Divine music

Recently I have been going to Sunday services with the local congregation of the Anglican Church of Canada. This may surprise some of my readers; let me add that the motive force behind this is my wife, who wanted to add one more singer to the ranks of the congregation. So my connection with the Anglican church is primarily through hymns and the liturgy of the Eucharist.

Since I am a historian whose teaching career has involved A LOT of ecclesiastical history, it's very interesting to return to this material (see? I told you I was a historian). Thanks to my training and my own scholarship I can't help but look at the liturgy and the readings as a collection of voices originating in far-flung times and places, and try to understand both the individual texts and their connections to each other. For example, the letters of Paul and... just about anything else in the Bible.

Throw in the hymns (the Anglicans have a huge collection) and it becomes quite a challenge to visualize for instance Regency-era country gentlemen retreating to their studies, having just returned from some gambling hell, and trying to turn King David or Wesley or both into a coherent representation of what is essential in Christianity.

About a month ago there was a hymn that depicted the universal chorus of God's creatures and how even pathetic human beings could add their little bit. That struck me as an entirely mistaken understanding of the divine, of music, and of humanity. You can say a lot of bad but true things about humanity, but our ability to turn any collection of noises produced by sticks and stones or our own voices into astonishing structures of sound is truly amazing. Faithful readers know how much I have been impressed by the innovative rock music of the 1960s and 70s (Jefferson Airplane, Yes). But pick your own faves. How about the Irish traditional band The Bothy Band?

Well over a decade ago I was driving to work listening to the Bothy Band and I was suddenly struck by the divine nature of their enterprise. I had a flash of anger against such divinities, that they could not spare some of their evident power to deal with the many problems afflicting humanity. But quickly I realized my mistake. Practical problems are for humans, as humans, to deal with. The divine nature of music is the proper concern of those seemingly human, but actually divine musicians. And that's my theology.

If you find this lacking in sophistication or rigor, I suggest you look into the "procession of the Holy Spirit," which has divided Christian churches for a thousand years, and then explain to me why this schism makes sense.

Biblical marriage

Quite possibly if you are interested in this issue, you've seen something like this. But Juan Cole's summary of what the Bible says about marriage is to the point:

But wackiest of all is the idea that the Bible sees marriage as between one man and one woman. I don’t personally get how you could, like, actually read the Bible and come to that conclusion (see below). Even if you wanted to argue that the New Testament abrogates all the laws in the Hebrew Bible, there isn’t anything in the NT that clearly forbids polygamy, either, and it was sometimes practiced in the early church, including by priests. Josephus makes it clear that polygamy was still practiced among the Jews of Jesus’ time. Any attempt to shoe-horn stray statements in the New Testament about a man and a woman being married into a commandment of monogamy is anachronistic. Likely it was the Roman Empire that established Christian monogamy as a norm over the centuries. The Church was not even allowed to marry people until well after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, since it was an imperial prerogative.

Ancient scripture can be a source of higher values and spiritual strength, but any time you in a literal-minded way impose specific legal behavior because of it, you’re committing anachronism. Since this is the case, fundamentalists are always highly selective, trying to impose parts of the scripture on us but conveniently ignoring the parts even they can’t stomach as modern persons.

1. In Exodus 21:10 it is clearly written of the husband: “If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish the food, clothing, or marital rights of the first wife.” This is the same rule as the Qur’an in Islam, that another wife can only be taken if the two are treated equally.

2. Let’s take Solomon, who maintained 300 concubines or sex slaves. 1 Kings 11:3: “He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray.” Led him astray! That’s all the Bible minded about this situation? Abducting 300 people and keeping them immured for sex? And the objection is only that they had a lot of diverse religions and interested Solomon in them? (By the way, this is proof that he wasn’t Jewish but just a legendary Canaanite polytheist). I think a settled gay marriage is rather healthier than imprisoning 300 people in your house to have sex with at your whim.

3. Not only does the Bible authorize slavery and human trafficking, but it urges slaves to “submit themselves” to their masters. It should be remembered that masters had sexual rights over their property assuming the slave-woman was not betrothed to another, and so this advice is intended for concubines as well as other slaves. And, the Bible even suggests that slaves quietly accept sadism and cruelty from their masters: 1 Peter 2:18:

And there is more...

Image: Abraham's family. Don't get me started.

What would Thomas Jefferson have said?

Today I took the time to watch Pres. Obama's eulogy all the way through. It certainly will go down as one of the great American speeches.

On the other hand, it felt odd to have the Emperor lecturing us on theology of Grace. If he had been talking about the evils of icons, just at the time when a caliphate is being established, we might have to wonder if we were on our way back to the 7th century.

Image: Paine, not Jefferson -- Mr. Age of Reason

Yes, the ancient Egyptians were odd

From Discovery News:

Animals Mummified by the Millions in Ancient Egypt

About a third of the X-rayed and CT scanned artifacts do in fact contain complete and remarkably well preserved animals. Another third contain partial remains. The rest is simply empty.

Highlighted in a BBC documentary, the “mummy scandal” was exposed as scan of beautifully crafted animal mummies showed linens padded out with various items.

“Basically, organic material such as mud, sticks and reeds, that would have been lying around the embalmers workshops, and also things like eggshells and feathers, which were associated with the animals, but aren’t the animals themselves,” Lidija McKnight, an Egyptologist from the University of Manchester, told the BBC.

Experts believe as many as 70 million animals were‭ ‬ritually slaughtered by the Egyptians to foster a huge mummification industry that even drove some species extinct.‭ ‬

How Different Cultures Made Their Mummies

There were four kinds of animal mummies: pets that died of natural causes before their mummification and were buried with their owners; sacred beasts, worshiped and pampered in life, and buried in elaborate tombs at their death; animals serving as food for their owners in the afterlife; and religious offerings, which were the majority.

Having miserable, short lives, these poor animals were simply bred to become votive mummies — offered to the gods in a gesture similar to the way people light candles in churches today.

The practice began as early as‭ ‬3,000 B.C. and reached its zenith from about‭ ‬650‭ ‬B.C. to‭ ‬200‭ ‬A.D., when millions of animals like dogs and cats were raised by temple priests and mummified.‭

According to the researchers, there was an element of demand outstripping supply which may have accounted for some mummies not containing a complete animal.

Ancient Dogs Found Buried in Pots in Egypt

“There simply wouldn’t have been enough to go round,” McKnight told Discovery News.

“More importantly, the ancient Egyptians believed that a small fragment of bone or material associated with the animals or a sacred space contained sufficient importance to be offered as a gift to the gods,” she added.

McKnight believes the procedure shouldn’t be seen as a forgery or scam as the pilgrims likely knew they were not burying a fully mummified animal.

“It simply wouldn’t have mattered what they contained as long as they were a suitable offering to the gods. Often the most beautifully wrapped mummies don’t contain the animal remains themselves,” she said.

Juan Cole on religious divisions in the Middle East: Sunni vs. Shiite?

From Informed Comment

JUAN COLE: I agree that from 30,000 feet, it looks as though Iran has put together a bloc of countries with significant Shiite populations and is using the Shiite form of Islam as a kind of soft-power wedge to establish a kind of bloc. But if you go down on the ground, then that way of looking at it becomes difficult to maintain. Syria, for example, where Iran is supporting the government of Bashar al-Assad, is a Baathist state, which is irreligious. They actually persecuted religion. It is true that the upper echelons of the Baath Party in Syria are staffed by members of the Alawite minority, who are technically—at least scholars would consider them a form of Shiite Islam. But Alawite Islam is barely Islam. They don’t have mosques. They don’t pray five times a day. They have Neoplatonic and Gnostic philosophies coming from the pre-Islamic Greek world. There is a kind of mythology there that is very important in their thinking.

I went to Antakya one time, which is an Alawite city, and I asked someone—I was eager to meet an Alawite—I asked someone local, “Are you an Alawite?” He said, “No. Praise be to God, I’m a Muslim.”

The idea that Iran is supporting Syria because orthodox Twelver Shiite Islam feels any kind of kinship with the Alawites is crazy. The ayatollahs would issue fatwas of excommunication and heresy and so forth against Alawites.

Then the Alawites are only one part of a coalition of Syrians that involves Christians, Druze, and very substantial numbers of Sunnis. The regime still has about two-thirds of the country, which it cannot have unless a large number of Sunnis in Damascus continue to support it, because the business class has benefited from that regime and so forth.

So, yes, Iran is supporting the Alawites of Syria, but you have to have an extremely narrow lens to make this look as though it’s about Shias.

DAVID SPEEDIE: The other, perhaps even more contemporary context in which this being played out in the minds of some Western commentators, of course, is in Yemen, which is a very, very perilous situation, it seems to many of us. Obviously, al-Qaeda in Yemen claimed responsibility for many terror attacks, including Charlie Hebdo at one point. It is regarded as one of the most virulent and violent of the extremist movements. They, of course, are extremist Sunni. Then this dichotomy, Shia-Sunni, comes into play with, “Oh, Iran is supporting”—now, I read somewhere that they should not technically to be called Houthi, but Ansarullah, the Shia insurgent forces in Yemen.

What’s going on there? What should our response be, for example, to the Saudi-led military action? Is this offering comfort and succor to the extremist elements in Yemen? Or is that again too simplistic? JUAN COLE: In my own view, Yemen is, of course, a complete mess. It is an ecological mess above all. It is running out of water. The capital may go dry within five years. We can expect vast displacement of people just on, surely, ecological grounds. For it to be bombed is the last thing that it needed. This is a humanitarian catastrophe.

The United States has joined in this effort and is giving logistical support, it says, to the Saudis and others who are engaged in this bombing campaign. The bombing campaign is being conducted against a grassroots tribal movement and seems very unsuited to produce a military victory of any sort. I think it can succeed in knocking out electricity and making it difficult to distribute petroleum and, again, making people’s lives miserable. I’m not sure it can succeed in changing the politics simply by bombing from a distance.

I really think the United States is poorly advised to get involved in this thing. I don’t think that the lines are at all clear. The Houthi movement is named for the family that led it. Of course, it is not what it calls itself. (The Quakers don’t call themselves that either. It’s the Society of Friends. People don’t get to choose.) But they have become known as the Houthis. They are a movement of the Zaidi Shiite community in Northern Yemen. The Zaidis are known as a form of Shi’ism, again, very unlike what is in Iran and Iraq what is in Iran and Iraq, what Americans are more used to, as being quite close to the Sunnis. They don’t, for instance, curse the Sunni caliphs. They don’t have that kind of animosity towards Sunnism. And they don’t have ayatollahs. They shade over at some level into Sunnism. They are not that different. People in Yemen, anyway, make alliances by clan and tribe, and not so much by which sect the clan or tribe belongs to. There are substantial Sunni tribes that are allied with the Houthis. Seeing this as Shiite or Iran—maybe it looks like that from a very great distance, but down on the ground, it is a real exaggeration. DAVID SPEEDIE: Again, it is superficial to see this as strictly a religious divide. Many of the tribal entities are probably not that religious at all. JUAN COLE: Many of the tribal entities are not religious at all, and then the ones that are can be united. For instance, most Sunnis in Yemen, in North Yemen at least, are Shafi’i Sunnis, who differ dramatically with the Sunni Wahabi branch of Islam and might well make common cause with Zaidis against the Wahabis.

Medieval versus enlightened

Thanks to the anonymous medievalist who wrote this to Dan Savage:

I've been reading your column for years (19 years?), and I love it. "Savage Love" has been a major part of my coming to terms with my sexuality after a very religious upbringing. And I hate to complain about something that probably seems pretty minor, but hopefully my reasons will be compelling. You recently advised GTBHF about , and you referred to his very conservative upbringing and the "medieval version of his faith." I'm a medievalist, and this is one of the things about our current discourse on religion that drives me nuts. Contemporary radical Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all terrible, but none of them are medieval, especially in terms of sexuality.

I'm not saying that the Middle Ages was a great period of freedom (sexual or otherwise), but the sexual culture of 12th century France, Iraq, Jerusalem, or Minsk did not involve the degree of self-loathing brought about by modern approaches to sexuality. Modern sexual purity has become a marker of faith, which it wasn't in the Middle Ages. (For instance, the Bishop of Winchester ran the brothels in South London—for real, it was a primary and publicly acknowledged source of his revenue; and one particularly powerful Bishop of Winchester was both the product of adultery and the father of a bastard—which didn't stop him from being a Cardinal and Papal Legate.) And faith, especially in modern radical religion, is a marker of social identity in a way it rarely was in the Middle Ages.

The thing that really screwed up a lot of us religious kids was that engaging with our sexuality destroyed our religious identity: we stopped being Christians or Muslims when we started having sex, or sometimes, just started desiring to have sex. (Jewish identity is somewhat different, though my Haredi friends would perhaps find a similar situation.)

The Middle-Eastern boyfriend wasn't taught a medieval version of his faith, and radical religion in the West isn't a retreat into the past—it is a very modern way of conceiving identity. Even something like ISIS is really just interested in the medieval borders of their caliphate; their ideology developed out of 18th and 19th century anti-colonial sentiment, and much ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Judaism and Evangelical Christianity developed at the same time. Even the radical Roman Catholicism of someone like Rick Santorum is surprisingly modern.

...The common response in the West to religious radicalism is to urge enlightenment, and to believe that enlightenment is a progressive narrative that is ever more inclusive. But these religions are responses to enlightenment, in fact often to The Enlightenment. As such, they become more comprehensible. The Enlightenment narrative comes with a bunch of other stuff, including concepts of mass culture and population. (Michel Foucault does a great job of talking about these developments, and modern sexuality, including homosexual and heterosexual identity, as well—and I'm stealing and watering down his thought here.) Its narrative depends upon centralized control: it gave us the modern army, the modern prison, the mental asylum, genocide, and totalitarianism as well as modern science and democracy.

Again, I'm not saying that I'd prefer to live in the 12th century (I wouldn't), but that's because I can imagine myself as part of that center. Educated, well-off Westerners generally assume that they are part of the center, that they can affect the government and contribute to the progress of enlightenment. This means that their identity is invested in the social form of modernity.

However, for those on the margins, for the excluded, the feeling is much different. Some governments have taken advantage of that: the Nazis made national identity part of a progress narrative in order to involve lots of struggling, middle-class Germans in their cause (despite Germany having become a nation only recently); the Soviet Union did a similar thing with the oppressed Russian peasants (despite Marx saying that a mostly agricultural society wasn't ready for Communism). Radical religion is doing something similar: it offers a social identity to those excluded (or who feel excluded) from the dominant system of Western enlightenment capitalism. It is a modern response to a modern problem, and by making it seem like some medieval holdover, we cover up the way in which our social power produces the conditions for this kind of identity, and make violence appear as the only response for these recalcitrant "holdouts."