"Good" & "Bad" Christians?

[Belacqua]

They kinda were though.

This is from Atheist Delusions, by David Bentley Hart. It's true, shock horror, that the writer is a Christian. This doesn't mean that he can't type true sentences, and any rebuttal to what he says here can't simply consist of "yah, he's a Christian." 

It is true, obviously, that the church was not immune to the general
alarm regarding maleficent magic and cults of cannibalistic Satanists,
especially during the late fifteenth century. It was, for instance, two Dominicans
who, around 1486, produced the titillatingly ghastly Malleus
maleficarum, the infamous manual of witch-hunting that convinced so
many of its readers of the reality of diabolic magic. One should note, however,
that the book’s principal author, Heinrich Kramer, was recognized
as a demented imbecile by many of his contemporaries; in Innsbruck, for
instance, the local bishop not only thwarted his attempts to convict certain
local women of witchcraft but even forced him to leave the city. And the
same year that the Malleus appeared the Carmelite Jan van Beetz published
his Expositio decem catalogie praeceptum, an icily skeptical treatment of
tales of black magic. Of course, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
there were popes who—whether or not they believed in magic—still
believed popular tales of a rising tide of Satanism, and who consequently
charged inquisitors to seek out the malefactors. Nevertheless, it was the
Catholic Church, of all the institutions of the time, that came to treat accusations
of witchcraft with the most pronounced incredulity. Where secular
courts and licentious mobs were eager to consign the accused to the tender
ministrations of the public executioner, ecclesial inquisitions were prone
to demand hard evidence and, in its absence, to dismiss charges. Ultimately,
in lands where the authority of the church and its inquisitions were
strong—especially during the high tide of witch-hunting—convictions
were extremely rare. In Spain, for example, in the whole of the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, we have evidence of only two prosecutions going
to trial. In the middle of the sixteenth century, the Catalonian Inquisition
set the precedent (imitated by other inquisitions soon after) of arguing
against all further prosecutions for witchcraft. In or around 1609, during
an eruption of witch-hunting panic in Basque country, the Spanish
Inquisition went so far as to forbid even the discussion of witchcraft; and
more than once, in the years following, Iberian inquisitions were obliged
to intervene when secular courts renewed prosecutions.1

The rather disorienting truth about the early modern fascination with
witchcraft and the great witch hunts is that they were not the final, desperate
expressions of an intellectual and religious tradition slowly fading
into obsolescence before the advance of scientific and social “enlightenment”;
they were, instead, something quite novel, modern phenomena,
which had at best a weak foreshadowing in certain new historical trends
of the late Middle Ages, and which, far from occurring in tension with
the birth of secular modernity, were in a sense extreme manifestations
of it. In many cases, it was those who were most hostile to the power
of the church to intervene in secular affairs who were also most avid to
see the power of the state express itself in the merciless destruction of
those most perfidious of dissidents, witches. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679),
for instance, the greatest modern theorist of complete state sovereignty,
thought all religious doctrine basically mendacious and did not really
believe in magic; but still he thought witches should continue to be punished
for the good of society. The author of De la démonomanie des sorciers
(1580), perhaps the most influential and (quite literally) inflammatory of
all the witch-hunting manifestos of its time, was Jean Bodin (c. 1530–1596),
who believed witches should be burned at the stake, that nations that did
not seek them out and exterminate them would suffer famine, plague,
and war, that interrogation by torture should be used when sorcery was
so much as suspected, and that no one accused of witchcraft should be
acquitted unless the accuser’s falsity be as shiningly apparent as the sun.
But Bodin was also the first great theorist of that most modern of political
ideas, the absolute sovereignty of the secular state, and he was certainly
not an orthodox Catholic but an adherent to his own version of “natural”
religion. British laws making sorcery a capital offense were passed only
in 1542 and 1563, well after Crown and state had been made supreme over
the English church, and the later act was not repealed until 1736. In 1542,
the Concordat of Liège, promulgated under the Holy Roman Emperor
Charles V (1500–1558), placed the prosecution of sorcery entirely in the
hands of secular tribunals. This was also, perhaps not coincidentally, precisely
the time at which the great witch hunt began in earnest.

More significantly, perhaps, some of the great early theorists of modern
science and scientific method were believers in magic, and consequently
were often willing to prescribe the prosecution of those who used
it for maleficent ends. Rodney Stark is not overstating his case when he
declares, “The first significant objections to the reality of satanic witchcraft
came from Spanish inquisitors, not from scientists.”2 One might even
argue that an interest in magic (though not of the maleficent variety)
was one of the essential ingredients in the evolution of modern scientific
thought. Certainly the Renaissance rediscovery of the Corpus hermeticum—
the splendid late antique anthology of Neoplatonic, Gnostic, alchemical,
magical, astrological, and devotional texts—was of immense importance
in shaping the ethos of modern science. Francis Bacon (1561–1626),
who did so much to define the inherent rationality of modern scientific
method, and who was so vigorous an advocate of the human “mission”
to know and to conquer the material world, was an heir at the very least
to the hermetic revival’s emphasis upon humanity’s godlike prerogatives
over the lower orders of material creation, and to the alchemical tradition
of wracking elemental nature to force it to yield up its deepest secrets.
Robert Boyle (1627–1691), one of the founders of the Royal Society, perhaps
the most accomplished experimental scientist of the seventeenth century
and a pioneer in the study of air pressure and vacuums, was a student of
alchemy and was firmly convinced of both the reality of witches and the
need for their elimination. Joseph Glanvill (1636–1680), also of the Royal
Society and chief apologist for its experimental methods, thought the reality
of sorcery to be scientifically demonstrable.3 Even Newton devoted far
greater energy to his alchemy than to his physical theories.

In truth, the rise of modern science and the early modern obsession
with sorcery were not merely contemporaneous currents within Western
society but were two closely allied manifestations of the development of
a new post-Christian sense of human mastery over the world. There is
nothing especially outrageous in such a claim. After all, magic is essentially
a species of materialism; if it invokes any agencies beyond the visible
sphere, they are not supernatural—in the theological sense of “transcendent”—
but at most preternatural: they are merely, that is to say, subtler,
more potent aspects of the physical cosmos. Hermetic magic and modern
science (in its most Baconian form at least) are both concerned with hidden
forces within the material order, forces that are largely impersonal
and morally neutral, which one can learn to manipulate, and which may
be turned to ends fair or foul; both, that is to say, are concerned with
domination of the physical cosmos, the instrumental subjection of nature
to humanity, and the constant increase of human power. Hence,
there was not really any late modern triumph of science over magic, so
much as there was a natural dissolution of the latter into the former, as
the power of science to accomplish what magic could only adumbrate
became progressively more obvious. Or, rather, “magic” and “science”
in the modern period are distinguishable only retrospectively, according
to relative degrees of efficacy. There never was, however, an antagonism
between the two: metaphysically, morally, and conceptually, they belonged
to a single continuum.

So: not monolithic.