Today is MLK's birthday. As I noted last year, piety will abound. While it is now not only acceptable but practically a sign of ethical evolution to note on Washington's Birthday --what's left of it as mixed and generic "Presidents' Day"-- that he was a slaveholder, it is still thought to be gross, in the worst possible taste and "racist" to note that Rev. "Dr." King was a serial plagiarist and a serial adulterer. Talk about "the content of our character." As with so many others, his place in history was hugely enhanced because he was assassinated.
It is emblematic of our times that although an academic panel in 1991 clearly judged his doctoral thesis to be seriously compromised by plagiarism, they did not feel that it was "useful" to revoke his degree. Craven cowardice.
To say nothing of King's larger political views. Views which match very much the views of the current half-Black incumbent in the White House.
Evidence for the above statement from both the Black Left and the White Right.
And although there are a variety of voices there at PT, the original group, who see themselves as fellows of the monk-blogger in charge, find no fault to the religious left of them. Rome, on the other hand, can hardly ever do anything right. If the Reformation happened again, they would all run over fast. Indeed, several of them said they'd be Episcopalians except for "blooming where God had planted them." Pretty funny, eh?
Now Luther may well not have set out intentionally to break up the Church, but between his 1517 Theses and the 1520 condemnation and what he did by 1525, you can certainly see that breaking up the Church was not something he found distasteful. When he saw that the Peasant Revolt was claiming him as an inspiration, he moved heaven and earth to disassociate himself and stop them, but he never lifted a finger to halt the cracking apart of Western Christendom. Au contraire. Sorta like Gene Robinson, the divorced and gay Episcopal bishop, whose acceptance of ordination put the dissolution of the Anglican Communion on a rapid new footing. I don't know, but if you engage in a program of action with a very likely set of outcomes, and those outcomes start to happen, and you continue unabated with your program, how convincing is it to say that you bear no responsibility because you didn't intend this to happen?
My takes on the Reformation, and on the Civil Rights Movement, are mixed. I find little to like in Protestantism as a religion, --basically, I find it anxiety-driven, fetishizing of a fantasied primitive purity, and boring-- yet were it not for the Protestants, there'd be no America. L'Amerique vaut-elle bien une reformation?
The continuing outcomes of the Civil Rights Movement leave me very unimpressed, to say the least. To put the matter at its most provocatively impolite, have Blacks, as a group, proved worth all the vast and historically unprecedented energy that's been lavished on them in the last half century? The more law and treasure and sympathy thrown at them, the less able they seem to get their group act together. After all that effort, --and all that gushing of guilty Whites--we get a 72% illegitimacy rate, a hugely disproportionate rate of criminality and incarceration, and Hip Hop. Oh, and Barack Hussein Obama. And Michelle.
On my gloomiest days, I locate the confluence of MLK's movement (including the White governmental response to it) and the Vietnam War as the turning point in the nation's soul and its cultural fall into pointless self-erasure. But the most significant relationship of my life has been with a Black man. Without the social changes of the 60's, that would not have been possible.
Anyone who judges history judges, of course, from within history.
The Maoist feel of this huge piece is no accident.
It is emblematic of our times that although an academic panel in 1991 clearly judged his doctoral thesis to be seriously compromised by plagiarism, they did not feel that it was "useful" to revoke his degree. Craven cowardice.
To say nothing of King's larger political views. Views which match very much the views of the current half-Black incumbent in the White House.
Evidence for the above statement from both the Black Left and the White Right.
As for Martin Luther himself, over at PrayTell, the issue came up of whether he was a saint. I noted that at least from the Roman side, a monk who marries a nun and then sets about to break up the unity of the Church is hardly a likely candidate. I was serially instructed on my uncharitable, unnuanced, ahistorical and pre-Vatican II attitude and that mutual acceptance of responsibility was important for healing and the unity of the churches. And anyway, he just did openly what a lot of Catholics did on the side. (A great argument for canonization, that. Maybe I shouldn't give up hope for my own elevation to the altars.)
Sigh. Anyone who thinks that "the unity of the churches" is ever going to happen also thinks that there will be a female pope. That ship sailed quite a while ago. And although there are a variety of voices there at PT, the original group, who see themselves as fellows of the monk-blogger in charge, find no fault to the religious left of them. Rome, on the other hand, can hardly ever do anything right. If the Reformation happened again, they would all run over fast. Indeed, several of them said they'd be Episcopalians except for "blooming where God had planted them." Pretty funny, eh?
Now Luther may well not have set out intentionally to break up the Church, but between his 1517 Theses and the 1520 condemnation and what he did by 1525, you can certainly see that breaking up the Church was not something he found distasteful. When he saw that the Peasant Revolt was claiming him as an inspiration, he moved heaven and earth to disassociate himself and stop them, but he never lifted a finger to halt the cracking apart of Western Christendom. Au contraire. Sorta like Gene Robinson, the divorced and gay Episcopal bishop, whose acceptance of ordination put the dissolution of the Anglican Communion on a rapid new footing. I don't know, but if you engage in a program of action with a very likely set of outcomes, and those outcomes start to happen, and you continue unabated with your program, how convincing is it to say that you bear no responsibility because you didn't intend this to happen?
My takes on the Reformation, and on the Civil Rights Movement, are mixed. I find little to like in Protestantism as a religion, --basically, I find it anxiety-driven, fetishizing of a fantasied primitive purity, and boring-- yet were it not for the Protestants, there'd be no America. L'Amerique vaut-elle bien une reformation?
The continuing outcomes of the Civil Rights Movement leave me very unimpressed, to say the least. To put the matter at its most provocatively impolite, have Blacks, as a group, proved worth all the vast and historically unprecedented energy that's been lavished on them in the last half century? The more law and treasure and sympathy thrown at them, the less able they seem to get their group act together. After all that effort, --and all that gushing of guilty Whites--we get a 72% illegitimacy rate, a hugely disproportionate rate of criminality and incarceration, and Hip Hop. Oh, and Barack Hussein Obama. And Michelle.
On my gloomiest days, I locate the confluence of MLK's movement (including the White governmental response to it) and the Vietnam War as the turning point in the nation's soul and its cultural fall into pointless self-erasure. But the most significant relationship of my life has been with a Black man. Without the social changes of the 60's, that would not have been possible.
Anyone who judges history judges, of course, from within history.
6 comments:
Freud to MLK: ... So you have a dream?...
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Ah, well, you know, ... Perhaps when churches aren't doing direct persecution that's enough ecclesiastical unity. The Peace of Westfalia suffices? ... But I do feel that the RCC is at her strongest and most self-confident when she can see and say that the Church separated Luther and his followers from the Church -- "the" Church, as Catholics still refer to their denomination, which seems right to me. I mean, individuals and groups behave best when they have self-confidence -- and thus don't lash out etc from a feeling of "threaten'dness."
Surely, though, Luther would not wish to be deem'd a "saint." Calvin would by the usual sorts of popular standards be more likely to merit the designation 'saint' but perhaps he too would consider it a mis-understanding. One must realize, though, that V2 Catholics think to arrange Church approval for Luther from their own continuing sense that Church approval is so important. V2 Catholics accordingly suppose that arranging for approval of Luther as a "saint" would be a nice thing to do. V2 types hold out hope that the papal ecclesiastical patriarchy will approve of them.
Abstractly consider'd, the "Reformation" "could have" gone much differently. However little Luther expected this from the pope the pope could have call'd a reform council and used Luther's complaints and proposals as the primary principles for a reform. This isn't absurd at all. Joseph Lortz, S.J., admits that Western Christianity was is rather a low ebb by 1517, although he insists that Luther should have used his tremendous energies and talents for reform within the Church. But the pope demanded silence of Luther and excommunicated (and anathematized) him. Difficult to work for reform within the Church when one is defined by the Church as a heretic and schismatic.
Luther's continued pleas sent to the Vatican for attention perhaps amused the officials for his apparent obtuse naivete that the pope would take a break from hunting and superintend reforms that would take Christian stuff seriously. Ostensibly naive superstition for the vulgus and for the intellectuals or clerisy humanist flimflam (plus sentimental tours of countryside rites when book-learning grows too boring) is the natural (Egyptian?) pattern of religiosity, and I suppose that Luther and Calvin saw that this pattern cannot be removed but only continually militated against by prophecy.
When a real papal-centred reform council was finally call'd in 1545, Luther is reported to have said "This comes a generation too late." Lortz argues that because the Church eventually did reform herself within, when the S.J. took over the Council of Trent and compel'd serious reform, this proves that Luther should have accepted being silenced (and perhaps even have agreed to go to Rome to be burnt at the stake). Well, perhaps. One can make the argument that institutional unity is possible only by royal principle, sc the pope's royal rule over the baptised. But royal rule alone is only a formal rinciple. One needs substance. Trent was possible as a real reform council only because of the royal rule of the S.J.'s General -- and because the S.J. had a substantive agenda. (Trent was going nowhere -- cardinals dancing in the evening with the upper class ladies of Rome, etc -- until the S.J. took over.)
Which really is to say that Martin Luther ought to have been Ignatius of Loyola. But would Ignatius of Loyola had been taken seriously by Roman Catholicism without Luther? "Christian" humanism plus countryside rituals (rite of the corn doll, etc, à la Robert Graves) weren't enough to preserve RC institutions.
Evelyn Waugh seems rather to admit that only because of the Reformation did Catholic laity take the mass seriously, and intellectuals have to take Christianity seriously -- no more reading Boccaccio when one ought to be following the missal (Saint Edmund Campion, p. 136).
Nietzsche feigns indignation that Luther restored Christian man -- by a 'slave revolt in morality' -- rather than falling down in gratitude at the highness of Renaissance man as higher man (Gay Science 357), as though Erasmus et al constitute a higher achievement than Homeric man, Old Testament man. ... Luther admits that the Roman curia "was once a gate of heaven" (Freedom of a Christian; Dillenberger ed., p. 47). Perhaps Ignatius of Loyola noticed this and consider'd how to make it so again.
And yet, as Waugh hints, the new Catholicism was based in considerations of honour (op cit, e.g. 29, 35, 45, 114) -- which laid it open to attack by Pascal who doesn't balk at declaring that the ego's task is hatred and dishonour, not 'honnêteté.'
Someone said (could have been a Straussian Catholic) "Protestantism isn't a religion for a gentleman." I think the retort was, "Catholicism isn't a religion for a believer."
Not that hating gentlemen and iconoclasm attains understanding of biblical revelation -- as Aquinas ostensibly tries to make clear.
"Being a good person" is okay for individuals, but not for population-group identity.
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It's as though MLK had said he dreamt of a day when everyone will be judged by their population group's collective career achievement résumé.
Supporting statement: parenthood is contemptible "staying home and baking cookies." I guess we all believe this. ... So much for Aristotelianism. But also, so much for Nietzsche. Maybe that's the point.
... Imagine thinking to compete for value in terms of 'greatness of soul' or 'liberality' rather than in terms of career achievement, SAT scores, semiotics expertise, etc! ... Or to compete for value in terms of faith, hope and love. ... But our entire "culture" would collapse if we noted that its a scramble for individual and group prestige in terms of IQ tests.
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