Defeatists
de-feat'ism (-ism), n. The policy of admitting defeat of one's own country, party, etc., on the ground that the continuation of a contest is impossible or inadvisable. — de-feat'ist (-ist), n. & adj.
The subject of this blog does not have anything to commend it, nevertheless I have chosen to address it forthrightly as did Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, from which it is quoted. Webster's Compendious Dictionary and the OED, neither have a definition, as the word, according to Wikipedia, was invented to describe a policy, or as in defeatist, to describe a person, like a soldier for instance who sees clearly the impossibility of victory.
Vince Lombardi, onetime coach (and cheerleader) of the Green Bay Packers was quoted "Winning is not everything, it's the ONLY thing," (emphasis mine). I grew up with a motto in my head "Winning is not everything, but how you play the game." I think this motto sums up the American spirit of gamesmanship better than Lombardi's, who obviously is "playing for keeps."
Yesterday, and today, against different opponents, our Cleveland IndIans lost, their record showing that after leading the division most of the year, they were in 2nd place, a half-game behind the Tigers. And the paper also reported that the Philadelphia Phillies (I used to work in Philly), had lost their 10,000th game. Hey, if you lost 100 games a year for 100 years you could achieve that almost impossible record of defeats, yet you won't find a man on that squad who is a defeatist. That's because none of the players are playing for keeps, or are they. I suppose the Phillies have played against a majority which they lost, still they'll be back next year, after Bonds hits his 756th home run. Could Bonds have spent too much time as a kid listening to the likes of Lombardi, or the dynamic duo, Bush and Cheney. I can count on my Phillies, and Indians to play fair, sometimes in defeat.
Can you remember the last time War Protesters crowded the streets? Wasn't it during Viet Nam, or was there some other outrageous conflict our leaders had chosen to engage our troops in? In the polite society of elected officials, the term Pacifist is usually given out as an epithet to describe an opponent who is seriously troubled by an active war by our country's leaders. And don't the Pacifists have the word Jingoist ready to sling at the belligerent? The other day, Sen. McCain hurled the term Defeatist at his, and Pres. Bush's vocal opponents, and I doubt he really knew the dictionary definition, or have a sense of the history of War Protesters.
Back in day one a child was born who grew up, having been baptized as an adult, who decided to protest the occupation of his native country, by leading his group of protesters to the capitol city, then called Hierosolyma or Al-Quds, also City of David. He was not leading a group of protesters to arm with swords to attack the invading foreign troops, but to call on his country's leaders to resist the occupation by non-violent means. Jesus is also called the Prince of Peace, and his instructions to turn the other cheek, is not a defeatist attitude, but one that takes the greater courage, to control his own emotional responses to non-violence.
I have researched several historical accounts, which I have included below in hopes that I might learn more about the merits of non-violence, to which I intend to join the company of Ghandi and Martin Luther King from my own time. This first concerns the Cathari, who were the objects of a Crusade by the Church, called the Albigensian, which is not the first instance of genocide, but possibly the first such action taken against Christ's own followers, after judging their faith heretical.----------------------------------
CATHARI (cathars), a heretical Christian sect that flourished in western Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. The Cathars can be distinguished from the other heretical sects of he period by their dualistic views and their organized church. Dualism in this sense means the belief that goodness exists only n the spiritual world of the good God; that the material world is evil and was created by an evil god or spirit called Satan; and that Good and Evil have two separate creators. Views containing similar implications had been common among the Gnostic sects in the early Christian centuries; these ideas had had their greatest influence on the middle east and on Christian literature in the religion of Mani (see manichaeism), and were held in the early middle ages in the Balkans and the near east by the religious ects of the Paulicians and the Bogomils (gg.v.). The Cathars were closely connected with the last two, and they were sometimes known in the west as Publicani (a corruption of Pauliciani, but also an echo of the publicans of the New Testament) or Bougres (i.e., Bulgarians, for Bulgaria was the home of the Bogomils); but most commonly as Cathari (Gr. Catharoi, "pure") or Albigenses (the men of Albi, after one of their chief centres of influence in the south of France). The word "Albigenses," however, could refer to all the heretics of this region, both Cathars and Waldenses (q.v.).
Emergence of the Heresy.—After the fall of the Roman empire dualist heresies w;ere virtually unknown in western Europe until about the year 1000. In the first half of the llth century isolated groups of heretics appeared of whose doctrine little is known. Some of these groups may have been merely anticlerical and puritanical, like the later Waldenses, but some were certainly dualists. It is clear that these had learned their dualism by contact with the Bogomils, but the nature and extent of the contact is quite uncertain. These groups appeared in western Germany, Flanders. France and northern Italy. In the late llth century no more was heard of them; then in the 12th century they reappeared in the same areas, revealing the same range of views.
The Gregorian reform of the church in the llth century was accompanied by widespread popular enthusiasm. But the official church failed in the long run to contain and channel this enthusiasm. The growth of clerical education and the heightened emphasis on the importance of sacraments made of the clergy more a class apart and left the laity with little chance to develop their own initiative in the affairs of the church. It was among the unprivileged lower clergy, poorer knights, merchants and artisans that heresy became popular in the 12th century: among men and women often of considerable intelligence and enterprise but without the means of expressing their zeal (in their own view at least) within the Catholic Church. The heretical movement was one aspect of the religious revival of the day, and in part at least it was a by-product of the immensely rapid cultural, social and economic changes of the llth and 12th centuries. (ed. early Renaissance)
The period of most rapid growth came in the 30 years following 1140. At about this time the Bogomil church was reorganizing itself, setting up an episcopate, planning missions; and there is no doubt that Bogomil missionaries, as well as western dualists who had imbibed their doctrines in the Byzantine empire while on the second crusade (1147-49). were at work in the west in the middle of the century. The preaching of St. Bernard against the heresy proved unavailing, and from the 1140s the Cathars were an organized church with a hierarchy, a liturgy and a system of doctrine, though none of these ever became so coherent as their Catholic counterparts. About 1149 the first bishop established himself in the north of France; a few years later he established colleagues at Albi and in Lombardy. The authority of these bishops was not clearly defined; their status was confirmed and the prestige of the Cathar church enhanced by the visit of the Bogomil bishop Nicetas in 1167. He visited both Lombardy and the south of France, which was now becoming the most fruitful area of Cathar activity, held councils and established new bishoprics. In the following years more bishops were set up in Italy, until by the turn of the century there were 11 bishoprics in all, one in the north of France, four in the south (Albi, Toulouse, Carcassonne, Val d'Aran; two more were added later) and six in Italy (Concorezzo near Milan, Desenzano, Bagnolo, Vicenza, Florence and Spoleto). It was in the second half of the 12th century that the Greek word Cathari was first applied to them; its first known use was in Germany in 1163.
Two Parties.—The multiplication of bishoprics in Italy, however, was partly due to a doctrinal rift. Bishop Nicetas had come to the west in 1167 to instill into his colleagues a more thoroughgoing dualism than they had believed in hitherto. The difference corresponded to a divergence within the Bogomil churches themselves: between those who held that Satan, the creator of the world, had once been an angel of God who had fallen from grace, and those who held that he was an independent deity. The former view implied that God was the ultimate creator of the universe, and so involved a modified dualism; the latter—clearly stated in the Liber de duobus principiis, which was written by an associate of John de Lugio, the heretic bishop of Bergamo—was more radically dualist. On the whole the Cathars in the south of France accepted the more radical dualism; those in Italy became divided into two parties. The opposition between the two never involved out-and-out schism; they always agreed in their opposition to the Catholic Church. But it was a symptom of the divergences in Cathar doctrine from place to place and time to time which make it exceedingly difficult to define with precision.
Matter, they were all agreed, was evil. Man was an alien and a sojourner in an evil world, and his aim must be to free his spirit, which was in its nature good, and restore it to communion with God. They believed in the ultimate redemption of spirits—though not always in universal redemption—but thought the process was slow since they believed in the transmigration of souls from man to man or from man to beast (for animals too had souls). There were strict rules for fasting, including the total prohibition of meat; to eat an animal's flesh was tantamount to cannibalism. Sexual intercourse was forbidden: they had a horror of procreation because it involved the imprisonment of more spirit in the world of flesh. Thus they believed passionately in celibacy and in every form of ascetic renunciation of the world; and they looked favorably on suicide, an attitude which made the more fervent of them impervious to persecution.
The extreme asceticism of Cathar doctrine made the Cathar church a church of the elect; and yet in France and northern Italy it became a popular religion. This involved a considerable process of adjustment, which was achieved, as is common in dualist or ascetic religions, by the division of the faithful into two bodies: the "perfect" and the "believers." The perfect were set apart from the mass of believers by an elaborate ceremony of initiation, or spiritual baptism, the consolamentum. Within the ranks of the perfect was a hierarchy of bishops and deacons, but they did not have the exclusive right of administering sacraments. The Cathars had two other sacraments apart from consolamentum and ordination: penance and breaking of bread. The breaking of bread was a kind of communion; they did not believe in transubstantiation. The perfect devoted themselves to contemplation and were expected to maintain the highest moral standards, and it was the privilege of the believers to provide them with food and drink.
The believers could not be expected to attain the standards of renunciation of the perfect. Many believers underwent the consolamentum at the end of their lives, as many early Christians had received baptism on their death beds, so as to avoid the dire consequences of a lapse after being received among the elect. The enemies of the Cathars usually admitted the lofty standards of the perfect, but they accused the believers of all manner of vice. Sexual intercourse was officially forbidden but could not be entirely suppressed. Marriage, however, was regarded as organized vice, and particularly noxious; it seems that casual vice and sodomy were preferred. But the charges of the Catholics were doubtless exaggerated, and in course of time the Cathars came to conform themselves in a variety of ways to normal western standards.
The Cathar doctrines of creation led them to rewrite the biblical story—like all dualists they devised an elaborate mythology to replace it—and to reject the notion that the whole Bible was sacred. They viewed much of the Old Testament with reserve; some of them rejected it altogether; and in the vernacular Bibles they circulated there was much apocryphal matter. The New Testament was accepted but extensively reinterpreted. The orthodox doctrine of incarnation—of God, as it were, imprisoned in human flesh—was impossible to the Cathars. Jesus was an angel merely, who came to indicate the way to salvation not himself to provide it; his human sufferings and death were an illusion.
The Church's Attack.—The Cathar doctrines, therefore, struck at the roots of orthodox Christianity and of the social institutions of Christendom, and the authorities of church and state united to attack them. Some of the heretics of the llth and early 12th centuries perished, but more often because of the zeal of the lay power or the violence of a mob than at the instruction of the ecclesiastical authorities. But the church's law had always envisaged the possibility that active persecution might be needed; and the catastrophic rapidity with which various heretical sects, and most notably the Cathars, grew in the middle of the 12th century led to a rapid development of the legal machinery. In 1184 Pope Lucius III and the emperor Frederick I Barbarossa joined at Verona in issuing the decree Ad abolendam, which laid down a procedure for ecclesiastical trial, after which an obdurate heretic would be handed over to the secular arm for punishment; and punishment meant confiscation of property, exile or even possibly death. Tradition, however, had already established burning as the most suitable punishment for the unrepentant heretic. Pope Innocent III (1198-1216), like many of the church's leaders, preferred conversion to persecution. But the Cathars were not to be persuaded, and their triumphant progress looked like giving them dominance over the Catholic Church in southern France and northern Italy. By and large the Cathars did not recruit from the nobility; so large a proportion of them were artisans that they were commonly known as the Weavers, and it was under this title that their brief appearance in England in the 1160s was noted by William of Newburgh (Historia rerum Anglicarum, ii, 13) and other writers of the late 12th century. But in Provence and to a lesser extent in Italy they won the favour of the nobility, and even recruited some of them. Innocent Ill's attempts to force Raymond VI, count of Toulouse, to join him in putting down heresy ended in disaster; the papal legate Peter de Castelnau was murdered (Jan. 15, 1208), and the count was generally thought to have been an accessory to the crime. A crusade was proclaimed against the heretics, and a substantial army led by a group of barons from northern France proceeded to ravage Toulouse and massacre the inhabitants, both Cathar and Catholic. The Albigensian crusade was violent and cruel, but it seems that the more orderly persecution sanctioned by Louis IX, in alliance with the nascent Inquisition, was more effective in breaking the power of the Cathars. In 1244 the great fortress of Montsegur near the Pyrenees, which had long contained a large nest of the perfect, was captured and destroyed. The Cathars had to go underground, and many of the French Cathars fled to Italy, where persecution was more intermittent.
Final Collapse.—Early in the 13th century the Dominican order was founded to provide learned preachers as able and as poor as the Cathars for the purpose (among others) of combating heresy. It was natural that they should often be employed by the papacy in inquiries into heresy; and it was out of these inquiries that the machinery of the Inquisition (q.v.) was gradually developed in the 13th century. In a very different way the other great order of friars founded about the same time, the Friars Minor or Franciscans, were almost equally dangerous to the Cathars. St. Francis also preached to the classes to whom the Cathars had especially appealed; but his message was a message of joy, and he brought home, as it had never been brought home before, that the world was God's world, and good. It is likely that the collapse of the Cathars was as much due to the failure of their appeal as to the fires of the Inquisition, and it is noticeable that they disappeared both in France and in Italy about the same time, although persecution was much more persistent north of the Alps. The hierarchy faded out in the 1270s; the dying embers of Cathar heresy lingered through the 14th century to be finally extinguished early in the 15th.
The Inquisition was their chief legacy to medieval Europe, for the future of the church was to be directly influenced far more by the sects that preached a puritanism and a return to the primitive church innocent of dualism. Of all the sects denounced in the decree Ad abolendam, only the Waldenses continue to exist in the 20th century.
bibliography.—Steven Runciman, The Medieval Manichee (1947); A. Borst, Die Katharer (1953) ; J. Guiraud, Histoire de I'inquisition an moyen age, vol. 1 (1935) ; H. Maisonneuve, Etudes sur les origines de I'inquisition, 2nd ed. (1960); Z. Oldenbourg, Massacre at Montsegui (1961) ; Liber de duobus principiis, ed. by A. Dondaine (1939).
(C. N. L. B.)---------------------------------------------------
According to Western Civ. the Reformation crept across Europe, but not until most of the middle east and Northern Africa were solidly Muslim. In fact, though the article above doesn't mention it, the European Renaissance could be easily credited to the news brought back from the east by pilgrims who's safety the crusades were purportedly organized to protect. Also, if we can believe the Travels of Marco Polo, trade with the east was an important and growing cultural activity. My next article is from the Catholic Encyclopedia and concerns the Anabaptist Faith, which, once you get to know it seems to be a direct outgrowth from the Cathari, and possibly their heresies, too.--------------------------------------------------
ANABAPTISTS
(Greek ana, again, and baptizo, baptize; rebaptizers).
A violent and extremely radical body of ecclesiastico-civil reformers which first made its appearance in 1521 at Zwickau, in the present kingdom of Saxony, and still exists in milder forms.
I. NAME AND DOCTRINAL PRINCIPLES
The name Anabaptists, etymologically applicable, and sometimes applied to Christian denominations that practice re-baptism is, in general historical usage, restricted to those who, denying the validity of infant baptism, became prominent during the great reform movement of the sixteenth century. The designation was generally repudiated by those to whom it was applied, as the discussion did not center around the question whether baptism can be repeated, but around the question whether the first baptism was valid. The distinctive principles upon which Anabaptists generally agreed were the following:
* They aimed at restoring what they claimed to have been primitive Christianity. This restoration included the rejection of oaths and capital punishment and the abstention from the exercise of magistracy.
* In a more consistent manner than the majority of Protestant reformers, they maintained the absolute supremacy and sole sufficiency of the canonical Scriptures as a norm of faith. However, private inspiration and religious sentiment played an important role among them.
* Infant baptism and the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone were rejected as without scriptural warrant.
* The new Kingdom of God, which they purposed to found, was to be the reconstruction, on an entirely different basis, of both ecclesiastical and civil society. Communism, including for some of them the community of women, was to be the underlying principle of the new state.
II. ORIGIN AND HISTORY
The question of the validity of baptism appears in two great phases in ecclesiastical history. The first controversy raged at an early date (third and fourth centuries) and regarded the minister of the sacrament (baptism conferred by heretics). It was at a much later date that the second discussion originated, in which the subject of infant baptism was the point controverted. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Petrobrusians rejected infant baptism and they and many subsequent medieval heretics (Henricians, Waldenses, Albigenses, and Bohemian Brethren) held views resembling in some respects the tenets of Anabaptists. There is, however, little if any historical connection between the Anabaptists and those earlier sects. Luther's principles and examples exercised more influence over the new movement. Private interpretation of the Scriptures, however, and inward teaching by the Holy Ghost could be claimed by any individual, and logically led to the extreme Anabaptist views.
(a) Anabaptizm in Saxony and Thuringia (1521-25)
Nicholas Storch, a weaver (d. 1525) and Thomas Münzer, a Lutheran preacher (c. 1490-1525), together with the other self-styled "Prophets of Zwickau" made, at the Reformation, the first attack on infant baptism. The doctrines of the absolute equality of all men and complete community of goods and the resulting disturbances soon brought them into conflict with the civil authorities of Zwickau. Storch, before any repressive measures were taken against him, left with two associates for Wittenberg (1521), where he continued his preaching. Carlstadt was soon gained over to the cause. The combined agitation of Carlstadt and Storch at Wittenberg, and Carlstadt's iconoclastic proceedings forced Luther to leave the Wartburg and appear on the scene. He preached against the new apostles with such vehemence that they had to leave the city. Storch until his death at Munich travelled through Germany, spreading his doctrines, especially in Thuringia (1522-24) where he was one of the principal instigators of the Peasants' War. Münzer rejected infant baptism in theory, but retained it in practice. He was expelled from Zwickau (1521) and went to Bohemia, where he had but little success as a propagandist. In 1525 he came as preacher to Alstedt (Electoral Saxony) and married a former nun. He was soon surrounded by a large following, introduced a German religious service and attacked Luther as well as the then existing order of things. His sojourn at Mühlhausen (Thuringia), which was interrupted by a journey through the south of Germany, was equally successful. Henry Pfeifer, an apostate monk, who became his co-labourer at Mühlhausen, had prepared the ground for the new gospel. Münzer and Pfeifer became absolute masters of the city, and crowds of peasants and burghers who, discontented with prevailing conditions, flocked around them, pillaged and devastated the surrounding country. To quell the insurrectionary movement John, the Elector of Saxony, Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, and Henry, Duke of Brunswick, united their forces and attacked the peasants, led by Münzer at Frankenhausen (1525). The insurgents were utterly defeated. After the battle Münzer was discovered at Frankenhausen in a bed in which he had hidden, and was delivered up to the executioner. He received the sacraments of the Catholic Church before his death, while his associate Pfeifer, still impenitent, underwent the death penalty (1525).
(b) The Swiss Anabaptist Movement (1523-25)
Like Luther, Zwingli, the originator of the Reformation in Switzerland, soon found more radical competitors. In 1525 some of his associates separated from him and preached rebaptism and communism. The party found two capable leaders in John Denk and Balthasar Hubmaier. Its following, recruited especially from the working classes, became considerable, not only in Switzerland, but also in southern Germany and Austria. Augsburg, Nuremberg, and, at a later date, Strasburg became the chief centers of the movement. Resistance to its spread came from two sources. The Anabaptists' teaching added substantially to the causes of the Peasants' War which broke out (1524) in the very territory where the Anabaptists had carried on their propaganda. As a consequence the defeat of the peasants (1525) meant, to a great extent, the dispersion of the Anabaptists. On the other hand, some town councils as that of Zürich (1526) decreed the severest penalties against their adherents. Still in spite of defeat and constant repression, the sect continued to live.
(c) The Anabaptists in Münster (1533-35)
The spread of the Anabaptists in lower Germany and the Netherlands must largely be ascribed to the activity of Melchior Hofmann, a widely traveled furrier. The arrival of some of his disciples (Melchiorites) at Münster in Westphalia (1533-34) marks the beginning of the most extraordinary period in the history of the Anabaptists and the city of Münster. In the latter, Bernard Rothmann a chaplain, and Knipperdollinck a cloth-merchant, had already succeeded in diffusing Lutheran ideas. They joined the Anabaptist movement, of which John Matthys or Matthiessen, a former baker, and John Bockelsohn or Bockold, a Dutch tailor (more generally known as John of Leyden), became two great local representatives. Knipperdollinck was elected burgomaster (February, 1534) and the city passed under the complete and unrestricted control of the partisans of rebaptism. Münster, instead of Strasburg, was to become the centre of the projected conquest of the world, the "New Jerusalem", the founding of which was signalized by a reign of terror and indescribable orgies. Treasures of literature and art were destroyed; communism, polygamy, and community of women were introduced. Rothmann took unto himself four wives and John of Leyden, sixteen. The latter was proclaimed King of the "New Sion", when Francis of Waldeck, Bishop and temporal lord of the city, had already begun its siege (1534). In June, 1535, the defence became more and more hopeless, and John, as a last means of escape, determined upon setting fire to the city. His plan was frustrated by the unexpected capture of the town by the besiegers (24 June, 1535). The King, his lieutenant Knipperdollinck, and his chancellor Krechting were seized, and after six months' imprisonment and torture, executed. As a terrible warning, their bodies were suspended in iron cages from the tower of St. Lambert's church.
III. RESULTS
The Anabaptists in England
Along with the fanatic element, there was always in the Anabaptist party a more pacific current represented especially by its Swiss adherents. The effect of the fall of Münster and of the determined repression of Anabaptists by Catholics, Lutherans, and Zwinglians alike, was the very pronounced and ultimately complete elimination of the violent features of the movement. Menno Simonis, formerly a Catholic priest, who joined the party in 1536, exercised a beneficent influence in that direction. The very name Anabaptists was superseded by others, particularly that of Mennonites. It is under the latter designation that the Anabaptists exist today, principally in Holland, Germany, and the United States. Another result of the capture of Münster seems to have been the appearance of the Anabaptists in England, where they come into frequent notice shortly after this time and continue to be mentioned during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their following there was in all probability largely composed of Dutch and German refugees. The penalties of death and banishment enforced against them prevented the sect from acquiring importance. The Anabaptists' teaching respecting infant baptism was adopted by the English and American Baptists.
Book recommendations
Publication information
Written by N.A. Weber. Transcribed by Robert H. Sarkissian.
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume I. Published 1907. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Nihil Obstat, March 1, 1907. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York
Bibliography
Kerssenbroch, Anabaptistici furoris monasterium inclitam Westphaliae metropolim evertentis historica narratio, ed. Detmer (Münster, 1899, 1900); Cornelius, Geschichte des m nsterischen Aufruhrs (Leipzig, 1855, 1860); Janssen, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes (Freiburg and St. Louis, Mo., 1897) II, 231-238, 394-416, 557-571, III, 109-121, 326-351, tr. Hist. of the German People (St. Louis, Mo., and London, 1900, 1903), III, 256-263, IV, 87-117, 217-222, 291-310, V, 150-165, 449-485; Newman, A History of Anti-Pedobaptism from the Rise of Pedobaptism to A.D. 1609 (Philadelphia, 1897), with extensive bibliography, 395-406; Idem, A History of the Baptist Churches in the United States (New York, 1894), in Amer. Church Hist. Series, II, 1-56; Bax, Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists (London, 1903); Burrage, A History of the Anabaptists in Switzerland (Philadelphia, 1905); Tumbult, Die Wiedert ufer (Leipzig, 1899).
From CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA
I'm sorry I had to put you through that diatribe, but to get a taste of dualism, you must be aware that to become informed, you must turn over the stone, and look at the backside. For TRUTH is a consensus of the best informed, according to someone a whole lot smarter than me. Fortunately Wiki has assembled a better picture of Anabaptists by a group of volunteers, which I think will better acquaint you with the radical or left leaning religion that has survived through the centuries and still can help orient your moral character. Please excuse this article as it seems sort of hastily prepared and obviously additional efforts are needed. I gave a lift to the word Didache, which you will run into in the early text. Also, the Mennonites have a version of their church history which you can find with a Google search. Also please note that there are a number of links which explore subjects mentioned or corolary to the section being covered, which you can check out by going to Wikipedia and finding this piece, before my editing.-------------------
Anabaptists (Greek ??? (again) +??????? (baptize), thus, "re-baptizers"[1], German: Wiedertäufer) are Christians of the Radical Reformation. Various groups at various times have been called Anabaptist, but this article focuses primarily on the Anabaptists of 16th century Europe.
The term "anabaptist" comes from the practice of baptizing individuals who had been baptized previously, often as infants. Anabaptists believe infant baptism is not valid, because a child cannot commit to a religious faith, and they instead support what is called believer's baptism.
The word anabaptism is used in this article to describe any of the 16th century "radical" dissenters, and the denominations descending from the followers of Menno Simons. Today the descendants of the 16th century European movement (particularly the Baptists, Amish, Hutterites, Mennonites, Church of the Brethren, and Brethren in Christ) are the most common bodies referred to as Anabaptist.
Contents
* 1 Anabaptist origins
o 1.1 Forerunners
o 1.2 Views of origins
+ 1.2.1 Monogenesis
+ 1.2.2 Polygenesis
+ 1.2.3 Apostolic succession
* 2 Types of Anabaptists
* 3 Zwickau prophets and the Peasants' War
* 4 The Münster Rebellion
* 5 Miscellany
* 6 Persecutions and migrations
* 7 Anabaptists today
* 8 The Anabaptist heritage
* 9 References in popular culture
* 10 See also
* 11 Footnotes and references
* 12 Bibliography
* 13 External links
[edit] Anabaptist origins
[edit] Forerunners
Though the majority opinion is that Anabaptists began with the Radical Reformers in the 16th century, certain people and groups may still legitimately be considered their forerunners. Peter Chelcicky, 15th century Bohemian Reformer, taught most of the beliefs considered integral to Anabaptist theology. Medieval antecedents may include the Brethren of the Common Life, the Hussites, Dutch Sacramentists[1][2] and some forms of monasticism. The Waldensians also represent a faith similar to the Anabaptists.
In the following points Anabaptists resembled the medieval dissenters:
1. Some followed Menno Simons in teaching that Jesus did not take the flesh from his mother, but either brought his body from heaven or had one made for him by the Word. Some even said that he passed through his mother, as water through a pipe, into the world. In pictures and sculptures of the 15th century and earlier, we often find represented this idea, originated by Marcion in the 2nd century. The Anabaptists were accused of denying the Incarnation of Christ: a charge that Menno Simons repeatedly rejected.
2. They condemned oaths, and also the reference of disputes between believers to law-courts.
3. The believer must not bear arms or offer forcible resistance to wrongdoers, nor wield the sword. No Christian has the 'jus gladii.'
4. Civil government (i.e. "Caesar") belongs to the world. The believer, who belongs to God's kingdom, must not fill any office, nor hold any rank under government, which is to be passively obeyed.
5. Sinners or unfaithful ones are to be excommunicated, and excluded from the sacraments and from intercourse with believers unless they repent, according to 1 Corinthians 6:1-11 and Matt.18:15 seq. But no force is to be used towards them.
They may have preserved among themselves the primitive manual of conduct called the Didache,[The first word in name of a book of writings of the first 12 Apsotles] for Bishop Longland in England condemned an Anabaptist for repeating one of its maxims "that alms should not be given before they did sweat in a man's hand." This was between 1518 and 1521.
[edit] Views of origins
Thomas Müntzer was one of the founders of the Anabaptist movement.
Research on the origins of the Anabaptists has been tainted both by the attempts of their enemies to slander them and the attempts of their friends to vindicate them. It was long popular to simply lump all Anabaptists as Munsterites and radicals associated with the Zwickau Prophets, Jan Matthys, John of Leiden (also Jan Bockelson van Leiden, Jan of Leyden), and Thomas Muentzer. Those desiring to correct this error tended to over-correct and deny all connections between the larger Anabaptist movement and this most radical element.
The modern era of Anabaptist historiography arose with the work of Roman Catholic scholar Carl Adolf Cornelius' publication of Die Geschichte des Münsterischen Aufruhrs in 1855. Baptist historian Albert Henry Newman (1852–1933), whom Bender said occupied "first position in the field of American Anabaptist Historiography", made a major contribution with his A History of Anti-Pedobaptism. Though a number of theories exist concerning origins, the three main ideas are that,
1. Anabaptists began in a single expression in Zürich and spread from there (Monogenesis),
2. Anabaptists began through several independent movements (polygenesis), and
3. Anabaptists are a continuation of New Testament Christianity (apostolic succession or church perpetuity).
[edit] Monogenesis
Protestantism
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Pre-Reformation Movements
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Henricians (France)
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A number of scholars (e.g. Bender, Estep, Friedmann) have seen all the Anabaptists as rising out of the Swiss Brethren movement of Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, George Blaurock, et al. The older view among Mennonite historians generally held that Anabaptism had its origins in Zürich, and that the Anabaptism of the Swiss Brethren was transmitted to South Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and North Germany, where it developed into its various branches. The monogenesis theory usually rejects the Münsterites and other radicals from the category of true Anabaptists. In this view the time of origin is January 21, 1525, when Grebel baptized Georg Blaurock, and Blaurock baptized other followers. This remains the most popular single time posited for the establishment of Anabaptism. But in the last quarter of the 20th century, Deppermann, Packull, and others suggested that February 24, 1527 at Schleitheim is the proper date of the origin of Anabaptism. This correlates with the following polygenesis theory.
[edit] Polygenesis
James M. Stayer, Werner O. Packull, and Klaus Deppermann disputed the idea of a single origin of Anabaptists in a 1975 essay entitled "From Monogenesis to Polygenesis". That article, emphasizing distinctive characteristics and distinct sources, has become a widely accepted treatment of the plural origins of Anabaptism. According to these authors, South German-Austrian Anabaptism "was a diluted form of Rhineland mysticism," Swiss Anabaptism "arose out of Reformed congregationalism", and Dutch Anabaptism was formed by "Social unrest and the apocalyptic visions of Melchior Hoffman". Pilgram Marpeck's Vermanung of 1542 was deeply influenced by the Bekenntnisse of 1533 by Münster theologian Bernhard Rothmann. The Hutterites used Melchior Hoffman's commentary on the Apocalypse shortly after he wrote it. David Joris, a disciple of Hoffman, was the most important Anabaptist leader in the Netherlands before 1540. Grete Mecenseffy and Walter Klaassen established links between Thomas Müntzer and Hans Hut, and the work of Gottfried Seebaß and Werner Packull clearly showed the influence of Thomas Müntzer on the formation of South German Anabaptism. Steven Ozment's work linked Hans Denck and Hans Hut with Thomas Müntzer, Sebastian Franck, and others. Calvin Pater has shown that Andreas Karlstadt influenced Swiss Anabaptism in areas including his view of Scripture, doctrine of the church, and views on baptism.
[edit] Apostolic succession
Another theory is that the 16th century Anabaptists were part of an apostolic succession of churches (or church perpetuity) from the time of Christ. According to this idea there had been a continuity of small groups outside the Roman Catholic Church from A.D. 30 to 1525 (which continues also to the present).[citation needed] This form of the doctrine ignores (or is ignorant of) any possibility of Apostolic Succession held independently of Rome by the Eastern Orthodox or Oriental Orthodox Churches. The doctrine holds that all the powers (etc.) of the apostles will continue on throughout whatever group holds Succession.[citation needed]
Proponents of this view point out many common expressions of belief in these Roman Catholic dissenters.[citation needed] The opponents of this theory emphasize that these non-Roman Catholic groups differed from each other, that they held some heretical views, and/or that they had no connection with one another. This view is held by some Baptists, some Mennonites, and a number of "true church" movements.[3] The writings of John T. Christian, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary professor, contain perhaps the best scholarly presentation of this successionist view. Somewhat related to this is that the Anabaptists are of Waldensian origin. Some hold the idea that the Waldenses are part of the apostolic succession, while others simply believe they were an independent group out of whom the Anabaptists arose. Estep asserts "the Waldenses disappeared in Switzerland a century before the rise of the Anabaptist movement." Ludwig Keller, Thomas M. Lindsay, H. C. Vedder, Delbert Grätz, and Thieleman van Braght all held, in varying degrees, the position that the Anabaptists were of Waldensian origin.
[edit] Types of Anabaptists
Main article: Theology of Anabaptism
It is beneficial to recognize different types among the Anabaptists, although these categorizations tend to vary with the scholar's viewpoint on origins. Estep claims that in order to understand Anabaptism, one must "distinguish between the Anabaptists, inspirationists, and rationalists." He classes the likes of Blaurock, Grebel, Hübmaier, Manz, Marpeck, and Simons as Anabaptists. He groups Müntzer, Storch, et al. as inspirationists, and anti-trinitarians such as Michael Servetus, Juan de Valdés, Sebastian Castellio, and Faustus Socinus as rationalists. Mark S. Ritchie follows this line of thought, saying, "The Anabaptists were one of several branches of 'Radical' reformers (i.e. reformers that went further than the mainstream Reformers) to arise out of the Renaissance and Reformation. Two other branches were Spirituals or Inspirationists, who believed that they had received direct revelation from the Spirit, and rationalists or anti-Trinitarians, who rebelled against traditional Christian doctrine, like Michael Servetus." Most of the Anti-Trinitarian Anabaptists were modalistic monarchians and baptized in the shorter formula of the name of Jesus Christ. They also spoke in ecstatic languages and prophecies known as "speaking in tongues." Holiness was a very important doctrine to them.
Those of the polygenesis viewpoint use Anabaptist to define the larger movement, and include the inspirationists and rationalists as true Anabaptists. James M. Stayer used the term Anabaptist for those who rebaptized persons already baptized in infancy. Walter Klaassen was perhaps the first Mennonite scholar to define Anabaptists that way in his 1960 Oxford dissertation. This represents a rejection of the previous standard held by Mennonite scholars such as Bender and Friedmann.
Another method of categorization acknowledges regional variations, such as Swiss Brethren (Grebel, Manz), Dutch Anabaptism (Menno, Philips), and South German Anabaptism (Hübmaier, Marpeck).
Historians and sociologists have made further distinctions between radical Anabaptists, who were prepared to use violence in their attempts to build a New Jerusalem, and their pacifist brethren, later broadly known as Mennonites. Radical Anabaptist groups included the Münsterites, who occupied and held the German city of Münster in 1534-1535, and the Batenburgers, who persisted in various guises as late as the 1570s.
[edit] Zwickau prophets and the Peasants' War
Main articles: Thomas Muentzer, Zwickau prophets, and Peasants' War
On December 27, 1521, three "prophets", influenced by and in turn influencing Thomas Müntzer, appeared in Wittenberg from Zwickau: Thomas Dreschel, Nicolas Storch and Mark Thomas Stübner. The crisis came in the so-called Peasants' War in South Germany in 1525. In its origin a revolt against feudal oppression, it became, under the leadership of Müntzer, a war against all constituted authorities, and an attempt to establish by revolution an ideal Christian commonwealth, with absolute equality and the community of goods.
[edit] The Münster Rebellion
Main articles: Münster Rebellion and Münster
A second and more determined attempt to establish a theocracy was made at Münster in Westphalia (1532-1535), led by Bernhard Rothmann, Bernhard Knipperdolling, Jan Matthys and John of Leiden.
[edit] Miscellany
The first leaders of the movement in Zürich — Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, George Blaurock, Balthasar Hübmaier — were men learned in Greek, Latin and Hebrew.
In English history frequent reference is made to the Anabaptists during the 16th and 17th centuries, but there is no evidence that any considerable number of native Englishmen ever adopted the principles of the Münster sect. Many of the followers of Müntzer and Bockelson seem to have fled from persecution in Germany and the Netherlands to be subjected to a persecution scarcely less severe in England. The mildest measure adopted towards these refugees was banishment from the kingdom, and a large number suffered at the stake. Their Christology and negative attitude towards the state rather indicate, as in the case of John Wycliffe, Jan Hus and the Fraticelli (Brethren), an affinity to the Cathars and other medieval sects. But this affiliation is hard to establish.
The earliest Anabaptists of Zürich allowed that the Picardi or Waldensians had, in contrast with Rome and the Reformers, truth on their side, yet did not claim to be in their succession; nor can it be shown that their adult baptism derived from any of the older Baptist sects, which undoubtedly lingered in parts of Europe. Later on, Hermann Schyn claimed descent for the peaceful Baptists from the Waldensians, who certainly, as the records of the Flemish inquisition, collected by P. Fredericq, prove, were widespread during the 15th century over north France and Flanders. It would appear from the way in which Anabaptism sprang up everywhere independently that more than one ancient sect took in and through it a new lease of life. Ritschl discerned in it the leaven of the Fraticelli or Franciscan Tertiaries.
In Moravia— if what Alexander Rost related be true, namely that they called themselves Apostolici and went barefoot healing the sick—they must have at least absorbed into themselves a sect of whom we hear in the 12th century in the north of Europe as deferring baptism to the age of 30, and rejecting oaths, prayers for the dead, relics and invocation of saints.
The Moravian Anabaptists, says Rost, went barefoot, washed each other's feet (like the Fraticelli), held all goods in common, had everyone working at a handicraft, had a spiritual father who prayed with them every morning and taught them, dressed in black and recited long graces before and after meals. Zeiler also in his German Itinerary (1618) describes their way of life. The Lord's Supper, or bread-breaking, was a commemoration of the Passion, held once a year. They sat at long tables, at which the elders read the words of institution and prayed. The members passed round a loaf from which each broke off a bit and ate, and they handed round the wine in flagons. Children in their colonies were separated from the parents and lived in the school, each with his own bed and blanket. They were taught reading, writing and arithmetic, as well as cleanliness, truthfulness and industry. The females married the men chosen for them.
On April 12, 1549, certain London Anabaptists brought before a commission of bishops asserted:
"That a man regenerate could not sin; that though the outward man sinned, the inward man sinned not; that there was no Trinity of Persons; that Christ was only a holy prophet and not at all God; that all we had by Christ was that he taught us the way to heaven; that he took no flesh of the Virgin, and that the baptism of infants was not profitable."
One of the most notable features of the early Anabaptists is that they regarded any true religious reform as involving social amelioration. The socialism of the 16th century was necessarily Christian and Anabaptist. Lutheranism was more attractive to grand-ducal patriots and well-to-do burghers than to the poor and oppressed and disinherited. The Lutherans and Zwinglians never converted the Anabaptists. In Austrian-controlled territories, the Jesuits had somewhat better success in persuading or coercing many Hutterites to rejoin the Roman Catholic Church.
[edit] Persecutions and migrations
Dirk Willems saves his pursuer.
Much of the historic Roman Catholic and Protestant literature has represented the Anabaptists as groups who preached false doctrine and led people into apostasy. That negative historiography remained popular for about four centuries. The Roman Catholics and Protestants alike persecuted the Anabaptists, resorted to torture and other types of physical abuse, in attempts both to curb the growth of the movement and bring about the salvation of the heretics (through recantation). The Protestants under Zwingli were the first to persecute the Anabaptists. Felix Manz became the first martyr in 1527. On May 20 1527, Roman Catholic authorities executed Michael Sattler. King Ferdinand declared drowning (called the third baptism) "the best antidote to Anabaptism". It has been said that a "16th century man who did not drink to excess, curse, or abuse his workmen or family could be suspected of being an Anabaptist and thus persecuted."[2] Estep estimates that thousands died in Europe in the sixteenth century. The Tudor regime, even those that were Protestant (Edward VI and Elizabeth I) persecuted Anabaptists as they were deemed too radical and therefore a danger to religious stability. This occurred particularly under Elizabeth, who desired moderate religion and disliked Catholics, Puritans and Anabaptists.
Thieleman J. van Braght's Martyrs Mirror describes the persecution and execution of thousands of Anabaptists, such as Dirk Willems, in Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and other parts of Europe between 1525 and 1660. Continuing persecution in Europe was largely responsible for the mass immigrations to North America by Amish, Hutterites, and Mennonites.
Anabaptist women have faced horrifying human barriers to serving in ministry, including martyrdom. An estimated 525 Anabaptist women were martyred; the first was Madelyn Wens, who was burned at the stake for preaching. [4] [5]
[edit] Anabaptists today
Several existing denominational bodies may be legitimately regarded as the successors of the Continental Anabaptists — Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, Mennonites, Bruderhof Communities and Quakers. Some writers prefer to distinguish institutionally lineal descendants (Amish, Hutterites, Mennonites) from the spiritual descendants Brethren, Church of the Brethren, the Bruderhof Communities, and Seventh-day Adventists, Baptists and the many parts of the Emerging Church in the UK, Australia and parts of the US. The Quakers are listed here only because they share the distinction of also being a peace church. Nevertheless, some historical connections have been demonstrated for all of these spiritual descendants, though perhaps not as clearly as the noted institutionally lineal descendants. Although many see the more well-known Anabaptist groups (Amish, Hutterites and Mennonites) as ethnic groups, the Anabaptist bodies of today are no longer comprised mostly of descendents of the Continental Anabaptists. Total worldwide membership of the Mennonite, Brethren in Christ and related churches totals 1,297,716 (as of 2003) with about 60 percent in Africa, Asia and Latin America.[6]
Today in response to post-modernism, what some theologians are calling 'the end of Christendom' and the global ecological crisis, some churches and theologians are drawing upon Anabaptist traditions as a paradigm for Christian spirituality in the 21st century. This movement, sometimes referred to as 'neo-anabaptism', includes theologians and communities who are from Christian denominations not part of the historic Peace Churches but who see in the 16th century radical reformers an authentic witness of early Christianity and of the life and teachings of Christ. Some such thinkers include Stanley Hauerwas, Nancey Murphy, Glen Stassen, Lee Camp, Marva J. Dawn, Richard Hays, Craig A. Carter, James McClendon, and Michael Cartwright.
Sojourners Magazine editor Jim Wallis has said that Mennonite Theologian John H. Yoder "inspired a whole generation of Christians to follow the way of Jesus into social action and peacemaking." The neo-Anabaptist communities and theologians are also a direct result of this legacy. Neo-Anabaptist communities are often identifiable by their desire to live as a prophetic alternative to larger society through their commitment to Christ's Sermon on the Mount as normative for the Christian life when empowered by the Holy Spirit. Outworkings of this spirituality include simple yet joyful lifestyle, peace and justice making, the practice of nonviolence, communal living and the voluntary sharing of goods, particularly with those in need all as an outworking of seeking the kingdom of God.
In addition, it may be argued that one of the historical Anabaptist doctrines, specifically that one must volitionally, consciously, and personally relate to God, is a likewise found among much of Evangelical Protestantism, even though these churches may not be historically linked to the Anabaptists.
[edit] The Anabaptist heritage
* Freedom of religion
* Priesthood of all believers
* Bible as the sole rule of faith and practice
* Pacifism
The Anabaptists were early promoters of a free church and freedom of religion (sometimes called separation of church and state).[7] When it was introduced by the Anabaptists in the 15th and 16th centuries, religious freedom independent of the state was a radical idea, and unthinkable to both clerical and governmental leaders. Religious liberty was equated with anarchy; Kropotkin[8] traces the birth of anarchist thought in Europe to these early Anabaptist communities.
According to Estep,[9]
"Where men believe in the freedom of religion, supported by a guarantee of separation of church and state, they have entered into that heritage. Where men have caught the Anabaptist vision of discipleship, they have become worthy of that heritage. Where corporate discipleship submits itself to the New Testament pattern of the church, the heir has then entered full possession of his legacy."
---------By now, you can see that the dualism of the Cathari had crept into the Anabaptist faith, and that freedom of religion depended upon the principle of separation of Church and State. You don't find this distinction from the Catholic Encyclopedia, but the truth seekers of Wikipedia have drawn the inescapable conclusion, that was reached in an earlier of my blogs, that peace in Iraq will come about with the realization that all faiths have to cooperate, and no one faith can be allowed to dominate the other. And that this program can be advanced by a strong movement here in the U.S. to reduce the intervention into domestic politics by ecclesiastical organizations. In fact, the history of the Middle East of recent times has been the organization of the Baathist Party within the government officials, which has created a basis for overcoming the dominance of French and English overseers of what were considered colonies of those countries, but which were in fact merely mandates, which were supposed to earn the occupiers a trip home, leaving the Mideast country with a self-governing entity.
I would like to now turn to America's history, one of the prime movers of which was William Penn's venture into the making of a religious based society, in Pennsylvania, using English & Welsh Quakers, Scotch-Irish Separatists, and Continental Anabaptists. Again from Wikipedia.--------
QUAKER HISTORY
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Religious Society of Friends, also known as Quakers, is a movement that began in England in the 17th century. In its early days it faced opposition and persecution; however, it continued to expand, extending into many parts of the world, especially the Americas and eastern Africa.
The Society of Friends has been influential in the history of the world. The state of Pennsylvania, in the United States, was founded by William Penn, as a safe place for Quakers to live and practice their faith. Quakers have been a significant part of the movements to abolish slavery, acknowledge the equal rights of women, and end warfare. They have also promoted education and the humane treatment of prisoners and the mentally ill, through the founding or reforming of various institutions.
During the 19th century Friends in the United States suffered a number of separations. These separations have resulted in the formation of different branches of the Society of Friends. Despite the separations, Friends remain united in their commitment to discover truth and promote it. There are approximately 600,000 Quakers in the world today.
Contents
* 1 Early days
* 2 Nayler's sign
* 3 Other early controversies
* 4 Persecution in England
* 5 Persecution in the New World
* 6 18th Century
* 7 Influential Quakers of the 19th Century
* 8 19th century controversies and divisions
* 9 Twentieth Century Developments
* 10 Quakers in Costa Rica
* 11 References
o 11.1 Sources
* 12 External links
[edit] Early days
The Quakers began in England in the early 1650s as a Nonconformist movement separate from other such movements, from Anglicanism and from Roman Catholicism. Some would say that it was not precisely a "break" from any of these, but was organized outside of them. Traditionally George Fox has been taken to be the founder or at least the most important early figure, but modern scholarship suggests a more complicated picture. Most likely, a number of radical Puritans, among them Fox, James Nayler and Edward Burrough, independently came to similar positions, eventually came into contact with one another, and then began to coordinate their preaching. However, since Fox outlived most of what some Quakers have called the Valiant Sixty---a group of early Quaker evangelists---his account of the early days as recorded in his Journal, while it may exaggerate his role, is the most detailed one available.
The Valiant Sixty believed that direct experience with God was available to all people, without any mediation (e.g. through a pastor, or through sacraments). Friends have often expressed this belief by referring to "that of God in Everyone", "inner light", "inward Christ", "the spirit of Christ within", and many other terms.
Fox left home at age 19 in 1644 on a religious search that lasted about three years, until he reported hearing the voice of Christ, and undergoing a process of personal transformation by the workings of the "inward light". He began preaching publicly in 1648. At that time, Puritanism was predominant in England under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, but religious dissent and political dissent were increasing. Fox was a highly vocal dissenter, as he considered many of the religious practices of the time to be inconsistent with Christian faith. In particular, he rejected the notion of a paid priesthood and of governmentally sanctioned church buildings (which he derided as "steeple-houses"), believing instead that everyone can be a minister and that any worshipful gathering of true Christians is equally legitimate. Thus, traditional Quaker worship had no individual in charge of conducting a planned service; instead, worshippers gathered in silence, which was only interrupted when someone in attendance felt moved by the Spirit to speak. Fox also believed the Puritans were wrong to regard literal reading of Scripture as a higher authority than personal experience of the divine, quoting Paul's statement in 2 Corinthians that "the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life."
He began his career by speaking in outdoor public places and in congregations—something he continued to do throughout his life. In many cases this resulted in his abuse and imprisonment—especially when he came into "steeple-houses" to denounce the sermons after the minister had finished, which was the custom and legal during the Commonwealth. From 1652 onward Fox was closely associated with an earlier, very loosely organized movement of religious dissenters, the Seekers. Seekers typically believed that there was no true church in existence, and resigned themselves to waiting for God to reestablish his kingdom, either spiritually or temporally. They had many practices that were similar to the emerging Quaker movement; they had discarded all ceremony in worship and begun the practice of silent meetings which, as Fox rapidly gained followers among the Seekers, became the practice of Friends.
Fox was equally critical of many aspects of English culture besides religious dogma, particularly those that he saw as symptoms of pride and misuse of authority. In 1661, he and other leading Quakers made their first public profession of the peace testimony; it is unclear how universal pacifism was before then, many Quaker converts being sympathetic with the Puritan revolution or even members of the New Model Army, as James Nayler was. After that point, the Quakers maintained that the proper response to injustice was neither violence nor acquiescence, but peaceful non-cooperation. Fox's criticisms of his society were similar to those of the Seekers, Ranters, and Levellers, and he drew followers from all of these groups (as well as from dissatisfied members of Cromwell's movement), but differed from them in his urgent call for a revival of what he saw as original Christian faith and practice, based on obedience to the inwardly revealed word of God and public resistance to injustice. Early Friends saw themselves as "primitive Christianity revived", in William Penn's words, and saw their Puritan and Anglican persecutors as analogous to the Pharisees.
Soon after its birth, the Religious Society of Friends was introduced to Ireland by William Edmundson. He was born in Westmoreland, England in 1627 but moved to Ireland in 1652. On a return trip to England, Edmundson was convinced of the truth of Quakerism under the teaching of James Nayler He went back to Ireland and set up a business in Lurgan, County Armagh. The first Friends meeting in Ireland took place in Edmundson's home there in 1654.
[edit] Nayler's sign
In 1656, a popular Quaker minister, James Nayler, went beyond the standard beliefs of Quakers when he rode into Bristol on a horse in the pouring rain, accompanied by a handful of men and women saying "Holy, holy, holy" and strewing their garments on the ground — clearly imitating Jesus's entry into Jerusalem. While this was apparently an attempt to emphasize that the "Light of Christ" was in every person, most observers believed that Nayler and his followers believed him to be Jesus Christ. The group was arrested by the local authorities and handed over to Parliament, where they were tried, probably illegally. Parliament was sufficiently incensed by Nayler's heterodox views that they punished him savagely and sent him back to Bristol to jail indefinitely. This was especially bad for the movement's respectability in the eyes of the Puritan rulers because some considered Nayler (and not Fox, who was in jail at the time) to be the actual leader of the movement. Many historians see this event as a turning point in early Quaker history because many other leaders, especially Fox, made efforts to increase the authority of the group over the leadings of the individual, to prevent similar behavior. This effort culminated in 1666 with the "Testimony from the Brethren," aimed at those, in its own words, who despised a rule "without which we . . . cannot be kept holy and inviolable"; it continued the centralizing process that began with the Nayler affair and was aimed at isolating any separatists who still lurked in the Society. Fox also established women's meetings for discipline and gave them an important role in overseeing marriages, which served both to isolate the opposition and fuel discontent with the new departures. In the 1660s and 1670s Fox himself traveled the country setting up a more formal structure of monthly (local) and quarterly (regional) meetings, which still survives today.
[edit] Other early controversies
The Society was rent by controversy in the 1660s and 1670s because of these tendencies. First, John Perrot, previously a respected minister and missionary, raised questions about whether men should uncover their heads when another Friend prayed in meeting. Soon this minor question broadened into an attack on the power of those at the center. Later, during the 1670s, William Rogers of Bristol and a group from Lancashire, their spokesmen being John Story and John Wilkinson, all respected leaders, led a schism that disagreed with the heightening influence of women and centralizing authority among Friends closer to London. By the end of the century, their leaders dead, the influence of these groups had been mostly overcome.
In 1678 the London Yearly Meeting, which is now called the Britain Yearly Meeting, was created and was recognized as the representational head of the Society.
[edit] Persecution in England
In 1650 George Fox was imprisoned for the first time. Over and over he was thrown in prison during the 1650s through the 1670s. Other Quakers were put in prison as well. Sometimes the charge was causing a disturbance. Other times it was blasphemy.
Two acts of Parliament made it particularly difficult for Friends. The first was the Quaker Act of 1662 [1], which made it illegal not to take the Oath of Allegiance and to hold any religious meetings other than those of the established church. Because Friends believed it was wrong to take an oath, they were sure to run afoul of this law, as its authors well knew. The second act was the Conventicle Act of 1664, which reaffirmed that holding unauthorized religious meetings was a crime.
Despite these laws, the Friends continued to meet openly. They believed that by doing so, they were testifying to the strength of their convictions and were willing to be punished for doing what they believed was right.
In 1689 the Toleration Act was passed. It allowed for freedom of conscience and prevented persecution by making it illegal to disturb anybody else's worship. Thus Quakers became tolerated though still not widely understood and accepted.
See also: Margaret Fell, Francis Howgill
[edit] Persecution in the New World
Title page of book on Quaker persecution in New England
Friends faced persecution again as they migrated to America. The first Friends in the New World came in order to spread their beliefs. In 1656 Mary Fisher and Ann Austin did so, and were imprisoned and banished by the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Their books were burned, and most of their property was confiscated. They were imprisoned in terrible conditions, deprived of food and even light. Were it not for somebody smuggling food to them, they might have starved in their cell. They were eventually deported.
In 1657 a group of Friends from England landed at Long Island in what was then called New Amsterdam. One of these Friends, Robert Hodgson, preached to large crowds of people. He was arrested, imprisoned, and flogged. Some sympathetic Dutch colonists were able to get him released. The preaching continued with some positive response as well as some continued persecution. Finally, on December 27, 1657 some of the citizens of Flushing wrote to the governor in protest. They reminded Governor Peter Stuyvesant that the colony's charter allowed for freedom of conscience. The document is called the Flushing Remonstrance. It is the first instance in the American colonies of settlers petitioning for religious freedom.
Some Friends in New England were only imprisoned or banished. A few were also whipped, branded, or otherwise corporally punished. Christopher Holder, for example, had his ear cut off. A few were executed by the Puritan leaders, usually for ignoring and defying orders of banishment. Mary Dyer was thus executed in 1660. Three other martyrs to the Quaker faith in Massachusetts were William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, and William Leddra.
In contrast to the intolerant Puritans, several colonies offered safe haven for the Friends in the New World. Rhode Island was founded on the principle of religious freedom, and many Friends migrated there. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware were also tolerant of the Friends. In fact, Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn specifically as a place for Quakers to live in peace. Maryland, which was established as a haven for Roman Catholics extended a welcome to Friends as well.
[edit] 18th Century
In 1691 George Fox died. Thus, the Quaker movement went into the 18th Century without one of its most influential early leaders. Thanks to the Toleration Act of 1689, people in Great Britain were no longer criminals simply by being Friends.
During this time, other people began to recognize Quakers for their integrity in social and economic matters. Many Quakers went into manufacturing or commerce, because they were not allowed to earn academic degrees at that time. These Quaker businessmen were successful, in part, because people trusted them. The customers knew that Quakers felt convicted to set a fair price for goods and not to haggle over prices. They also knew that Quakers were committed to quality work, and that what they produced would be worth the price.
Some useful and popular products made by Quaker businesses at that time included iron and steel by Abraham Darby and pharmaceuticals by William Allen.
At the same time that Friends were succeeding in manufacturing and commerce, they were also becoming more concerned about social issues and becoming more active in society at large.
One such issue was slavery. The Germantown (Pennsylvania) Monthly Meeting put their opposition to slavery into their minutes in 1733, but abolitionism did not become universal among Friends until its promotion by concerned Friends like Anthony Benezet and John Woolman. Woolman was a farmer, retailer, and tailor from New Jersey who became convinced that slavery was wrong. Before that time, some Friends owned slaves. In general they opposed mistreatment of slaves and promoted the teaching of Christianity to them. Woolman argued that the entire practice of buying, selling, and owning human beings was wrong in principle. Other Friends started to agree and became very active in the Abolition movement. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting prohibited members from owning slaves in 1776.
Another issue that became a concern of Friends was the treatment of the mentally ill. Tea merchant, William Tuke opened the Retreat at York in 1796. It was a place where the mentally ill were treated with the dignity that Friends believe is inherent in all human beings. Most asylums at that time forced such people into deplorable conditions and did nothing to help them.
By the late 1700s, Quakers were sufficiently recognized and accepted that United States Constitution contained language specifically directed at Quaker citizens -- in particular, the explicit allowance of "affirming," as opposed to "swearing," various oaths.
[edit] Influential Quakers of the 19th Century
During the 19th Century, Friends continued to have an impact on the world around them. Many of the industrial concerns started by Friends in the previous century continued. New ones began. Friends also continued and increased their work in the areas of social justice and equality. They made other contributions as well in the fields of science, literature, art, law and politics.
In the realm of industry Edward Pease opened the Stockton and Darlington Railway in northern England in 1825. It was the first modern railway in the world, and carried coal from the mines to the seaports. Henry and Joseph Rowntree owned a chocolate factory in York, England. When Henry died, Joseph took it over. He provided the workers with more benefits than most employers of his day. He also funded low-cost housing for the poor. John Cadbury founded another chocolate factory, which his sons George and Richard eventually took over. A third chocolate factory was founded by Joseph Fry in Bristol.
Quakers actively promoted equal rights during this century as well. As early as 1811, Elias Hicks published a pamphlet showing that slaves were "prize goods"--that is, products of piracy--and hence profitting from them violated Quaker principles; it was a short step from that position to reject use of all products made from slave labor, the so-called "free produce" movement that won support among Friends and others but also proved divisive. Quaker women such as Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony joined the movement to abolish slavery, moving them to cooperate politically with non-Quakers in working against the institution. Somewhat as a result of their initial exclusion from abolitionist activities, they changed their focus to the right of women to vote and influence society. Thomas Garret lead in the movement to abolish slavery, personally assisting Harriet Tubman to escape from slavery and to coordinate the Underground Railroad. Richard Dillingham died in a Tennessee prison where he was incarcerated for trying to help some slaves escape. Levi Coffin was also an active abolitionist, helping thousands of escaped slaves migrate to Canada and opening a store for selling products made by former slaves.
Prison reform was another concern of Quakers at that time. Elizabeth Fry and her brother Joseph John Gurney campaigned for more humane treatment of prisoners and for the abolition of the death penalty. They had moderate success, in that Parliament did eventually pass legislation to improve prison conditions and to decrease the number of capital crimes.
In the early days of the Society of Friends, Quakers were not allowed to get an advanced education. Eventually some did get opportunities to go to university and beyond, which meant that more and more Quakers could enter the various fields of science. Thomas Young an English Quaker, did experiments with optics, contributing much to the wave theory of light. He also discovered how the lens in the eye works and described astigmatism and formulated an hypothesis about the perception of color. Young was also involved in translating the Rosetta Stone. He translated the demotic text and began the process of understanding the hieroglyphics. Maria Mitchell was an astronomer who discovered a comet. She was also active in the abolition movement and the women's suffrage movement. Joseph Lister promoted the use of sterile techniques in medicine, based on Pasteur's work on germs. Thomas Hodgkin was a pathologist who made major breakthroughs in the field of anatomy. He was the first doctor to describe the type of lymphoma named after him. An historian, he was also active in the movement to abolish slavery and to protect aboriginal people. John Dalton formulated the atomic theory of matter, among other scientific achievements.
Quakers were not apt to participate publicly in the arts. For many Quakers these things violated their commitment to simplicity and were thought too "worldly." Some Quakers, however, are noted today for their creative work. John Greenleaf Whittier was an editor and a poet in the United States. Among his works were some poems involving Quaker history and hymns expressing his Quaker theology. He also worked in the abolition movement. Edward Hicks painted religious and historical paintings in the naive style and Francis Frith was a British photographer whose catalogue ran to many thousands of topographical views.
At first Quakers were barred by law and their own convictions from being involved in the arena of law and politics. As time went on, a few Quakers in England and the United States did enter that arena. Joseph Pease was the son of Edward Pease mentioned above. He continued and expanded his father's business. In 1832 he became the first Quaker elected to Parliament. Noah Haynes Swayne was the only Quaker to serve on the United States Supreme Court. He was an Associate Justice from 1862-1881. He strongly opposed slavery, moving out of the slave-holding state of Virginia to the free state of Ohio in his young adult years.
In the 19th Century Friends began to be influenced by the revivals sweeping the United States. Robert Pearsall Smith and his wife Hannah Whitall Smith, Quakers from New Jersey, had a huge impact on the Christian world. They promoted the Wesleyan idea of Christian perfection, also known as holiness or sanctification, among Quakers and among various denominations. Their work inspired the formation of many new Christian groups. Hannah Smith was also involved in the movements for women's suffrage and for temperance.
[edit] 19th century controversies and divisions
The Society in Ireland, and later, the United States suffered a number of separations during the 19th century. In 1827-28, the views and popularity of Elias Hicks resulted in a division within five yearly meetings, Philadelphia, New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Baltimore. Rural Friends, who had increasingly chafed under the control of urban leaders, sided with Hicks and naturally took a stand against strong discipline in doctrinal questions. Those who supported Hicks were tagged as "Hicksites," while Friends who opposed him were labeled "Orthodox." The latter had more adherents overall but were plagued by subsequent splintering. The only division the Hicksites experienced was when a small group of upper class and reform-minded Progressive Friends of Longwood, Pennsylvania, emerged in the 1840s; they maintained a precarious position for about a century.
In the early 1840s the Orthodox Friends in America were exercised by a transatlantic dispute between Joseph John Gurney of England and John Wilbur of Rhode Island. Gurney, troubled by the example of the Hicksite separation, emphasized Scriptural authority and favored working closely with other Christian groups. Wilbur, in response, defended the authority of the Holy Spirit as primary, and worked to prevent the dilution of the Friends tradition of Spirit-led ministry. After privately criticizing Gurney in correspondence to sympathetic Friends, Wilbur was expelled from his yearly meeting in a questionable proceeding in 1842. Probably the best known Orthodox Friend was the poet and abolitionist editor John Greenleaf Whittier. Over the next several decades, a number of Wilburite-Gurneyite separations occurred.[1]
For the most part, Friends in Britain were strongly evangelical in doctrine and escaped these major separations, though they corresponded only with the Orthodox and mostly ignored the Hicksites [2].
Starting in the late 19th century, many American Gurneyite Quakers adopted the use of paid pastors, planned sermons, hymns and other elements of Protestant worship services. This type of Quaker meeting is known as a "programmed meeting". Worship of the traditional, silent variety is called an "unprogrammed meeting", although there is some variation on how the unprogrammed meetings adhere strictly to the lack of programming. Some unprogrammed meetings may have also allocated a period of hymn-singing or other activity as part of the total period of worship, while others maintain the tradition of avoiding all planned activities. (See also Joel Bean.)
[edit] Twentieth Century Developments
During the 20th century, Quakerism was marked, paradoxically, by movements toward unity and continuing divisions, meaning that by the end of the period, Quakers remained more sharply divided than ever. By the time of the first World War almost all Quakers in Britain and many in the United States found themselves committed to what came to be called "liberalism," which meant primarily a religion that deemphasized theology and was characterized by social action and especially pacifism. Hence when the two Philadelphia and New York Yearly Meetings, one Hicksite, one Orthodox, united in 1955--to be followed in the next decade by the two in BaltimoreYearly Meeting--they came together on the basis of a shared liberalism. As time wore on and the implication of this liberal change became more apparent, sharpening lines of division between various groups of Friends became more accentuated.
The war at first produced an effort toward unity, creation of the American Friends Service Committee in 1917 by Orthodox Friends, led by Rufus Jones and Henry Cadbury. A Friends Service Committee, as an agency of London Yearly Meeting, had already been created in Britain to help Quakers there deal with problems of military service; it continues today, after numereous name chages, as Quaker Peace & Social Witness. Envisioned as a service outlet for conscientious objectors that could draw support from across diverse yearly meetings, the AFSC began losing support from more evangelical Quakers as early as the 1920s and served to emphasize the differences between them, but prominent Friends such as Herbert Hoover continued to offer it their public support. Many Quakers from Oregon, Ohio, and Kansas had become alienated from the Five Years Meeting (later Friends United Meeting) because it seemed infected with the kind of theological liberalism that Jones exemplified; Oregon Yearly Meeting seceded in 1926. In 1927, eleven evangelicals met in Cheyenne, Wyoming, to plan how to resist this influence of liberalism, but depression and war prevented another gathering for twenty years, until after World War II ended.
To overcome such divisions, liberal Quakers organized so-called world-wide conferences of Quakers in 1920 in London and again in 1937 at Swarthmore and Haverford Colleges in Pennyslvania, but they were too liberal and too expensive for most evangelicals to attend. A more successful effort was the Friends Committee on National Legislation, originating during World War II in Washington, D.C., as a pioneering Quaker lobbying unit. In 1958 the Friends World Committee for Consultation was organized to form a neutral ground where all branches of the Society of Friends could come together, consider common problems, and get to know one another; it holds triennial conferences that meet in various parts of the world, but it has not found a way to involve very many grass roots Quakers in its activities. One of its agencies, created during the Cold War and known as Right Sharing of World Resources, collects funds from Quakers in the "first world" to finance small self-help projects in the "Third World," including some supported by Evangelical Friends International. Beginning in 1955 and continuing for a decade, three of the yearly meetings divided by the Hicksite separation of 1827, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York, as well as Canadian Yearly Meeting, reunited.
Disagreements between the various Quaker groups, Friends United Meeting, Friends General Conference, Evangelical Friends International, and Conservative yearly meetings, involved both theological and more concrete social issues. FGC, founded in 1900[3] and centered primarily in the east, along the west coast, and in Canada, tended to be oriented toward the liberal end of the spectrum, was mostly unprogrammed, and closely aligned with AFSC; by the last part of the century it had taken a strong position in favor of same-sex marriage, was supportive of gay rights, and usually favored a woman's right to choose an abortion. Its membership tended to be professional and certainly upper middle class or higher.
Rooted in the mid-west, especially Indiana, FUM was historically more rural or small town with members who could hardly be considered part of the elite, except in a small-town sense. Its churches--a term that was usually used--were almost all programmed and pastoral, its theological position likewise close to more mainstream Baptist or Methodist bodies. In 1960, it even created a theological seminary, Earlham School of Religion, to offer training to those who desired to become pastors or wanted a graduate degree in religion;[4] ironically, it soon enrolled significant numbers of unprogrammed Friends.
EFI was staunchly evangelical and by the end of the century had more members converted through its missionary endeavors abroad than in the United States; Southwest Friends Church illustrated the group's major drift away from traditional Quaker practice, for it permitted its member churches to practice the outward ordinances of the Lord's Supper and baptism. On social issues its members exhibited strong antipathy toward homosexuality and ennunciated a determined pro-life position on abortion. At century's end, Conservative Friends held onto only three small yearly meetings, in Ohio, Iowa, and North Carolina, with the Buckeye State's Friends the most traditional and seemingly questioning the others's right to call themselves "conservative." In Britain and Europe where liberalism reigned pretty much triumphant, these distinctions did not apply, nor did they in Latin America and Africa where evangelical missionary activity continued and almost no liberals lived.
In the 1960s and later, these categories were challenged by a most self-educated Friend, Lewis Benson, a New Jersey printer by training, a theologian by vocation. Immersing himself in the corpus of early Quaker writings, he made himself an authority on George Fox and his message. In 1966, Benson published Catholic Quakerism, a small book that sought to move the Society of Friends to what he insisted was a strongly pro-Fox position of authentic Christianity, entirely separate from theological liberalism, churchly denominationalism, or rural isolation. He created the New Foundation Fellowship, which blazed forth for a decade or so but had about disappeared as an effective group by the end of the century.
By that time, the differences between Friends were quite clear, to each other if not always to outsiders. Theologically, some Friends among the "liberals" proclaimed themselves atheists or agnostics, while their more evangelical fellow believers adhered staunchly to the Bible and their interpretations of it. Periodical attempts to separate--or "realign," as evangelicals usually phrased it--the disparate Quakers into more theological congenial groups occurred, but just as often failed, at least in a formal organizational sense. By the beginning of the twentieth-first century, Friends United Meeting, as the middle ground, had suffered from these efforts, but still remained in existence, even if it did not flourish. In its homebase of Indiana yearly meeting especially, it lost numerous churches and members, both to other denominations and to the evangelicals.
Quakers in Britain and the eastern United States embarked on efforts in the field of adult education, creating two schools with term-long courses, week-end activities, and summer programs. Woodbrooke College began in 1903 at the former home of chocolate magnate George Cadbury in Birmingham, England, and later became associated with the University of Birmingham, while Pendle Hill, in the Philadelphia suburb of Wallingford, did not open until 1930; both sought to educate adults for the kind of lay leadership that the founders's Society of Friends relied upon. They also maintain modest research libraries and resources.
During the twentieth century, two Quakers, Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon, both from the western evangelical wing of the group, were elected to serve as presidents of the United States, thus achieving more secular political power than any Friend had enjoyed since William Penn. The policies of neither brought much acclaim to Quakers, with many eastern American Friends actively opposing Nixon and calling for East Whittier Friends Church[5], where he held formal membership, to disown him.
[edit] Quakers in Costa Rica
In 1951 a group of Quakers (members of the Religious Society of Friends) objecting to the military conscription, emigrated from the United States to Costa Rica and settled in what was to be Monteverde. Part of the Quaker faith is the belief that there is an inner light in everyone and that this inner light is in essence a piece of God. Most Quakers consider themselves pacifists. The Quakers founded the Cheese Factory, the Friends School and in an attempt to protect the areas watershed purchased much of the land that now makes up the Monteverde Reserve. The Quakers have played a major role in the development of the community and this is one of the things that make Monteverde a special place.
[edit] References
1. 'Charles II, 1662: An Act for preventing the Mischeifs and Dangers that may arise by certaine Persons called Quakers and others refusing to take lawfull Oaths.', Statutes of the Realm: volume 5: 1628-80 (1819), pp. 350-51. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=47304. Date accessed: 05 March 2007.
2. For an account of how British Friends (London Yearly Meeting) transformed from evangelical to liberal Christian thinking see Kennedy, Thomas, Cummings (2001) British Quakerism 1860-1920: the transformation of a religious community, cited below
3. "Locations of FGC Conferences and Gatherings", FGC website.
4. "Theological Education" on the ESR website.
5. East Whittier Friends Church Website (No mention of their former member, Richard Nixon) See also text of a lecture with the provocative title "Richard Nixon: exemplary 20th century Quaker"
[edit] Sources
* Abbott, Margaret Post, et al. Historical Dictionary of the Friends, Scarecrow Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8108-4483-4
* Barbour, Hugh, and J. William Frost. The Quakers, Greenwood Press, 1988. ISBN 0-313-22816-7
* Ingle, H. Larry. First Among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism, Oxford University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-19-510117-0
* Ingle, H. Larry. Quakers in Conflict: The Hicksite Reformation, Pendle Hill Publications, 1998. ISBN 0-87574-926-7
* Kennedy, Thomas, Cummings British Quakerism 1860-1920: the transformation of a religious community Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0198270356
* Moore, Rosemary. The Light In Their Consciences: Faith, Practices, and Personalities in Early British Quakrism, (1646-166), Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-271-01988-3
* Nayler, James. Works of James Nayler, vol. 1, Licia Kuenning, ed., Quaker Heritage Press, 2003.
* Nayler, James. Works of James Nayler, vol. 2, Licia Kuenning, ed., Quaker Heritage Press, 2004.
* Punshon, John. Portrait in Grey: A Short History, Britain Yearly Meeting, 1984. ISBN 0-85245-180-6 new edition 2006 ISBN ISBN 0 85245 399 X
[edit] External links
* Historical Overview by David Murray-Rust
* Quaker Information Center
* A Quaker Page at the Street Corner Society
* Timeline of Quaker history
* Quaker Heritage Press
* Article by Bill Samuel on the Beginnings of Quakerism in quakerinfo.com
* Quaker Women Online
* Monteverde, Costa Rica information
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WOW, the life of Quakers has been contentious, and I must say, no matter how controversial a topic, the Friends were not reluctant to jump in, and put in their two cents worth.
They were born in the cauldron of the English Civil War, or I should say the British Civil War, as the Scots played their own role. In another culture, the blind poet, John Milton, was educated, and throughout the period of Quaker birth he was an influence as great as Shakespeare, though the Bard has remained as popular today as he was before Milton. Nonetheless, Milton created a poem "Waldensians" to honor the sacrifice these people endured in the outbreak of the Reformation, and almost contemorary of Luther, who was much more successful in his quite similar heresy.
I recommend a study of these people, or should I call them co-religionists, as was mentioned above with the Cathari, their courage to endure against the forces of the great powers, and in particular, the Pope, should not be forgotten. In fact, the desire to possess simultaneously the freedom of the press, and free speech is a legacy that cannot be, even momentarily, lost as the growth of democracy directly proceeded from their mission to all land, and especially to Milton's England. I quote from the introduction of a book on Waldensians written by David McCallum - "In the literature of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, there appears the figure of an intriguing man who had an exceptional impact on the society of his day. He is referred to variously as Valdes, Valdesius, Valdensius and Waldo (Valdo), from the city of Lyons.
References to the movement he founded ("Waldensians" "the poor of Lyons" "the Leonese" "the Poor of Lombardy" or simply "the Poor") appear repeatedly throughout the succeeding centuries of European history. They are always in the shadows, always under bitter persecution, always hard to understand, but always seemingly at the cutting edge of reformation ferment.
Which brings me to Walden's Pond, (Not related to Peter Waldo) the favorite haunt of Henry David Thoreau, the 19th century transcendentalist, after Ralph Waldo Emerson (Here's the Waldo we were looking for!) David had a poet's skill with words, which have been able to fly around the world and get translated into a thousand tongues. Thoreau protested paying poll tax to support the Mexican War, and was incarcerated for it, from where he came to Walden's Pond to reflect upon his situation in the world. Some class him as one of the world's greatist Pacifists, or exponent of non-violence, but I rather think of him as a very humanistic soul, who felt everyone could experience the solace at their own cabin in the woods, in the betterment of mankind.
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My maiden Aunt Nette was proud of her two uncles who went off the fight in the Civil War, even before she was born. William Bechtel fought at Cedar Creek, in Virginia, one of the last battles of that war, was wounded and died shortly later at a hospital in Baltimore. The other, Lewis Harris was a member of Iowa's Greybeard Regiment, and came home. Another uncle, Alex McCoy was killed shortly before the war when the roof blew off his barn and landed on him. It was a sad day, but at least he was a McCoy, not one of the dreaded Hatfield's, who had a running fued with the McCoys. I guess. Which brings me to dualism, the religion of the Cathari. And it was a subject of one of my early blogs. Her pride in the Glory that came from being victorious in a civil war, is not one of the moral high ground of civilization, niether is slavery, which was revered long after the end of the conflict. I found out a lot about Cedar Creek in a little book, "Banners at Shenandoah", by Bruce Catton.
A cousin, John Fisher, is justly proud of the Beadle Dime Novels, which were printed during the civil war by cousins or relatives of his mother, Mrs. Tempest (Beadle) Fisher.
I remember being proud of being hired out of Engineering School by DuPont, and of course, was not proud of their proud history of being one of the biggest generators of gun powder that powered the guns of that and other wars. Some feel the literature and manufactures of war feeds into the hands of Satan, while works of authors like Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Julia Ward Howe, who transformed "John Brown's Body" into "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," represented another, loftier achievement of mankind. With the Civil War, America joined the rest of the countries of the World in having a Great War that inspired heros to the loftiest heights, that wrote pages of history, but did little to promote the progress of mankind in a continuing fight with ennui, poverty, and fear of the end. Once again, popularity of pacifism reached a low ebb, just when the need for knowing the right way was needed most. Toward the end of my college days, continuing with the humanities courses that my class enjoyed as part of a new enlightened curriculum for engineers I took Logic.
I cannot help but feel that I got more out of this class than several others put together, still I cannot imagine graduating without the bulk of the core courses that were mandatory. We enjoyed Dr. Gustav Bergman for our lecturer, one of the most popular educators ever to come to the Iowa campus. He also taught "The Philosophy of Science" but as an undergraduate, I could not get in, but I guess I was lucky anyway. Logic by Aristotle is thought of as two types, deductive and inductive. However, our course, which enphasised the deductive, was primarily one of symbolic logic, as propounded in the 20th century by Lord Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, two of England's most distinguished scholars. It happened that Lord Russell became in his lifetime one of the most famous or notorious pacifists. I found a review of Ray Monk's critical biography of him in the May 2001 issue of "The New Republic" magazine, which I reprint (permission not requested) below:---------
HOW TO BE FREE AND HAPPY
By Thomas Nagel - The New Republic May 7, 2001
BERTRAND RUSSELL: THE GHOST OF MADNESS, 1921-1970
By Ray Monk
(The Free Press, 590 pp., $40)
BERTRAND RUSSELL WAS born in 1872 and died in 1970. This second volume of Ray Monk's historically authoritative biography begins exactly halfway through the life, in 1921. It has the curious property of transcending the emotional and sympathetic limitations of its author: Russell's greatness and indomitable force of life shine through the scrupulously researched narrative in spite of the relentless contempt and distaste with which Monk presents it. To his credit, Monk acknowledges in the preface that his attitude toward Russell may have distorted the account; but equally to his credit, I found that even with Monk's emphases, the facts presented did not support his attitude.
This is another of those painful biographies of a major creative figure that open up personal failings and sexual agonies to the kind of intimate scrutiny that none of us could withstand. Those who read Monk's first volume may have felt, as I did, the indecency of being exposed to the depths of Russell's misery and the expression of his sexual passions. Why does a great philosopher, or a great artist, or a great scientist, forfeit his privacy forever, so that we all get to read his love letters and sneer at his weaknesses? What such people create is always something far finer than they are. It is extracted from a flawed and messy self so that it can float free, detached from the imperfect life that produced it.
Granted, in Russell's case there is more excuse than usual for comprehensive attention, since he himself went public about so much. He published an autobiography that was at least an attempt at self-exposure, and he wrote a great deal about life, sex, and the pursuit of happiness. He had the self-assurance of an aristocrat and the independence of mind of a great intellect, and perhaps he would not have cared what we know about him.
Certainly he was not consumed by shame and by the desire to hide, like Wittgenstein, the subject of an equally excruciating and informative biography by Monk. In that book it is clear that Wittgenstein has Monk's profound sympathy, yet he comes across as an insufferably selfish and heartless human being. Russell comes across as a basically decent and generous man with personal flaws, who led a life of stupendous energy and achievement in which he attempted to have some good effect on the world in his murderous and creative epoch. The life was also shot through with personal disasters, and Monk does what he can to blame Russell for these. He castigates Russell for vanity, egotism, and personal coldness, and heaps scorn on the reams of popular journalism that Russell produced to make a living and to care for others after he had given away his inheritance, mainly to support T. S. Eliot and the London School of Economics.
Russell also did not share, to put it mildly, Wittgenstein's reluctance to publish, or his conviction that philosophers should stay out of the world. When Wittgenstein in the 1920s rebuked Russell for his activities in favor of peace and freedom, Russell asked whether it would be preferable to establish a World Organization for War and Slavery. Wittgenstein replied, of course, "Yes, rather that, rather that!"
Though it is popularly and journalistically thought to be central to the job description of a philosopher to discover how we should live, and then to reveal the secret for the rest of us, it is in fact rare for philosophers to set themselves this audacious task. Most of the major philosophers of the past have concentrated their efforts on trying to understand the nature of reality, truth, and knowledge. While this includes ethical theory, that is not the same thing as knowing how to live, since one cannot live merely by not doing what is wrong. This tradition of the abstract and theoretical character of philosophy continues unbroken, for the most part, and analytic philosophers belong to it.
Russell is the great exception. He was a figure of towering originality, one of the founders of mathematical logic, analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of language, and a logico-metaphysical visionary of the type of Leibniz, with a brilliant command of the mathematics and the science of his day. But he spent a large proportion of his time and energy trying to communicate to his fellow human beings a set of ideas about sex, love, happiness, religion, social organization, public responsibility, education, war, and peace—an effort that increasingly dominated the second half of his life, though it had already been prominent in the first; and he did so with a wit reminiscent of Voltaire. He was fearless, outspoken, and eloquent, and, while his judgment was sometimes egregiously wrong, for someone who spoke out continually on so many subjects he had a pretty good record. He was a believer in reason, and it is easy to deride him for this, given the dark forces at work in the world against whose evils he fought. Monk quotes Keynes's remark that Russell held the inconsistent beliefs that all the world's ills were due to irrationality, and that the solution to them was simply that we should conduct ourselves rationally. Keynes had a point, because the explanation of irrationality is not in most cases a failure of understanding, so it will not be put right by patient instruction. Yet Russell's unstinting effort to be the voice of reason was an honorable course. Whatever other forces may be at work, it is a contribution to progress to try to say as clearly as possible what makes sense and what does not; at least it applies pressure in the right direction, and indicates the path to be followed when people are ready to listen to reason.
Monk is particularly dismissive of Russell's rationalistic claim that romanticism as an intellectual movement was partly responsible for fascism, because of its denigration of reason and of the idea of objective truth, by comparison with feeling and instinct. "Rationality," wrote Russell, "in the sense of an appeal to a universal and impersonal standard of truth, is of supreme importance to the well-being of the human species, not only in ages in which it easily prevails but also, and even more, in those less fortunate times in which it is despised and rejected as the vain dream of men who lack the virility to kill where they cannot agree." It is equally possible, of course, to murder millions of people in the name of objective truth, as Stalin did—though we cannot for that reason blame the gulag on the Enlightenment. I think that Monk underrates the power of ideas to infuse and to give shape to fanaticism that depends also on other causes. The rejection of reason and objectivity was fundamental to the character of Nazism and quite explicitly so, and the strength of philosophical romanticism in Germany probably weakened how we should live, and then to reveal the secret to the rest of us, it is in fact rare for philosophers to set themselves this audacious task. Most of the major philosophers of the past have concentrated their efforts on trying to understand the nature of real- resistance to it. (Less lethal political fallout from debased forms of the view that there is no such thing as objective truth is still with us, in the excesses of multiculturalism.)
II
RUSSELL'S MOST FAMOUS popular book was Marriage and Morals, which appeared in 1929. So much of what he called for in that volume has been achieved by the sexual revolution and the women's movement that I suppose no one reads it any more. Its rationality and its good sense exist in painful counterpoint with the unraveling of his second marriage, to Dora Black, which was happening when he wrote it. Russell's book is not a defense of free love, but it offers an argument that adultery should not in general lead to divorce, because it is so important to keep families with children together:
A marriage that begins with passionate love and leads to children who are desired and loved ought to produce so deep a tie between a man and a woman that they will feel something infinitely precious in their companionship even after sexual passion has decayed, and even if either or both of them feels sexual passion for someone else. This mellowing of marriage has been prevented by jealousy, but jealousy, though it is an instinctive emotion, is one which can be controlled if it is recognized as bad, and not supposed to be the expression of a just moral indignation.
It would be easier and healthier, Russell thought, to suppress jealousy than to suppress errant sexual attraction; but here reason proved not to be a good guide, at least in his own life. He had underestimated the power of sex. In his autobiography he said that he had been "blinded by theory."
At the age of forty-nine Russell was overjoyed at the arrival of his first child, John, and two years later there was a daughter, Kate; but after seven years of marriage he became impotent with his wife. Dora was half his age and much more radical, politically and personally. She had always believed in complete sexual freedom, and during one of Russell's lecture tours to the United States she became pregnant by one of her lovers, Griffin Barry. She wrote to ask Russell if he wanted her to terminate the pregnancy; Russell said no, and the child, Harriet, was registered legally as his, though after the marriage broke up he expended a major effort to get her name removed from Burkes Peerage and Debrett's.
Russell himself took up with someone else, and all four adults and three children more or less co-habited off and on for a period of time, under severe emotional strain. Eventually Dora and Barry had a second child. Throughout this period Russell and Dora were also running the progressive school that they had founded to implement their theories of education, unfortunately influenced by the American behaviorist John B. Watson. This involved a partial abandonment of the close individual relation that they had to their children, who became instead ordinary members of the student body, and were treated somewhat impersonally.
Everything went to pieces in a protracted and bitter divorce, followed by Russell's marriage in 1936 to his lover and secretary Patricia Spence, a woman in her twenties, and the birth to her of his second son, Conrad. Russell and Dora fell into constant conflict over the children. John began to show signs of disturbance as a young adult and was eventually diagnosed as schizophrenic, after having married the daughter of the poet Vachel Lindsay, herself mentally unbalanced; the couple had two daughters, both of whom also became schizophrenic. (One of them committed suicide by burning herself to death at the age of twenty-six.) Conrad was forbidden by his mother to have any contact with Russell after their divorce in 1950, and when he did take up relations with his father as an adult, shortly before the end of Russell's life, his mother kept her word and never spoke to him again.
Russell—frightened and repelled by John's madness and wanting to take over the care of the granddaughters—tried to have John committed, but Dora kept him with her and he managed to survive in her care and even to attend the House of Lords occasionally, having inherited the earldom without regaining his sanity. Monk suggests that the strains to which John was subjected by Russell's mismanaged personal life contributed to his illness, but this is causally naive. Russell had always been afraid of hereditary madness in the family line, and he was evidently right. Fortunately his relations with his daughter Kate were always good, and his fourth marriage—at the age of eighty to Edith Finch, an American woman a mere twenty-nine years younger than himself— was happy and stable. Monk's relentless censoriousness about Russell's personal troubles seems uncalled for; things can go badly wrong in any family, even that of a tireless social commentator.
III
Russell wrote books called "How to Be Free and Happy, Why I Am Not a Christian, The Conquest of Happiness, In Praise of Idleness"—a kind of popular anti-devotional literature calling for the abandonment of conventional religious and moral taboos and their replacement by freedom, kindness, and a fearless openness to knowledge. He also defended socialism and stood twice for Parliament as a Labour candidate in a safe Conservative district.
Monk approvingly quotes Beatrice Webb's dismissals of Russell as lazy and flippant in his social and political commentary, but at least Russell, unlike Webb, was never enraptured by the Soviet Union; he understood and condemned it from the start. His polemical style was always ironical and mocking rather than dour or enraged, but he had a solid core of decency and common sense that usually kept him on the right track. His popular writings are light, fluent, and full of amusing sound bites: "Children were idealized by Wordsworth and un-idealized by Freud. Marx was the Wordsworth of the proletariat; its Freud is still to come." It is perhaps Monk's lack of humor, an unfortunate quality in a biographer of Russell, that makes him immune to Russell's charm.
Russell also produced excellent books of popular science—"The ABC of Atoms, The ABC of Relativity"—and was absorbed by both the promise and the menace of science. It is a sphere where reason and objectivity reign, and it offers the possibility of eventually making the world a material paradise; but it also puts into the hands of irrational and power-mad political leaders technologically advanced means of destruction that could eventually destroy civilization. Russell sounded this warning long before the invention of nuclear weapons, and the danger that he saw from coupling advanced science with barbaric politics is still acutely real.
His powerful concern with war and peace led to some of his finest moments, and also to some of his most foolish moments. He was sent to prison and fired from Trinity College, Cambridge for advocating resistance to conscription during World War I. He was not a pacifist on principle, but he regarded it as monstrous that two nations as civilized as Britain and Germany could go to war with each another. Who can disagree with him? He favored world government as a basis for peace, but thought that it could be achieved only by forceful domination of the world by one overwhelming power, and had some hope that the United States might play this role.
Russell's hatred of war led him to favor British neutrality in the 193 Os, and in 193 6 it resulted in what was probably his silliest publication, "Which Way to Peace?" It argued that if Britain simply disbanded its own armed forces, the continued military posturing of the Nazis would come to seem ridiculous, and they would be laughed out of power by their own compatriots. It was only when the war started that he finally acknowledged the necessity of a military response to Hitler.
the advent of nuclear weapons at the end of the war fulfilled Russell's longstanding fears of the technological threat to the survival of civilization. During the brief period when these weapons were an American monopoly, he urged that the Soviet Union be forced by the threat of their use to submit to a world government whose dominant power would be the United States. He had for a long time been fiercely anti-Soviet. He believed Stalin was bent on world domination, and maintained in private correspondence the ruthless position that even an actual nuclear war against the Russians would be worthwhile if it prevented Soviet domination of Europe and Soviet acquisition of the bomb.
Once the American nuclear monopoly ended, however, Russell's overwhelming concern became the prevention of a nuclear war in which the two sides would destroy each other and take with them the populations of many countries that had no nuclear weapons. He favored the unilateral abandonment of the bomb by Britain, not in the unrealistic hope that it would lead the United States and the Soviet Union to follow suit, but in the hope that it would enable Britain to play a role in getting the two superpowers to cooperate in preventing any further nuclear proliferation—which he regarded as posing the greatest danger to the survival of civilization.
The threat of proliferation is still present, but it is getting hard to remember the threat of global annihilation that formed a basso continuo to our lives for decades. The United States and the Soviet Union were fully prepared to destroy each other and much of the rest of the world completely, under certain conditions. Perhaps it was unrealistic to hope that this threat could be eliminated without the disappearance of the absolute political conflict over the future of mankind that lay behind it—which is what finally happened. Yet in the absence of this resolution, some effort seemed called for in the face of the greatest danger that humanity had ever faced.
Russell did not regard the abolition of nuclear weapons as possible, and he even recognized their value as a deterrent; but he worked tirelessly to give effect to the common interest in reducing the threat of nuclear war. He was instrumental in setting up the regular meetings of scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain known as the Pugwash Conferences, and he campaigned for the suspension of nuclear tests, which was a realistic goal. He published "Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare" in 1959, and served as president of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. This involvement led to the entry into his life of Ralph Schoenman, an American radical and former Princeton philosophy student who was twenty-four when he met Russell, then eighty-eight, in I960.
Schoenman persuaded Russell to lead a movement of civil disobedience against the bomb, and in 1962 to set up the Ber-trand Russell Peace Foundation, which attracted substantial monetary contributions, including large sums from Russell himself, that were used to further Schoenman's agenda. Schoenman was virulently anti-American and pro-Cuban, and as the Vietnam war developed into a major American commitment Russell was drawn into Schoenman's Guevarist position, favoring "many Vietnams" as the way to bring down American imperialism. Statements and letters began to appear over Russell's signature whose heavy style showed that they had not been composed by him (as both he and Schoenman eventually admitted): "The message that Cuba has for the peoples of the world is one of utter determination in struggling against great odds for liberation from brutal foreign domination and rapacious economic exploitation." Russell even sent a telegram to Alexei Kosygin urging him "to place part of the airforce of the Soviet Union at the disposal of the Vietnamese." Monk finds no reason to believe that Russell did not understand or approve of what he signed, but the issue is hardly straightforward. Russell had evidently lost his independence of mind. It is true that he repeatedly declared that Schoenman was his authorized representative; but given that he was in his mid-nineties and in deteriorating health, it seems both uncharitable and unrealistic to construe this as an example of fully informed consent.
There were attempted interventions in the Sino-Indian border dispute, the Cuban missile crisis, the Bolivian trial of Regis Debray, and of course the Vietnam war again, through the war crimes tribunal run by Sartre and Vladimir Dedijer, of which Russell was honorary president, though he did not attend the sessions. It was only in 1968 that Russell, with the support of his wife Edith, detached himself from Schoenman, dismissed him as director of the Peace Foundation, and wrote him out of his will. (In 1966, Russell had written a will bequeathing almost everything that he owned, including the copyright on his books, to the foundation and making Schoenman his executor and trustee. The foundation had absorbed the large advance that Russell received for his autobiography and the proceeds from the sale of his papers to McMaster University.) Russell's infatuation with a manipulative disciple and his abdication of judgment near the end of his life was tragic and absurd. Monk's detailed account of Schoenman's activities is highly absorbing, but the spectacle was painful to witness at the time for those who admired Russell as a lifelong champion of reason.
This is not an intellectual biography. Monk wisely does no more than comment briefly on the abstract philosophical works that Russell produced during the second half of his life, which included a second edition of "Principia Mathematica," the great classic of logic; "The Analysis of Mind; The Analysis of Matter; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; and Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits," as well as the very successful "A History of Western Philosophy." And the best intellectual biography of Russell is his own, "My Philosophical Development," published in 1959.
Monk, a creature of his time, gives the back of his hand to Russell's views on epistemology and the mind-body problem: "Most philosophers regarded, and still regard, Russell's view that what we see is an event in our heads as bizarre, an unfortunate legacy from the British empiricism of the eighteenth century." This is a narrow-minded response. Russell's monistic theory of mind and world, and his attempts to explain how knowledge of the external world is possible, deserve to be taken seriously. But he lived long enough to become a distant historical figure while he was still energetically publishing books. A philosophical climate came to dominate Britain that was hostile to the kinds of metaphysical and epistemological ambitions that motivated Russell and most philosophers before him.
This new climate was the outlook derived from Wittgenstein's later work, which flourished in Cambridge, and in Oxford took a somewhat different form as Ordinary Language philosophy—the view being that the traditional questions of philosophy are confusions based on misunderstandings of how language functions, and that in asking and trying to answer those questions we violate the conditions of meaning of the words by which they are posed. Still, like all theories claiming to bring philosophy finally to an end, this one failed to achieve its aim. The Wittgensteinian hope that philosophical problems could be dissolved by the examination of language has very few adherents today, and the ambition to construct large and substantive philosophical theories of the world has again come to dominate the field.
Wittgenstein was a great philosopher, and Russell was always proud of having encouraged him in youth—but Russell, too, was a great philosopher, though not as deep or as obscure. In the present philosophical climate, depth is unfashionable, and systematic, scientifically based theories of knowledge, thought, and reality are again pursued without embarrassment by analytic philosophers much more in the mold of Russell than of Wittgenstein. (Indeed, the idea that the problems of philosophy can be solved by the methods of science has been taken by some philosophers much further than Russell would have contemplated.) Things will certainly change again, but in Russell's technical virtuosity, his distrust of obscurity, and his vast appetite for a comprehensive understanding of the universe, he has left his imprint on our time.
Russell was an extraordinarily fully expressed figure: his popular writings even won him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950. No doubt vanity and self-love were part of what drove him, and he may have been hard to like, but surely this is trivial by comparison with the result, warts and all. He gave incomparably more to the world than he took from it, and he did little harm. Aristotle advised us to call no man happy until he is dead. Even though Russell's long, embattled, and densely crowded life included much personal misery and public failure, we can now call him happy.
Thomas Nagel is currently writing, with Liam Murphy, a book on taxes and justice.
----------------------------I am tempted to direct some research into Wittgenstein's view on non-violence, but I see I could easily become contaminated as were his students. I don't know even if I were a student today, that I would find Russell's choice of direction optimum, but he was courageous enough to put it down on paper, and get it out. That's what I'm doing here. JIM Opfell
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posted by James E. Opfell @ 7:25 AM
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