Who Was the Emperor?

OK. First off, I want to make this post the only thing you will ever read about the Holy Roman Empire that doesn’t tell you what Voltaire said.

Secondly, I have to admit that I gave up on a book, something I’ve only done a handful of times in all my life. It’s not like Peter Wilson’s Heart of Europe is a classic of great literature, so I don’t feel too guilty, just a little lopsided in a mild-OCD way. Wilson claims up front that he didn’t arrange his 600-page book chronologically but thematically, with a timeline at the end. So when he says that such-and-such an event hadn’t happened since Otto II without having told the reader about Otto II or provided any contextual dates, I don’t know what he’s talking about. Could any reader know?

I’d rather have a story with an appendix of interpretation than a thematically ordered history with an appendix of dates. Of course, I’d really rather have something like a narrative with explanation and interpretation folded in all along the way. But it seems that’s too much to hope for in a history of the HRE. The other longish book I saw on Amazon claimed the same thematically driven organization. So I just settled for the Very Short Introduction to . . .  from the Oxford series (this one by Joachim Whaley). These little guides are also not anything like great literature, but every one I’ve tried has done a good job of laying down a foundation of understanding about some difficult topic.

The big question on this topic is always, “What was the Holy Roman Empire?” I’ve come to the oxymoronically temporary conclusion that the question is perennial because it’s simply the wrong question. The better question is, “Who was the Holy Roman Emperor, and what did he think the Empire was?” The Empire was at least an ideal whose chance of realization definitely started in 800 and definitely ended in 1806, but apart from that, it doesn’t seem to have been much of anything. There were many years in the Empire’s history in which no emperor was crowned. The Emperor never had a central army or the ability to raise taxes. Starting in the fourteenth century, the electorate was codified as one set of seven (later eight, and then nine) German leaders who wanted the prestige and stability of an emperor. So the Emperor represented seven out of millions, but to what extent did this elected figurehead preside over and unify the territories of these princes, not to speak of the hundred-fifty or so towns, duchies, and bishoprics that got no vote? At times over the years, some groups of towns and territories within the Empire, most famously the Hanseatic League, formed mutual defense and economic pacts, leaving other parts of the Empire out. The Empire fought a civil war in the seventeenth century that lasted thirty years. In the eighteenth century, various pieces of the kingdom sided at different times with France against “the Empire” and yet remained within the Empire. And in Napoleon’s time, several of the Empire’s territories voted to become part of France.

Now what kind of country would the United States be if, say, West Virginia had been able to form an alliance with ISIS and yet stay within the U.S.? What would Italy be if Tuscany and Umbria could form their own army and make a trade pact that excluded Venezia? What would Canada be if Alberta could just vote to become a part of Mexico and then be exactly that, without any further ado?

So the story of the HRE, I think, is really a story of people. It’s the story of Otto I, the first German Emperor; of Henry IV, who made obeisance to the Pope in the snow at Canossa; of Frederick II, the stupor mundi (wonder of the world); of Charles IV, who wrote the Golden Bull enshrining the election process; of Charles V, who cared more about Spain and American colonies than he did about German lands and left his brother to try to handle the Reformation; and of Charles VI, who really only cared about Austria. These fascinating people all had ideas about what the Empire was and tried to make it what they wanted it to be. But if generations of potters continually work at the wheel trying to make and reshape the same vase, is it ever really a vase?

Better Times for Hard Times

Around some twenty-five years ago, I used to see the occasional student walking around campus carrying a copy of Hard Times. Some course at the U of Oklahoma – maybe in English, but more probably in history – required it, and I used to feel sorry for the members of this captive audience since they were, as I saw it, asked to become acquainted with my favorite author through my least favorite of his novels.

The book has its advantages for academia. It’s the shortest of the complete novels (the unfinished Edwin Drood might be a touch smaller), making it much easier to fit into a curriculum than, say, Bleak House. And it gives clear presentations of two important movements in nineteenth-century British history: utilitarianism and labor unions.

But it has its drawbacks, as well. For one thing, the language of the characters is unusually difficult to read, even for Dickens. Either they’re trying to speak philosophically, or they’re trying to outdo one another in piling up politenesses at the beginning of every simple sentence (I hope I do not show too much presumption when I say to one of your upbringing that, and so on), or they’re speaking in a mid-England dialect. Young people reading a novel look to quotation marks for relief; they won’t be happy when that punctuation introduces language actually more complex than that of the narration.

The problems with the language make it difficult for the average young reader of today. But not for me. The feature that bothers me most is that Hard Times is just so dreary! While others keep an eye out for quotation marks, I journey through the sad, bitter parts of a Dickens novel in anticipation of the happy home (Aunt Betsey’s, for instance) or the lovable clown (Captain Cuttle or Dick Swiveller). An element such as these serves as a pole star, centering the story as it whirls around in seeming chaos and providing the moral compass for the reader trying to find the way to rest and resolution. Hard Times has Sissy Jupe, but we hardly get to know her as we do Oliver or David or Pip or Nell in other novels. Sissy has a happy ending, but the narration only reports it rather than portraying it, and we don’t learn any of the important details. Dickens was just too focused in Hard Times, as perhaps the short form allowed him to be, on the villains and the conflicts and the social dysfunctions to give the reader a periodic haven of rest.

I will say, though, that, at least in the chapters before Stephen Blackpool shows up, I read the novel this time with a new enjoyment as I imagined the mind-above-heart father and the ludicrously utilitarian schoolmaster being played by Eric Idle and Graham Chapman. The first fifty pages or so, read in this way, struck me as darkly comic, and I actually laughed several times. I would declare these passages deliciously biting satire, except that the introduction in my Oxford edition assures me that many schools at the time were run in this very way and that Dickens is here doing more recounting than exaggerating.

I still feel sorry for any student who is required to read Hard Times, but at least I’ve found a strategy for myself.

In Jeopardy!

I generally don’t expect people to know that the author of Gargantua is Rabelais. If I were to eat out for lunch today and then go to the Visitor Center in Great Smoky Mountain NP and then to the grocery store, I would guess that not one person out of the hundreds I see would know this information. I wouldn’t expect my neighbors to know it. I wouldn’t have expected any of my students to know it.

But I expect Jeopardy! contestants to know it. And yet in an episode a couple of weeks ago, one clue sought the author of Gargantua, and not one buzzer sounded. I’ll lower my expectations even lower: I don’t expect any Jeopardy! contestants to have read this comic masterpiece. But I expect them to be able to come up with, for instance, any author and title in my Britannica Great Books set. At Father Guido Sarducci’s university, “I say ‘economics,’ you say-a ‘supply and-a demand.’ ” Shouldn’t the traditional canon be in the heads of national-class quizzers and trivia enthusiasts at that level at least? I say ‘Gargantua’ and you say ‘Rabelais’?

It gets even worse. This past week brought the clue that went something like this: “So-and-so tried founding an ideal community based on this work by Plato.”

Crickets.

Honestly?! If you’re going to know about one ancient classic other than the Bible, isn’t it going to be Plato’s Republic? Okay, maybe the Odyssey, but you get my point. The next day, players were asked to identify the literary character who said something about Mr Darcy. Total silence again. Isn’t Pride and Prejudice our culture’s favorite nineteenth-century novel?

Jeopardy! contestants also don’t seem to know the Beatles or Carole King. But that’s a rant for a different blog.

The Spirit of Notre-Dame

Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (i.e. “The Hunchback”) is exactly the kind of book that my reading plan is for. I do read books from the last hundred-thirty years; I just generally like older books better. And the schedule of reading, among other purposes, gets me to make a pact with myself to read a lot of classics I haven’t read before in the hopes of finding new favorites. Notre-Dame is now a favorite. I’ve been walking around laughing while I read it because it’s so good. But, then, I am – you know – a little weird.

If you hear anyone talking about Victor Hugo (admittedly, the chances of this oddity occurring on any given day are quite slim), it will be someone complaining about how long Les Miserables is, especially the chapter on the sewers of Paris. For me that book is not too long at all, and I love the chapter about the sewers! But I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone talking about Notre-Dame, the novel. The hunchback seems to have settled into our culture’s consciousness as a character that lives in various films, not on the pages of a book.

The movies, even Disney’s, seem to follow the plot of the novel fairly closely. But there’s so much more than plot here! After all, the book itself is not named for the hunchback, a character with a story that unfolds, but for the church itself, which, with little change from day to day, stands monumentally telling its own stories. Here is a long chapter not about sewers but about the history of the architecture of the church, displaying as it does the Romanesque, medieval, and Renaissance styles in its successive layers. Then there’s a long chapter on what a person alive in 1482 would see from one of the towers of the cathedral. Who needs plot with chapters like these? Next is an amazing chapter about Quasimodo’s activities in the church. I’ve been trying to come up with a way to describe it better than my lame attribution of the adjective “amazing.” But, like poetry that can’t be translated, Victor’s beautiful language is so much a part of the description of the man who lives, breathes, and moves as the spirit of the church, I think the chapter can’t be described; it can only be read. So put it on your ten-year reading plan!

Okay, in a bizarre coincidence, I find that I have heard someone talking about this novel, and I came across the reference again just last night. I was rewatching an episode of Buffy, and in that episode, Willow and Tara, having finished reading the book for class, talk about Quasimodo and Esmerelda while Buffy tries to figure out if Charles Laughton was one of the singing gargoyles. So, yes, the point of the exchange was the joke about the Hunchback movies. But . . . but Willow and Tara with the talking about my new favorite!

Aquinas Returns

After twenty-some years of reading Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, each year’s reading highly anticipated and ultimately revelatory and rewarding, I’ve been disappointed the last couple of years. My first pass through the tome was guided by Mortimer Adler’s schedule, provided with the Britannica Great Books set. My second pass through it, during the first ten-year reading plan that I drew up on my own, got me through all parts of the work but skipped certain sections, leaving something like 15-20% to be completed later.

It seems that I did a good job seventeen years ago in picking out the highlights to read first. Covering the basics of the virtue of justice was super-interesting a few years ago. Now filling in the gaps and reading this year (in a section on sins opposed to justice) about the difference between backbiting and tale-bearing: not so much.

But the experience this year didn’t disappoint as much as it had in other recent years. The ethics of trial advocacy, for instance, really piqued my interest. For example, Aquinas says that a judge must decide according to what is proven by evidence. If he privately knows some piece of evidence to be false, he must use legal means to sift it and try to reject it. If he cannot do this legally, he must judge according to what has been proven by the legal procedure, even if he knows it is wrong. He is bound to try every legal avenue he has to keep an innocent person from suffering capital punishment. I don’t know if you agree with Aquinas’s take on this issue; I like his respect for the system and the rule of law.

Other intriguing points in this section deal with wasting the court’s time and resources in unjust causes. One who accuses falsely, for instance, and fails to prove his case is rightly bound to the punishment he sought for the other party. Accepting that rule in this country might limit the number of frivolous torte cases seeking millions! Similarly, although a losing defendant has a right to appeal (Christians may appeal without concern that they are disrespecting authority), one who loses an appeal should be punished for the appeal itself as well as for the crime or civil injury he has been convicted of.

I’m actually taking a break from Aquinas now for three years. In his place, I’ll read some other medieval theologians: Abelard, Peter Lombard, and Albertus Magnus. In my fourth ten-year plan, though, I’m going to fill in every nook and cranny of the Summa!

(That phrase reminds me of a joke – if it doesn’t exist, it should – about the Dickensian woman who ran a generous soup kitchen frequented by pick-pockets and poor girls looking for day work caring for children: she filled every crook and nanny!)

George MacDonald and Adoption

When I wrote a post last year on George MacDonald’s sermons, I didn’t say anything about his deep feelings about the theological use of the word “adoption.” Early in his life, George MacDonald was told that he was not a child of God but that God could adopt him as a son. MacDonald grew up thinking that this message meant that God had rejected him to the point that He no longer recognized MacDonald as part of his creation. As an adult, he discovered, he tells us, that the Greek word translated “adoption” in the New Testament does not in fact mean adoption. He indicates the textual context of Galatians 4 in which the heir in Paul’s metaphor is in fact the son of the house but is treated as no better than a slave until “adoption,” which must therefore mean full recognition as a son, not chage of status from non-son to son. Tell a child he is not in his right relationship with his heavenly Father, MacDonald says, but don’t tell him God is not his Father.

This year, I read MacDonald’s novel Donal Grant, and partway through I started thinking: MacDonald sees Donal as himself, and Donal must believe that most Christians are wrong to think that God has adopted them. Then, sure enough, Donal says, in words understandably reminiscent of the sermon I read last year, that the word has been mistranslated and that the mistake has done grave harm to many people. I may be overreacting, but it seemed in this novel as if MacDonald were saying that any Christian who understood “adoption” as a valid theological concept was something like an enemy to the Truth, and that stance made it sound like MacDonald was pitting himself not just against a word or a detail but against the vast majority of English-speaking Christians.

I think that some Christians are wrong about some things. I think, for instance, that MacDonald is wrong to see the acceptance of the word “adoption” as a line in the sand. But I hold my disagreements with other Christians in two very important contexts. First, if most Christians disagree with me on some given doctrine, I simply must attenuate my absolute confidence that I am right. You know. Human. Fallible. Etc. Second, if I truly believe that person A is a Christian and I truly believe that A believes the wrong thing about doctrine B, then, if I see an enemy at all, I hold what I see as the wrong view on B as the enemy, not person A. We wrestle not with flesh and blood.

After reading this book, I feel like I’ve “figured out” MacDonald, and, as I just explained, I’m not sure I like what I figured out. I have three more of his novels on my list for this ten-year reading plan, and right now I’m not sure what I’ll do when they come up.

Leo’s Christmas Sermons

Leo the Great was the Bishop of Rome from 440 to 461. During that time, he famously treated with Attila the Hun and convinced him to leave Rome alone for a while. Over the course of his career, less famously, he preached, as I understand it, at least eight sermons on Christmas day, seven of which have survived. (I reach this tentative conclusion since the ones included in the Eerdman’s Library of the Fathers on ccel.org are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8.)

These sermons were exactly what I was hoping they would be and, truth be told, was afraid they might not be. The celebration of the birthday of Christ, says Leo, is a day to celebrate God’s gift of redemption. We so often read “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” to mean that God allowed his Son to be sacrificed on the cross. (I heard that interpretation in yesterday’s sermon at my own local, twenty-first-century church.) But God the Father gave us the Son in one sense at the Incarnation and in another sense on the Holy Night in Bethlehem.

Leo tells us that Christmas is also a time to celebrate the Trinity and Christ’s dual nature in one Person: full divinity and full humanity. No anathemas here as in many theological messages in these early centuries. Paul says that the one preaching the false gospel should be cursed, not the one who believes the false message. I don’t want to pronounce my own anathemas against those who pronounced anathemas. I just wholeheartedly support Leo’s desire to use Christmas Day to preach the true gospel without drawing lines through the Church visible.

He does draw a line, however, between those who worship Christ and those who worship the sun – or who think that Christmas is really only about worshiping the sun as its daily time above ground starts to lengthen. And yet, while Leo tells people not to worship creation, he doesn't tell Christians to despise creation either: “And so, dearly beloved, we do not bid or advise you to despise God's works or to think there is anything opposed to your Faith in what the good God has made good, but to use every kind of creature and the whole furniture of this world reasonably and moderately.” And this seems to me a central part of the Christmas message: that if God was willing to take on flesh and humanity in all its mundane materiality, then that physicality must have been created good. God made the land and the sea and the sun and the moon and the stars and the fish and the birds and the beings that creep on the earth, and He saw that they were good. It must be right to enjoy them as long as, as Augustine says, our love for them is subordinate to our love for God – not just less than, but subordinate, in that enjoying earthly gifts leads to enjoying God.

Some Christians have worn black because they thought they must be modest in appearance in order to be good Christians. I don’t judge their decision about what they must do to quell pride; I just don’t want them to tell the Ghost of Christmas Present he can’t wear green. Some Christians have served God in poverty. I don’t judge their deliberation to conquer the lust for wealth; I just don’t want them telling nephew Fred that he can’t share a joyous Christmas meal and games with family and friends. Some Christians have made worship a solemn and silent thing. I don’t doubt that they have found Christ in the quietude; I just don’t want them telling Bob Cratchit he can’t slide down the ice with some neighborhood boys “in honour of its being Christmas Eve.”