I am going to critique a review. Well, to put it more bluntly, I am going to tear it apart. The review in question, by Kate Kirkpatrick, appearing in Christianity Today’s September 2009 issue, is of a book of pious fiction called:
Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies
By David Bentley Hart
Yale University Press, April 2009
Kate Kirkpatrick’s title for her review is no less contentious than Hart’s book title:
Reframing Human History
How we got into the atheism culture war in the first place
A better title for Ms. Kirkpatrick would have been “Rewriting Human History” because that seems to be the goal of this particular fraud, book and review both.
First let me say that this is not something that we have not all heard before; this is apologia at its finest, designed not only to reassure the faithful but to uphold the tapestry of 20 centuries of lies by pretending what happened never really happened and that what ought to be true really is true. I will therefore give Hart and Kirkpatrick both an A+ for their promotion apologia as a genre, but for history, an F.
Ms. Kirkpatrick begins her review with comedy. I suppose she wants to put us at our ease before unleashing the full vigor of her apologetic purpose:
Hart, a visiting professor of theology at Providence College, begins by looking at the New Atheist phenomenon, lambasting Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett et al. for their carelessness with and rhetorical manipulation of philosophy, theology, and history. But that is quickly left behind; in the book’s second half, we begin to see the Orthodox theologian’s real intent: to offer a counter-narrative of religion’s role in human history.
These atheists are accused of “carelessness with and rhetorical manipulation of philosophy, theology, and history” – by a conservative Christian. If that doesn’t make you laugh, I really don’t know what will. There has been no greater manipulation of philosophy, theology, and history perpetrated upon humanity than Christianity’s normative inversion. In fact, Christianity did not simply manipulate – it turned philosophy, theology and history on their heads. As for a counter-narrative, that is exactly what Abrahamic monotheism has produced, a counter-narrative to support counter-religion. What Hart and Kirkpatrick are selling here is pious history, or “history as it should have been”.
This is just as well because they have no interest in history as it was.
The New Atheists trade in “fruitless abstractions of religion,” Hart writes, and reduce Christianity to its history’s “bloodthirsty crusaders and sadistic inquisitors”—in other words, to its worst constituent parts. But far from being an obstacle to human flourishing and fulfillment, Hart asserts, Christianity gave birth to the idea of humanity as we know it. Never before the 2,000-year-old religion were slave and free, man and woman, rich and poor, Jew and Gentile welcomed in equal measure and with immeasurable love.
This is simply false. If you read this and you have a truth-o-meter active, it will crash and probably never work again. Christianity did not offer any of these things. Egalitarianism? No, a myth. Slaves were not free. Christianity not only did not free slaves, it established new ones, the Catholic Church enshrining the idea that blacks were natural slaves, and thus giving rise to racism in the New World (see below). And Jew and Gentile welcomed with “equal measure”? Are we forgetting the treatment of Jews under the Christian Roman Empire? The Christian-sponsored medieval pogroms? Crusaders on their way to slaughter Muslims for Christ used to stop along the way and warm up by killing whatever Jews they could find. And are we forgetting the horrors of the Spanish Reconquista when Jews and Muslims both were brutalized, deported and killed? The crusades against heretics and pagans? Hart dismisses the crusades as an aberration but it is no aberration at all. Here is an example of that “immeasurable love”:
In the introduction to a recent book, R. Joseph Hoffmann has provided a list illustrating the long history of monotheistic violence, a list which could be longer, if it were made to extend back to the period prior to 554 or the period between 554 and 1032, but it is still illustrative of the scope of monotheistic violence in general and of Christian anti-Semitism specifically:
554, at Clermont, slaughter of Jews and forced baptism of 500
1032, Fez, Muslim troops kill 6,000 Jews in bid to reconquer Spain
1066, Grenada, 4,000 Jews killed
1096, Germany, from Mainz to Speyer, thousands of Jews slaughtered
1099, Christian slaughter of Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem
1148, Christians and Jews in Islamic Spain forced to accept Islam or die
1236, across France, 3,000 Jews killed in an failed attempt to organize a Crusade
1298, professional “Jew Killers” move across Germany, looting, burning, and killing as many as 4,000 Jews
1328, 5,000 Jews killed in Navarre
1209, Beziers, Christian forces kill 20,000 Albigensian heretics – fellow Christians – and hundreds of Jews
1614, Frankfurt, 2,000 Jews killed[1]
Hoffmann’s list covers one thousand years. ONE THOUSAND YEARS. But in a larger sense, the Christian crusades began with the elevation of Constantine, when Christianity turned its violence against Paganism – and if you mark down 1700 as an arbitrary end then you have fourteen centuries, 1,400 years. With all due respect, an “aberration” doesn’t last 14 centuries, Mr. Hart and Ms. Kirkpatrick. Twelve centuries out of twenty – 70% of Christian history and if we subtract three centuries from the 20 as the only centuries in which Christianity did not occupy a position of power, over 80% of the time Christianity has been the ONLY LEGAL RELIGION. Quite an aberration. I would suggest to Mr. Hart and Ms. Kirkpatrick that the 20% in which no crusades and holy wars took place (and arguably, Operation Iraqi Freedom could be called a crusade) is the true aberration.
But let’s get down to some specifics. We will use slavery as an example here, in order to illustrate just how pervasive and insidious is the lie of this pious history.
We hear often that Christianity did away with the institution of slavery altogether, along with its many other alleged social reforms. Jean-Pierre Devroey asserts that “The triumph of Christianity constituted a major challenge to the ideology of slavery.”[2] But did it? Even Frend is forced to admit that there was no Christian drive to abolish slavery.[3] Ramsay MacMullen challenges the standard model of Christian social egalitarianism: “Christian leaders once they emerged anywhere at or near the top of the social pyramid looked down on those beneath them with just the same hauteur as their non-Christian equivalents”[4]
The early Christians, it may surprise some, showed remarkably little concern for slaves or opposition to the institution of slavery. Paul for instance, while urging slave masters to be just and fair to their slaves (Col. 4.1), says in Ephesians (Eph. 6.5-8)
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, single-mindedly, as serving Christ. Do not offer merely the outward show of service, to curry favor with men, but as slaves of Christ, do whole-heartedly the will of God. Give the cheerful service of those who serve the Lord, not men. For you know that whatever good each man may do, slave or free, will be repaid by the Lord.
This admonition is repeated in Colossians 3.22-24. 1 Timothy, one of the epistles written later and not by Paul himself says that “All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect, so that God’s name and our teaching may not be slandered” and further reminds slaves that those whose masters are like them, Christian are no less deserving of respect because they are brothers. In other words, don’t take advantage or expect special privilege. You’re still a slave so act like one (1 Tim. 6.1-2). Titus echoes these sentiments:
Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them, and not to steal from them, but to show that they can be fully trusted, so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive (Titus 2.9-10).
Here it is all about making a good impression on the Pagans. After all, who is likely to convert if they see that slaves behave like rascals and without respect towards their masters who share the same faith? Practical, but hardly the stuff of social egalitarianism! This is the end justifying the means. Rhetoric aside, the bottom line was as important to Christians as to Pagans.
Of course it can be argued that in Paul’s case, slavery, no more than matrimony, mattered, because the End Time was near. The Parousia was at hand. He and his congregations expected it daily, certainly at the outside in their own lifetimes. So Paul’s advice to the slaves in Corinth, “Each one should remain in the situation which he was in when God called him. Were you a slave when you were called? Don’t let it trouble you – although if you can gain your freedom, do so” (1 Cor. 7.20-21) should perhaps be seen in this light. We might say the same for his relationship to the slave Onesimus who ran away from his master Philemon to join Paul (Philemon 16).
Of Pagan Romans, Seneca and Cicero are best known for their remarks about slavery. Neither man, living approximately a century apart, considered abolishing the institution of slavery, but this can hardly be held to be a mark against either them or Paganism as no Christian was making this recommendation either. The simple fact is that the ancient world had no serious abolitionists, Howard Fast’s Marxist freedom fighter Spartacus aside. Without doubt Spartacus wanted freedom, but he was no socialist reformer. His own people, the Thracians, kept slaves just as did the Romans, and had the situation been reversed, Spartacus would have had no qualms about owning a Roman or two. Social engineering was not something to be considered in a world which depended so heavily upon slave labor, some would say for its very survival.[5] Pagans knew this, so did Christians. That does not mean that the matter was not discussed at least theoretically. In fact, when a suggestion was made that slavery was not a natural condition of man, it was a Pagan who spoke. Alcidamas, a pupil of Gorgias, who lived in the fourth century, said “God has set all men free; nature has made no man a slave.”[6] Aristotle discusses attitudes towards slavery and makes it sound as though the idea was not unique to Alcidamas:
Others affirm that the rule of a master over slaves is contrary to nature, and that the distinction between slave and freeman exists by law only, and not by nature; and being an interference with nature is therefore unjust.[7]
This consideration did not eliminate the possibility of discussion about the proper treatment of slaves. And how were slaves treated? Variously. It depended on the type of slave and upon the master. Slaves in the mines obviously worked under terrible conditions. Caius relates that “slaves were in the power of their masters; in all nations the masters had the power of life and death over the slaves”[8] but so too had fathers over the lives of their wives and children and Roman governors over the lives of the inhabitants of their provinces, slave, freed, or free – Roman citizens included. So this is hardly something any Roman would have blinked at. After all, one could hardly expect slaves to have more rights than free women and children. And indeed, as Devroey points out, there were some instances in which Pagan practice was superior to what came after. A first century Roman master who killed a slave without just cause might find himself punished, and ill treatment might result in his being required to sell the slave, while the Lex Burgundionem of the Christian post-Roman era does not recognize the death of a servus to be homicide until Chindasvinth’s reform (642-653).[9]
Pliny seems to have been an indulgent master, solicitous of the feelings of those he owned. In describing his house he says that “the rest of this wing is reserved for the use of my slaves and freedmen, but most of the rooms are elegant enough to house guests…at the end of the terrace is a suite of rooms. When I am there I feel that I have got away from the rest of the house…for in this way I don’t disturb my slaves’ enjoyment and they don’t interrupt my work.”[10]
Here we return to Seneca and Cicero. Seneca urged that slaves be treated humanely: “it is strange that we should think it a good thing to send a poor unfortunate slave to prison. Why are we so anxious to beat him at once and break his legs? We should wait until our anger has cooled off before fixing a punishment. For we punish by sword and execution, chains, imprisonment and starvation a crime that deserves only a light beating.”[11] In his epistles he says that slaves should be treated as fully human.[12] He argues elsewhere[13] that every human being is a member of an all embracing common world – typical Stoic fare, and no requirement here – unlike Christianity – to worship a common God or to abandon ancient customs and traditions. It is a brotherhood not dependent upon Christ, and the more gentle for it.
In truth, there is nothing in Christian thought that surpasses Stoic ideas about slavery. And despite Christianity’s much vaunted claim to moral superiority over Paganism, the Essenes, according to Josephus,[14] kept no slaves while Gentile Christians did. Christianity did not create a social revolution even after it gave up hope that the Parousia was immanent, even after Paul’s excuses were exhausted and irrelevant. Instead, it was business as usual. Slaves continued to toil and only the religious orientation of their masters changed.
The typical view would be that expressed by Keith Hopkins but what does not get said because of the illusion of Christian egalitarianism is that this description is as true for Christian Rome as for Pagan Rome:
Slavery was a cruel and repressive institution, enforced by hatred and fear. “All slaves are enemies”, stated a Roman proverb. The hostility of Roman slave-owners to their slaves, and of slaves to their owners, lay just below the surface of Roman civilization like an unexploded volcano. To be sure, some slave-owners were probably kind and considerate to some of their slaves, whether out of affection, generosity or the self-interest which was prompted by a desire to safeguard valuable assets. Sometimes owners’ kindliness was projected into an idealized image of the grateful and loyal slave, who in an emergency even sacrificed his or her own life to save the slave-owner. That favourable image was one side of the coin. The other, and dirtier side of slavery rested in slaves’ legal powerlessness and in their more or less complete dependence on their owner’s favour, which, as far as the slave knew, could turn at any moment from love to hate. [15]
What we find when we examine the relationship of Christianity to slavery is that Paul’s view is not unique: A reading of Polycarp or Ignatius shows that slavery was not, as Christians would make it, a Pagan vice. Ignatius goes so far as to say that slaves should not be “puffed up” and not desire their freedom “at the Church’s expense…” (Ign. Pol. 4.3) and Ignatius’ letters to Christian households, such as Tavia’s with slaves. John Chrysostom argued that Christianity did not enter the world to overturn everything and require masters to free their slaves (Argumentum ad Philemon PG 62). Tertullian (Apology 27.5) said “rascal slaves…mingle insolence with fear.” He believed “resisting or rebelling slaves” were to be equated with demons and believed they should be confined to work houses or sent to the mines! Under Christianity slaves were forbidden to be priests “not out of fear of complications with a runaway, but because of such candidates’ sheer vileness, by which ecclesiastical office would be ‘polluted.’ This amounted to a serious devaluation in comparison to paganism’s auspices: “Slaves under paganism had free access to almost all cults and temples, they mixed promiscuously among most cult groups, and commonly formed their own cult groups with their own priests and officials.”[16]
In contrast to those earlier Christian apologists mentioned above, Augustine is often held to have disapproved of slavery, but he did not advocate the abolition of the institution itself. His contribution was to hold slaves to be human, and to urge their fair treatment by masters. It is a shame he did not hold women in equally high regard, or Pagans, or Donatists, or other so-called heretics. In any event, as we have seen above, Augustine’s views are not in advance of Seneca’s, writing three centuries earlier and between the two, Seneca seems the more vociferous, and he might have benefited by a reading of Seneca’s views on cruelty (95.30). Taking Seneca’s views to heart might have mitigated some of the worse results of Augustine’s own intolerance. Moreover, there had already been progress as early as the last century of the republic towards seeing the slave as a human being. Augustine was doing nothing more than walking on already well trod ground – and by the despised Pagans to boot. An appeal to Augustine then does not much advance the Christian claim of social egalitarianism.[17] In conclusion, MacMullen’s judgment seems sound: “If we ask, in summary, whether life was on the whole easier for slaves in Christian times than in pagan, the answer is probably No.[18]
The revolt of Spartacus is held out by Howard Fast (and by Hollywood) to be a story of man’s struggle for freedom under the tyranny of Pagan Rome, but if this is so, how do we explain the Byzantine Era “Spartacus”, a runaway Byzantine slave named Peter Delianos? He led a revolt in Bulgaria in 1040 by claiming to be Czar Samuel’s grandson and defeated several Byzantine forces sent against him before the revolt was finally suppressed. Is it not equally valid to see this as a story of man’s struggle for freedom under the tyranny of Christian Rome?
Slavery continued in Western Europe as well, and it continued for a long time. Susan Mosher Stuard draws our attention to the fact that even the Latin terms, ancilla for females, servus for males, were retained, and that “medieval custom never jettisoned the Roman notion that women passed on their servile condition to the heirs of their body.”[19] Rouen in Duke William’s day was a flourishing trade center, including among its other goods slaves from Ireland.[20] Slaves were bought and sold openly, in many cities, including Dublin (the other end of the Rouen axis), but also in Marseille and Prague. Many slaves came from Russia and Kaffa on the Black Sea, an old Greek colony and alternately Genoan and Venetian outpost during the 13th century was a huge emporium in the trade – Europe’s largest, in fact. Many among this human cargo were Pagan slavs from the interior, captured and sold by the nomadic peoples who dominated the Ukrainian steppes.[21] Christianity can claim that it was under their auspices that European slavery finally disappeared but slaves were not really all that critical to the economy when one of the fruits of feudalism was an every growing body of cheap labor – Medieval Europe’s disenfranchised rustics – the serfs, to do all the hard work. Though serfs could not be bought or sold, their condition was not much better. It is true that over time, conditions for slaves improved but conditions varied widely. Marc Bloch asserts that slavery disappeared from France in the 11th century,[22] but Ruth Karras argues that slavery did not disappear from Sweden until the 14th century.[23] Stuard notes that “In Scandinavia, as in England and France, the domiciled slave remained a feature of rural life even after the disappearance of the unfree agricultural worker,” and furthermore points out that “As for the Balkans and the Adriatic region, there appears never to have been a time when the slave-trade died down or slavery fell into disuse.” And much of this human traffic was in children, especially young females, who formed a special market niche. Female slaves had certain advantages over male; they were considered “more tractable” than males, who tended to run away more often.[24] And even when slavery itself had been left aside in Europe, Europeans continued to traffic them to the Islamic powers on the Mediterreanean’s periphery.
Slavery lasted much longer in the Iberian Peninsula with its long history of warfare against the Islamic powers controlling the south. Muslim prisoners were regularly enslaved and this activity continued as Portugal began to operate militarily on the African continent (for example, Cueta in 1415 and Tangier in 1437). And of course, in the 15th century, not much later, began the African slave trade, in 1441 to be precise, when two Portuguese captains, Antão Gonçalves and Nuno Tristão, captured a dozen unfortunate Mauretanians and returned home with the new slaves. Black slavery caught on quickly. On August 8, 1444, six caravels sent to capture “black Moors” unloaded 235 slaves at Portuguese-controlled Lagos. Castile and Genoa were also early participants in this lucrative enterprise. It cannot be argued that this was simply a bit of secular economics. On18 June 1452 Pope Nicholas V issues a Papal bull, the infamous Dum Diversas, which authorized the Portuguese to reduce “Saracens [Muslims] and pagans and any other unbelievers.” Much is made of the numbers of slaves in Roman cities and as a percentage of the empire’s population as a whole, but there were so many slaves in Spain that by 1565 one tenth of the population of Seville – six thousand people – were slaves. The same figure holds true for Portugal’s capital, Lisbon in 1527 – some five to six thousand all told – and by 1573 there were some forty thousand slaves in Portugal. [25] It was from this beginning that America was populated with black slaves, and it is to Christian thought, to attitudes established before the first European settled in North America, that racism owes its origins – not, as should be obvious – to Paganism.[26]
So much for the much vaunted Christian brotherhood of all men, both slave and free, united and equal in Christ!
I have looked elsewhere at just how free Christianity made women.
Kate Kirkpatrick continues with her review:
Much of Atheist Delusions reminds readers of the importance of remembering what Christianity has done for us—not just for the believer in personal salvation, but also for the nonbeliever in human history. Would we have had medieval leper hospitals if not for Christ’s teachings of kindness and his charge to seek the good of those less fortunate? Would almshouses, orphanages, and hospitals have come into existence without the Christian message that God dwells in “the least of these”? Hart finds no precursor in pagan society that shows that Christ’s message was anything but revolutionary.
Another laugh-out-loud bit here. We’ve looked at some of the violence above. We’ve seen therefore just a glimpse of “what Christianity has done for us” and it is horrifying enough: centuries of atrocity heaped upon atrocity, unrelenting and without apology.
This is a very old claim being advanced here, one that Christian apologists trot out at need to prove the “superiority” of Christian morality – which is, of course, a myth. Yes, Christianity has done so much for the nonbeliever, by ruthlessly stamping out and eradicating every alternative to itself, by forcibly converting, through torture and violence, all of Europe.
But we should all be thankful! Do these people even seriously believe this crap? It’s hard to comprehend how anyone could. Perhaps they’ve never actually picked up a book to read outside of collections of their own propaganda. I’m quite sure Hart can believe anything if he believes this, so I’m not surprised he finds no precursor in Pagan society…I mean, it’s not like there were any healing sanctuaries or anything in polytheistic society! Athenian law even supported all orphans of those killed in military service until the age of eighteen. Plato (Laws, 927) says: “Orphans should be placed under the care of public guardians. Men should have a fear of the loneliness of orphans and of the souls of their departed parents. A man should love the unfortunate orphan of whom he is guardian as if he were his own child. He should be as careful and as diligent in the management of the orphan’s property as of his own or even more careful still.”
For the record, there were no almshouses until the 10th century. It is disingenuous at best to argue that Paganism did not have something that Christianity did not itself have or that Paganism did not have it when it is Christianity that forcibly eradicated Paganism and prevented it from having the opportunity to have something similar.
Let’s pluck this little gem apart. We can start by asking, was Pagan and Christian morality all that different? There is evidence that the early Christians did not think so. They, in fact, made much more of the similarities than the differences, as witnessed by the writings of the second century’s apologists. Nor was the Sermon on the Mount so revolutionary. Rodney Stark argues that Christianity’s attraction lay in the fact that it offered an antidote to “life’s miseries here and now!” He lists its attractions as though they were new and marvelous: “Love one’s neighbor as oneself,” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” and “When you did it to the least of my brethren, you did it unto me.” “These were not just slogans,” Stark tells us.[27] But they were not simply slogans to Pagan society either.
The idea of philanthropia was well known by Pagan society – and long before Christianity appeared, and even the idea of loving one’s enemies is well attested in Pagan writings. Diogenes Laertius (8.23) mentions Pythagoras on this score and it is found in Seneca too (De vita beata 20.5). John Whittaker’s findings are impossible to argue with: “We have no choice but to conclude that the pertinent conception was deeply entrenched in the popular morality of the ancient world.” Whittaker goes on to say: “We may conclude that pagan critics had not been slow to note that the Christian ideal of morality, lofty though it might be, was well anchored in the Hellenistic tradition.” Indeed, “in the Iambi ad Seleucum of Amphilochius of Iconium, friend of the Cappadocians and cousin of Gregory Nazianzen, the exhortation to follow the ethics of the pagans but not their theology.” This amounts to less than a damning condemnation of Pagan ethics and morality. [28] The argument, so often used (by Stark as well) that Christianity was in some sense socially superior to Paganism is proven by the fact that Julian urged Pagans to match Christian “benevolence” is flawed, as it derives from a period in which Paganism had been illegal for two generations and the operations of temples disrupted. By the time Julian came to the purple, it is quite likely that the conditions with which he was familiar indeed prevailed; that did not mean that they were true of the period pre-Constantine.[29]
Celsus went so far as to accuse the Christians of a lack of originality in the area of morality.[30] Origen does not even try to contest the point, but settles for asserting that “basic moral principles are by divine disposition universally one and the same.” Whittaker notes that Christian apologists of the second century “took pains to emphasize the similarities rather than the divergences between their beliefs and the pagan wisdom of the Roman Empire.” [31] Even the bigoted Augustine insisted that philosophers converting to Christianity leave only their false doctrines behind, not their way of life.[32] But of course, philosophers did not spend their time singing and dancing.
Kate Kirkpatrick:
He also refutes many of the New Atheists’ unjustified charges regarding witch hunts, the Inquisition, wars of religion, the destruction of the Alexandrian Library (which supposedly symbolizes Christians’ antipathy toward learning), and so forth. You might think, as I did, that saying that much of Christian history has been distorted in this debate is hardly revelatory. But Hart goes further, asserting that itself has a mythology of its own, according to which the Age of Reason came to birth during the Enlightenment (Genesis), scientists such as Galileo have been sacrificed (as martyrs) for the cause, and the superstitions of religion (evil) must be fought in order for science and reason (good) to prevail. Modernity has rewritten the past, editing out the role of the church, the cradle of many triumphs of scientific inquiry.
We’ve looked at some of the facts regarding apologetic denials of violence. A substantial list has been posted at mosmaiorum.org. Feel free to examine this and to revel in examples of Christian love and tolerance.
Here we will look instead at this claim that the church is the “cradle of many triumphs of scientific inquiry.”
Christianity has an insatiable appetite for everything not its own. Though through this ravening thirst it long ago destroyed itself, it has never ceased acquiring the property of others and making them its own. Almost immediately it laid claim to newness and originality though it is and has always been almost entirely derivative. Its latest example of self-approbation is no less than the claim that it saved Western Civilization.[33] Part of this claim is the assertion, incredible though it may seem, that Christianity saved Classical learning, the very Classical learning it is itself responsible, with malice aforethought, for systematically destroying! After destroying nearly every manuscript it found inconvenient, dangerous or not in some way useful, and redacting what survived until it fit Christianity’s needs, it now attempts to take credit for preserving what little remains to us out of the countless millions of books, letters and tracts that in the period of a few hundred years, it ruthlessly destroyed.[34]
Kate Kirkpatrick:
A good deal of the modernists’ mythology parades in the name of education; science and religion are presented as polar opposites, while misinformation about this battle, such as the belief that Galileo suffered at the hands of the church, prevails. Galileo’s own irascible character, in fact, was the source of much of his misfortune.
Right…it’s always the victim’s fault isn’t it? Are you serious? I mean, seriously serious? You want to go with this? Here are the facts about Galileo: Galileo suggested that the earth revolved around the sun, which was contrary to the Church’s position. Pope Urban VIII ordered that Galileo, who was then 70 y ears old, be threatened with torture unless he recanted. Repeated threats of torture finally forced the old man to do what the church demanded and admit he was wrong. Yes, we can see how Galileo’s “irascible character” was responsible for being threatened with torture. Telling the truth, after all, was a crime. But Galileo wasn’t the first to come to this conclusion: Copernicus had figured this out by 1500, a century before Galileo, but he didn’t say anything for fear of persecution. Tommasso Campanella (1568-1639), who wrote a treatise in defense of Galileo, was for a time confined to a convent for his unacceptable views and for defending Galileo (The Defense of Galileo 1622) he was tortured by the Inquisition.
These men were hardly alone. Philosopher Renee Descartes, whose thinking gave rise to the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, had to flee to the Netherlands to do his writing because Catholic Church dominated France would have seen him executed.[35] Or look at the example of John Spencer (1630-1693) who avoided charges of heresy only by pointing to the New Testament’s claims about Moses when he suggested that Moses was an “Egyptianized” Jew.[36] A century later, Voltaire fared not much better, and after he was buried in the Pantheon in Paris in 1791, his body was stolen by religious zealots and dumped in a trash heap (1814). Such free thinking and questioning of orthodox truths was not permitted.
Kate Kirkpatrick:
This is not to say that science and religion have always existed harmoniously, but where such tensions existed, they were often internal; many conflicts arose because so much early science was done in the church’s pursuit of learning.
This is a bald-faced lie. I guess you can convince yourself of anything if you try hard enough, but the facts don’t support you here. The science done, by figures such as Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Isaac Newton and others, did their science not by or for the church, but despite it’s vigorous and often violent opposition.
Kate Kirkpatrick:
Hart describes our world as “post-Christian,” stressing that even unbelievers are, for good or for ill, post-Christian. We all have inherited the consequences of Christianity and, most importantly for Hart, its morality and definition of human life. For him, post-Christian culture precariously stands on the brink of being post-human. The God-free Age of Reason promised to usher in a new cultural reality in which liberty, justice, and equality would be protected by rulers who in reality saw human lives as expendable in achieving their ends. For all its “enlightenment,” secular society has come with unprecedented violence in the form of revolutions, imperialism, chattel slavery, and ideologically inspired mass murder (one need only think of Stalin and Pol Pot).
We have certainly “inherited the consequences of Christianity.” This cannot be argued. But this heritage is hardly on the positive side. I have to admit that if anyone knows about mass murder it’s Christianity, so I hate to poke holes in the assertions here (I mean, the Church is the real expert here). But this is like the recent claim by conservative Catholic scholars that it wasn’t really the Inquisition and the Catholic Church that killed all those people, it was the nasty Protestants. Let’s face it: Conservative Christianity endorses avoidance of personal responsibility for your actions and these are classic examples of that tendency.
Let’s take another look at where unprecedented violence has its true origins. It does NOT derive from secular humanism! We’ve already had Christianity “save” us once before and millions died as a result. We don’t need that kind of help, thank you very much!
People speak of the barbarity and cruelty of paganism and in particular, cite the gladiatorial contests as an example. But Christians both financed and attended the arena (why else would Tertullian rail against it?). As MacMullen observes, “The role of Christianity in the abandoning of the most western gladiatorial combat was nil.” He notes too that there is “no clear difference” between the opinions of Christian and Pagan moralists on the subject. Nor do fourth century Christian writers show any pity for the combatants, but rather scorn. We are told that Constantine, the first Christian emperor, put an end to the contests but this is untrue. They were a thing of the past already in the 200s in parts of the West, Gaul, Germany and Britain, and the reasons were economic, not moral. It must be stressed that this process took place not under Christian auspices but Pagan. And as for Constantine’s law, gladiators still fought in Beirut three years later, and the emperor himself allowed them in Italy. Nor did the Christian emperors Constantius and Theodosius put an end to them.[37]
Still we are told how brutal Paganism was and how enlightened and peaceful Christianity was in contrast but “judicial savagery” as MacMullen calls it, was on the rise in the Christian era. Christians today, fond of complaining about the cruel punishments inflicted under Islamic law would do well to revisit the first Christian century for a salutary lesson in cruelty. The role of Christianity is clear. While not solely to blame for this increase in violence, it did contribute to it:
Observing both Christianity and an aroused paganism in operation, it appears to me likely that religious beliefs may have made judicial punishment specially aggressive, harsh, and ruthless. In both, the characteristics of action were similar, producing cruelty in the service of zeal. But there was also a major difference: pagan beliefs left daily morals to philosophy. For pagans, only correct cult mattered. Christian zeal in contrast was directed over all of daily life. Hence, threats and torture, the stake and the block, spread over many new categories of offense.[38]
And even as great an enemy of the old ways as Jerome had to admit that not all Pagans were savage; he speaks of pagan governors proud of never having inflicted the death penalty during their administration (Ep. 2.5.3 cited in P. Brown, Religious Coercion, 115). While much is made of how terrible the Roman “persecutions” were, the tales of the martyrs (many of them invented) pale in comparison to the atrocities committed by the Christian Roman authorities on pagans of all stripes. We have discussed the issue of Christian intolerance and exclusivism elsewhere but a few examples bear repeating. Ramsay MacMullen speaks of the difficulties faced by the ecclesiastical and secular forces in “completing the process of conversion”:
What the difficulty indicates can only be an emptiness, call it, or some mix of deficiencies, in Christianity itself. Therefore anyone who would not respond to the social and economic inducements held out by the “Christian empire,” not to the arguments and demonstrations proving the rightness of Christianity, must be persuaded by other means. It is a striking indication of the urgency felt within the church, that the ideal held up for imitation in accounts of evangelical efforts were heroes that would lock an old man for life in their private dungeon of some sort, or burn a heathen priest to death. Government, too, at the urging of the bishops weighed in with threats, and more than threats, of fines, confiscation, exile, imprisonment, flogging, torture, beheading, and crucifixion. What more could be imagined? Nothing. The extremes of conceivable pressure were brought to bear.
Thus, he says, “over the course of many centuries, compliance was eventually secured and the empire made Christian in truth. [39]
Nor were pagans the only targets. In the fourth century, “the century opened by the Peace of the Church, more Christians died for their faith at the hands of fellow Christians than had died before in all the persecutions.”[40] If the empire was suddenly free of the spectacle of gladiators toiling to the death in the arena, it was given another spectacle to replace it, one far closer to home, the violence of the new religion itself turned against Pagan and Christian alike. Drake discusses the black-robed monks, the storm-troopers of the Christian empire who did the violent bidding of the Church:
Heresy is…the issue that mobilized the monks behind a message of coercion instead of love…pagan critics like Libanius and Eunapius provide vivid accounts of rampaging, black-robed mobs, and even the catholic emperor Theodosius is known to have remarked that ‘the monks commit many crimes’…The enormous spiritual prestige these desert warriors enjoyed in the Christian community is…a factor. By their more tedious and less visible regimen of self-denial the monks had woven for themselves the mantle formerly worn by the martyrs, champions of Christian commitment and endurance during the long centuries of persecution. In a community that identified such behavior with sanctity and holiness, the monks wielded a spiritual authority that turned what otherwise might have seemed senseless acts of violence into moral crusades. Under such conditions, reasonable voices are easily stilled.[41]
Can it be said that the removal of gladiators and their replacement by innocent victims in every town and city and in the country made the empire a better, more peaceful place? We are often told how Constantine changed the law sending criminals to the arena. What is as often omitted is the fact of their new destination, the mines.[42] Given the onerous and brutal labor of the mines and a life expectancy not far exceeding that of gladiators, we might wonder if he was doing them any favor. At least in the arena a successful gladiator had a chance at super stardom equal to that of any rock star today, with fame, adoration, women and eventual freedom awaiting him. Nothing of that sort could be found in the mines. It is difficult to see any improvement in the human condition through the burning of Bogomil heretic leader Basil in the Hippodrome of Constantinople, an event recorded by Anna Comnena, daughter of the emperor Alexius Comnenus.[43] Going back again to the story of the apostates to Baal of Peora, David Lochhead argues that “the violence expressed in this text, albeit in a more subtle and spiritualized way, has persisted in the Christian tradition.”[44]
The Middle Ages, a Christian era, were no less violent than the eras that preceded it, nor, contrary again to popular (Christian inspired) belief, were the Heathen Vikings any more fierce or savage than the Christians they battled with. The Vikings are still often considered to represent the epitome of violence, but this same sort of violence was a part of everyday life in Christian Medieval Europe.[45] The atrocities regularly committed by Christian feudal magnates make so-called atrocities of Pagan Rome pale in comparison. Poisoning and other forms of assassination even of and by religious figures, was commonplace. For instance, it was not enough for Byzantine emperors to execute their rivals or rebels; first they were blinded and otherwise maimed. Justinian, the Christian emperor who put an end to the Academy in Athens and legislated brutal punishments for Pagans did not hesitate either to put thirty thousand Christian citizens of Constantinople to death when in 532 a riot rocked the city after the arrest of murderers in connection with riots which had followed an earlier chariot race.[46]
Against this view of a more violent Middle Ages David Nicolle argues that
Contrary to a widespread popular impression, medieval Europe was no more warlike nor more violent than preceding or subsequent periods within Europe, nor indeed in comparison to most other societies during what Europeans call the medieval period. On the other hand, warfare as a social and political phenomenon was more widely accepted as “normal” within medieval Europe than it was in many other cultures, times or places.[47]
Of course, for our purposes it is enough to prove that the claims of apologists notwithstanding, that it was no less violent than the period preceding it, namely, the Pagan.
No, it can be demonstrated that Christianity has done nothing to make the world a better place. It has nothing special to offer the populations who would otherwise be left their ethnic religions. But what it replaced – what it destroyed, had a great deal to offer – religious tolerance. In the 21st century, monotheistic spawned religious violence is as pervasive as in the 11th century at the dawn of the Crusades, perhaps more so. Two billion Christians and one and-a-half million Muslims insist that the world must convert to their belief systems and it is possible even that American foreign policy is being directed with a mind towards the long-expected Parousia, the fabled Second Coming of Christ. This is not a situation that can be palatable to the other half of the world’s population who stand to lose a great deal indeed if global war should result from these beliefs and aspirations.
Kate Kirkpatrick:
Meanwhile, the freedom of the will has become a god unto itself, transcending the Christian “superstition” that every life is of immeasurable value. And with the will so exalted, it is choice itself, not what we choose, Hart writes, that now matters. We see this in many of today’s ethical debates—abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, economics, and censorship—where choice is invoked frequently and seems to exercise “an almost mystical supremacy over all other concerns.”
Quite obviously, Christianity does not believe that every life is of immeasurable value. Twenty centuries of history have demonstrated this beyond the shadow of doubt. Christianity has always opposed choice. The very word “choice” is anathematized as “heresy” (the meaning of the word). Choice is evil. Choice is not allowed. Uniformity of thought and action will be imposed by Christianity. Those who reject this imposition will be punished, as Ramsay MacMullen observed, by any means necessary. We see here “choice” being called evil, invoked “over all other concerns” but I fail to see where the ability to choose is evil but imposition of a narrow and rigid belief system is positive. It is unsurprising, of course, that choice would be considered evil: it is enshrined in Christian belief in the tale of the Garden of Eden. Choice has always been bad. Intolerance is upheld as a virtue and tolerance is its opposite. The world, as I said, turned upside down.
Kate Kirkpatrick:
Hart concludes by asserting that we need a re-education of what it means to be human. We must learn more about the story that we Christians have inherited. In doing so, we must also face the uncomfortable fact that Christianity is not shaping civilization today as much as it once did. “Innumerable forces are vying for the future, and Christianity may prove considerably weaker than its rivals,” Hart warns.
Yes, we have seen how Christian “re-education” works. We have seen, as we showed above, twelve centuries of it (at a modest estimate). The world functioned just fine before monotheism reared its ugly and intolerant head. And we got along just fine without your holy wars, witch hunts, and inquisitions, thank you.
Here you give the whole game away, don’t you: “Rivals”. As Jan Assmann demonstrates, polytheism was a means of translation between cultures. It transcended culture. There were no religious rivals. Monotheists invented the whole concept of religious rivalry, so it’s a bit late to get all upset about having rivals isn’t it?[48] You made your bed, now you lie in it, and I mean “lie” in any number of ways.
Kate Kirkpatrick:
But Hart’s message is not as disempowering as it may seem: it is a call to action, for learning more of our history better equips us to fight the battle to reclaim it. If Hart is correct that “Christianity has been the single most creative cultural, ethical, aesthetic, social, political, or spiritual force in the history of the West,” then we must ask ourselves: Why? Christian hands are by no means free of blood and wrongdoing. As Hart writes repeatedly, “human beings frequently disappoint.” We are corrupt and callous, and the temptations of power and conquest have snuffed out the holiness of many. But through the darkness, a glimmer of hope shines, for unlike atheism, Christianity offers hope—a hope of transformation from beyond ourselves.
But Hart is not correct in his assertion that only Christianity offers hope. Simply stating this is true does not make it true. It is a demonstrably false claim. And what you actually mean is not “learn” about your history but “rewrite” your history to convince people that it’s really the nasty secularists and atheists and pagans that are responsible for all the problems in the world you’ve tried so hard to correct (by exterminating us all).
Kate Kirkpatrick:
As we survey modernity’s rewriting of history, we must remember this hope as we look to shape the future. For it is the life and death of Jesus Christ that has transcended the ages: for Christians, faith is not merely “a cultural logic but a cosmic truth.”
And this assertion is precisely why you have rivals. Have you no comprehension of how soul-destroying your religion is? There is no cosmic truth to your religion. Pagans understood (and understand now) that our religions are true for us. They are not for export. You have no right to impose your own truth on the rest of the world. The rest of the world did not want it, as proven by the fact that you did have to impose your truth on it. It was not welcomed by the 30,000 Saxons massacred by Charlemagne to force conversion, nor by King Radbod of Frisia, who sent the missionaries packing, nor by any of the other millions of people killed by Christianity as part of an effort to eradicate every alternative to itself. Have you ever actually picked up a history book, Ms. Kirkpatrick? I have serious doubts.
Kate Kirkpatrick:
Atheist Delusions is a stimulating and challenging contribution to the New Atheist debate, and is recommended for any believer who wants to confront modern misconceptions about Christianity and its history.
The problem with this claim is that Hart contributes to misconceptions about Christianity and its history. He reinforces mythology with his apologetic efforts and does nothing to encourage examination of the historical record where it comes into conflict with “history as it should have been.” (Translation: Atheist Delusions is a work of apologia that will reassure you that everything is all right, that the nasty atheists are wrong and that you can go on comfortably believing your delusions and know that Christianity has no responsibility whatsoever for any of the evil it has wrought on the world for twenty centuries).
Kate Kirkpatrick, an editor with Lion Hudson in Oxford, England
Mr. Hart, with perhaps Kate Kirkpatrick assisting him, needs a new job as a propagandist. She obviously has mad skills in that regard.
Notes:
[1] R. Joseph Hoffmann, ed., The Just War and Jihad: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), 7-8.
[2] Jean-Pierre Devroey, “Men and Women in Early Medieval Serfdom: The Ninth Century North Frankish Evidence,” Past and Present 66 (2000), 7.
[3] W.H.C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia, 1984), 133.
[4] MacMullen, Christianity & Paganism, 7 cf. MacMullen (1990), 264 f. and n. 29
[5] Though Chester Starr argues that ancient slavery is misinterpreted by modern scholars, pointing out that while slavery was present but not dominant in industry and commerce, agriculture “nowhere rested on slave labor permanently.” See Idem, “An Overdose of Slavery,” The Journal of Economic History, 18 (1958), 17.
[6] Alcidamas, Messeniakos
[7] Aristotle, Politics 1253b20-3). B. Jowett in R. McKeon, ed. The Basic Works of Aristotle (NY, 1941)
[8] Caius, Inst., I, 8, I
[9] Devroey, 7, n. 13. For slavery in the ancient world see Moses Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (NY, 1980), 93-122 and Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (Cambridge, 1978). Also A.H.M. Jones, “Slavery in the Ancient World,” The Economic History Review 9 (1956), 185-199.
[10] Pliny, Letters, II, 17
[11] Seneca, On Anger, III, 32
[12] Seneca, Epistles 47.1
[13] Seneca, De Beneficiis 3.18.2, also Epistles 31.11.
[14] Josephus, Ant. 18.1.5, the reason given being that “the latter tempts men to be unjust.”
[15] Keith Hopkins, “Novel Evidence for Roman Slavery,” Past and Present 138 (1993), 3-27. cf. Idem, Conquerors and Slaves (Cambridge, 1978).
[16] MacMullen (1997), 7.
[17] Augustine did not write a tract on slavery so it is no easy task to ascertain what his views on the matter were. For an examination of these attitudes see Margaret Mary, “Slavery in the Writings of St. Augustine,” The Classical Journal 49 (1954), 363-368. For Seneca’s views on slavery see Epistle 47. For earlier Roman attitudes towards slaves as humans see Juvenal, 14.16-17.
[18] Ramsay MacMullen, “What Difference Did Christianity Make?” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 35 (1986), 325.
[19] Susan Mosher Stuard, “Ancillary Evidence for the Decline of Medieval Slavery,” Past and Present 149 (1995), 7.
[20] McLynn (1999), 94.
[21] Perhaps, appropriately, given its reputation, Kaffa is believed to have been the city from which the Black Death spread to Europe in the 14th century.
[22] Marc Bloch, “Personal Liberty and Servitude,” in Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages: Selected Essays (University of California Press, 1975), 33-92.
[23] Ruth Mazo Karras, Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia (New Haven, 1988), 138-140.
[24] Stuard, 16-20.
[25] A.J.R. Russell-Wood, “Iberian Expansion and the Issue of Black Slavery: Changing Portuguese Attitudes, 1440-1770,” The American Historical Review 83 (1978), 16-27.
[26] James H. Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997), 143-166.
[27] Rodney Stark, Cities of God (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), 30.
[28] John Whittaker “Christianity and Morality in the Roman Empire” Vigiliae Christianae 33 (year?) 210.
[29] See Stark, Cities of God (2006), 31, who while railing against scholarly bias, reveals his own: “Paganism was utterly incapable of generating the commitment needed to motivate such behavior.”
[30] Origen, Contra Cels. 1.4 (PG 11.661).
[31] Whittaker, 212-213.
[32] Augustine, Civ. Dei 19.19.
[33] An example of this is to be found in Philip J. Sampson, 6 Modern Myths about Christianity and Western Civilization (InterVarsity Press, 2001), an apologetic attempt to refute the crimes of Christianity against civilization and science. See also Thomas E. Woods, Jr. How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (Regnery Publishing, Inc, 2005). Woods apparently feels we should ignore the destruction wrought by Christianity and thank Catholicism for replacing it with a syncretistic amalgam of its own creation. These books (and Christianity itself) are in open defiance of the well proven credo, “if it isn’t broke; don’t fix it.”
[34] The process was simple: books were outright burned, or were not recopied, or were reused. This latter process, that of the palimpsest, vellum pages of older works were scraped and washed and the surfaces reused. In this way, many ancient texts were destroyed. Sometimes, these lost texts come to light, as in the case of the Archimedes Palimpsest, a 10th century manuscript of several treatises by that 3d century mathematician, which had been “palimpsested” by a 12th century monk and reused to write down Greek Orthodox prayers. It would be disingenuous at the least to argue that this is an example of Christianity saving ancient learning. Felicia R. Lee, “A Layered Look Reveals Ancient Greek Texts,” NY Times, November 27, 2006. See also the project website at http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org
[35] See Russell Shorto, Descartes’ Bones. A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason (Doubleday 2008).
[36] For John Spencer see Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian. The Memory fo Egypt in Western Monotheism (Harvard University Press, 1997), 55-90.
[37] MacMullen, “What Difference Did Christianity Make?”, 331-332.
[38] Ibid., 332.
[39] Ramsay MacMullen. Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 72.
[40] Ibid, 14.
[41] Drake, 31-32.
[42] C. Th. XV.12.1.
[43] Anna Comnena (Komnene), The Alexiad 15.10. Edited and translated by Elizabeth A. Dawes. (London: Routledge, Kegan, Paul, 1928), 427. Not only heretics were dispatched here but traitors, deserters and rebels. It is not easy to see from these examples where the supposed evils of Pagan society have been much improved upon once Christianity has taken hold.
[44] Lochhead, 3, 5.
[45] See, for instance, Frank McLynn, 1066: The Year of the Three Battles (London: Pimilco, 1998) for the goings on in the Christian Anglo-Saxon and Norman courts.
[46] Procopius, History of the Wars, I.24, translated by H.B. Dewing (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 219-230
[47] David Nicolle, “Medieval Warfare: The Unfriendly Interface,” The Journal of Military History 63 (1999), 579.
[48] Assmann (1997).
