Category Archive: History
Yeats on the Victorians
In one of his letters to his brother, C. S. Lewis talks about having met William Butler Yeats, whose poetry he had once admired. The first meeting, Lewis says, was very strange. A few days later, however, Lewis visited Yeats at his home again, and this time Yeats “was almost quite sane, and talked about books and things, still eloquently and quite intelligently.”
Lewis summarizes something Yeats said about the “great Victorians,” which I found interesting for the light it sheds on that period:
The most interesting thing about the Victorian period was their penchant for selecting one typical great man in each department — Tennyson, THE poet, Roberts, THE soldier: and then these types were made into myths. You never heard of anyone else: if you spoke of medicine it meant — (some ‘THE Doctor’ whose name I have forgotten): if you spoke of politics it was Gladstone (in Lewis, Collected Letters, 1:534).
C. S. Lewis’s School Schedule
For some time now, I’ve been reading through the first volume of C. S. Lewis’s Collected Letters. They are fascinating reading for anyone who has enjoyed Lewis’s works. I was interested to discover what his educational schedule was during the time he was studying with his tutor, Mr. Kirkpatrick, in 1915, when he was sixteen or seventeen years old. This is from a letter he wrote to his best (one might well say, his only) friend, Arthur Greeves:
You ask me how I spend my time, and though I am more interested in thoughts and feelings, we’ll come down to facts. I am awakened in the morning by Kirk splashing in his bath, about 20 minutes after which I get up myself and come down. After breakfast & a short walk we start work on Thucydides — a desperately dull and tedious Greek historian (I daresay tho’, you’d find him interesting) and on Homer whom I worship. After quarter of an hour’s rest we go on with Tacitus till lunch at 1. I am then free till tea at 4:30: of course I am always anxious at this meal to see if Mrs. K. is out, for Kirk never takes it. If she is I lounge in an arm chair with my book by the fire, reading over a leisurely and bountiful meal. If she’s in, or worse still has “some people” to tea, it means sitting on a rigiht angled chair and sipping a meagrue allowance of tea and making intelligent remarks about the war, the parish, and the shortcomings of everyones servants. At 5, we do Plato and Horace, who are both charming, till supper at 7.30, after which comes German and French till about 9. Then I am free to go to bed whenever I like which is usually about 10.20 (p. 145).
What I find most interesting about that schedule is that it is focused almost entirely on languages and on the classics. This is a “high school” curriculum, but with no math or science or English literature or even any history besides the history in the books that Lewis was translating (of course, when he says he’s “working on” Thucydides or “going on” with Tacitus or “doing” Plato and Horace, he means he’s reading them in the original Greek and Latin).
People complain today sometimes that certain homeschoolers aren’t teaching a complete curriculum. That may be, and maybe that isn’t good for every child. On the other hand, Lewis seems to have done fairly well with the education he received.
Public Secrets?
In his lecture last May at the Resurgence conference, Ed Stetzer listed a bunch of things church planters ought to get to know about their communities. One of them, I recall, was what he called “the best-kept public secrets.” Every community has certain things which people know about but which they don’t like to recall or discuss. Knowing what these things are can be helpful if you’re planting a church in that region.
I suspect that the stuff in the fifth chapter of Land in Common: An Illustrated History of Jackson County, Oregon would fall into this category. The chapter focuses on events in Jackson County in the 1930s, though it begins with some disturbing information from earlier periods of its history:
As the wealthiest section in southern Oregon, Jackson County became known to upstaters as a place where volunteer troops fighting the local Indians carried banners proclaiming “Extermination,” where newspaper editors — excelling at the so-called Oregon style of journalism — lambasted their opponents with vicious personal abuse, where racial minorities such as the Chinese routinely were subjected to indignities and violence, and where in 1860 the electorate bucked the state’s Unionist tide to vote for pro-slavery presidential candidate John Breckinridge (p. 85).
Racism seems to have been fairly widespread in this area back in the early years of the Twentieth Century, in fact. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan arrived in this area and was especially strong in Ashland and even kidnapped some people (p. 87). The next chapter, focusing on Camp White during the war years, talks about the way black soldiers were treated in Medford and the surrounding region. One woman is quoted as saying “Medford was known as the town where the sun didn’t set on blacks” (p. 115) and many businesses refused to serve black customers (p. 117).
Those attitudes seem to have changed dramatically since World War II, though I don’t know enough about how the Hispanic community has been treated in more recent years. Ashland, in particular, appears to have changed its tenor dramatically.
But equally surprising was the story of Llewellyn Banks, Earl Fehr, and the Good Government Congress. The 1930s saw the rise of populism all over the United States, and Jackson County was no exception. Labelling the current government “the Gang,” Banks and Fehr began plotting to gain power.
The story includes the GGC’s future president, Henrietta Martin, lashing a journalist across the face with a horsewhip (from her picture, I’d say she was exactly the type of woman who would do that!) and the theft of ballots from the Jackson County Courthouse (the man who broke the window was Rogue River’s mayor), and it culminates with Banks shooting down the officer who came to his house to arrest him. The trial revealed that Banks intended not only to have the District Attorney kidnapped and possibly murdered, but also to form a band of guerillas to fight “the Gang.”
Even in the ’90s, when this book was published, the author of this chapter says, “The question of Who was in the right? during the stormy Good Government Congress period still can cause heated debate among now-elderly residents of the county who recall those events” (p. 100).
The Bible and Human History
We today are so used to reading the Bible only for individual inspiration and personal guidance that we overlook the fact that the Bible is also concerned with the development of human history. The Bible teaches us that humanity is God’s Daughter. We are called Daughter Zion and Daughter Jerusalem (often mistranslated “Daughter of Zion”; in fact, Zion/Jerusalem is the Daughter). We are the “only-created” Daughter of God, whose destiny it is to grow up to become the Bride of the “only-begotten” Son of God. The Spirit, the Divine Matchmaker, has been sent to prepare the Bride for the Son. That course of preparation is what human history is all about. — James Jordan, Crisis, Opportunity, and the Christian Future, pp. 4-5.
Strange Disappearance
Recently, I’ve been reading Land in Common: An Illustrated History of Jackson County, Oregon, in an attempt to understand the history of the region where God has placed me and called me to plant a church. The chapter I read today was about the “roaring 20s,” which happened here mainly in the 1910s. Back then, Medford appears to have been a little ahead of the rest of the States in those sorts of things.
A number of Easterners moved out to this region in that decade, many of whom were given to the fast life. The young men spent their time in the Nash Hotel. Grace Fiero recalled that “Champagne was always flowing, just like water.” Grace Fiero and her husband Conro were friends with George and Rhea Carpenter, who has a bungalow with its own swimming pool, tennis court, and Japanese garden.
But one party hosted by the Carpenters in the late 1910s was dry. Grace Fiero recalled that everyone, knowing the party would be dry, had dinner parties beforehand so that they came to the party already “cheery.” And then at the party, people spiked the punch.
Did the Carpenters know? Were they offended? We don’t know. But here’s the strangest part:
Whatever it was, sometime afterward the Carpenters left town — and never returned. They left everything behind: the Steinway piano with photographs on it, glasses on the kitchen counter, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antiques in the living room. The Carpenters refused to rent or lease their Medford home to anyone, including high-ranking military officers during World War II. The house stood untouched until the early 1960s, when most of its contents were auctioned off (p. 58).
Very mysterious.Â
Like Hidden Fire
I’ve read John Buchan’s novel Greenmantle several times. It’s the second of his Peter Hannay stories and it is set during World War I. The Germans have teamed up with the Turks and are working to bring about a Holy War in the Islamic world in the hopes that the Muslims will overthrow the British. Rumors abound about a mysterious figure in the East who is going to lead that Holy War, and Richard Hannay and his friends get caught up in the attempt to stop him.
I enjoyed the novel, but didn’t dream that there was actual history behind it. Which shows you how little I knew about the history of World War I. A while back, when I mentioned Greenmantle on this blog, Paul Baxter recommended Peter Hopkirk’s Like Hidden Fire: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire. It’s the true story behind Greenmantle — and more!
Sure enough, the Germans and the Turks did plot to bring about a Holy War in order to turn the Muslims in Persia, Afghanistan, and India against the British. Their propaganda even declared that Kaiser Wilhelm had converted to Islam and had made a pilgrimage to Mecca!
Hopkirk traces the development of the plot which looked for quite a while as if it might succeed. In fact, Buchan had intelligence contacts and may have had inside information.  His friend, Lawrence of Arabia, once commented that “Greenmantle has more than a flavor of truth.” Buchan’s novel ends with the defeat of Erzerum, but Hopkirk goes further, telling the story of the end of the Holy War as Turkey pushed toward the city of Baku in Transcaucasia.
I’ve heard the complaint that Buchan’s characters often just happen to stumble across plots and clues, making the novels less believable. On the other hand, if the coincidences and mistakes that Hopkirk records were in fiction, the same charge could be levelled against them.
For instance: Would you believe that in fleeing from capture, Wassmuss (the German “Lawrence of Arabia”), who was trying to get the southern Persians worked up to fight the British, would leave behind his code book? And that he wouldn’t report it to his superiors? And that they would end up continuing to use the same code, not knowing that the British could read it? And that they would send a top secret telegram (the Zimmermann Telegram) to Mexico via lines that ran through Britain? And that Britain’s Naval Intelligence Director, Sir Reginald Hall, would have been curious about why Wassmuss tried so hard to get his luggage and, though no one else seemed interested in it, would have examined it and discovered the code book?
In fiction, maybe not. “That’s stretching coincidence,” you might say. But it happened. The telegram was sent from the US consulate in Germany to the US state department, where the German consul translated it and then sent it on to Mexico. But the telegraph lines went via Britain and the British happened to be reading all those telegrams, discovered this one, recognized the code (thanks to Hall), and discovered that the Germans were planning to attack US shipping and were trying to convince Mexico to join in the war in order to reclaim Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. And that, of course, had a lot to do with the States entering World War I (though I remember nothing of this from my high school history class).
Hopkirk writes well and I read the final chapters at a gallop yesterday afternoon, trying to discover what was happening to characters such as Ranald MacDonell, left alone in Baku in the midst of Bolsheviks and anti-Bolsheviks and Muslim-hating Arminians and with Turks approaching, Edward Noel, a real-life “Sandy Arbuthnot,” who was famous for his ability to travel great distances in surprisingly little time and whose escapes and adventures were legendary but who left hardly any records of them (alas!), and Reginald Teague-Jones, who was later (likely falsely!) accused of engineering the slaughter of the twenty-six Baku commissars and who had to change his name and disappear to escape reprisals.
I’ll be reading more of Hopkirk. And having read this book, I almost want to go back and re-read Greenmantle again!
“Prehistoric Man”
C. S. Lewis talks a great deal of foolishness about evolution and “prehistoric man” in The Problem of Pain, alas. But along the way, in spite of all that, he does present some wisdom. People often think of early men as clumsy savages, lacking in intelligence. After all, look at the crude artefacts they made. Well, says Lewis, we shouldn’t be taken in by an illusion here:
We must be on our guard here against an illusion which the study of prehistoric man seems naturally to beget. Prehistoric man, because he is prehistoric, is known to us only by the material things he made — or rather by a chance selection from among the more durable things he made. It is not the fault of archaeologists that they have no better evidence: but this penury constitutes a continual temptation to infer more than we have any right to infer, to assume that the community which made the superior artefacts was superior in all respects. Everyone can see that the assumption is false; it would lead to the conclusion that the leisured classes of our own time were in all respects superior to those of the Victorian age. Clearly the prehistoric men who made the worst pottery might have made the best poetry and we should never know it.
And the assumption becomes even more absurd when we are comparing prehistoric men with modern savages. The equal crudity of artefacts here tells you nothing about the intelligence or virtue of the makers. What is learned by trial and error must begin by being crude, whatever the character of the beginner. The very same pot which would prove its maker a genius if it were the first pot ever made in the world, would prove its maker a dunce if it came after millenniums of pot-making.
The whole modern estimate of primitive man is based upon that idolatry of artefacts which is a great corporate sin of our own civilisation. We forget that our prehistoric ancestors made all the most useful discoveries, except that of chloroform, which have ever been made. To them we owe language, the family, clothing, the use of fire, the domestication of animals, the wheel, the ship, poetry and agriculture. — C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, pp. 61-62 (paragraph breaks added).
Reading Silently
Recently, I’ve been reading C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. In an earlier life, I was an English major with a strong interest in medieval and Renaissance literature, and though I don’t get to do as much study in literature as I would like my interest has not evaporated.
I’ve long wanted to read through Lewis’s works, and this one aroused a sense of nostalgia for the days when I was studying Chaucer under Dr. Stephen Reimer and Shakespeare under Dr. James Forrest at the University of Alberta. In it, Lewis discusses the rise of “courtly love” and medieval allegorical poetry before examining The Romance of the Rose and works by Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Spenser.
In the course of that discussion, Lewis touches on a number of other topics. This side-comment I found particularly interesting:
But perhaps there is no writer who admits us so intimately into the heart of that age as Augustine. Sometimes he does so by accident, as when he comments on the fact — to him, apparently, remarkable — that Ambrose, when reading to himself, read silently. You could see his eyes moving, but you could hear nothing. In such a passage one has the solemn privilege of being present at the birth of a new world. Behind us is that almost unimaginable period, so relentlessly objective that in it even “reading” (in our sense) did not exist. The book was still a logos, a speech; thinking was still dialegesthai, talking. Before us is our own world, the world of the printed or written page, and of the solitary reader who is accustomed to pass hours in the silent society of mental images evoked by written characters (pp. 64-65; I’ve transliterated the Greek, because I can’t do Greek font on this blog yet).
Serfs and Feminists
The March 2004 issue of The Atlantic contains this interesting article by Caitlin Ferguson: “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement.” (There’s an interview with the author here.)
The Catholic Luther
I’ve recently been reading The Catholicity of the Reformation, edited by Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson. The book is a collection of essays, all but one from Lutheran authors, demonstrating that the intention of the early Reformers wasn’t to create a new kind of Christianity but rather was to reform and renew in keeping with the historic catholic (note the lowercase c) Christian tradition.
On Saturday, I read David S. Yeago’s essay, “The Catholic Luther.” Yeago, himself a Lutheran, offers an interesting approach to Luther’s story.
The traditional Luther-story goes like this: Luther was a young priest with a very troubled conscience, which nothing in the Catholicism of his day could help because it kept pointing him to his works. Then he had the famous Tower Experience in which he discovered justification by faith alone. After that, he got into controversy, first with regard to indulgences and then with regard to justification itself.
More recently, scholars have argued (convincingly, says Yeago) that the Tower Experience happened in 1518, which is to say that it happened after the 95 theses (which don’t talk about justification by faith alone) and the beginning of the indulgence controversy.
Yeago agrees that the Tower Experience did take place in 1518. But his read of Luther’s history up to and including that point is quite different from either of those other interpretations.
If we look at his earlier writings (as opposed to his reflections twenty-five to thirty years later), we don’t find Luther wrestling with a troubled conscience or asking how he can find a gracious God. Rather, we find him wrestling with the question of idolatry and how we can find the true God.
The problem, says Luther and much of the catholic tradition at the time, is that people want a god who benefits them. They love God for his gifts and not for himself, which, they say, is a form of idolatry (“I worship the God who makes me feel good”).
So then how can you know that you’re worshipping the true God (who can’t be used) instead of this idol of your own imagination? Luther’s response is the theology of the cross: the true God comes to you in sufferings — the sufferings of Christ but also our own sufferings — such that we are left clinging to him even when he doesn’t seem to benefit us at all. In fact, if we’re clinging to him even though it appears to be his intention to damn us (and we should be willing to be damned if only we have the true God, he says), then we know that we’re not worshipping an idol.
Yeago agrees that Luther did talk about uncertainty of salvation during this point, but Luther didn’t see it as a problem. In fact, Yeago says,
It should be clear that this strategy utterly excludes the sort of confident assurance of God’s favor that Luther later came to teach; on the contrary, for the early theologia crucis our uncertainty of salvation plays an important role in weaning us from self-interested piety: we must learn to cling to God even though it seems most likely he will damn us (p. 23).
There is a marked difference between this early Luther of the “theology of the cross,” whose view leads to and embraces a lack of assurance of salvation, and the later Luther, who proclaims assurance. What made the difference? In 1518, Yeago says, Luther began to study sacramental theology.
To the question “What is the sacrament good for, anyway?” Luther finally responds: the concrete, external, public sacramental act in the church is the concrete, external, public act of Jesus Christ in the church. When we come to the sacrament, we run into Jesus Christ: his word, his act, his authority. The question with which every participant in the sacraments is confronted, therefore, is simply this: Is Jesus Christ telling the truth here? Can he do what he promises? Can we count on what he says? (pp. 25-26).
Luther’s basic question remains the same: How can I find the true God, as opposed to idols of my own imagination? But the answer changes. His earlier answer appears to have been this: “the one who I am to adore and in whom I am to put my trust is precisely the one whom all experience says is bent on destroying me” (p. 27). His new answer would have been different:
“The true possessor of deity is the one whom I encounter here — in the particular flesh of Jesus Christ and in the concrete sacramental sign.” It is the particularity and concreteness of God’s presence that now bear the brunt of the task of foreclosing idolatry; the true God, who by definition cannot be used, is the God who makes himself available as he chooses, here and not there, in the flesh born of Mary and the specificity of his church’s sacramental practice, not in the groves and high places consecrated by our religious speculation and self-interest (p. 27).
The whole theology of the cross changes:
[I]n Luther’s early “theology of the cross,” God hides his saving presence in the torment he visits on his elect; in the mature theology, the gracious hiddenness of God is primarily a matter of his lowliness, his kenosis in the incarnate Son, in his chosen signs, and in his saints. The tribulations of the faithful are no longer identical with the grace that saves them, although they drive them to seek that grace and are the veil under which it is hidden from the proud and mighty of this world (p. 28).
Yeago’s thesis seems quite radical: far from being driven by his troubled conscience to find a new solution for his sins which meant that he had to break from the version of Christianity in which he lived, Luther originally thought that a troubled conscience was a good thing (“theology of the cross”) but then began to study the historic, catholic tradition of sacramental theology and adjusted his thinking so that he now proclaimed the certainty of forgiveness in Christ, a forgiveness received only by faith (“Does Jesus Christ mean what he says?”).
Yeago’s essay is brief (you’ll find a still briefer, earlier version of it here) and it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. He admits that in the short compass of this essay (originally a speech) he can only assert, though he plans to offer a more extended argument for this reading of Luther’s history in the future. As he says, “I will, so to speak, describe the shoe; readers may let Luther wear it if they find that it fits him” (p. 13).
Anyone else read this essay? Have any of the other Luther scholars responded to it? Has it caught on in Luther scholarship? Is Yeago coming out with his extended argument anytime soon? At any rate, it’s certainly an interesting and thought-provoking article.
Martin Bucer
Martin Bucer was a man loved by all. He was a man who won friends wherever he turned, but only because it was his nature to make friends. He loved people. He loved the church fathers. He loved beer. He upheld the faith once for all given to the saints, and he upheld it with a smile. Bucer’s life was so laced with joyful orthodoxy that Roman Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc was forced to say in his book Characters of the Reformation, “I shall not touch upon the life and influence of Bucer lest the malleable reader come to believe that the Reformation had its own Chesterton.”
Joshua Clark‘s short article on Martin Bucer reminds me that I want to get to know Bucer better.
“Spiritual” Worship?
Last night, I started reading E. Brooks Holifield’s The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570-1720. I’ve often seen the book in footnotes and bibliographies and I finally tracked down a copy.
So far, I’ve read only the first part of the first chapter, the section dealing with Luther and Zwingli. I’m just starting the section on John Calvin. But already, I’ve begun to wonder about a theological strain which can be found in the early Reformers and which still infects the church today, namely, the idea that real worship is “spiritual” as opposed to physical — an idea which tends to downplay the sacraments.
If I recall correctly, Carlos Eire, in War Against the Idols, points out that the iconoclasm of many of the Reformers was grounded on Christ’s statement that God is Spirit and must be worshipped in spirit and truth, which they took to mean that our worship should be purged of all the “externals” and “physical stuff” which characterized medieval Roman Catholic worship. I’d agree that there were problems with medieval worship, but I question the “spiritual worship is non-physical, non-external worship” argument and the exegesis and the understanding of God’s “spirituality” that lie behind it. It seems like a remnant of gnosticism, not to mention a far cry from the robust and even sensual worship we find in Scripture.
Zwingli’s view of the sacraments, in particular, seems to have been shaped by this emphasis on “spiritual” worship. Holifield writes:
Zwingli believed that the Spirit acted directly on the souls of men without the mediation of material instruments. Implicit in that belief was a devaluation of external means, which, he said, could “never cleanse the soul.” In effect, Zwingli divided the world into material and spiritual spheres which could never intersect, and then he located Christian existence solely in the realm of spirit. Consequently, internal spiritual baptism, constituted by an immediate relation between the Spirit of God and the spirit of man, was not necessarily related to the external water baptism. Zwingli’s presuppositions left little room for baptismal efficacy. In 1525 he even denied that the sacrament could strengthen faith: “It does not justify the one who is baptized, nor does it confirm his faith, for it is not possible for an external thing to confirm faith” (p. 7)
By 1531, Zwingli did admit that the sacraments could strengthen faith, which is certainly an improvement on his earlier position.
It strikes me that this same sort of view lives on today. If Paul says something about baptism which sounds as if baptism is efficacious in some way, then people conclude that Paul mustn’t be talking about water baptism. He must mean Spirit baptism instead.
Looking for a topic for a doctoral dissertation in Reformation church history? Here’s one worth studying. Where did this “spiritual worship versus ‘physical, external’ worship” view come from? Some of the Reformers got it from Erasmus, but did it originate with him? Why the opposition to “externals”? What’s the exegesis behind that? Does it have something to do with the Reformer’s understanding of the move from Old Covenant to New Covenant? I expect so. What’s the rest of the history of this “not water baptism but Spirit baptism” interpretation? How did Reformed people end up claiming that God’s real work is immediate (i.e., unmediated)?
I imagine Holifield is going to give me some answers, though I want to be cautious as I read him. Reformation scholars, like other scholars, sometimes (mis)read their sources in terms of their own categories and questions. At any rate, the book looks like a very interesting read.