Posted on 11/19/2002 12:15:15 PM PST by LiteKeeper
Come on now, TQ. You can do better than that. There has actually been new historical research done on these events in the past 113 years
This alleged execution of 2,000 is unfootnoted and is given no primary source.
It's a bald assertion. Where did Fiske get this number? The same place he fabricated his 75,000 Dutchmen - a number which even he agrees is exaggerated?
The fact is, the population of the Spanish Netherlands was probably not even 2 million people in the XVIth century. Are we to believe that one out of every 25 adults was burned at the stake?
The numbers casually thrown about for religious executions in medieval Europe are almost always grossly exaggerated.
As for the proportion you mention, it is by a lot smaller than the killings of the XX century (in Russia and China, for instance).
Anything can be dismissed as anti-Catholic propaganda. At the same time, I found the ending of the Catholic ENcyclopedia article rather interesting: the Albigensian "herecy was finally suppressed by ..." (I do not recall the year). No regrets even 800 years later. Thank G-d; it was menace; it was hard to get rid of; we finally did it.
The Albigensians believed that intentionally starving oneself to death and starving one's infant children to death were good things. They also believed that killing another person was an act of mercy, since physical reality reality was evil - that the world was created by the Devil instead of God. They were a death cult similar to the Solar Temple or Aum Shinryko.
The fact that Albigensianism stopped spreading was a very positive development for the human race.
You won't find the Catholic Encyclopedia saying that the Spanish Inquisition was a good thing just because it kept Spain Catholic. The Catholic Encyclopedia realizes that the Spanish Inquisition was an egregious example of the abuse of power, while the Albigensian example was a matter of civilization fighting for its life.
As for the factor of ten, try a factor of a thousand. There are people who will claim with a straight face that 100,000,000 people instead of 6,000 were executed by the Spanish Inquisition. That's right - people who claim that four times as many people as live in all of 21st century Spain were executed in Southern Spain in the 1500s.
The fact is that in the XVIth century the Dutch were engaged in a civil war against the Spanish throne. I'm sure that something like 50,000 people died over the course of this conflict. But separating purely religiously motivated executions from political assassinations and executions for treason is pretty much impossible. There was a Calvinist army fighting Catholic troops - every encounter would have some religious aspect to it.
If Fiske is going to chalk up the deaths of Protestants in Holland to pure religious bigotry, then he'll have to add all the Irish and Northern Scottish deaths and land clearances to England's and Protestantism's balance sheet. But he's already ruled that out - since he feels that the tender mercies of Cromwell in Ireland can't be compared to the brutality of the Spanish Throne in Holland.
From little that I know, I understand that Albigenses were rather extreme in their beliefs. I also understand that, when looking back this many centuries, one has to view that world through the standards of that time. Yet, I do not find it normal to write about a mass slaughter matter-of-factly. The human sacrifice of the Incas was not up to our standards of civility, and yet I cannot imagine that someone would write today, "They have been finally wiped out by ..." And if someone did, I would consider that an abomination.
As for the insane people who claim that millions and millions were killed by inquisition, thank you for letting me know; this is new for me; the claim is clearly ridiculous. However, Fiske is one of the majot historians of the XIX century, he knows the difference between "slaughtered for herecy" and "killed in fighting." I suspect that you have read something by him, and can attest yourself that, while his interpretations may be in question, his motivations are not.
I certainly hope that you do not question my motivations either: it is not my intention to show the Church in a bad light (in fact, I wish it was more proactive in claiming its rightful place in history of Europe, as Pope only recently asserted). Yet, the ending of the article on Albigenses did leave a bad feeling in my mouth. Despite your very informative reply, which I read with great interest, that feeling has not dissipated, I am sorry to say.
I don't know; I stopped upon reading the sentence ...
For several centuries, scientists have set the standards of truth for Western culture. And their undeniable usefulness in helping us organize, analyze, and manipulate facts has given them an unprecedented importance in modern society.
... and realized that the author thought he could "manipulate" facts.
I hold that words mean things, and that "facts" are facts until proven otherwise.
Here's the scenario: Spanish soldiers are sent to Holland by their king, who also happens to be the duke of Ghent and sovereign of other areas in Holland. They are foreign troops sent in to quell a rebellion.
They are attacked by partisans or militia from a local town. They roll into the town, don't speak the language, have little means of determining who's hostile and who's neutral. They kill all the men of fighting age, since they have no other practical means of neutralizing the threat.
This is certainly a war crime. It's despicable behavior. They shouldn't even be in a country that's not their own at war with people who have no quarrel with them personally. They're analogous to the Hessians in America during the Revolutionary War.
That's the human situation as it probably was on the ground: emperor's occupation forces march into a village that's offering guerrilla resistance and sheltering rebel troops. The occupiers kill all the menfolk. The way it reads to Fiske is this: Papist soldiers invade a righteous Protestant village and kill all the Godfearing men of that town whose only crime was to read their Bible. Chalk that up as 300 people executed for heresy by the Roman Church.
That's Fiske's spin - I'm not saying he's making it up (although he admits that 75,000 is a bit high), but that he's interpreting it in a sense amenable to his thesis.
As far as the Albigensians are concerned - the Catholic Encyclopedia does not say that the war was well and righteously conducted and the outcome was wonderful. It's more like: what if a few thousand Muslim fanatics took over a swath of southern Michigan and started instituting Sharia law and killing people who defied Sharia. Then the Michigan National Guard units come in - they're overzealous and kill a hundred thousand Muslims, killing fanatics along with many more who were just along for the ride. My reaction: it really is a shame about all those people who died who may or may not have sympathized with the jihad in Southern Michigan, but thank God those jihadis were stopped and they can no longer use America's heartland as a base of terrorist operations.
Substitute Albigensians for Muslims, the Languedoc for Southern Michigan and Christendom for America and you've captured the Encyclopedist's sentiment.
The Albigensian War wasn't pretty - but consider the alternative: a fanatical death cult conquering the heart of Europe.
Catholics, being a very large aggregation of human beings, have inevitably done some pretty inexcusable things, are doing some inexcusable things (like the disgracefully evil pedophilia scandal) and will continue to do inexcusable things, I'm afraid.
And we should be prepared to answer for them.
At the same time there are always those who exaggerate things and present things in a worse light than is really justified.
America is an English-speaking, largely Protestant society, and therefore most English-language medieval historiography that Americans encounter comes from a triumphal, XIXth century Protestant perspective as far as the Church is concerned.
Fiske would never mention Margaret Clitheroe, for example. She was a pregnant mother of nine children who was formally charged with the crime of allowing a Catholic priest to say Mass in her home. She was put on trial, tortured, and then slowly crushed to death with millstones over a period of ten hours while a large crowd of the sensitive, compassionate British Protestants Fiske writes of cheered loudly.
Some of the crowd were so delighted that they composed ballads and poems celebrating her gruesome death, some of which have come down to us.
Catholics aren't the only ones who should hang their heads inj shame about that period in Western history.
But both Protestants and Catholics can demonstrate that they have changed their ways and have moved their discourse to a much higher and more humane level. That's something of which Marxism, for example, has proved incapable so far.
So as long as people like you keep forcing us to reexamine our past, I have high hopes for the future.
(1) Traditional Catholic: Albigensians were evil and vicious.
(2) Traditional Protestant: The Albigensians disobeyed the Pope, so they must have been some kind of proto-Protestants and therefore really good guys.
(3) Postmodern revisionist: The Albigensians rejected the hegemonic power structures of their day, so they must have been really good guys.
The primary sources are spotty - they left little behind in the way of testimony on their own behalf - partially because they were doomsdayers who didn't see the point in scribbling while the world was ending, partially because the Church burned their recruiting materials and partially because the Provencal language they spoke died out and any remaining documents that were left behind were probably unintelligible within a couple of generations and were thrown away or overwritten.
There are sources from Churchmen which divide roughly into two groups: clergymen who worked for the King of France, who had a vested interest in putting the Albigensians in as bad a light as possible - such as accusing them of human sacrifice, cannibalism and sorcery; and clergymen who were engaged in debating them and trying to convert them - these are the ones who delved more deeply into their theology and beliefs.
There are a few scholarly articles that examine the later sources - clergymen who tried to familiarize themselves with Albigensian doctrine and practice - and try to read in b etween the lines to get a clearer picture.
I'll try and find the articles' titles and authors.
Basically their theology was an interesting mix of two older heresies which seem to have been imported from the Near East: Manichaeanism and Marcionism.
From Manichaeanism they got the concept of having a ruling class of mystics who were kind of like what we call gurus. They also adopted the idea that physical matter was evil and that eating and sex, even marital intercourse, was sinful.
From Marcionism they got the idea that the God of the Old Testament was the Devil and that he created the physical universe. They adopted Marcion's practice of removing large parts of the Bible, including the Old Testament and many Gospel passages as demonic additions to the Scriptures.
They had one sacrament called the consolamentum - it was given to those who were perfecti, those who had successfully starved themselves. They believed that property ownership was carnal and therefore evil. They rejected social distinctions and were genrally very collectivistic.
Frankly, I would not mind if someone were to provide openly subjective accounts but then were at least comprehensive. Thank you very much for an integrative introduction into the subject.
P.S. Most people, although not always a majority, realize that individuals are fallible and sinful --- worse, capable of inflicting onto others great amounts of undeserved pain, such as the case of the poor Catholic woman you described. Early social psychologists have demonstrated that experimentally (in the 50s, a famous experiment, but the names of the authors escape me at the moment). Consequently, the behavior of individuals from the perspective of their religions is not much of a puzzle.
What is harder to assess is the structure and behavior of institutions. Since the structure determines, to a great extent, the spectrum of actions, one may therefore entertain the question as to the viability of the current structure of that institution. This is what one does when comparing the constitutions. One could argue also that Marxism, to which you alluded earlier, was incapable of the progress achieved in temporal matters by the Christian world, precisely because it is bound to deteriorate into a nightmare; its very structure leads to the perpetual violence against the citizens.
Similarly, when one looks today at Inquisition, for instance, it is hardly surprising to see the ability of people to be so nasty to each other. Regrettable, but not surprising: not after the atrocities of the XX century that dwarfed whatever the Inquisition ever did in scale and degree. The question that is more interesting is whether an institution has checks and balances that prevent it from abuse of the purpose for which it is created. Could the Inquisition have been avoided? Can there be Marxism with the human face?
These are valid lines of inquiry. Unfortunately, it is also convenient for the bigots to be used as a cover. I understand that, as a result, it may not be easy for a Catholic to hear such question. The inquirer's perspective matters: it differentiates the search for truth from venting of prejudice. This is a favorite vehicle of the educated bigots: "See, I am not against Catholics (Jews, Roma, etc.), I am merely discussing an issue." Yet, when you examine the standards of inquiry, they show a different picture. We witness today much the same thing from anti-Semites with respect to Jews ("I am not against them, I just disagree with Israel") and anti-capitalists and Marxists with respect to our country ("I am a real American, I just disagree with Bush"). I think it is precisely because of the admixture of the two that it is hard to come by a decent analysis of social institutions.
Regards, TQ.
Dang it - I hate it when that happens. Here I am, ready to post, when I find that someone's already said what I wanted to say, and done a better job of it than I could have anyway. ;)
I think that Marxism and Catholicism are different in this way: that Marxism believes itself to be scientific, and that it can achieve specific results by using specific measures. It is a central tenet of Marxism that human nature is pliable and that a perfect society can be produced by economic manipulation and force.
Catholicism, conversely, believes that no human society can be perfect and that there will always be sin in the world. Moreover Catholicism believes, per the doctrine of Original Sin, than human nature is essentially inalterable by human means. Catholicism seeks a perfect society in the New Jerusalem after the Last Judgment.
And as far as checks and balances are concerned, Marxism necessarily has none. It is a total and totalizing ideology.
Catholicism has two checks: Scripture and Tradition. Scriptural interpretation in the Church has always been multifaceted - there has never been a literalist majority among exegetes. No Pope can change what his predecessors have taught - although there have been Popes who were absolutely repulsive in terms of their personal behavior, there has never been a "rogue Pope" on matters of doctrine or moral teaching. Alexander VI acknowledged that fornication was immoral even while he practiced it. It would never have occurred to him to declare fornication morally acceptable just because he enjoyed it.
Marxism, by its very nature, demands full control of the State. Even in the middle of the Middle Ages there was a very healthy debate raging between advocates of papal sovereignty and advocates of the distinction between ecclesiastical and secular government. Dante Alighieri, author of the Divine Comedy is probably the most famous, the most archetypal Catholic writer and poet in history. He lived at the turn of the 1300s. Yet he openly rebuked Popes he disagreed with and championed the political cause of the Emperor against the Pope even while he lived in the Papal Kingdom.
So within the Church of the Middle Ages there was a freedom of political thought unimaginable to those who lived in the "enlightened" First French Republic or the Bolshevik regime of Lenin - a freedom of political thought analogous to that of the pre-Civil War USA.
And the Church certainly encouraged scientific research. Albertus Magnus reintroduced the methods of scientific experiment to Europe in the XIIIth century by trying to replicate the biological research of Aristotle. He was much admired for his intellectual accomplishments and became the general of the Dominican Order, one of the three most powerful religious orders in the Church. He established schools throughout Germany and France.
One of these schools became the Sorbonne, where a French friar named Jean Buridan formulated a theory which would later become the First Law of Thermodynamics.
And few critics of the Church acknowledge that Copernicus was a Catholic priest who taught at a papally-approved University and that he lectured on his theories quite openly in Rome fifty years before Galileo was born.
This kind of freedom of research contrasts quite favorably with Lysenkoism.
wideawake, if you remember from our collaboration on the Broder article, Broder has a web forum.
Yesterday I posted that in my opinion, the way out of the current mess for Germany (and Europe) is a return to the roots of bourgeois (in the non-derogatory sense) society: Christianity (although I'm Jewish, I don't think Europe can become a Judeo-Christian society like the U.S.), family, and the enlightenment.
Two people responded, one largely agreeing with me, the other said, "Christianity and the enlightenment are mutually incompatible. And 'family' is on the wane anyway." No explanation, no reasoning, no sign of critical self-examination.
To be fair, I too had not gone to great lengths to argue my point, but at least I spent some time discussing the severe problems Germany is in. If you're interested, I've summarized the key points of an article by historian Arnulf Baring on this topic here.
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