"Pusey in a Blue Coat" : The religious views of William Gladstone

Gladstone Religion
IN our exploration of Gladstone the Victorian Titan we now turn to perhaps the most important source of his political views- the way in which his religious views shaped the views of the latter Gladstone the “Grand Old Man”.

This was absolutely central to Gladstone’s political thought as is very well shown by Matthew’s work and more generally in Gladstonian scholarship. This can be seen partly as a significant part of the rediscovery of the central role of religion in the Victoria era. IT also reflects the expansion of scholarshi8p on Gladstone-and access to Gladstone’s own papers and Diary. It’s also represents the slow overcoming of the negative legacy of his official biographer.

His official biographer was John Morley one of Gladstone’s closest political allies. IN terms of the role of religion however he was badly chosen. For while Morley’s politics were close to Gladstone’s own his religious views as a “freethinker” (that is an opponent of the claims of organised religion) could scarcely be more different. Unsurprisingly he did not do their central role of the latter in the former justice.

IN order to access the effect of these it is necessary first of all to establish the nature of these views. The mature Gladstone was not an evangelical it needs to be strongly emphasised. He had it is true come from an evangelical background particularly his devout mother. Several of the Gladstone children moved far away from this theology. One Robertson at one point Mayor of Liverpool become I think a Unitariain that is a denier of the Trinity the central doctrine shared by Catholics and Protestants alike . Another the possibly mentally unstable Helen became a Roman Catholic at one point using some works of Anglican divines as toilet paper.

William Gladstone moved less far but still far from his background. HE was an early enthusiast for the “oxford movement” that is the revival of Catholicism within the Church of England. This was to take him far from central evangelical themes such as the sufficiency of scripture and faith alone as the road to salvation. Despite this many seem today under the impression he was an evangelical. The writer had one conversation with a well informed historian (albeit not of this era) who was sure he was a nonconformist (that is a Protestant non Anglican) .

Many commentators have empathised supposed evangelical roots of his character and thought often in the teeth of the evidence in way that’s hard not to ascribe to prejudice or ignorance . One common one is the supposed evangelical roots of his emphasis on moral discipline and mortification. In Fact Gladstone like much of the early Oxford movement (the same was true of John latter Cardinal) Newman was partly attracted to it because he saw evangelicalism particularly with it’s emphasis on salvation through faith and a single moment of decision as insufficiently committed to the development of moral discipline and character.

They thus joined the growing “Catholic” element in the Church of England-one that was less Protestant and closer to the Church of Rome than any salient faction had been in the established churches of the British Isles for centuries the movement initially known as the “oxford movement” ( the university where it had arose in the 1830’s) has often become known as Anglo-Catholicism . IT was to develop into a broad group including those who agreed with the Roman Church doctrine on virtually every issue (even to the extent of denouncing many catholic priests as too Protestant) as well as those who had various problems with “catholic” doctrine whether the traditional Protestant objections or others.

So what was Gladstone’s personal version of Christianity? He was called by John Keble's the movement's founder “Pusey in a blue coat” –Pusey was one of the founders of the Oxford Movement one who left Protestant doctrines behind but remained Clearly distant from the Church of Rome. So for example he donated money (to the furry of some of the “higher” or more Catholic members of the Oxford Movement ) and rejected the official Roman Catholic understanding of Papal authority. This is quite a good way of understanding Gladstone’s theological views which were both Catholic and a long way from Rome.

On the one hand he was very clearly not a traditional Protestant. He believed for example that the communion service had a real effect in causing salvation, he emphasised a Priesthood ordained by bishops as central to the full Christian faith and saw the church in institutional and historic terms marked by these marks. That is in direct contradiction is contrary to the evangelical (and with some ifs and but the more broadly protestant insofar as it was separate) conception of the church as a union of believers. Gladstone’s belief in the Church as an institutional body with different national parts and compositions (and including Roman Catholics) was to be central to his politics. It was also bitterly controversial seen as heretical at a time when such things still mattered for politics. Gladstone was for eighteen years the mp for Oxford University (graduate of the universities had constituencies of their own untill the Atlee government). His deposition as mp for their, was significantly to the candidate of the “low church and anti-Puseyite party”.

On the other hand he was no Roman Catholic. Many Catholic doctrines he opposed even with abhorrence including their beliefs on the Virgin Mary. He was happy with the Book of Common Prayer (The Anglican liturgy) inherited from the Reformation and unlike many “Anglo Catholics” saw no reason to change it. Most significantly of all he saw the Pope as the foremost bishop of Christendom. The declaration of “Papal Infallibility” by the Vatican Council (though a more nuanced doctrine than the name suggests ) in 1870 sparked of a virulent polemic against it from Gladstone. This distance from Rome is perhaps significant though for complex reasons most British Catholic voters inclined overall to the left most English Catholic intellectuals were not on the left- and they certainly were rarely Gladstonian progressives.
Nonetheless it should be noted that Anglo Catholics including those with distance from Rome were rarely “Gladstonian” either, indeed they tended to be strongly conservative (though some were early Socialists). Indeed Gladstone himself when early an Anglo Catholic had been a “stern and unbending” Tory. Lord Salisbury had unsually close theology indeed it's important for the history of the Church of England that two such powerfull politicans were so sympathetic to the "ritualists" whom there was huge popular and lay pressure to expel from the Chruch of England).But Salisbruyt had very different political views from Gladstone So it is to the way he developing a “liberal” politics on the basis of his religious convictions to which we will now turn.

The picture above is of the same Pusey whose theology so closed matched Gladstone's

The death of Decius

Manlius sacraficed his son to Roman authority: Livy presents a second sacrafice to Rome therefore which brings back to my mind at least the second aspect of Roman authority- religion. The consul Decius commanded one wing of the Roman army against the Latins: Manlius the other. On Decius's flank the battle went badly and then Decius shouted to Marcus Valerius who blessed him and bade him put on his toga.

Then he girded up his toga in the Gabine manner, leaped fully armed on to his horse and rode into the midst of the enemy- a sight to admire for both armies, almost superhuman in its nobility as if sent from heaven to expiate allthe anger of the Gods and deflect disaster from his own people to the Latins. Thus the terror and panic in every form which Decius brought with him...penetrated deep into the Latin army.... and when he finally fell beneath a rainof missiles, from that moment there was no doubt that the Latin cohorts were thrown into complete confusion VIII 9

This incident is fascinating: obviously it describes something Livy admired. Decius's actions are the epitome of the Roman who throws away his own life to save his country: unlike Manlius's he sacraficed his own life- an unproblematic moment.

They also record something it is right to consider: for Livy here provides us an example of religious enthusiasm. In a peculiar sense Decius is a kind of martyr- unlike Christian or Muslim martyrs he does not die to justify a faith- rather Decius dies to justify an army to his Gods. In the first case the act of martyrdom says something about the individual's relationship with God, in the second the martyrdom, as Livy presents it (and as usual we have no idea of whether this happened or not) justifies the city to the Gods. The nature of the religious relationship has subtly changed between say Decius's sacrafice and Diocletian's persecution.

Daniel and Universal History

Arnaldo Momigliano argues in a collection published in 1987 (the essay was first published in 1979) that the sources of modern universal history lie in Greece and Israel. The Greek tradition was mainly in the hands of non-historians: Hesiod who wrote before any of those that we normally consider historians (Hecateus, Herodotus and Thucydides are normally considered the first) formulated the first univeralist structure for history. Hesiod posited several ages- an iron succeeding gold, silver, heroic and bronze. There were other schemes available to the Greek universalist- that of ages, leading from youth to senility, something picked up by Romans who as late as Marcellinus in the fourth century compared Roman age to barbaric youth, and that of cultures perhaps expressed first by Hecateus and then carried on by others. Greek historians though were mostly interested in political history- Herodotus uses the idea of a succession of empires, Babylonian, Mede, Persian, to structure his non-Greek history. Others turned to the same idea- adding the Macedonian empire after the Persian once Alexander had acheived his conquests.

Momigliano talks about this using the familiar tools of close textual analysis. Perhaps as interesting though is where he takes up this narrative of empire and suggests that it became fused with the Hebraic apocalypticism visible in Daniel. Daniel is an odd book of the bible: it is one of two that appear to have been written in two languages- Hebrew and Aramaic. It concerns a figure Daniel- who we can locate in Middle Eastern literature right back to the 14th Century BC- and yet it places him in the reign of Belthazzar, the legendary successor of Nebuchudnezzar. Furthermore as Momigliano suggests it shows clear signs of being compiled- chapters 7-12 were compiled with a clear knowledge of the politics of the court of Antiochus IV which the previous chapters do not show. Incidentally Daniel also shows ignorance of contemporary events: there never was a 'Darius the Mede'! But more importantly the book interestingly separates into two parts- the first Momigliano argues was written when the Jews still believed in their place in the Seleucid Empire, its tone ressembles that of the Book of Esther and the second was written under Antiochus, referring to things like an unhappy marriage for one of his predecessors.

What is interesting about Daniel though is that whoever wrote it seems to have absorbed the Greek idea of a succession of world empires. In Daniel obviously these are the four human empires followed by the fifth divine empire- Hebrew apocalypticism has been imported into a Greek scheme. There is no echo outside of the Greek tradition of this scheme according to Momigliano and he submits that this must be an influence on Daniel- one of the first instances of the long story by which Greek philosophy and Hebrew theology became wedded together. Its an interesting argument and I leave the analysis of its truth to others: Momigliano does not fully develop it in his piece and more could be done to work with and through it but the argument that Daniel's structure owes much to Greek influence does not seem stupid and reminds us once again that the story of the Jewish and Christian Bible is not that of an unbroken single tradition, but rather of a conversation and impulses to record at different points in time.

Cuthbert and Durham

The County Palatinate of Durham was a unique jurisdiction in medieval England. Independent of the crown and ruled by its bishop, the local nobility asserted their independence of the rest of England and of obligations such as knight service that other nobles held. What this book review in the Medieval Review explains is that that resistance was grounded upon a political motive- which should be obvious to most- but also upon a spiritual language. The nobility asserted their rights as the successors to those who had guarded the remains of St Cuthbert as they made their journey from Lindisfarne to Durham under Viking assault. What you have here therefore is the independence of a part of England being buttressed and described by a saintly and spiritual motif: religion provides the legitimacy for the County Palatinate to exist and exist free of the interference of London and the rest of the Kingdom.

Some things memorably considerable in the conditions, Life and Death of the ever blessed and now eternally happy Mris Anne Bovves

Of all the multitude of sins in the English civil war, one that still hits home is bad poetry- take this from a hagiographical pamphlet dedicated to Anne Bovves and published in 1641:

Never fleshe lesse fear'd to dye
Nor soul fled more cheerfully

The rhyme does not work and the rhythm of the two lines is completely distinct. However as a means to close off the pamphlet the sentiment is right. The argument of the pamphlet is about Anne Bovves's religious leanings and the way that she died. She was born in 1598/9 and died at the age of 41 in 1640. She appears to have been unmarried, living in close congress with her brother and his family (like one imagines many single women of the time) who fulfilled her as far as a social life goes. Apart from that we know very little from the pamphlet about Anne Bovves- the writer rather than going into the particulars of her life includes some generic compliments, we get praise of her faithfulness, modesty, pity, gratefulness, business, forgiving nature and much else of the same tint- leading of course to a commendation of 'the excellence and sweetnesse of her naturall disposition'- but that does not tell us much about who Anne Bovves was and why we should remember her.

The reason I think for this is that the writer, whoever he or she was, of the tract is less interested in Anne than in Anne as an example of a religious life. In that sense all those conventional epithets make sense- you could tie them to Anne but equally they are things anyone could acheive. Hence I think it is interesting to look at the latter part of the pamphlet in which the writer defines Anne's religious practice- both the writer and Anne have a particular position within the theological struggle of the seventeenth century and reading what the author says about his subject allows us some access to what a normal person might be expected to do if they were a puritan. The first thing that we should note is that Anne was not, as modern commentators (and not historians believe) averse to 'Musick, sportings and divers Christmas solemnities'. She also took dreams and indications from the almighty seriously- in her last days her conviction that she would go to heaven and was redeemed by God was confirmed by the vision of a 'white sheet or a large foure square linnen cloath... let down to her by cords from heaven'. Anne's religious nature accepted both dancing and dreams.

The tone of the pamphlet's description of Anne's religion places her for me into the puritan side o the debate. She was 'for certain inwardly and ardently most religious', a 'severe judg of her selfe: a dayly weeping and broken-hearted penitent: never satisfied enough in the strength of her faith, measure of repentance and sufficiency of charity'. Priests in the pamphlet are called 'ministers'- something Archbishop Laud had striven to drive from the English language. Anne's religion was scriptural- 'it was very ordinary to hear her pray, and most joyously to sing whole Psalms in her sleep'. She clung to her sense of the mercy of God and the promises of 'her dear saviour'- the rhetoric as always in the seventeenth century is physical and has a sexual overtone: the writer includes an image of Anne with her arms clinging to Christ's body. The writer himself compares Anne's suffering in her final illness subtly to that of Christ's temptation in the desert- she like him suffers for 40 days before she acheives redemption and death. The tone of the pamphlet is about piety and puritan piety at that (the latter observation is the more uncertain one) and it drives the reader forwards to her or his own salvation.

Religion for Anne and for the writer thus was scripturally focussed and inwardly motivated. Anne attended Church services of course- but no minister is mentioned in the body of the text as providing her with sustenance. It is scripture and the teachings of her own conscience which confirm Anne's religious nature. We tend to think of puritanism though as an exclusive creed- exclusive of merriment on the one hand and superstition on the other. Such an understanding, in Anne Bovver's case is clearly wrong: she did not assail her brother for dancing but seemed willing to attend an occasion where it was on the agenda. Neither did she reject the influence of dreams. The key part of her religion was her relationship with God- conceived through the idea of Christ physically carrying her up to heaven- and her relationship with scripture. Like Oliver Cromwell, Anne evidently knew the Bible well enough through repeated readings to be able to cite it without a text- in her sleep! Despite the bad poetry, this pamphlet gives us a pretty good idea of what popular piety in the seventeenth century might have looked like- the picture is complicated but it is also interesting.

Reflections on Tony Benn's early life

I thought after the last post I'd briefly give a few thoughts on aspects of Benn's life particularly ones i picked up from the biography. This is no way meant to be a summary or a proper appreciation of this fascinating man or his historic impact! For this post at least I will address some thoughts trigged by aspects of his early life.

One is the degree to which British Socialism particularly in its middle class more ideological form was a continuation of radical liberalism. Benn's father Wedgwood Benn latter Viscount Stansgate (given to represent the Labour party in the lords) was a radical liberal a supporter of such trendy post Gladstonian causes as home rule, colonial rights etc. He was also a massive supporter of planning like many radical liberals. His transition into a Socialist in the 1920's happened without any obvious change in views at all. Indeed even in the late 1950's he was agitated strongly for faster decolonisation-and was on the left of the Labour party as he had been on the liberal party. Indeed he seems more radical than the young Benn ( at one point Jennie Lee the leading left winger said to him of his son his becoming a "right little tory" ) and the Labour leadership. Benn himself shared his enthusiasm for colonial independence-and this gave him much of his left wing credentials in this era. Whether or not Labour owed more to Methodism to Marx, it seems fairly clear to me that it owed more to the "new liberalism" which sought to use government action (Rather than the withdrawal of it) as a battering ram against privilege than either.


Another is the system of controls and restricions that were mostly imposed during the war out of necessity and kept by Labour for numerous reasons-but perhaps foremost the desire to build a better Socialst world. There is a fascinating individal anecdote which I think sums up why Labour ended up losing the 1950 election. Benn and his new wife found they couldn't' bring all her stuff back from American-because of these controls, he is clearly very annoyed in his accounts at the time by this. And let this was Benn- the son of a Labour peer, seeking to become a Labour mp himself. This helps explain why Labour lost the 1950's election. They lost middle class support and the liberals melted down among the middle classes-their voters went massively g for the conservatives who were runniong on "set the people free" ending this system of control and offering the middle classes the hope of something resembling pre war (middle) class standards. This was not due to fall in Labour support among the working class-it rose sharply so much sao that the 1951 election (which they lost due to the electoral system) saw the highest % of the vote Labour has ever got at any election-a tribute to how popular so much of the Labour record (particulary perhaps on health) was. But the middle class backgrounds against less ideological committed middle class progressive "Benn's" nearly obliterated theri majority in 1950 and threw them out altogether a year latter.

The Christian Socialist (arguably Christan radically liberal) nature of Benn's family is very compelling. His elder brother (who was supposed to inherit the peerage that nearly killed Benn's career) who died in a plane accident was very devout-so much so he concluded war was wrong even as he served loyally in the British military.Nor was this confined to him. Strafford Cripps praising his sucessor emphasised his commitment to christianity (to Benn's apparent embarrassment- this was more or less as he was losing his previous faith) as well as socialism. One is tempted to say that the Benn family may not be unrepresentative in keeping their religious attitudes whilst dropping their beliefi n formalised religon one of the biggest changes among the radical left (and arguably the political class in general) over the last few decades. One thing that struck me about the piety of Benn's family is what a high view of humanity it had by traditional Christian standards - indeed Benn's brother in the same moving letters talks of his belief humans can easily work together and become good people. This tempts one to suggest semi seriously that what has held together the British left secular and religious is a high view of human capacity and a belief in the fundamental vulnerability of human evil-or to put it antoher way a renunciation of the traditoinal view of the inherent limits of human character.

Another interesting aspect of the Young Benn is Technology. As his opponent Lord Rodgers pointed out and Jacks' biography shows in greater detail he was a massive pioneer of television and television methods in a very sophisticated form (his main pre political job was for the BBC's world service). This is very interesting given what an old fashioned politician Benn seems today love him or loathe him. It's an indicator that being human politicians tend to become set in their ways - so technologies that come along in the middle of their career they are much less adept with than ones they are More acculturated to. Benn's diaries show he has the discipline which is perhaps the most essential element of a blogger. NO doubt pioneering media politicians of today Will one day seem just as old fashioned as Benn.

They will be lucky if they've had anything like the same impact in the meantime though.

The legacy of Throne and altar religous minorities and confessional states

These blog posts raise an interesting historical question the nature of religious minorities in Confessional states- whether Catholics in the Netherlands or the (by the 19th century much smaller) protestant population of say.

A confessional state is simply speaking a state whose laws privilege a particular religious denomination (or conceivably several denominations). In that Sense the United Kingdom is such a state the "Anglican” Church of England is established in England, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland in Scotland and the British monarch on coronation affirms Christianity and Protestantism as the faith of the land. Similar situations exist in some Scandinavian countries (including Finland which has the very large established church of Lutheranism and the very small one of Orthodoxy. Even today dissident Christian denominations in Sweden and groups (such as Jehovah witnesses) outside a small circle of semi-established ones in Germany, face genuine legal problems

However for this article I mean something very different by the term "confessional state". I mean the state's that were routine in Europe till well into the 19th century. States where not only is one confession established by law but confessions that do not meet the law are discriminated against formally in access to political office. This was true in every state in Western Europe in 1780-even states such as Great Britain and the Netherlands long notorious for their tolerance. In less tolerant states very exacting legal penalties could exist quite late-Sweden eliminated exile as the penalty for Catholicism in the 1850's. Political office was mostly or entirely restricted to members of the "established faith" , taxes went to the state churches (and were a much higher % of taxation than the few religious taxes left in the likes of Germany) and were legally privilege in a host of ways.

In such states the religious minorities understandably felt outsiders to the political system. In the French Revolution and afterwards the system of the confessional states (along with linked power systems such as the power of the monarchs) came under huge attack. The early 19th century saw a backlash-or rather a cacophony of backlashes against this "the union of throne and altar" was endorsed in one form or another (including countries like the UK with very few used altars in those churches) in just about every European country. In a sense this created the whole concepts of right and left- and arguably still shapes them they can be seen as those who wish to push relative to the status quo away or towards (right and left respectively) a radical version or extension of French Revolutionary principals Obviously though the debate has rather moved on -but in the 19th century "established church" meant something much fiercer than the current Church of England or even the Lutheran church of Sweden in terms of political rights

Not surprisingly the Confession ally excluded tended to be rather more hostile to the confessional states and sympathetic to a pluralistic or secular system. This took the form of disproportionate support for parties of the left. I have posted about this in the context of the Dutch liberals (till Kuyper reshaped Dutch politics) but it's equally true elsewhere. For example late 19th century British politics can in very crude and broad brush terms be seen as a three way between the party of Anglicans Scottish Presbyterians and Irish Protestants ( Tories) , the party of British Catholics and Nonconformist liberals nod the party of Irish Catholics (home rulers). Similarly in France the most protestant areas of France tended to be among the most radical-and latter socialist and this still tends to be true today.


The legacy of this can still be seen today. In just about every European country the adherents of denominations which were excluded by the confessional state are more likely to support the left than those who were not (this is particularly true if one allows for religiosity). Exceptions tend to be the rare exceptions that prove the rule. So for example in Germany Catholics are more likely to support the CDU than Protestants but a) Self declared Catholics are more pious in Germany than self declared Protestants and b) the heavily Catholic areas of Germany-Bavaria etc the Confessional states were classically Catholic. Indeed I recall reading an interview this a devout evangelical Christian in Baravia in the 1950's saying she could no vote Social Democratic since it was atheistical or Christian Social Union because it was Catholic.

The superb religious sociologist Steve Bruce has seen these differences as fundamentally being a matter of the conservatism and traditionalism of the Catholic Church naturally making it the party of the right. He interprets the Catholic tendency to vote for the left (at least till very recently) in Anglo-Saxon countries as a matter of class. Respectufly I think this will not work- in Scotland in the 1950's (bear in mind this is the height of class politics in Britain) working class Protestants were more conservative than middle class Catholics! I think the interpretation should be found in the history of confessional states-and even their death. of which religions were the” traditional” one. So where "tradition" was protestants Catholic naturally lean(Ed) to the left, where Catholic to the right. This can link up and overlap with a religiosity cleavage which are often newer. So in France Protestants vote more Socialist than Catholic but churchgoing Protestants and Catholics alike vote massively more for the right than the non churchgoing.

However this tendency to support the parties of the "left" for religious minorities was not invariable even at the height of tensions. So in the late 1820's Catholic Emancipation (whether Catholics who could vote-very liberal for the time, could also sit in Parliament) dominated "left" and "right" in UK Politics. And yet in the mid 19th century there were Catholic Tory mps!

Part of the explanation was that members of the minority could accept a lesser status either as the best possible deal, as an attentive to a secularism which might be more hostile (in the late 19th century for example British Catholics were more likely to vote Tory in school board elections-because Tories were much more pro church schools and host8le to secular education than liberals) or because they believed in the system-even if they were excluded in it . A combination of this helps explain for example why the Popes tended to be very sceptical of leftwing movements in most non Catholic Countries. . I have already explained how this helps explain why the catholic south of the Netherlands did not join the revolt that created Belgium. In England (not the UK) it was so strong that the "restoration of the hierarchy" provoked outrage among English Catholics. The Duke of Norfolk the foremost Catholic aristocrat (indeed the foremost aristocrat the dukes of Norfolk are to the aristocracy of England what the Archbishops of Canterbury are to the bishops Primus inter pares) was so outraged he took communion in an Anglican church (then even more than now against canon law) to express his fury!

So the story of confessional minorities in the nineteenth century has fascinating nuances but the basic story- of minorities being driven to the liberal of radical left is one that still shapes the politics of the western world today.

The picture is of Henry Fitzwilliam Howard- 15 duke of Norfolk a title so old they are the first aristocrats of England (roughly equivalent to the Archbishop of Canterbury among bishops) but an outsider due to his Catholicism.

God and Soil Nationalism- Religion

This post by Vilno inspires me to briefly exmaine the protean nature of national identity. I don't wish to comment on his post but rather to use it to make some points about national identify.


One is the importance of religion as Vilno rightly points out the rebellion that crated modern Belgium was on religious lines-religious not ethnic. The fact that Flemish is much closer to Dutch than French as a language was simply not nearly so important. It’s important to realize this is not some unique exception. Ireland can perhaps best be understood as the part of the British Isles that failed to become fundamentally Protestant- it was Catholic inhabitants of Ireland not Gaelic ones who became Irishmen- there would never have been enough support for independence if it the divided had been linguistic. . More secular is German nationalism -not usually thought of as a confessional based nationalism-and rightly so. On the other hand the modern southern boundaries of Germany were essentially deliberately created by Bismarck to make a clear Protestant majority in the new "Reich". Even more remarkably in one referendum on the Germany borders after World War one Protestant Polish speakers voted by over 90% to be in the new Germany rather than the new Poland -so even in Germany nationalism had a religious component.

Or rather it might be truer to say that that was the case for Polish nationalism- Polish nationalism had been an elite obsession throughout the nineteenth century (for example this books shows the famous 1848 rebellion led to massacres of nationalist rebels without encouragement from the has burg authority-indeed to their slight horror). This owed a great deal to the indifference even hostility of the church- the leading Polish prelate in "German Poland" (Poland at that time being divided) in the 1870's didn’t' even speak Polish properly! Bismarck’s vicious Kulturkampf ironically partly out of paranoia of Polish nationalism predicated the end of this state of affairs as the cleary and laity identified Polish nationalis with the struggle for their faith- by the early 20th century Polish nationalism was a mighty popular force. To this day Polish Catholicism and Polish natoinalism are almost inextricably linked.

Religion can often be mixed up with issues of national identity today elsehwere as well. This is not just rue in pious countreis. The former Yugoslvaia was exceptioaly secular among it's population-but the division between Serb, Croat and Bosnick are essentially religous in nature-even if this difference is one of what church or mosque you don't go to. This can be true even in Finland often identified (probably wrongly but it can't far from it) as the most secular country on earth. Nonetheless One candidate for the Presidency of Finland was however repeatedly interrogated in 2006 on how a Catholic could be president of Finland!

Indeed more generally my understanding is that religion is exceeded only by language as a cleavage that determines national identify.

But cleavages are not the only thing that determines national identity. As Vilno rightly points out that so does history-and that raises another important aspect -history-to which I will return at a subsequent point

The picture shows the flag of Finland- adopted after World War 1-which as you can see is a religious symbol.

Abraham Kuyper Neglected Titan

In these posts and particularly this one I have sought to show just how crucial Abraham Kuyper one time Prime Minister of the Netherlands, founder of the Anti-Revolutionary Party was to the development of Dutch Politics in the early 20th century. Among other things he founded it's first mass political party, pioneered popular politics founded the religious coalition that dominated Dutch politics for decades, split traditionalist Protestants, converted many of them to a more plural model of politics and massively weakened aristocrats within their ranks, introduced the modern Dutch school system and coalesced the entire system of "pillarisation” that dominated the Netherlands for many decades and still matters today. Indeed even the current Prime Minister of the Netherlands has talked about him very favourably as his political inspiration and stated he is a "Kuyperian heart and soul" - a rare feat for a political eighty years dead- I imagine for example Barack Obamaa and George Bush would be delilighted to get such an epitah from any head of government in a century.

It should be noted this only covers part of Kyper’s importance- he was hugely important outside domestic politics (to which he gave many other contributions I lack space to list- and many others I’m sure I’m ignorant of). For example in Foreign Policy he played a significant role strengthening the natural Dutch tendency to side with the Boers in the Boer War and lean (as a neutral) to Germany in World War 1. Theologically he was hugely important- his failed attempt to purge liberals who would not subscribe wholeheartedly to the Reformed confessions led him to lead a significant breakaway form the Dutch Reformed church and he latter organised a merger with latter sececessions to form the Reformed Churches of the Netherlands- a third force in the Dutch theological world. In a (very narrow and in the light of subsequent history slightly ironic) sense this may have been the first significant "fundamentalist" secession denomination. He led the first major secession break in protest at the modernism of the late 19th century on the grounds it was incompatible with the Reformed Faith and was supreme among clergymen in the creation of a new denomination formed of groups that papered over their huge differnces out of a common hostility to protestant liberalism

Kuyper was also a huge influence on Princeton Theological Seminary which ended up being crucial to the first significant American Fundamentalist (so defined) denomination the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. To this day he is a big influence on some of the more intellectual sections of American Evangelicalism including (but not confined to)the "religious right". At the same some of his views such as Presumptive regeneration and his rejection of a sharp notion of "infelicity" of scripture laid the foundations for some more liberal types of Christianity!

Nor did this exhaust Kuyper's titanic contributions. He was also one of the foremost writers of his age- even being on a committee concerning the Dutch language! He founded (as part of his religious work essentially ) the Free University of Amsterdam as an alternative to secularising universities - to this day it is one of the Netherlands a leading university. In its early days it was the subject of strong persecution and attempts to exclude it’s graduates from government jobs-but he grew so mighty that he was able to overturn and overule this.

So in politics, in theology in the Dutch language even in the history of academia he was a true Titan who played a transformative and giant activity In British terms he was like a combination of William Gladstone, Robert Cecil (3rd Marquis of Salisbury) Thomas Chalmers, John Stuart Mill, John Henry Newman, Ashley Cooper 7th Marquis of Shaftesbury, and Bishop John C Ryle all rolled into one!

And yet my suspicion is that even the extremely well educated average reader of this blog would never have heard of him- and as I said it's incredibly difficult to find good works in English on him or his activists. Why is this -and what does this illustrate about the nature of current Historiography?

I thick by far the most important reason is that he was after all Dutch. This is partly a strong (and in a sense) justified bias against small countries- though the Netherlands dwarfs Ireland Demographically. More problematically I think this is due to the linguistic barrier. Dutch is a language very few Dutch people know partly because of its small demographic base and partly due to the proflicany y of the Dutch in foreign languages in part due to the excellent education system Kuyper did so much to shape. . If Kyper had been Prime Minister of Canada- a less historically significant country at least in that era I suspect he'd been much better known to Anglo-Saxon historians.

But I don't think that bad reason is the only one. Partly this is due to neglect of or contempt of religion's importance for history in general -and particularly late 19th and 20th century politic. This is the dead hand of the "secularisation thesis"- that society naturally follows a development where organised religions and traditional orthodox ideas gradually dimities in their hold. Kuyper is an enormous embarrassment for such theories and so like many such is politely ignored.

One should add that the changes of the Netherlands over the last few decades in the direction of secularisation and sexual liberalism (both generally exaggerated by outsiders but still very real) add to amnesia about it's interesting past.

Another is increasingly specialisation in the type of history people do. Kyper's contributions cross an incredible number of fields including electoral politics, political ideology, theological history, diplomatic history and educational. To sum up his contributions would require incredible breadth in terms of our modern historical discipline - a Gibbon is rare indeed among modern historians.

Still in however small a way I hope I have shown the enormous importance and achievements of this now obscure figure. Like or loathes his achievements he did “great things” in the true sense of the term.

Pilarisation and Power

So how did this system of "pillars" or Spheres" Kuyper helped build work?

The fundamental factor to realise is that this is not just about something that affects the political-it's about something that affects every course of life. Kryper's and his associates theory of Sphere sovereignty both reflected and shaped this. ON the one hand it was (at least in one sense) just a good description of Dutch life- secularism (increasingly the secular labour based sub culture), Catholicism and Reformed traditionalism (itself like secularism increasingly divided) decisively shaped peoples entire way of life in every detail from leisure time to sexual views to attitudes to foreign peoples-there was in Holland no general "sphere" of values -though no doubt Kryper wished there was . The tendency of western nations in general to adopt such tendencies in the early 20th century is often underrated-it is often used to understand the politics of Germany for example though it's often disputed how the divisions should be seen Protestant, Catholic, Social Democratic or National, catholic and Social Democratic for example. It strikes me such an informal pillarisation can actually work quite well to understand lands Like the UK, the United States or Spain it is not really used for as well.

AT the same the power of Sphere Sovereignty and it's increasing domination as an ideology in the early 20th Century Netherlands was to make this even more a reality than it was when Kryper began his carer-and make the Netherlands the paradigm of such. For one thing government funding was divided between intuitions both formally and informally. This was not just true of education but was true for example of administrative jobs and government appointments. So pervasive was this system of deals that in the late twentieth century it was even true of many major Dutch corporations-who for example often deliberately split senior positions between Catholics and Protestants.

What affected the ability? One was the cohesiveness of the different pillars-that is however strong a system of pillarisation was as it obviously varied from pillar to pillar-how much people really identified with a pillar rather than broader society, how much the party could rely on its support base come hell or high water. of the different pillars Catholics, Protestants, socialist and liberal I would say that the Catholics probably had the strongest pillar in this regard- the amazing strength of all catholic institutions in the Netherlands into the 1960's is amazing to behold. Conversely the liberals were almost certainly the weakest. Perhaps the most obvious sign of this was they lacked former intuitions outside the party-they tended to be close for example to the main business confederation but there was no formal ties the way there was between the ARP and major protestant papers. The result was the liberals having been the dominant tendency into the early 20th century withered away over the 20th century. It was only when Pillarisation really took knocks in the 1960's that they made a revival. Nor is this just psychological information of interest only to political anoraks. The values of the liberal party were in constant decline for the decades after the turn of the century. For the first few decades secularism was gradually marginalised in Dutch public life- so much so the labour party and even more avidly the liberals themselves formally disowned it. Particularly by the mid 20th century free capitalism was also on the back foot in Holland- as the welfare state and to some degree others form of government intervention grew sharply. It's not a coincidence that the collapse of pillarisation saw the reversal of such trends.

Another important factor was the attitudes of the different blocks to each other. NO matter how strong a block was given all were far off a majority the attitudes of other pillars was crucial to public policy. So the Catholic party was one of the two largest parties consistently from the first world war to the 1960'#s and in government consistently-but was unable to liberalise processions through the countryside in the face of the united opposition of the protestant" majority. This was why Kryper and even after his death his Anti-Revolutionary Party were so crucial-and so powerful at driving the agenda in the early 20th century. This dominance was not just over the blocks but also over the Christian Historicists, the more establishment, aristocratic, and theocratic alternative from within his own block.

Essentially every other block preferred the ARP to the alternatives. The Seacoasts preferred them to the alien and papal linked Catholics and to the hopelessly bourgeois Liberals (and initially the more aristocratic Christian Historicists). The Catholics preferred them to the hostility of the secular parties and the more theocratic Christian historians. The liberals preferred them to the "superstitious" "backward" and "alien" Catholics and to the terrifying Socialists (at least once the Socialists were a powerful enough force). The Christen historicist’s unsurprinsgly preferred their fellow conservative Protestants to the rest of the political spectrum. At the same time Catholic and Secularists alike preferred tee more Pluralistic ARP to the notion of a party that wished to restore their status to the traditional marginal one- one tolerant for the early modern era it should be noted but not tolerant ) . Thus the ARP was the fulcrum party. Even post war this endured to some degree and gave the ARP an influence out of proportion to their number. In the interwar period they essentially set the governing agenda of the Netherlands. The importance of these factors is well illustrated by Vilno in this typically excellent post.

The image above is that of the symbol of the Netherlands-the royal crest. In the early 20th century the continuing dominance of a monarchist, conservative Protestant house as the supreme symbol of the nation well illustrated the continued dominance of the Protestant side of the Netherlands through their well built ideological hegemony.

Abraham Kupyer and the transformation of Dutch Politics

As this previous post has shown Dutch Politics in the 1870's was loosely divided between the "throne and altar" classic 19th century conservatives (though given they Calvinists it might be better called throne and pulpit) based on traditional protestant elites and the dominant secularizing and reforming liberals based on secularizing and Catholic elites. This changed out of all recognition in the late 19th and early 20th century-and the path that as followed was very sharply different from the extremely similar society of Germany. I submit that Abraham Kuyper played a key and unequalled role in shaping this transformation.

Firstly he created a modern mass party. The Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP) founded by him in 1879 became essentially the first proper mass party in Holland. Candidates were mostly decided centrally it had a mass membership and organized support on a mass scale with a centrally decided programme and ideology. The infrastructure and approach was increasingly populist- rather than based on the support and local networks of traditionalist aristocrats and clergyman (in sharp contrast to the Conservatives) to us this sounds obvious but in the Dutch Politics of the era it was a revolution. There is a decent case the first non Catholic non Social Democratic party in Germany (ie the first to appeal to a near majority of the pop ululation) to do this was the Nazis. To the party that would pioneer this approach enormous electoral strength was on offer to take another example arguably the early success of the US democrats owed something to such innovation. At the same time the increasing centralization and populism of -the ARP were behind in part nearly all the numerous breakaways form the ARP in its early period. Many leading ARP's rejected the notion of a central party -a clash that looms large in the politics of many states in the period. Thus paradoxically Creeper’s ARP served both to mobilize and unite traditionalist Protestants-and to split them

Secondly he reshaped the religious cleavages of Dutch Politics an effort over decades before even the formation of the ARP. While previous conservative politicians had sought to appeal to relatively sympathetic Protestant liberals he sought to realign the whole political spectrum by forming an alliance with Catholics who also opposed late 19th century secularization particularly but by no means exclusively in the schools. This meant a willingness to reverse a previous insistence on education in the state church and to at least downplay the previous hostility to legalization of Catholic bishoprics. The rewards were immense a new Catholic party could be formed which rapidly became one of the largest part. In the era before World War 1 (when Holland had a First Past the Post election system) this also meant in the religiously mixed cities catholic votes could be available to the ARP. A silent religious minority in cities. This alliance has to represent one of the most extraordinarily successful in western history. Marginalized at first by the early 20th century this alliance was alternating in power with the liberals. In the interwar period it had a permant parliamentary majority and was the governing force-only divisions within it temporarily cracked it and the oppostion only mattere for policy insofar as they could exploit . They had some sucess with anti-Catholicism in the 1920's and deficit spending and a reflationary currency in the late 1930's ( in the latter case it was of course onl the Social Democrats-by that point by far the largest of the secular parties.But It was not till post war that the coalition ceased and not till the 1960's that the votes for religious parties fell below half the vote (withal consequent)

Thirdly and in part in order to justify this new alliance Kuyper helped develop a new ideology of "spheres" in place of the old idea of a Confessional State in every walk of life it was now to be accepted that every religious and philosophical tradition had a right to organize itself-including in accessing the state such as educational funds. To this day this guarantee remains in the Dutch Constriction and means the supposedly arch secular Netherlands has the largest percentage of Children at religious schools in Protestant Europe. The sphere concept perhaps even more than his party innovations coalesced a group of more conservative dissenters who ultimately united in the Christian Historical party.

Fourthly partly motivated by a belief in the Piety of the electorate and partly by principle (ideally Kuyper believed in householder franch8ise) Kuyper pushed for extensions of the franchise culminating in the extension to universal adult suffrage immediately after World War 1. Indeed a party broke away from the ARP in protest at the extension to women-this party still opposes female suffrage and exists in the Dutch parliament to this day.

Now obviously just about all these developments had roots in what had already happened - the coalition of secularists and Catholics was an inherently unstable one for example and the franchise was being extended across Europe in this period particularly in the wake of World War 1. But I submit Kuyper was crucial in shaping the result. Christian parties pioneered populist policies. The result was that by the interwar period the drift to secularization had ended and the Netherlands was a fairly stable though deeply divided liberal democracy. It had universal suffrage and a government whose governing ideology put huge limits on the role of the state in the economy and Society. The example of Germany shows that this was not some inevitable result of history but owed a lot to human agency. And the most important agent here was Kuyper. His example also is a warning about certian assumptons historians of the last 200 years are vulnerable to. In particular the notion of increasing secularisation, or the more generally telogical that trends will continue. In the Netherlands by contrast so powerfull was the religous revivial that in the post war era both the Social Democrats (by no coincidance now reborn as Labour instead despite being the result of a merger wtih two very small parties) and even more the libeals did their best to distance themsleves from their secular roots-reluctantly coming to terms with Kryper and the ARP's enormous legacy.


The picture above shows the ARP (n a poster of 1946) as it saw itself fighting the principles of the French Revolution (whether in liberal or Socialist guise) on behalf of Protestantism and Christianity.

The Netherlands divided

The Netherlands is not usually considered as having an exciting politics. Nor is it regarded as a stronghold of religious conservatism at least in recent centuries. But the Netherlands in the early 20th century was all these things and more it was divided by deep political cleavages- cleavages as deep and vicious as the cleavages that divided Conservative and Labour in the 1980's. Indeed I would argue they were fundamentally greater. For they were not simply differences in polic and voting (though they were that) but differences in people's entire mode of existence.

The First of these cleavages was class –like just about every European country. By World War 1 there was a vigorous Labour party in Holland. it mobilized workers and others ( some of the earliest gains were among poor fishermen in the North of Holland) behind such issues as an expanded welfare , legal rights and protections for trade union . AT the same time the power of working class was not confined to the Labour party- the religious parties had many working class voters and many voters’ sympathetic to at least some of labor’s leftwing economic agenda (this was particularly true of Catholics). Vicious strike battles were routine in early 20th century Holland and the entire country was divided on the basis of Class. Examples of the policy issues fought on class lines and identify were the laws affecting unions.


The second was arguably more important and was that between the secular (including many praticising liberal Christians) and the pious) and the pious. IN many ways modern Dutch politics was born in the late 19th century in the fight over the attempts to secularize the schools .This caused an alliance of disparate Christian religious and political traditions to oppose-this a fight they essentially won by the early 20th century but the battle over the degree of secularism in the public sphere and the degree of latitude and influence for orthodox/ "conservative" religous very much remained. An example of issues were such issues were important were divorce and schooling. The secularism and even atheist Marxism of the early Dutch Labour Party (very unlike the British of the era) was enormously alienating to the Catholic Church .. As late as the 1950's the Catholic Church excommunicated people for subscribing to the Dutch labour party's newspaper!

The third was the Catholic Protestant division in many ways the most profound of all and certainly the oldest. Importantly was in nearly all cases a very clear division while class divisions and secularism were more matters of degree and thus the separation of matters of life like church attendance or marriage practices was sharper for sectarian divides than the other. Two other aspects of the Catholic Protestant division were very important. Firstly the two groups were very geographically divided the south (whcih had been under ardently Catholic Hapsburg rule longer) was overwhelmingly catholic the north and center of the state Protestant. Secondly the default mode of Dutch politics and society was Protestant (though often not the majority of churchgoers) , the majority of the public identified as such, the monarchy was Protestant and so forth. This meant the huge number of secularist politicians (even atheist) were effectively Protestant secularists. An example of issues where Catholic Protestant divides were important was the right of Catholic religious processions to March in public and the recognition of the Vatican (a massive issue in 1920's Dutch politics)

The Fourth was between the Protestant state Church and the breakaway Reformed Churches of the Netherlands. The division was ultimately about whether a denomination could include “heretical” protestant Christians for example those who denied biblical miracles. The latter left the former over this issues. It should be noted the state church included many who were strongly conservative in personal faith and even many who wished to exclude liberals-but did not wish to leave their denomination over the issues preferring to work from within. In a sense this social cleavage was between separatist and anti-separatist christians. No single political issue necessarily correlated with these divisions but one important one was to be the theology and politics of "sphere Sovereignty" which sought a third way between governments imposed secularism and government imposed theocracy supported by many establishment Christians.

All these cleavages helped shape the "pillars" of Dutch society. All were linked to sharp political divisions but it is important to realize that they went well beyond that- even people not at all interested in politics were intimately affected by them. They affected how they worshipped, which schools they went to , which newspapers they reads who they married in short nearly all aspects of everyday life. This led to parties much more deeply rooted and distinct than in just about any Anglo-Saxon Democracy.

Pinkie's Devils

Brighton Rock is about a crucial distinction- that between right and wrong and that between good and evil. Right and wrong are the categories used by Ida, the amateur detective, who seeks to find out what happened to her friend who was murdered. She is a lively, sexual and vivacious woman who desires to live and lives within a set of rules- common sense principles of morality. Opposed to her is the criminal Pinkie and his girlfriend Rosie, Pinkie and Rosie are both ‘Romans’, Catholics. They live within the world of good and evil: invest the world with an eschatology that Ida never feels and believe in mortal sin- Pinkie believes that losing his virginity was worse than committing a murder- rather than in common sense morality. The novel is about a contrast between these two principles- two ways of looking at the world.

Some interpret this as a repudiation, not of Pinkie and Rosie, but of Ida. Her ‘totalitarian’ morality is what one introducer to Greene’s novel believes is at issue within the story. Common sense morality is rejected upon the basis that it is inferior to Catholic morality. This reading of the novel- and it may well be the intention behind the writing- has some merit: Ida is definitely viewed as disgustingly lively, her plump breasts are referred to by Greene with scorn as though they were overripe. There are pretty obvious echoes in Ida’s character of the barmaid in Elliot’s Wasteland. Rosie in particular is presented as battleground within the novel- she like the reader is poised between Pinkie and Ida and yet at the end of the day, she chooses Pinkie and not Ida. Ida’s confidence that she can reverse the girl’s decision by imposing her own view, not persuading but cajoling, is condescending and unpleasant.

Step back though and what Greene’s novel exposes is something that would be familiar to any observer of the nineteenth century novel. The insight of Dosteovsky that a higher morality does not justify immoral deeds- throughout so many of his novels, this point is expressed in different ways- seems to have been forgotten. What we have arrived at with Pinkie is a nihilistic Christianity which sees murder as less important than sexual taboo. What Greene argues, in my opinion, is that Ida’s morality is insufficient to properly live within the world- but that so too is Pinkie’s and Rosie’s morality. Right and wrong and good and evil must live together- or become enemies to each other. Ida’s sins come with a kindness that is no vice, Pinkie’s come with an ascetic contempt that is no virtue.

Greene appears to me to be directing his novel towards contemporary Catholicism: it should be read as a resounding call to Christianity not to abandon the common sense ideas of right and wrong, the underpinning of morality, as it becomes a minority faith. Perhaps instead of reading the book as a contrast between secular and Christian morality, we should read Brighton Rock as a terrible warning- that if Christianity becomes an aggressive minority culture, it might lose a sense of right and wrong in the search for good and evil. That warning is important- for it reminds us of the great danger of intellectual eschatology- whatever its source- that elevated ideas must be accompanied by moral intuitions unless they are to become perverted.

Pinkie, like Raskolnikov, is a warning of a type of nihilism- Raskolnikov warned the West of the dangers of Atheist nihilism. Greene through Pinkie warns us of religious nihilism and its dangers.

The secrets of the new foundation

Refounding a city involves reconstruction- the Romans spent 'unremitting toil and labour' in restoring their city. More importantly though it meant refounding a political community- and in that sense a religious community. Livy tells us that Rome was refounded in three steps- firstly with the physical reconstruction of the city, secondly with the election of new magistrates and thirdly with the restoration of Roman religion. This last matter is what the historian emphasizes- the other two matters take up a paragraph, but religion, as ever for Livy, is at the heart of his political narrative. As soon as new magistrates are appointed, he tells us that they 'consulted the senate before anything else on matters of religious observance.' (VI 1). This is important- but so are the actions that immediatly come after this search- this consultation of the senate- because they amount to a restatement in religious language of the key principles that underlay the Roman state .

Firstly the magistrates and pontiffs made a search 'for all that could be found of the treaties and the laws, the twelve tables and certain laws of the Kings'- so far so civil but notice the following- 'to some of these even the common people were given access, but those which applied to the sacred rites the pontiffs supressed, largely so they could keep the minds of the populace under control through religious awe'. (VI 1). The point is important and relates both to the use of religion for social control and the class basis of that use in Rome. Notice here the secular magistrates and the priests- who often would be the same people- search for both judicial, political and religious records- and find them and exclude religious ones from their publication in order to maintain political power. This is a world in which the civil and the religious are not divorced but firmly married together and where the imposing posture of the latter supports the social structure and diktats of the former.

Secondly they declared two religious days. The 18th July became the day of the Allia- the battle lost against the Gauls and decreed 'it should be marked by the cessation of all business, public or private'. (VI 1) Secondly 'some think it was also decreed' that religious rites should not be held on two days following the Ides. (VI 1). Livy is here telling us something important- what the Roman state was doing was twofold. They reintroduced the ritual calendar. Also they added to it to memorialise the stress of the state under the Gallic invasion. The calendar was used to bind together the populace in patriotic and religious zeal. If the first measures about secrecy bound religion to social structure, the second sought to bind it to the fortunes of the state. In so doing, the argument was the state might be blessed by divinity, but even more so the people would see the deeds of the state not as political acts on a civil stage, but as religious acts in a moral drama.

It is impossible to understand anything going on in Livy's history without seeing the importance of the binding together of religious and political. Both internally and externally, opposition to Rome becomes impiety if you take the ceremonial functions of the Roman state seriously. In this sense the religious observances of sacrifice and prayer, fasting and idleness, take on a special meaning- they become part of the ideology of an aristocratic city state, fixed for eternity, and anchored in a world both human and divine. They are the perfect riposte to the Gallic invasion- in that they assert both Rome's civilisation and social stratification and its divine blessing.

Deir el-Bahari

Deir el-Bahari was an important ancient Egyptian religious site. It held the female pharoah, Hatshepsut's, mortuary temple. But it also was the site of another temple- more venerated in the ptolemaic age ( 305 BC-30BC) where two particular gods Amenhotep and Imhotep were worshipped. Recently the site has been excavated by Adam Lajtar- and a report on his reports of his excavations is here. What I find interesting about it, and I'm just reading at the moment an analysis of Roman religion which I will inflict on you later, is a number of points about the way that religious observance functioned differently in the polytheistic ancient world to the way it functions in today's modern world. What Lajtar has found is fascinating: he has found a great deal of Greek inscriptions from believers who came to this shrine to worship. Egypt at this point in history was dominated by a Greek dynasty- the Ptolemies were one of the more important successor dynasties to Alexander's empire in the Eastern Meditereanean- culminating with the spectacular figure of Cleopatra and sustaining the Alexandrian Library amongst other culturally important activities.

Perhaps more surprising than that historical detail is a couple of things- which are characteristic of Ancient Polytheism. One of which is that the temple commemorated two individuals- one of whom at least was an identifiable historical personality: Amenhotep, son of Hotep, a court official, priest and medic at the court of Amenhotep IV of the 14th Dynasty. Imhotep was also a minister- he served the 3rd Dynasty (in the 27th century BC). These two ministers therefore became venerated as important figures, intercessionary figures with the higher Gods and later turned into Gods themselves. The line between human and divine which in the austere monotheisms is so solid, in ancient polytheism was much more fluid. That has implications for the way for instance the Christian doctrine of the saints worked- but it also suggests to me a very different idea about religion itself. Noone going to these shrines would have gone under any illusion that these men had originally been men, noone would have doubted that they were now Gods.

There is a second point that I think is very interesting and seems very strange to a modern eye though. And this is this: just because you went to worship Amenhotep in Deir el-Bahari, does not mean you wanted to worship Imhotep. Furthermore many Greeks went to worship neither God, but to worship Asclepius, the divine physician, who they assumed Imhotep to be an Egyptian form of. What is interesting about this: and it is a point I will build on in my later article: is that ancient religion unlike modern religion was far less concerned with doctrinal difference. Polytheism could embrace a fluidity between religious custom that modern religion finds difficult to sustain. (I am not arguing that Polytheism was in any way better than modern monotheism- but that it was very different in character, it could fuse with less tension Greek and Egyptian religious practise than say one can fuse Jewish and Muslim and Christian religious practice). It is an interesting distinction- and we will come back to what that reveals at a later point but as a prologue to a later article, Deir el-Bahari is a useful pointer- it demonstrates some of the differences between a polytheistic ancient outlook and our own understanding of religion as a doctrine to which you adhere, excluding all other doctrines.

Francesco, Giullare di Dio

"a monument to stupidity... never before have Christianity and cretinism been so close to one another" Martin Oms

The tale of St Francis is one of the most central of the Catholic saints to Christian life. Roberto Rosselini directed a film based upon St Francis's life in the 1950s- a follow up to his trilogy about the end of the war (Roma citta Aperta, Paisa, Germany Year Zero) took the theme of the Christian renounciation of the world and attempted to create an alternative to the war, greed and genocide which had dominated his era. St Francis and his disciples in this movie are held up as an alternative- a Christian folly- against the worldly wisdom of the dictators who had deformed the modern era. This film is an attempt- like Robert Bresson's work about Joan of Arc- to reclaim the values of a medieval saint and install them in a modern era. It is a utopian film- but its utopia is the utopia of personal spiritual fulfilment- of rebirth through Christ, the utopia of what St Francis calls perfect happiness, the renounciation of everything, even happiness itself for the beatific vision of God acheived through suffering.

In that sense the film rejects the whole basis of modernity. From first to last this is a film that revels in folly and stupidity. Its heroes are the mad and the starving- its power lies in its reinvention of poverty. Similarly to the Christians studied by Peter Brown in his magnificent study of Poverty and the Church, Rosselini wants us to remember that wealth is independent of virtue and indeed can be opposed by it. Possessions in this film are an absolute evil. Villagers who love their pigs and cows not as brother animals but as possessions let them obstruct their own salvation. One of the monks, Ginepro, is so foolish that every time he goes out he manages to lose his habit, or rather he grants someone else the privilege of taking his habit from him. That happens three times- the last time the Monks are being visited by Sister Chiara and they have to drag the naked Ginepro off to a bush to reclothe him using some plant stems and a coat. Ginepro's naivety and his lack of property though are of a piece- worldly wisdom is all about the collection of possessions, Ginepro has no idea about how to function in a world of possessions. Give him a load of wood and some vegetables and you'll find him as likely to allow the wood to be cooked and the vegetables to be used as material for the fire as anything else- indeed you can expect him to not realise that food goes cold and rots with time.

Poverty is a virtue here- but so is laughter. St Francis laughs himself throughout the film- he finds things absurd and funny- the title translates as St Francis, God's jester! The monks laugh repeatedly and joy is something they often express. But its the object of their laughing and their joy that Rosselini wants us to observe. Joy proceeds in this film from comradeship. Everyone is everyone else's brother. Poverty has abolished property and even a sense of individuality. Everyone follows St Francis and Francis himself follows his congregation- allowing them to take major decisions- and of course the living God. Francis declares himself the leader because he is the greatest of sinners and invites, nay orders his own followers to place their feet upon his face and neck because of his manifest and multiple sins. This response to every question is echoed by his followers- when Ginepro is captured by the Barbarian King, he too uses the response, telling the King that he Ginepro has deserved death because of the way that he has betrayed God and submitting to any torture with a stare that signifies his increasing saintliness. Hence Francis in a conversation later in the film tells one of the monks that the only way to Christ is to suffer for him- in suffering man abases himself, wipes himself clean of sin and comes closest to the Christ of the cross. In wordly happiness, man is furthest from that Christ and lives in sin- even if he loves Christ, so long as he is rich or powerful or even content, he cannot acheive full happiness, wallowing in the mud he can.

But that's not to say that pain does not hurt or touch these monks. Rosselini wants us to see that- and in perhaps the film's most important scene which is almost silent he does. In the nighttime Francis prays on his own to God, and as he prays a leper comes along almost silently beside the dwellings of the monk. Francis watches the leper through the trees, observes the man's bloodied and emaciated face, his infected hands and his doomed limp. He moves up to the leper, almost level, the leper slowly moves away. Francis keeps following the man, then deliberately he stands in front of him and hugs him, blessing him in hugging him. Of course we are meant to know what this means. Leprosy in the Middle Ages was the most infectious disease of them all, the most feared disease. The leper moved away to spare Francis, Francis embraced him to remind the leper and himself of the man's common humanity. Perhaps the most important shot of the whole film is at the end of this sequence, the leper moves on and St Francis filled with shame and horror collapses weeping to the floor. As a piece of cinema it is incredibly powerful, not a word has been spoken and yet the central Christian themes of compassion and abasement, of the centrality of morality, the sadness of fallen man and the hope of salvation have all been expressed wordlessly in the actions of a Christian saint and a disfigured human being.

And this is a film that we can take in this way. Originally it was preceded by shots of medieval art work. Even in the form we see it in most normally today- it is a story told like a medieval religious chronicle. There is no story- and the most important aspects of St Francis's life and order- his commission from the Pope and his preaching are left out. This is a story rather about what makes a saint, it is a story whose message is spiritual and not secular or historical. Whereas as a historian my film would concentrate on St Francis, the Pope and the Emperor, this film concentrates on St Francis and his comrades, their charity, their foolishness and comedy. That has a more profound message though for our times- Rosselini's film wants us to refocus. For too long he is telling us we have focussed on politics, for too short a time on ethics. To renew society after the experience of total war it is ethics though- it is the personal and sainthood that can reach something that no ammount of political theorising can. In a sense this is self criticism- Italy had of course sustained a Fascist dictatorship and Rosselini had worked for it- when he talks of sin, Italy's sin must be at the forefront of our minds. But this is a deeper film than a mere examination of a personal and national moment- Rosselini wants us to refocus our attentions, politics is not enough, only ethics can save us now is what he seems to be saying.

Martin Oms considered this film to be the marriage of Christianity and cretinism- his comment missed the point. This film exalts cretinism to be the foundation of a truly Christian life. Such a vision is incompatible with almost any modern philosophy of government- to laud the beggar and the preacher on the street over the responsible member of society, the senile old man over his children who want their cow to build families not be fed to religious simpletons, the monk who robs a peasant of his pig in order to feed a sick comrade over the industrious farmer. It puts all our heirarchies upside down and reminds us of how different the Middle Ages are from our own time in terms of mental outlook. Rosselini was to pass in later films, as Martin Scorsese argues, to considering the Dosteovskyan question, is idiocy truly possible in the society that we have built or is there no place for the holy fool in our world?

Regardless of our answer to that question, this is one of the most powerful portraits of the holy fool in western cinema- there may indeed be nothing else much like it. It is a beautifully shot film- as a non-Christian I do not agree with its message but I cannot but marvel at the power with which that message is expressed.

Civil and Religious Law in England: Contra Canterbury!

I have heard Rowan Williams speak and unlike some am fairly well disposed to him- he gave a fascinating talk on art and philosophy at Cambridge in 2005. I suppose that makes me a perfect advocate of the argument that today the Archbishop has made a complete idiot of himself. Partly he has made an idiot of himself through the fact that whatever Rowan Williams does understand, the media isn’t one of the things that he gets. Partly though he has made an idiot of himself because he has advocated a concept of law which I think is dangerous and creates a special privilege for established Churches in this country which they should not have.

Williams’s speech has usefully been put up on the Guardian website. Reading it one notices a couple of things. Williams is not really talking about Sharia- the discussion of Sharia is just a bridge into a much more important theoretical issue which is the attitude of the law to the citizens who live under it. What Williams wants the law to do is to distinguish between citizens based on what they believe: he tells us that

there is a risk of assuming that ‘mainstream’ jurisprudence should routinely and unquestioningly bypass the variety of ways in which actions are as a matter of fact understood by agents in the light of the diverse sorts of communal belonging they are involved in.

Williams of course over emphasizes the communal (and Matt Sinclair has criticised the Archbishop adequately on those grounds here): but he also mistakes what the law is about.

The law is the instrument by which we maintain peace and mark out civil goods and bads: it delineates that which the country considers private and inoffensive and that which the country considers public and dangerous. The law insofar as it does that cannot respect the will of the particular agents who operate under it, even if they have a sense of ‘communal belonging’ which say excuses murder: the question before lawyers is what did they do and what is the punishment. In some situations the law also arbitrates and here you could argue that the intentions of the agents matter- but that is only in the sense that the law intends to respect both of the agents. The sense of the agents is not what governs the process of arbitration but its a factor in it. For example, say I am someone who believes that animals are equivalent to children: the fact that I believe that is a factor in the decisions the court might make, but it does not govern those decisions. Williams is right that the law should not be blind to the intentions of agents as factors in any decision, but it should not be governed by those intentions (and he knows it shouldn’t- at one key moment he qualifies his own position to exclude the religious courts ever destroying someone’s rights- quite how he would do that when almost all law concerns questions of right is a different and interesting matter). Ultimately the standerd to which the law aspires is not Muslim, Christian or Jewish justice or Mormon or Scientologist justice but its justice as defined by statute and precedent within Parliament- justice as it applies to everyone who is any of those five religions and to anyone who isn’t from the Sikh to the Satanist, from the atheist to the polytheist.

The problem with Rowan Williams is in part that he is deceived by his own subtlety- go and read the lecture it is an example of encasing yourself in sentences like a mummy in wallpaper and then trying to walk through a crowded tube platform. But its more than that. As a theologian Williams wants us to think about revelation all the time: but revelation doesn’t have that much to do with politics. In a democratic secular state, revelation is a factor in any decision but it doesn’t govern what the government should or shouldn’t do. Ultimately people who believe owe just as much as people who don’t to the state because the state is not a religious formation- it is on its Western model a secular foundation which exists to perpetuate the well being of its members. The point isn’t that religious people can’t be religious, or can’t be members of society, but that the state isn’t interested in their religion. They can use religious justifications for their political actions if they like- but those justifications will only appeal to those that share the same religion and will irritate those that don’t- they will produce communities struggling against each other. The state is a minimalistic project in the sense that it talks a minimalistic language of politics- the problem with Dr Williams is that for him that just isn’t enough.

Its a common problem that you can see here and across the Atlantic- the current Pope is another person guilty of demanding accomodation on his own terms alone. But what people need to realise is that as soon as you create a legally privileged religion or argue that all argument has to take place in religious terms: you do abandon the whole idea of a secular state- a meeting place between people of different religions and none which does not proscribe any faith but tolerates almost all. There is a lot of modern work been done on these questions- Mark Lilla has just published an interesting book I mean to write about here in the future on the philosophy of this area. But ultimately it all comes down to the reasoning of the earliest modern philosopher of secularism, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes had a dark vision of where arguments like the Archbishop’s could lead us: towards a hell of civil strife and communal violence, towards religious tyranny and massive unhappiness.

Despite my admiration for Rowan Williams, who is a very intelligent and thoughtful person, this time I’m with Thomas Hobbes.

Crossposted at Liberal Conspiracy.

The Children's Crusade

In Chartres, amidst the calls for knights and noblemen to go to Spain to fight against Islam, a group of shepherds led by Stephen of Cloyes one of their number, got up and started marching to deliver a letter from Christ to the King of France. Months later in Cologne Nicholas of Cologne set off with a group of German adolescents to take ship to the Holy land and recover the true Cross and with it Jerusalem. The movements may have been related- we don't know. We don't know though we can guess who took part, we have little knowledge of what happened to those that did take part- and we know only three people's names who were on the expeditions- Stephen and Nicholas referred to above- and an Otto who petitioned the papal curia in 1220 to be releived from his vows to crusade. And yet these crusades have become famous, passed from chronicler to historian, from poet to philosopher, from novelist to children's novelist, until they became part of the common currency of our times. The Children's Crusade is one of those events that shocked Europe at the time- yet had almost no consequences- it survived as a myth- a rumour- a disquieting revelation about human nature that kept the leaders of the Church and the doctors of the enlightenment awake at night.

What were the Children's Crusades? Well firstly there were as I said two of them. On both medieval chroniclers say that 'pueri' (latin for 'boys') took part. Some historians beleive that those pueri were a social group- marginalised young men on the edge of medieval society- some beleive that they were an age group- the young. Gary Dickson who has produced the most authoritative modern treatment suggests a mixture of the two- that the pueri were most likely shepherds and the dispossessed- young men before their marriage who left their homes and went to join these movements. The crusades happened in the Chartres region of France and in Germany. At our best guess, the crusade around Chartres developed after a request was sent out to the churches of the Chartrain to furnish soldiers for Christian armies under pressure in Northern Spain. The Chartres crusade arose out of processions around the great cathedral at Chartres- our best guess is that Stephen of Cloyes, mentioned by a chronicle from Laon, went home and was inspired by those processions to mount his own procession to bear a letter from Christ to King Phillip of France at St Denis. We know that that excitement led to perhaps hundreds and maybe thousands (numbers are hard with our limited information) to go south to St Denis. After St Denis, for some reason the remnant of the crusade headed off into the Rhineland- we have them recorded in a document at St Quentin, 140 miles north east of St Denis and a possible eye witness account by Renier of Liege at Liege in the first fifteen days of July 1212. From there they went onto Cologne where the movement seems to have grown in size. Dickson comments that fewer shepherds and more young people seem to have been present because the references in the chronicles emphasize the youth more. Nicholas of Cologne's group passed from Cologne southward- over the Alps and into Italy heading for the meditereanean- before attempting to board ships at various ports down the coast, culminating we think at Brundisium on the southern coast of Italy.

A spontaneous popular movement like this is not something that passed without comment. Monastic chroniclers were terrified of its implications- angry at the outburst of enthusiasm and fearful of the ways that the pueri had deserted the authority in particular of their parents. But nor was it unusual in the medieval world. There were movements before this- that behind the crusade launched by Peter the Hermit in the 1090s for example (though his movement did attract aristocratic support which the Children's Crusades didn't) and later movements like the Shepherd's Crusade of 1251 for example also had a popular nature. Popular revivals of religious sentiment were a feature of European religious history right up until the reformation and beyond: in 1457-9 thousands of French youths headed for Mont Saint Michel to pray and chronicles talked of the countryside emptying, similar things happened in the sixteenth century for example John of Leiden roused his supporters behind a manifesto of equality and free love based on the scripture. Such upheavals were the price society payed for a surplus of young men who were unemployed and ready to be roused to a biblically literalist interpretation of Christianity. They had other effects too- Dickson the author of the latest study of the Children's Crusade argues that one of those effects was mass migration. Effectively the pueri moved from Germany down to Northern Italy and many of them stayed behind within Italian towns- legends still connect many families in Genoa with the families of pueri who stayed behind, and Otto our petitioner to the papal curia was himself an emmigrant to Italy. Furthermore Dickson argues the effect of the crusade was to popularise the discourse about Crusades and hence about identity within medieval Europe: the call to crusade, made by Pope Innocent in 1213, was the first to address the people of Europe as well as its princes.

The Crusade has passed latterly into fiction and fairytale. Many of whose elements are unreliable- we have little evidence that there were mass sales into slavery at the end of the crusade- its not that likely that babies took part as one rather inspired chronicle has it. Nor that as medieval writers asserted the whole thing was a dasterdly plot by the Old Man of the Mountain or by Stephen of Cloyes's father who had sold his soul to Satan or for that matter by anyone else. Protestants in the 17th Century accused the Pope of selling out the crusaders and loved the self inspired nature of the movement. Voltaire in the 18th Century thought of it as a testament to his new doctrine of a socially contagious mental disease- religion. Victorians imagined it as the march of the innocent- H.G. Wells thought it was a 'dreadful affair'- Bertolt Brecht saw it as an analogy for wartorn central Europe and even a historian whose credentials were as impressive as the British Byzantist Sir Stephen Runciman couldn't resist gilding the history. The truth is though that the movement was a revivalist movement- launched from within the lower classes. We don't know an awful much about it- but what we do know makes it more fascinating than any myth would have it- we have a group of people marching away from their homes in the service of a living God, a God who breaks up authorities and family. The God of truly radical religion- not radical in our sense of the word- but radical in a much more profound sense- the God that destabilises.

The Children's Crusade is a useful marker in that sense- and Dr Dickens's book a useful testament- to the power of religion.