Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"To my mind, anyone who believes that the era that witnessed the building of the Chartres Cathedral and the invention of parliament and the university was 'dark' must be mentally retarded..." -- Warren Hollister , quoted in Bearing False Witness , p. 86

Starks's Bearing False Witness is somewhat tendentious when it comes to the " lost gospels ." These gospels are, too a great extent, " Gnostic " in character. The trait that characterizes gnosticism, in general, is that it is neither works nor faith that bring salvation, but knowledge . More specifically, it is usually secret knowledge, available only to spiritual adepts, that saves. And even more specifically, that knowledge is often held to be the knowledge that the physical world is a prison, trapping the adept in his or her body, and blocking the adept from realizing the soul's true nature, as a resident of a better, divine realm. Gnostic texts often described an elaborate metaphysics of this imprisonment, involving multiple levels of divine beings. In particular, one divine being, the demiurge , had fallen from the Pleroma , essentially gone mad, and created a prison -- the physical world -- in which he could entrap other spiritual beings and garner...

I am now reviewing Rodney Stark's Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History . (Stark, by the way, is not a Catholic.) So we'll be addressing the Middle Ages often in the next week or two (the book is short). First, let us take up Jews and the Catholic Church. Stark stresses something I have seen historians specializing in the Middle Ages point out: while Jews sometimes were attacked or killed by Christians between 500 and 1400, the Church hierarchy was always their defenders. For instance, during the First Crusade, some crusaders decided that, that before they went all the way to the Middle East to fight "God's enemies" they should take care of some of them (i.e. Jews) who were living next door in Europe. And so Emich of Leisingen set out to kill Jews in the Rhineland. Their first stop was Speyer, but: The bishop of Speyer took the local Jews under his protection, and Emich's forces could only lay their hands on a dozen Jews ...

A few quotes from the work with the above title by Richard C. Dales: "The really important thing to be noted, however, is the rapidity with which the scientists of the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries learned to differ with Aristotle..." (quoting Lynn White). "The striking thing about this [twelfth] century is the attitude of its scientists. These men are daring, original, inventive, skeptical of traditional authorities although sometimes overly impressed by new ones, and above all steadfastly determined to discover purely rational explanations of natural phenomena." "Despite the fact that many excellent illuminating studies of medieval science, as well as the texts of the works themselves, have been published in easily accessible volumes during the past fifty years, it is not unusual to find even well-educated people abysmally ignorant of the subject. Unfortunately this does not inhibit them from writing authoritatively about it."

While the blood libel actually occurred far too often in the Middle Ages, Philip Daileader claims that he has not been able to discover a single instance of a Catholic bishop supporting the charge. Universally, he says, they dismissed the idea as nonsense. Similarly, when hoi polloi of the People's Crusade attacked Jews in France and Germany, "The Church opposed these attacks, and local clergy often came to the defense of Jews in their community." Jews suffered a lot at the hands of the common people of Europe through the Middle Ages. Almost always, church officials denounced these episodes and tried to protect the Jews from their attackers.

Long before Scientology called itself "applied religious technology," there was a predecessor: chivalric romances . Around 1000 A.D., the problem of "noble violence" was acute. The Church tried to stem this with programs like " The Peace and Truce of God ." But it is quite possible that an independent reform program actually did the most good. The most common authors of chivalric romances were court chaplains , and what they sought to do with them was to re-channel noble violence. They combined elements and values nobles already liked (fighting, adventure, courage, strength) with "Christianizing" influences that directed those preexisting dispositions towards spiritual and benevolent goals, so that adventurers might seek the Holy Grail and a knight would fight to protect the weak from predation. And there is evidence that chivalric ideals had some effect: tournaments, for instance, became notably less violent after the idea of chivalry beca...

And it sucked ? My current frontrunner for worst attempt at a pithy saying this year is from Steve Horwitz, who posted on Facebook one day (I quote from memory): "We tried localism. It was called the Middle Ages, and it sucked." What I loved about this is how many bad ideas are packed into a dozen short words. First off, people in the Middle Ages were not exactly "trying" localism. There had been a terrible demographic collapse, leading to the near disappearance of cities, the decay of transportation infrastructure, and the lessening of the division of labor. Furthermore, trade with the east was sometimes difficult after the rise of Islam. Localism was pretty much forced upon Western Europe, not tried out as an experiment. And that, of course, makes a big difference if one is going to do comparative political economy. For a people who were already relatively poor compared to those in the West today to have extreme localism forced upon them by their circum...

"Tutte le stelle già dell' altro polo Vedea la notte, e il nostro tanto basso Che non surgeva fuor del marin suolo." -- Dante, La Divina Commedia , Canto XXVI   So, in the early 1300s, Dante not only knew the earth was a sphere, he also realized that this meant that someone sailing south would see new stars, and the the North Pole Star would become lower and lower in the sky.