Meanwhile, Back in Middle-Earth...

  

Lovers are reunited, kingdoms are overthrown, and Sauron seeks means of crafting the One Ring to rule them all. And we finally find out who the dark wizard is...he is one of the mysterious blue wizards. Gandalf experiences an epiphany in the desert, a scene which appears to be borrowed from the Book of Exodus.Yes, I am enjoying Season 3 of Rings of Power. From The Wardrobe Door:

In the lead-up to this season, those behind the show have said viewers could start watching this season without having seen previous ones. This opening prologue and map seems designed to introduce new viewers and catch up returning ones.3

It has been five years since season 2 when Sauron destroyed the elf city Eregion and took the nine rings for men. In a voice-over, Galadriel tells us that Sauron has been marching across Middle-earth held back by only the elf rings, which the Dark Lord had no hand in forging.

The dwarves have rings from Sauron but have resisted using them at this point, but he has begun giving rings to men, who have succumbed to the power of the rings.

To this point, the kingdoms of Rhûn, the eastern desert land, and Númenor, the advanced island realm to the West, have not joined either side. (Read more.)

 

From The Conversation:

As much as The Rings of Power’s creators are aiming for a fresh start, the audience already has two seasons of the series on its mind – and in many cases, Tolkien, Jackson and decades of fandom.

These different yardsticks were apparent in reactions to season three’s trailer.

One commenter on Reddit acknowledged plot holes and lore changes while still valuing getting to spend time in Middle-earth.

Another said they would “watch characters in Middle-earth if they were going to a laundromat” as long as it was filmed in New Zealand or similar-looking locations.

Another commenter, a lifelong Tolkien reader, said the show is worst when it tries to emulate Jackson’s films. (Read more.)

Robert Aramayo plays Elrond 

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The Giant Problem of Tolkien’s Legendarium

 From Visions of Middle-Earth:

Giants actually occur in several of Tolkien’s works. Although we never learn a great deal about them, tracing Tolkien’s changing ideas about giants reveals a fascinating corner of his creative process and raises an intriguing question: if giants really exist in Middle-earth, what exactly are they?

Giants are among the most widespread creatures of traditional folklore and mythology. As John D. Rateliff notes in The History of the Hobbit, ‘giants have a long, long tradition in folklore of being extremely dangerous if not downright wicked.’ Tolkien encountered them in many of the traditions he knew well, from Classical mythology to the powerful jötnar of Jötunheim in the Old Norse sources.

So giants were hardly an out-of-place idea for a mythology-minded writer like Tolkien. No more than dragons, dwarves, great eagles, or walking trees. And Tolkien clearly found the idea appealing. Throughout the development of his legendarium, he repeatedly experimented with giants and different roles they might play.

In this essay, I want to follow that history and explore where giants appear across Tolkien’s writings. In a follow-up to this article, I will look at the major theories about their identity and ask which explanation best fits the evidence. (Read more.)

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The Medieval Mystical Concept of “Natur Naturans”

 

From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

In the 13th century, Latin translations of Aristotle flooded European universities. Aristotle wrote extensively about physis (nature) as an intrinsic, active principle of motion and change within the material world. The idea was, broadly, that the physical world was not inert or lifeless. Each natural thing possesses an internal principle governing its characteristic movement and development.

Going back to the simple little grazing rabbit or the bird tending its nest, according to Aristotle’s physis, natural things possess their own principles of movement and development. And you can see this principle at work. An acorn looks nothing like an oak tree, but it grows into an oak because it contains the principle of “oakness” and its nature is to grow into the fulfilment of that principle.

When Aristotle became the foundation of Christian philosophy, thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure had to find a way to understand this in a way that did not end in Pantheism. The obvious question had to have a coherent Christian answer: If nature itself is imbued with an active energetic force that creates, shapes and moves things, does that mean nature has its own independent power separate from God? If nature does all the work, does that mean God is relegated to being a passive bystander, perhaps something like what later thinkers would call the “watchmaker” deity who made everything like a machine that runs on its own, and then left?

The solution was obvious: God’s power of creation is combined with His will to sustain everything that exists in existence from moment to moment. And everything He created is endowed with an inherent nature and functions according to that nature. Everything has characteristic powers, activities or behaviours and ways of developing inherent to it. The rabbit grazes and burrows; the bird builds its nest and sings; the acorn develops into an oak because they were all created with those powers and instincts. (Read more.)

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The Making of Alfred the Great

From Historical Chronicles:

At the time of the Great Heathen Army's Invasion of England in AD 865, Alfred was a young, quite unassuming, prince (Atheling) of Wessex.

He was studious and interested in religious matters, and when he was just a boy, he undertook a pilgrimage to Rome and met with the Pope. Because Alfred had four older brothers and was therefore well down the royal pecking order, this may have been intended to prepare him for a life of the cloth.

However, any hopes of a peaceful monastic life were dashed in late 870 when the Viking menace turned its furious gaze to Wessex.

By this time, only Alfred and his older brother, King Aethelred, remained. The pair rose to the occasion and marched out to meet the Great Heathen Army at Reading, but here they were taught a brutal lesson, and both were rather lucky to escape with their lives.

Alfred’s first major bout with the Vikings ended in disaster. It was, in fact, very nearly his last. Yet, in what would become the defining pattern of his reign, Alfred refused to stay down. (Read more.)

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The Body Is Not a Prison: Franciscan Spirituality and Modern Neo-Catharism

 

From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

I was thinking about it all again today while looking at some of the Franciscan artworks from the 13th century. These are in a form that is thought by some art historians to have been popularised by the Church as an answer to the Catharist1 heresy, that was gaining ground in some parts of Italy at the time. Once you learn something about Catharism, you start to see similarities happening all around us, and you start to wonder what part of that Franciscan spirituality might be useful to us now.

It’s a popular pastime of revisionist modern historians to cast the Cathars and other medieval heretical movements as innocent, hobbitish hippies who just wanted to do their thing and be left alone by the wicked patriarchal oppressors in the Catholic Church. It can be eye-opening to learn what they were up to, the extreme consequences of Bad Ideas.

How could a good God have made a world containing suffering, decay and cruelty? The Cathars answered this ancient problem by reviving Dualism, separating God from creation and attributing the material world to an evil power. Some Cathar groups taught there were two eternal principles, two equal and opposed “gods”. Others said the evil creator of material reality was subordinate to the good, spiritual God. Either way, the main point is that material creation, including our bodies, are evil, stopping us having union with God.

This created the idea of a radical separation within man, between the material, bodily self and the spiritual self or soul. The spiritual element in the human person, they said, belonged to the higher, spiritual realm and salvation meant liberation from the captivity of material physicality. All sorts of things follow logically from this starting point. (Read more.)

 

My novel on the Cathars, HERE. How it was stolen and made into a film, HERE.

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UK Cathedral Could Be First to Shut in Church of England’s history - Opened in 1108

 From Express:

A UK cathedral dating back to 1108 is at risk of closure due to financial challenges. The cathedral's dean has warned it will run out of money next year and faces becoming the first to shut in the Church of England's 492-year history. He admitted that if "something major doesn't change", it will be forced to close due to a funding deficit required for urgent structural repairs. Southwell Minster, built during the reign of Henry I, serves as the cathedral church for the Anglican Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham. It is known for its Norman and Gothic architecture, as well as its world-renowned Leaves of Southwell, which are detailed 13th-century stone carvings located in its Chapter House. (Read more.)

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A Medieval Monk’s Herb Garden

 

From The Conversation:

For whatever the land you possess, whether it be where sand
And gravel lie barren and dead, or where fruits grow heavy
In rich moist ground; whether high on a steep hillside,
Easy ground in the plain or rough among sloping valleys -
Whereever it is, your land cannot fail to produce
Its native plants…

These words come the Hortulus: The Little Garden written by Wahlafrid Strabo (c. 808-849), who was a Benedictine monk from the monastery of Reichnau on an island in Lake Constance.

The 9th-century Hortulus is considered one of the most important European historical documents on gardening and plants, combining practical advice with its poetry. It continues to inspire modern gardeners in planting and design. The writings offer a tour of the monastery garden and the qualities of its plants. Twenty-nine plants are named, from Indian pepper to grapes, nettle, pennyroyal and peach. For the most part these are medicinal, though Wahlafrid includes some culinary observations, and a final detail about the rose as a source of soothing oil and symbol of the Virgin Mary.

The descriptions of the fresh and delightful taste of melon and gourds (bottle gourd or calabash) sit alongside longer discussion of the use and preparation of herbs and vegetables for health.

As a flavour of the way in which these observations were made, take the plant Southernwood (Aretemisia Abrotanum), not commonly known these days but common enough in the medieval period. Strabo notes that: “It has power against fevers, banishes stitch, and if your limbs ache with the elusive and mysterious pain of gout, it will bring relief.” (Read more.)

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Who Killed the Fairies?

 From Simon's British Mythology:

In the last five hundred years there have been periods of enthusiasm for fairies among writers and, more usually, generations of indifference and disdain (the ‘deserts’ of the title). Looking back at the years since the Reformation, a juicy half millennium of British history, I can identify three periods when fairies were important in national British culture. The first might be called ‘Elizabethan plus’ and stretches from about 1570 to the English Civil War: in this period playwrights and poets could not shut up about fairies. Indeed, no twee rhyme was complete/ without a fairy feat (see what I did there?) The second stretches through most of the nineteenth century. British folklore collectors tried their best, at this time, to scribble down everything they could about the ‘hill folk’ and their deeds. This peaked perhaps in the 1880s or 1890s. By the Great War it was most certainly over. Then the third period of enthusiasm started about thirty years ago… I am writing in the middle of it. It too, of course, will end.

Fairylore did not alter very much in the first four hundred years. Compare Elizabethan fairylore (and we have two extraordinary books) with nineteenth-century fairylore (where we don’t have any great books).1 If you do so you will see that fairylore remained essentially the same out in the British countryside. Fairies had not vanished there. They were part of the old order: the grim grind of surviving in a landscape which dated back to the Neolithic. The fairy enthusiasms and the periods of disdain (which turned on and off like a faulty bulb) were the inconsequential fashion choices of a relatively small literate class. The Elizabethan and Caroline scribblers particularly seem to have had no influence on rural fairylore. As a historian I find this counter-intuitive. I expect things to mutate: I probably also have the prejudice deep inside me that intellectual elite matter outside intellectual elites. But what has impressed me in a decade and a half in supernatural studies is that rural folklore is extraordinarily conservative and extraordinarily resilient. The reason that these periods of fashion matter is that when the light bulb comes on we see the fairies in our sources. (Read more.)

 

The Isles of the Blessed. From The Library of Lewis and Tolkien:

One of the most stirring elements of Tolkien’s mythology glimpsed in The Lord of the Rings is the recurring allusions to a distant and enchanted island — an island of the elves — that lies far out in the Western seas. The tantalizing knowledge of this mysterious realm frames the narrative itself: we hear of this remote region early on, in the second chapter of the book, when the narrator mentions (almost in passing) that “past the old towers beyond the western borders of the Shire” lie “the Grey Havens, from which at times elven-ships set sail, never to return.” And at (nearly) the end of the book, Frodo, wounded, bereaved, and restless, journeys there to be healed, and with Frodo we glimpse it at last, the “white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.”

In between, allusions to the lands across the western sea recur all throughout the book. The elves hold it in memory, they sing of it, here and there they speak of going back one day; and the shadow of what the elves’ return to this land — their eventual departure from Middle-earth — forebodes hangs over the whole narrative: we know that something irreplaceably good and beautiful will have gone out of the world.

Meanwhile, the world of The Chronicles of Narnia also features a mysterious and enchanted land that lies far, far out beyond the sea, that lies indeed at the world’s very end: “Aslan’s country,” the homeland of the Great Lion himself. Our first indication that Aslan comes to Narnia — like Tolkien’s Elves to Middle-earth — from beyond the sea comes from one of Aslan’s epithets when we first meet him in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: he is “the son of the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea.”

And as with the end of The Lord of the Rings, in the final chapter of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, we catch a glimpse of Aslan’s country: a vast mountain range lying beyond the world, “warm and green and full of forests and waterfalls however high you looked.” (But in Lewis’ world the enchanted land beyond the waves lies not in the West, but in the East, the direction of the sunrise.)

It is striking that both Narnia and Middle-earth contain stories of remote and enchanted lands situated across the sea, lands of great beauty and goodness that lie across the waves and beyond the mortal world. This image — and the ache of longing evoked by it — was clearly one that both authors felt deeply. (A shared sensibility that they no doubt discussed with one another as well.) Where does the image of such a land come from, and why did both men respond so powerfully to it? (Read more.)

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The Beauty That Makes Men Build

 

From To the Ends of the Earth:

Only much later did I realize that what captivated me wasn’t simply feminine beauty. It was feminine beauty illuminated by virtue. And that realization eventually led me to a lovesick Florentine poet named Dante Alighieri, a young woman named Beatrice, and perhaps the greatest lesson ever written about why beauty has the extraordinary power to awaken the human heart.

Dante and I actually have a lot in common.

We’re both hopeless romantics.

The only difference is that he was a fourteenth-century Italian poet who gave the world one of the greatest works of literature ever written, and I’m a project coordinator from Georgia writing about my celebrity crushes on Substack. So he’s got me there.

If you’ve never read Dante, you’ve probably at least heard the name. Most people know him because of The Divine Comedy—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. They think it’s a story about Hell.

It isn’t.

It’s a story about love.

Or maybe more accurately, it’s a story about where love ultimately leads.

Long before Dante wrote about descending into Hell or climbing the mountain of Purgatory, there was a woman named Beatrice. According to tradition, Dante first saw her when they were both about nine years old. He encountered her only a handful of times throughout his life. They never courted. They never married. There was no grand romance worthy of Hollywood. If you pitched their story to a movie producer today, they’d probably reject it for “not enough chemistry.”

And yet, she became the great love of his life.

Not because she belonged to him, but because she changed him.

In La Vita Nuova (The New Life), Dante describes seeing Beatrice for the first time with words that almost sound excessive—until you’ve encountered someone who changes your life simply by existing. He writes, “At that instant, I say truly that the spirit of life, which dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that even the least pulses of my body shook.” (Read more.)

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Pugin’s Illustrations of Newman’s Lives of the English Saints

 From NINS:

Two major pieces of literature on Augustus Welby Pugin (1812–1852), the renowned Gothic Revivalist and Catholic convert who designed Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, six cathedrals, and more, state, in summary fashion, that Pugin illustrated St John Henry Newman’s Live of the English Saints.[1] The late Professor Margaret Belcher, however, provided a great deal of detail on this subject in the second volume of her The Collected Letters of A.W.N. Pugin, published in 2003.[2] This essay republishes, for the first time since 1914, all eleven of Pugin’s illustrations[3] and does so for the first time ever in a single document.[4]

The period in question is mid 1842 through the end of 1844.[5] During this time, Pugin was, among other things, doing his typical traveling (Scotland, Ireland, and the Continent),[6] worked on his home in Ramsgate,[7] and on several churches, including three cathedrals.[8] He also published An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England (1843) and Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume (1844).[9] For his part during this time, Newman (1801–1890) was in the throes of converting to Catholicism and had relocated from Oxford to Littlemore, a few miles away, in February 1842.[10] Among other things, he was busy drafting An Essay on The Development of Christine Doctrine (1845).

With respect to Newman’s Lives of the English Saints, the first thing to notice is that any and all illustrations were by Pugin, no one else, and they were not attributed to anyone at the time of original publication. Second, Newman himself may not have written any of the Lives.[11] He edited the first two numbers: St Stephen Harding and St Richard.[12] The introduction to the 1900 edition, the first comprehensive edition, stated that the work is described as Newman’s because he initiated the effort.[13]

Here is how the work came about: Newman’s thoughts on the subject started at least as early as 4 April 1841, when he wrote to his friend, J.W. Bowden, about English saints, the “National Church,” and the desirability of someone writing a biography of St Anselm (1033/34–1109).[14] In the summer of 1842, Newman had a conversation with publisher James Toovey about “publishing the Lives of the [English] Saints … thinking it would be useful, as employing the minds of persons who were in danger of running wild, and bringing them from doctrine to history, from speculation to fact; again, as giving them an interest in the English soil and English church, and keeping them from seeking sympathy in Rome as she is”.[15] On 3 April 1843, almost precisely two years since Newman had first written Bowden on the subject, he wrote Bowden again, stating that he intended the work “to be historical and devotional, but not controversial.”[16]

As of 18 May 1843, “Many men are setting to work [researching and writing biographies].”[17] There were 30 such men. A few months later, in early fall of 1843, Newman published a prospectus describing the anticipated Lives.[18] He envisioned a monthly publication written by various authors, each writing independently of the others.[19] He identified 300 saints![20]

At some point in 1843, Newman asked J. R. Bloxam, previously a curate to Newman, to find out from Pugin what he wanted to do about illustrations for Saints Stephen and Richard.[21] Pugin initially declined the work.[22]

In late 1843, Anglican Father and Oxford Professor E. B. Pusey saw some pre-publication proofs of the first Life, that of St Stephen Harding, by J. D. Dalgairns who lived in community with Newman at Littlemore. Pusey’s objections to these proofs caused Newman great anxiety. Newman had wanted the Lives to present facts with total detachment but realized that “miracles, or monkery [monasticism], or popery”[23] would unavoidably seep in. Newman consulted James Hope, a young barrister and William Gladstone, then a Member of Parliament (and future Prime Minister), both of whom shared Pusey’s concerns.[24]

By December, Newman decided to withdraw from the project but desired that individual biographies, many of them in process, would be published one at a time and that enough of them would eventually constitute a series.[25] As soon as the first, on St Stephen, came into print, it was clear that the project of publishing lives of English saints was incompatible with Anglicanism.[26] After the second biography (of St Richard[27]) was published, Newman gave public notice in January 1844 that he was withdrawing as editor.[28] He declared that only those biographies completed or nearly completed would be subsequently published.[29]

There was a flurry of correspondence—28 letters identified and summarized by Belcher—between Pugin, Newman, Toovey, and the new editor Frederick Oakeley (then minister at Margaret Chapel, the predecessor of All Saints, Margaret Street, and the author of the draft life of St Augustine of Canterbury) from the last half of January through November 1844, some of which may have crossed in the mail. The subjects included employing Pugin to illustrate individual lives as well as the design of a “Wrapper,” or frontispiece, that is, a title-page illustration that would be used for every number in the series, Pugin’s fees, the colors of the illustrations, the status of the work of the engraver, Orlando Jewitt, and comments on Pugin’s illustrations. For example, Toovey wrote Newman on February 9 that Pugin had supplied a “beautiful” design for St Augustine.[30] (Read more.)

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The Knightly Virtues

 From Return to Order:

The Code of Chivalry cannot be assimilated to the Decalogue in the Old Testament consecrated by the New Law, popularized by the Church, a truly divine and universal covenant for all centuries, and adapted to all nations. The rules for the use of knights are necessarily of a more restricted and of a more special character than the sacred Commandments. We will give a striking example. “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” says the sacred text. “Thou shalt keep thy word,” adds the commentator of the Middle Ages. The difference is easily perceived.

It is just the same as regards the precepts and evangelical counsel, and it is not worthwhile to pause and find them word for word in the decalogue of chivalry. It is certain (and here again we wish to take a decisive illustration) that chastity is more than once advised in our old poems to Christian soldiers. Elias of Saint-Gilles expressly enjoined this virtue on his son, and the author of the Ordene de Chevalerie, of that almost mystic work, is as stern and rigorous on the subject as a preacher, and advises the knights to keep themselves pure. This is as it should be, and we have nothing but admiration for those who repulsed energetically any temptations, whether from Saracens or Christians. (Read more.)

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Dragons and Other Monsters

 
From Smithsonian:

The dragon resting on its golden hoard. The gallant knight charging to rescue the maiden from the scaly beast. These are images long associated with the European Middle Ages, yet most (all) medieval people went their whole lives without meeting even a single winged, fire-breathing behemoth. Dragons and other monsters, nights dark and full of terror, lurked largely in the domain of stories—tales, filtered through the intervening centuries and our own interests, that remain with us today.

As Halloween approaches, we’re naturally thinking about scary stories. Though horror today is most often about entertainment—the thrill of the jump scare or the suspense of the thriller—it hasn’t always been that way. In the European Middle Ages, monster stories served as religious teaching tools, offering examples of what not to do, manifestations of the threats posed by the supernatural and the diabolical, and metaphors for the evil humans do to one another. (Read more.)

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A True Arthurian Legend

 From The Habsburg Way:

You notice that so far I haven’t even spoken of the plot of GALAHAD AND THE HOLY GRAIL. It’s because it is barely necessary as the title tells it all - you get to know Galahad and his background, then Camelot calls, and the the quest for the Grail begins. You follow him and several of the knights of the Round Table as they face challenges and move closer to the longed-for goal.

So far, so Arthurian.

But what Guite does unashamedly is to imbue his book with deep, earnest, traditional Christian Faith. Before I found out that he is an Anglican pastor I was convinced he was a Traditional Catholic - you’ll get there, Malcolm ;) He explores the whole depths of Christian connotations of the Grail legend, Christian Chivalry, prayer and the Sacrifice of the Mass. It actually (gasp) encourages you to pray in temptations and set your hope in Christ! Figure that! (Read more.)

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Becoming a Knight in Burgundy

 From The Medieval Scholar:

Knighthood and nobility must nevertheless be distinguished. A nobleman’s son inherited family relationships and might inherit property; he did not simply inherit his father’s personal accolade. Late medieval records could distinguish nobles who were knights from nobles who remained esquires. The candidate needed promotion if he wished to cross that particular boundary.[1,5]

The household offered a setting in which inherited standing could become demonstrated usefulness. It brought young men into contact with experienced adults, obligations, and patterns of conduct. Historian Arie van Steensel describes noble education in the Burgundian Low Countries as substantially practical, with young nobles spending time at different courts. He also stresses regional variation: the dukes did not make noble culture uniform throughout their territories.

That helps explain why a family connection mattered without treating birth as the whole story. An introduction could secure an opportunity to serve. It could not, by itself, show whether the young man could make himself useful, handle responsibility, or sustain a reputation among those whose opinion mattered. (Read more.)

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Justice

 I certainly won't be watching. But the popes held public executions for hundreds of years as did most Catholic monarchs, including canonized saints. It was perceived as a matter of safety for innocent people, and thus the duty of the ruler. It would not have occurred to anyone that it was a bad thing to execute a murderous criminal in the town square/marketplace. Only if the person was clearly innocent, like St. Joan of Arc, did people object. The Soviets were big on private executions. People would just disappear. Their loved ones never knew what became of them. Also, private executions can lead to doubt whether the person really died. Interesting take here from a few years ago: 

The Grand Duchy of Tuscany had become the first sovereign state to ban the death penalty in 1786, 10 years before Bugatti took up his ax. It did so under the influence of Italian essayist Cesare Beccaria, whose 1764 anti-death penalty tract “On Crimes and Punishments” is considered a classic.

So strong had Italian aversion to capital punishment become that when an anarchist named Angelo Bresci assassinated King Umberto I in 1900, Italian courts sentenced him to life in prison. It was the first time a man had killed a European king (without toppling his regime) and not been executed.

Yet the Catholic church was never part of this development. The guillotine was busy up to the very last minute of the pope-king’s regime. Its final use came on July 9, 1870, just two months before Italian revolutionaries captured Rome.

What explains this stubbornness? In part, that Catholic standby -- tradition. Christian writers since the fourth century had defended capital punishment.

St. Augustine did so in The City of God. “Since the agent of authority is but a sword in the hand [of God], it is in no way contrary to the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ for the representative of the state’s authority to put criminals to death,” he wrote.

Augustine saw the death penalty as a form of charity. “Inflicting capital punishment … protects those who are undergoing it from the harm they may suffer … through increased sinning, which might continue if their life went on.”

Aquinas followed Augustine in the 13th century in Summa Contra Gentiles. “The civil rulers execute, justly and sinlessly, pestiferous men in order to protect the state,” he wrote.

The Cathechism of the Council of Trent, issued in 1566, solidly endorsed capital punishment as an act of “paramount obedience” to the fifth commandment against murder.

Nor was this tradition confined to the Middle Ages. As late as Sept. 14, 1952, Pope Pius XII echoed its logic. “It is reserved to the public power to deprive the condemned of the benefit of life, in expiation of his fault, when already he has dispossessed himself of the right to live,” he said.

The leading abolitionists of the 18th and 19th centuries were Enlightenment-inspired critics of revealed religion. Popes defended their right to send people to death because to do otherwise seemed tantamount to abandoning belief in eternal life.

Catholic scholar James Megivern summed up the tradition this way: “If tempted to waver, one needed only to consult the bedrock authorities from Aquinas to Suarez. Questioning it could seem an act of arrogant temerity. If one did not believe in the death penalty, what other parts of the Christian faith might one also be daring or arrogant enough to doubt or deny?”

All of which makes the shift in thinking under John Paul II astonishing.

In the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, John Paul wrote that the only time executions can be justified is when they are required “to defend society,” and that “as a result of steady improvements … in the penal system such cases are very rare if not practically nonexistent.”

When the new Catechism of the Catholic Church appeared, it did not ban capital punishment, but expressed a strong preference for “bloodless means.” Such strategies, it said, “better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.” (Read more.)

 

From The Enterprise:

Think about what we already accept. The Sixth Amendment guarantees the accused a public trial. In Richmond Newspapers v. Virginia (1980), Chief Justice Warren Burger traced the open courtroom from the English assizes through the colonial courthouse and concluded that “a presumption of openness inheres in the very nature of a criminal trial.” Burger’s reason had nothing to do with whether spectators enjoy trials. A judge who knows he is being watched is less likely to cut corners, a prosecutor under observation is more careful with the truth, and a public that can see justice done is more likely to believe it was done. Every one of those reasons applies with greater force to the moment when the state actually kills a man. The trial decides whether the government may take a life. The execution is the taking. We have arranged things so that the deliberation is open and the act is hidden, which is exactly backward.

For most of American history nobody would have found that arrangement natural. Colonial hangings took place in town squares and courthouse yards, usually with a sermon. Pennsylvania and New York began moving executions inside prison walls in the 1830s, and the other states followed over the next 70 years, with Virginia still hanging men publicly in Richmond until 1907. Britain made the same move in 1868 with the Capital Punishment Amendment Act. What strikes you about the 1866 parliamentary debate that preceded it is that almost nobody in the chamber wanted to abolish hanging. The question was whether the public should see it. Defenders of the old practice argued that publicity was the only guarantee the sentence was carried out, and that it was carried out the same way against a lord as against a laborer. Opponents answered that the crowds at Newgate treated the morning as a holiday. Both sides were right; the opponents won, and the rule they left behind, that the state should inform the public of executions without letting it watch, has governed Anglo-American practice ever since.

The American endpoint came on August 14, 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky, when something like 20,000 people turned out to see Rainey Bethea hanged. Kentucky permitted public hanging for rape but required murderers to die inside the penitentiary, so prosecutors charged Bethea with rape alone even though he had confessed to killing his victim. The crowd behaved like the Newgate crowd, with vendors and picnics, and the national press was appalled. Kentucky abolished public hanging in 1938. Since then an American execution has been witnessed by a few dozen designated people, officials, a handful of reporters, relatives of the victim, a representative of the condemned, while the rest of the country reads a wire story the next morning. (Read more.)

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The Code of Chivalry

This picture is a romanticized image of a young squire making his prayer vigil before the Blessed Sacrament, as was the custom before being knighted. There was no set code of chivalry for the medieval period; it changed according to region and century. However, here are some codes which were attributed to the Emperor Charlemagne:

To fear God and maintain His Church.
To serve the liege lord in valor and faith.
To protect the weak and defenseless.
To give succor to widows and orphans.
To refrain from the wanton giving of offense.
To live by honor and for glory.
To despise pecuniary reward.
To fight for the welfare of all.
To obey those placed in authority.
To guard the honor of fellow knights.
To eschew unfairness, meanness and deceit.
To keep faith.
At all times to speak the truth.
To persevere to the end in any enterprise begun.
To respect the honor of women.
Never to refuse a challenge from an equal.
Never to turn the back upon a foe.

And here is Charlemagne's Exhortation:

Love God Almighty with all your heart and all your powers.
Love your neighbor as yourself.
Give alms to the poor as ye are able.
Entertain strangers.
Visit the sick.
Be merciful to prisoners.
Do ill to no man, nor consent unto such as do, for the receiver is as bad as the thief.
Forgive as ye hope to be forgiven.
Redeem the captive.
Help the oppressed.
Defend the cause of the widow and orphan.
Render righteous judgment.
Do not consent to any wrong.
Persevere not in wrath.
Shun excess in eating and drinking.
Be humble and kind.
Serve your liege lord faithfully.
Do not steal.
Do not perjure yourself, nor let others do so.
Envy, hatred and violence separate men from the Kingdom of God.
Defend the Church and promote her cause.


Did all knights follow such codes? Certainly not, but many did, such as St Louis IX, St Ferdinand of Castile, and Saint Nuno. It was really meant to keep military men from indulging overmuch in pillage and rapine, by encouraging the protection of ladies, the poor, and monastic houses. Some of it must have worked, since both the rich and poor traveled a great deal in the Middle Ages, going to various pilgrimage sites throughout Europe, and even to Jerusalem. The Knights Hospitaller had the duty of caring for sick pilgrims and guarding pilgrims on their way. Were all knights saints? No, there were corrupt people back then just as there are now. But that does not mean the system was all bad. Saints such as Teresa of Avila and Ignatius of Loyola were inspired by the codes of chivalric conduct and tried to apply the ideals to the religious orders which they founded. This is especially evident in St. Teresa's spiritual masterpiece The Interior Castle.

With the rise of industrialization and the fading of the old aristocracy, the Victorians were enthralled with the old Arthurian legends and the days when Knighthood was in flower. Did they over-romanticize? Yes, probably. But many young people were inspired with ideals, which is one of the purposes of great art and literature.

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Otto Rahn and the Cathars

The Cathars were anti-Semitic, just like the Nazis., which is why the Nazis were fascinated with them. From War History Online:

 Born in Germany in 1904, Rahn became obsessed with European myths and legends at an early age. He was particularly fascinated with medieval German stories about the Grail, such as Parzival (a romantic poem about a knight), Lohengrin (a story about Parzival’s son), and The Song of the Nibelungs (about a dragon slayer).

As a university student, he also became fascinated with Catharism – a Christian branch in France that was wiped out by the Catholic Church in the 13^th century. He, therefore, visited France to look for clues about the Cathars and the Holy Grail.

Rahn concluded that German Christian traditions preserved many elements from its pre-Christian pagan past. He also believed that the Holy Grail was a real object that the Cathars had once held and that it remained hidden near Château de Montségur where the Cathars made their last stand.

In 1933, he published his theories in the Crusade Towards the Grail, which was well-received in Germany. It also earned him a dangerous fan, because 1933 was also the year that the Nazis took over. That fan was Heinrich Himmler, suddenly one of the most powerful men in Germany and the one whom Hitler tasked with exterminating the Jews and other minorities. Himmler, like many high-ranking Nazi officials, was also obsessed with Germanic myths and legends. To justify their ideals of German racial superiority, the Nazis looked to the country’s pre-Christian era. They wanted to reinvent their history and make it look greater than conventional history would have it. (Read more.)

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Catharism, Calvary Chapel, and Catholicism

2 Cathari perfecti give the consolamentum to a dying man while fending off 2 friars

 From Nicholas Gulda:

To begin, the terms Cathar and Albigensian are synonymous.  Generally speaking, historians have understood the Cathars to be more or less what Tim referred to them as; “gnostic heretics”.  [3]  Similarly, in his Manual for Inquisitors Bernard Gui (d. A.D. 1331) referred to them as “Manichean heretics”, before giving a brief synopsis of their beliefs.[4]  The heresy itself is often associated with the Albigensian Crusade.  By the thirteenth century the targets of the maturing crusading movement had expanded to include heretics, pagans, and even political opponents of the papacy.  The targets of this particular crusade were the heretics and their Catholic protectors.

 The Cathars/Albigenses of the Languedoc region in the South of France ultimately drew the ire of the papacy.  They had entrenched themselves within the nobility there, facilitated by the fact that it was largely independent of the Capetian monarch to the North.  Initially, the Church’s response of preaching, and public debating seemed to make little headway in rolling back the heresy, and the conventional wisdom was that force was needed.  After the papal legate to the region was assassinated,– apparently on the orders of Count Raymond VI of Toulouse (a protector of heretics)­, Pope Innocent III issued the indulgence for what became known as the Albigensian Crusade (ca. A.D. 1209-1229).

 Some omissions aside for brevity’s sake, this is more or less how the origins of the Albigensian Crusade is presented in standard survey works on the subject of the Crusades, such as the late Jonathan Riley-Smith’s The Crusades: A History (2005), or Thomas Madden’s The Concise History of the Crusades.  Both authors are well known Crusade historians, and both are/were university professors.  Both were recommended reading on a syllabus in a colloquium on the Crusades I took at a secular university.  Both present Catharism as a non-Christian, dualistic religion.[5]  Both happen to be Catholics.

 Additionally, both scholars above have influenced the historiography of the Crusades, are peer reviewed, have reputations to uphold, and are top notch.  Madden also was a contributor to the Encyclopedia Brittanica’s entry on the Albigensian Crusade (hardly a pro-Catholic source).  Nevertheless, since the very notion that Catharism was a non-Christian dualistic religion has been called “a Catholic lie”, we will look elsewhere for a basic understanding of this medieval heresy.

 “Catharism was the greatest heretical challenge faced by the Catholic Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries”.[6]  Thus reads the first line of Malcolm Barber’s work, The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages.  He notes that the common view is that it was transplanted from the East in the form of Bogomilism, though some like R. I. Moore believe that it was a home grown dualism.[7]  That it was a form of dualism is a given throughout the first chapter on the topic of the origins/ pedigree of Catharism.[8]

 Like Madden and Riley-Smith, Barber affirms that the Cathars [aka Albigenses] denied the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, and that they had a rite known as consolamentum.  After receiving this rite, the mere “believer” became one of the initiated (perfecti), and it was often delayed until just before death.[9]  Like his discussion on the pedigree of Catharism in the first chapter, he includes a robust discussion of Cathar beliefs and practices in the third chapter.  The evidence discussed there contradicts any notion of the Cathars/Albigenses being akin to modern day Evangelicals, as Yardley’s position seems to imply.

 Though I don’t suspect that Mark Pegg would endorse Baptist successionism, he is nevertheless a historian who might possibly be coopted by its proponents.  One major argument in his book A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom is that “a very distinct Christian culture…was accused of being heretical by the Catholic Church”.[10]  He called for a revision of Christian history, arguing that “The Albigensian Crusade…was not a martial pilgrimage against a discrete religion with an organized heretical ‘Church’”.[11]

A survey of three reviews published about Pegg’s book shows that they were overwhelmingly critical regarding this particular aspect of it.  One reviewer said that it was against “academic consensus”, and that the evidence presented failed to convince with respect to the historical revision.[12]  While too mentioning that the scholarship is stacked against Pegg, another reviewer was also critical of his “dismissal of so many primary sources that support a Cathar church because he constantly suspects orthodox intent”.[13]  Of the three reviews, it was the one in the Catholic academic journal which was arguably most sympathetic on the topic of Catharism, but even there the reviewer acknowledges that Pegg is contradicting notable scholars on this topic.[14]

 For Barber, Cathar sources take a primacy when reconstructing Catharism, but “even orthodox [i.e. Catholic] attacks on Cathar belief are important since they were particularly concerned to define it accurately in order to give weight to their refutations”.[15]  He posits a “moderate dualism” extant in the West up until a Cathar Council at St Félix de Caraman  (ca. 1167) attended by envoys from the Bogomil Church in Constantinople changed the religious landscape to one dominated by “absolute dualism”.  The Charter of Niquinta which emanated from that Cathar gathering seems to be a main component of his argument.[16]

Ultimately, Barber says, it was this absolute dualism that really drew negative attention from the Catholic hierarchy.[17]  Though he argues that there were already established Cathar bishops in places like Albi [hence “Albigensian”] in the South of France, after the Council at St Félix de Caraman there would be a network of sixteen dioceses stretching from Tuolouse to Constantinople.[18]  It is generally said that the Inquisition was the tool that the Catholic Church (in concert with the secular authorities) utilized to ultimately vanquish the heresy.  Barber posits that both the moderate and absolute varieties of it may have survived up until the end of the fourteenth century.[19]

Whatever the case may be, Staples was certainly correct when he rejected the notion that, as he paraphrased Yardley), “the Albigensians are some sort of link in true Christians”.  As Barber indicates, almost since the inception of the Reformation, Protestant authors have been concerned with establishing some basis for historical continuity in response to the charges of novelty coming from their Catholic opponents.  Evidently, the first to attempt to link Protestantism with Catharism in a direct line was Jean-Paul Perrin, who in his work Histoire de Vaudois (1618), erroneously conflated the Cathars with the Waldenses [as the title indicates].

This Protestant affinity for the Cathars would sour a little over a century later.  All of this and more Barber observes in his historiography.[20]  Still, there are those in modern times who try to link Protestantism and Catharism.  The position argued by Pegg, and seemingly by others more recently, is very different from the apparent Baptist successionism (or something in that vein) argued by Yardley.  Moreover, the academic/ historiographical argument against the traditional understanding would seem to beg the question of how exactly to define “Christian”, and who has the authority to determine that? (Read more.)

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The Mathematics of Beauty, #1: Harmony, Monotony, and Cacophony

 From The Way of Beauty:

This is the first of six posts on the mathematics of beauty1: the traditional body of knowledge, running from the ancient Greeks through the Church Fathers and into the design of Western art and architecture, which held that beauty has a mathematical structure and that this structure can be studied, learned, and applied. It was a standard part of an artist’s and an architect’s formation for centuries. Today it is virtually unknown, and I think its recovery is essential if we are to build beautifully again.

As six posts devoted to a single subject is a lot to post on consecutive weeks, I will post them on alternate weeks.

In this first post, I want to establish the problem by looking at some buildings, and to say something about how this tradition relates to natural science, which is the other great tradition of describing the world by number. The posts that follow will set out where the tradition came from, what it consists of, how it is used in practice, why it was abandoned, and what its recovery would mean.

 If you examine almost any building constructed since the Second World War, the chances are that it will conform to one of two simple guiding principles of architectural design, and in both cases, the results are often bad. These two principles are even spacing and random spacing. The first generates visual monotony; the second generates visual cacophony. I have chosen these terms deliberately to set them against what traditional architecture always sought to achieve instead: harmony. (Read more.)

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The New Face of An Old Heresy

 This article sums up the point I make in my novel The Night's Dark Shade. From Postliberal Order:

In the early thirteenth century, a fanatical religious movement known to history as Catharism or Albigensianism spread throughout southern France.  Its fashionableness led self-interested local nobility to favor it.  But so bizarre and subversive of social order were its doctrines that political and ecclesiastical authorities beyond the region judged its suppression to be urgent.  At first the preferred methods were preaching and public disputation, with the new Dominican order taking the lead.  But these appeals to reason proved inadequate, and after a papal legate was murdered by a Cathar, a military solution seemed unavoidable.  Thus was launched the Albigensian Crusade – a venture notorious for excess and whose participants did not all have pure motives, but which did succeed in destroying the toxic movement.  

What was the content of Catharism?  It was grounded, first and foremost, in the conviction that the world is absolutely permeated by evil.  This is not the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, but something much darker.  For the Cathars, the natural order is not the creation of a benevolent deity from whose grace we have fallen.  Rather, they held that it always was in the first place the product of an evil power.  And they identified this evil power with the God of the Old Testament, the authority of which they rejected.  On the Cathar conception of salvation, the imperative is not to redeem the natural order but to be altogether liberated from it, and thereby to be “Pure Ones” (the literal meaning of Cathari).  

Those closest to achieving this were known as the Perfect, who took on the full weight of Catharist moral discipline.  Its chief component was renunciation of marriage and children, which were regarded as wicked insofar as they perpetuated the evil natural order of things.  Meat and dairy products were also eschewed, given their connection to procreation. Private property was rejected.  Capital punishment and war were condemned as intrinsically immoral.  Yet suicide was not only permitted but commended for those judged ready for it.  Infanticide was sometimes practiced.  And as the murder of the papal legate illustrates, the Cathars would sometimes resort to violence in order to protect the movement itself.

Most adherents of the Cathar movement (the “Believers” rather than the Perfect) were not expected immediately to adopt its austere ethic in its entirety, though.  Hence, while complete abstinence from sex was considered the ideal, sexual indulgence was tolerated among Believers as long as it did not lead to procreation.  Indeed, sexual practices of the kind that carried no risk of pregnancy were judged permissible, and extreme debauchery was frequently a part of Cathar life.  Whereas the Church favored sex when it was procreative, the Cathars favored it only when it was not procreative.

Since the God of the Old Testament was identified with the devil, biblical heroes like Abraham and Moses were dismissed as diabolical agents, and divine acts of judgment like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah were condemned as murderous.  While the Cathars regarded themselves as the Children of Light, they judged those who approved of living as human beings have always lived – marrying and having children, practicing sexual restraint outside of that context, owning property, using animals for food, resorting to war and the death penalty when justice and order made it necessary – as the Children of Darkness.  Since these things are just commonsense preconditions of the social order, it is no surprise that ecclesiastical and political authorities judged Catharism to be radically subversive of that order and in need of suppression. (Read more.)

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