The Big Deal v. the Enlightenment

Which comes first, democracy or enlightenment? Continue reading

I know very little about the details of the struggle to establish something resembling democracy in the Middle East. I also am uncertain as to whether the chicken came before the egg. I am pretty certain of one thing, however, and that is that enlightenment is a prerequisite for democracy.

The Enlightenment began in Europe in the sixteenth century or, arguably, as early as the end of the fourteenth century. It was a reaction against what I like to call The Big Deal, the agreement between the papacy and the nobility to control everything. This arrangement began in the late years of the eighth century when the papacy was under siege on all sides by the Lombards, the last of the Germanic troops to invade the Italian peninsula. In Pope Stephen II (or III if you count the guy who was pope for three days in 752) crossed the Alps to meet with Pepin, the nomadic ruler of the Franks. The details of this meeting are sketchy, at best. The pope probably used some forged documents known as the Donation of Constantine to convince Pepin that he, the pope, was the rightful ruler of all of western Europe. The two agreed to share power. In 800 Pepin’s son Charlemagne was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III, and, in return for papal recognition of the ascendancy of his family, he effected his own “donation” of a swath of central Italy to the papacy and swore to protect it from any and all invasions. For 1,000 years this agreement formed the basis for government in central and western Europe.

The details of this arrangement varied considerably over the next millennium, but the essential elements remained constant. The pope made binding moral judgments; the emperor and all the nobility enforced them. Emperor Frederick II — not the pope — made heresy, which is essentially anything that questions a papal decree, a capital crime throughout the empire. Untold thousands of heretics were executed. The popes called for crusades over a dozen times, and the kings and emperors were expected to spring into action. In return the popes made it clear that it was always sinful to question the authority of the princes. One hand washed the other.

David's Coronation of Napoleon

David considered The Coronation of Napoleon so important that he painted it twice.

This relationship held firm until the time of the Thirty Years War. Thereafter it was still dominant in Catholic countries until Napoleon crushed it by crowning himself emperor. He even forced Pope Pius VII to watch him do it. The contract was officially abrogated in 1870 when the fledgling Italian republic officially eliminated the pope’s status as a ruler of a portion of Italy and let him run things only in the world’s tiniest country, Vatican City.

I would be willing to bet that the Vatican never becomes a democracy, or, at the very least, it will be one of the last places on earth that allows popular rule. The Big Deal is still in effect there, but it is between the pope as spiritual ruler of Catholicism and the pope as civil ruler of his postage-stamp-sized kingdom.

Most of the rest of the world did not suffer through the pain of replacing the Big Deal with a different model. In the United States people who set up the government were English citizens who were intimately familiar with the perils of an established church. They specifically prohibited any such idea in the constitution. South America, on the other hand was settled by Europeans from countries that still supported the Big Deal. Their colonies have had a much more difficult time implementing and sustaining popular rule.

That brings us to the Middle East, the place in which the Enlightenment is just now in its infancy. Israel has a state religion. Nearly all of the Arab countries also have one. Some of them call themselves “Islamic republics,” but to my way of thinking, the nomenclature is as ludicrous as the “people’s republics” of the countries behind the Iron Curtain. It is difficult to think of a single example in which establishment of popular rule was not preceded by a bloody period of Enlightenment. It just makes sense that as long as the opinions of religious leaders are officially considered divinely inspired, the will of the people will take a back seat. Those who have been in power are unlikely to relinquish it willingly.

So, it seems inevitable that there will be continued clashes in the Middle East between religions, between the religious leaders and the privileged military and civilian authorities, and between the underprivileged and everyone else. The task ahead for a nation like ours that would simply like to speed up the process and minimize the bloodshed there will be difficult. Just think of Egypt, in which the secularists, the Islamists, and the military/bureaucracy complex are vying for power. Whom should we support? Anyone? Does our support cause as much long-term damage as short-term gain? In Egypt today the U.S. is vilified both for supporting the military and for supporting Morsi’s government.

Not statue, stature.

Not statue, stature.

To me the scary people are those who think that these questions have clear answers. It was much easier for Lafayette. He supported our revolt against England in large part because of his respect for enlightened people like George Washington, Ben Franklin, and John Adams. If there are any people of George Washington’s stature in the Middle East today I have not heard of them.

A Jesuit Pope

A short history of the Society of Jesus. Continue reading

The new pope is a member of the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuit order. He is the first pope to be chosen from the ranks of the Jesuits. The Jesuits, apart from the pontiff himself and the four Jesuit cardinals, are known for their simple black robes, Most of them are teachers and missionaries. Many of the most well-known Catholic universities in the United States — Georgetown, Boston College, Marquette, St. Louis University, and all of the Loyolas to mention a few — are run by the Jesuits.

I know a little about them; I went to a Jesuit high school for four years. I can still remember my very first religion class there. Fr. Bauman began the first class by challenging us freshmen to answer the following question, “The Bible: book or books?” I was very impressed that he actually wanted us to think about it. Prior to that day religion classes for me consisted of memorizing the catechism and speculating about whether one could use water from a car’s radiator for an emergency baptism if it contained antifreeze.

The primary reason that no Jesuit had previously been elected pope is that all Jesuits swear an oath that they will not accept any such election. That Pope Francis felt compelled to break this vow might be the most underreported story of the entire event. The other reason is that Jesuits have been so historically controversial that they were actually disbanded for decades by one of the popes whom they swore to serve. This is a story worth telling.

The Jesuits were founded in the sixteenth century by a Basque mystic known as Ignatius Loyola. The group devoted itself to the pope for two purposes: to counter the intellectual arguments of the Protestants and to spread the faith outside of Europe. They were more successful at the second objective than the first, largely owing to the fact that they were perfectly willing to adapt to the customs and cultures of those whom they aimed to convert. In China they worked so closely with the emperor that one of them helped him manufacture cannons. The Jesuits there learned Chinese language and customs and even adopted Chinese modes of dress. A few Confucian notions were even integrated into the celebration of the mass. The results were overwhelmingly positive.

In Latin America the Jesuits likewise converted huge numbers of natives to Christianity and fought hard against their enslavement by the Portuguese. This struggle was dramatically portrayed in the 1986 movie, The Mission.

For two centuries the Jesuits amassed tremendous power in the Church. The process of their ascendancy, however, ruffled a few feathers. The Dominicans objected to their unconventional tactics in the Far East, and eventually they were recalled from their missions in China and India by Pope Benedict XIV. The Bourbons and other European powers complained about their activities in the New World, which occasionally ventured into entrepreneurial realms that competed with the activities of the kings and their relatives. Matters came to a head in 1767 when all Jesuits were rounded up and banished from Spain. In 1774 Pope Clement XIV issued a bull that officially disbanded the order. Within a month he died a horrendous death, and many blamed the Jesuits for poisoning him.

The Jesuits were officially suppressed, but they did not disappear. Jesuit priests were still priests, but their order had no official standing. In a few countries they continued to operate openly, but in most places they were forced to keep a very low profile. In 1814 Pope Pius VII reinstated the order after four decades of suppression, and the Jesuits almost immediately resumed their positions of influence, which they have maintained until yesterday, when one of their number assumed the Throne of Peter to lead the entire Church.

Incidentally, the correct answer to Fr. Bauman’s question is “Books.”

Unenlightened, not Unexplained

Much of the world has yet to experience the Enlightenment. Continue reading

I learned about the Enlightenment in high school, but it did not mean much to me. I knew that a bunch of guys like Locke and Rousseau wrote about men having rights, but I did not understand the context. Researching the popes gave me a new perspective.

The story really started in eighth century Italy, which was dominated by the Lombards, the last of the powerful barbarian tribes that came down from the north. The Lombards, led by King Aistulf, held territories on all sides of Rome and threatened to lay siege to the city. The Lombards were originally Arian Christians, but by this time most had been converted to orthodoxy. They had nothing against the pope; they just wanted to eliminate the gap in their holdings.

Pope Stephen II (or III if you count the guy who died after three days as pope), was desperate. He undertook the difficult journey across the Alps to meet with the King of the Franks, Pepin the Short. Pope Stephen somehow convinced the king that it was his duty to defend Rome against the Lombards. Pepin and his army descended into Italy and defeated King Aistulf’s forces. He and his son Charlemagne confirmed that the Pope was the legitimate ruler of all of western Europe because of a “Donation” that Constantine had allegedly made to the pope after he had moved his own empire to the east. In return Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as (Holy Roman) emperor, and threatened to excommunicate anyone who questioned the right of his family to rule the empire.

I think of this as the Old Deal. The emperor and by implication all of the kings, princes, barons, and other nobles in the empire gained legitimacy for their claims. The pope was ceded a considerable amount of territory in central Italy to rule, and his word in spiritual matters was enforced by the emperor. Thus, Church and State had a mutually supportive understanding. Since the pope was the Vicar of Christ, the kings could claim a divine right to rule.

The relationship had its ups and downs, of course. Over the centuries several popes attempted to depose emperors with mixed results. Likewise several emperors and kings tried to depose popes with mixed results. However, for centuries no king or emperor ever challenged the legitimacy of the papacy. On occasion a powerful monarch lost patience with a pope and install an antipope. Never, however, did an emperor claim that there should be no pope. Similarly no pope ever challenged the feudal system with the emperor at the top. Each institution supported the other.

IMHO the most crucial time for this relationship was the reign of Emperor Frederick II. Although the emperor had violent disagreements with the pontiffs, he never tried to undermine the institution of the papacy. In fact, he ordered that heresy, which essentially was tantamount to disagreement with papal rulings, was a capital crime throughout the empire. When the Inquisition found people guilty of heresy, the civil governments implemented the sentences.

The first memorable challenge to this arrangement came from Jan Hus. At the Council of Constance he was found guilty of heresy in 1415 and put to death by Emperor Sigismund, who had previously granted him safe conduct to the council. A little over a century later Martin Luther had a similar experience at the Diet of Worms, but for some reason Emperor Charles V allowed him to return home. Charles later said that he should have executed Luther as a heretic.

Luther was the first prominent person to claim publicly that the pope might be wrong about a few things and lived to talk and, more importantly, write about it. He never claimed that he was always right, and so he was never a direct challenge to the pope. He just said that the pope could be wrong.

This simple idea threatened to undermine the entire basis of the Old Deal. If a pope can make a mistake, then he could not be the true Vicar of Christ. If he was not the Vicar of Christ, of what importance was his sanctioning of the feudal arrangement? The Church made a vigorous effort to eliminate everyone who promulgated this notion, but effective suppression of the ideas of the Enlightenment was made impossible by the advent of the printing press at just this time.

Eventually philosophers worked out a different justification for government that was based on human rights. The pope’s role in this new world (or rather western European) order was not clear until Pope Pius VII was brought to Paris to crown Napoleon as emperor. While the pope was sitting there in his papal regalia waiting for the big moment, however, Napoleon grabbed the crown and placed it on his own head. Soon thereafter the pope was actually taken as prisoner and held against his will for years in France. So much for the Old Deal.

Eventually in the west the entire feudal system collapsed, but not until a lot of blood had been shed. The pope today is probably as well respected as ever, but very few people are calling for the pontiff to play a more active role in politics, and the people of central Italy much prefer their current political system, even if no one else can understand it.

The process of replacing the Old Deal with a new way of doing things is called the Enlightenment. As far as I know, it is a distinctly western phenomenon. The “founding fathers” of the United States were definitely inspired by the principles of the Enlightenment, but other nations were founded on different principles. For example, Israel was founded as a refugee state. The nations that replaced the European colonies were sometimes designed to resemble western states, but the citizens never went through the process of dismantling a religion-based government.

So, in much of the world religion still plays a much different role. Religious authority figures are treated with more deference in political matters than in western cultures. Religious traditions such as the Islamic imprecation against portraying the prophet are considered as inviolable.

So, it should not surprise anyone that some Arab countries seem to be having trouble with the transition to governments that respect human rights. After all, it took the West more than a millennium to become enlightened.

Likewise it should surprise no one that some people have not learned how to take criticism about their beliefs or to tolerate actions by nonbelievers that are considered ineffable by their religions. For many centuries the western Church and State tolerated no criticism, and the penalty was usually death. Somehow Enlightenment will probably come to all corners of the earth, but it will take a long time, and the transition will be painful.

“The Pope”

Why are popes so often anonymous? Continue reading

I have been reading Margaret Armstrong’s romanticized biography of Edward John Trelawny, a controversial figure associated with the English poets Byron and Shelley. I came across the following pair of sentences that set me off:

[Teresa Guiccioli’s husband] thought that she had been away from home long enough. So did the Pope — from the first, the Pope had taken a benevolent interest in the Byron-Guiccioli triangle.

“The Pope?” I immediately wondered which pope had so little on his plate that he involved himself in one of Lord Byron’s trysts. This common technique of neglecting to disclose the pope’s name is a pet peeve of mine. I cannot list how many times authors have talked about the pope without identifying the man in question.

Does it matter? I think that it matters a great deal. In this case I deduced from the book’s index that the pontiff in question was, in fact, Pius VII, who ruled the Church from 1800 to 1823. If you are interested in the details of his long and arduous pontificate, you can read about them here.

IMHO Pius VII was one of the most interesting of all the popes. He assumed the papacy at a critical period in Church history. His predecessor, Pius VI, had been apprehended by Napoleon’s men and transported to France, where, in fact, he died. Because Rome was considered too dangerous, Pius VII was elected and crowned (with a papier-mâché tiara!) in Venice, which was then controlled by the Austrian Emperor.

David’s Le Sacre de Napoléon

A few years later Pope Pius was persuaded by Napoleon to come to Paris as his guest and to crown him as emperor. Not only did Napoleon switch signals at the last minute and crown himself in front of an astonished pontiff (a moment captured not once but twice by Jacques-Louis David), he refused to allow the pope to return to Rome. Until Napoleon was overthrown and imprisoned, Pius VII, along with thirteen of his cardinals, was held captive in France for several years.

The primary title of the pope, remember, is the Bishop of Rome. When Pius was finally able to return to the Holy See, he faced the monumental task of reestablishing order there. At the time the pope was not just the unquestioned ruler of the Church. He was also the king of the Papal States, a territory that stretched across the center of the Italian peninsula. Napoleon had seized these lands, but they were returned to the pope in the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

Pope Pius VII

And there’s the rub. The pope was probably not interested in Byron or Teresa as much as he was in her husband, Count Guiccioli. During the pope’s exile the count had backed Napoleon, and he had made a fortune doing so at a time when most of Italy suffered. After Napoleon had been deposed, Guiccioli somehow managed to retain much of the property that he had acquired in the Romagna, which was part of the Papal States. He was also closely associated with both the Freemasons and the Carbonari, two secret organizations that were thorns in the papacy’s side in the nineteenth century.

From the pope’s perspective, Count Guiccioli had stolen from the Church by aligning himself with a monster who had both humiliated and imprisoned the Vicar of Christ and then joined up with the heretics trying to undermine the papacy itself. So, when Teresa’s father (!) petitioned Pope Pius VII to approve a separation of his daughter from Count Guiccioli, the pontiff probably did not give Byron a moment’s thought. Guiccioli, on the other hand, was already on his enemies list. In short, knowing who the pope was puts a much different twist on the story.

The inability of most authors to distinguish one pope from another seems not to apply to the last two popes. At any given time most people can remember who the previous pope was and how he differed from the current one. So, most people today know that Benedict XVI is as different from John Paul II as Germany is from Poland. But what about the previous popes? I wager that even most Catholics would have a hard time naming JP II’s predecessors (one only lasted a month) and identifying what they stood for. Almost no one can identify any pope who was dead before he/she was born.

I think that that is a shame. The popes are interesting (to me).