The morning of February 22, 2010

I'm still not operational with this system. I read David's comments and posted a short response but I don't think it ever transmitted.

Essentially I wrote:

(1) Many thanks. I learned a lot and should read Chapter 1 again.
(2) Despite the decadence David, Dante and Barzun perceive and considering my origins, I'm
quite happy to be part of the present rather than the 16C. I doubt that I would have done very well under either the Catholics or the Reformers.

I plan to upload my report on Chapter 2 soon. I'm very much looking forward to comments from the two of you. This chapter is more difficult for me to follow. I have many question marks throughout.

Neal

Themes

I do enjoy the many themes Barzun presents in his book, like emancipation, primitivism, and many others.

Barzun defines emancipation as "one of the cultural themes of the era, perhaps the most characteristic of all. And of course it requires more and more limitations in order to prevent my right from infringing yours."

I think the truth of this depends on the definition of "rights." Was it a right to emergency health care in the early 16C? Underlying this seemingly concise definition is a fluid term, "rights", yet I suspect these ideas are the keys to understanding our culture through Barzun's eyes.

For instance, Barzun claims that Primitivism is "a main motive of the Protestant Reformation". After reading David's comments about Johann Tetzel, I would tend to think people were rebelling against a system they created that could allow his kind of parasite to survive (notwithstanding if I could wash away my guilt for $10000.00, I would, though I try in that and other ways).

I'm wondering whether it would be worthwhile to have posts that we link to and update throughout the book our understanding of these terms and their expression in various time frames throughout the course of the book. I hope we all post at least once per chapter. I'm thinking of this as more of a catalog to add depth of understanding and as a point of reference. Note, these are Barzun's terms, so in that sense it is a leap of faith that this is a worthwhile endeavor.

Thoughts on this idea?

Based on the title alone I would find "From Dawn to Decadence" appealing. I have always found history to be very interesting and I like the idea of examining events from longer term timescales. Since my own particular bias is that Western Civilization is in decline, I want read Barzun theories critically.

Some of my initial thoughts on the prologue are:

I like Barzun bias of the exceptionalism of Western Civilization. The advances made by the West are really impressive. It is interesting that he is limiting the "West" to the past 500 years. Rediscovering the classic works of Roman and Greeks contributed the Renaissance, did any of these classics plant the seeds for the eventual Decadence?

"EMANCIPATION is one of the cultural themes of the era, perhaps the most characteristic of all. And of course it requires more and more limitations in order to prevent my right from infringing yours." This passage makes me think of a snake slowly constricting the creative breath out of a society.

Barzun's definition of Decadence is straight forward, a multitude of groups and institutions blocking and preventing progress. I am having a harder time understanding what constitutes the unity of Western Civilization.

Thoughts on the first chapter:

I like the description of the Reformation as more then a religious revolution, especially the part about raising the status of vernacular languages. Writing great works in native tongue helps to unify a culture. I am still not comfortable with a "ancestral sense of unity". My feeling is that the unity was already lost at this point.

Barzun covers a lot of material; I have read entire books and taken courses on subjects he refers to in a paragraph. This is necessary trade-off in covering a large time span but I am concerned about my understanding in other chapters where I don't have as much background information.

I think the brief introduction allows Barzun to understate the corruption of medieval church and the absurdities of the sale of indulgences. Consider Johann Tetzel:

He was a sort of medieval P. T. Barnum who traveled from village to village with a brass-bound chest, a bag of printed receipts, and an enormous cross draped with the papal banner. Accompanying him were a Fugger accountant and another friar, an assistant carrying a velvet cushion bearing Leo's bull of indulgence.

Setting up in the nave of the local church, Tetzel would begin his pitch by opening the bag and calling out, "I have here the passports . . . to lead the human soul to the celestial joys of Paradise. " The fees were dirt-cheap, he pointed out, if they considered the alternatives. Christians who had committed a mortal sin owed God seven years' penance. "Who then," he asked, "would hesitate for a quarter-florin to secure one of these letters of remission?" Anything could be forgiven, he assured them, anything. He gave an example. Suppose a youth had slipped into his mother's bed and spent his seed inside her. If that boy put the right coins in the pontiff's bowl, "the Holy Father has the power in heaven and earth to forgive that sin, and if he forgives it, God must do so also." Warming up, Tetzel even appealed to the survivors of men who had gone to their graves unshriven: "As soon as the coin rings in the bowl, the soul for whom it is paid will fly out of purgatory and straight to heaven."

In Germany Tetzel exceeded his quota. He always did. This was his profession; he traveled from one diocese to another, raising funds as instructed by the Curia. Indulgences were popular among the peasantry, but less so among those who, in those days, formed the opinions of the laity. And this time he was in hostile territory. Northeastern Germany — Magdeburg, Halberstadt, and Mainz — had been chosen for this extortion because it was weak. France, Spain, and England were strong, and when they had asked that little be expected of them, pleading poverty, the pontiff had agreed. The decision was not without risk. Anti-papal feeling was strong and vocal in Germany. The papal nuncio to the Holy Roman Empire was worried. That part of the Reich, he had written the pope, was in an ugly mood. He had therefore urged cancellation of the jubilee.

Leo had ignored him — unwisely, for presently ominous signs appeared. After watching Tetzel perform, a local Franciscan friar wrote: "It is incredible what this ignorant monk said and preached. He gave sealed letters stating that even the sins a man was intending to commit would be forgiven. The pope, he said, had more power than all the Apostles, all the angels and saints, more even than the Virgin Mary herself, for these were all subjects of Christ, but the pope was equal to Christ." Another eyewitness quoted the money-raiser as declaring that even if a man had violated the Mother of God the indulgence would wipe away his sin.

The call for PRIMITIVISM seems more understandable considering the level of corruption.

"Violent events were to be typical of European life till the middle of the 17C." How does the level of violence compare with the time before the Reformation? Warfare in Europe seems to be the norm.

Martin Luther theology seems very appealing to me, having God's grace heal a sick soul must be a blissful experience. I think this idea can bind really tightly in some people's minds and the comfort they derive from it would compel to fight for a new religion. I really liked the way Barzun presented the various character traits of Martin Luther. Luther was an intelligent man who didn't seem particular ambitions but rose to the occasion when history called. It was interesting that he added the part about "despite the rude noises that the Devil kept making to thwart him".

"For Luther the bathroom was also a place of worship. His holiest monuments often came when he was seated on the privy (Abort) in a Wittenburg monastery tower. It was there, while moving his bowels, that he conceived the revolutionary Protestant doctrine of justification by faith. Afterward he wrote: "These words 'just' and 'justice of God' were a thunderbolt to my conscience. . . I soon had the thought [that] God's justice ought to be the salvation of every believer. . . Therefore it is God's justice which justifies us and saves us. And these words became a sweeter message for me. This knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower."

Well, God is everywhere, as the Vatican conceded four centuries later, backing away from a Jesuit scholar who had gleefully translated explicit excretory passages in Luther's Sammitche Schriften. The Jesuit had provoked angry protests from Lutherans who accused him of "vulgar Catholic polemics." Yet the real vulgarity lies in Luther's own words, which his followers have shelved. They enjoy telling the story of how the devil threw ink at Luther and Luther threw it back. But in the original version it wasn't ink; it was Scheiss (shit). That feces was the ammunition Satan and his Wittenberg adversary employed against each other is clear from the rest of Luther's story, as set down by his Wittenberg faculty colleague Philipp Melanchthon: "Having been worsted. . . the Demon departed indignant and murmuring to himself after having emitted a crepitation of no small size, which left a foul stench in the chamber for several days afterwards."

Again and again, in recalling Satan's attacks on him, Luther uses the crude verb bescheissen, which describes what happens when someone soils you with his Scheiss. In another demonic stratagem, an apparition of the prince of darkness would humiliate the monk by "showing his arse" (Steiss). Fighting back, Luther adopted satanic tactics. He invited the devil to "kiss" or "lick" his Steiss, threatened to "throw him into my anus, where he belongs," to defecate "in his face" or, better yet, "in his pants" and then "hang them around his neck."

A man who battled the foulest of fiends in der Abort and die Latrine was unlikely to be intimidated by the vaudevillian Tetzel.

Final thought is, I am happy the Reformation happened, even happier that I wasn't there for it.

Chapter 1

I find I can't separate my thoughts I had from reading the book from my re-read of chapter 1.

First, the book is dense, full of facts and ideas, many of which are easy to skip over in the mind without obtaining the full benefit.

My sense of Chapter 1 is a longing for the success of people like Erasmus to make change, but accepting of the fatalistic idea that only the right concocture of independently aligned selfish forces can bring about major change, with an underlying populace sentiment part of the selfish people's unwitting servants.

I recall a note, perhaps in a later chapter, the idea that before the reformation everyone thought the same way, and that the idea of life eternal is very comforting. The reformation destroyed that idea. If there are multiple views of what religion is, they can not all be correct, and that adds doubt.

I had often wondered how it was possible that simple ideas like "crop rotation" and "horses are better beasts of burden than oxen" were lost in the middle ages until I recently read that fathers died before their sons were adults. How much support would people need in that time to get through their lives? Embracing a common idea like Catholicism (different then than in 1942), must have been wonderful. I wonder even if hell was much a part of the equation then, though clearly purgatory became a major force as wealth increased.

So to that extent, I think of the pre-Lutheran times as Nirvana. Everywhere you went, people knew your values and morals, and knew that your future life depended on your own actions.

A few years ago I went to a church, which served several thousand people, and the expression was amazing. People had so much emotion, and there were even people closing their eyes with hands outspread to receive God. But even the need to express in that way is an expression of doubt, the need to exclaim one's faith. I can't imagine that form of emotional expression in any environment, except perhaps at a football game in which everyone knows it is pretend.

The Reformation destroyed that Nirvana of common understanding and brotherhood.

I wonder whether something that good simply can not last without the misery that enabled it. Perhaps it is not a part of human nature to live in Nirvana, and eventually that leads to decadence, and as Barzun says, the change itself must be violent.

Perhaps Barzun's first chapter is really an expression the sane course of Erasmus is the path humanity will not traverse.

February 8, 2010

Dear Dante and David,

I record here some of my thoughts that were generated following my reading of Chapter 1 “The West Torn Apart” in Barzun’s FDTD.

My first impression is that I need to adjust my critical attitude to appreciate this book fully. By that I mean that when Barzun ‘makes a statement of fact’, I should understand this statement as his interpretation of historical facts that he has retrieved through his scholarly endeavors. He does not give much wiggle room, in my opinion, even though the material is complex. But, equally importantly, I am happy to make this adjustment because he has convinced me (even within these few pages) that he has an exceptional grasp of the critical events of the past 500 years. He explains in his prolog that he is biased (and I think that he is, particularly from the perspective of how he views the common man vs. the uncommon man). Now, I will be paying particular attention to when his biases may give an exaggerated view of historical facts to support an underlying thesis. It would be easier for me if he had laid out this thesis in a more expanded version than the title of the book. Still, that may be enough. However, it would be of some interest to me to have an attribution to identify the jacket image (I should recognize it). This looks like decadence long before beginning of the 16C.

Here are some other general thoughts:

(1) Barzun writes well. This is a real pleasure for me and I very much look forward to ‘consuming’ this entire opus.

(2) I wonder where he is ‘coming from’ is this first chapter. I sense that Barzun is highly critical of the decadence of the Catholic Church but at the same time highly critical of the forces that led to the reformation, in particular because this revolution, like all revolutions according to him, are violent. So, one question that I will be asking as I proceed in my reading is How does Barzun judge (and, I think that he does judge) the maintenance of the status quo that is corrupt and exploitative vs. upheavals that attempt to dismantle the status quo?

(3) Barzun starts his book with “The Modern Era Begins, characteristically, with a revolution”. That is a big mouthful for me. First of all why is 1517 (or what ever specific date) the beginning of the Modern Era? and What does he mean by ‘characteristically’?

(4) “the four main quakes”—That is rather arrogant, I think. Maybe he could have stated this as an opinion with a few sentences of justification. And I wonder why he appears to dismiss revolutions like the Scientific Revolution that has so dramatically impacted on the history of modern man (I guess I will start with the 15C since Barzun has already documented the Modern Era).

(5) I very much agree with Barzun about the impact of technology on history. Had it not been for Gutenberg’s mobile type where would we be today?

(6) “No longer always in Latin for the clerics only….” But I remember as a kid (about 1942) when my Spanish neighbor explained that, if I didn’t go to church, I certainly would go to hell. I went to church. I still can smell the guts of the interior and a see the images of the crucifixion and the arrogance and ignorance of the nuns. And the mass was in Latin—Nobody that I knew understood the meaning of the words. I’m not certain that the message is much clearer in the ‘common man’s language’, but at least one can discuss the issues.

(7) I learned a new word—indulgences—or at least a new meaning of the word. I looked this up in Google and discovered that, at least one interpretation, describes indulgences as a way of paying off (sometimes using someone else’s treasure) for your sins so that time in purgatory will be diminished. You could ‘buy’ up to 40,000 years this way. No wonder Luther was mad. But he probably should have been better informed since, according to Barzun, the Albingenses tried to fight the establishment’s use of indulgences and they were exterminated. So, maybe it is better to not rock the boat. I note that later on in this chapter, Barzun reports that Luther had second thoughts about how some of his followers were behaving and ordered the princes to destroy thousands or protestors. “The end was a massacre or exile for some 30,000 families.”

(8) The story about Erasmus was great. I know the Dürer portrait. Now I know a little about the person. I should read more about him.

(9) How do you two understand Luther? He seems complicated to me. I’m not certain that his brand of religion was any better than the Pope’s. I must admit to problems with Catholicism. Maybe we could make that another topic. My problem with Luther is that he seems to be self-damned, and that he damns almost everyone else with him. At least the Church (the One and Only) provided avenues for salvation—including the indulgences.

(10) An interesting concept introduced by Barzun is that revolutions are based, at least in part, on individuals trying to ‘rediscover the fundamental truth’ that has been lost by the degenerate elite. I think that I like that but, in Luther’s case, the truth was a rather primitive concept that humanity is utterly destitute of creative energy. Maybe I have it wrong, but I don’t see too much difference between Luther and other power-motivated ‘leaders’.

So here I leave you.

Neal (l’ancien)

Prelude

We didn't have a protocol for the prelude or the author's notes. So I will start by writing about these notes.

Tonight I read the author's notes and the prelude. One of the many ideas is it is difficult to eliminate bias. I particularly like the idea that multiple perspective helps to lead to ones own truth about the reality. It leads to God's view.

Another point Barzun makes is the idea that we live off of the past, and everything flows from it. He points out the heroes we hold up as the icons of change stand on the shoulders of others. Perhaps this is correct, but I find this offensive. It diminishes the quantum jumps forward by Einsteins. As Barzun says, perhaps these are the things we have to leave behind to understand the reality, or on the other hand perhaps this may be part of the bias.

David has said he will scan the entire book, and send it to us for quotations, despite his feeling it is a travesty to destroy a book.

Regarding the stake in the ground

After consulting with David, I put a two week stick in the ground for a chapter. However, I think we all know the depth and complexity of this wonderful book, so let us only use the two weeks as a guide.