I have recently been re-reading (well, more like re-dipping into) Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (first published 1931), mainly because I prefer light (as in not weighing very much) reading when I am out and about in London, as I often am now.
The gist of this slim but profound and highly influential volume is that the past did not consist of people arguing about the same things as we argue about, and trying to do or to stop the same things as we are now trying to do and to stop. History is not a smooth ascending line during which perfection as we understand it slowly manifested itself, despite opposition of the same sort as we enlightened ones still face now. Monarchy, aristocracy, democracy. Religion, toleration, secularism. Tyranny, freedom. That kind of thing. The past had its own contending pre-occupations, its own contending definitions of progress. And just because something did lead to something else, that does not mean that they intended it to at the time. Recently I came across this illustration of these point. It fitted snugly onto page 60 of my 1971 paperback edition. You can find it about half way down this webpage:
The Reformation which is so often regarded as result and continuation of the Renaissance – a parallel movement of man’s expanding mind – might also be looked upon as a reassertion of religious authority in the world, a revolt against the secularization, the laxness and the sins of the time. Luther, who appeals to us so strongly as an innovator and a rebel against constituted authority, was behind everything else the religious leader, in a sense the revivalist – whose rebellion was only an incident in his great attempt to establish right religion in the world. Luther and Calvin were both alike in that they attacked the papal and medieval conception of the religious society; but it is doubtful whether the Biblical Commonwealth for which they laboured would have been any less severe in its control of the individual, or would have commended itself to these men if it had been less severe. And although the Bible has proved to be the most flexible of authorities and the most capable of progressive interpretation, it has yet to be demonstrated that the Reformers who used it to confound the Popes did not regard it as a more firm and rigid authority than the Roman tradition or the canon law, of which they seem to have condemned precisely the innovations and the development. Luther, when he was making his development of religious doctrine, was not hindered but was generously encouraged by his superiors in the Catholic Church, and he was not molested when, like so many other preachers of his day, he fulminated in his sermons against the common attitude to indulgences. One might say that the very action which precipitated the break with Rome was prompted by Luther’s own intolerance of what be deemed wrong religion in other people. It might be argued that what Luther rebelled against was not the severity but the laxity of the Popes.
I do not think that I am the only person reading this now who would say: Islamic Fundamentalism! And the comparison is made all the more telling by the fact that when Butterfield wrote this, about an earlier age of fundamentatlism, Islam was at about its all time low as a force in the affairs of the world. (Did Butterfield even entertain the thought of this comparison?)
It is often said, especially in blogs in our part of the political landscape, that what Islam needs is a Reformation. What this passage drives home is that Islam has already been having and is even now still having its Reformation, in the form of what we in the West call Islamic Fundamentalism. And this “Islamic Reformation” has indeed been a lot like the Reformation that we had. It is not that the currently raging Islamic Reformation has actually been, because similiar to ours, good. It is that our Reformation was not nearly so good (by our current Whiggish standards) as some of us imagine it to have been.
What, by our current liberally Whig standards, the Islamic world really needs is what followed our Reformation and all the religious and political turbulence it gave rise to: toleration. And, just as many of the voices speaking out for toleration during our Reformation were traditional and Catholic rather than modern and Protestant, as Butterfield makes clear, so now, many of the most eloquent arguers for toleration within Islam are those very exponents of traditional Islamic ideas whom the Islamic Fundamentalists now denounce for their laxity and lack of zeal.
And to all those who say: but Islam contains very few such persons, I reply: and Europe contained very few such persons at the time of Europe’s Reformation. Yet they eventually won.
Things can change. Europe’s history proves it.
I am well aware of the fact that this post demonstrates me to be in many ways an unreconstructed Whig. Indeed.
However, I do not believe that History is the story of the inexorable triumph of, approximately speaking, Whiggism. I merely say that it should have been, and that it should continue so to be.
Very interesting, and I tend to agree. I always find it hard to look at a violent fundamentalist without thinking of Cromwell. I don’t think the Islamic world of today is nearly as homogenous as the Christian world of the Reformation. Turkey and Indonesia have little enough in common, after all, and states like Egypt are busy oppressing the religious in the name of counter-terrorism, while states like Iran are busy oppressing the secular in the name of Islam.
I think if left to their own devices, the troubled areas of the Islamic world would regain their tolerance soon enough, albeit with an unpleasant revolution here, and civil war there, on the way. It is regrettable that other countries, from Turkey to Russia to China, Britain, France, and the US have been interfering for one reason or another for the last 150 years or so.
I believe that many people still regard secular tyranny as more acceptable, more advanced, and certainly more familiar than religious extremism. A dictator is merely a strong leader who’s got carried away, but the Taliban? Why, that’s mass insanity!
Destroying the Buddhas of Bamiyan was seen by many as the nadir of the Taleban – the ultimate manifestation of the destructive, insane, jealous irrational evil of islamic fanaticism. Those people would do well to take a walk around Britain’s older churches. The only reason we have so many noseless statues is because stone is hard to burn.
We recovered, and so will the Islamic world.
Interesting insight Brian though I fear you are teetering on the edge of historicism; the poverty of which the great Sir Karl Popper warned us against.
The past is not a guide to the future.
I think another thing to be wary of is that Islam is utterly unlike Christianity in its view of society, state and religion.
The Christian world has always had the concept that church and state are two quite separate things, although at various times they have been closely allied. In the Moslem world, Islam IS the state. Ayatollah Khomeini said:
What happened in the west is not certain (and indeed IMO unlikely) to happen with Islam – the two are so utterly different in several key respects.
No, history is not a (complete) guide to the future. However, if you wish to understand the present and have some idea of the future, you must first understand the past.
EG
Up to a point, Lord M. But people can be far too hard on the reformation. I’ll grant you that there was a bit of blood spilled in England, but the Scottish one spilled very little. It’s all very well caricaturing Cromwell, but he was pretty enlightened about the Jews – had he not been they would not have found such successfull sanctuary in Britain and the thirteen colonies. Both Elizabeth I and James VI and I set out to be tolerant: if the House of Saud were to adopt their standards…..
This talk of an “Islamic Reformation” is nonsense. Islam is an extremeist religion which promotes violence.
This is evident in Quran verses 4.34 which allows husbands to beat their wives, and 8.12 whch encourages the decapitating of non-believerss
Here are more examples in the Quran: http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/quran/cruelty/long.html(Link)
I agree. The doctrinal differences are immense. The New Testament is a text full of rhetoric urging its followers to be peaceful. Atrocities committed in the name of the Christian god were usually performed by people who couldn’t read, and were told they were acting in the name of god by being violent. Those who urged them on – clerics and political leaders – could, and did turn their backs on the message of their faith to forward their political ends. The Koran contains peaceful messages, but it has violent, bloody ones too. Moderate Muslims ignore the violent messages. Extremists embrace them, and they can do so independent of a cleric, because they can read. They can justify their violence along religious lines, because they are following the way their prophet lived as described in the Koran and other Muslim holy texts. I think it’s a long shot to suggest they’ll calm down, just like the Christian reformers did. Actually, the extremists may calm down when their circumstances change, however as soon as a large number of young Muslim men start to feel (for possibly very good reasons) persecuted and hard done by, they will more than likely start paying more attention to the bloodthirsty chapters of the Koran and absorbing these as part of their religious practice.
My point is, under certain circumstances a Muslim can mass-murder, rape (take concubines), take slaves etc in the name of their god. A Christian CAN NEVER do these things under any circumstance and claim to be acting in the name of their god.
You can point out the bits in the Bible which say slavery is wrong, or that whole tribes cannot be wiped out, or that one cannot take concubines, I assume?
EG
Not quite. Older writers like Belloc saw this much more clearly – Islam as an early ‘reformation’ or splitting off – from Catholicism. So the comparison would be to some extent between Calvin and Mohammed, Islam and Calvin’s religion; (albeit with massive doctrinal differences between the two)
Euan – I’m no biblical scholar. I’m sure there is something in the New Testament that forbids the taking of vassals – that deals with slaves and concubines, right?. And I’m willing to make a wager with you that the bits prohibiting murder have no exceptions making murder acceptable in certain circumstances ie. in the case of a “holy war”. Does the New Testament even mention holy war as a Christian act? I think Winzeler would be a helpful contributor to this discussion.
I’d always thought that protestant toleration, especially the Dutch, was an historical accident rather than a doctrinal matter. That in the Netherlands and in England the catholic minorities were simply too large to be easily done away with, and therefore the protestant authorities hoped evangelism would do what extermination couldn’t. What is more it took until the Enlightenment for there to be a genuine ideology of toleration. But lately I’ve been wondering if the conversion rather than warfare strategy was part of a larger eschatological program, rather in the manner of present day christian zionists. Perhaps someone with a better grasp of theology than I can let me know.
I dispute the underlying assumption that Luther rebelled against the Pope’s “religious laxity”. He rebelled against the Roman Catholic doctrine that the Pope determined church theology. Luther believed in the existence of Truth – specifically religious Truth, but was convinced that God wanted each individual to discover that truth for themselves. Like at university, we need the guidance of more experienced and educated guides for sure, but ultimately the individual must have an individual relationship with God. Furthermore, Luther and his adherents believed the “congregational” form of church structure was Biblical. In other words, each congregation was self ruling and could not impose its practices or doctrine on another congregation. However, congregations with similar practices and doctrines would voluntarily band togethor to do things such as missionary work or educate pastors. This was a direct threat to the Roman Catholic’s hiererarchal structure.
You may see how Luther helped spark the movement towards individual freedom. Knoweldge could not be dictated, each individual must use their intellect to study and aquire knowledge. Church structure was local and voluntary, not authoritarian and widespread. Unfortunately, many groups calling themselves Lutheran (including the state-run Prussian Lutheran Church and the current Evangelical Lutheran Chuch in American (ELCA)) look more like the Roman Catholic Church than the traditional Lutheran model. This has nothing to do with Luther. In fact it is along the lines of North Korea and China calling themselves “Democratic Republics”.
The whole point is, it was not the laxity of the Pope which offended Luther, but the centralized, authoritarian structure of the Roman Catholic Church which dictated religious dogma to automaton laypeople. Luther’s insistence on individual conscience and the autonomy of each congregation lay the groundwork for religious tolerance and a multi-plural society. To give an example of what Christianity would look like without Luther, here’s a quote from Dana’s “Two Years Before the Mast” regarding Roman Catholicism and the state in Mexican California: “No Protestant has any civil rights, nor can he hold any property, or, indeed, remain more than a few weeks on the shore, unless he belong to some vessel. Consequently, the Americans and English who intend to remain here become Catholics, to a man.” If not for Luther, you could expect a similar set of rules to continue to exist in most Christian countries. Thankfully, the Reformation broke the authority of the Pope and lay the ground work for each individual to follow his or her own conscience and religious convictions regardless of what Herbert Butterfield has to say on the matter.
Yup, I reckon you’re right, David. I was under the impression that Luther’s great revelation was that an ordinary layman must have a direct relationship with god – cut out the middleman (priest, archbishop, pope, etc). Obviously this had the effect of massively depleting the church’s authority, which is why they fought it so hard.
There is indeed nothing in the Bible, New Testament or Old, banning slavery, for either Jews (OT) or Christians (NT).
But the attitudes in Christianity and Islam towards govt. could not be further apart. Compare Jesus’ “render unto Caesar” with the Prophet’s personally leading jihad against cities that wouldn’t convert wholesale to Islam, and instructing his armies to kill every man, woman and child in them.
Islam is the only major world religion who’s founder personally engaged in genocide. And that’s a tough nut to crack.
I’m sure there’s something in the New Testament forbidding the acquisition of vassals. Or did it use the term ‘human chattels’ – I can’t remember.
The Bible is ambiguous towards the slave trade, perhaps because, like divorce, it was so widespread. On one hand you have passages such as 1 Timothy 9-11, “We also know that the law is made, not for the righteous, but for the lawbreakers and rebels, . . . for those who kill their fathers and mothers, for murderers, . . . for slave traders and liars and perjurers” and Paul’s direction to Philemon to treat his returning slave Onesimus, “not as a slave but as a fellow brother in Christ”. On the other hand the Bible constantly directs slaves to faithfully serve and obey their masters and masters to treat their slaves humanely.
Many commentaters have compared this to the Mosaic law regarding divorce and Jesus’ comments on divorce. According to Jesus, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.” In other words, God allowed Moses to create divorce laws only because humans insisted on the right to destroy their marriages. In the same way he allowed the creation of laws regarding slavery because humans insisted on enslaving each other. That God allowed the creation of rules to limit the consequences of actions he dissaproved of, such as slavery and divorce, should in no way indicate that God approved of these things.
At least that is the common understanding of these issues. I’m sure you can find someone who will disagree.
Euan, I generally respect your comments on this stuff, but you’re missing something. There is an extremely minute instance where genocide was condoned in the Bible -Jewish settlement of the Promised Land. By the way, according to the Bible, God picked the land he promised to the children of Israel because of the blatant idolotry of its inhabitants. It is a very exclusive instance. On the other hand even the Pentateuch (Mosaic Law) commands that the children of Israel were to completely respect and be hospitable to the “stranger within their gates,” remembering that they were once strangers in Egypt. The New Testament, which is the fulfillment (or completion) of the Old certainly provides for tolerance (note: of people, not religions). The New Testament also doesn’t advocate any kind of warfare to counter other religions, pagans, or unbelievers. Rather it suggests proselytization through teaching -a big difference.
I don’t think the Bible has ever specifically condemned slavery. That is a recent phenomenon.
Concubines, mistresses, and polygamy are talked about, but not condoned. In fact the New Testament clearly states that the leaders of the church are to be the husband of one wife. It also states that the leaders are the “rudder to the ship,” so to speak (first part of James 3), with the rest of the church modeling their behavior.
“It’s all very well caricaturing Cromwell, but he was pretty enlightened about the Jews ”
Good for Cromwell, but he was still a theocratic dictator. Admiration for and identification with Old Testament Israel is a core cultural feature of Calvinism. It was foundational to Manifest Destiny. It hasn’t always been “good for the Jews” either – by weird mutations it morphed into the virulently anti-Semitic Christian Identity movement in the US.
“This talk of an “Islamic Reformation” is nonsense. Islam is an extremeist religion which promotes violence.”
Begs the question. This is based on the conventional wisdom that the Reformation was somehow liberal and democratizing, which is the very assumption the post questions.
“I’d always thought that protestant toleration, especially the Dutch, was an historical accident rather than a doctrinal matter. ”
Trade had a lot more to do with it than doctrine. Profit was the only absolute moral criterion for Dutch Calvinists.
I think a comparison with the Catholic Counter-Reformation might be more accurate with regards to Islam.
Perhaps Erasmus is a better representative of the tolerant strain in Catholicism than Luther. Luther was necessary to stand up to the entrenched power of the Church and Erasmus to give the reformers a philosophical basis for toleration. If bin Laden is the Islamic Luther, who is the Islamic Erasmus?
I tend to agree, Brian. I am often very grateful to have been born into a relatively liberal society under the rule of law.
I often wonder if it was not the emergence of printing technology which played a greater role than anything else in the Enlightenment. Certainly when the population watchd while a few hundred indulgences were whacked out with a wooden block some must have been saying to themselves “Hey wait a minute, I’m having to pay very good money to the priest for that” Certainly Luther’s revolt against all wisdom emanating only from the priests created a new philosophy but it was the technology which enabled it to really go into effect.
And widespread literacy will prevent the bible from being misused by power hungry clerics.
Widespread literacy only increases the flock of power hungry clerics in the Islamic world.
They had a woman called Irshad Manji on the Today programme this morning. Brian, you might be slightly interested in her, if you haven’t come across her already. While preaching a form of modern liberalism in the name of Islam, she also claimed to be the traditionalist, where the “Islamofascists” (she used the term, and on the BBC too!) are the radicals.
I think it is very difficult for us to understand how small the world of a European peasant in 15th or 16th century truly was. It is much the same now with the average Muslim. Little education or knowledge of the rest of the world, primacy of one religious viewpoint which is much more all encompassing than we can imagine, a closed and repressed society that has always been that way.
The conflicts between the various factions in Christendom were utterly viscious, and went on for generations. It will hardly be surprizing if the disputes between the various factions of Islam are every bit as nasty.
It has often been said that the most bloodthirsty fights are those between versions of the same belief system (see the bolsheviks vs the Mensheviks) whether religion is directly involved or not. Since Christianity and Islam are both heresies of Judaism, it isn’t so unusual that they are all at each others’ throats, but tragic nonetheless.
It isn’t true belief that is the culprit, but the lack of a specific deference to the right of an individual conscience to ascertain God in its own way. As in so many areas of life, it is the denial of the individual as an entity which possesses rights inherent to his own existence which causes so much grief and bloodshed.
What a coincidence. I was blogging about the Reformation the other day, comparing and contrastring it to, of all things, the plot of a three-part episode of Star Trek: Enterprise from earlier this year.
The main concern of the Reformation was the definition of canon. The relationship between church and state was a theme of certain portions of the Enlightenment. When people who say they want an Islamic Reformation, they really mean (probably unknowingly) an Islamic Enlightenment. What they want jives more with Samuel Rutherford and John Locke than with Luther and Calvin.
Perhaps I should have said “A critical concern…” instead. Political independence from Rome was perhaps just as important, at least to certain reformers. Perhaps even more so in the case of Henry VIII – at least that’s the impression I get from the history books.
(While my knowledge of the era that gave birth to the C of E is somewhat limited, “reformation” is not the first word I would use to describe it.)
Back to Muslims…one of the biggest obstacles to (Lockean) Enlightenment in the Islamic world is the Koran’s apparent incompatability with the notion of fully privatized religion – at least that’s what certain ex-Muslims say. Mohammad’s history certainly offers no such precedent. The officially-Christian nations had state religion because a) all countries had it, so it was deemed normal and proper, and b) Christendom accepted the heresy that they could scarf up theocratic authority that, according to the Torah, God gave to somebody else.
Christendom could eventually get rid os state religion without Derrida-esque Biblical spin. Jesus never made political prescriptions, but He championed the individual over the status quo and rule of law over rulers; these ideas became cornerstones for Rutherford, Locke, and their philosophical kin.
Can Islam do the same? Muslim scholars will have to argue some sort of dispensationalist theory, that Mohammad’s mission of evangelism through conquest was binding then but not now.
It’s the Madrassas. Typical timetable:
Prayers, Lesson 1 The Koran
Prayers, Lesson 2 The Koran
Prayers, Lesson 3 The Koran
Etc
Second day, same as the first and so on.
There is no hope and no enlightenment in a culture like this even with the availability of the printing press, the internet, television, broadcasting or anything else.
The following is relevant in an oblique way. Comments are appreciated
Back to the Future:
The Public Purpose of a Collection of Incunabula Leaves
“If the printing press was the enabling technology for the rise of the nation state, what will digital communications enable? The erosion of the nation state?”
By Donn F. Downing
Their number now exceeds 500. In the opinion of one respected antiquarian book dealer, the collection of incunabula leaves may be the largest in private hands, as distinguished from those housed in the world’s great libraries or making up inventories of dealers in the business of buying and selling them. They are citizens of the first 50 years of print technology in the West, ending arbitrarily in 1500. Within just 50 years, 10 to 20 million textual volumes were printed by well over 200 printers in Europe, more texts than had ever been produced over the a thousand years of scribal copying. Their interest and significance to a digitally connected and networked post-9/11 world lifts them out of the realm of mere antiquarian interest. For this reason the collection seeks and deserves to find a public purpose.
In 1500 Europe was a global stepchild, massively overshadowed by the great civilizations of China and the Islamic world. Anyone accurately predicting the unintended consequences of print technology would have been branded a heretic and burned. Those consequences – the fragmenting of Catholic Europe, the Protestant Reformation and Counter Reformation, the replacement of Latin by the vernacular (a necessary preliminary to the establishment of the nation state), and the spread of secular and scientific texts that drove the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and an era of information overload. Elizabeth Eisenstein, in her book “The Printing Press as an Agent of Change” argues convincingly that printing was nothing less than the enabling technology underlying these movements that over generations helped drive Western global dominance. The printing press accelerated European connectivity, the matrices of relationships beyond family, clan and tribe that was a foundation of the “rise of the West,” something Einstein once called “the European miracle.”
Consider this. In 1795 Napoleon established the first secular printing press in Cairo one of the several hearts of the Islamic world. And while the secure and tolerant attitude of Islamic princes permitted printers of Jewish and Christian religious texts, a printed Koran was not acceptable. Printing threatened the fundamental oral and calligraphic transmission of the work, which along with the familiar (to the Christian and Jewish world) prohibition against imagery, occupied a central role for communication that underlay the calligraphic state, preventing any struggle to navigate the field between spirit and matter, the sacred and the secular.
That same year Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”, a response to Edmund Burke’s attack on the French Revolution, had been in print in England for three years. Paine was the philosophical mate of Thomas Jefferson and author of the first American best seller – “Common Sense,” a book with a circulation then that rivals Harry Potter today. Before “Rights of Man” went out of print in 1810, 1.5 million copies had been printed and sold. That represents one book for every tenth man, woman and child in England, Scotland and Wales.
For such demand and saturation to occur, layers of historical, cultural and even cognitive (see note below) events had to already be in place. The end of Europe’s lethal religious wars, relatively high literacy rates, the infusion of secular ideas, the idea of a civil authority separate from religious authority had to be in play. By then Erasmus and Luther’s attack on the authority of Rome had already occurred, the Reformation and Counter Reformation were past history, Latin had declined in favor of vernacular literatures and national identities, an English king had lost his head, the Enlightenment and science established, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Harvey, Spinoza and many others had published. Finally, Hobbes and Locke had published, introducing a contractual theory of government, a concept internalized by Jefferson. In short Europe’s printing presses had been chugging along for over 300 years and the unintended consequences of the printing press had mostly played out.
In a Rand Corporation study recently, James Dewar concluded that digital technology and the Information Age will see change as dramatic as that of the printing press in the middle ages and a future that will be dominated by unintended consequences. Dewar’s central point is that unlike print, broadcast, television and film technology, all examples of communication between the one and the many , the very definition of mass communication, networked computers and digital communication are the enabling technology for communication between the many and the many. This is not just a difference in degree. This is a difference in kind. One of the many unintended consequence of digital technology – the linkup between virtual diasporas of peoples, identities, beliefs, nationalities and civilizations – is currently underway. Collapsing time and geographical space, linked diasporas includes the Islamic world, a suggestion of Islamic specialists, continuing a reformation that began years prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Only occasionally might you see the Islamic reformation on television. The twin towers on 9/11 comes to mind, an example of the Islamic equivalent of a counter reformation says Reza Aslan, author of “No god but God.” This reformation is mostly digital and like an iceberg, barely visible above the surface of the sea.
If then digital communication produces comparable generations of unintended consequences as print technology, a collection of printed leaves might prove to be a useful traveling resource and component for libraries, educational institutions, conferences and other public venues to make the quiet point that the road ahead may be nearly as long as the road behind. Why nearly? While the circulation of books, letters, pamphlets, etc. – the circulation of a text based culture – can be measured in months, years and decades for some texts, digital circulation – the measure of a visual and image based culture – beyond geographies and borders is measured in minutes, hours and months.
A collection of printed leaves has the advantage of emphasizing print technology over content. And since they do not have great value as rarities (compared with books of the period) or great scholarly interest, they need not be locked up in national libraries, whether private or public. In short they can travel and form a living component of an audio-visual display.
Indeed they may even be handled. There is a kind of magic in this, the handling of a 500-year-old printed manuscript, where that marginal smudge could be the thumb print of a reader, a printer or the residue of a 500-year-old stew left on a page late at night as a candle guttered and outside, a cold wind moaned.
(Note: Cognitive studies of the brain function has established that reading a text lights up the brain’s left hemisphere, the site of linear, sequenced, analytical and logical thought modes, while a shift in attention to a television screen of computer monitor engages the right hemisphere, the site of holistic, non-logical states of being. See “The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image”, by Leonard Shlain)