[Serious] Book reports

[Belacqua]

Maybe it makes sense to have a general thread to discuss the religion/atheism books we've been reading. 

Rather than start a new thread for every book, this way we could also compare and contrast different authors.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Sounds a good idea.  There's already a 'Read any good books lately' thread, though.

Boru

[Belacqua]

Recently the book Dominion by Tom Holland has been getting some attention. It's a single-volume compact history of the changes that Christianity brought to the world, and claims that even non-Christian thinkers today continue to think along the lines that Christianity laid out for us.

I am not claiming the book is great or fault-free or necessary to anyone's education; only that it covers topics which people on this forum sometimes discuss. We might get something from paying it some attention.

I'll post some comments on it when my morning routine settles down later.

[Belacqua]

In the Shoutbox, @Grandizer asked several relevant questions about Dominion . The first question was:

According to Holland, what's not Christian about preChristian ideals and beliefs?

In general, Holland is claiming that the Greek/Roman classical world took it for granted that athletic and military prowess were clear indications of a superior person. That in large part life was about winning, and those who won were just better and more deserving than those who didn't.

We know that Aristotle had no qualms about saying that some people are higher quality than others, and that some are natural slaves. In fact a major part of his Ethics is that properly evaluating people is necessary, and treating the better people better. The idea that slaves, women, or conquered peoples deserved the favor of the gods would have been laughable.

This is from page 34:

What mattered was victory, not the cost.

This spirit, this ferocious commitment to being the best, was one in which
all aspired to share. In Homer’s poetry, the word for ‘pray’, euchomai, was also
a word for ‘boast’. The gods invariably looked with favour upon an agon. Rare
was the sanctuary that did not serve as the venue for some competition, be it for
dancers, poets or weavers. From athletics to beauty contests, all had their divine
sponsors. When Aristophanes wrote The Acharnians he did so as a contender in
an agon. The Lenaia was held in honour of Dionysus, a god whose fondness for
drunken revelry and female company rendered him a more than appropriate
patron for Aristophanes’ brand of comedy. Kings and princes, of the kind who
on the plain of Troy had dared to fight even with gods, no longer reigned in
Athens. Less than a century before the time of Aristophanes, revolution had
come to the city and a radically new form of government, one in which power
was entrusted to the people, been enshrined there. In a democracy, the right to
contend with one’s peers was no longer the prerogative of aristocrats alone.
Indeed, the ethos of gods and heroes might come to seem, when viewed through the prism of a more egalitarian age, more than a little comic.

Aristophanes, who was nothing if not competitive himself, did not hesitate to portray them as oafs, or cowards, or liars. In one of his comedies, he even dared to show Dionysus, disguised as a slave, shitting himself as he was threatened with torture, and then being scourged with a whip. The play, like The Acharnians, was awarded first prize.

The tension, though, between ancient song and the values of those who
were not heroes, was never simply a matter for laughter. ‘Are there no guidelines
set by heaven for mortal men, no path to follow that will please the gods?’24
This question, which the sick, the bereaved or the oppressed could hardly help
but ask, had no ready answer. The gods, inscrutable and whimsical as they were, rarely deigned to explain themselves. They certainly never thought to regulate morals. The oracle at Delphi might offer advice, but not ethical instruction. ‘The god does not rule by issuing commands.’25

Note that Holland is too careful to say that it's all-or-nothing, simply winner-take-all. There was tension and debate. Nonetheless, he claims that an executed God and the announcement that the weak and poor are better than the strong and rich was a major change.

I know, of course, that we can find intimations of this idea earlier. The later Hebrew prophets, in particular, emphasize social justice for widows and orphans.

Also we know that, in our modern view, Christianity didn't go far enough, by failing to call for an end to slavery or equal rights for women. Holland claims that while Paul can't imagine the end to the reigning economic order, and saying slaves should be free, he nonetheless says that God loves slaves as much as others. This provided the seeds for development over centuries, resulting, among other things, in today's Social Justice Warriors saying that oppressed peoples deserve special treatment. Holland claims this is something that derives ultimately from Christianity.

I'm aware that, in an alternate history, we can imagine a case where equality was advocated even without Christianity. This book, though, sticks to the history we really have.

Other pages describe how later on many Christians who advocated equal rights were opposed and attacked by Christians who didn't support equal rights. Internal divisions were many.

————————

More questions from @Grandizer which I'll look at later:

And what exactly is Christian about the Crusades? I see secularism as a response to centuries of religious rule but it need not have been Christian. Secular Christianity necessarily must be Christian, I suppose, but not secularism in general.

[Succubus]

Maybe it makes sense to have a general thread to discuss the religion/atheism books we've been reading.

The bait.

And what exactly is Christian about the Crusades? I see secularism as a response to centuries of religious rule but it need not have been Christian. Secular Christianity necessarily must be Christian, I suppose, but not secularism in general.

And the switch.

What is secular Christianity?

[GrandizerII]

I'll wait for your response(s) to my other question(s) before I respond, Belaqua.

[Belacqua]

And what exactly is Christian about the Crusades? I see secularism as a response to centuries of religious rule but it need not have been Christian. Secular Christianity necessarily must be Christian, I suppose, but not secularism in general.

And the switch.

What is secular Christianity?

These are questions that Grandizer asked. If you have answers I'd be glad to read them. 

I don't know what "secular Christianity" is; that's a term Grandizer used. Holland posits that dividing the world into religious and secular realms is something that derives from Christian customs, long into Christian history.

---

I'll wait for your response(s) to my other question(s) before I respond, Belaqua.

Fair enough. I'll get to it later today.

[EgoDeath]

Moderator Notice
Post removed for violating the Serious Thread rules.

[Belacqua]

@Grandizer asked:

And what exactly is Christian about the Crusades?

I guess the Crusades were Christian because they were done by people who called themselves Christians.

Some people, who feel certain about a sort of true core or essence of Christianity, might argue that the Crusades weren't really Christian, but I'm not one of those people. I have said many times before that I see the label Christianity as a big baggy category of things, many of which are incompatible.

Here are some things Holland says about the Crusades:

In the Book of Revelation it was foretold that, at the end of days, an angel
would gather grapes from the earth’s vine, and trample them in the winepress of
God’s wrath, and that blood would flow out of the press, and rise as high as a
horse’s bridle. The passage was one that Gregory’s followers knew well. One
bishop who had travelled in Urban’s train to Clermont openly wondered whether
it was the enemies of reformatio who were destined to be crushed in the final
harvest. In the event, though, it was not on the battlegrounds of the papacy’s
great conflict with Henry IV that blood would be made to flow through the
streets, but in Jerusalem. Urban’s speech had reverberated to miraculous effect.
A great host of warriors drawn from across the Latin West had taken a familiar
road. As pilgrims had been doing since the time of the millennium, they had
journeyed across Hungary to Constantinople; and then from Constantinople to
the Holy Land. Every attempt by the Saracens to halt them they had defeated.
Finally, in the summer of 1099, the great army of warrior pilgrims had arrived
before Jerusalem. On 15 July, they stormed its walls. The city was theirs. Then,
once the slaughter was done, and they had dried their dripping swords, they
headed for the tomb of Christ. There, in joy and disbelief, they offered up praises
to God. Jerusalem – after centuries of Saracen rule – was Christian once again.
So extraordinary was the feat as to be barely believable – and the news
redounded gloriously to the credit of the papacy. Urban himself died a fortnight
after the city’s capture, too soon for news of the great victory that he had
inspired to reach him; but the programme of reform to which he had devoted his
life was much burnished by the winning of the Holy City. Emperors since the
time of Charlemagne had fought wars of conquest beneath the banner of Christ;
but none had ever sent an entire army on pilgrimage. Warriors present at the
capture of Jerusalem reported having seen ‘a beautiful person sitting atop a white
horse’19 – and there were some prepared to wonder if it might not have been
Christ himself. Whatever the truth of the mysterious horseman’s identity, one
thing was clear: the Holy City had been won, not in the name of any king or
emperor, but in that of a much more universal cause.
But what name to give this cause? Back in the Latin West, the word starting
to be used was one that, until the capture of Jerusalem, had barely been heard.
The warrior pilgrims, so it came to be said, had fought under the banner of
Christianitas: Christendom. Such a categorisation – divorced as it was from the
dynasties of earthly kings and the holdings of feudal lords – was one well suited
to the ambitions of the papacy.

And on page 223:

Back in 1095, when Urban II had summoned the warriors of Christendom
to set out for the Holy Land, he had instructed them, as a symbol of their vow, to
wear the sign of the cross. Now, in July 1209, when an immense army of knights
unmatched since the time of Urban assembled at Lyon, they too were
crucesignati: ‘signed with the cross’. It marked them as pilgrims who, like their
Saviour, were so aflame with love of mankind that they were ready to be killed
in the cause of redeeming them from hell. ‘The cross that is fixed to your coats
with a soft thread,’ a preacher reminded them, ‘was fixed to His flesh with iron
nails.’26 Even those in the path of the great force as it lumbered down the Rhine
and then along the coast towards the town of Béziers could recognise in the
invaders a formidable sense of identification with the sufferings of Christ. A
crozada, they called the campaign: a ‘crusade’. Yet although the word would in
time be applied retrospectively to the great expedition that had been launched by
Urban, the crusade against the Albigensians was war of a kind that Christians
had never fought before. It was not, as Charlemagne’s campaigns against the
Saxons had been, an exercise in territorial expansion; nor was it, in the manner
of the crusades that aimed at the liberation of Jerusalem, an armed pilgrimage to
a destination of transcendent holiness. Rather, it had as its goal the extirpation of
dangerous beliefs. Only blood could wash Christendom clean of the pollution
presented to the Christian people by heresy.

In the interview, Holland emphasizes the paradox of going to kill people who fail to love correctly. He points to this as an enduring and unsolvable result of Christian influence, in which the "enlightened" group has to deal with people who refuse to be enlightened. He mentions the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution as cases where dreams of a loving and moral future end up making people commit mass murder. (He doesn't mention the modern U.S.'s practice killing lots of people in order to bring peace to the Middle East and elsewhere.) Again, he sees this as something that could not have happened without Christianity or Christian ways of thinking. Pre-Christian rulers were clearer, that their invasions were for power and resources.

---

Grandizer:

I see secularism as a response to centuries of religious rule but it need not have been Christian. Secular Christianity necessarily must be Christian, I suppose, but not secularism in general.

Holland posits that the very idea of a separation of church and state was suggested first by Christians.

Personally, I don't know about everywhere, but in Greece and Rome the rituals that we modern people call "religious" were largely conducted for or by the government. Emperors were said to be divine, etc. There was some division of labor, just because no one can do everything, but the idea that what we do "religiously" and what we do "in non-religious life" wasn't clearly divided.

There's an old British joke, that religion is like drinking: it's a fine thing as long as it doesn't interfere with your daily life. This is an expression of secularism that, Holland claims, wouldn't have made much sense before about the time of Augustine.

Augustine, looking about him at the great cities of the world, at Rome, and
Carthage, and Milan, had imagined the City of God as a pilgrim, unshackled by
worldly cares. ‘There, instead of victory, is truth; instead of high rank, holiness;
instead of peace, felicity; instead of life, eternity.’31 This, when supplicants
ventured through the woods that surrounded Luxeuil and approached the
settlement founded by Columbanus, was what they hoped to find. The very wall
that enclosed the monastery, raised by the saint’s own hand, proclaimed the
triumph of the City of God over that of man. The shattered fragments of bathhouses
and temples had been built into its fabric: pillars, pediments, broken
statuary. These, converted to the uses of religio, were the bric-à-brac of what
Augustine, two centuries previously, had identified as the order of the saeculum.
The word had various shades of meaning. Originally, it had signified the span of
a human life, whether defined as a generation, or as the maximum number of
years that any one individual could hope to live: a hundred years. Increasingly,
though, it had come to denote the limits of living recollection. Throughout
Rome’s history, from its earliest days to the time of Constantine, games to mark
the passing of a saeculum had repeatedly been held: ‘a spectacle such as no one
had ever witnessed, nor ever would again’.32 This was why Augustine, looking
for a word to counterpoint the unchanging eternity of the City of God, had seized
upon it. Things caught up in the flux of mortals’ existence, bounded by their
memories, forever changing upon the passage of the generations: all these, so
Augustine declared, were saecularia – ‘secular things’.33

Augustine's new use of the word came to be widespread. From page 197:

The dream of Gregory and his fellow reformers – of a
Church rendered decisively distinct from the dimension of the earthly, from top
to bottom, from palace to meanest village – no longer appeared a fantasy, but
eminently realisable. A celibate clergy, once disentangled from the snares and
meshes of the fallen world, would then be better fitted to serve the Christian
people as a model of purity, and bring them to God. No longer would it be
monasteries and nunneries alone that stood separate from the flux of the
saeculum, but the entire Church. Bishops who pledged themselves to the
radicalism of this vision could reassure themselves that it was in reality nothing
new, nothing out of tune with the teachings of their Saviour. In the gospels, after
all, it was recorded that Jesus, approached by questioners looking to trip him up,
had been asked whether it was permitted to pay taxes to pagan Rome. Telling
them to show him a coin, he had asked them whose image was stamped on it.
‘Caesar’s,’ they had replied. ‘Then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s,’ Jesus had
answered, ‘and to God what is God’s.’14
Nevertheless, deep though the roots of Gregory’s reformatio lay in the soil
of Christian teaching, the flower was indeed something new. The concept of the
‘secular’, first planted by Augustine, and tended by Columbanus, had attained a
spectacular bloom. Gregory and his fellow reformers did not invent the
distinction between religio and the saeculum, between the sacred and the
profane; but they did render it something fundamental to the future of the West,
‘for the first time and permanently’.15

So I agree with you, that "it need not have been Christian." If Mithraism had taken over, it might have been Mithraic. But in the history we actually have, the distinction came about through Christian thought.

[EgoDeath]

How about a book list for us atheists, Bel?

You seem to have the superior understanding of Christianity and its intricacies... so where we do start?

In all seriousness, I'm curious.