Dark Ages and Secularist Rages: A Response to Professor
A.C. Grayling | Carl E. Olson | January 30, 2007
Dark Ages and Secularist Rages: A Response to Professor
A.C. Grayling | Carl E. Olson | January 30, 2007
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2007/ceolson_grayling_jan07.asp
As readers of the Insight Scoop blog know, I recently posted
a somewhat caustic fisking
of a column,
"The persistence of the faithful" (The
Guardian, Jan 23, 2007), written by
Professor A.C. Grayling, professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College,
University of London. This led to some responses by Grayling
(here,
here,
here, and
here).
Grayling's column was ostensibly
concerned with the apparent decision of the British government passing a law,
the "Equality Act," that would make it law that adoption agencies, including
those run by the Catholic Church, would have to allow homosexual couples to use
their adoption services. But Grayling's column touched on a number of larger issues,
both historical and philosophical in nature, which deserve some further
response, especially since many readers have shown an interest in the various
issues involved, and because Professor Grayling has taken the time to join the
conversation. My goals in this short piece are modest: to offer some context to
situate this small discussion in a larger and older debate, to suggest some
resources that might be of interest to readers, and to critique some of the
premises set forth by Professor Grayling. I am certainly not an historian, nor
do I play one on television or on the internet, nor am I a specialist in
matters medieval. And so I readily draw upon the knowledge and work of those
who know much more about some of these issues than I do, perhaps pointing
curious readers to longer and more detailed works of history, philosophy, and
theology.
Grayling's column states:
Seven centuries after the beginnings of classical
civilisation in the Greece of Pericles and Socrates, an oriental superstition,
consisting of an amalgam of dying and resurrecting god myths and myths about
the impregnation of mortal maids by deities, captured the Roman Empire. Such
was the beginning of Christianity. By the accident of its being the myth chosen
by Constantine for his purposes, it plunged Europe into the dark ages for the
next thousand years - scarcely any literature or philosophy, and the forgetting
of the arts and crafts of classical civilisation (quite literally a return to
daub and wattle because the engineering required for towers and domes was
lost), before a struggle to escape the church's narrow ignorance and oppression
saw the rebirth of classical learning, and its ethos of inquiry and autonomy,
in the Renaissance.
Grayling admitted in his later comments that his column "was
of course brief, conversational, rhetorical and polemical only." Fair enough,
but it is readily apparent where he is coming from and what he thinks of
Christianity: it is an intolerant and despondent mythology that thrives on
ignorance, oppression, and the suppression of knowledge.
Grayling describes himself as a "humanist" and an adherent
of what he calls "secular, free-thinking, classically rooted inheritance." He
is an heir to the Enlightenment and thrives on the sort of anti-Christian
polemics and dubious historical assertions that became the rage among many
intellectuals during the Enlightenment era, so much so that he seems to be
nearly entombed in a dusty (dare I say "old-fashioned") form of simplistic skepticism
that was in style many decades ago.
So, for example, his description of early Christianity as
"an amalgam of dying and resurrecting god myths and myths", has far more in
common (nearly everything) with the pseudo-scholarship of The World's Sixteen
Crucified Saviors, written in 1875 by
freethinker and anti-Christian Kersey Graves, than it does with the sober
historical, textual, and biblical research done by over the last several
decades by men such as Jean Danielou, N.T. Wright, Richard Bauckham, Raymond
Brown, Luke Timothy Johnson, John Fitzmyer, Bruce Metzger, John P. Meier, Larry
W. Hurtado, and many others. Writing over fifty years ago, Henri Fehner (then a
professor at Russian College, Meudon, France), observed that prior to the end
of the eighteenth century "nowhere at any time had there ever been any doubt
about the historical existence of Christ" [1] The point here is not to launch
an extended apologetic discussion on this topic, but to point out that Grayling's
position is, ironically enough, antiquated and out of step with the best
scholarship.
The same criticism can be leveled at this sweeping remark,
"By the accident of its being the myth chosen by Constantine for his purposes,
[Christianity] plunged Europe into the dark ages for the next thousand years."
There has been much debate over the term "dark ages" and what era it might
specifically describe, but modern scholars do not attach the term to a
millennium, if they use it at all. Grayling himself admitted, when I questioned
his sloppy use of the term, that "you are quite right to pick me up on the
rhetorical flourish of 'a thousand years'; more accurately I should have
nominated the period between (say) 320 and--shall we choose your date of 1145 as
the beginning of the construction of Chartres Cathedral?"
No matter how short and popular the column, such a
"rhetorical flourish" was not only inaccurate, it was used purposely to invoke
the prejudices of a largely ignorant readership. This misuse of the term "dark
ages," as well as the use of "medieval" in a pejorative sense, has been
commented on many times by historians. For example:
Both continuity and change are
characteristic of the Middle Ages. This conception runs counter to ideas widely
prevalent not only among the unlearned but among many who ought to know better.
To these the Middle Ages are synonymous with all that is uniform, static, and
unprogressive; 'mediaeval' is applied to anything outgrown, until, as Bernard
Shaw reminds us, even the fashion plates of the preceding generations are
pronounced 'mediaeval. The barbarism of the Goths and Vandals is thus spread
out over the following centuries, even to that 'Gothic' architecture, which is
one of the crowning achievements of the constructive genius of the race; the
ignorance and superstition of this age are contrasted with the enlightenment of
the Renaissance, in strange disregard of the alchemy and demonology which
flourished throughout this succeeding period; and the phrase 'Dark Ages' is
extended to cover all that came between, let us say, 476 and 1453. [2]
So wrote Charles Homer Haskins (1870-1937), America's first
great medieval historian, eighty years ago
in his influential 1927 work, The Renaissance of the 12th
Century. He also stated, in the preface,
"The continuity of history rejects violent contrasts between successive
periods, and modern research shows the Middle Ages less dark and less static,
the Renaissance less bright and less sudden, than was once supposed."
Unless, of course, you are committed, for whatever reason,
to rejecting the possibility that much, if not most, of what came into fruition
in the Renaissance and Enlightenment was reliant upon Christianity and medieval
culture and thought. Thus Grayling angrily writes of "the plan of Angela Merkel
and the Pope to recycle the old lie that the enslavement of the European mind
by the absurdities of Christianity are foundational to what is in truth our
secular, free-thinking, classically rooted inheritance." Yet Haskins wrote that
the twelfth century in Europe
was in many respects an age of
fresh and vigorous life. The epoch of the Crusades, of the rise of towns, and
of the earliest bureaucratic states of the West, it saw the culmination of
Romanesque art and the beginnings of Gothic; the emergence of the vernacular literatures;
the revival of the Latin classics and of Latin poetry and Roman law; the
recovery of Greek science, with its Arabic additions, and of much of Greek
philosophy; and the origin of the first European universities. The twelfth
century left its signature on higher education, on the scholastic philosophy,
on European systems of law, on architecture and sculpture, on the liturgical
drama, on Latin and vernacular poetry... We shall confine ourselves to the
Latin side of this renaissance, the revival of learning in the broadest
sense--the Latin classics and their influence, the new jurisprudence and the
more varied historiography, the new knowledge of the Greeks and Arabs and its
effects upon western science and philosophy... [3]
This echoes what was stated two years earlier by philosopher
and metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead in Science and the Modern World, based on the Lowell Lectures of 1925:
The Reformation and the scientific
movement were two aspects of the [historical] revolt which was the dominant intellectual
movement of the later Renaissance. The appeal to the origins of Christianity,
and Francis Bacon's appeal to efficient causes as against final causes, were
two sides of one movement of thought.
And:
I do not think...that I have even
yet brought out the greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of
the scientific movement. I mean the inexpugnable belief that every detailed
occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite
manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible
labours of scientists would be without hope.... My explanation is that the
faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development
of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivation from medieval
theology. [4]
Again, the point simply being that Grayling's views are not
only distortions of the historical record, they've been out of date among
scholars for close to a century. Which brings us to the person and work of
Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), one of the finest historians of the past
century. Dawson, a Catholic, has sometimes been called a "metahistorian"
because of how he approached the big picture of cultures and historical epochs.
In books such as Understanding Europe, Religion and the Rise of Western
Culture, Religion and Culture, Medieval Essays, and Progress and Religion
(and the excellent compilation of essays,
Dynamics of World History), Dawson explored the relationship between culture
and religion, especially between European culture and Christianity. In the
essay, "The Scientific Development of Medieval Culture," found in Medieval
Essays, Dawson discusses the criteria used
by historians in evaluating the role of religion:
The ultimate criterion by which we must judge the
value of a religion is not its cultural fruits but its spiritual truth. This,
however, is not the criterion which the historian or the sociologist applies in
his judgment of an age or a civilization. A false religion which produces a
great art or a great literature, a religion which expresses itself in a
brilliant civilization, will naturally be of greater interest to him than a
true religion which produces only martyrs or mystics. But while the historian
is justified in judging the cultural value of a religion by its cultural
fruits, he has no right to treat his conclusions as final from the religious
point of view. Actually, however, it is very difficult for an historian to
preserve this distinction between religious and cultural values. If he believes
a religion to be true, he will naturally tend to take a favourable view of the
culture with which it is associated, and if he regards a culture as barbarous
or unprogressive he will be apt to condemn or depreciate its religious
standards and beliefs.
And then, a description that could just as well be put to
the recent column and comments of Professor Grayling:
Now it was on this ground that the
traditional humanistic criticism of medieval religion was based. Medieval
literature, medieval philosophy and medieval science alike appeared beneath
contempt in the eyes of the Renaissance scholar, and still more of the
philosopher of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and consequently medieval
religion either shared in their condemnation or, still more frequently, was regarded
as primarily responsible for the cultural backwardness of medieval Europe--in
Gibbon's famous phrase, the Middle Ages were "the triumph of barbarism and
religion". [5]
But, Dawson notes--in 1934--that such views were no longer
tenable, nor in vogue:
This wholesale condemnation of
medieval culture has long since been abandoned by the educated world, and it
was the rediscovery of the purely cultural values of the Middle Ages--of
medieval literature and medieval art--which was the main factor in bringing
about the change, and which contributed very materially to the wider
appreciation of the value of medieval religion. [6]
And yet Grayling and others are able to be so unremittingly
negative about the history of Christianity in general and the medieval era in
particular because there remains, for various reasons, a huge chasm between
scholarly research and popular knowledge. As Grayling's column indicates (and
as he even tacitly admits), appealing to popular prejudices and longstanding
stereotypes about the "dark ages" is often a successful polemical tactic. This
is discussed at length by Régine Pernoud, a French medievalist, in her book Those Terrible Middle Ages! Debunking the Myths
(first published in French in 1977), who summarizes part of the problem in this
way:
The Middle Ages still signifies: a
period of ignorance, mindlessness, or generalized underdevelopment, even if
this the only period of underdevelopment during which cathedrals were built!
That is because the scholarly research done for the past fifty years and more
has not yet, as a whole, reached the public at large. ... It is so easy, in fact,
to manipulate history consciously or unconsciously, for a public that is not
knowledgeable about it ... The Middle Ages is privileged material: one can say
what one wants about it with the quasi-certainty of never being contradicted.
[7]
Sociologist Rodney Stark, professor at Baylor University,
goes even further in his recently published book, The Victory of Reason:
For the past two or three centuries, every educated
person has known that from the fall of Rome until about the fifteenth century
Europe was submerged in the "Dark Ages"--centuries of ignorance, superstition,
and misery--from which it was suddenly, almost miraculously rescued, first by
the Renaissance and then by the Enlightenment. But it didn't happen that way.
Instead, during the so-called Dark Ages, European technology and science
overtook and surpassed the rest of the world! [8]
Stark describes the "Dark Ages" narrative as "a hoax originated
by antireligious, and bitterly anti-Catholic, eighteenth-century intellectuals
who were determined to assert the culturally superiority of their own times and
who boosted their claim by denigrating previous centuries ..." He goes on to
provide a provocative and well-documented summary of the many scientific,
technical, economic, and artistic innovations and advances of the medieval era,
ranging from water-powered mills to chimneys to the harnessing of horses. [9]
Which is not to suggest that the history of Christianity
from the fourth century until the twelfth century was one of steady and
unhampered progress and success. Not at all. As Dawson and other historians
readily point out, there were difficult, even dark, moments throughout,
including the fall of Rome, disease and famine, various assaults by barbarians
and, later, by Muslims. Nor is it to deny that there have been Christian
despots, corrupt clergy, and lax laity. Yet Grayling apparently thinks that any
mention of positive achievements on the part of Christianity is a naïve denial
of any failures--as though any admission of Christian achievement is tantamount
to kissing the hand of the Pope and begging entrance into the Catholic Church.
Thus:
From that point to this day every millimetre of progress
in liberty and learning has been bitterly opposed by the organised institutions
of Christianity, which at the outset burned to death anyone who disagreed with
its antique absurdities--none of its officers ever being arraigned for these
vast numbers of murders, or the literally millions of deaths caused by the wars
of religion that plagued Europe, especially in the 16th and 17th centuries. But
bit by bit religion was forced back into its own shadows by the new learning
and the larger freedoms of mind and action that increasing secularisation
brought, liberating individuals and societies to the extent enjoyed today.
But now that toleration and
secularity has allowed the cancers of organised superstition to regrow, we see
the old story repeating itself: the church battling to stop progress, to return
us to the dark of prejudice and irrationality.
If I understand Grayling's argument correctly, he is saying
that the last 300 years or so have witnessed a steady growth of liberty and
tolerance that has been inversely proportional to the decline of religious
(Christian) belief, which is full of prejudice and empty of reason.
Secularism--that is, the absence of religion (again, Christianity)--is a
force--the engine--for freedom, tolerance, liberty, reason, and progress.
There are a couple of notable problems with this vignette of
recent Western history. First, it begs the question: In a world of increasing
liberty, reason, and tolerance, why would anyone see fit to return to darkness,
repression, and intolerance? Sure, there will always be a few crazies and
misfits on the fringes, but religion, which was supposed to die in the 20th
century, has made a dramatic comeback in recent decades. Why? And how? Again,
how can the supposed secular virtue of tolerance be the reason when the
greatest secular virtue of reason should keep the enlightened masses away from
Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and various forms of Eastern mysticism.
Secondly, what to do with Naziism and (especially)
Marxism/Communism, the two most murderous ideologies of the past century? After
all, both hated religion, especially Judaism and Catholicism, with a passion.
Communism, in its various forms, promised liberty, progress, a life guided by
reason, and freedom from religion. Grayling's answer to this is not convincing,
but is rather revealing:
Thirdly, the major religions and the major ideologies of
fascism and communism are the same thing, namely, totalitarian ideologies -
systems that seek to impose a monolithic outlook to which all must conform on
pain of punishment including torture and death.
They are orthodoxies insisting that all must believe and
act the same, under threat. In religion the threat is damnation; it used to be
posthumous damnation PLUS the rack, the water torture, the auto de fe. Fascism,
communism, religionism: the one difference is that the enlightened world rose
up and defeated fascism and communism (at least the Soviet kind), the first in
12 years and the second in 70 years; but the resourceful reinventions of
religion keep it alive, even through the liberating and enlightened centuries
which have followed the breaking of the Catholic Church's hegemony over Europe
and its extension round the world ...
There is more than a little strained logic and notable ironies in Grayling's position:
1). He conflates fascism and Communism with Christianity,
even though fascism and Communism hated Christianity for the same reasons he
dislikes it, especially its insistence on an afterlife and a moral judgment
based on actions and decisions from this life. [10] This is akin to saying
that observant Muslims and Jews are just alike because they are both
monotheists. As simple as it sounds, it must be said that what ultimately
distinguishes religions and ideologies from one another is not what they share,
but what they do not share. Besides, it's not as though the real or potential
punishments of imprisonment or persecution are absent from Grayling's secular
society, since it (as does every society) requires enforcement of laws.
2). He scorns a "monolithic outlook" that demands
conformity, even while insisting that all
people must embrace homosexual acts as "natural"--this based on the very dubious
assertion that such acts are as natural of "fact" as "being female, or black,
or white, or heterosexual"--as though external physical characteristics (gender,
skin color, etc.) should be confused with actions based on free will and moral
judgments. (On what basis, I wonder, might Grayling condemn pedophiles or
peddlers of pornography featuring children?) So now instead of the (mythical)
Catholic hegemony we take another step closer to the (increasingly) secular
hegemony, which operates via the application of a soft totalitarianism that is
most certainly ideological and totalitarian beneath its veneer of patronizing political
correctness.
3). He apparently believes that "tolerance" means agreeing
with him, as in the Catholic Church must do as he wishes because, well, that
is what he wants. And what he wants is for
homosexuals to be able to force the Catholic Church to provide them with
children, even though there is plenty of evidence that homosexuals are far more
prone to violence, abuse, instability, depression, and suicide. [11] How
rational and caring is it to place children in homes where they are far more
likely to be exposed to such problems? Of course, asking such a question is not
only embarrassingly unenlightened, it dares to question the monolithic outlook
of Grayling and Co., which simply cannot be allowed. [12]
4). He doesn't appear to understand that the Catholic Church
(along with other Christian bodies) makes a clear distinction between the
dignity and value of every person, and the moral value of that person's
actions. [13] Instead, he assumes that a moral judgment about an action is a wholesale condemnation of the person, and he concludes
that this is "horrible and unjustified, unkind and ignorant." As opposed to
saying that anyone and everyone who is a Christian is intolerant and
irrational, regardless of whether or not they actually are those things.
We return, then, to Grayling's understanding of tolerance.
He writes, in a comment on the Insight Scoop blog:
I sorrow for my fellow human beings who languished
under so long an oppression, and as you see, join with fellow humanists and
secularists to save us from being dragged back into its shadows. We say to you:
be free to believe what you like, but do not impose it on those of us who do
not agree with you. That is our message; for then we can live in peace, you
with your private beliefs in the private sphere, the public domain a neutral
space where we can all meet as human beings, and respect one another on merit,
not because of labels.
Which is simply the
schoolyard bully saying, with a thin smile, "I'll leave you alone. Don't worry.
Just give me your lunch money everyday and don't tell anyone about it and we'll
get along just fine." Notice that the belief that the Catholic Church should be
able to control its own affairs, especially when it comes to the well being of
those in her care, is to be private.
Why? Because the secularist
believes that is best. Why? Because the tolerant and open-minded secularist
knows that sharing the public square would give religion implicit credibility;
it would be a tacit admission that Christianity might have public value. And so
he demands that religion must remain a private matter only, simply because that
is his public belief, hoisted, however precariously, upon a platform of new
"rights" that cancel out longstanding, traditional rights. So, instead of a
place where ideas can be debated, the public square becomes, by default, the
property of the secularist, who calls upon the state to enforce his
"reasonable" and "tolerant" views upon everyone else.
This way of thinking has been described well by a man quite
familiar with the ideologies and pathologies of the past century:
Indeed, in a certain sense,
scientific rationality is imposing uniformity on the world. In the wake of this
form of rationality, Europe has developed a culture that, in a manner hitherto
unknown to mankind, excludes God from public awareness. His existence may be
denied altogether or considered unprovable and uncertain and, hence, as
something belonging to the sphere of subjective choices. In either case, God is
irrelevant to public life. This is a purely functional rationality that has
shaken the moral consciousness in a way completely unknown to the cultures that
existed previously, since it maintains that only that which can be demonstrated
experimentally is "rational."
And:
The concept of discrimination is
constantly enlarged, and this means that the prohibition of discrimination can
be transformed more and more into a limitation on the freedom of opinion and on
religious liberty. Very soon, it will no longer be possible to affirm that
homosexuality (as the Catholic Church teaches) constitutes an objective
disordering in the structure of human existence ... At the same time, it is
equally obvious that the concept of liberty on which this culture is based
inevitably leads to contradictions, since it is either badly defined or not
defined at all. And it is clear that the very fact of employing this concept
entails limitations on freedom that we could not even have imagined a
generation ago. A confused ideology of liberty leads to a dogmatism that is
proving ever more hostile to real liberty. [14]
That is how Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger accurately and with his usual
clarity summarized the situation in his book,
Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, written shortly before he was
elected to be Pope Benedict XVI.
Later, in the same work, Ratzinger asks the rhetorical
question about his critique of the Enlightenment: "Does this amount to simple
rejection of the Enlightenment and modernity? Certainly not!" He then notes
that Christianity is rational, philosophical, universal, trans-political,
trans-cultural, pro-man, and pro-life. "In this sense," he writes, "the
Enlightenment has a Christian origin, and it is not by chance that it was born
specifically and exclusively within the sphere of the Christian faith, in
places where Christianity, contrary to its own nature, had unfortunately become
mere tradition and the religion of the state". [15] Obviously, Grayling
disagrees. But note that Ratzinger has no problem acknowledging whatever is
good and true in the Enlightenment and in modernity. Compare that to Grayling's
refusal to admit--despite much historical evidence to the contrary--that anything good has come from Christianity.
Whether in the realms of theology and philosophy (as
Ratzinger demonstrates) or the realms of science and technology (as Stark
argues), Catholicism has shown a remarkable ability to assess, incorporate,
assimilate, and appreciate what is good and truthful in other religions and
belief systems. An obvious example from the medieval era is Thomas Aquinas, who
vigorously engaged with the thought of Aristotle and other pre-Christian pagan
philosophers, as well as with some aspects of Islamic theology. It is easy
enough, of course, to find examples in Church history of what would now be
described as repression, intolerance or cruelty. More often than not, such
examples are taken out of context, misrepresented, or judged according to
criteria that didn't exist in the past. When Grayling speaks of the "cruelty of
[the Church's] discrimination against women," he overlooks or is ignorant of
how much better off women were in early and medieval Christian cultures than
they were in ancient Greece and Rome [16], not to mention many countries caught
up in the fervor of the Enlightenment [17].
The secularist view is decidedly small and self-absorbed. It
rejects all that is good about religion, especially Christianity, even while
living off of the intellectual and cultural goods created by those who were
supposedly superstitious and intellectually inferior. The Catholic view is far
more open minded and clear minded, being open to what is good and true while
being equally certain that there actually do exist things that are good and true. This is part of what
G.K.
Chesterton called the "thrilling romance of Orthodoxy":
People have fallen into a foolish
habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There
never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and
to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. ... The orthodox Church never took
the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never
respectable. ... It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is
always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's
own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have
fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion
after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom --
that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an
infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. [18]
ENDNOTES:
[1] "The Problem of Christ: The Myth of Jesus," Henri
Fehner, in God, Man and the Universe,
edited by Jacques de Bivort de La Saudee (New York, 1953), p. 219. An excellent
overview of the short history of the denial of the existence of Jesus is given
in Jesus Outside the New Testament,
by Robert E. Van Voorst (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), in a section titled
"Did Jesus Really Exist?" (6-17).
[2] The Renaissance of the 12th Century, by Charles Homer Haskins (New York, Meridian,
1927), 4-5.
[3] Haskins.
[4] Quoted by Richard Kirk, "Exercise in Contempt", (American
Spectator, December 8, 2006.
[5] Christopher Dawson, Medieval Essays (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1954), 135-136.
[6] Dawson, 136.
[7] Régine Pernoud, Those Terrible Middle Ages! Debunking
the Myths (Ignatius Press, 2000), 18, 141,
142.
[8] Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity
Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2005), 38.
[9] See Stark, "Medieval Progress: Technical, Cultural, and
Religious," The Victory of Reason,
33-68.
[10] Profound analysis of this can be found in the works of
French political theorist Raymond Aron (1905-83), including The Opium of the
Intellectuals, Marxism and the Existentialists,
and The Dawn of Universal History.
[11] See, for example, "Homosexual Parenting: Is It
Time For Change?", American College of Pediatricians
[12] For much more on tolerance and faulty views of it, see
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance (Ignatius Press, 2004) and Brad Stetson and Joseph G. Conti, The
Truth About Tolerance: Pluralism, Diversity, and the Culture Wars (InterVarsity Press, 2005)
[13] "The number of men and women who have deep-seated
homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively
disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with
respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in
their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will
in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the
Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition" (Catechism
of the Catholic Church, 2358).
[14] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Christianity and the
Crisis of Cultures (Ignatius Press, 2006),
30, 35.
[15] Ratzinger, 47, 48.
[16] See Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 95-128. "Although some
classical writers claimed that women were easy prey for any 'foreign
superstition,' most recognized that Christianity was unusually appealing
because within the Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than
did women in the Greco-Roman world at large." (95)
[17] See Régine Pernoud, Women In the Days of the
Cathedrals (Ignatius Press, 1998). In Those
Terrible Middle Ages! Pernoud argues that
the Enlightenment repressed and destroyed many of the rights that women had
enjoyed during the Middle Ages (97-113).
[18] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Ignatius Press, 1986), 305-306.
Related IgnatiusInsight.com
Links/Articles:
• Author page
for Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)
• Author page
for G.K. Chesterton
• Truth and Tolerance | Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
• Are Truth,
Faith, and Tolerance Compatible? | Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
• Why Do
We Need Faith? | Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
•
Are Christians Intolerant? | Michael O'Brien
• On Adapting to "Modern Times" | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• Is Religion Evil? Secularism's Pride and Irrational Prejudice
| Carl E. Olson
• Atheism and the Purely "Human" Ethic | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• A Short Introduction to Atheism | Carl E. Olson
• The Crusades 101 | Jimmy Akin
Carl E. Olson is the editor of IgnatiusInsight.com.
He is the co-author of The
Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in The Da Vinci Code and author
of Will
Catholics Be "Left Behind"? He has written for numerous
Cathlic periodicals and is a regular contributor to National Catholic
Register and Our Sunday Visitor newspapers.
He resides in a top secret location in the Northwest somewhere between Portland,
Oregon and Sacramento, California with his wife, Heather, and two children.
Visit his personal web site at www.carl-olson.com.
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