be recognized as similar to if not sanctioned by the philosophy of the time, which was essentially pagan and, I believe, still is pagan.  If Jesus is God, and there is only one God, what then? 

Because of the fact the disputes were similar to legal and philosophical disputes, the arguments raised by one side or the other are not clearly false or absurd.  There is a basis for them in the sense that relevant scripture may be referred to in their support or recognized authorities appealed to by disputants.

But ultimately the resolution of these disputes, to the extent they were resolved, entailed the imposition of certain mysteries, certain inexplicable doctrines.  In other words, Magic, but Magic of the highest kind.  The view that God is one substance but three persons is magical.  The view that Jesus is consubstantial with the Father is magical.  There is simply no other explanation for these beliefs.

It's interesting to consider what would have happened if Jesus was not considered God or divine in some manner, or perhaps a lesser God.  I suspect Christianity would be much less complex and far less dependent on mystery.  But Christians in charge were probably leery of making him a lesser God, as this would smack of polytheism.  And what would the death of one man matter?  Jesus' death and sacrifice would be insufficient to salvation if he was not at all times God.

We tend to forget what a mess Christianity was during its development.  Dispute is considered inconsistent with what is said to be clearly set forth by God.  Perhaps Christianity's search for a rational basis was unwise, and there is none clearly present.  It's no wonder some Christians came to believe that God could not be known except through revelation.  This conclusion may be less the result of mysticism as the realization that applying reason in the case of Jesus/God inevitably results in machinations of a particularly tortured kind.

"I Will Destroy the Wisdom of the Wise"

St. Paul quotes these words in a letter to "the Corinthians"; those Christians residing in Corinth.  It appears the Corinthians were being unduly quarrelsome, or at least too quarrelsome for Paul, who modestly described himself as "called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God."  But I wonder just what was going on, in addition to quarrels, as in this letter Paul indulges in something of a tirade against wisdom, something not normally the subject of anger or disdain.

The words used by Paul which make up the title of this post are borrowed from the cheerful works of the prophet Isaiah, and are attributed to God.  God, it seems, wants to destroy the wisdom of the wise.  It's unclear why he would.  Paul adds to this, stating that God made foolish the wisdom of the world, apparently because the wise failed to understand Jesus was God before Jesus was born and that failure continues as Paul writes.

According to Paul, the wise did not come to God through wisdom, and God choose instead to save those who believe through the "foolishness" of his message.  Greeks, says Paul, seek wisdom, and think the preaching of "Christ crucified" is foolishness.  But the foolishness of God, writes Paul, is greater than the wisdom of the wise.

It's possible I suppose that Paul was being ironic in his use of "foolishness" here, though the Christians of that time and for centuries later were (and are now) not notably ironic in their proselytizing of, or apologies for, Christianity.  They were generally in grim earnest.  So, it's at least possible that Paul thought God's message, and Christ crucified, as establishing the existence of the true God or as signs of it, were ostensibly foolish.  This is a remarkable claim for a believer to make, or at least for a thinker to make.  Wisdom is inadequate to bring us to God--it's foolishness that does the trick, or at least that which is to all appearances foolish.

Given this curious use of language on Paul's part, I'm given to suspect that his supposed encounters or debates with pagan philosophers may not have gone as well for him as we've heard.  Perhaps he was unable to rebut claims that Christian beliefs were foolish, and so was compelled to take the position that if they are in fact foolish, that's the way God wants it.  Being God, the fact that he choose foolish means to bring the truth to fools, rather than the wise, has the result that fools and foolishness are greater than the wise and wisdom.

Regardless, though, such language and such claims regarding the wisdom of the world and the wise, when taken to be the words of God or God's agents, doing his bidding, can have serious consequences.  I think they did have serious consequences indeed when the religion which adopted such claims came to dominate the Roman Empire, as it became part of the doctrine of the state as well as the prevailing religion that the wisdom of the world and of the wise was nothing, the "foolishness" of God everything.

Perhaps it began with the repression of paganism and persecution of pagans during the reign of the Christian emperor Theodosius I.  It's said that Justinian closed the last surviving pagan schools of philosophy some 200 years later.  Perhaps the "triumph" of Christianity wasn't entirely at fault, and that the view that the world is insignificant and truth to be found outside the world which we find in Plato prompted the Western world to turn away from life and the first efforts towards science we see among the ancient Greeks.

It's been maintained that what are called the Dark Ages weren't nearly as dark as they've been claimed to be, and I'm willing to believe that is the case.  But it seems beyond dispute that little in the way of new knowledge was acquired in Europe during those times, and that what passed as knowledge was primarily if not exclusively what was found in the Bible or in the works of the Church Fathers.  The standard of living fell far below that of the Roman Empire, even as to the great of the time.  And why not, the world in which we live being without value?   In a way, the Church if not God did indeed destroy the wisdom of the wise, if that wisdom related to how to live well and flourish in the world, and to the value of learning of the world and its wonders.

For a time, at least.  It's true that Europe gradually became aware of the wisdom of the ancient wise, and even valued it after a fashion.  The Church, which was at the time the only institution having any interest in books and writing, is to be thanked for the dissemination of the old knowledge it has so ruthlessly suppressed.  That began to take place, though, roughly 600 years after Justinian.  And the Church was grudging, even miserly, in its disclosure of what was lost.  It was another 200 years or so before the Renaissance was possible.

It's fun to speculate what would have happened had wisdom not been destroyed.  But we seem to live in a time when the pursuit of knowledge of the world is once more mistrusted and even under attack in some parts of the world.  Religion is once again involved in this, or at least religious fanaticism.  Let's hope historians of the future won't refer to a "New Dark Ages."