From Henry VIII to Richard Nixon

Political, religious, social and cultural leaders often bring forth popular movements at odds with their own intentions. Perhaps this is particularly true of religious leaders, or perhaps it seems that way to me because I've been studying the history of religions lately. 

Henry VII's son Henry was born in 1491, became King Henry VIII of England in 1491, shortly before his 18th birthday, and reigned until 1547. In 1521, with Lutherism spreading quickly all over Europe, Pope Leo X declared Henry to be defensor fidei, Defender of the Catholic Faith. In 1530, however, Henry became a Protestant when Pope Clement VII refused to grant him a divorce. 

Henry envisaged the Church of England as being very much like the Catholic Church, except that it would allow divorce, thus allowing him, he thought, to have many sons, making the succession of the English crown more secure. But once he opened the door, many forms of Protestantism poured in. 

There were very bloody religious conflicts in England for a long time after Henry VIII died. By far the bloodiest was that we now call the English Civil War, from 1642 to 1651, pitting King Charles I, very Catholic-friendly, against Parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan, as Calvinists were called in England, and not Catholic friendly at all. 

During the Civil War many new Protestant denominations sprang up in England. One of these became known as the Quakers. Their official name was and is the Friends, but they accepted that they were known as Quakers. The Quakers took the Protestant principal that a Pope and a strict Church hierarchy were unnecessary, took it much further, and declared that no preachers were necessary, and that no-one should tell anyone else what to believe.

The Quakers said that everyone had within them an inner light. They said that everyone should look within themself to understand what was right. And so, naturally, many of them were killed by Anglicans and also by Puritans, both in England and in the American colonies, where many of them emigrated. Quaker emigration increased greatly after 1681, when King Charles II gave William Penn, a Quaker, the colonial territory which would become known as Pennsylvania.

Not only Quakers came to Pennsylvania. Their reputation for religious tolerance also attracted many Lutherans, as well as many Protestants from Germany who no longer called themselves Lutherans, such as Baptists and Pietists. Some of these offshoots of Lutheranism greatly resembled the Quakers in their de-emphasis on church hierarchy, their encouragement of all members to participate and speak in their meetings, and their pacifism.

Spinoza, when he was cast out by the synagogue of Amsterdam, found friendship and support from Quakers who had emigrated to Holland. John Locke was exiled from England in the 1680, and he too found friendship among Dutch Quakers. Two examples of those who found that you don't have to be a Quaker to be accepted and defended by Quakers.

Remember, officially, they've never been called Quakers. Officially, they're Friends.

And yes, Richard Nixon was a Quaker. Some might say that he was not a particularly good Quaker. Others might possibly refer to Matthew 7:1, a Bible verse not infrequently cited by Quakers over the centuries.

Early 16th-Century Europe

It's often been described as a time and place crowded with great personalities, and the people meant by that include Henry VIII, Francis 1, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent, Luther, the "bad" Popes, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Machiavelli and Rabelais.

I don't think Henry VIII was so great. His appetite for food was great, appallingly so. Even more appalling were his treatment of his wives and his being more ready to accept religious war than a female heir. Elizabeth I turned out alright. I wonder how much that may have been due to her being neglected by Henry, since she was neither male not Henry's oldest daughter and therefore may have seemed unlikely to him to become Queen.

Many would not argue with me at all when I say that Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, who was also Charles I of Spain as well as the ruler of vast regions in the western hemisphere, was not a great statesman. He did nothing to conquer any of those regions, he merely inherited them, and one might well say that the steep decline of his huge empire began as soon as he took charge of it. He was not able to stop Luther from cracking the Western Church in half and kicking off a series of truly horrendous religious wars which lasted until 1648; he was not even in sure enough control of his own soldiers to keep them from looting Rome in 1527, in the early stages of those religious wars, when his troops were actually supposed to have been defending Rome from the Protestants. He did nothing to improve the lot of the vast numbers of natives in the Western Hemisphere who were enslaved in mines and other Spanish industries, and died from European diseases from which they had no immunity. He knew about the suffering of those natives; there were a few Spaniards brave enough to loudly complain about what was being done to them. Charles himself did not have a high opinion of his abilities as a leader. He abdicated in the 1550's, handing off the Holy Roman Empire to his brother, who became the Emperor Ferdinand I, and Spain and its huge American territories to his son, who was thus made Philip II of Spain. Ferdinand actually did a half-decent job of managing the bag of crap Charles handed him, temporarily bringing a degree of respite from the bloodshed of Catholic against Protestant within the Empire. Philip, on the other hand -- one thing you can say about Charles is that compared to Philip, he seems like a genius, a truly wonderful person, a beacon of humanity, reason and kindness. (But only compared to Philip.)

I have less bad things to say about Francis I and Suleiman the Magnificent, but that may only be because I know less about them. Suleiman expanded the Ottoman Empire as far to the north-west as it would ever grow when he besieged Vienna in 1529, an expansion they would match in 1683 when they besieged Vienna again. But I don't know how much of that expansion is due to Suleiman truly being magnificent as a general, and how much of it is due to the eastern frontier of the Holy Roman Empire having been in the hands of that klutz Charles V.

Leonardo and Michelangelo and Raphael and Machiavelli and Rabelais were impressive personalities, I admire them all, but they were only artists and engineers and writers, dependent upon the politicians, the rulers like Charles and Henry and Suleiman and Francis for their careers and for their very existences. The time and place itself, early 16th-century Europe, does have much which is exciting to the scholar, but because of things like Columbus having discovered America by accident while trying to sail west to India; and the spread of printing, which had been invented quite a while earlier. Things for which no ruler can take credit.

Luther hated the "bad" Popes for the thing for which they should be loved: for patronizing Leonardo and Michelangelo and Raphael and Machiavelli and many other creative geniuses, for participating fully in that joint which we today refer to as the Italian Renaissance, and above all, Luther hated the "bad" Popes and kicked off all that Catholic vs Protestant gore because those Popes simply weren't able to take all the religious stuff very seriously. No, I don't admire Luther, not at all. The best I can say of him is that compared to Calvin, he seems like a genius, a truly wonderful person, a beacon of humanity, reason and kindness. (But only compared to Calvin.)

And screw Erasmus too, that pious Bible-thumping twit! Take my advice: if anyone tells you they like Augustine, or Aquinas, or Erasmus: RUN!!! Drop what you're doing, turn your back and run until your legs feel like lead and your lungs are on fire, or risk being bored to death.

Genealogies. And The Imperial Election Of 1519

I was going to write a post about the election of the King of the Romans in 1519, which was in effect the election of the Holy Roman Emperor. Charles I of Spain was elected Emperor Charles V. Francis I of France and Henry VIII of England also competed for the Imperial crown. The question I was going to examine was: how serious a challenge was either of them to Charles? I have often heard and read that the election was very close and that both Francis and Henry had come very close to becoming Emperor. But I suspect that the closeness of the election, the uncertainty of the outcome, has been greatly exaggerated by recent historians. If we examine the Empire as a continuously-existing entity from Ad 800 until 1918, we see that every single Emperor belonged either to the Carolingian, Saxon, Salian, Supplinburg, Hohenstaufen, Welf, Luxumbourgian, Wittelsbach, or Habsburg dynasty.

One standard objection would be that I had left out the Guideschi, Bosonid and Unruoching dynasties who ruled, with one brief interruption by a Carolingian, between 894 and 924, between the main run of the Carolinginas and the beginning of the Saxon dynasty, but I'm counting the Guideschis, Bosonids and Unruochings as Carolingians. Yes, they were based in Italy, not Germany, but they all also happen to be direct descendants of Charlemagne.

In fact, ALL of the Emperors up until 1918 were direct descendants of Charlemagne.

Another objection here is that the Holy Roman Empire is said to have ceased to be in 1806, when Emperor Francis II surrendered to Napoleon and gave up the Imperial crown. I'm saying that the Austrian Empire which Francis formed in 1804, and which lasted until 1918 when Charles I abdicated, is the same Empire, with a rather minor change of status in some German territories, with the cessation of some formalities having to do with the Vatican while the close political connection between Empire and Vatican was uninterrupted, and with the open acknowledgement that the Empire was the hereditary preserve of the Habsburgs, which it had already been for centuries. Historians will say I'm mistaken. Let them say it. I'm saying that from 1440 to 1918, one family, the Habsburg, ruled the Empire, except for three years, from 1742 to 1745, when a close cousin of theirs from the house of Wittelsbach was the Emperor Charles VII.

And, let me just repeat it, all of the Emperors were directly descended from Charlemagne.

That was going to be today's blog post, but when researching the topic I can across the assertion, published in the Atlantic in 2002, that everyone in the world is descended from Nefertiti and Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne.

That kinda knocked this whole joint sideways for a while. Then I thought: Is that true?

Then I thought: if it actually is true, and every single person of European descent who was not a direct descendant of Charlemagne had died off by 2002, that would still be a very different thing than saying that every single person of European descent who was not a direct descendant of Charlemagne had died off by 1519. If it is true, it would still not mean that Henry VIII and Francis I were descendants of Charlemagne.

And even if they were descendants of Charlemagne, that still wouldn't mean that anyone knew it in 1519. Okay, apparently Francis was and knew that he was, but it had been over 500 years since his ancestors had included any rulers of Germany. Any ancestral claims Henry VIII had to Germany were even more remote. Charles' grandfather Maximilian, on the other hand, had been Holy Roman Emperor until his death earlier in 1519.

I'm saying that, in spite of the procedure of seven electors choosing each Emperor, and despite the 13th-century aberration of the very un-German Richard of Cornwall having been elected by them as King of the Romans, and the only slightly more German Alfonso X of Castile being elected as anti-King during Richard's reign -- at that time, being elected King of the Germans was still far from a guarantee that one would be crowned Emperor, and neither Richard nor Alfonso ever came close to the Imperial crown -- in spite of that aberration, and despite all the formal protestations that the Emperor's crown was not hereditary, it looks extremely hereditary to me.

And furthermore, I also think that the nice-sounding cliche about the Holy Roman Empire having been neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire, is false. It was very holy and Roman in the sense of having been very Catholic, and it always was an empire it the sense of a monarch -- practically always German -- having ruled people of foreign tongues and ethnicities, pretty much always directly against their will. Charles V wasn't German? His grandfather the Emperor Maximilian certainly was, and his brother, whom he made Emperor Ferdinand I by his abdication in 1556, is very rarely not considered German. The fact that Charles was born and raised in Burgundy and was King of Spain for three years before succeeding his grandfather as Emperor is scarcely a hiccup in the Germanness of the ruling house of the Empire. The Electors -- all German -- all knew who Charles' grandfather had been. They would have seriously considered selling the Empire to the King of France or the King of England? I suppose we can never really know what they did or didn't seriously consider, but I can't imagine them having done such a thing.

Now -- every single man, woman and child on the face of the Earth is directly descended from Nefertiti? What about the Australian aborigines?

I realize that i have a very weak grasp of the fundamentals of genealogy and of biology in general. I think I'm much stronger when it comes to European dynasties. I'd be very glad if someone wanted to weigh in on the extent of Nefertiti's, Muhammed's and Charlemagne's DNA.

PS, 8 Sep 2017: Richard Dawkins, in The Ancestor's Tale, Weidenfield & Nicolson, London, 2004, estimates that the most recent ancestor of all present-day human beings lived "probably tens of thousands of years ago, and at most hundreds of thousands." p 55. Dawkins discusses the evidence which led him to this conclusion on pp 36-55. The illustration on p 37 shows an estimate of 30,000 years ago. Nefertiti was born less than 3400 years ago.

The Persistence of Latin

Sometimes referred to as Neo-Latin. I'm going to list just a few examples.

For the most part, new volumes of Classical Latin and Greek texts from Oxfordand Teubnerare still appearing with prefaces in Latin. The few recent exceptions with prefaces and/or appendices in vernacular languages disturb me not a little.

Apart from Classical Studies, the only current communication in Latin of which I know is a Finnish website which still presents the news in Latin.

I own several volumes of volumes written by Catholic clergy in Latin in the 20th century, before the 2nd Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965, some consisting of theology, others of general news and notes from this or that order.

They say that the use of Latin persisted longer in the fields of mathematics and botany than elsewhere. For now I'm taking their word for it about botany. When it comes to math, as late as when Thomas Paine was blithely calling for ancient languages to be discarded, one of the leading mathematicians of the time, Leonhard Euler,was writing and publishing in Latin, as were, I presume, many of his contemporary mathematicians, and many more for quite a while after.

A little earlier, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Isaac Newton published his Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica in Latin; and Newton's rival -- or his punching-bag, depending upon how one views the matter -- Leibniz, although born and raised in Germany, was writing and publishing almost exclusively in Latin and French. As a young man Leibniz briefly met and corresponded with Spinoza, who wrote a few things in Dutch, but whose fame rests for the most part upon his Latin works, which today, for whatever reason, seem to be extraordinarily hard to find in untranslated book form. (Beaucoup translations of Spinoza's works. What th Heck are the translators translating from? as a character in William Gaddis' JR asked who was, it's not such a stretch to presume, representing Gaddis wondering in the face of the volume of fan mail he got about The Recognitions, are they all passing one copy around?)

Milton and Hobbes wrote quite a bit in Latin as well as in English. Milton's Latin poems -- and his Greek ones! Boy howdy! -- can be had in some anthologies;his Latin prose, although available translated everywhere you look, just like Spinoza's stuff, seem to be even rarer untranslated. (Or -- a possibility which my readers should assumed is implied. Always -- I'm just clueless.)

It would seem that a working knowledge of Latin was still assumed in some circles in the 17th century, not just in math and other sciences and philosophy, but among politicians and readers of history as well. In his collection of eywitness and near-contemporary accounts of the battle of White Mountain in 1620,Anton Gindely includes among his 44 sources 12 written in Latin. (Along with 20 in German, 3 in French, 4 in Spanish, 3 in Czech and 1 in English, which adds up to 43 and means, you're right, I counted wrong. But you get the idea.)

Some collections of letters give me the impression that Elizabeth I and Henry VIII of England wrote much more and much better in Latin, and possibly in French as well, than in English. (Which would mean that that scene in A Man For All Seasons where Henry meets Thomas More's daughter and the subject of Latin comes up, and she starts chattering away in the language and Henry can only haltingly respond with a few words, and he gets embarassed and angry, is historicaly waaaay off. Unless someone ghost-wrote all those letters of Henry's, but you know what? I doubt that!)

How far back into the past, into the history of western Europe, does one have to go to reach the point where Latin was more prevelant as a written language than the venacular? It really depends upon which group one considers, which profession or specialty, which social class, too. Latin seems always to have been more prevalent the higher one climbed on the social ladder. Perhaps the higher classes consciously used it as a means of separating themselves from the masses or of making the separation greater. Thomas Paine reacted by rejecting the language. I take just the opposite tack, I say it's just one more reason for us unwashed masses to learn it, one more way to seize what was denied our kind.

Some Remarks on Protestantism

The word "protest" is right there in it. Protesting against what, is the question, and the answer has varied considerably from Protestant to Protestant. Within Lutheranism there has been a lot of controversy on this point, as far back as Luther's lifetime, when German peasants heard of this movement against the authority of the Catholic Church, and immediately associated it with their urge to rebel against their feudal overlords. There were some widespread and violent peasant uprisings in the 1520's in Germany. Luther condemned these revolts, explicitly sided with the hereditary rulers and the traditional class society and urged the aristocrats to crush the peasant revolts ruthlessly, which they did -- but a lot of people never got this message and have never gotten it since, and to this day, in Germany, at least, Protestantism, which in Germany is almost synonymous with Lutheranism, is generally associated with the political Left, and Catholicism with the Right.

Right from the start, Luther's revolt against the established Church was mistaken by many to be a revolt against Christianity, and for the freedom to question everything. Luther meant just about the opposite: himself a Catholic monk when he began to protest against the Church, he protested, as had other Catholics before him like Francis of Assisi and Savoranola, as other would later, as Ignatius of Loyola did at the same time as Luther, that the Church was not Christian enough. Francis' and Ignatius' protests were heeded by the Church and incorporated into it, Savoranola's were condemned and he was executed, Luther's were condemned and he escaped execution at the hands of the Church, not by much, but he escaped, and soon enough Lutheranism had established itself in parts of Germany, and in parts of the Netherlands and Scandinavia and elsewhere, and was executing Catholics.

Lutheranism was not the first protestant movement to break away from the Catholic Church which persists to this day: Jan Hus led a break from the Church in Bohemia a century earlier. Hus himself was burned at the stake in 1415, but the Hussites survived, combining theological objection to Catholic theology with a Czech nationalist revolt against the rule of the Catholic, Austrian Holy Roman Emperor. The Emperor was not just Catholic, he was very Catholic, crowned by the Pope. It was much harder, impossible, really, to separate religion from politics in those days.

The Hussites started earlier, but it was the Lutherans who seemed to open the floodgates of Protestantism: in Luther's lifetime Calvin and Henry VIII started Protestant denominations of their own, and from Lutheranism, Calvinism and Anglicanism there quickly splintered off many more denominations, and despite many bloody religious wars from Luther's time until 1648, religious unity was gone from the formerly all-Catholic regions of Europe from Iceland to Poland and Croatia. And, quite ironically, much of the movements of science and secularism since that time, at least in Germany, have their roots in the movement started by an extremely pious Augustinian monk who protested because in his eyes the Church was all too worldly, all too secular, all too interested in the free examination of new scientific ideas.

Luther also disliked the lavish art of the Vatican. While still a monk he visited Rome, and was shocked and appalled by the splendour of St. Peter's, paid for in large part by the indulgences bought by his fellow Germans. (At the same time that the Renaissance Popes were building their magnificent churches and palaces and filling them with great art and with scholars and building up the Vatican library and doing all the other things to which Luther objected, the things which their critics to this day have not ceased to denounce, they were also doing a much better job of caring for the poor in Rome and the Papal lands than many Popes before or since them, a fact unknown or unimportant, or both, to their critics.) In his (dis)taste for art, especially for grand and lavish, luxurious art, he does seem to have been more influential among his supposed followers than among Catholics.

I'm going to give Friedrich Nietzsche the last word here: this is chapter 61 of his book Der Antichrist:

"Hier tut es not, eine für Deutsche noch hundertmal peinlichere Erinnerung zu berühren. Die Deutschen haben Europa um die letzte große Kultur-Ernte gebracht, die es für Europa heimzubringen gab, - um die der Renaissance. Versteht man endlich, will man verstehn, was die Renaissance war? Die Umwertung der christlichen Werte, der Versuch, mit allen Mitteln, mit allen Instinkten, mit allem Genie unternommen, die Gegen-Werte, die vornehmen Werte zum Sieg zu bringen ... Es gab bisher nur diesen großen Krieg, es gab bisher keine entscheidendere Fragestellung als die der Renaissance, - meine Frage ist ihre Frage -: es gab auch nie eine grundsätzlichere, eine geradere, eine strenger in ganzer Front und auf das Zentrum los geführte Form des Angriffs! An der entscheidenden Stelle, im Sitz des Christentums selbst angreifen, hier die vornehmen Werte auf den Thron bringen, will sagen in die Instinkte, in die untersten Bedürfnisse und Begierden der daselbst Sitzenden hineinbringen ... Ich sehe eine Möglichkeit vor mir von einem vollkommen überirdischen Zauber und Farbenreiz: - es scheint mir, daß sie in allen Schaudern raffinierter Schönheit erglänzt, daß eine Kunst in ihr am Werke ist, so göttlich, so teufelsmäßig-göttlich, daß man Jahrtausende umsonst nach einer zweiten solchen Möglichkeit durchsucht; ich sehe ein Schauspiel, so sinnreich, so wunderbar paradox zugleich, daß alle Gottheiten des Olymps einen Anlaß zu einem unsterblichen Gelächter gehabt hätten - Cesare Borgia als Papst ... Versteht man mich? ... Wohlan, das wäre der Sieg gewesen, nach dem ich heute allein verlange -: damit war das Christentum abgeschafft! - Was geschah? Ein deutscher Mönch, Luther, kam nach Rom. Dieser Mönch, mit allen rachsüchtigen Instinkten eines verunglückten Priesters im Leibe, empörte sich in Rom gegen die Renaissance ... Statt mit tiefster Dankbarkeit das Ungeheure zu verstehn, das geschehen war, die Überwindung des Christentums an seinem Sitz -, verstand sein Haß aus diesem Schauspiel nur seine Nahrung zu ziehn. Ein religiöser Mensch denkt nur an sich. - Luther sah die Verderbnis des Papsttums, während gerade das Gegenteil mit Händen zu greifen war: die alte Verderbnis, das peccatum originale, das Christentum saß nicht mehr auf dem Stuhl des Papstes! Sondern das Leben! Sondern der Triumph des Lebens! Sondern das große Ja zu allen hohen, schönen, verwegnen Dingen! ... Und Luther stellte die Kirche wieder her: er griff sie an ... Die Renaissance - ein Ereignis ohne Sinn, ein großes Umsonst! Ah diese Deutschen, was sie uns schon gekostet haben! Umsonst - das war immer das Werk der Deutschen - Die Reformation; Leibnitz; Kant und die sogenannte deutsche Philosophie; die "Freiheits"-Kriege; das Reich - jedesmal ein Umsonst für etwas, das bereits da war, für etwas Unwiederbringliches ... Es sind meine Feinde, ich bekenne es, diese Deutschen: ich verachte in ihnen jede Art von Begriffs- und Wert-Unsauberkeit, von Feigheit vor jedem rechtschaffnen Ja und Nein. Sie haben, seit einem Jahrtausend beinahe, alles verfilzt und verwirrt, woran sie mit ihren Fingern rührten, sie haben alle Halbheiten - Drei-Achtelsheiten! - auf dem Gewissen, an denen Europa krank ist, - sie haben auch die unsauberste Art Christentum, die es gibt, die unheilbarste, die unwiderlegbarste, den Protestantismus auf dem Gewissen ... Wenn man nicht fertig wird mit dem Christentum, die Deutschen werden daran schuld sein ..."

Please forgive me for not translating that. I'm a little tired, and I don't really want to translate that passage anyway. It's so full of fire and passion and furious energy, and I couldn't do justice to it under the best of circumstances.

The Nazis claimed they loved Nietzsche, but it's hard for me to imagine them reading this or many another passage by Nietzsche where he criticizes Germany about as sharply as anyone ever has. Instead of translating the passage -- chapter 61 of Nietzsche's Antichrist, if you really want a full translation there are lots of them about -- I'll just summarize it: The Renaissance was on the point of doing away with Christianity, replacing its values with their life-affirming opposites in the person of the Pope, when Luther came to Rome, saw these life-affirming tendencies, hated them with a typically German hate, and attacked the Church for this and so robbed the world of the achievements of the Renaissance. This type of German, represented by Luther, Leibnitz, Kant and by German philosophy generally, is Nietzsche's enemy.