Church History Studies in Christianity and Culture 2009-1

C HURCH HISTOR S TUDIES IN C H R I S T I A N I T Y AND C ULTURE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CHURCH HISTORY VOLUME 78, NUMBER 1...

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HURCH HISTOR S TUDIES IN C H R I S T I A N I T Y AND C ULTURE

AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CHURCH HISTORY VOLUME 78, NUMBER 1 MARCH 2009

Y

THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CHURCH HISTORY PRESIDENT CHARLES H. LIPPY, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

PRESIDENT-ELECT RICHARD P. HEITZENRATER, Duke University

EXECUTIVE SECRETARY KEITH A. FRANCIS, Baylor University

EDITORS JOHN CORRIGAN AMANDA PORTERFIELD Florida State University

MEMBERS OF THE COUNCIL Class of 2009 JOHN M. GIGGIE PATRICIA Z. BECKMAN TIMOTHY TSENG J. PATOUT BURNS CANDY GUNTHER BROWN Class of 2010 CHRISTOPHER BEELEY KATHLEEN SPROWS CUMMINGS STEVEN L. OLSEN QUINCY D. NEWELL Class of 2011 MARGARET BENDER SUSAN E. SCHREINER SCOTT W. SUNQUIST FR. AUGUSTINE THOMPSON, O.P. Council Student Representative 2009–2010 BRANDON BAYNE

The Society was founded in 1888 by Philip Schaff, was reorganized in 1906, and was incorporated by act of the Legislature of the State of New York in 1916.

Vol. 78

March 2009

No. 1

CHURCH HISTORY Studies in Christianity & Culture

Published quarterly by THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CHURCH HISTORY

# 2009, The American Society of Church History

CHURCH HISTORY

Studies in Christianity and Culture

Editors John Corrigan Amanda Porterfield

Senior Assistant to the Editors Monica Reed

Assistants to the Editors Brooke Sherrard Shaun Horton Tammy Heise

FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY Associate Editors Elizabeth A. Clark Thomas Noble Carlos Eire Hugh McLeod Dana Robert Myung Soo Park Enrique Dussel

Duke University Notre Dame University Yale University University of Birmingham Boston University Seoul Theological University Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico

CHURCH HISTORY (ISSN 0009-6407)

ARTICLES 1

Trent and the Clergy in Late Eighteenth-Century Malta FRANS CIAPPARA

26 Joseph (Smith) in Egypt: Babel, Hieroglyphs, and the Pure Language of Eden SAMUEL BROWN 66 What Should Christians Do about a Shaman-Progenitor?: Evangelicals and Ethnic Nationalism in South Korea TIMOTHY S. LEE 99 The Great War, Religious Authority, and the American Fighting Man JONATHAN EBEL

BOOK REVIEW FORUM 134 143 147 151

What Makes a Prophet: The Case for Uchimura Kanzo¯ ......... Darrell E. Allen The Limitations of the Genre of the Heroic Individual Biography .................... ........................................................................................ Gary L. Ebersole An Impression of J. F. Howes’s Japan’s Modern Prophet ........Shibuya Hiroshi Response to Comments on Japan’s Modern Prophet.................. John F. Howes

BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS 159

164

Blanton, Virginia, Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St. Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695 –1615, Sto¨ber, Karen, Late Medieval Monasteries and their Patrons: England and Wales, c. 1300–1540, and Evans, J. Wyn, and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds., St. David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation ............................................................ Joseph F. Kelly Lahr, Angela M., Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism, and Phayer, Michael, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War............................ .............................................................................................. Dianne Kirby

BOOK REVIEWS 171 173 175

AND

NOTES

Scheck, Thomas P., Origen and the History of Justification: The Legacy of Origen’s Commentary on Romans ....................................Robert J. Hauck Heyman, George, The Power of Sacrifice: Roman and Christian Discourses in Conflict ..............................................................................Michael Whitby Van Dam, Raymond, The Roman Revolution of Constantine ............................ ....................................................................................... Jeremy M. Schott

178 180 183 185 187 189 191 193 195 198 200 203 206 208 211 213 215 216 219 221 224 225 227

Herrin, Judith, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire ............. .......................................................................... Dorothy de F. Abrahamse Macy, Gary, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West ..........................................................Constance H. Berman Bruce, Scott G., Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: The Cluniac Tradition c. 900– 1200 ..................................... Constant J. Mews Dickson, Gary, The Children’s Crusade: Medieval History, Modern Mythistory ............................................................................Anne Llewellyn Barstow Burnham, Louisa A., So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke: The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc...................................................... Christine Caldwell Ames Cothren, Michael, Picturing the Celestial City: The Medieval Stained Glass of Beauvais Cathedral................................................ Mary Weitzel Gibbons Heal, Bridget, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648 ..............David J. Collins, S.J. Wilkinson, Robert J., Orientalism, Aramaic and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation: The First Printing of the Syriac New Testament.................. .......................................................................................... Joseph P. Byrne Kaplan, Benjamin J., Divided By Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe .................................... Keith P. Luria Tutino, Stefania, Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570– 1625............................................................................ Robert Trisco Simpson, James, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents.................................................................... Dale Walden Johnson Moore, Jonathan D., English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology............................. Dewey D. Wallace, Jr. McCafferty, John, The Reconstruction of the Church of Ireland: Bishop Bramhall and the Laudian Reforms, 1633–1641 ....... William M. Abbott Hur, Nam-lin, Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, AntiChristianity, and the Danka System..............................Robert Entenmann Lamont, William, Last Witnesses: The Muggletonian History, 1652–1979...... ..................................................................................William H. Brackney Jacob, W. M., The Clerical Profession in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1680–1840 ............................................................................................. E. Brooks Holifield Strong, Rowan, Anglicanism and the British Empire, c. 1700–1850................ ................................................................................................ John Wolffe Kidd, Thomas S., The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America........................................................ Ava Chamberlain Spangler, Jewel L., Virginians Reborn: Anglican Monopoly, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century ........................ ................................................................................................... A. G. Roeber Dichtl, John R., Frontiers of Faith: Bringing Catholicism to the West in the Early Republic ................................................................ Michael Pasquier Razzari Elrod, Eileen, Piety and Dissent: Race, Gender, and Biblical Rhetoric in Early American Autobiography.................................Randall M. Miller Lutz, Jessie Gregory, Opening China: Karl F. A. Gu¨tzlaff and Sino-Western Relations, 1827–1852........................................................ Michael Lazich Pereiro, James, “Ethos” and the Oxford Movement: At the Heart of Tractarianism .......................................................................Rowan Strong

230 232 235 237 240 242 244 246 248 251

254

Manchester, Laurie, Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia .................................J. Eugene Clay Cohen, Raymond, Saving the Holy Sepulchre: How Rival Groups Came Together to Rescue their Holiest Shrine ............................ Simon Goldhill Spicer, Kevin P., Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism ..... ............................................................................................ John Cornwell Mitchell, Claire, Religion, Identity, and Politics in Northern Ireland: Boundaries of Belonging and Belief.............................Edward J. K. Gitre Billingsley, Scott, It’s a New Day: Race and Gender in the Modern Charismatic Movement ................................................... Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews Wilson, J. Matthew, ed., From Pews to Polling Places: Faith and Politics in the American Religious Mosaic ........................................................Mark Silk Murray, Bruce T., Religious Liberty in America: The First Amendment in Historical and Contemporary Perspective .................Eric Michael Mazur Phipps, William E., Supernaturalism in Christianity: Its Growth and Cure ..... ........................................................................................ Charles H. Lippy Spencer, Carole Dale, Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism; An Historical Analysis of the Theology of Holiness in the Quaker Tradition................................. ........................................................................................ R. Melvin Keiser Morgan, D. Densil, Wales and the Word: Historical Perspectives on Religion and Welsh Identity.....................................................Marcella Biro Barton

BOOKS RECEIVED

Church History 78:1 (March 2009), 1 –25. # 2009, American Society of Church History doi:10.1017/S0009640709000018 Printed in the USA

Trent and the Clergy in Late Eighteenth-Century Malta1 FRANS CIAPPARA

T

Consilium de emendanda Ecclesia, read to Paul III on March 9, 1537, identified the ordination of unsatisfactory priests as the primary cause of the ills of the Church.2 The Council of Trent took up this suggestion almost thirty years later when it set a new model of the priesthood.3 The priest trained in a seminary was to be a man apart, clearly detached from, as well as superior to, lay society. Such a task, the formation of “a newly selfconscious clerical caste in society,”4 which the Counter Reformation set for itself, is believed to have broken the mold of the medieval clergy. To quote Louis Pe´rouas, HE

Despite his several natural ties with the people the priest became more and more conscious of being different from them. This psychology nourished itself on the notion of the eminent dignity of the priesthood. . . . Leaving deliberately aside the laity’s way of life, the parish clergy shut themselves up within the domain of the sacred.5 In his seminal book published in 1971, Jean Delumeau, who was highly praised by John Bossy, asserted that this vision of the Catholic Church was accomplished by the end of the seventeenth century.6 While this claim has been generally accepted, Professor Po-Chia Hsia warns us, in an equally influential book, to remind ourselves that clerical discipline was imposed

1

I am grateful to Professor Christopher Black for reading and commenting on this article. J. Ignacio Tellechea Idigoras, “Riforma del Clero, Riforma della Chiesa,” in Per il Cinquecento Religioso Italiano. Clero, Cultura, Societa`, ed. Maurizio Sangalli (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 2003), 233. 3 Angelo Turchini, “La nascita` del sacerdozio come professione,” in Disciplina dell’anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della societa` tra medioevo ed eta` moderna, eds. Paolo Prodi and Carla Penuti (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994), 228. 4 N. S. Davidson, The Counter-Reformation (Oxford: Blackwell’s, 1987), 34. 5 Louis Pe´rouas, Le Dioce`se de la Rochelle de 1648 a` 1724. Sociologie et Pastorale (Paris: SEVPEN, 1964), 452. 6 Jean Delumeau (with an introduction by John Bossy), Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-Reformation (London: Burns and Oates, 1977), esp. 179 –189. 2

Frans Ciappara is senior lecturer in history at the University of Malta.

1

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CHURCH HISTORY

unevenly and with difficulty.7 Professor Adriano Prosperi agrees with this thesis: to speak of an ignorant, unprepared, and immoral clergy who became exemplary almost overnight is unreal.8 Did not the curate of Malgrate, a parish in sixteenth-century Milan, find it difficult “to realize what his function in a newly oiled hierarchical system was”?9 Agostino Borromeo further explains that the decrees of Trent produced tangible results and promoted evident religious renewal, but the process was slow, laborious, and non-uniform.10 Kathleen M. Comerford came to the same conclusion about Florence, Lucca, and Arezzo, where the bishops were unable to enforce the Tridentine mandates.11 Speaking of the French clergy in the diocese of Nıˆmes in the seventeenth century, Robert Sauzet claims that if, by that time, the intellectual and moral level of the clergy had been assuredly improved, it was rather uneven.12 Similarly, Rona Johnston says for Lower Austria that the implementation of the reform decrees of the council of Trent was neither a speedy achievement nor a straightforward task.13 This piece supports the latter view that the Tridentine ideal was usually well beyond full-scale implementation in Malta. Four themes inform my analysis: attire, manual work, sexual irregularities, and violence. But the article especially analyzes the social and historical factors that account for the remarkably slow formation of a clerical elite in Malta. Their extremely slim prospects for advancement, their excessive number—with its concomitant dangers of lack of vocation and discipline—and their rudimentary education 7 R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 120–121. For this delayed reform see also Martin D. W. Jones, The Counter Reformation: Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 96–98. 8 Adriano Prosperi, “Educare gli Educatori: Il Prete come Professione Intellettuale nell’Italia Tridentina,” in Proble`mes d’Histoire de l’E´ducation, Actes des se´minaires organiseés par l’Ećole française de Rome e l’Universita` di Roma—La Sapienza (janvier–mai 1985) (Rome 1988), 125. 9 Wietse De Boer, “Il Curato di Malgrate, o il Problema della Cultura del Clero nel Milano della Controriforma,” Studia Borromaica 12 (1998): 148. This is a revised version of the article in English in The Power of Imagery: Essays on Rome, Italy and Imagination, ed. P. Van Kessel (Rome: Apeiron, 1992), 188– 200, 310– 316. 10 Agostino Borromeo, “I Viscovi Italiani e l’Applicazione del Concilio di Trento,” in I Tempi del Concilio. Religione, cultura e societa` nell’Europa Tridentina, ed. Cesare Mozzarelli and Danilo Zardin (Rome: Bulzoni, 1997), 76. 11 Kathleen M. Comerford, “‘The Care of Souls is a very Grave Burden for [the Pastor]’: Professionalization of Clergy in Early Modern Florence, Lucca, and Arezzo,” in The Formation of Clerical and Confessional Identities in Early Modern Europe, eds. Wim Janse and Barbara Pitkin (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 348. 12 Robert Sauzet, Contre-Re´forme et Re´forme Catholique en Bas-Languedoc. Le Dioce`se de Nıˆmes au XVIIe Sie`cle (Paris: Sorbonne, 1979), 428. 13 Rona Johnston, “The Implementation of Tridentine Reform: The Passau Official and the Parish Clergy in Lower Austria, 1563– 1637,” in The Reformation of the Parishes: The Ministry and the Reformation in Town and Country, ed. Andrew Pettegree (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1993), 216.

TRENT AND THE CLERGY IN MALTA

3

were some of the material and practical aspects of cultural life in Malta that retarded religious reform. In 1574 Pope Gregory XIII sent Monsignor Pietro Dusina as apostolic delegate to Malta to see that the decrees of the council were being put into effect.14 In 1582 he proposed to Grand Master Verdale the opening of a Jesuit college “for the reform of that city”15 but which was also to serve as a seminary. Moreover, the development of pastoral visitations, synods, spiritual exercises, ecclesiastical conferences, retreats, and pastoral letters suggests that the Counter-Reformation Church in Malta was attempting to improve the cohesion and discipline of the diocesan corps and impose the marks of a profession on the clergy.16 Yet, with all this urgency, it will be argued that non-committed priests, whose duties did not include the care of souls, still remained involved in daily affairs, undistinguished from the rest of the people among whom they lived. If by professionalization of the clergy is meant “the formation of a compact, well-trained, socially distinctive and culturally cohesive body of ‘pastoral workers,’ endowed with a professional ethos and collaborating within an efficient hierarchy towards the creation of a new Catholic identity,”17 then Maltese priests were far from being so. The evidence is taken mainly from the diocesan tribunals, which offer rare windows into clerical behavior. Our prime source of the discussion is the episcopal court, but other evidence comes from the corte provicariale of Mdina as well as the tribunal of the Roman Inquisition.18

I. ATTIRE AND MANUAL WORK In public the clergy were to put on the cassock so that “by the propriety of their outward apparel they may show forth the inward uprightness of their morals.”19 14

The literature on these visitors is vast: Gabriele de Rosa, “Il Francescano Cornelio Musso dal Concilio di Trento alla Diocesi di Bitonto,” Rivista di Storia della Chiesa in Italia, 39:1 (1985): 55– 91; Paolo Preto, “Il Vescovo Gerolamo Vielmi e gli Inizi della Riforma Tridentina a Padova,” Rivista di Storia della Chiesa in Italia, Anno XX, no. 1 (1966): 18– 33; Pietro Caiazza, “Stato del Clero nella Diocesi di Sarno durante la Visita Pastorale del Vescovo Paolo Fusco (1581),” Rivista di Storia della Chiesa in Italia, Anno 33:1 (1979): 80–94; Ludovico Von Pastor, Storia dei Papi. Pio V (1566– 72), viii (Rome: 1924), 132; Angelo Turchini, Clero e Fedeli a Rimini in Eta` Post-Tridentina (Rome: Herder, 1978), 13; Angelo Paredi, “San Carlo e gli Studi del Clero,” La Scuola Cattolica, Anno 33:1 (1979): 80–94. 15 David F. Allen, “Anti-Jesuit Rioting by Knights of St. John during the Malta Carnival of 1639,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 65 (1996): 12– 18. 16 Anthony Joseph Borg, The Reform of the Council of Trent in Malta and Gozo (Malta: 1975). 17 Wietse de Boer, “Professionalization and Clerical Identity: Notes on the Early Modern Catholic Priest,” in The Formation of Clerical and Confessional Identities, 372. 18 For a description of these archival deposits, see Frans Ciappara, The Roman Inquisition in Enlightened Malta (Malta: PIN, 2000), 1 –13. 19 Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, ed. H. J. Schroeder (Rockford, Ill.: Tan Books, 1978), 110, 168. For Malta, see Synodus Dioecesana ab Illustrissimo et Reverendissimo Domino Fratre Davide Cocco Palmerio Episcopo Melitensi (Malta: 1842), 103.

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CHURCH HISTORY

A special clerical dress suggested superiority or at least difference in kind from laymen. This separateness of clergy from the rest of society was, of course, an ideal recommendation of the conciliar fathers, a counsel of perfection. The story is well known that when in 1623 Louis XIII met a priest in clerical garb and with short hair he mistook him for a monk of a new religious order.20 This was the situation in France, but Trent’s directives were only partially observed in Malta more than a century later. In 1783 Bishop Labini still felt the need to threaten with “suspension a divinis those members of the clergy who appeared in public without collar, shoes, and cassock.”21 Generally, priests discarded the soutane when they undertook manual work. This is exemplified by a 1785 Cospicua case against Don Giuseppe Zammit, who built his own house. Witnesses testified that they saw him with his sleeves rolled up loading stones onto a cart and leveling the road with a hoe.22 Most priests, though, were reported to the ecclesiastical court when, as one deponent put it,23 they “disguised” themselves in peasant fashion. They wore a cap, a shirt, a waistcoat and trousers. They went barefoot or else wore peasant shoes (qorq).24 Most clergymen, in fact, were priests-cum-peasants. They purchased,25 inherited, or rented26 land to farm, but often these agricultural holdings formed part of their sacred patrimony or title. In other words, as in nineteenth-century Lecce (Italy), the bond between the clergy and the land was fundamental.27 What type of activities did these “peasant-priests” pursue, and on what scale? Most practiced mixed farming. Apart from arable land producing mainly cotton, wheat, and barley, they were also engaged in animal husbandry and owned cows,28 sheep, horses, donkeys, and pigs.29 A few priests, like Don Arcangelo Cumbo of Tarxien,30 managed their own economic affairs and farmed the land themselves. They prepared the ground for the cotton seed, mowed and threshed the grain, and helped with the tying of the sheaves.31 They transported seaweed to their fields, perhaps like Don Giuseppe 20 Jeanne Ferte´, La Vie Religieuse dans les Campagnes Parisiennes 1622–1695 (Paris: Vrin, 1962), 177 –178. 21 Archiepiscopal Archives Malta (hereafter AAM), Cappillani (Qrendi), unnumbered. 22 Curia Episcopalis Melitensis (hereafter CEM), Acta Originalia (hereafter AO) 698, ff. 1r– 2v. 23 CEM, AO 689, f. 182r. 24 CEM, AO 696, f. 114v. 25 On 3 September 1734 Don Giovanni Battista Barbara from Qrendi bought a piece of land for the huge sum of 700 scudi—Notarial Archives, Valletta (hereafter NAV), Notary Tommaso Magri 7/924, ff. 4r– 5r. 26 AAM, Dicta 25, no. 3. AAM, Dicta 27, no. 32. CEM, AO 705, f. 13r. 27 Bruno Pellegrino, Terra e Clero nel Mezzogiorno. Il reclutamento sacerdotale a Lecce dalla Restaurazione all’Unita` (Lecce: Milella, 1976), 101– 116. 28 Archives of the Inquisition, Malta (hereafter AIM), Atti Civili (hereafter AC) 535, ff. 149r– 223v. 29 AIM, AC 529, f. 233r. 30 AAM, Informationes 6, no. 92. 31 CEM, AO 696, ff. 114v, 116v.


5

Frendo of Naxxar, on a female donkey.32 This must have consumed a considerable part of their time and interfered so with their priestly ministry that in 1783 Don Salvatore Farrugia of Qrendi was reported to the bishop for not serving in church.33 Often, therefore, priests employed castaldi. These stewards slept in their masters’ own houses and did all the necessary agricultural work, “with all punctuality and attention as it needs an obedient, humble and diligent disciple.”34 Priests could also employ day laborers to take the sheep to graze, pick cotton, look after the animals, take the fruit to market, plough the land, and glean the ears of corn.35 In this way they became dependent on the ability of the workers to carry out their work. The same difficulty arose when priests leased out the land to one of their parishioners to farm it for them because these lessees could not always meet their commitment.36 Similar problems were faced in 1759 by Don Michel’Angelo Ellul with the me´tayer Michel’Angelo Grech, who refused to share the produce with him.37 Other priests sued their antagonists in court for trespassing or theft, or for having their fields damaged by their neighbors’ hens.38 In return, clergy were prosecuted for planting trees too close to cotton fields, because the roots “sucked their humidity.”39 Prosecution for debt was more frequent than prosecution for planting practices.40 In such instances priests had their animals or fields auctioned to pay their creditors.41 Occasionally, the courts heard cases involving fraudulent sale of animals. By way of example, in 1770 Don Pietro was made to take back within two days the she-ass he had sold to Alessandro Zammit; it was lame, besides having other defects “in other parts of the body, as several witnesses testified.”42 Sometimes a picture of clergy doing business in a shrewd and resolute manner is exhibited. When he came to know that cotton was selling at 5 scudi a rotolo, Don Giuseppe Zerafa demanded 8 tarı` more from Giovanni Maria Galea and refused to honor the agreement they had made earlier.43 32

CEM, AO 691, ff. 298r–309v. AAM, Cappellani (Qrendi), unnumbered. 34 AIM, AC 495, f. 144r. 35 AAM, Dicta 24, no. 59. CEM, AO 690, f. 180r. CEM, AO 706, f. 161r. AIM, AC 53O, f. 250r. AIM, AC 524, ff. 186r–189v. 36 NAV, Not. Tommaso Magri, 9/924, f. 76r– v, 8 April 1739. AIM, AC 503, ff. 38r–77v. 37 AIM, AC 516 (i), ff. 202r–v. For this type of land tenure in Malta, see Howard Bowen-Jones, John C. Dewdney, and W. B. Fisher, Malta: Background for Development (Durham, U.K.: Department of Geography in the University of Durham, 1962), 305. 38 AAM, Dicta 27, no. 51. AAM, Dicta 25, no. 65. AAM, Dicta 27, no. 41. 39 CEM, AO 652, ff. 31r– 38v. See also CEM, AO 665, ff. 250r–252v. 40 (cotton seed)—CEM, AO 370, f. 152r; (fodder)—CEM, AO 371, ff. 36r–61v; (rent of a field)— CEM, AO 372, ff. 124r–143v. 41 CEM, AO 369, ff. 53r– 56v. CEM, AO 365, ff. 275r– 305v. 42 CEM, AO 680, ff. 232r–264v. 43 CEM, AO 374, ff. 275r–78v. 33

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CHURCH HISTORY

This striking series of examples of priests’ involvement in agricultural interests suggests that, in economic and social terms, firm distinctions between clergy and laity were rarely drawn. Priests were firmly integrated into the cycles of the agrarian economy, which put them on a par with many parishioners, engaging in agriculture like several of them. Some of the rural clergy, that is, were very much part of the village community in that they were farmers. But this was not the only way in which priests were practically indistinguishable from the peasants farming the adjacent land. They were not dissimilar, for instance, when it came to seeking the sexual favors of women.

II. SEXUAL IRREGULARITIES “Fornication of ministers of the sacred altar” had been a focus of church reform since Gregory VII in the eleventh century.44 The most cogent argument brought forward by the adherents of a celibate clergy was that it symbolized the unique and superior status of the consecrated person of a priest. By the sixteenth century, however, “clerical marriage” had become prevalent again, which impelled the Council of Trent to make a forceful drive against clerical incontinence. In its twenty-third session it decreed that those “called to have the Lord for their portion, ought by all means so to regulate their life and conduct that their actions may inspire reverence.” How could the clergy correct the laity, the Fathers asked, “when they must answer silently to themselves that they have committed the same things that they censure?”45 Despite these admonitions, in the bishopric of Speyer more than half of the priests investigated in the 1580s lived with concubines.46 In France, “the cure`s who had fathered children used their sons to serve mass . . . , and taught them the rudiments of reading, writing and Latin, hoping to be able to hand over their benefice or vicariate in due course.”47 Malta also had its share of concubinary clergy.48 In the immediate aftermath of the council, the apostolic delegate Monsignor Dusina identified the incumbent of St. Helen’s (B’Kara), Don 44 H. E. J. Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 550–553; Michael Frassetto, ed., Medieval Purity and Piety: Essays on Medieval Clerical Celibacy and Religious Reform (New York: Garland, 1998). For Gregory’s letter to Bishop Otto of Constance (December 1074), referring to the “chastity of the clergy,” see Ephraim Emerton, ed., The Correspondence of Pope Gregory VII: Selected Letters from the Registrum (New York: Octagon, 1966), 52. See also N. J. G. Pounds, A History of the English Parish: The Culture of Religion from Augustine to Victoria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 158 –159. 45 Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 173. 46 Marc Forster, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 23. 47 Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire, 156. 48 Godfrey Wettinger, “Concubinage among the Clergy,” Journal of the Faculty of Arts 6:4 (1977): 165–188.


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Giuseppe Bellia, who kept a concubine at his own parish and another at St. Lawrence’s (Vittoriosa).49 By the eighteenth century, the effort to create a morally upright clergy had been under way for a long time, although with limited success. In 1703 Bishop Cocco Palmieri still found it necessary in one of his synod’s decrees de vita et honestate to caution priests to eschew private meetings with members of the opposite sex and ordered the officials of the ecclesiastical court to take special pain to ferret out offenders.50 Such moral deviants were “presented” to the bishop during visitations. Don Celestino Borg of St. Lawrence’s, who in 1796 was confined in prison for his relations with Aloisia Grech, was a case in point.51 However, morality cases were overwhelmingly “office” cases initiated by the ecclesiastical judge. Generally, he was informed of suspicious behavior by court officials like the captain and the alarii or apparitors.52 Such vigilance is glimpsed in a case in 1757. Rocco Falconi, the capitano of the episcopal court, reported on August 1: My Lords, it came to my notice that Don Valerio Borg of citta` Burmola has been having scandalous relations with one Fortunata of the same city for many years, sleeping with her in his own house. Last Saturday, 30 July, toward seven in the evening I went to Burmola. . . . Having found the door of the priest’s house open I went inside. He was shaving while Fortunata held up a candle in her hand to make light for him. I called as witnesses Giuseppe Fenech and the cleric in minor orders Giovanni Andrea Zahra, both of Burmula. Then I ordered the priest under pain of 50 onze to present himself before the Revd. capitular vicar in the bishop’s palace at Valletta this morning. Therefore, in fulfillment of my duty, I inform you of this fact so that Your Lords take the necessary steps.53 People often engaged in ribald gossip about the sexual misdeeds of lecherous priests, but the number of clergy detected to the church courts for sexual crimes between 1750 and 1798 amounted to a mere handful, 25 in all (Table 1).54 Some words of caution are needed here regarding these numbers before going on with our analysis. First, they refer only to actual physical sexuality and not to instances of sollecitazione ad turpia, or the tempting of penitents 49 National Library Malta (hereafter NLM), Library (hereafter Libr.) 643, p. 42. Joseph CassarPullicino, “Malta in 1575: Social Aspects of an Apostolic Visit,” Melita Historica 2:1 (1956): 35. 50 Synodus Dioecesana, 104. 51 AAM, Informationes 5, no. 59. AAM, Informationes 6, no. 102. 52 For the use of the power of privy search, see Frans Ciappara, “Perceptions of Marriage in LateEighteenth-Century Malta,” Continuity and Change 16:3 (December 2001): 392. 53 AAM, Dicta 25, no. 84. 54 This paucity of cases is also the conclusion of Peter Marshall for sixteenth-century England. See his The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), 144–150.

8

Table 1. Sexual charges against priests before the Ecclesiastical Court, 1750– 1798 Reference

Fornication

Incest

Rape

Sexual Harassment

Convicted

Not summoned

Released

Total

1 – 1 1 – – – – 3

2 1 2 – 1 2 2 1 3

– – – – – – – 1 –

1 – – – – – – – 1

– – – 1 – 1 – – –

3 1 2 1 – 1 2 2 3

1 – 1 1 1 2 – – 3

– – – – – – – – 1

4 1 3 2 1 3 2 2 7

6

14

1

2

2

15

9

1

25

CHURCH HISTORY

AAM, Dicta 24 AAM, Dicta 25 AAM, Dicta 26 AAM, Dicta 27 AAM, Dicta 28 AAM, Dicta 28A AAM, Informs 5, nos. 53, 69 AAM, Informs 6, nos. 65, 102 CEM, AO 677, 689, 690, 691, 692, 702, 705 Total

Adultery

9

TRENT AND THE CLERGY IN MALTA Table 2. Confessors accused of solicitation, 1743– 1798 Secular priests Augustinians Dominicans Capuchins Minims Discalced Carmelites Conventual Chaplains Total

12 5 5 4 3 2 1 32

SOURCE: Frans Ciappara, Society and the Inquisition, 151.

during confession for dishonest ends.55 In the period 1743 – 1798 these amounted to thirty-two cases and were decided by the tribunal of the inquisition and not by the episcopal court (Table 2).56 The man who best illustrates such a “bear who attacks travelers who have lost their way” is Don Baldassare Marchesan, the organist of the parish church of Senglea. This jovial, short, pale, curly-haired priest with an aquiline nose was held by most to be a flirt and in love with 35-year-old Elisabetta Durante. He told her during confession in 1755, “I have spent all this night with you . . . I dreamed that you came to me and stayed on your knees by my bed. Then you went to sleep and then . . . ”57 Secondly, can we take these statistics to be representative, or do such figures underestimate the incidence of sinful priests, in which case our quantification becomes worthless? It has been argued for other countries, for instance Italy, Spain, and Catholic Germany, that parishioners connived at priests’ immorality as long as this did not interfere with their priestly office.58 This could not be said for Malta, where, as in late medieval Lincoln,59 it seems 55

For a full treatment of the subject, see Stephen Haliczer, Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). See also Christopher F. Black, Church, Religion, and Society in Early Modern Italy (Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 107– 111. For confession in the Counter Reformation, see Wietse de Boer, La Conquista dell’Anima. Fede, Disciplina e Ordine Pubblico nella Milano della Controriforma (Turin: Einaudi, 2004), and W. David Myers, “Poor, Sinning Folk”: Confession and Conscience in Counter-Reformation Germany (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996). 56 Frans Ciappara, Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta (PEG: Malta, 2001), 151. 57 AIM, Proceedings (hereafter Proc.) 128A, ff. 105r– 32v. 58 Gaetano Greco, “Fra disciplina e sacerdozio: il clero secolare nella societa` italiana,” in Clero e Societa` nell’Eta` Moderna, ed. Mario Rosa (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1992), 57; Allyson M. Poska, Regulating the People: The Catholic Reformation in Seventeenth-Century Spain (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 43–44; Forster, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages, 22–32. 59 Margaret Bowker, The Secular Clergy in the Diocese of Lincoln 1495– 1529 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 115– 116.

10

CHURCH HISTORY

that clerical sexuality did conflict with the parish’s sexual norms and the faithful were greatly concerned with the lives of their ministers. This begs the remark that a new-style clergy eventually emerged not only on the initiative of the bishop but also of the people. Parishioners had a particularly strong interest in correcting priests’ sexual immorality because a bad minister was a threat to the whole community. Concern for the safety of wives and daughters was only one cause of the hostility toward unchaste clergy. People were preoccupied with their priests’ sexuality mainly because it was commonly believed that sacraments administered by a wicked minister were invalid. This belief was theologically unsound, but it was held by some of the clergy themselves. In 1672 Don Giuseppe Calleja, the parish clerk of Zabbar, was reported to the Holy Office for having allegedly told his congregation that they were not to hear the Mass of a priest in mortal sin.60 Instead, Rosolea Mifsud was catechized by Inquisitor Gallarati Scotti in 1785 that sacraments conferred grace ex opere operato, irrespective of the qualities or the merits of the persons administering them.61 Thirdly, how reliable were these charges? Could not these indictments have been maliciously motivated, concocted by disgruntled parishioners in order to discredit a clergyman? These are pertinent questions because in nine cases the defendant was not even summoned while one case was dismissed because the charge could not be sustained. It concerned Don Andrea Camilleri tal vaiuu of Tarxien. In 1767 a widow brought suit against him for having fathered a child by her. But he succeeded in proving that she was a prostitute and that the child she bore on the feast of S. Andrea was a result of her commerce with one Antonio of casal Zebbug. Besides, the witnesses whom she produced were “vile and infamous.” The charges against him, so he claimed, were brought deliberately in order to make him maintain her child.62 That accusations of sexual impropriety should be treated with caution is also demonstrated by the case of Don Aloiso Camilleri of Naxxar. In 1793 his nephew accused him of entertaining a lewd woman in his house, but he had ulterior motives connected with an inheritance for wishing to discredit her: the priest’s mother had left her a house for tending her during her illness for almost a year right up to her death.63 Other charges, though, resulted in prosecutions, and in fifteen instances (60 percent) the accused were convicted. Such cases implied that the pitiless urge of carnal desire could not be contained within the pattern of lifelong clerical chastity. Continence must have been, as Christopher Black has said 60

AIM, Proc. 77A, f. 45r. AIM, Proc. 134A, ff. 85r–v. 62 CEM, AO 677, ff. 216– 226v. 63 AAM, Informationes 6, no. 108. 61


11

in a passage full of warmth and understanding, “an ideal that took . . . little account of natural worldly instincts and temptations.”64 The case of Don Andrea Borg of Hasseiet from St. Helen’s serves to illustrate this point. In 1789 he contemplated going to Turkey to apostatize to Islam and there “take as many wives as my strength allowed me.” He did not execute his wish, however, or so he confided to Inquisitor Gallarati Scotti, only because he found no way of escaping from Malta, “despite all the attempts I made.”65 In further confirmation of this irresistible libidinous urge, Don Michele Micallef of the parish of the annunciation (Balzan) claimed in 1749 that the Church “allows its priests to give vent to their passions and know carnally a woman once a month.”66 Immorality cases against priests handled by the ecclesiastical court were invariably restricted to what Thomas Aquinas refers to as “natural lust”: adultery (six cases) and fornication (fourteen cases). Plausibly there were relatively few cases of the latter because sexual intercourse between an unmarried man and an unmarried woman was considered a less serious crime than adultery. Illicit intercourse with a married woman is an act that hurts a third party; and besides the sexual crime involved, the offender commits the added injustice of taking over the rights of another man. Included in Table 1 are two rape charges and one single case of a priest convicted of incest. It concerned Don Pantaleone Dalli from the parish of the assumption (Gudja). His brother, Giuseppe, had married one Maria on October 6, 1793.67 She gave birth to a child five months later on February 26, 1794,68 but it started being rumored in the village that the priest was its father. Maria’s husband protested that it was not his child, so he refused to be present at church at its christening and, on the excuse that his wife was unwell, gave the child to the foundlings’ hospital. Don Pantaleone was incarcerated in the bishop’s prisons at Vittoriosa, but after a month, on April 4, 1794, “I asked the prosecutor in so important a matter to conduct me to this tribunal to make the present spontaneous confirmation”: I declare that I raped her (Maria) twice last May, that is, five months before marriage. It was the result of blind passion when as a neighbor she came almost daily to our house to help us with the chores.69 This example sheds light on the fact that servants engaged in domestic work or farm labor were especially easy prey for lascivious priests. Trent had prohibited 64

Christopher F. Black, Early Modern Italy: A Social History (London: Routledge, 2001), 174. AIM, Proc. 134B, ff. 704r– 709v. AIM, Proc. 122A, ff. 199r– 202v. 67 Parish Archives (hereafter PA) (Gudja), Liber Matrimoniorum iv, p. 94. 68 PA (Gudja). Liber Baptizatorum iv, p. 17. 69 AAM, Informationes 6, no. 65. 65 66

12

CHURCH HISTORY

“all clerics whatsoever to presume to keep concubines or other women concerning whom suspicion can be had in their house or elsewhere, or to presume to have any association with them.”70 The Maltese synod of 1703 further laid down that these women or perpetue71—to refer to them by the name of Don Abbondio’s in Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed72—should be over fifty years of age and of good morals. Nor could priests employ them before having permission in writing by the bishop or the vicar general.73 All the same, women repeatedly charged priests with attempts on their virtue.74 The fact that most of them were widows was itself a source of suspicion: they were subject to the control of neither father nor husband. Anna, of St. Bartholomew’s, for instance, started frequenting Don Giovanni Bezzina as soon as her husband died in 1767.75 Separated women were in like position. Liberata, from the parish of the assumption (Mqabba), was abandoned by her husband just a few days after marriage, “not having found her a virgin, as the common fame goes.” She left her village and went to Valletta where in 1783 she moved in with Don Bartolomeo Zarb of Zebbug. Her mother was very happy that “the priest provides her with everything for the house.”76 As this last example shows, underlying these cases was a great deal of human misery. Their poverty made these women especially vulnerable. Take the 1796 case of Maria from the village of Balzan. All the villagers knew that her mother constrained her to lend her sexual favors to Don Salvatore Sammut and threatened to beat her if she declined.77 The priest, so the case implies, must have been maintaining the girl’s family in return. Other instances indicate that a priest was bringing up his own offspring. Was this not the reason perhaps why Don Bernardo Ellul of Qrendi organized a wedding party for Grazia’s son when the lad got married in 1778?78 A case of 1765 from the town of Rabat in Gozo provides further proof. Grazia and her family lived in the same house with Don Nicola 70

Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 247. Oscar Di Simplicio, “Le Perpetue (Stato Senese, 1600–1800),” Quaderni Storici no. 68, Anno XXIII (1988), 381–412. 72 This is how Manzoni refers to her: “a faithful and devoted servant, who could obey orders and give them as the occasion required, put up for some time with her master’s whims and complaints, and make him put up with hers for some time too”: Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed, trans. A. Colquhoun (London: Everyman’s, 1962), 13. 73 Synodus Dioecesana, 104. 74 For the cases of Don Nicola Zammit of S. Leonardo, Gozo (1773), and Don Giovanni of citta` Pinto (1791), who were rumored to be living dissolutely with their maids, see CEM, AO 683, ff. 192r– 197v and AAM, Informationes 6, no. 51. 75 CEM, AO 692, f. 37r. 76 AAM, Informationes 6, no. 90. 77 AAM, Informationes 5, no. 63. 78 CEM, AO 690, ff. 178r– 183v. 71


13

Zammit and when, on orders from the bishop, they were evicted, the priest bought another house for them behind the church of S. Francesco. However, a son of hers, Giuseppe, stayed with the priest, who paid for his schooling. Were the people to blame when their suspicions were aroused and called the boy the priest’s bastard?79

III. VIOLENCE Priests lived in close proximity with the laity because they still resided with their families in the areas where they had grown up. They were local figures since in Malta, unlike France, the clergy did not migrate to other parishes.80 This familiarity meant that the people accepted the local priest without any difficulty. But it also meant that the priest could more readily have been caught up in local disputes, resentment and enmity sometimes boiling over into intense antagonism. This observation leads to the fourth topic of our analysis since violence further lessened the distance between priest and people. It was the most notorious aspect of a secularized priestly way of life, or as one French author put it, “un style de vie commune´ment vulgaire.”81 The evidence from the ecclesiastical court is astounding and, as Jean-François Soulet has observed for the central Pyrenees82 and H. Roure for the southeast of France in the seventeenth century,83 it provided the most serious indictment of the quality of the Maltese clergy in the late eighteenth century. The situation should not be compared, though, to that in southern Italy where, according to Bishop Zuccari, in 1771 several priests guilty of homicide took refuge in the mountains.84 Even so, for the years 1750 through 1798, the laity brought 119 suits in the ecclesiastical court for such incidents (Table 3). A striking feature of these denunciations is the paucity of verbal assaults. Only 25 instances, or 20.8 percent of the total, are recorded and, besides, if suits were abusive and insulting, they were not all strictly defamatory. A case from Floriana provides illustration of this point. In October 1780, toward two in the afternoon, 79

CEM, AO 673, ff. 372r–407v. Joseph Bergin, “Between Estate and Profession: The Catholic Parish Clergy of Early Modern Western Europe,” in Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification, ed. M. L. Bush (London: Longman, 1992), 73. 81 Pe´rouas, Le Dioce`se de la Rochelle, 201. 82 Jean-François Soulet, Traditions et Re´formes Religieuses dans les Pyreńeés Centrales au XVIIe Sie`cle (Pau: Marrimpouey Jeune, 1974), 192–194. 83 The bishop of Pamiers, Henri de Sponde, who died in 1645, called the canons of his cathedral “the twelve leopards”: quoted in H. Roure, “Le Clerge´ du Sud-Est de la France au XVIIe Sie`cle: Ses De´ficiences et Leurs Causes,” Revue d’Histoire de l’E´glise de France xxxvii, no. 130 (1951) : 179. 84 Gabriele De Rosa, Vescovi, popolo e magia nel Sud. Ricerche di storia socio-religiosa dal XVII al XIX secolo (Naples: Guida, 1971), 143. 80

14

CHURCH HISTORY Table 3. Violence by the clergy, 1750–1798

Reference AAM, Dicta 24 AAM, Dicta 25 AAM, Dicta 26 AAM, Dicta 27 AAM, Dicta 28 AAM, Dicta 28A AAM, Dicta 29A AAM, Dicta 30A AAM, Inform. 6 CEM, AO 673, 676–77, 683, 687, 689–94, 698, 701–04, 706 Total

Physical assaults on males females

Verbal assaults on males females

8 13 10 6 3 2 – 2 4 21

1 2 2 3 1 – – 1 – 9

– 3 2 2 – – 1 1 – 6

– 1 1 – – 2 – – – 6

69

19

15

10

Others

Total

– 1 (a) 3 (b) – 1 (c) – – – – 1 (d)

9 20 18 11 5 4 1 4 4 43

6

119

(a) placing horns on the roof of one’s house (b) shooting at a dog and at pigeons, attempt to poison parish priest (c) spoiling door with excrement (d) shooting at pigeons

Clara the wife of Filippo Xerri was watching Don Giusto Mangani quarrelling with two porters near her house. Suddenly he started beating his buttocks with his hands while telling Clara, “Come and kiss my . . . ”85 As is evident from this case, most of the deprecations were uttered in passion or anger without any real intention of harming a person’s repute. Thus, in another case of 1790, Don Giuseppe Tonna of Rabat (Gozo) shouted abuse at Grazia from his balcony across the open street after she returned a perforated kettle he had lent her.86 Other slanders, though, did not concern trivial exchanges of words87 but were designed to hurt. In 1777, two priests from Gudja threatened Giuseppe Hellul with exile from Malta or else to “bring my days to an end beneath the earth.”88 And Don Lazzaro Azzopardi of St. Catherine’s (Zejtun) assaulted Rosa Aquilina where it hurt most, her reputation. In an attempt to frustrate her betrothal to his nephew, he boasted that he had laid her himself. “Do you want to marry that whore and fill our house with dung? You thief!” he fulminated against him in 1779.89 Regrettably, there is no sequel to this latter incident, but often these bouts of defamation, or what Peter Burke calls “the ritualized sequence of words 85

CEM, AO 693, ff. 163r– 166v. CEM, AO 703, ff. 68r–v. Such as “thieves,” “prostitutes,” “rogues,” “knaves,” “worthless,” “villains,” a “pig,” “the devil’s soul,” and “a filthy face.” 88 AAM, Dicta 27, no. 16. 89 CEM, AO 692, f. 3v. For another case see CEM, AO 697, f. 149r. 86 87


15

and gestures,”90 were only the prelude to fighting. A typical case was that of Don Francesco Scerri of Rabat. When in 1777 he fell out with Lorenzo Bugeja, he first called him a cuckold and a thief and then attacked him “like a tiger.”91 In other words, abusive language and violent behavior were intimately related. Shouting and threats were generally accompanied by punches, but an instrument could also be used, like a whip, a hammer, a hoe and, rarely, a knife.92 Turning now to the context in which these squabbles occurred, which were the circumstances that made priests forget their priestly calling and made them no different from the people? Fortunately, there is enough material for a close study. It could be a frivolous matter over precedence. Claiming that his confraternity of the Holy Sacrament was the oldest in the village, Don Alberto Abela of Zejtun in 1755 did not let the confratelli of the Holy Rosary stay on the highest step of the presbytery. He pushed one of them to the ground and smashed to pieces the candle that another brother held in his hand.93 One more incident worth citing because of its detail concerned Alberto Cassar, who was attacked for having in 1755 pelted a priest’s dog with a stone: Last Saturday toward four in the afternoon while I was passing in front of the shop of Lorenzo Rapa at the village of Caccia an angry dog came out of the shop. It tried to bite me but I threw a stone at it and hit it in the leg. There at once appeared Don Agostino Buhagiar, who started hitting me on my neck. And he would have beaten me more if Giuseppe Mizzi had not interceded.94 Unlike the case in England,95 instances of drunkenness that led to physical assault were particularly rare among the Maltese clergy. One such unusual case concerned Don Giuseppe Grima of St. Lawrence’s. In 1776 he punched one Michele so soundly on the face and chest that he forced him to escape into his neighbor’s field and hide under a tree of prickly pears.96 90 Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 11. 91 AAM, Dicta 29A, no. 67. 92 CEM, AO 703, ff. 235r–v. AAM, Dicta 26, no. 76. AAM, Dicta 24, no. 5. AAM, Dicta 30A, no. 8. Other instruments were the handle (marlogg) of a mattock (AAM, Dicta 24, no. 46); a key (AAM, Dicta 28, no. 10); a piece of wood, stanga (AAM, Dicta 26, no. 4); sword (CEM, AO 691, ff. 299r–306v.); stone (AAM, Dicta 26, nos. 11, 26.); and a mule’s bridle (AAM, Dicta 25, no. 89). 93 AAM, Dicta 25, no. 7. 94 AAM, Informationes 6, no. 22. 95 Donald A. Spaeth, The Church in an Age of Danger: Parsons and Parishioners, 1660– 1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 122–132. M. F. Snape, The Church of England in Industrialising Society: The Lancashire Parish of Whalley in the 18th Century (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2003), 178–180, 185. 96 AAM, Dicta 26, no. 110. Don Salvatore Said of Nadur was the other priest indicted for his drunken and violent behavior. In 1791 he came to blows with Don Vincenzo Camilleri. He grabbed him by the throat, tore his shirt, and hit him with a stone: AAM, Dicta 28, no. 11.

16

CHURCH HISTORY

Apart from such examples, as has been observed above, these priestscum-peasants were generally embroiled in disputes with people over matters related to agriculture. One such incident resulted in homicide. On Saturday, July 27, 1765, Martino Vassallo, a 17-year-old lad, together with other workers, was on his way from Zabbar to his native village of Siggiewi. At tal Handach he climbed over a wall to pick two figs from the field of Don Lorenzo Pace tal furnara (the baker’s son). The priest pelted him with a stone and hit him in the belly. The boy fell to the ground so that he had to be helped to reach home by his fellow workers. The next day, Sunday, he felt so ill that his father took him to the hospital, where he died on Tuesday at 10 p.m. The priest was arrested but the victim’s father forgave him.97 Was this the usual way people responded to clerical violence? The best way to answer this query is to analyze the number of suits brought by clergy against the laity. In the period 1750 – 1798 these amounted to 91, but only seven of them ended in conviction (see Table 4). The rest of the suits may have been settled outside the court while in other cases it was impossible to establish the exact facts owing to conflicting evidence. These cases require some clarification. According to the canon Si quis suadente of 1139, a sentence of excommunication could be passed on any who laid violent hands on the clergy.98 This penalty, unlike the case in seventeenth-century England,99 should have terrified the people because it was commonly believed that neither the parish priest nor the bishop, the pope, God, or the Holy Trinity could absolve it.100 Even if this was a wrong theological tenet, excommunication did mean exclusion from the Church and the solace of the sacraments. Besides these spiritual effects, excommunication also involved social exclusion or ostracism, segregation from the faithful in Christ.101 According to one author, this was “symbolic of the fact that the Church was supposed to be coterminous with the whole of society.”102 The “cursed” one was to be avoided by the rest of the Christian community until he had 97

PA (Siggiewi), Libr. Mort. IV (1760– 1800), f. 44v. CEM, AO 673, ff. 22r–39v. The other incident of homicide occurred on 11 October 1781, when Don Filippo Borg and Filippo Haxach, both from the parish of St. George’s, quarreled over a wall dividing their fields. The priest hit his antagonist with a piece of wood and left him dead: PA (Qormi), Liber Defunctorum B, p. 13. CEM, AO 694, ff. 71r–190v. See also AAM, Corrispondenza (hereafter Corr.) xx, f. 306r. AAM, Corr. xxi, ff. 12– v. 98 Elisabeth Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 99 Ronald A. Marchant, The Church Under the Law: Justice, Administration and Discipline in the Diocese of York, 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 228. 100 Don Giuseppe Grech of Tarxien told this wrong theological proposition to his congregation in 1788, for which he was reported to Inquisitor Gallarati Scotti: AIM, Proc. 135B, f. 707r. 101 AAM, Dicta 30A, no. 66. 102 Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 340– 363.

17

TRENT AND THE CLERGY IN MALTA Table 4. Violence against the Clergy, 1750– 1798

Reference AAM, Dicta 24 AAM, Dicta 25 AAM, Dicta 26 AAM, Dicta 27 AAM, Dicta 28 AAM, Dicta 28A AAM, Dicta 30A AAM, Informs. 6 CEM, AO 672–73, 676–77, 679, 683, 689 –90, 692, 697– 98, 701 Total

Physical Assaults by males females

Verbal Assaults by males females

Priests robbed

Total

6 9 7 8 5 2 1 1 13

– – – – – – 1 – 1

1 1 2 3 1 – 1 – 2

– 1 1 – 1 – – – 1

7 5 6 1 1 – – – 2

14 16 16 12 8 2 4 1 19

52

2

11

4

22

91

purged himself. He could not be greeted in the street, and all normal conversation with him was forbidden because whoever came into contact with him was touched by his pollution. In a society in which the community was needed for sustenance, social ostracism might result in starvation. A case that came before the ecclesiastical court reflects the significance of this. On Sunday, July 31, 1768, toward five in the evening, Vincenszo Corso, a 22-year-old boatman of Burmula, was transporting some bathers to Rinella bay. As he was in his boat, smoking the pipe, the cleric Giuseppe Attard called him a cuckold and a thief. On land they came to blows and Vincenzo threatened to pluck out his adversary’s eye if he did not substantiate his charges. Vincenzo was arrested on August 11 and on the 30th he was excommunicated. But, “being a poor man who had to work daily to earn his living,” he asked to be absolved and integrated within the Church.103 How effective were these “horrible censures which, like a sharp sword, separate a Catholic from the body of the Christian republic”?104 Did they serve, as they did in More’s Utopia, as a deterrent for people not to lay violent hands on a man “dedicated and consecrated to God as a holy offering”?105 Could a priest avert an assault on his person by an appeal to his priesthood and fall back on his position as the anointed man of God? Attitudes toward priestly violence are perhaps best summed up in a 1790 case. Giovanni Battista Diacono was an inmate at Saura hospital. When Don 103

CEM, AO 678, ff. 138r–v. AAM, Dicta 30A, no. 13. 105 Thomas More, Utopia (London: David Campbell Publishers, 1992), 127. 104

18

CHURCH HISTORY

Michele Felici assaulted him he refrained from retaliating, even though he kept a stick beside his bed, “being so much afraid of excommunication.”106 Other individuals were less cautious and “don’t esteem your collar.”107 Such an attitude is glimpsed in a 1755 case when a Zabbar man, Andrea ta sula, told his clerical antagonist not to delude himself “that the tonsure enables you to devour the people.”108 In another case, Giuseppe Attard, a coachman, warned Don Pietro Borg in 1752 not to raise his hands because he would raise his as well.109 Taking such evidence into account, it seems likely that not much shame or disgrace seems to have been attached to handling priests roughly. In other words, not all Maltese resembled the Gozitan carpenter who, on hitting Don Antonio Teuma in 1783 with a piece of wood, asked for pardon, knelt down, and kissed the priest’s feet.110 What matters here is that in such encounters priests were lucky if they escaped simply with having their hat taken violently off their head.111 In 1788 Grazia Gatt of Ghaxaq spat in Don Michele Vella’s face for allegedly stealing one of her hens.112 Other priests had their fingers bitten or their faces scratched “as Your Excellencies can well see.”113 Antonio Borg of Zurrieq pointed a gun at Don Giovanni Mifsud’s chest, telling him in 1753, “I’ll disembowel you like a pig.”114 In one exceptional case, Don Bernardo Busuttil was murdered in November 1794 as he was on his way from Zebbug to Xaghra (Gozo). His corpse was found after eight days, on December 2, in a valley close to Hayn Emhellel. Suspicion fell on Tomaso ta cannabusa whom the priest had cited for 14 tarı`, but the document contains no further information.115

IV. SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL FACTORS Having explained that priests in Malta were slow to professionalize along lines set forth at Trent, it now remains to analyze the social and historical factors that account for this remarkably slow formation of a clerical elite. In other words, why were priests in Malta not so distinct from the people? One reason that must be dismissed outright was their poverty. In order to be ordained they had to have proof of sufficient economic support, which was a 106

CEM, AO 703, f. 229r. AAM, Dicta 26, no. 5. AAM, Dicta 25, no. 20. 109 AAM, Dicta 24, no. 48. 110 AAM, Dicta 28, no. 3. 111 AAM, Dicta 26, no. 33. 112 AAM, Dicta 28A, no. 6. 113 AAM, Dicta 27, nos. 9, 20, 53. 114 AAM, Dicta 25, no. 33. 115 AAM, Dicta 28, no. 22. PA (Zebbug), Liber Mortuorum i, 2 Dec. 1794. 107 108


19

guarantee that they would not become a burden on the Church.116 This ordination title or patrimony stood at 45 scudi a year until 1777, when it was nearly doubled to 80 scudi.117 In fact, priests’ salaries compared well with those of other professions. In 1754, Giovanni Bazilio Zammit, a “doctor of the poor” at Senglea, had a salary of 50 scudi a year;118 a master builder in 1772 earned half that sum, 25 scudi.119 Moreover, priests augmented their salary by their daily Mass stipends (messe manuali) and by sharing the common revenues of the parish church. Above all, they were the sons of well-to-do families. If in France, as Joseph Bergin has demonstrated, a large proportion of them were drawn from the bourgeoisie,120 in Malta, as in southern Italy,121 they belonged to families of property holders, with a primary involvement in agriculture.122 Don Giuseppe Giovanni Dimech of Burmola, for example, was the son of a grocer, but his father possessed several houses and fields and had some 6,000 scudi invested in sea exchanges ( pret a la grosse aventure).123 As Luise Schorn-Schu¨tte claims for Germany,124 the entrance to clerical office was open for the sons of prosperous families but barred to the great majority of poor independent ones. Timothy Tackett has put it more succinctly: “The long-held myth that the Old-Regime clergy arose from the midst of the common people has now been largely exploded.”125 This is also confirmed for Naples126 but contrasts with what Mario Rosa has said for Italy in general, and Thomas Deutscher for Novara and Silvia Mostaccio for Saluzzo in particular.127 116 Frans Ciappara, “The Financial Condition of Parish Priests in Late Eighteenth-Century Malta,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53:1 (January 2002): 95– 96. 117 NLM, Archives 273, f. 161r. 118 NLM, Archives 189, f. 185v. 119 AIM, Registrum Actorum Civilium (hereafter RAC) C5 (1772), f. 232r. 120 Bergin, “Between Estate and Profession,” 76–77. 121 Rosa Martucci, “De vita et honestate clericorum: La formazione del clero meridionale tra Sei e Settecento,” Archivio Storico Italiano 144 (1986): 429– 430. 122 Ciappara, “The Financial Condition of Parish Priests,” 102. 123 AAM, Patrimonio Sacro 55, no. 24. For this type of investment, consult Carmel Vassallo, Corsairing to Commerce: Maltese Merchants in XVIII Century Spain (Malta: Malta University Publishers, 1997), 70– 71. 124 Luise Schorn-Schu¨tte, “Priest, Preacher, Pastor: Research on Clerical Office in Early Modern Europe,” Central European History 33:1 (2000): 9. 125 Timothy Tackett, “The Social History of the Diocesan Clergy in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Church, State, and Society under the Bourbon Kings of France, ed. Richard M. Golden (Lawrence, Kan.: Coronado, 1982), 337– 338. 126 Giacomo Garzya, “Recrutamento e mobilita` sociale del clero secolare napoletano fra il 1650 e il 1675,” in Giuseppe Galasso and Carla Russo, eds., Per la Storia Sociale e Religiosa del Mezzogiorno d’Italia, vol. 1 (Naples: 1980), 290. 127 Mario Rosa, “The Italian Churches,” in Church and Society in Catholic Europe of the Eighteenth Century, eds. William J. Callahan and David Higgs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 66–76; Thomas Deutscher, “The Growth of the Secular Clergy and the Development of Educational Institutions in the Diocese of Novara (1563–1772),” Journal of

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In Malta one does come across isolated instances of priests who, like Don Arcangelo Saliba of St. Catherine’s (Zurrieq), wore the cassock on their bare flesh and cleaned themselves of lice. But such extremely rare examples refer not to destitute priests but to those members of the clergy who lived on their own with no one to look after them. After all, witnesses testified that Don Arcangelo had “enough means with which to live decently” and behaved that way only because he was mentally unbalanced.128 If, then, Don Antonio Galea, who left some 150,000 scudi when he died in 1762, must have been an exception,129 it is fair to say that priests led a fairly decent life and did not live on meager incomes. They must have possessed effective financial independence and cannot be regarded as an impoverished clerical proletariat. If poverty was not at stake in determining the profile of the priests studied in this article, the extremely slim prospects for advancement were a major reason why priests appeared like other villagers. This is a seminal consideration because it illustrates that in ancien re´gime Catholic Europe priests did not simply administer to their sacred ministry.130 The clerical market was extremely limited, and those priests who were able to secure a beneficed post were only a tiny minority.131 The rest did not possess a career pattern and simply recited the Mass and read the breviary. In a way, ignoring the pastoral care of the population was in consonance with Catholicism, which stresses the sacrificial function of the priest in offering the Mass.132 But did not these priests resemble, as has been well remarked, barristers who never practiced and teachers who never taught?133 This plethora of clergy without care of souls went against the decrees of the Council of Trent, which stipulated that in a parish there should only be “as many priests as are necessary to administer the sacraments and carry on divine worship.”134 It also created grave problems for the church authorities.135

Ecclesiastical History 40:3 (July 1989): 386– 389; Silvia Mostaccio, “L’Oratoriano Giovenale Ancina Vescovo di Saluzzo e la Riforma del Clero,” in Per il Cinquecento Religioso Italiano, 258. 128 AAM, Informationes 6, no. 99. 129 NLM, Libr. 13, p. 748. 130 For England at an earlier period see Bowker, The Secular Clergy in the Diocese of Lincoln, 72–63; Michael L. Zell, “The Personnel of the Clergy in Kent in the Reformation Period,” The English Historical Review 89 (1974): 524–525. 131 On this point, Bergin, “Between Estate and Profession,” 74–82. 132 Claudio Donati, “La Chiesa di Roma tra antico regime e riforme settecentesche (1675– 1760),” in Storia d’Italia Annali 9, La Chiesa e il potere politico dal Medioevo all’eta` contemporanea, eds. Giorgio Chittolini and Giovanni Miccoli (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 766. 133 Rosemary O’Day, The English Clergy: The Emergence and Consolidation of a Profession, 1558–1642 (Leicester, U.K.: Leicester University Press, 1979), 67. 134 Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 173. 135 Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter Reformation (London: Macmillan, 1999), 143.


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Blocked in their ecclesiastical career, some of these “marginal” priests, as Angelo Turchini calls them,136 served as churchwardens (procuratori), sacristans,137 puntatori,138 and church organists, or else gave music lessons139 and ran their own “schools.”140 In Gozo in 1770, Don Francesco Sapiano was the commune’s school teacher for 28 scudi a year.141 As we have already observed, though, not all priests exercised their activities in a manner consonant with their priestly character. A few were lawyers or, like Don Giuseppe Micallef of citta` Pinto, medical doctors.142 Others, like Don Giovanni Balzan, who in 1744 appointed the Frenchman Giacchino Pignateau as his trade representative at Tripoli, were involved in commerce.143 In a letter to his superiors at Rome, dated 14 December 1738, Inquisitor Carlo Francesco Durini denounced the shamelessness of those priests in Malta “who are seen all day amongst merchants in the public square transacting business.”144 The great number of clergy, who in 1782 made up 1.3 percent of the population,145 was another plausible reason why ecclesiastical officials in the late eighteenth century were still having difficulty inculcating the new values enshrined in the sixteenth-century decrees on the priesthood. St. Philip’s, for instance, with a population of about 4,000, boasted 54 priests, while that same year the tiny parish of the assumption (Attard), with some 808 inhabitants, was served by seventeen priests, or a priest for every 48 persons. These numbers, which tally with those in other Catholic countries like Italy,146 amply justify the clericalization of the Maltese islands.147 Simply put, priests riding and walking about were familiar figures.

136

Turchini, “La nascita del sacerdozio come professione,” 247. The duties of these priests included preparing the missal, vestments, and vessels for Mass as well as distributing communion after Mass. 138 They registered, for instance, the number of Masses each priest said and his attendance at funerals, to be later remunerated. 139 AAM, Dicta 27, no. 6. 140 Vincent Borg, “Developments in Education outside the Jesuit Collegium Melitense,” Melita Historica 6:3 (1974): 215– 254. For these preti-maestri at Siena and Venice see Maurizio Sangalli, “Maestri, preti-maestri e scuole a Siena e a Venezia nel secondo Cinquecento,” in Per il Cinquecento Religioso Italiano, 373–403. 141 National Archives, Gozo, vol. 16, Registrum Negotiorum Universitatis, 11 December 1770. 142 AAM, Informationes 5, no. 50. 143 NAV, Notary Pietro Paolo Magri, 2/922, ff. 78r– v, 20 May 1744. 144 AIM, Corr. 95, ff. 72v–73r, Inquisitor Durini to cardinal inquisitors, 14 December 1738. See also AAM, Corr. xxii, f. 132r. 145 Ciappara, “The Financial Condition of Parish Priests,” 95. 146 Greco, “Fra disciplina e sacerdozio: il clero secolare nella societa` italiana,” 74– 86. For southern Italy see Martucci, “De vita et honestate clericorum,” 423–467. 147 For this term, see Raffaele Colapietra, “La ‘Clericalizzazzione’ della Societa` Molisana tra Cinque e Seicento: Il Caso della Diocesi di Boiano,” in Il Concilio di Trento nella vita spirituale e culturale del Mezzogiorno tra XVI e XVII secolo, eds. Gabriele De Rosa e Antonio Cestaro (Potenza: Edizioni Osanna Venosa, 1988), 259– 306. 137

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This easy access to the ranks of the clergy meant that there were more than enough clergymen to attend to the normal liturgical services, even if sometimes not enough to say the abnormally large number of death Masses.148 Parishes teemed with clergy; yet this exorbitantly high level of recruitment had its disadvantages. First, there can be little doubt that some priests lacked a vocation. They could have joined the ranks of the Church perhaps forced by their families149 for the legal and fiscal exemptions that they enjoyed.150 Did not The Catechism of the Council of Trent warn that “some there are who embrace this state to secure the necessaries of life . . . attracted to the priesthood by ambition and love of honors”?151 Secondly, it was practically impossible to keep this multitude in check. Trent had strengthened the power of the parish priests, but their assistant clergy, natives of the community, spited these “foreigners” like the rest of the parishioners.152 One such instance occurred at Cospicua in 1746. Although Don Francesco Crispo ordered his priests—“as rector of my church and also on the authority of the bishop, my master”—to take part in the viatico procession, Don Felice Demarco defied him and preferred to say Mass instead.153 How did this insubordination originate? In its twenty-third session, the Council of Trent had enacted a series of laws in default of which it was impossible for young men to be ordained.154 In a highly informative essay, Angelo Turrini classifies these rules as “internal” and “external.” The first regarded the person of the candidate, his vita et mores, his birth, his physique, his level of instruction. The second group had nothing to do with his personal qualities but with such conditions as the sacred patrimony.155 Candidates, therefore, exercised their office only after reaching the expected level, and those of them with moral and intellectual qualities below standard were excluded. At Naples, for instance, Bishop Innico Caracciolo

148 Frans Ciappara, “Una Messa in Perpetuum: Perpetual Mass Bequests in Traditional Malta, 1750–1797,” The Catholic Historical Review 91:2 (2005): 297. 149 The aforementioned Don Andrea Borg had received holy orders only because he was threatened by his mother: AAM, Corr. xxi, f. 262Cr, AAM, Corr. xxii, ff. 137r–142v. For the case of Fra Carmine Azzopardi, a Carmelite friar, and the capuchin Fra Romualdo, see AIM, RAC, C5 (1772–1775), ff. 31r–35v and AAM, Rubrica 8 (1750– 1769), no. 1. 150 On this point see Cecilia Nubola, Conoscere per governare. La diocesi di Trento nella visita pastorale di Ludocvico Madruzzo, 1579–1581 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993), ch. 7, and Garzya, “Reclutamente e Mobilita` Sociale,” 241– 306. 151 John A. McHugh and Charles J. Callan, trans. and eds., Catechism of the Council of Trent for Parish Priests (Rockford, Ill.: Tan Books, 1982), 318. 152 Frans Ciappara, “Parish Priest and Community in 18th-Century Malta: Patterns of Conflict,” Journal of Early Modern History 9:3–4 (2005): 329– 347. 153 AAM, Dicta 23, no. 54. 154 Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 167– 169. 155 Turchini, “La nascita` del sacerdozio come professione,” 228.


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(1667– 1685) proceeded with so much vigor that he halved the number of candidates for the tonsure.156 How does this theme appear in eighteenth-century Malta? Until the end of the seventeenth century, priests were educated at the Jesuit College or the studium generale of the Dominicans.157 The seminary was set up only in 1703.158 Bishops, therefore, started participating more extensively in establishing the clerical and spiritual contents of what was taught. But what kind of supervision was imposed on those young men aspiring to be ordained? In other words, did ordination follow automatically at the end of a spiritual itinerary? Unfortunately, present research has only dimly enlightened this point. Hence, there is no reference that the seminarians returned home in the evenings or that they resided in the seminary for only a semester before their ordination.159 Nor do we have any proof that, as was the case in eighteenth-century Lombardy, the seminary served just as a boarding school (convitto), the teaching being delivered outside in colleges run by the religious orders.160 What we can say with certainty is that to be able to finance itself161 the seminary in Malta as elsewhere162 provided a general education for other young men who did not intend to become priests.163 On August 14, 1769, in fact, Inquisitor Mancinforte reported to the cardinal secretary of state that the capitular vicar had closed the seminary for lack of funds.164 But did not these fee-paying students generally outnumber the seminarians?165 In such cases could not the presence of such 156 Xenio Toscani, “Il reclutamento del clero (secoli XVI– XIX),” in La Chiesa e il potere politico, ed. G. Ghittolini and G. Miccoli, 575–586. L. Osbat, “Innico Caracciolo,” in Dizionario Bibliografio degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1976), 399– 401. 157 Pio Pecchiai, “Il Collegio dei Gesuiti in Malta,” Archivio Storico di Malta, Anno IX (1938), 129–202, 272–325. A. P. Vella, “The University of S. Maria Portus Salutis,” Journal of the Faculty of Arts 2:2 (1962): 164–180. 158 For the setting up of the seminary in Malta, see Vincent Borg, “First Efforts To Build A Seminary In Malta,” Seminarium Melitense no. 5 (1950), 28–26, and V. Borg, The Seminary of Malta and the Ecclesiastical Benefices of the Maltese Islands (Malta: 1965). 159 Mario Rosa, Religione e societa` nel Mezzogiorno tra Cinque e Seicento (Bari: La Terza, 1976), 296; Kathleen M. Comerford, “Chierici e Seminari nei Primi Decenni del Periodo PostTridentino,” in Per il Cinquecento Religioso Italiano, 368. 160 E. Brambilla, “Societa` ecclesiastica e societa` civile: aspetti della formazione del clero dal Cinquecento alla Restaurazione,” Societa` e Storia, no. 12 (1981): 304. 161 CEM, Miscellanea 175, p. 521. 162 Xenio Toscani, “Seminari e Collegi nello Stato di Milano fra Cinque e Seicento,” in Per il Cinquecento Religioso Italiano, 316, 331. Consult also Domeenico Roccioli, “Il Cardinal Vicario e il Clero di Roma nella Seconda Meta` del Cinquecento,” in ibid., 250, and Brambilla, “Societa` ecclesiastica e societa` civile,” 330 –334, 338 –339, 346–347. 163 AAM, Status Animarum 24A (Notabile/ Rabat, 1781), no. 115, ff. 6v– 7r. 164 Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Segreteria di Stato (Malta) 167. 165 In 1783 the ratio stood at 23:16; in 1785, 32:21; in 1787, 34:23; in 1789, 34:23; in 1791, 32:27; and in 1793, 23:20. Francis Bonnici, For Service Alone: The Institution of the Seminary of Malta and its Development as Recorded in the Pastoral Visits of the Maltese Diocese, 1703– 2003 (Malta: The Archbishop’s Seminary, 2003), 105.

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youths make discipline difficult to keep, besides weakening a devout atmosphere?166 However that may be, on April 25, 1744, Inquisitor Paolo Passionei informed the Sacra Congregazione del Sant’Ufficio that “grave and intolerable disorders presently prevail in this seminary.”167 In 1764 it was the turn of Inquisitor Angelo Maria Durini to report to Rome that the procuratore of the seminary, Don Girolamo Rizzardopoli, had been dismissed for publicly defaming and threatening the rector.168 Besides, if Trent decreed that each diocese must have such institutions, future clergy were not compelled to attend them, and young men could still proceed to the priesthood much as before.169 Several clerks, in fact, never attended the seminary and made their apprenticeship at the local church where they served as altar boys. They were ordained after receiving a rudimentary clerical education at a “private school” in their own village conducted by a local priest.170 The point I want to make is that in this way they still lived in the village environment, in the area in which they had grown up. This phenomenon of chierici casalinghi (domestic clerics) was not confined to Malta. For instance, from 1635 to 1675, about 59 percent of the priests ordained in Fiesole (Italy) spent no time at all in the seminary. They were “for the most part locals who remained local.”171 According to Trent, ordinands were to be examined by the bishop assisted by “priests and other prudent men skilled in the divine law and experienced in the laws of the Church.” But in actual fact many queries present themselves. What form did the examination take? How rigorous was it? Which qualities were regarded as essential in candidates? Was it simply the right canonical age, a legitimate birth and the possession of a patrimony to ensure physical maintenance that examiners insisted on? Was the examination perfunctory? Were ordinations easily obtained with few questions asked? Unfortunately, we are unable to answer these questions because in Malta, unlike the case in Ely,172 documentation on this point is nonexistent. 166

O. Chadwick, “The Seminary,” in Studies in Church History 12, The Ministry: Clerical and Lay, eds. W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell’s, 1989), 8. 167 AIM, Corr. 95, ff. 164v–165r. 168 For the lamentable description of the Maltese diocese, see AIM, Corr. 100, ff. 273r– 75r. 169 A point made by David Gentilcore in From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1992), 47. See also Owen Chadwick, The Popes and the European Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 112–121. 170 AAM, RS 8, f. 194v. AAM, Dicta 25, no. 11. For these village schools, see the seminal article by Borg, “Developments in Education outside the Jesuit Collegium Melitense,” 215– 254. 171 Kathleen M. Comerford, “Clerical Education, Catechesis, and Catholic Confessionalism: Teaching Religion in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, eds. Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 252. Consult also Paola Vismara, “Il ‘Buon Prete’ nell’Italia del Sei-Settecento. Bilanci Prospettive,” Rivista di Storia della Chiesa in Italia 60:1 (2006), 56. 172 O’Day, The English Clergy, 49–65.


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V. CONCLUSION My concerns in this exercise in micro-history were twofold. First, I tried to identify those priests who did not administer the cure of souls and did not live up to their priestly ministry. They differed very little from their neighbors and, like priests in southern Italy, led at best semi-secular lives.173 These homegrown clerics were involved in agricultural pursuits and had enough spare time to go hunting and fishing.174 They went about perhaps with a wig on175 and a kerchief around their necks.176 They frequented “low” company in taverns and wine shops177 to socialize and play such card games as the reversino.178 They sought sexual relations with women, even seducing them during confession. They carried weapons and were violent, quarrelsome, aggressive, and blasphemous.179 They held carnival balls at nighttime in their houses180 and attended wedding receptions, where they could have danced a minuet and contradanza with the bride.181 Their nicknames are a further proof that they were not much different from the people among whom they lived. If a nickname is a sign of endearment, it also signifies that the priest was not a man to be feared and respected.182 My second and more important aim was to explore the social and historical factors that made it permissible for priests not to be much different from the people. This situation can be attributed less to economic factors than to limited career opportunities, the great number of clergy, and uneven education and institutional controls.

173 Michael P. Carroll, Madonnas that Maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy since the Fifteenth Century (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 103– 104. 174 AAM, Dicta 25, no. 49. AAM, Dicta 26, no. 104. For priests as hunters see also AAM, Informationes 6, no. 19 and AAM, Supplicationes 19, no. 48. 175 AAM, RS 11, ff. 13r– v. Wigs, though, could be worn for medical reasons as a protection from colds, catarrh, bronchitis, and even toothache. 176 AAM, Dicta 24, no. 75. 177 AAM, Informationes 6, nos. 18, 20. 178 AAM, Dicta 28A, no. 21. CEM, AO 706, f. 155r 179 AAM, Dicta 28A, no. 22 180 CEM, AO 705, ff. 13r– 18v. 181 AAM, Informationes 6, no. 75. 182 For example ta’ mustaccia (mustache), AAM, Dicta 25, no. 49.

Church History 78:1 (March 2009), 26–65. # 2009, American Society of Church History doi:10.1017/S000964070900002X Printed in the USA

Joseph (Smith) in Egypt: Babel, Hieroglyphs, and the Pure Language of Eden1 SAMUEL BROWN

I

N June 1835, Michael Chandler, an Irish-American entrepreneur, arrived in the Mormon capital of Kirtland, Ohio, to meet Joseph Smith, the Latter-day Saint founder and, according to an 1830 revelation, “a seer, a translator, a prophet, an apostle of Jesus Christ.”2 Visiting nearby Cleveland with an exhibit of road-weary Theban mummies and their funeral papyri, Chandler had caught word of Smith’s notoriety as a translator of hieroglyphs. Although the showman probably recognized that the mummies were unlikely to survive further travel and hoped to dispose of them profitably, he may have been genuinely curious to hear what the New York prophet had to say about his charges. In any event, Chandler did not leave Kirtland disappointed. After issuing a certificate of Smith’s skill with hieroglyphs, he sold the Mormon founder four of his “posthumous travelers” and their attached papyri for the formidable sum of $2,400 (five times the annual income of a typical family farm in the area).3

1 An early version of this essay was presented at the Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake City on August 9, 2007, and it derives from material for a book in preparation on early Mormon death culture and theology, tentatively titled In Heaven as it Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Conquest of Death. I thank Kate Holbrook, Matthew Bowman, Brett Rushforth, Jonathan Stapley, Brian Hauglid, and the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their insightful criticism. I thank the LDS Church History Library in Salt Lake City for the images used in this essay. 2 The Doctrine and Covenants of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Containing Revelations Given to Joseph Smith, the Prophet, with Some Additions by his Successors in the Presidency of the Church (Salt Lake City: Intellectual Reserve, 1981; hereafter Doctrine and Covenants) 21:1, a revelation given the day the church was founded in April 1830. 3 Though Smith termed Kirtland a mere “stake” of the Zion his followers were building in frontier Missouri, the town served as de facto headquarters of the movement from 1831 to 1837. H. Donl Peterson, in The Story of the Book of Abraham; Mummies, Manuscripts, and Mormonism (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1995), provides the details of the disinterment of the mummies by Italian adventurer Antonio Lebolo, working in Thebes, and their acquisition by Chandler, who dishonestly represented himself as Lebolo’s nephew. The reference to “posthumous travelers” (from the Cleveland Daily Advertiser for 26 March 1835) is on p. 111. Simeon Andrews and Joseph Coe purchased the mummies with Smith, but he took complete possession of all the artifacts. The annual income of a family farm is estimated by Marvin Hill, et al., “The Kirtland Economy Revisited: A Market Critique of Sectarian Economics,” BYU Studies 17:4 (Summer 1977): 396.

Samuel Brown is a fellow in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of Utah.

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Smith soon announced that the mummies were Egyptian royalty, and their papyri contained the writings of the patriarchs Joseph and Abraham. He and his spirited amanuensis and sometime ghostwriter, William Phelps, almost immediately began attempts to decode their hieroglyphic message.4 The better-known product of Smith’s encounter with the papyri, published in the American and British church organs in 1842, is the Book of Abraham, an Apocryphal-sounding account of terrestrial creation and cosmology narrated by Abraham himself.5 Less known is the record Smith and Phelps left of their initial interactions with the papyri, a collection of ostensibly grammatical documents later titled the Kirtland Egyptian Papers (KEP).6 The KEP, when situated culturally, confirm and expand several aspects of Smith’s religion making and its close relationship to language. First, Smith believed that human language was irreparably damaged by the biblical confounding of tongues at Babel. Second, he believed that ancient records and their constitutive hieroglyphs, typified by the Egyptian, provided a key to recovering the language of primitive humanity spoken in the Garden of Eden and the sacred names by which language first touched creation. Third, this quest for language clarifies Smith’s primitivism as an attempt to create relationships with past generations in anticipation of a united human family after Christ’s return. Smith grounded this project in direct, genealogical bonds to Adam and Eve, a point central to the meaning of the KEP and the broader religious sensibilities of early Mormonism. Permuting mystical currents from his youthful engagements with folk magic and themes generally labeled hermetic, Smith led his followers to a celestial society. In this vast human family possessed of a single heavenly language, Smith answered the plural and divisive voices of American religion as well as the 4 Oliver Cowdery, “Egyptian Mummies—Ancient Records,” The Latter-day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate 2:3 (December 1835): 234, 237. Smith never published the story of Joseph. Bruce N. Westergren, ed., From Historian to Dissident: The Book of John Whitmer (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1995), 167. Smith’s widow confirmed a long-standing and well-documented tradition that the Chandler mummies were a pharaoh and his family in her bill of sale for the mummies, reprinted in Glen Wade, “The Facsimile Found: The Recovery of Joseph Smith’s Papyrus Manuscripts,” Dialogue 2:4 (Winter 1967): 52. 5 See Times and Seasons 3:9 (1 March 1842): 704– 706 and 3:10 (15 March 1842): 719–722; and Millennial Star 3:3 (July 1842): 34–36 and 3:4 (August 1842): 49–53. 6 After Smith’s murder in 1844, official church historians, unable to retrieve the mummies or papyri from his estranged family, carefully transported the grammar documents to Salt Lake City in 1847, where they lapsed into obscurity: Jay M. Todd, The Saga of the Book of Abraham (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1969), 281– 84, 286, 326–31. Mormon scholar Sidney Sperry became aware of the KEP in LDS church archives in 1935, but little came of this awareness until 1966, when former Mormons published an unauthorized microfilm copy as Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Joseph Smith’s Egyptian Alphabet & Grammar (Salt Lake City: Modern Microfilm Company, 1966). The Tanner microfilm was republished in 1981 as H. Michael Marquardt, comp. and ed., The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papers (Sandy, Utah: bound photostat published by the author, 1981). The original documents are available as microfilms in LDS Church Archives (MS 1294 & 1295), though Brian Hauglid of Brigham Young University is currently preparing a critical edition with high-quality photographic reproductions for publication.

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social disruption of the new American republic. The society around him emphasized freedom from tradition alongside the power of the individual; in politics, party controversies predominated, while in religion denominations multiplied.7 These sometimes strident diversities threatened the family harmony Smith sought. By discovering the pure language, Smith saw his way to a restoration of a united world free of sectarian strife.8 Though he echoed his broader culture, which agreed that human language was corrupt (primarily as an indictment of Calvinist and Catholic theology), Smith took his theology of language much further, deep into an Edenic primitivism fraught with distinctive genealogical themes. Through Smith’s hieroglyphic projects, early Latter-day Saints enjoyed his apparently miraculous facility with ancient languages. More significantly, though, they discovered sacred access to humanity’s origin and future. In an important sense, these hieroglyphic projects served, as his published scriptures, to allow “the living to hear from the dead,” to create genealogical and eschatological relationships with them.9 The work of Phelps and Smith, with minor input from others, the KEP comprise philological exercises (KEPE) and manuscripts of the published Book of Abraham (KEPA).10 The major portion of KEPE is a bound notebook whose spine reads “Egyptian Alphabet,” and whose title page declares it a “Grammar and A[l]phabet of the Egyptian Language” (hereafter GAEL) (fig. 1).11 Divided into two sequential “parts” of five “degrees” each, GAEL contains parallel lists of glyphs, transcriptions, and glosses designed to decipher the contents of the Chandler papyri. Within a “part” each glyph is carried through all five “degrees” of related meaning, like a dictionary repeated five times, each definition an expansion of the prior one. (A variety of similar but much shorter documents are often designated KEPE 2 – 5.)12 7

For one of the more vivid contemporary reports of antebellum political partisanship and sectarian controversy, see the horrified account of the prolific Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: Whittaker, Treacher, & Co.; New York reprint, 4th ed., 1832), esp. 37, 76, 101, 136, 206– 207, 286. 8 Marvin Hill, Quest for Refuge: The Mormon Flight from American Pluralism (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1989). 9 William Phelps, “The Book of Mormon,” The Evening and the Morning Star 1:7 (December 1832): 59. 10 The KEPA, which contain handwritten paragraphs from the published Book of Abraham matched to glyphs of relevant thematic content, have been important to arguments about the provenance of the Book of Abraham but are of little direct relevance to the arguments of this essay. 11 A full list of the KEP documents is available in John Gee, “Eyewitness, Hearsay, and Physical Evidence of the Joseph Smith Papyri,” in The Disciple As Witness: Essays on Latter-day Saint History and Doctrine in Honor of Richard Lloyd Anderson, eds. Stephen D. Ricks, Donald W. Parry, and Andrew H. Hedges (Provo: FARMS, 2000), 196. Several miscellaneous documents are designated KEPE 6– 9; some of these minor documents are in the hand of Oliver Cowdery. 12 John A. Tvedtnes, “The Critics of the Book of Abraham,” in Book of Abraham Symposium (Salt Lake City: Salt Lake Institute of Religion, 1971), 73– 74, proposes that “part” and “degree” refer to columns, lines, and fragments of the original papyri. While this may help


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Fig. 1. Title page of GAEL, outlining the method for understanding grammatical “degrees” (horizontal lines) within the lexicon. Courtesy Church History Library, # IRI.

As with many of Smith’s later projects, the nature of the involvement of his associates—“scribes” or “clerks” in early Mormon parlance—in the production of the KEP is complex. Smith, as Mormonism’s translator and seer, superintended the project and provided its animating vision, while Phelps, a newspaperman and self-styled linguist who claimed knowledge of more than a dozen languages, provided much of the purported grammatical expertise.13 Oliver Cowdery, Smith’s major scribe for the 1830 Book of Mormon, provided publicity for the Egyptian project but little direct input on the grammars, while a temporary scribe named Warren Parrish seems to have been least involved. If Phelps worked entirely without Smith’s input, as some writers have suggested, he proved a remarkably perceptive student of his prophet: the KEP faithfully reflect and amplify Smith’s broader religionmaking projects. In any case Smith was involved: he mentioned his work on the grammar in his official diary and left a brief document among the KEP in his own handwriting.14 As with many other writing projects under his

locate a given glyph spatially, the meaning of “degree” is clearly more than such a trivial notation would suggest. 13 In describing what Smith did with language, hieroglyphic relics, and scripture, I have elected to use the word translation, the terminology he and his followers used, as more traditional terms like pseudo-translation would distract from the evocation of Smith’s idea-world. I have elected not to use scare quotes for the same reason. On Phelps’s creative involvement and estimation of his own linguistic abilities, see Samuel Brown, “The Translator and the Ghostwriter: Joseph Smith and William Phelps,” Journal of Mormon History 33:4 (Winter 2007), esp. 31–32, 54– 55, 57–58. 14 Scott Faulring, An American Prophet’s Record: The Diaries and Journals of Joseph Smith, Jr. (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1989), 35, 65–66. B. H. Roberts, ed., History of the Church of Jesus

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name, Smith likely oversaw and directed the efforts of his scribes, guiding their work while he learned from them in an intellectual and religious symbiosis.15 Ultimately, although Phelps likely affected Smith’s approach and the details of the final product, the Mormon founder’s vision is clear in the outlines and scope of the Egyptian grammar project. Owing to turmoil within the Latter-day Saint movement, Smith and Phelps stopped work on the project by 1837. They made plans to return to it in 1843, but Smith died before completing the Egyptian Grammar. Though the KEP remain unfinished, these philological exercises provide a dramatic and important window into Smith’s religious and social vision and the broader context of hieroglyphic culture in which he operated. The KEP have proved controversial—the documents contain no recognizable Egyptian words and are often maintained to be the source of the published Book of Abraham, thereby proving both fraudulent.16 This is the thrust of the disclaimer in a polemical reprinting of GAEL: “Note: This is not an authentic Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language. It does not contain any grammar or any genuine or reliable analysis of the Egyptian language.”17 The polemics surrounding the KEP have deflected attention from their meaning as religious documents per se. That these documents are not Egyptian according to any standard linguistic metric is beside the point. The KEP are not a grammar of hieroglyphs; they are themselves a hieroglyphic grammar. These manuscripts point beyond themselves to a place and time, imminently to be repeated, where the confusion of language could no longer tear the human family apart.

Christ of Latter-day Saints, 7 vols. (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1932–1951), 2:235– 236 supports Smith’s involvement. Smith appears to have written KEPE 4, a brief document titled “Egyptian Alphabet First Degree” (hereafter EA), which bears significant similarities to GAEL. 15 In the apt phrase of Michael Hicks (“Joseph Smith, W. W. Phelps, and the Poetic Paraphrase of ‘The Vision,’” Journal of Mormon History 20:2 [Fall 1994]: 68), “[Smith’s] name on any document from his last years is not an answer but a question.” 16 The original major apologia is Hugh Nibley, The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1975) and “The Meaning of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers,” BYU Studies 11:4 (Summer 1971): 350 –399. Gee (“Joseph Smith Papyri,” 175– 217) provides a reasonable summary of current apologia. Edward Ashment, “Reducing Dissonance: The Book of Abraham as a Case Study,” in The Word of God: Essays on Mormon Scripture, ed. Dan Vogel (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1990), 221–236, is a reasonable review of criticism. One less polemic treatment of the KEP is Dan Vogel and Brent Metcalfe, “Joseph Smith’s Scriptural Cosmology,” in The Word of God: Essays on Mormon Scripture, 187–220, which discusses them as source documents for reconstructing Smith’s views of planetary interactions, though the authors consider only superficially their religious significance. An analysis of the KEP from a religious hobbyist—Joe Sampson, Written by the Finger of God: A Testimony of Joseph Smith’s Translations (Sandy, Utah: Wellspring, 1993)—takes the KEP too seriously for modern taste, although in some respects his treatment bears striking resemblance to the views of the KEP authors themselves. 17 Marquardt, Egyptian Papers, 4.


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I. THE CURSE OF BABEL The enemy Smith battled with his hieroglyphic translations was Babel. According to antebellum understandings of the biblical narrative (Gen. 11:1 – 9), an arrogant attempt to build a tower on the plain of Shinar to reach the heavens resulted in the “confusion of the ancient language,” or the “confound[ing of] the language of men.”18 Though many saw Babel primarily as a morality tale about pride or the explanation for present linguistic diversity, others sought more specific insights about language and society from the Genesis account. Some saw Babel as the root cause of the limitations of human communication. William Phelps emphasized these failings in 1832 in a devotional essay on letter writing later attributed to Smith. “We can hardly find a language, written or spoken, on earth, at this time, that will convey the true meaning of the heart to the understanding of another,” he announced, a point he reiterated in an 1833 statement to the Mormon diaspora.19 Occasionally Phelps got specific: in an 1833 explanation of the polemic uses of “civilized” and “savage,” he cautioned “as to the meaning of words, we are sensible, many contradictions in terms exist, and will till wickedness is destroyed, and the Pure Language returned.”20 Adam Clarke’s popular Methodist Bible commentary had made much the same argument, while a Mormon editorialist later complained that “language has become confounded, corrupted, changed, mixed and adulterated, so that words are very unintelligible signs of ideas.”21 A mythic narrative of the source of linguistic diversity came to stand for the basic problem of human communication. Babel not only separated Greek from Latin or English; it also left all language unable to support pure communication. Throughout his career Smith demonstrated his concern with the problems of language and languages. Having grappled with the inconstancy of English in his 1830–1833 revision and amplification of the King James Bible (the “Inspired Version” or “Joseph Smith Translation”), he confronted early the 18 Josiah Priest, American Antiquities, and Discoveries in the West, 2nd ed., revised (Albany, N.Y.: Hoffman and White, 1833), 22; [William Phelps], “All Flesh,” The Evening and the Morning Star 2:13 (June 1833): 102. 19 William Phelps, “Writing Letters,” The Evening and the Morning Star 1:4 (September 1832): 25. The later misattributions are “History of Joseph Smith,” Times and Seasons 5:19 (15 October 1844): 672 and Joseph Smith, “Counsel Regarding Letter Writing,” Millennial Star 10:34 (5 March 1872): 145–146. See also [William Phelps, et al.], “The Elders Stationed in Zion to the Churches Abroad,” The Evening and the Morning Star 2:14 (July 1833): 111: “Our language, that is, the English tongue, fails to express our joy.” 20 William Phelps, “Civilized and Savage,” The Evening and the Morning Star 1:11 (April 1833): 88. 21 Adam Clarke, The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, 6 vols. (New York: T. Mason and G. Lane, 1837), 1:88; [John Taylor], “We do not agree,” Times and Seasons 4:7 (15 February 1843): 105.

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problem of Babel.22 As he transitioned from the Noachian flood narrative of Genesis 6–10, Smith told the story of the tower on the plain of Shinar with brief but significant modifications. Where the biblical narrative proposed a limit on human autonomy and left punishment for pride as an implicit theme, Smith added two clauses to emphasize that the confusion of languages was a direct punishment for sin. The sin was disobedience, as the people “hearkened not unto the Lord,” and the loss of “the same language” for all humanity occurred “because the Lord was displeased with their works.”23 Smith felt the effects of this curse at a personal level. During the period of his Bible revisions, he prayed in an otherwise exultant letter to Phelps, “Oh Lord God deliver us in thy due time from the little narrow prison almost as it were totel darkness of paper pen and ink and a crooked broken scattered and imperfect language.”24 Even after mystically translating the Book of Mormon and revising the Bible, Smith continued to plead with God for deliverance from fallen language.25 Six months into the KEP project, the day before his thirtieth birthday, Smith continued the theme, writing in his official diary, “O may God give me learning even Language and indo[w] me with qualifycations to magnify his name.”26 A few months later he wrote, “My Soul delights in reading the word of the Lord in the original and I am determined to persue the study of languages untill I shall become master of them if I am permitted to live long enough. [Or] at any rate, so long as I do live, I am determined to make this my object and with the blessing of God I shall succe[e]d to my sattisfaction.”27 Smith invested considerable emotional resources in grappling with the limits of human language. He was determined to overcome them. The Latter-day Saints joined with and supported their prophet in the struggle, proudly taking collections to support his translation activity.28 Many Saints personally 22

Philip Barlow, “Joseph Smith’s Revision of the Bible: Fraudulent, Pathologic, or Prophetic?” Harvard Theological Review 83:1 (January 1990): 45–64, and Kathleen Flake, “Translating Time: The Nature and Function of Joseph Smith’s Narrative Canon,” Journal of Religion 87 (October 2007): 497–527, are the two best interpretive treatments of Smith’s New Translation of the Bible. 23 “Old Testament Manuscript 1,” in Scott H. Faulring, Kent P. Jackson and Robert J. Mathews, Joseph Smith’s New Translation of the Bible: Original Manuscripts (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2004), 120–121 (Genesis 11). The Book of Mormon (Helaman 6:28) announced that Satan had directly orchestrated the plans to build the tower at Babel. 24 Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, comp. and ed. Dean Jessee, rev. ed. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2002), 287 (27 November 1832). Reprinted in Times and Seasons 5:19 (15 October 1844): 673. 25 Faulring, American Prophet’s Record, 91; Louis Zucker, “Joseph Smith as a Student of Hebrew,” Dialogue 3:2 (Summer 1968): 41–55. 26 Faulring, American Prophet’s Record, 91 (22 December 1835). 27 Faulring, American Prophet’s Record, 133 (17 February 1836, reprinted in Roberts, History of the Church, 2:396). 28 Brigham Young, “Recorder’s Office,” Times and Seasons 3:9 (1 March 1842): 715, and Brigham Young and Willard Richards, “Proclamation to the Saints in Nauvoo,” The Wasp 1:37 (14 January 1843): 3.


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embraced the pursuit of sacred language: inclusion in Smith’s Kirtland Hebrew school was a badge of honor, and even itinerant elders enthusiastically carried Hebrew primers on their missionary travels.29 Some even tried their hand at translations of Bible texts.30 This focus attracted proselytes and amused learned observers. The Anglican scholar Henry Caswall emblematically observed, with thinly veiled condescension, that the Mormons “consider the study of the Hebrew language to be a religious duty.”31 Early Latter-day Saints enjoyed a natural fraternity with the prophets of their Book of Mormon in their concerns over fallen language. The first author, Nephi, lamented his “weakness” in language, his failure to be “mighty in writing.” Moroni, the final writer, worried in an apostrophe to God that outsiders would “mock” the American scripture because “thou hast not made us mighty in writing.”32 Beyond such personal asides, Smith’s first scripture contained a powerful direct witness to the power of Babel. In Smith’s phrase, the Book of Mormon told the story of America’s “first settlement by a colony that came from the tower of Babel, at the confusion of languages.”33 Recounted in the Book of Ether, this epic narrative of the only people to escape Babel’s curse chronicles the history of the Jaredites “from the tower down until they were destroyed.”34 In this account, the eponymous patriarch Jared pleaded with his prophetic brother Moriancumer to “cry unto the Lord, that he will not confound us that we may not understand our words,” a wish God granted to this Moses for the New World, who according to Ether was the first person faithful enough to see the actual, physical hand of God. In the odd and multivalent phrase of Smith’s scripture, “Jared and his brother were not confounded,” and they migrated to America, their language intact.35 In fact, 29 Jan Shipps and John Welch, eds., The Journals of William E. McLellin: 1831– 1836 (Provo and Urbana: Brigham Young University Press and University of Illinois Press, 1994), 215, 219. 30 Brown, “Translator and Ghostwriter,” 55. See also “CX Psalm,” Times and Seasons 5:14 (1 August 1844): 600–601, and “Keys,” Times and Seasons 5:23 (15 December 1844): 748. 31 Henry Caswall, America and the American Church (London: J. G. & F. Rivington, 1839), 323. He and others made note of Mormon employment of the reasonably well-known Hebrew teacher Joshua Seixas. 32 2 Nephi 33:1, 11; Ether 12:23– 24. See also 1 Nephi 19:6. Moroni’s father Mormon confessed the limits of Nephite language itself in 3 Nephi 5:18. In the Bible revision (Moses 7:13), Enoch was similarly worried about a lack of verbal talent but was ultimately blessed that “all nations fear[ed] greatly, so powerful was the word of Enoch, and so great was the power of the language which God had given him.” 33 Joseph Smith, “Church History,” Times and Seasons 3:9 (1 March 1842): 709. Cf. Omni 1:22. 34 Ether 1:5. The Jaredite encounter with the tower is sufficiently important that it was highlighted in both the copyright notice and the “Testimony of Three Witnesses” in the first edition of the Book of Mormon (Palmyra, N.Y.: E. B. Grandin, 1830). 35 Ether 1:34– 39, 3:6–9. [Oliver Cowdery], “Rise of the Church, Letter VI,” Times and Seasons 2:11 (1 April 1841), 362, provides the name for Jared’s brother, which had been used to name the port from which the Jaredites migrated to America (Ether 2:13) but was not explicitly tied to the prophet in the Book of Mormon proper. These Jaredites would serve as a trope for sacred

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this Moriancumer had a supernatural ability, apparently related to God’s protection from Babel’s curse: in Moroni’s apostrophe to the Creator lamenting his weakness in writing, he said of the Jaredite prophet, “thou madest him that the things which he wrote were mighty even as thou art, unto the overpowering of man to read them.”36 For Moriancumer freedom from Babel imparted to his words a supernatural force, one he could use to maintain his ethnic community and overpower his readers. Beyond the Jaredites, the quest for linguistic purity represented a significant motif in the overall Book of Mormon narrative, from its characterization of mainline Christianity as the corrupter of the “plain and pure” language of the Bible that went “forth from the Jews in purity” to Apocalyptic writings sealed to “come forth in their purity” free from human corruption, to a sacred compass that would issue messages in “writing, which was plain to be read” if the Nephites were sufficiently faithful.37 The American scripture even seems to have sanctioned murder to the end of preserving ancient language in its pure state. Early in the story, the prophet-hero Nephi obeyed a divine command to murder his kinsman Laban, a powerful and inebriated merchant, in order to recover the “brass plates,” the ancient records of his people, “that we may preserve unto our children the language of our fathers.” The dutiful Nephi decapitated Laban, and the Nephite people maintained their language for a millennium.38 This point bears emphasizing: the concluding author Moroni compiled but did not need to translate the writings of the first author Nephi, despite ten centuries separating them, because the prophets taught the people in “all the language of [their] fathers,” which was the “language of the Egyptians.”39 The Mulekites, a third civilization in the New World that migrated when Nephi and his family did, demonstrated the risks of losing such ancestral records. According to the Book of Mormon, “their language had become corrupted” because they lacked records—they knew nothing of God and could not understand Nephite language despite a shared culture three or four centuries earlier.40 Though the brass plates Nephi stole from Laban filled other needs, the emphasis on the intrinsic importance of comprehensible, unadulterated language is striking.

records and textuality as their scripture passed from people to people, finally being assembled with the other plates to form the final Book of Mormon. 36 Ether 12:24. 37 1 Nephi 13:25, 14:23, 16:29. In Mosiah 24:4–7, a converted Lamanite king has the Nephite language taught throughout his country. As a testament to the power of Nephite Hebrew, his people almost immediately started to “wax great, and began to be a cunning and a wise people.” 38 1 Nephi 3:19; 4:14–16. Laban is identified as Nephi’s kinsman in 1 Nephi 5:16, although the nature of the relationship is not specified in the text. 39 Mosiah 1:2–4. 40 Omni 1:17.


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In his Old Testament revisions, Smith provided the ancient exemplar for such language-preserving records. In the text now termed the Book of Moses, Father Adam kept a “book of remembrance” that was “recorded in the language of Adam, for it was given unto as many as called upon God.” This first human scripture was used to teach children “to read and write, having a language which was pure and undefiled.” Adam’s book would be cherished generations later for imparting knowledge of lost ancestors: in the words of Enoch, “even the first of all we know, even Adam. For a book of remembrance we have written among us, according to the pattern given by the finger of God.”41 Sacred records encoded in the language of the Garden of Eden connected humanity to its first parent, emphasizing the familial and social scope of pure language. This emphasis on the capacity of language to tie the present to the past strongly frames the KEP. Though generally more implicit, in the GAEL interpretation of the character they called Zool, Phelps and Smith posited that the glyph hearkened “back to the beginning of Creation,” by a power invoked in a later “degree” as “the denomination of language.”42 In the sparse phrasing of GAEL, language mediated the connection to the beginning times. The same type of narrative surfaced in the canonized Egyptian scripture. Abraham there stated that certain “records have come into my hands,” much like an Adamic book of remembrance, “a chronology running back from myself to the beginning of the creation.”43 Essentially all the righteous peoples in Smith’s scriptures possessed such linguistic ties to those who had come before. Smith’s disciples would also have the opportunity to create Books of Remembrance of their own. From a church ledger recording their “patriarchal blessings” to Smith’s “Book of the Law of the Lord” to their temple records and official ecclesiastical history, Mormons created sacred records for their own progeny to read. Rank-and-file Mormons cherished this participation in the ancient tradition of memorials and the power of the written word. In this textual mimesis, they created for themselves a space in the flow of human history and safe passage to heavenly glory.44 41 Moses 6:5–6, 45– 46. Manuscript 1 for vv 5–6 has Moses “write with the finger of inspiration,” just as God would in vv 45–46, and in an echo of the encounter between Jesus and Moriancumer recorded in Ether 3. Manuscript 2 corrects it to the published “spirit of inspiration.” Faulring, et al., Joseph Smith’s New Translation, 97, 100, 608. 42 GAEL, 7, 14. The full gloss in the latter degree is “Sharing the denomination of language and through what descent they came and are to continue by promise.” See also the glosses for the composite Zub Zool on GAEL, 6, 14, 18, 22, which strongly emphasize continuity across time. 43 Abraham 1:28– 31. 44 These modern books of remembrance were modeled on the Biblical Book of Life. On the Book of Life in broader Anglo-American culture, see Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 30–32, 69–70, and Susan Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 163. On Smith’s Book

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Smith and Phelps were far from alone in their concern over the degradation of human language, though contemporary thinkers tended to have a more explicitly theological problem in mind.45 The strident restorationist Alexander Campbell (1788–1866) sought the “pure language” of Canaan, in contrast to the fallen language of Ashdod (the capital of biblical Philistine), a position he maintained throughout his career. For Campbell, “modern ecclesiastic and sectarian terminology” for Bible teachings and texts represented Ashdod, while intelligible, atheological language was the modern language of Canaan. (He was protesting Catholic and Calvinist theology, which he had earlier described as “the Babylonish or corrupt phraseology of the dark ages.”) In Campbell’s view, only by “calling Bible things by Bible words” could the truth of scripture find its way to the believing soul. The “supernatural ideas” of the biblical revelation, those unknowable by human experience, could never reach the believer’s soul without a reformation of theological language.46 To this end, Campbell revised and reprinted a composite edition of the New Testament from the independent translations of three Scottish scholars in 1826. Employing ideas similar to those espoused in Smith’s Book of Mormon, Campbell justified this new translation (to which he made brief but significant emendations and adjustments) by arguing that “a living language is continually changing,” and even authoritative, familiar texts are prone to “the cankering hand of time,” which “moulders” them “away.” Invoking the providence of God in making Hebrew and Greek “dead” to protect them from corruption, Campbell announced that “we have, in writing, all the Hebrew and Greek that is necessary to perpetuate to the end of time.” In the battle over the meaning and mutability of language, Campbell used his reverential view of the original writings of “the sacred penmen” to reject the King James Version, heavily contaminated in his view by formal theology.47

of the Law of the Lord, see Dean Jessee, comp. and ed., The Papers of Joseph Smith: Journal, 1832–1842 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1992), 440– 441 (23 August 1842) and Samuel Brown, “The ‘Beautiful Death’ in the Smith Family,” BYU Studies 45:4 (2006): 135, 137–138. On the Patriarchal Blessing Book as a Book of Remembrance, see H. Michael Marquardt, comp. and ed., Early Patriarchal Blessings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2007), esp. 12, 14–17, 39, 58, 71, 76, 87, 96, 99, 124, 162– 163, 186– 187. 45 Though there is no direct overlap, the seventeenth-century Anglo-European search for pure language freed from Babel’s curse is remarkably similar to Smith’s quest. See James Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes in England and France 1600–1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 9 –12. 46 Alexander Campbell, “A Restoration of the Ancient Order of Things,” Christian Baptist (2nd ed. revised, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1835) 2:11 (6 June 1825), 159. On Ashdod, see Nehemiah 13:24. 47 Alexander Campbell, ed., The Sacred Writing of the Apostles and Evangelists of Jesus Christ, Commonly Styled The New Testament. Translated from the Original Greek, by George Campbell, James MacKnight, and Philip Doddridge, Doctors of the Church of Scotland. With Prefaces to the Historical and Epistolary Books; and an Appendix, Containing Critical Notes and Various Translations of Difficult Passages (Bethany, Va.: Alexander Campbell, 1826), with three further


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He proposed these textual renovations of the English Bible, in his phrase, to “heal divisions and prevent debate among Christians.” 48 In his New Testament translation project, Campbell created a space for himself within a broader tradition of rejecting elite theology on the grounds that theologians had relied too much on isolated, ambiguous, or anachronistic words and phrases. Several of his peers took the suspicion of language’s corruption still further. Andrews Norton (1786 –1853) related in his 1833 Unitarian manifesto that important spiritual “truths cannot be expressed in human language.”49 Using the trope of superhuman beings to frame his concerns in a perhaps unwitting echo of Emanuel Swedenborg, Norton wrote that those concepts “with which the human understanding is conversant are all that can be expressed by words. If an angel have faculties of a different nature from those which we possess, he can make no use of our language to convey to our minds the results of their exercise.”50 Though Norton intended primarily to dispute Trinitarianism, he specifically chose to emphasize that reliance on the intricacies of language was doomed to failure. Human language, mired in human experience, would not permit comprehension of the eternal.51 Liberal Congregationalist Horace Bushnell (1802 – 1876) introduced his 1849 collection of three discourses (God in Christ) with a “Preliminary Dissertation on the Nature of Language as Related to Thought and Spirit.” He prefaced the sermons by commenting that “in the misuse or abuse of this

editions by 1835. This work became known popularly as “the Living Oracles,” though Campbell himself reserved that title for the original language texts: Cecil K. Thomas, Alexander Campbell and his New Version (St. Louis: Bethany, 1958), esp. 31, 59, 62, 67, 69, 120, 129. Campbell’s revisions were much more significant than those of Noah Webster, whose 1833 Common Version was a minor Victorian updating of the King James Version. Campbell’s discussion of “living languages” is from his “General Preface: An Apology for a New Translation,” on pp. 3– 10 of the 1835 fourth edition. 48 Alexander Campbell, Christian Baptism: With the Antecedents and Consequences (Bethany, Va.: Alexander Campbell, 1852), 20. 49 Andrews Norton, A Statement of Reasons for not Believing the Doctrines of Trinitarians (Cambridge: Brown, Shattuck, and Co., 1833), 114. The internationally famous deist Thomas Paine (1737–1809) also expressed considerable skepticism that truths about God could be communicated in any human language, an observation he intended as a harsh indictment of Christian scripture. See The Theological Works of Thomas Paine (Boston: Advocates of Common Sense, 1832), 38, 43–44. See also the discussion in E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 167. 50 Norton, Statement of Reasons, 113. On Swedenborg’s similar appraisal of this issue, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000), 208. 51 See discussion in Holifield, Theology in America, 201– 202.

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instrument [language], a great part of our religious difficulties have their spring.” According to Bushnell, the error of believing that this “instrument” was “infallible” or even “sufficient” underlay many errors of theology. Though he doubted whether pure human language had ever existed, Bushnell claimed regardless that the “history of Babel and the dispersion” proved “the virtual destruction of the one language of the race by a miracle.” This confounding curse was so central that Bushnell indicted the quest for a mother language as an attempt “to prove the Bible untrue,” a rejection of the permanence of the Babel miracle. Whatever else it taught, the Bible revealed the inherent fracture of language. After a prolonged historical review of scholarship on the origins of language, including that of his Yale tutor, Josiah Gibbs, Bushnell made his critical claim that philological theology, conducted by “one-word professor” theologians, was a doomed enterprise. The dependence of language on the internal states and personal histories of speakers and listeners ultimately precluded any conclusions of more than tentative significance.52 The philosopher-critic Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) expressed his own sensibilities about the limits of human language in his renowned first book Nature (1836), invoking general human frailty rather than Babel as the cause. “The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language . . . old words are perverted to stand for things which are not,” he wrote. In this fallen state, “words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections.”53 While Emerson intended to indict secular as well as religious thinkers in his naturophilic essay, he grounded this criticism in the drift of language from its original state of purity. (In a more religious vein, Emerson’s occasional muse Emanuel Swedenborg had famously announced that “human language . . . cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God.”54) Still further outside the mainstream, the United Society of Believers (Shakers) would reject the possibility that human words could communicate truth. Rejecting a Biblicism bereft of Spirit, Shaker leader Benjamin Seth Youngs (1774 – 1855) claimed that the Bible was “composed of letters, and letters are no more than signs, marks, or shadows of things, and not the very substance of the things which they signify.”55 While Emerson honored a language born

52 Horace Bushnell, God in Christ: Three Discourses Delivered at New Haven, Cambridge, and Andover, with a Preliminary Dissertation on Language (Hartford, Conn.: Brown and Parsons, 1849), 46– 50. 53 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature. Addresses, and Lectures ([1836] Boston: James Munroe, 1849), 27– 28. 54 Schmidt, Hearing Things, 208. 55 Benjamin S. Youngs, et al., The Testimony of Christ’s Second Appearing, 2nd ed. (Albany, N.Y.: E. and E. Hosford, 1810), 412, 605. See discussion in Holifield, Theology in America, 331.


39

of Nature and Youngs one of the Spirit, they could agree that ordinary words failed to communicate higher truths. Human language kept aspiring believers from eternal truth. The purported consequences of Babel’s curse varied sharply among these early American thinkers. For Norton, Bushnell, Youngs, and to a lesser extent Emerson, whatever the specifics of their religious affiliations, fallen language falsely supported the theology of orthodox Calvinism and estranged believers from spiritual truth. For Campbell, only the providentially dead Hebrew and Greek were spared language’s curse. This chorus of voices, however divergent in its conclusions, was clear: human language was imperfect, even irreparably damaged. Few believed pure language could be recovered; the differences generally rested in their approaches to circumventing its failings, whether poetry and Nature (Emerson), common-sense translation (Campbell), or ecstatic experience (Youngs). For some observers, the problem of fallen language not only muddied theology and divinity, it also supported the divisions of sectarianism, impeding both knowledge and human community. Bushnell blamed misuse of fallen language for “the infinite multiplications of opinion, the errors and sects and strifes of the Christian world,” much as did Alexander Campbell or Adam Clarke.56 Because language could not communicate spiritual truths certainly, many different views and denominations could arise, resulting in what Campbell’s associate Barton Stone referred to as the “Babel of confusion” of American Protestantism.57 Smith and his followers, ever attuned to interdenominational discord as a sign of God’s disfavor, agreed. Mormon writer Parley Pratt, in a military metaphor, referred to the Protestant world as “the plains of Babel.”58 Elder Erastus Snow wrote in the church organ that, as a consequence of Babel, “different nations sprang up in Idolatry, speaking different dialects, and as they had a partial knowledge of the true worship of God, which was had among the posterity of Shem in their native land; they, in their idolatrous condition counterfeited the true priesthood, and the religion of heaven.”59 This “counterfeit” religion was 56

Bushnell, God in Christ, 12–16, 40–46, 50. Bushnell responded to critics in his Christ in Theology (Hartford, Conn.: Brown and Parsons, 1851), persisting in his argument that language could only approximate religious truth. See also Campbell, Christian Baptism. See useful discussion of Campbellite millennialism in Richard Hughes and Leonard Allen, Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism, 1630– 1875 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 108–110. Clarke, Holy Bible, 1:87, took a longer-term view of Babel as a story about religious sectarianism. 57 Hughes and Allen, Illusions of Innocence, 109. 58 [Parley Pratt], “Manchester, May 10th, 1841,” Millennial Star 2:1 (1 May 1840): 9, reprinted in Times and Seasons 3:5 (1 January 1842): 646. 59 Erastus Snow, “On Priesthood,” Times and Seasons 2:19 (2 August 1841): 490.

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more generally a Mormon term for established Christianity. Snow here recapitulated the argument of the Book of Mormon: when language was lost, nations lapsed into religious apostasy and sectarianism. For Mormons, Babel stood for the bewildering pluralism of early national America, the disputing voices of American Protestantism. They did not have to look far for its effects—the early American Republic represented to many who lived within it a surfeit of change, disruption, and plural voices.60 The Latter-day Saints sought the contrary, a perfect unity, a quest reflected in the KEP. In the GAEL glyph meant to describe the celestial kingdom of heaven, Phelps and Smith proclaimed “the connection of attributes; many parts perfected, and compounded into one[.] Having been united; being united that which will be united.” Reflecting their integrative impulse, this glyph is a composite of Lish [supreme glory or divinity], Zi [woman or queen], ho e oop [prince], and Iota [seeing/eye] (fig. 2). In this pictogram of a royal couple seen (or seeing) together in divine glory was the unity, couched in familialgenealogical terms, that Smith and his followers earnestly sought.61 In fighting Babel, Smith struggled against its effects—a language that hindered communication and a religious landscape marred by disunion.

II. HIEROGLYPHS AND

THE

QUEST FOR PURE LANGUAGE

For Smith the antidote to Babel’s curse lay in part in his gift with the records of the ancient dead, encoded in their sacred script, hieroglyphs. The timing of Chandler’s visit could not have been more opportune for Mormonism’s translator and seer. A student of folk magic—with its talismans, parchments, and codes—in childhood and early adolescence, Smith had been acutely concerned with ancient Egyptiana since at least the 1820s, when he prepared his signature Book of Mormon, translated from gold plates “filled with engravings, in Egyptian characters” that Latter-day Saints denominated 60

Gordon S. Wood, “Evangelical America and Early Mormonism,” New York History 61 (October 1980): 360–386, describes religious turmoil; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, 4th ed., 2 vols. (New York: J. & H. G. Langley, 1841), esp. 2:105–106, provides a contemporary European view of the disorientation of antebellum American culture. Charles Sellers’s The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815– 1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) is a standard summary of economic dislocations for the period, though Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815– 1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) includes a sustained response to Sellers. 61 GAEL, 23. The meaning of Lish is not entirely certain. Compounded with the particle from the name of God (Ah, as in Ahman), Lish represents a glorious or supreme being elsewhere in GAEL (3, 9, 17, 21), though the distinction from God’s identity is not certain, since in one glyph (Phah ah), ah appears to be a comparative or superlative (GAEL, 9, 13, 17). If this is the case, Lish would refer to a divine being. Whether Lish represents divinity or glory more generically does not affect my interpretation of Lish Zi ho e oop Iota.


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Fig. 2. Gloss for Lish Zi ho e oop Iota, a composite glyph representing heaven as a royal couple in the presence of God. Courtesy Church History Library, # IRI.

“Reformed” or “short-hand” Egyptian.62 This American scripture revealed that Smith was the prophetic namesake of the biblical patriarch Joseph of Egypt, a connection he strengthened by assuming Joseph’s Egyptian title— Zaphnathpaaneah—as an occasional nom-de-plume.63 Though he had completed the Book of Mormon and Bible by June 1835, Smith had not yet learned Hebrew or Greek. Of his gold plates only a small transcript of hieroglyphs now termed the Caractors document remained.64 In Chandler’s 62 On folk magic, see Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1987); Rodger I. Anderson, Joseph Smith’s New York Reputation Reexamined (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1990), and the several papers in BYU Studies 24:4 (Fall 1984) devoted to the topic. The general historical context is aptly summarized in Alan Taylor, “The Early Republic’s Supernatural Economy,” American Quarterly 38:1 (Spring 1986): 6 –34, and “Rediscovering the Context of Joseph Smith’s Treasure Seeking,” Dialogue 19:4 (Winter 1986): 18– 28. See also Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), and Herbert Leventhal, In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1976). On the language of the Book of Mormon, the text itself uses the name “reformed Egyptian” in Mormon 9:32. See also Joseph Smith, “Church History,” Times and Seasons 3:8 (15 February 1842): 707. Phelps used “short-hand” in a 15 January 1831 letter printed in Eber D. Howe, History of Mormonism (Painesville, Ohio: by the author, 1840), 273. 63 2 Nephi 3:14–20. See expansion of this theme in William Phelps, “The Tribe of Joseph,” The Evening and the Morning Star 1:6 (November 1832): 41. Zaphnathpaaneah, “Parable of the Lame Boy and the Blind Horse,” Nauvoo Neighbor 1:9 (28 June 1843) is a letter defending Smith’s real estate practices that is difficult to attribute to anyone but Smith or his ghostwriters. This name (from Genesis 41:45) saw invocation among Masons as well as mainline Christians in a variety of fanciful interpretations dating at least from Jerome, who believed it meant “savior of the world.” The Book of Mormon (Ether 13:6– 8) uses the Joseph in Egypt story as a “type” to explain the founding of a New Jerusalem in America, invoking a parallel between Egypt and ancient America. 64 This document, apparently one Smith’s financier showed to academic classicists in 1828, was transferred to David Whitmer with a manuscript of the Book of Mormon and ultimately came into possession of the then –Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It is reproduced in

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CHURCH HISTORY

papyri Smith finally possessed an artifact of uncontested Egyptian hieroglyphs, one he proudly displayed and studied up until his death, filling at least in part the lacuna left by the missing gold plates.65 The continuity between the missing and the new hieroglyphic relics comes clear in Oliver Cowdery’s proud announcement that certain Book of Mormon “characters” (presumably the Caractors document) were “like those of the writings” on the funerary papyri. In broad agreement with Cowdery, Phelps announced in an 1835 letter to his wife that the papyri would “make a good witness for the Book of Mormon.”66 As Smith and his followers moved beyond folk magic, stung by the stigmatization of the occult by neighbors and critics, the papyri imparted substance to their religion making, even as they opened new metaphysical vistas. The papyri and their glyphs would become important marks of continuity in the development of Smith’s religion. The national origin of these papyri mattered a great deal. Though images of Egypt occasionally appeared on the biblical stage of colonial America (often as the enemy—Benjamin Franklin declared English rule “Egyptian Slavery”), American fascination with Egypt expanded considerably in the aftermath of Napoleon’s looting of Egyptian antiquities (1798 – 1801). Antebellum America at times seemed to hum with Egyptomania—mummy teas and medicinal nostrums, fictional treatments of resurrected mummies, touring mummy exhibits, the metaphysical weight of the Rosetta stone, omnipresent images of the Nile, even an imaginative situation for race and slavery all partook of this fascination with things Egyptian.67 For many

Brigham H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1930), 1:106. The document had been made into placards by 1844 as a celebration of Smith’s abilities as a translator of hieroglyphs: see Stanley B. Kimball, “The Anthon Transcript: People, Primary Sources, and Problems,” BYU Studies 10:3 (Spring 1970): 325– 352. 65 On this point, his proud displays in the fall of 1835 of the papyri as “the ancient reccords in my possession” or “the records of antiquity,” several times a week for months, suggest the role these relics played: see Faulring, American Prophet’s Record, 36, 39– 40, 42, 65, 67, 69, 72, 75, 77–78, 90, 91, 99, 127– 128, 132– 133. 66 Cowdery, “Egyptian Mummies,” 235; Phelps’s letter of 19–20 July 1835 was reprinted in Bruce A. Van Orden, ed., “Writing to Zion: the William W. Phelps Kirtland Letters (1835– 1836),” BYU Studies 33:3 (1993): 556. 67 Moshe Davis, “The Holy Land Idea in American Spiritual History,” in With Eyes Toward Zion: Scholars Colloquium on America-Holy Land Studies, ed. Moshe Davis (New York: Arno, 1977), 4 –5, citing a proposed seal for the United States in Franklin’s hand. Early Americans named their cities for Egyptian predecessors and compared their mightiest rivers to the Nile: John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), 72. For broader context, see Jasmine Day, The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-Speaking World (London: Routledge, 2006), 3, and sources therein cited. Scott Trafton, Egypt Land: Race and NineteenthCentury American Egyptomania (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), explores the complex paradoxes of America’s situation of itself within ancient history.


43

nineteenth-century Americans, Egypt represented a crucial source of human culture and civilization, particularly though not exclusively in its intersections with ancient biblical culture. Egypt was the source of writing, the arts, astronomy, and magic.68 Masons and others sought wisdom from the priest-god Hermes (Thoth), while various writers saw Egypt as one important source of ancient American civilization, citing Native mummies, Mesoamerican petroglyphs, and other artifacts that seemed reminiscent of Egypt.69 Applying humanity’s beginnings to their individual ends, antebellum Americans modeled their death culture on Egypt, claiming that its death emphasis, indeed its dead themselves (the astonishingly preserved mummies that began to arrive in the 1820s), represented humanity’s ancient response to the eternal problem. America’s cemeteries, particularly in the rural movement of the 1830s and 1840s, made this claim explicit. The contemporary historian of the Forest Hills cemetery reported that “Egyptian architecture is essentially the architecture of the grave . . . it seems particularly adapted to the abode of the dead.”70 68 Travel writing about Egypt enjoyed significant popularity in this period: John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (New York: Harper, 1837); James Ewing Cooley, The American in Egypt: With Rambles through Arabia Petraea and the Holy Land (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1843), from which Mormons reprinted sections in “Egyptian Mummies,” The Wasp 1:21 (10 September 1842): 4. Reprints of circulating essays in Mormon newspapers reflect some of this curiosity about Egypt: “Egyptian Antiquities,” Times and Seasons 3:13 (2 May 1842): 774, reprinted in The Wasp 1:4 (7 May 1842): 3. 69 On Hermes and Masons, see Catherine Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 38, 125, 134. Michael Russell, View of Ancient and Modern Egypt (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1831), 194–195, provides a contemporary situation of Hermes in theories of ancient Egypt. Charles Rollin’s (1661–1741) Ancient History ([1730–1738] New York: Robert Carter, 1844), an eighteenth-century reference Smith donated to the Nauvoo Library, also mentions Hermes in these terms (2nd ed., 1:65, 79, 119). On Egyptians in early America, see Robert Wauchope, Lost Tribes & Sunken Continents: Myth and Method in the Study of American Indians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 7 –27; Trollope, Domestic Manners, 219; Priest, American Antiquities, 125; and the description of Thomas Ashe’s travels in Angelo I. George, Mummies, Catacombs, and Mammoth Cave (Louisville, Ky.: George Publishing, 1994). Mormons accepted these beliefs: [Joseph Smith], “A Catacomb of Mummies Found in Kentucky,” Times and Seasons 3:13 (2 May 1842): 781 –782. 70 Stanley French, “The Cemetery as Cultural Institution: The Establishment of Mount Auburn and the ‘Rural Cemetery’ Movement,” in Death in America, ed. David Stannard (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), 83, citing Anon., Forest Hills Cemetery: Its Establishment, Progress, Scenery, Monuments, etc. (Roxbury, Mass.: John Backup, 1855), 79– 80. Charles Buck, Theological Dictionary (Philadelphia: Edwin T. Scott, 1823), 194; Douglas Davies, The Mormon Culture of Salvation (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2000), 101–102; James Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830– 1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 170; Robert Wells, Facing the “King of Terrors”: Death and Society in an American Community, 1750– 1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 121–122. On the cultural power of death in the period, see Brown, “Beautiful Death,” and Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996).

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In antebellum America, Egypt (Ah meh strah according to the KEP) commanded interest for its mummies and towering funerary monuments. The language of Egypt would for some eclipse even those impressive monuments of ancient civilization.71 Egyptian was central to Smith’s and Phelps’s quest for pure language and the broader context of the philological exertions of the KEP. Though Jean-Francois Champollion (1790 – 1832) had deciphered the Rosetta stone by 1822, culture changed slowly, and the mystique of those inscrutable pictograms persisted—if increasingly metaphorically—inspiring the literati of the American Renaissance, Emerson and his Transcendentalist peers, and a host of other observers. Champollion’s phonetic Egyptian was slow to find traction because hieroglyphs had so long been understood to function as secret pictographic codes rather than an alphabetic system.72 Though often attributed to the German Jesuit Johannes Kircher (1602– 1680), by the nineteenth century this belief had moved well beyond the esoteric literature from which it sprang.73 Noah Webster (1758 – 1843), defining the term for his compatriots in 1828, explained: In antiquity, a sacred character; a mystical character or symbol, used in writings and inscriptions, particularly by the Egyptians, as signs of sacred, divine, or supernatural things. The hieroglyphics were figures of animals, parts of the human body, mechanical instruments, &c., which contained a meaning known only to kings and priests. It is supposed they were used to vail morality, politics, &c., from vulgar eyes.74 William Phelps among others imbibed this tradition of hieroglyphs as secret code as early as an Independence Day celebration two years before the mummies arrived. Phelps then claimed that the “Egyptians could astonish the universe . . . concealing their arts in mystical characters or hieroglyphics,” a position Cowdery also publicly espoused.75 Few voices disputed the general wisdom that hieroglyphs concealed ancient mysteries. In this tradition an aspect of the esoteric quests of hermeticism entered the mainstream as accepted truth. Without ever opening the Kabbalistic Zohar or the hermetic Divine Pymander, the devoted student could, through Egyptian 71

Ah meh strah is translated on GAEL, 6. Professional scholars generally understood the significance of Champollion’s findings, as in the anonymous “Egyptian Antiquities,” North American Review 29 (October 1829): 361 –388, esp. 370–371. 73 Sampson Reed is the most famous of the educated objectors to Champollion’s solution: Irwin, American Hieroglyphics, 8– 9. Kircher influenced Western thinking on hieroglyphics for centuries via his Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652). See Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes, 13. 74 Noah Webster, American Dictionary of the English Language (New York: S. Converse, 1828), s.v. “hieroglyphic.” 75 W. W. Phelps, “Reflections for the Fourth of July, 1834,” The Evening and the Morning Star 2:22 (July 1834): 173. See also Cowdery, “Egyptian Mummies,” 235, amplified in “Egyptian Antiquities,” The Wasp 1:4 (7 May 1842): 3, and Times and Seasons 3:13 (2 May 1842): 774. 72


45

hieroglyphs, approximate the awesome power of holy words.76 Through general hieroglyphic culture, untrained believers could participate in the popular and influential themes of metaphysical correspondence and the mystical power of language that animated their more learned and esoteric compatriots.77 Though only the very rare Mormon was an actual Kabbalist, most of them saw hieroglyphs as confirmation of the ancient mysteries Smith could discover, wedded to the records of the dead.78 Wilford Woodruff, touring the British Museum on an evangelizing mission in 1840, emblematically admired the papyrus collection “more . . . than any thing” else, realizing that they contained “many glorious things Sacred & historical concerning the early ages of the world Abram & the Prophets &c.,” if only they could be “translated.”79 Central to the mystique of hieroglyphs was their pictographic nature. As no phonetic language could, these signs represented actual objects in Nature.80 Understanding hieroglyphs as pictographic ciphers for the mysteries of human origin and religion provides the most immediate context for understanding Phelps’s and Smith’s Egyptian grammar project. The KEP nearly overflow with creative pictographic interpretations of Egyptian characters. As the simplest example, a dot represents the human eye (Iota, “the eye or to see or sight”), while similar references to vision in association with dots or circles are scattered throughout the manuscripts, and a “compound” of Iota looks like an eye with a horizontal lash.81 Geographic 76 The quest for sacred language demonstrates the difficulty in tying Smith directly to hermetic texts when the tenets of the secret quest were easily accessible in cultural commonplaces about the meaning of hieroglyphs. The failure to appreciate the broader dissemination of these sensibilities mars the standard treatment of Mormonism and hermeticism: John Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: the Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. 28, 195–197, 212. The narrower treatment of Lance Owens, “Joseph Smith and Kabbalah: The Occult Connection,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 27:3 (Fall 1994): 117–194 is similarly flawed. 77 Albanese, Republic of Mind and Spirit, 6, 13–6, 26–27, 141, 147, 164; Quinn, Magic World View, 151– 152. 78 The European Jewish proselyte Alexander Neibaur is the best-known Latter-day Saint to have explicitly quoted Kabbalistic writings: “The Jews,” Times and Seasons 4:14 (1 June 1843): 220– 222 and 4:15 (15 June 1843): 233–234. Owens’s (“Occult Connection”) attempt to extend formal Kabbalism in early Mormonism moves well beyond the documentary evidence. 79 Kenney, ed., Woodruff Journal, 1:535, 19 October 1840. In a similar vein, Mormon convert William Rowley believed the Book of Abraham was an “argument . . . sufficient to convince any that are candid, that the God of heaven must be in our midst”: “Letter from William Rowley,” Times and Seasons 3:22 (15 September 1842): 925. 80 Hebrew, Chinese, and Mesoamerican languages were grouped with Egyptian as hieroglyphic by most observers: “Progress of Ethnology, continued,” Nauvoo Neighbor 1:32 (6 December 1843), and Russell, Ancient and Modern Egypt, 178, 185. Such beliefs about Chinese date at least to Francis Bacon: Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes, 16. Moses Stuart’s Hebrew primer, one the Latter-day Saints used in their Kirtland Hebrew School, strongly emphasized the pictographic nature of the Hebrew alphabet: Grammar of the Hebrew Language (Andover: Flagg & Gould, 1831), 2. 81 EA, 1 and GAEL, 2.

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Fig. 3. Gloss for Ho hah oop and its constituent glyph Jah ni hah (left leg of the stick figure), representing Christ the “intercessor” as God’s legate. Courtesy Church History Library, #IRI.

interpretations are also represented in a convex arc translated as the earth’s horizon (Sue, “the whole earth” and by extension “the whole of anything”) or a concave arc as its antipodes (Toan tau ee tahee tahee toues, “under the sun; under heaven; downward . . . going down into the grave; going down into misery ¼ even Hell”).82 Many of the KEP glyphs are semantic and syntactic composites of simpler glyphs, evincing a combinative pictography. A stick figure (Ho hah oop) represents Jesus, an “intercessor”; his left leg is the glyph for delegation (Jah-ni-hah) (fig. 3), anticipating the Abraham account of a Jesus chosen as God’s legate to earth in the cosmological drama.83 The glyph for Kiahbroam appears to be a combination of the character for Zub Zool oan (“first man or father of fathers”) with the eye (ki) and a horizon-determining Sue. Thus the composite glyph meant “a father of many nations.” There seems to be implicit within this gloss the image of Abraham seeing his posterity and thereby comprehending the earth.84 In many cases, Phelps’s and Smith’s interpretations combined physical and metaphorical meanings, as the glyph Zi, which means both “upright” (it looks like an upside-down “T”) and “modest and chaste being taught most perfectly.”85 The identical glyph is later transcribed as Zub, extending another pictographic interpretation, this time vertical ascent: “leading up or to: the time for going up to the altar to worship; going up before the Lord[;] being caught up” (fig. 4).86 82

GAEL, 5, 14. GAEL, 31. Jah-ni-hah represented “one who was the second person in authority.” Cf. Abraham 3:24. 84 GAEL, 3, 5. 85 GAEL, 4, 9. 86 GAEL, 6. Though the evidence of a direct connection between Smith and the Swedish mystic is not certain, this close attention to the physical shape of glyphs recalls Swedenborg’s attention to 83


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Fig. 4. Gloss for Zub, a metaphorical reading of the vertical line as heaven-directed worship. Courtesy Church History Library, #IRI.

The funerary vignettes within the Chandler papyri confirmed the connection between pictures and objects. Smith offered interpretations of these vignettes, published in the church organ as “Fac-similes” (the name by which modern Latter-day Saints know them), similar to the approach within the KEP. Circulating in some respects as published predecessors to the anticipated Egyptian Grammar, these vignettes spanned the hieroglyphic project and the ultimate Book of Abraham. These vignettes— “the figures at the beginning” of the official Book of Abraham—were the very definition of hieroglyphs, pictures telling sacred stories.87 In support of this project, the Book of Abraham would reveal an ancient name— Rahleenos—for hieroglyphs themselves.88 The Latter-day Saints delighted in the circulation of these facsimiles within the exchange papers, even as they battled with critics who mocked their prophet’s interpretations.89 In their visual, material interpretations of the glyphs on their papyri, Phelps

“the copious meanings hidden in ‘the very flexures and curvatures’ of the Hebrew letters”: Schmidt, Hearing Things, 208. 87 Abraham 1:14. The relationship between KEP, the facsimile interpretations, and the Book of Abraham is fluid and disputed. On the one hand critics argue that the KEP represent a stylized draft of the Book of Abraham. On the other hand, apologists argue that the KEP are entirely separate from Smith’s Book of Abraham. Regardless of the status of direct textual relationships, all these documents reflect a single interpretive framework. The facsimiles are published in Times and Seasons 3:9 (1 March 1842): 703; 3:10 (15 March 1842): 722a; 3:14 (16 May 1842): 783–784. A variety of words present in the facsimiles are not found in the KEP (for example, Rahleenos, Shagreel, Olishem, Shulem, Olimlah), while others are found in both, if with sometimes varying meaning (for example, Oliblish, Enish-go-on-dosh, Kae-e-vanrash, Jah-oheh, Flo-eese). 88 Abraham 1:14; there is some uncertainty as to whether the first letter should be “K” or “R” in the KEPA manuscripts. I have elected to use the published variant. 89 On the circulation of the facsimiles in other papers, see Times and Seasons 3:14 (16 May 1842): 790. See also the proud reprint from the New York Herald in “The Mormons—A Leaf From Joe Smith,” Times and Seasons 3:13 (2 May 1842): 773–774. On disputes, see “A Scared Editor,” The Wasp 1:2 (23 April 1842): 3, in which Smith’s younger brother William responded to allegations that the facsimiles proved Mormon intentions to perform human sacrifice by indicating that the vignette demonstrated their critics “laughing at the calamity they have brought upon their sool [souls].”

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and Smith emphasized the strict correspondence of primal languages and objects in Nature, mediated through their conception of ancient pictography. In this respect they differed little from Bushnell and particularly Emerson, who enthusiastically appropriated hieroglyphs as figures for primal language.90 In Nature, Emerson argued that the use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation. Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance.91 Though Emerson had a broader project in mind, he was proposing something about language as well as about Nature.92 Words in their originals, the “roots” extending into “outer creation,” held the secrets to inner states, supernatural wisdom and, perhaps, the origins of humanity. In the same essay, Emerson argued, “As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols. The same symbols are found to make the original elements of all languages.”93 Though Emerson’s sensibilities about art affected his phrasing, he believed that physical artifacts and natural phenomena provided the necessary context for pictograms, the “original elements” from which language later fell into corruption. Elsewhere Emerson had shown his intellectual debt to the French Catholic Swedenborgian Guillaume Oegger, reprinting his claim that “material objects are necessarily kinds of scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation to their first origin; in other words, visible nature must have a spiritual and a moral side.”94 By conflating idealized words with the bare essence of physical existence, Emerson proposed a transformative language based in deep reality. Something like this is the implicit argument of Phelps and Smith in the KEP. Horace Bushnell, more concerned with spoken than written language, believed as early as 1839 that “the whole outward world” was “analogical to thought and truth,” an idea he extended in 1849 and 1851, claiming that “all the terms in language, which are devoted to spiritual and intellectual uses, have a physical or outward sign underlying their import.” In his 90

Irwin, American Hieroglyphics, 3– 13, 28. Emerson, Nature, 23. See discussion in Irwin, American Hieroglyphics, 12. 92 Holifield, Theology in America, 458– 459; Paul K. Conkin, The Uneasy Center: Reformed Christianity in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 236. 93 Emerson, Nature, 27. 94 Irwin, American Hieroglyphics, 12, citing Emerson’s use of Oegger’s Le Vrai Messie (Paris, 1829), to which many credit his inspiration for Nature. 91


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wide-ranging “Dissertation on Language,” Bushnell argued that language, including both words and grammar broadly conceived, derived from sensation, the body, and space.95 Less rigorous thinkers agreed that hieroglyphs, as pictograms, provided the correlation between object and word. Scottish minister Michael Russell, whose popular history of Egypt made its way into the library near Joseph Smith’s New York home, wrote at length on the nature of hieroglyphs as the first correspondence between language and nature. He argued that though Egyptian writing seemed inferior to classical Greek poetry, it presented a special gift to nineteenth-century Christians—the system of hieroglyphs. Russell maintained that such glyphs were “common to the whole human race,” explaining that “in the infancy of society, all communication not strictly verbal is carried on through the medium of picture-writing.”96 The more plebeian Josiah Priest—a consistent favorite of Mormons and their neighbors—advertised a similar belief in his fanciful and popular treatment of American antiquities. Priest reprinted in reverential terms Constantine Rafinesque’s (1783 – 1840) description of Mesoamerican glyphs: “these physical emblems are so natural and obvious, that they are sometimes found among many of the ancient alphabets.”97 Priest’s major goal was to prove a Near Eastern origin for America’s ancient culture. In the pictographic and universalizing power of glyphs he found the evidence he needed. Hieroglyphs promised one probable answer to the antebellum quest for the origins of language, a fascination that extended from the common public to some practitioners of the nascent scholarship of historical linguistics. Though 95 Holifield, Theology in America, 458–459, quoting “Revelation,” an unpublished manuscript; Bushnell, God in Christ, 22–25. Harold Durfee, “Language and Religion: Horace Bushnell and Rowland G. Hazard,” American Quarterly 5:1 (Spring 1953): 57–70, is a dated but useful presentation of these themes. 96 Russell, Ancient and Modern Egypt, 175– 176; and Robert Paul, “Joseph Smith and the Manchester (New York) Library,” BYU Studies 22:3 (Summer 1982), 333–356. Smith had left New York by the time the volume arrived at the local library. Its presence there indicates the penetration of the work into antebellum New York rather than a specific textual encounter. 97 Priest, American Antiquities, 121, reprinting a February 1832 letter of Rafinesque to Champollion regarding Palenque glyphs and the Lybian alphabet. Rafinesque was the popularizer of the strange and heavily pictographic Wallam-Olum (also known as Walam Olum), which he first published in his 1836 initial volume of The American Nations (Philadelphia: by the author), 121– 161. See Charles Boewe, “A Note on Rafinesque, the Walam Olum, the Book of Mormon, and the Mayan Glyphs,” Numen 32:1 (July 1985): 101– 113. Though unfamiliar with Rafinesque, Mormons read Priest’s works with gusto, one devoted Mormon attributing his conversion to reading American Antiquities (Eugene England, ed., “George Laub’s Nauvoo Journal,” BYU Studies 18:2 [Winter 1978]: 155), while others used the book in public proselytizing work as proof of the validity of the Book of Mormon: Charles Wandell, “Dear Brethren,” Times and Seasons 2:22 (15 September 1841): 545, or Charles Thompson, “Evidences in Proof of the Book of Mormon,” Times and Seasons 3:5 (1 January 1842): 640– 644. On Priest’s general popularity, see De Villo Sloan, “The Crimsoned Hills of Onondaga: Josiah Priest’s hallucinatory epic,” Journal of Popular Culture 36:1 (August 2002): 86– 104.

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a variety of scholars (and their academic societies) had cooled in their pursuit of the Ur-language by the nineteenth century, others continued to pursue scientific and religious evidence of the original language.98 Bushnell, siding with the majority of scholars, found the pursuit absurd, though he based his argument on the biblical authority of the curse of Babel. On the other hand, Presbyterian Samuel Miller (1769– 1850), in his pious Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, proudly hailed James Burnett, Lord Monboddo’s (1714 – 1799) somewhat mystical conclusion that all languages derived from Egyptian, of which Sanskrit was the purest modern remnant.99 Phelps and Smith clearly added their voices to a broader chorus. By imagining new pictograms in Egyptian characters, these founding Mormons thereby maintained that they had gained direct access to primal language. The Chandler papyri provided for them a view of the time when words possessed an almost physical substance. This was the power Phelps and Smith had publicly sought for years. Unsullied by Babel, such a language could unlock the mysteries of the ages and, perhaps, even transform society on the basis of a pure and reliable language for humanity.100 The hieroglyphic hermeneutic is critical to comprehending what Phelps and Smith understood of their Egyptian project and points to the mystical correspondence that supported the harmonies Smith sought.101 Smith’s quest had repercussions for his followers. Papyri and mummies, the remains of those who had lived and breathed in the time of the patriarchs, validated the Mormon quest to recover ancient Christianity as it extended to them the respectability of classical scholarship. While it made Smith’s prophethood more real for his followers, it also provided a compelling proof they could display to outsiders.102 Wilford Woodruff, on returning to Kirtland after a proselytizing tour, visited the new temple, where he “visited the upper rooms & there viewed four Egyptian Mumies & also the Book of 98 Irwin, American Hieroglyphics, 49. The Linguistic Society of Paris and Saussure both made strong pronouncements against the quest for original language. The Germans Johann Christoph Adelung (1732–1806) and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) made similar arguments, as Bushnell noted in God in Christ, 16. On earlier (sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries) pursuit of this Ur-language, see Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes, 13–15. 99 A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: T. and J. Swords, 1803), 2:122. Burnett was a famous philologist and philosopher. Miller cites Burnett’s Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1773– 1792). His Antient Metaphysics (1779– 1799), 4:322–323, is more commonly cited in support of his belief that Egyptian is the primal language. 100 Swedenborg had also believed as much: Schmidt, Hearing Things, 209– 211. 101 Though there is no direct connection, Elizabethan scholar John Dee’s (1527–1609) language of Enoch warrants mention. Pursuing a more ambitious and mystical project, Dee proposed a language purer than that available to humanity: D. E. Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 102 Joseph Smith also took great pride in his linguistic prowess: Brown, “Translator and Ghostwriter,” 37, 41–42, 62.

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Abram Written by his own hand & not ownly the hieroglyphicks but also many figures that this precious treasure Contains are Calculated to make a lasting impression upon the mind which is not to be erased.”103 As the Book of Abraham was being prepared for publication a half-decade later, Woodruff announced with great pride, “Truly the Lord has raised up Joseph the Seer of the seed of Abraham out of the loins of ancient Joseph, & is now clothing him with mighty power & wisdom & knowledge. . . . The Lord is Blessing Joseph with Power to reveal the mysteries of the kingdom of God; to translate through the urim & Thummim Ancient records & Hyeroglyphics as old as Abraham or Adam.”104 An encounter with an outsider helps to frame the Mormon experience of their prophet-translator. In 1842 Henry Caswall, the Anglican scholar who had watched Mormonism for several years, traveled to Nauvoo with an antique Greek Psalter intending to dupe Smith. On his arrival, a Latter-day Saint informed Caswall that he “had brought it to the right place to get it interpreted, for that none on earth but the Lord’s prophet could explain it, or unfold its real antiquity and value.” Another described for him Smith’s “remarkable Egyptian curiosities” and urged the learned visitor to inspect them. When Caswall informed Mormons of his plans to take the Psalter to outside scholars, one “answered with a sneer, that the Lord had chosen the weak things of the world to confound the mighty; that he had made foolish the wisdom of this world; and that I ought to thank Providence for having brought me to Nauvoo, where the hidden things of darkness could be revealed by divine power.”105 The hieroglyphic project boosted Mormon pride as it reassured them that their access to ancient texts was more secure than that of scholars. Ultimately, in Smith’s revelation by “divine power” of “hidden things,” mystical harmonies would come to encompass far more than the language beyond language.

III. PRIMORDIAL EDEN

AND THE

FUTURE PARADISE

For many students of language’s history, the primal language of Eden lurked behind Egyptian hieroglyphs. For these thinkers, Adam’s naming of animals 103

Kenney, ed., Woodruff Journal, 1: 107, 25 November 1836. Kenney, ed., Woodruff Journal, 2: 155, 19 February 1842. 105 Henry Caswall, The City of the Mormons; or, Three Days at Nauvoo, in 1842 (London: J. G. & F. Rivington, 1842), 5, 19–21, 24, 28– 29, 34–37, 43. Caswall’s account of Smith’s characterization of the Greek Psalter is a near-perfect description of the GAEL, suggesting the possibility that he saw the document or that Smith saw the Psalter as a parallel to his GAEL. The fact that Smith by then knew some Greek makes Caswall’s argument somewhat suspect; Mormons angrily denied Caswall’s account in their church organ. See Brown, “Translator and Ghostwriter,” 39– 40. John A. Clark, Gleanings by the Way (Philadelphia: W. J. & J. K. Simon, 1842), 292, also noted the importance of mystical translations to Latter-day Saint confidence about their religious authority. 104

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at Eden (Genesis 2:19 – 20) represented both the creation of language and the archetype of the sacred correspondence between divine language and physical reality.106 Merging the spoken word with the pictogram, Josiah Priest claimed that the names bestowed by Adam on animals arose necessarily from their physical appearance.107 Adam Clarke had argued in a similar vein that Adam’s names arose from “an intimate knowledge of the nature and properties of each creature.”108 Even Horace Bushnell left open the possibility that such names could in fact reflect the central reality of a being.109 Less wedded than his peers to biblical texts, Emerson replaced Adam’s archetypal words in the Garden with his pictograms and poetic words in primal Nature. Where others invoked snippets of Bible text, increasingly obsolescent scholarship, and commonplaces about pictograms in their pursuit of language’s origins, Joseph Smith actually believed he could recover the language of Eden. When his earliest disciples performed the ecstatic act of glossolalia, he often told them they were speaking the “pure Adamic language, that which was spoken in the garden of Eden.”110 The Latter-day Saints did not hide this belief from outsiders. According to their notorious critic Eber D. Howe, the early Mormons “professed to believe that these ‘tongues’ were the same which were ‘confounded’ at the building of Babel.”111 Where others (like some early Methodists, Quakers, Shakers, and a few Scottish Presbyterian revivalists) saw the recapitulation of a New Testament miracle of Pentecost, in Mormon glossolalia Smith espied further connection to the language spoken by the first humans.112 In the efflorescence of religious power he superintended, a familiar biblical charisma became a conduit to the primordium. In their interpretations (English-language exhortations or hymns pronounced by another believer after an act of glossolalia) of the ecstatic syllables, his followers could miraculously decode 106

Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes, 9 –10. He also believed that Adamic had persisted down to Noah and that the names for Noah’s sons were “descriptive prospectively, of their several destinies in the earth”: Priest, American Antiquities, 14, 19. 108 Clarke, Holy Bible, 1:43. 109 Bushnell, God in Christ, 34. 110 See Lee Copeland, “Speaking in Tongues in the Restoration Churches,” Dialogue 24:1 (Spring 1991): 20–23, for a brief summary of Mormon glossolalia. “History of Brigham Young,” Millennial Star 25:28 (11 July 1863): 439; “In Memoriam,” Contributor 3:5 (February 1882); and Edward Partridge, “Dear Friends and Neighbors,” Messenger and Advocate 1:4 (January 1835): 60. Smith and his followers also associated indigenous languages with glossolalia; though the details are beyond the scope of this paper, I explore in chapter 4 of my In Heaven as it Is on Earth the associations between Native peoples and Eden in early Mormon thought. 111 E. D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed (Painesville, Ohio: by the author, 1834), 133. 112 Schmidt, Hearing Things, 201–202. Though other enthusiasts did see glossolalia as speaking the language of angels, few were so explicitly Adamic in focus. 107


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that first language, much as their prophet and seer. On a more personal level they could transform themselves through this language beyond languages.113 Smith actually employed this Adamic language on several occasions to reveal sacred place names on the American frontier (Adam-ondi-Ahman, Zomar), new names for God, and a sacred name for seerstones (Gazelem), one he drew reflexively to himself as the American Seer.114 In a little-known revelation, Smith identified the Adamic name for angels (Anglo-man), as well as God (Ahman), Jesus (Son-Ahman), and humans (Sons-Ahman).115 Tying Adam’s language into his own religion-making activity, Smith emphasized that the “first word Adam spoke” was brought to the first father via the Urim and Thummim seer stones, the central relic in Smith’s early prophetic activity. These stones, the Jaredite prophet Ether had revealed, were created by God to preserve the Adamic language for future generations. As Moriancumer prepared his people for their escape from Babel, he saw God’s finger transform a collection of white stones into sacred lanterns and “interpreters” because “the [Adamic] language which ye shall write I have confounded.” The lanterns preserved the Jaredites in their transoceanic flight from Babel, while the interpreter stones made their way slowly to Joseph Smith, Jr., by way of his prophets Mosiah and Moroni, uniting his mystical translation and hieroglyphs in the making of scripture.116 Using the stones that revealed language to Adam and guided the Jaredites to linguistic purity, Smith translated the Book of Mormon and parts of the Book of Abraham.117 These stones, relics of America’s Adamic past, spanned the gap between artefactual objects and language. Called variously Gazelem or Urim and Thummim, Smith discovered in Revelation 2:17 that these white stones 113 One Mormon saw glossolalia as a mystical way to reveal the secrets of the human heart, a way to confess sins that could not be said in English: “Extracts of Letters from a Mormonite,” The Unitarian 1:5 (1 May 1834): 252. 114 On Zomar, see GAEL, 23, and Ezra Booth (who renders it “Zomas”) in Howe, Mormonism Unvailed, 199. Parley Pratt provides suggestive evidence that it was intended to mean “Zion” in his “One Hundred Years Hence. 1945,” Millennial Star 6:9 (15 October 1845): 141. On Gazelem, see Doctrine and Covenants 78:9 and Alma 37:23. Mark Ashurst-McGee, “A Pathway to Prophethood: Joseph Smith Junior as Rodsman, Village Seer, and Judeo-Christian Prophet” (M.A. thesis, Utah State University, 2000), 273–276, reviews the primary documents regarding Gazelem, including the likelihood that Smith believed his Urim and Thummim were the Jaredite stones. See also Quinn, Magic World View, 147– 148. It is not certain whether Gazelem referred to one single stone or, as seems more likely, a special type of stone. It certainly also referred to Joseph Smith. 115 Orson Pratt, “The Holy Spirit and the Godhead,” in Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (Liverpool: F. D. Richards, et al., 1855–1886), 2:342 (18 February 1855). 116 Ether 3:21–28. Cf. Mosiah 28 and Alma 37:21–25. An Intimate Chronicle: The Journals of William Clayton, ed. George D. Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1995), 133 (15 June 1844). 117 On Smith’s use of seer stones, see Richard van Wagoner and Steven Walker, “Joseph Smith: ‘The Gift of Seeing’,” Dialogue 15:2 (Summer 1982), 49– 68, and Ashurst-McGee, “A Pathway to Prophethood,” 334–335.

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contained a “new name” or “key word” for the Latter-day Saints.118 Smith announced that all worthy Saints would receive such stones and sacred names. They would be following the example of Adam, who discovered his own name in just such a stone. In the Eden-emphatic temple rites, these names would occupy center stage. Adopting a name in the Adamic language from “some Ancient man,” worshipers in the temple were “enabled to ask for present future & past,” to “address the th[ro]ne to enquire after Ancient things.”119 These names derived naturally from hieroglyphs—ancient pictograms were not simply words, they were names. Language, after all, began with Adam’s naming the animal creation, the final scene of the published Book of Abraham. Merging his translations with temple names in his April 1844 King Follett sermon, Smith announced proudly, holding aloft a quadrilingual New Testament, that the text “talks about Yachaubon [Iakobos] the son of Zebedee—means Jacob.” By comparison, the King James version of “the N[ew] T[estament] says James—now if Jacob had the keys you might talk about James and never get the keys.” These “keys” were passwords, secret knowledge obtained from the temple using the new names. Failure to obtain such keys could threaten even salvation. Smith asked, “How can we escape the damnation of hell unless God be with us—Men bind us with chains— Read from the Hebrew Yingacoub—Jacob. Greek Ichobon—Jacob.”120 In the phrase of another transcript of the sermon, “you may talk about James thro all Eternity” and still not “escape the d[amnatio]n. of hell.”121 Simply put, keys could only come when true names were known. To outsiders this sermon demonstrated Smith’s confidence in his abilities as a translator, the glorying of an autodidact at his knowledge of the difference between Jacob and James. To those within the inner circle, though, Smith was clearly alluding to his temple and its holy use of language, Adamic as refracted through biblical Hebrew. In these mystical names, the quest for pure language affected Mormon liturgy directly. The KEP grammars contain words that Smith and Phelps understood to be the language of Eden merged into and modulated by the ancient languages of Christian scripture that Campbell and others held sacred. Such was the power of pictographic representations—they could unite languages as 118 Andrew Ehat and Lyndon Cook. Words of Joseph Smith: The Contemporary Accounts of the Nauvoo Discourses of the Prophet Joseph (Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1980), 169, 2 April 1843; cf. Doctrine and Covenants 130:10–11. 119 See the various accounts of Brigham Young’s 28 December 1845 sermon reprinted in Devery Anderson and Gary Bergera, eds., The Nauvoo Endowment Companies, 1845–1846: A Documentary History (Salt Lake City: Signature, 2005), 204 (William Clayton’s minutes, cf. Smith, ed., Intimate Chronicle, 238) and 211 (Seventies Record, Book B). 120 Ehat and Cook, Words of Joseph Smith, 358, William Clayton’s report of the sermon. 121 Ehat and Cook, Words of Joseph Smith, 351, Thomas Bullock’s report of the sermon.


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seemingly diverse as Egyptian, Hebrew, New Testament Greek, and Adamic through the immutable association of objects and their names. Hebrew, whose pictographic alphabet Phelps and Smith studied in their 1836 Hebrew School, competed with Egyptian for primacy, even as the languages melded into each other. Phelps had claimed as early as 1832 that “the sacred poets came nearer the standard of truth . . . because the Hebrew, in which they wrote, was nearer the pure language, with which Adam gave names, than any other since used by man.”122 In this respect, he differed little from the preferred theological dictionary of Mormons and evangelicals.123 Cowdery, in a statement later attributed to Smith, claimed that “many characters or letters [on the papyri are] exactly like the present, (though probably not quite so square,) form of the Hebrew without points.”124 Edenic pictograms echoed through the generations in Egyptian and Hebrew; the languages could be difficult to disentangle.125 Many KEP transcriptions sound Hebrew, though only a handful are identifiably so; several Hebrew letters are invoked in the KEP as names for glyphs, including aleph, beth, and gimel.126 New Testament Greek terms and phrases also appear. Alpha and Omega are merged as Ahmeos, a letter rather like a capital alpha that means “God without beginning or end.”127 Hades appears in several permutations involving Hahdees, a glyph like the lowercase Greek lambda referring to the “kingdom of wickedness.”128 Much as Michael Russell before him, Phelps even proposed that Arabic numerals derived from the Egytian. In the manuscript KEPE 2, “Egyptian Counting,” essentially all the numbers from 1– 9 are matched with a similar-appearing 122 William Phelps, “Sacred Poetry,” The Evening and the Morning Star 1:6 (November 1832): 45. Shalom Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), provides additional cultural context for American reverence for Hebrew. See also Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes, 12. 123 Buck, Theological Dictionary, 229. On the popularity of Buck’s Dictionary, see Mathew Bowman and Samuel Brown, “The Reverend Buck’s Theological Dictionary and the Struggle to Define American Evangelicalism, 1802– 1851,” forthcoming in Journal of the Early Republic. 124 Cowdery, “Egyptian Mummies,” 234 (cf. Roberts, History of the Church, 2:348). 125 The Book of Mormon set the stage for such a merger, as the Nephites wrote a language “which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians”: 1 Nephi 1:2. 126 Aleph (GAEL, 31) is the top half of the Hebrew letter and means “in the beginning with God, the son, or first born”; Ba eth (GAEL, 27) is somewhat stylized but recognizable as beth, while the glyph named Beth (GAEL, 23) is a hatched single line meaning “residence”; Gah mol (GAEL, 33) appears to be gimel laid on its side and refers to a “situation.” 127 On Ahmeos, see GAEL, 33 and EA, 1. For context, see Webster, American Dictionary, s.v. “A,” and H. Michael Marquardt, The Joseph Smith Revelations: Text & Commentary (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1999), 240 (Doctrine and Covenants 95:17). 128 On Hah-dees see GAEL, 31. Smith knew Hades was a biblical name for hell. Faulring, American Prophet’s Record, 384–385, 444, and Scott Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, Typescript, 9 vols. (Midvale, Utah: Signature, 1983– 1985), 2:241. Whether this implied a response to Alexander Campbell’s adamant substitution of “hades” for “hell” in his edition of the New Testament is not clear.

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Egyptian character.129 The intermixing of ancient languages was unlikely to be accidental, as both Phelps and Smith recognized Hebrew and Greek words; during the project they studied Hebrew particularly intensively. Rather, the merger reflects a belief in the unity of scriptural languages at their pictographic beginnings. What is often seen as a novice mistake in Smith’s Egyptian project (his published Book of Abraham also contains Hebrew words) is actually evidence of his belief that sacred languages retained fragments of the original language.130 Smith’s famous and idiosyncratic 1843 etymology of Mormon, largely ghostwritten by Phelps, demonstrates their continued belief that languages contained fossilized fragments of ancient predecessors. In this etymology, Phelps and Smith claimed that mon was the Egyptian equivalent of Hebrew tob or Greek kalos, and that by combining mon with the English word “more,” the name Mormon was created, signifying “more good.”131 For Phelps and Smith, Egyptian imperiled the divisions of Babel’s plurality of languages. Under the right type of scrutiny, languages would begin to show their shared roots. The unity of sacred languages in their hieroglyphic origins was not the funeral scrolls’ only connection to the world’s beginnings. The papyri did more than reify Smith’s access to Eden’s language: the early Latter-day Saints understood them as an independent witness to the Bible. In those funerary pictograms and vignettes, the Latter-day Saints found confirmation of the sacred Garden. Oliver Cowdery’s most ecstatic exclamation regarding the relics was his certainty that they “were written by persons acquainted with the history of the creation, the fall of man” because their images seemed to relate familiar narratives. Such ancient proof of the existence of Eden made Cowdery positively giddy. 129

This document, in Phelps’s hand, lists glyphs with the Arabic numeral nearest them in appearance. The numerals 3 and 6 are stylized, while 6 and 9 are horizontally inverted. Russell, Ancient and Modern Egypt, 202– 203, proposes a similar numbering system. The numbers 5 and 1 are largely the same for Phelps and Russell, though other similarities are limited. What is important in the comparison is that both attempt to connect Egyptian characters and Arabic numerals. Mormon editor John Taylor later claimed that whereas words were variable, numbers never changed across languages: “We do not agree,” Times and Seasons 4:7 (15 February 1843): 105. Phelps would later make a similar claim in translating an apparent Spanish coin as if it were issued by a Book of Mormon king named Hagagadonihah: “An Old Nephite Coin,” Deseret News 10:41 (12 December 1860): 321. 130 Michael Walton, “Professor Seixas, the Hebrew Bible, and the Book of Abraham,” Sunstone 6 (March– April 1981): 41– 43. In addition, Smith’s Abraham, like the Nephites, generally spoke Hebrew but wrote Egyptian. 131 Joseph Smith, “To the Editor,” Times and Seasons 4 (15 May 1843): 194. Curiously, mon does not appear to figure in the KEP, though Smith and Phelps were using the KEP for their political writings at the time. There is always the possibility, difficult to entirely reject, that this etymology is an act of satire in response to the absurd association of Mormon with a Greek word meaning “to frighten.” The bulk of the evidence suggests, though, that this cross-linguistic etymology was proposed in seriousness: Brown, “The Translator and the Ghostwriter,” 42–43.


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The serpent represented as walking, or formed in a manner to be able to walk, standing in front of, and near a female figure, is to me, one of the greatest representations I have ever seen upon paper, or a writing substance; and must go so far towards convincing the rational mind of the correctness and divine authority of the holy scriptures, and especially that part which has ever been assailed by the infidel community, as being a fiction, as to carry away, with one mighty sweep, the whole atheistical fabric, without leaving a vestige sufficient for a foundation stone.132 Though Cowdery’s published writing often tends to the hyperbolic, the power of the papyri as proof of Eden’s existence remains remarkable. The memory of Eve and the serpent in Egyptian ink on funeral papyri proved to Smith’s followers the reality of the sacred garden and by extension the existence of God and the validity of the (revised) Bible. To these early Mormons, Egyptian pictograms clutched by mummified pharaohs demonstrated conclusively that humanity had arisen with Eve and Adam in this world’s first paradise. As few of their contemporary primitivists, these Mormons held fragments of the primordium in their hands. The KEP themselves reflect a strong attachment to the Garden. Phelps and Smith identified an Egyptian glyph on which they bestowed the Hebrew letter-pictogram for house (beth), designating it “the place appointed of God for the residence of Adam; Adam ondi ¼ Ahman).”133 This reflex of beth referred to the Adamic name for the location of humanity’s birth. Smith had conceptually identified this Adam-ondi-Ahman in 1832, returning to it in March 1835, a few months before Chandler arrived in Kirtland. He ultimately attached it to a new Mormon settlement in a valley on Missouri’s Grand River in 1837 – 1838, particularly emphasizing apparent Native ruins on two adjacent prominences dubbed Spring and Tower hills by the Latterday Saints.134 The Mormon prophet reported that Adam had inhabited the holy valley after the Fall and assembled all his living offspring there at the end of his life. At this site, Adam “called his progeny together” to give them 132

Cowdery, “Egyptian Mummies,” 236. GAEL, 23. The glyph is a single vertical line, much the same as an unidentified character Phelps previously published from an Indian tracing in “Israel Will Be Gathered,” The Evening and the Morning Star 2:13 (June 1833): 101. The interpretation of a mirror image of the Hebrew letter as Hi (“same as Beth”) in GAEL, 2, may suggest that they saw this line as a wall of the Hebrew pictogram beth. 134 Smith first mentioned Adam-ondi-Ahman in March 1832. Doctrine and Covenants 78:15; Robert J. Matthews, “Adam-ondi-Ahman,” BYU Studies 13:1 (Autumn 1972): 27–35; and Leland Gentry, “Adam-ondi-Ahman: A Brief Historical Survey,” BYU Studies 13:4 (Summer 1973): 553– 576. See also William Swartzell, Mormonism Exposed, being a Journal of a Residence in Missouri from the 28th of May to the 20th of August, 1838 (Pekin, Ohio: by the author, 1840), 11 –12; cf. Doctrine and Covenants 117:8 and Reed Peck’s untitled letter of 18 September 1839, generally known as the “Reed Peck Manuscript,” 19– 20, copy in LDS Church Archives. 133

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his “final blessing,” a gesture that an antebellum audience would have immediately recognized as a deathbed farewell scene.135 The tradition regarding the deathbed near Eden was so strong that several of Smith’s followers reported that their prophet had in fact discovered Adam’s grave marker at Adam-ondi-Ahman among the ruins on Spring Hill, a point that delighted outside observers.136 In the imaginative association of the KEP— the Hebrew pictographic letter for “home” attached to an Egyptian glyph and given an Adamic name—the mummies’ papyri pointed back to the corpse of the first father, the archetypal ancestral grave.137 Others in early America sought Eden, though usually as an expression of the majesty of apparently uncultivated land, American exceptionalism, or frontier boosterism.138 The review in Charles Buck’s Theological Dictionary mocked prevalent beliefs that Eden “has been placed in the third heaven, in the orb of the moon, in the moon itself, in the middle region of the earth, above the earth, under the earth, in the place possessed by the Caspian sea, and under the arctic pole.” 139 The last designation, merging with traditions about the location of Israel’s Ten Tribes in the “north countries,” had ostensibly scientific support, as Samuel Miller reported in his Retrospect.140 Ultimately the conservative Buck, representing the evangelical establishment, urged circumspection, suggesting that major geographic shifts may even have obliterated the original Eden.141 Primitivists looked much harder for Eden than those in the mainstream, though none—with the notable exception of the later spiritualist colony at Mountain Cove, Virginia—with the literal 135

On the antebellum deathbed, see Brown, “Beautiful Death,” 125, 130–131. Adam’s deathbed scene is found in Doctrine and Covenants 107:53–57, a revelation on priesthood received in Kirtland on 28 March 1835. 136 Jean Bickmore White, ed., Church, State, and Politics: the Diaries of John Henry Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1991), 606. See also Matthews, “Adam-ondi-Ahman,” 30–31, regarding the grave legend. John H. Wittorf, “An Historical Investigation of the Ruined ‘Altars’ at Adam-ondiAhman, Missouri,” Newsletter and Proceedings of the Society for Early Historic Archaeology 113 (15 April 1969): 1 –8, presents and summarizes several late sources on the ruins. Regarding the outside observers and the confusion over the nature of the ruins on the adjacent hills, see Gentry, “Adam-ondi-Ahman,” 574– 575, who favors the altar on Spring Hill and the foundations of a tower on Tower Hill. 137 The KEP (GAEL, 23) further merges the Garden with the Mormon settlement called Zion in the composite glyph Beth ka, which combines both places into one. 138 The impression of “virgin” forests incorrectly ignored evidence of the presence of Native peoples but remained nevertheless quite powerful among white residents and visitors: see Trollope, Domestic Manners, 47, as one example among many. For a literary critical view of the “adamic” controversies within postcolonialism, see George Handley, New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, and Derek Walcott (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007). 139 Buck, Theological Dictionary, 425. 140 Miller, Retrospect, 1:165, 167, citing the work of French naturalist George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707– 1788). 141 Buck, Theological Dictionary, 425.


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ardor of Smith and his followers.142 In this respect Smith moved well beyond other writers concerned with pure language. Linguistic tools pointed him toward the grander project of discovering Adam, his birth place, and his final resting place. The story does not end with an ambitious geographic primitivism, though. For Smith, Eden was not merely a paradisiacal garden, it was the home of humanity’s first parents. Adam, the “first man” and “Kingly power” known in KEP as Phah eh, stands at the beginning of human history, the origin of human language, and pure religion. This “first king” occupied center stage in Smith’s anthropology and cosmology, a point strongly emphasized in the KEP.143 (Little wonder that Smith’s successor Brigham Young would later teach that Adam was in fact God the Father.144) It is in the creation of family relationships, flowing from Father Adam, that the idiosyncratic grammar of the KEP comes into clearest focus. In their very structure, the grammar documents emphasize this point. “Degree,” a term Smith’s copy of Webster’s Dictionary situated within hierarchies and grammatical comparisons, possesses a strongly genealogical valence in the KEP.145 Where Bushnell believed grammar arose from physics and space, the correlation of objects and movement, Phelps and Smith seem to have believed that grammar arose from genealogical relationships.146 The preface to the GAEL document refers to “degrees of comparison” or “connecting parts of speech” that increase in their “signification.” Such an amplification was in fact obligatory: “in translating this character, the subject must be continued until there are as many of these connecting parts of speech used as there are connections or connecting points found in the 142 Hughes and Allen, Illusions of Innocence, 14– 21. Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 238–240, discusses the significance of Eden as trope in colonial America. On Mountain Cove, see Albanese, Republic of Mind and Spirit, 269. Emma Hardinge, Modern American Spiritualism: A Twenty Years’ Record of the Communion Between Earth and the World of Spirits, 3rd ed. (New York: by the author, 1870), 208–214, provides a nearly contemporary account. 143 GAEL, 3, 9, 30. This glyph appears to combine the root of king (Phah) with a particle suggesting primacy (eh). Compare Zub Zool and Zub Zool eh on GAEL, 6, and see the expanded definition of Phah eh on GAEL, 30. 144 David Buerger, “The Adam-God Doctrine,” Dialogue 15:1 (Spring 1982): 14– 58. On a plausible pathway from Smith’s hieroglyphic primordialism to Young’s later teaching, see Phelps’s pseudonymous speculative fiction in Joseph’s Speckled Bird, “Paracletes,” Times and Seasons 6:8 (1 May 1845): 891– 892, and “The Paracletes, Continued,” Times and Seasons 6:10 (1 June 1845): 917–918. See discussion in Samuel Brown, “William Phelps’s ‘Paracletes’: An Early Witness to Joseph Smith’s Divine Anthropology,” International Journal of Mormon Studies 2:1 (forthcoming, Spring 2009). 145 Webster’s 1828 Dictionary may have supported this interpretation in a secondary definition of “degree” as “a certain distance or remove in the line of descent, determining the proximity of blood.” 146 Bushnell, God in Christ, 26–29.

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Fig. 5. Gloss for Zip Zi, the glyph representing “degree,” which demonstrates its heavily genealogical character. Courtesy Church History Library, #IRI.

character.”147 Through this transformation every glyph held the potential to ramify meaning exponentially like a pedigree. Indeed, the glyph translated as “degree” (Zip Zi) refers to “all women: it took its origin from the earth yielding its fruit. And from the first woman who bore children; and men were multiplied upon the earth” (fig. 5).148 Phelps’s and Smith’s interpretation of “degree,” the main actual grammatical construct of the KEP, explicitly tied it to the primal parent of the Genesis creation narrative. Signification and connection arose as metaphors for human reproduction; the precepts of grammar derived from the natality of Eve and Adam. The glosses for the heavily maritalized Ho oop hah best exemplify the genealogical hermeneutic of the KEP. The first degree represents “Crown of a princes[s], or unmarried queen,” while the second degree denotes a “married Queen,” the third a “widowed queen,” and the fourth a “queen who has been married the second time.” These successive stages in a princess’s marital life advance toward a dramatic conclusion. In the expansive and personalized fifth degree, the authors revealed the full meaning of the glyph, which referred to Queen Kahtoumun, a daughter of Royal female lineage or descent from her [by] whom Egypt was discovered while it was under water, who was the daughter of Ham in lineage with whom a record of the fathers was intrusted by the tradition of Ham and according to the tradition 147

GAEL, 1. GAEL, 10.

148


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of their elders by whom also the tradition of the art of embalming was kept.149 The glyph achieved its full scope as it tracked Kahtoumun from her status as a maiden princess, to a twice-married queen, to her full glory in the fifth degree as a corpse bearing an ancient record. (Smith elsewhere identified her as one of the mummies he purchased from Chandler.)150 This dizzy rush of images of Eden, Egypt, family, Adam, reproduction, corpses, and ancient records describes Smith’s vision of a united human family extending backward to the beginning of time. The more staid glyph Zool confirmed the genealogical extent of the KEP, directing readers of the grammar “from Abraham back to his father and from Abraham’s father back to his father and so on back through the line of his progenitors.”151 Smith and Phelps emphatically focused their attention on modes of connecting to long-dead ancestors, as exemplified by Adam and Abraham.152 Smith’s hieroglyphic journey comprehended the primordium within the ancient family, but his pure language was not solely retrospective. By returning to Eden—humanity’s first parents, home, and language—the early Mormons prepared themselves for the eternities. A popular prophecy from Zephaniah (3:9) proved critical in the exegesis of this connection between Eden and the Millennium. More conservative authors like Adam Clarke saw it as a statement about orthodox religion, while Campbell saw this prediction as the promise that his new readings of scripture would overcome sectarian controversy and restore the primitive church.153 The noted Edwardsian theologian Samuel Hopkins also believed in a common language for humanity in preparation for Christ’s return as the fulfillment of Zephaniah’s prophecy.154 Swedenborg, for his part, looked forward to an angelic idiom 149

GAEL, 3 –4, 21. Peterson, Book of Abraham, 192, 198, which cites the Quincy Whig for 17 October 1840. See also Charlotte Haven, “A Girl’s Letters from Nauvoo,” Overland Monthly 16 (December 1890): 623–624; Daniel P. Kidder, Mormonism and the Mormons: A Historical View of the Rise and Progress of the Sect Self-styled Latter-day Saints (New York Lane & Sandford for the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1842), 120; and “A Glance at the Mormons,” The [New York] Sun 28 July 1840, reprinted at http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/NY/miscNYC2.htm, accessed 9 December 2007. 151 GAEL, 18. 152 Space limits exploration of these themes in this essay, but two rites introduced in the 1840s, ritual adoption and baptism for the dead, both strongly emphasized connections to past generations: see Gordon Irving, “The Law of Adoption: One Phase of the Development of the Mormon Concept of Salvation, 1830–1900,” BYU Studies 14:3 (Spring 1974): 291– 314, and M. Guy Bishop, “‘What Has Happened to our Fathers?’: Baptism for the Dead at Nauvoo,” Dialogue 23:2 (Summer 1990): 85– 97. 153 Campbell, “Ancient Order of Things,” 159. 154 Hopkins, Treatise on the Millennium [1793] (Providence, R.I.: Brown and Danforth, 1824), 110– 114, with discussion in Juster, Doomsayers, 159. 150

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that would replace human language in the millennial age.155 Mormons saw the prophecy that God would “turn to the people a pure language, that they may call upon the name of the Lord” as a claim about the return of Adamic at the Millennium.156 In an extended treatment for the church organ in 1834, Cowdery posed the question in simple terms: “Suppose that a Greek, a Roman, a Frenchman, a Spanyard, a German, an Englishman, and an Arab were to be saved by listening to the gospel of Christ; when they arrived in heaven could they understand each other? Or would the Lord have a school where they would all be taught to speak one language? And if so, what language would it be?” Reasoning from the necessity of a single language in heaven, Cowdery continued, “If then, God has power to cause all nations and languages to speak the same language, when in heaven, what is the reason that he has not power to cause the same on earth?” Specifically, Cowdery maintained that the primal language proved that God could unite humanity linguistically in the coming age, asking, “if we believe that all the earth once spoke the same language, and that was confounded by the power of God, why not believe that God has power to cause the earth to speak one language again?”157 The Mormon evangelist Parley Pratt used the same image to proclaim the millennial freedom of Native peoples from their babel of mutually unintelligible languages.158 Phelps placed a similar sentiment in an 1834 hymn, in which he predicted, borrowing biblical terminology, that “kindreds, tongues, and nations all” would “combine to make their numbers full” during the coming Millennium.159 The KEP confirmed this theme, promising a message that would encompass “all the kindreds of the earth.”160 The association of Eden’s pure language with the coming age was more than simply a millenarian interpretation of a passage from Zephaniah. The Mormons believed that something sacred had happened near Eden and needed to be revisited. In an 1833 editorial, Phelps had announced that “the Spirit of God 155

Swedenborg, Concerning Heaven and its Wonders, and Concerning Hell (Boston: Otis Clapp, 1837), 135– 137 (nos. 234–239). This language, the one spoken by the angels of Mars, was carried through the Eustachian tubes to the mind rather than traversing the ear: Concerning the Earths in our Solar System ([1758] Boston: Otis Clapp, 1839), 58. In distinction from Smith, Swedenborg seems to have believed that this angelic language would not be written, though his views on written language are complex (Earths in our Solar System, 74–76, 86). 156 Clarke, Holy Bible, 4:758– 759. 157 [Oliver Cowdery], “The Prophecy of Zephaniah,” The Evening and the Morning Star 2:18 (March 1834): 141 –142. 158 [Parley Pratt], “The Indians,” The Latter-day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate 2:4 (January 1836): 245, announced that God “will turn to them [the Indians] a pure language.” 159 [William Phelps], “The Gathering,” The Latter-day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate, 3:1 (October 1836): 400. This hymn is reprinted from The Evening and the Morning Star 2:20 (May 1834): 160. 160 GAEL, 7.


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upon all flesh, will cause all to fill the place of its creation, as in the day when all was named by Adam in the garden of Eden.”161 Eden connected believers directly to the afterlife, a point emphasized in the KEP. In an extension of beth as E beth ku ain tri eth, Phelps and Smith proclaimed Eden “a future place of existence, a place of residence beyond this earth” or “the earth in its most sanctified state as it shall be—eternity.”162 The primordial was to be the post-mortal paradise. Eden showed the path to heaven. Eden, broadly represented in Adam-ondi-Ahman, also signaled the familial valences of the Mormon eschaton. In the Grand River Valley, Smith revealed in a creative exegesis of Daniel’s apocalyptic prophecy (Daniel 7:9 – 27), Adam, as the Ancient of Days, would assemble all of humanity at the site of his former deathbed to present them as a united family to the returning Messiah. Many early Latter-day Saints made explicit plans to participate in this gathering at Adam-ondi-Ahman; Smith would use this image to describe his own father’s deathbed.163 Many seized on the image of Father Adam as the Ancient of Days—several Mormons even claimed direct visits from him.164 Over the ensuing 170 years, this image, both primordial and millennial, would focus the Saints on sanctified land, the place whose name they knew in the pure language, lending to both the distant past and anticipated future an almost physical immediacy.165 The connection of the Millennium with Adam’s return to Adam-ondi-Ahman as the father of the human family is clear in the 1836 phrase of Cowdery’s brother Warren: “the period is fast approaching when time itself shall be swallowed up or as the revelator expresses it, should be no longer, when Adam and his youngest son will be contemporaries.”166 This image of Adam standing with the most modern of his offspring is central to Smith’s notion of the unified family. Father Adam would hold in his arms a nineteenth-century child, and they would be united by both common blood and language. Beside Adam’s grave near the 161

[William Phelps], “All Flesh,” The Evening and the Morning Star 2:13 (June 1833): 102. GAEL, 31. Doctrine and Covenants 107:53– 57, and Marquardt, ed., Early Patriarchal Blessings, 4, 8. 164 On the Ancient of Days, see Faulring, American Prophet’s Record, 353, “Millennium. No. V,” Evening and Morning Star 2:20 (May 1834): 154; William Phelps, “Letter No. 8,” Messenger and Advocate 1:9 (June 1835): 131. Oliver Olney claimed a visitation: Fred C. Collier, ed., The Nauvoo High Council Minute Book (Hanna, Utah: Collier’s, 2005), 47; Journal History (LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City), entry for 10 February 1843; “Effects of Apostacy,” Times and Seasons 4:6 (1 February 1843): 89. So did Francis Gladden Bishop: Richard L. Saunders, “The Fruit of the Branch: Francis Gladden Bishop and his Culture of Dissent,” in Launius and Thatcher, eds., Differing Visions: Dissenters in Mormon History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 102– 119, and Collier, ed., Nauvoo High Council Minute Book, 46. 165 On twentieth-century interest in the Ancient of Days, see Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1966), 2nd ed., 34, and Daniel Ludlow, ed., Encyclopedia of Mormonism (New York: Macmillan, 1992), s.v. “Adam” and “Adam-ondi-Ahman.” 166 Warren Cowdery, “Brother O. Cowdery,” The Latter-day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate, 3:2 (November 1836): 411. 162 163

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primordial garden, believers would reunite to speak together Zephaniah’s pure language and embrace the coming Christ. In the Egyptian project, an Adamobsessed grammar of pure language, Smith provided potent symbols and concepts to prepare his people for this dramatic event. Then the sectarian babel of religious pluralism would give way to domestic unity in humanity’s first home. Drawing on traditions about Egypt, mummies, Eden, and hieroglyphs, Smith demonstrated to his followers the shape of things to come. Smith’s mysticism, exemplified by this hieroglyphic quest, was fundamentally a form of connection, not to a community of esoteric practitioners—Smith never described any debt to hermetic predecessors—but to a human family united by language and mutual awareness, one whose members called each other by sacred and ancient names. There was simultaneously in Smith’s mysticism the willful gravity of the autodidact and the confidence of the visionary. For his Egyptian project, he consulted Webster’s Dictionary and standard Hebrew primers rather than philological, biblical, or classical scholarship. In the search for names, signs, and keys in the pure language, he also ignored the esoteric manuals of his European predecessors and learned peers. Instead he took in hand his Jaredites’ Gazelem seerstone interpreters, his prophesied gift of seeing, and a collection of ancient papyri; and he saw.

IV. CONCLUSION Though it is tempting to dismiss them as the speculative ramblings of visionary autodidacts from Western New York’s burned-over district, the Kirtland Egyptian Papers both illustrate and extend familiar concepts from antebellum culture. Expressing a robust primitivism, these documents represent one attempt to unify a fractured world by deciphering the language of the Garden of Eden. This project rejected pluralism, expressing in its place a hunger to create a human family that would speak the same language in the Millennium. In simple terms, Joseph Smith wanted to know that when he and his followers met Adam, they would greet their first father in his native tongue. In retrospect, Egyptian funeral papyri were a logical vessel for such a revelation from Smith and Phelps. Whatever his motives, the showman Chandler delivered to Latter-day Saint Kirtland relics pregnant with the mysteries of life and death, earth and heaven, origin and ending. Egypt possessed the mysteries of humanity’s beginning and its transcendence of mortality; Egypt’s writing system instantiated the very essence of primal language. Through this fortuitous access to a culture long associated with biblical and even human cultural origins, early Mormons found powerful


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symbols for their religious quest for the family of Eden, sacred names that allowed them to address the cosmos, and reassuring evidence of the magnitude of their prophet’s power. Human language, hopelessly maimed by the curse of Babel, represented a mere echo of the holy pictographic language of Adam. Without divine intervention, such language could not communicate the truths of salvation; nor could it support the society of heaven. Where more educated minds urged the abandonment of such aspirations or used the insight primarily to attack orthodox theology, Smith and Phelps pressed on. For the Latter-day Saints, the pure language, once recovered, would ground humanity in a familial web of association that extended backward to the first king and queen in Eden and forward to the coming Kingdom of Heaven, a chain of belonging created in their temples. When the KEP are situated within American hieroglyphic culture, their religious valence becomes much clearer. The Egyptian grammar documents as an exercise are not translation in any traditional or scholarly sense. These documents are instead a hieroglyphic grammar, a prophetic, religion-making act, the metaphysical amplification of the intense meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs per se. Poring over the tiny pictures once clutched tight to the exemplars of humanity’s corpse, Phelps and Smith saw the past and future of all humankind, united in perfect harmony.

Church History 78:1 (March 2009), 66–98. # 2009, American Society of Church History doi:10.1017/S0009640709000031 Printed in the USA

What Should Christians Do about a Shaman-Progenitor?: Evangelicals and Ethnic Nationalism in South Korea TIMOTHY S. LEE

I

N the past fifteen years, global evangelicalism has emerged as an important field of study. A key contributor to this study has been Paul Freston, who authored Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, a book Harvey Cox of Harvard describes as “utterly indispensable for scholars of religion, not just for students of Third World evangelicalism.”1 In the book, Freston discusses South Korea as a “regional Protestant ‘superpower’” and “a key centre of evangelicalism in the Third World, both in numerical strength and missionary-sending importance.” He then observes that Korean evangelicalism has not received sufficient treatment in Western-language scholarship, especially on its relationship with Korean nationalism. Thus, he states, “We need more nuanced analysis of the relationship between Protestantism and various versions of Korean nationalism in more recent times.”2

1 Paul Freston, Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Cox’s comment is on the back cover of the book. Other works that address global evangelicalism include Donald M. Lewis, The Global Expansion of Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004); Alister McGrath, Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity (Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity, 1995); Mark Noll, David Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk, Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 2 Freston, Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, 61, 64. The National Statistics Office of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) finds that, as of November 2005, the country had a population of 47 million. Of this population, 53.1% (24.97 million) identified themselves as religious. This religious population is divided into Buddhists (22.8%; 10.73 million), Christians (29.2%; 13.77 million), and new religionists such as believers of Wo˘n Buddhism (0.3%: 0.13 million) and (institutionalized) Confucianism (0.2%; 0.11 million). The Christian population breaks down into Catholics (10.9%; 5.15 million) and Protestants (18.3%; 8.62 million). The study did not register the few thousand Eastern/Russian Orthodox members, nor did it register participants of amorphous religious traditions related to shamanism. See the statistics on the website

Timothy S. Lee is an assistant professor of the history of Christianity at Brite Divinity School, Texas Christian University.

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This study addresses the lacuna Freston has pointed out. It examines political implications of global evangelicalism in Korea, evangelicalism having arrived in Korea as a globalizing force at a time when nationalism was emerging as the touchstone of Korean identity. It does so by examining the ways evangelicals have responded to a particular kind of nationalism that has held sway in Korea: ethnic nationalism. At the center of this ethnic nationalism stands Tan’gun, the mythical progenitor of the Korean people. Tan’gun is celebrated as the paramount icon of Korean nationalism, with his lore taught in schools and his devotees exalting him as the bond of all Koreans—north and south, domestic and overseas. Tan’gun, moreover, is enshrined as a deity by several religions of Korea—all indigenous in origin—and is prayed to by shamans. Largely owing to overtones of religiosity (if not idolatry) surrounding him, Tan’gun has emerged as a problem for Korean evangelicals and has aroused a response from them. Evangelicalism has strong nationalist credentials in Korea. Unlike in China and Japan, where evangelicalism was seen as part and parcel of Western imperialism, in Korea it became positively associated with the nationalism of the land. Many a factor went into the making of such a positive association. As will be discussed below, one was that in Korea, Protestantism did not become identified with an imperialistic power, as it did in China and Japan. In Korea the chief imperialist power was the Japanese, the Shintoist nation. Another factor was that evangelicals played a crucial role in the formation of Korean nationalism, most notably by making key contributions to the 1919 March First Independence Movement, a turning point in modern Korean history. Their nationalist credentials afforded evangelicals solid grounding in Korean society (that is, South Korea) and made their religion acceptable to the general populace. Such acceptance, in turn, has emboldened them to speak out whenever they deemed their religion to be under attack. Such outspokenness, if not vociferation, was all too evident with respect to the Tan’gun problem. On the other hand, a minority of them—those who appreciated Tan’gun’s symbolic potency—was more accommodating. Consequently, as a community,

of the Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism (2007). The study also does not reflect that upward of 95 percent of the Protestants are evangelicals. On this point, see Timothy S. Lee, “Beleaguered Success: Korean Evangelicalism in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century,” in Christianity in Korea, ed. Robert E. Buswell and Timothy S. Lee (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 330–350. As to the religious population in North Korea, a 2004 study published in Japan finds that there are about 40,000 adherents of recognized churches. These are Protestants (13,000), adherents of the indigenous Tonghak Church (13,000), Buddhists (1,000), and Roman Catholics (3,000). The North Korean study was published in the August 2004 issue of Choguk [Fatherland], a monthly run by Chaeilbon Choso˘nin Ch’ongryo˘nhaphoe/Zainihon Cho¯senjin So¯rengo¯kai (General Association of Korean Residents in Japan), cited in the Yonhap news outlet (2006). With the construction of a Russian Orthodox Church in P’yo˘ngyang in 2006, there is now also a handful of Orthodox Christians in North Korea.

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evangelicals responded to the Tan’gun problem in two ways: by robustly resisting any attempt to confer official or sacral status on Tan’gun and by resorting to creative strategies to assimilate Tan’gun into Christian frames of reference.

I. EVANGELICALS AND KOREAN RELIGIONS Evangelical Protestantism began to disseminate in Korea in earnest in the 1880s.3 Korea at the time was in the throes of profound upheaval and transition. About a decade earlier, in 1876, Choso˘n (the last Korean dynasty) succumbed to Japanese gunboat diplomacy and signed the Kanghwa Treaty, Korea’s first modern treaty.4 In so doing, Korea was rudely initiated into an emerging world system, one based on nation-states. For nearly five hundred years, Korea was part of a Sino-centric worldview that it then abandoned. Koreans were compelled to re-envision their society, and to do so under imperialistic pressures. From 1876 onward, well beyond 1910, when Japan annexed Korea, a variety of visions was proffered. These included constitutional monarchy advocated by the Enlightenment Party (kaehwapa) and populist traditionalism demanded by adherents of the indigenous religion Tonghak (Eastern Learning). There was also communism, which made inroads into Korea in the 1920s, as well as ethnic nationalism, which eventually became the most influential vision in the twentieth century.5 Along with these was the vision offered by evangelicals. 3 See L. George Paik, The History of Protestant Missions in Korea, 1832–1910 ([1929] Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1970); Everett N. Hunt, Protestant Pioneers in Korea (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1980); Martha Huntley, Caring, Growing, Changing: A History of the Protestant Mission in Korea (New York: Friendship, 1984); Elizabeth Underwood, Challenged Identities: North American Missionaries in Korea, 1884– 1934 (Seoul: Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch, 2003). 4 The standard periodization of premodern Korean history based on the kingdoms is as follows: Old Choso˘n (fifth century B.C.E.? [2333 B.C.E. according the Tan’gun myth])–180 B.C.E. (Wiman Choso˘n); 180 B.C.E.–109 B.C.E. (Han Chinese commanderies established in northern Korea and the beginning of the Three Kingdoms Period, in which Koguryo˘, Silla, and Paekje contested for hegemony over the region); 109 B.C.E.– 313 C.E. (the last Chinese commandery conquered by Koguryo˘); 313–668 (Three Kingdoms Period: till the fall of Paekje [660] and Koguryo˘ [668] to the combined forces of Silla and Tang China, the Chinese expelled in 676); 668–936 (Unified Silla; the kingdom of Parhae in the northern part, former Koguryo˘, from 698 to 926); 936– 1392 (Silla succeeded by Koryo˘); 1392– 1910 (Choso˘n, until annexed by Japan in 1910). See Carter J. Eckert, et al., Korea Old and New: A History (Seoul: Ilchogak, 1990); Kim Key-hiuk, The Last Phase of the East Asian World Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, updated ed. (New York: Norton, 2005). 5 Chung Chai-sik, A Korean Confucian Encounter with the Modern World: Yi Hang-no and the West (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1995); Vipan Chandra, Imperialism, Resistance, and Reform in Late Nineteenth-Century Korea: Enlightenment and the Independence Club (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1988); Young Ick Lew, “The Conservative Character of the 1894 Tonghak Peasant Uprising: A Reappraisal with Emphasis on Cho˘n Pong-jun’s Background and


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The evangelical vision was simple: turn Korea into a Christian nation by converting its inhabitants to evangelicalism. In so doing, multitudes of Korean souls would be saved. Just as important, argued Protestant leaders such as Yun Ch’iho, with born-again—self-reconstructed—leaders at its helm, Korea would be revitalized, modernized, and strengthened. It would come to approximate countries like Britain and the United States, both powerful and heavily shaped by Protestantism.6 This vision captivated many, and a quest to Christianize Korea was launched. In this quest, Korean evangelicals were joined by missionaries from Australia, Europe, and, especially, North America.7 This evangelical quest persisted despite harsh challenges from Japanese colonialism and communism, challenges that often resulted in violent conflicts. Indeed, as a result of such conflicts, evangelicalism has often been identified with anti-colonialism and anti-communism. And after the Korean War (1950 – 1953), such identification helped evangelicalism become securely legitimated in South Korea, whose own political identity was constructed largely in opposition to these two “isms.”8 Evangelicalism is defined broadly here—to include movements more specifically known as fundamentalism and pentecostalism—as a species of Protestantism whose hallmarks are a literalist bent in biblical interpretation, a high Christology grounded in the substitutionary theory of atonement, a soteriology that values the individual over society, and a fervent advocacy of evangelism. In evangelicalism, salvation is typically achieved through a conversion experience, wherein one accepts Jesus Christ as personal savior and

Motivation,” Journal of Korean Studies 7 (1990): 149– 177; Robert A. Scalapino and Chong-Sik Lee, Communism in Korea: The Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). 6 Kenneth M. Wells, New God, New Nation: Protestants and Self-Reconstruction Nationalism in Korea (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990). 7 Kim In Soo, Protestants and the Formation of Modern Korean Nationalism, 1885–1920: A Study of the Contributions of Horace G. Underwood and Sun Chul Kil (New York: Peter Lang, 1996); Yi Mahn-yol, “Hanmal kidokkyoin u˘i minjok u˘isik hyo˘ngso˘ng kwajo˘ng” [The Formation of National Consciousness among Korean Protestants Near the End of the Han Empire], in Han’guk kidokkyo wa minjok undong [Korean Protestantism and the Nationalist Movement], ed. Yi Mahn-yol (Seoul: Han’guk kidokkyo yo˘ksa Yo˘nguso, 2001); Hyaeweol Choi, “Christian Modernity in the Missionary Discourse of Korea, 1905–1910,” East Asian History 29 (June 2005): 39– 68. 8 Timothy S. Lee, “A Political Factor in the Rise of Protestantism in Korea: Protestantism and the 1919 March First Movement,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 69:1 (March 2000): 116–142; Kim Su˘ngtae, ed., Han’guk kidokkyo wa sinsa ch’ambae munje [Korean Christianity and the Shinto Worship Problem] (Seoul: Han’guk kidokkyo yo˘ksa yo˘n’guso, 1991); Chang Pyo˘ngwuk, 6.25 Kongsan namch’im kwa kyohoe [The (Protestant) Church and the June 25th Communist Invasion of the South] (Seoul: han’guk Kyoyuk kongsa, 1982); Wi Jo Kang, Christ and Caesar in Modern Korea: A History of Christianity and Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Kang Inch’o˘l, Han’guk u˘i kaesin’gyo wa pan’gongsan’juu˘i [Korean Protestantism and Anti-communism] (Seoul: Chungsim, 2006).

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resolves to live in accordance with the Gospel. It is this form of Protestantism that entered Korea in the 1880s and has since dominated Korean Christianity.9 When evangelical missionaries arrived in Korea, the land, of course, was not a religious vacuum. By then, Koreans had internalized Buddhism and Confucianism, which had entered the country 1,500 years earlier; and shamanism, the most indigenous religion, was prevalent. There was also Tonghak (later renamed to Ch’o˘ndokyo [Religion of the Heavenly Way]), a new religion founded in 1861 by Ch’oe Cheu, partly as a nativist reaction to Roman Catholicism, which had arrived in Korea in 1784.10 A question springs to mind: how did evangelicals—missionaries and Korean converts—relate to these and other traditional religions of Korea? In answering this question, a helpful resource is Paul F. Knitter’s Introducing Theologies of Religion. In this book, the author discusses various models of Christian attitudes toward other religions. The model most appropriate to our discussion is what Knitter calls the replacement model—whose central axiom is that “no one can be saved unless they come into an explicit contact with Jesus and his Gospel.”11 This model has two versions. One is the total replacement version, which “looks upon other faith communities as so lacking, or so aberrant, that in the end Christianity must move in and take their place.”12 The other is the partial replacement version, which holds that “the [non-Christian] religions do prepare the way for the Gospel. But it’s a negative preparation: they provide questions, or indicate directions, which only Jesus can answer and guide. The religions therefore can serve ‘as a base from which to start because Jesus fulfills the truth which the religions have sought in vain.’”13 9 I am aware that some scholars dispute the usefulness of the concept “evangelicalism,” contending that it has become amorphous. D. G. Hart makes this case in Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the Age of Billy Graham (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2004). But on this issue, I am inclined to side with the mainstream scholarship, exemplified by Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk in their edited volume Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), and Randall Balmer, Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2004). On evangelicalism in Korea, see the following works by Timothy S. Lee: “Born-Again in Korea: The Rise and Character of Revivalism in (South) Korea, 1885– 1988” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1996); “Beleaguered Success”; and the following two chapters in Religions of Korea in Practice, ed. Robert E. Buswell (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007): “Conversion Narratives in Korean Evangelicalism,” 393–408, and “Indigenized Devotional Practices in Korean Evangelicalism,” 421–433. 10 James Huntley Grayson, Korea: A Religious History, rev. ed. (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002). 11 Paul F. Knitter, Introducing Theologies of Religion (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2002): 44. The others Knitter discusses are the fulfillment model (“The One Fulfills the Many”), the mutuality model (“Many True Religions Called to Dialogue”), and the acceptance model (“Many True Religions: So Be It”). 12 Ibid., 23. 13 Ibid., 41.


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The missionaries gravitated toward one or the other of these two versions of the replacement model, and the same missionary often adopted a different version depending on the religion he or she was faced with. In general, they tended to assume the total replacement model when it came to shamanism or other forms of religion based in folk culture. Thus, in a 1907 article published in The Korea Mission Field, a missionary wrote, “When the Koreans become Christians they [have to] destroy the ‘devil house’ on the mountain sides and the booth for the evil spirits by their door-yard.”14 More developed religions such as Buddhism and Confucianism fared somewhat better as their civilizing influence on Korea was grudgingly acknowledged. In the end, however, they too were seen as lacking. Thus, writing about Confucianism in Korea, a missionary stated, “I approach the subject with reverence. Whatever may be the weak points of Confucianism, it has given the Korean his conception of duty and his standard of morality.” He then went on to enumerate seven shortcomings of the religion, one of which is that Confucianism, knowing no higher ideal than a man, is unable to produce a godly or god-like person. Its followers may be moral, but never spiritual. The tallest of them, therefore, does stand higher than six feet or little over [sic]. On the other hand a Christian, having God to look unto as the author and finisher of his faith, is a man all the way up, however small he may be in himself. In other words, a Confucianist begins in man and ends in man. A Christian begins in man but ends in God.15 In 1889, in a journal titled Church at Home and Abroad, a missionary wrote: The present dynasty long ago tabooed Buddhism. It is not in any sense the religion of the country. Shintoism, the religion of Japan, never obtained a footing in Korea. The Confucianism of China has been largely adopted by the educated classes, but the real religion of Korea is shamanism, spirit worship, and low forms of popular superstition. Since Buddhism was under bans, sevenfold superstitions have entered in to fill the void, yet they are not religions. Wanted, a religion for Korea. What shall it be?16 The question, of course, was rhetorical: it was clear what the answer was: Christianity—evangelical Protestantism to be more specific. In 1932 the missionary Charles Allen Clark published Religions of Old Korea, the most comprehensive survey of Korean religions to be published in a Western language up to that time. In its preface, Clark justifies his labor by stating, “The 14 John Z. Moore, “The Great Revival Year,” The Korea Mission Field 3 (August 1907): 113– 120. The Korea Mission Field (hereafter KMF) was the most influential journal for the Protestant community during the colonial period. 15 Korean Repository (November 1895): 400 –404. 16 Church at Home and Abroad 3 (August 1899): 117, cited in Sources of Korean Christianity, 1832–1945, ed. Sung Deuk Oak (Seoul: Han’guk kidokkyo yo˘ksa, 2000), 229.

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writer has not felt that his labour was in vain, for we must know the religions which have been in any country, and the way in which those religions psychologically appealed to the people, if we would know how to approach them with a higher religion today.”17 Then after surveying Buddhism, Confucianism, “Miscellaneous Cults,” Ch’o˘ndokyo, shamanism, and early contacts between Christianity and Koreans, he ends the treatise with a prediction: “The ‘Religions of Old Korea’ seem destined to pass away to make room for brighter things.”18 The missionaries’ condescension, if not hostility, toward non-Christian religions was transmitted to Korean evangelicals, and that attitude rings starkly in the following statement by Pak Hyo˘ngnyong, an influential theologian and churchman in the twentieth century: “Christianity’s most appropriate relation to other religions is not compromise but conquest. . . . The attitude of the religion that bears the name of Jesus Christ [to other religions] is not compromise but clash and conquest.”19 Pak’s attitude was on the more extreme side. Even so, that the majority of the evangelicals looked askance at non-Christian religions was confirmed by a survey published in 1982 on the beliefs and practices of Korean Protestants. One of the questions in the survey was, “What do you think of other religions?” In response, 4.7 percent of the clergy and 8.8 percent of the laity gave a pluralistic response (their truth is just as valid as Christianity’s); 20.7 percent of the clergy and 25 percent of the laity gave a more inclusive response (Christianity’s truth is superior); and 70.9 percent of the clergy and 62.6 percent of the laity gave an exclusivistic response (only Christianity’s truth is valid).20 Given such beliefs, it is not surprising that evangelicals looked askance at icons of East Asian religions like Confucius, Buddha, and shamans. When it came to one particular icon, however, evangelicals have showed a more nuanced—or at least a more ambivalent—attitude. This icon is Tan’gun, a figure worshiped by Korean nativists, invoked in shamanistic rituals, and deemed the founder of Old Choso˘n, putatively the earliest Korean kingdom. Granted, Tan’gun, too, never lacked evangelical critics who dismissed him as fictive or superstitious. Yet if the majority disparaged Tan’gun, there has 17

Charles A. Clark, Religions of Old Korea ([1932] Seoul: Christian Literature Society, 1961): 5. Clark, Religions of Old Korea, 257. 19 Pak Hyo˘ngyong, “Igyo e taehan t’ahyo˘p munje” [The Problem of Compromising with Other Religions] in Sinhak chinam [Theological Guide], vol. 33:3, quoted in Han’guk chonggyo sasang [A History of Korean Religious Thought], ed. Kim Ch’ang-tae and Ryu Tong-shik (Yu Tongsik) (Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1986). 20 Lee, “Born-Again in Korea: The Rise and Character of Revivalism in (South) Korea, 1885– 1988,” 243– 244. The survey was titled Han’guk kyohoe 100-yo˘n chonghap chosa yo˘n’gu (Centennial Comprehensive Study of the Korean [Protestant] Church) and was conducted by the Christian Institute for the Study of Justice and Development; it was published by Hyo˘ndae sahoe yo˘nguso. 18


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always been a minority of evangelicals that has sought to give him special consideration—if only in the purview of the replacement model. Why such special consideration? One reason is that in the myth of Tan’gun, the central myth of the Korean nation, some evangelicals have seen an adumbration of a central doctrine of Christianity: the Trinity. Another was that, in the Korea of the twentieth century, ethnic nationalism emerged as the most influential touchstone of Korean identity, with Tan’gun embedded in its core. And in light of this development, disparaging him outright would have seemed unpatriotic, if not un-Korean, and would have incurred opprobrium. To the Korean evangelical community, therefore, Tan’gun became a problem. To this problem, evangelicals showed two responses. One was to vigorously resist any attempt to valorize or officialize Tan’gun—an attitude characteristic of the total replacement model, an attitude that became conspicuous in the latter half of the twentieth century, with evangelicals up in arms against efforts to place Tan’gun images in public spaces. The other was to accommodate him— in the manner of the partial replacement model—whether by analogizing his myth to the Trinitarian doctrine, as some missionaries sought to do, or by inscribing him into a Christian narrative, as an evangelical novelist sought to do.

II. THE MYTH OF TAN’GUN There are several versions of the Tan’gun myth, but the canonical one is that included in Samguk yusa (Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms), a compilation of fables and tales by the Buddhist monk Iryo˘n. Completed about 1280, when Korea (then the Koryo˘ dynasty) was under Mongol occupation, it is also the oldest account of the myth.21 The myth is relatively short, so it is presented here in its entirety: The Wei shu tells us that two thousand years ago, at the time of Emperor Yao [reputedly about 2333 B.C.E.], Tangun Wanggo˘m chose Asadal as his capital and founded the state of Choso˘n. The Old Record notes that in olden times Hwanin’s son, Hwanung, wished to descend from heaven and live in the world of human beings. Knowing his son’s desire, Hwanin surveyed the three highest mountains and found Mount T’aebaek the most suitable place for his son to settle and help human beings. Therefore he gave Hwanung three heavenly seals and dispatched him to rule over the people. Hwanung descended with three thousand followers to a spot under a tree by the Holy 21 James Huntley Grayson, Myths and Legends from Korea: An Annotated Compilation of Ancient and Modern Materials (Surrey, U.K.: Curzon, 2001); Keith Pratt and Richard Rutt, Korea: A Historical and Cultural Dictionary (Surrey, United Kingdom: Curzon, 1999), s.v. “Samguk yusa”; Tae-hung Ha and Grafton K. Mintz, trans., Samguk Yusa [Legends and History of the Three Kingdoms of Ancient Korea] (Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1972).

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Altar atop Mount T’aebaek, and he called this place the City of God. He was the Heavenly King Hwanung. Leading the Earls of Wind, the Master of Rain, and the Master of Clouds, he took charge of some three hundred and sixty areas of responsibility, including agriculture, allotted lifespans, illness, punishment, and good and evil, and brought culture to his people. At that time a bear and a tiger living in the same cave prayed to Holy Hwanung to transform them into human beings. The king gave them a bundle of sacred mugworts and twenty cloves of garlic and said, “If you eat these and shun the sunlight for one hundred days, you will assume human form.” Both animals ate the spices and avoided the sun. After twenty-one days the bear became a woman, but the tiger, unable to observe the taboo, remained the tiger. Unable to find a husband, the bear-woman prayed under the altar tree for a child. Hwanung metamorphosed himself, lay with her, and begot a son called Tangun Wanggo˘m. In the fiftieth year of the reign of Emperor Yao, Tangun made the walled city of P’yo˘ngyang the capital and called his country Choso˘n. He then moved his capital to Asadal on Mount Paegak, also named Mount Kunghol, or Ku˘mmidal, whence he ruled for fifteen hundred years. When, in the year kimyo [1122 B.C.], King Wu of Chou enfeoffed Chi Tzu (Kija) to Choso˘n, Tangun moved to Changdangyo˘ng, but later he returned and hid in Asadal as a mountain god at the age of one thousand nine hundred and eight.22

III. TAN’GUN IN MODERN KOREAN HISTORY In South Korea, since about 1960, a fierce and voluminous debate has raged over Tan’gun. Pundits have been divided over the historicity and significance of this figure. Different interpretations have pitted communities against one another, and the contestation has occurred in the national media and in schoolyards, as well as over the depiction of Tan’gun in history textbooks. Indeed, the passion, extraordinary arguments, and public significance of the debate would remind American religious scholars of the intense debate over creationism (or intelligent design) in their own country. Though the reliability of Iryo˘n’s account is one of the issues in contention, most scholars agree that since the late thirteenth century Tan’gun has deeply influenced how Koreans reckoned their collective identity.23 22 The translation is from Peter Lee, ed., Sourcebook of Korean Civilization I (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 6 –7. 23 Yun Ihu˘m, “Tan’gun sinhwa wa hanminjok u˘i yo˘ksa” [The Tan’gun Myth and the History of the Korean Nation], in Tan’gun: Ku˘ ihae wa charyo, chu˘ngbo p’an [Tan’gun: How to Understand Him and Sources, enlarged edition], ed. Yun Ihu˘m (Seoul: Seoul University Press, 2001): 3– 30; Hyung Il Pai, Constructing Korean Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State-Formation Theories (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000).


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In 1392, when a new dynasty was established in Korea, it chose as its own the name of the ancient kingdom mentioned in the myth. Thereafter the ancient kingdom was called “Old [or Ancient] Choso˘n” (kojoso˘n) to distinguish it from the new one. In its early years, leaders of the new kingdom saw themselves as successors of Tan’gun and venerated him at a shrine in P’yo˘ngyang. In time, however, this veneration was overshadowed by Choso˘n’s engrossment in neoConfucianism, the worldview that Koreans eagerly participated in throughout the dynasty. As a result, Tan’gun was eclipsed by the other culture hero mentioned in the myth, Kija, purportedly a Chinese nobleman of the Shang dynasty who migrated to Old Choso˘n in 1122 B.C.E. when the Shang fell to the Zhou and assimilated into the Korean populace.24 But when the Sino-centric world order collapsed in the late nineteenth century, Kija’s Chinese origin caused him to fall into disfavor, and Tan’gun re-emerged as a national icon. In his recent book, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea, Gi-Wook Shin argues that the collapse of the Sino-centric world order compelled Koreans to search for another kind of paramount collective identity.25 In such a search, he argues, ethnic nationalism was initially only one of several alternatives considered—ethnic nationalism defined here in the Durkheimian sense as the “‘mechanical [or organic] solidarity’ of Korean society,” which assumes that “Koreans’ national identity [is] based on common blood and shared ancestry [originating in Tan’gun].”26 Other forms of collective identity considered included pan-Asianism, civic (as opposed to ethnic) nationalism, and international socialism.27 But when Japan imposed a protectorate over Korea in 1905 and annexed it in 1910, it cut the ground from under pan-Asianism and civic nationalism; it also thwarted the possibility of international socialism in Korea. Subsequently, in order to keep Korea alive as a culture, Korean intellectuals resorted to an ethnic-nationalist strategy. Shin cites approvingly Carter J. Eckert, who states that “before the late nineteenth century there was little, if any, feeling of loyalty [among the inhabitants of the peninsula] toward the abstract concept of ‘Korea’ as a nation-state, or toward fellow inhabitants of 24 Kwangyong Pak, “Tan’gun insik u˘i yo˘ksajo˘k pyo˘nch’o˘n [Changes in Understanding Tan’gun through History], in Tan’gun: Ku˘ ihae wa charyo, chu˘ngbo p’an [Tan’gun: How to Understand Him and Sources, enlarged edition], ed. Yun Ihu˘m (Seoul: Seoul University Press, 2001): 158– 181; Andre Schmid, Korea between Empires: 1895– 1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 25 Gi-Wook Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006). 26 Ibid., 7. 27 Civic nationalism “equates nationalism with citizenship; is defined primarily in political or legal terms; implies a commitment (embraced voluntarily) to certain duties and rights; and can therefore be acquired and lost”: Gordon Marshall, Oxford Dictionary of Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), s.v. “nationalism.”

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the peninsula as ‘Koreans.’”28 But this circumstance did not inhibit the intellectuals from constructing a primordial ethnic-nation—the minjok—of Korea out of Koreans’ proto-national consciousness, defined as “various feelings of collective belonging which already existed [on the basis of commonalities such as geography, language, and a strong central state] and which could provide the foundations for modern nation-states.”29 This strategy was not novel in the context of the times. As the world system ascended in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nationalization of large communities was paradoxically the most globalizing trend of the period— both Germany and Italy, after all, had become unified nation-states only in 1871.30 In East Asia, Japan was the first to partake in this globalizing trend, with China and Korea close on its heels. For these Asian nations, the concept of ethnic nation was new—indeed the word minjok (minjoku in Japanese and minzu in Chinese), composed of two Chinese characters (the lingua franca of East Asia), was not even a common word until about the 1890s.31 Among Korean intellectuals, Sin Ch’aeho blazed the trail in envisioning the Korean nation. Well versed in classical learning, Sin was a self-taught journalist and historian, and a fierce independence fighter. He rejected Sino-centrism and the Kija-based historiography as a form of toadying (sadaejuu˘i); in its stead, he developed the conception of a Korean minjok based mainly on Tan’gun and his descendants, regarding Tan’gun as a historical personage and his descendants as a people who once ruled not only the peninsula but also territories of Manchuria and northeastern China.32 Sin’s erudition and historical imagination had enormous influence over his compatriots, and in 1909, one of these, Na Ch’o˘l,

28 Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea, 3; Carter J. Eckert, Offspring of Empire: The Koch’ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism, 1876– 1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 226. Eckert’s—or the modernist’s—is a minority view among Koreans; see Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea, 5. 29 John Duncan, “Proto-nationalism in Premodern Korea,” in Perspectives on Korea, ed. SangOak Lee and Duk-Soo Park (Sydney: Wild Peony, 1998), 198–221. Duncan’s notion of protomodernism was adapted from E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). On the role of intellectuals in constructing nationalism, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). Also useful are two works by Anthony D. Smith: The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) and Nationalism and Modernism (London: Routledge, 1998). 30 Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 31 Schmid, Korea between Empires, 172–175. 32 Andre Schmid, “Rediscovering Manchuria: Sin Chae’ho and the Politics of Territorial History in Korea,” The Journal of Asian Studies 56:1 (February 1997): 26–46; Henry Em, “Minjok as a Modern and Democratic Construct: With a Focus on Sin Ch’aeho’s Historiography,” in Colonial Modernity in Korea, ed. Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 336–361.


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took it upon himself to move the process a step further by founding Taejonggyo (Religion of the Great Ancestors) and apotheosizing Tan’gun.33 Japanese colonial historians sought to douse the nationalist ardor surrounding Tan’gun by arguing that his myth was fabricated by Iryo˘n as a way to rally Koreans against the Mongol occupiers.34 They also contended that if Tan’gun was as ancient and venerable a figure as he was claimed to be, then he should have been mentioned in Chinese and Korean records produced before the writing of the Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms, especially in Samguk sagi (Records of the Three Kingdoms). Samguk sagi, like Samguk yusa, focused on the three kingdoms of ancient Korea—Silla, Paekje, and Koguryo˘. But it differed from Iryo˘n’s account in that it was more historical—adopting the format of the Chinese dynastic history—and written by Kim Pusik, a Confucian scholar-statesman, on the orders of his king. Completed in 1145, the treatise remains the oldest extant book in Korea.35 And it indeed does not contain a Tan’gun story. The argument that Iryo˘n fabricated the Tan’gun story remains controversial in the debate. Generally speaking, it is held plausible by the majority of Koreanists outside Korea (and by some inside); it is largely rejected by scholars inside Korea, who see it as another stratagem the colonialists used to demean Korean culture and control its people—a form of Orientalism.36 In the colonial period, the Japanese view on Tan’gun was fiercely rejected by Korean nationalist intellectuals. Among them, no one—perhaps save Sin Ch’aeho himself—rejected it with more panache than Ch’oe Namson, a prolific writer, publisher, and polymath. Affirming Iryo˘n’s account of Tan’gun, Ch’oe published a treatise in 1927 in which Tan’gun emerged as the “title for shamanrulers of ancient Korea,” rulers who dominated an immense cultural realm that rivaled those of Chinese and Indo-European cultures—the realm of “Park 33 Don Baker, “The Korean God is not the Christian God: Taejonggyo’s Challenge to Foreign Religions,” in Religions of Korea in Practice, ed. Robert E. Buswell, Jr. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 464–475. 34 Yi Mahn-yol, “Tan’gun sinhwa munje e taehan kidokkyohoe u˘i ipchang” [The Christian (Protestant) Church’s Position on the Tan’gun Myth Problem], in Han’guk kidokkyo yo˘ngu: Hanguk kidokkyo wa minjok t’ongil undong [Studies in Korean Christianity: Korean Christianity and a Movement for National Unification] (Seoul: Han’guk kidokkyo yo˘ksa yo˘nguso, 2001). 35 To explain this puzzle, Korean historians point to Kim’s Confucian prejudices, especially against the Buddhist monk Myoch’o˘ng, who sought to move the capital to P’yongyang from Kaeso˘ng. The assumption is that Kim deliberately ignored the Tan’gun myth that existed before Iryo˘n wrote it down since he disapproved of Myoch’o˘ng. See Pratt and Rutt, Korea: A Historical and Cultural Dictionary, s.v. “Myoch’o˘ng Rebellion” and John Jorgensen, “Who Was the Author of the Tan’gun Myth?” in Perspectives on Korea, ed. Sang-Oak Lee and Duk-Soo Park (Sydney: Wild Peony, 1998), 222–255. 36 Ihu˘m Yun, Tan’gun: Ku˘ ihae wa charyo, chu˘ngbo p’an [Tan’gun: How to Understand Him and Sources, enlarged edition], ed. Yun Ihu˘m (Seoul: Seoul University Press, 2001), 777; Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978).

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culture,” park being the pure Korean word connoting light and the sun, representing a variant pronunciation of baek (white), which is the same as the second syllable in Mt. T’aebaek, the hoary mountain in Korea where, according to the myth, Tan’gun lived upon descending from heaven.37 Owing to the efforts of Ch’oe, Sin, and their ilk—and given Korea’s political circumstances— Tan’gun’s stature as a nationalist icon grew during the colonial period. Moreover, as Hyun-Key Kim Hogarth argues, “Tan’gun also plays an important role in Korean shamanism, as one of the most important shamanistic deities.”38

IV. TAN’GUN AND EVANGELICAL MISSIONARIES The myth of Tan’gun drew considerable attention from evangelical missionaries in Korea. This was the case partly because the more influential among them, such as Homer Hulbert and Horace G. Underwood, were supportive of incipient nationalists like Yun Ch’iho and So˘ Chaepil, who had converted to Protestantism and had sought to instill a sense of sovereignty among the Korean populace.39 They did so, for example, by dating their Independent (Tongnip sinmun), the first vernacular newspaper to be published in Korea, according to tan’gi (the founding date of Old Choso˘n, 2333 B.C.E.) rather than the regnant year of a Chinese emperor, which was the way dates had been reckoned by the Korean court traditionally. By doing so, the reformers sought to emphasize Korea’s independence from China. But the missionaries also had their own reason for being attracted to the myth. In the myth, they saw a way to address a keen missiological concern: relating Korean religions to a cherished missiological theory, the fulfillment theory of world religions, and thereby establishing (or construing) a point of contact between Christianity and Korean religiosity. The fulfillment theory of world religions accords with Knitter’s partial replacement model. Christians who held this view did not dismiss other religions outright but believed they contained an adumbration of the truth that would be fully realized in Christianity, in which case the heathen religions would be supplanted.40 Implicit in this view were three premises: 1) all meaningful religions contained a kernel of the truth—that is, 37

Chizuko T. Allen, “Northeast Asia Centered around Korea: Ch’oe Namson’s View of History,” Journal of Asian Studies 49:4 (1990): 787– 806. 38 Hyun-Key Kim Hogarth, Korean Shamanism and Cultural Nationalism (Seoul: Jimoondang, 1999), 271. 39 Both So˘ (also known as Philip Jaishon) and Yun were associated with the Enlightenment Party (Kaehwapa), which sought to force its reform on the government through a coup d’etat in 1884 and failed. J. Earnest Fisher, Pioneers of Modern Korea (Seoul: Christian Literature Society of Korea, 1977), and Chandra, Imperialism, Resistance and Reform in Late Nineteenth-Century Korea. 40 Knitter, Introducing Theologies of Religion; Kenneth Cracknell, Justice, Courtesy, and Love: Theologians and Missionaries Encountering World Religions, 1846– 1914 (London: Epworth, 1995).


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the monotheistic faith of Christianity—in their pristine state; 2) in the course of history, religions degenerated; and 3) as religions degenerated, whatever amount of truth they contained had become obscured, distorted, or lost. This theory had influenced a number of key Protestant missionaries to Korea, including Horace G. Underwood and Homer Hulbert.41 Hulbert was noted for his efforts to interpret the Tan’gun myth as reflecting the pristine kernel postulated by the fulfillment theory. In the myth, Hulbert saw a primitive monotheism, elaborated in a sort of Trinitarian language. He therefore analogized Hwanin to the creator God, Hwanung to the Holy Spirit, and Tan’gun to the Incarnate Son, the Christ. Accepting the antiquity of this myth, Hulbert believed that Tan’gun was a semi-divine culture hero who worshiped the True Spirit. As history evolved, however, this primitive monotheism of Tan’gun degenerated, contaminated by crass beliefs in evil spirits and nature gods, not to mention baneful influences of Buddhism and Confucianism.42 Having interpreted the Tan’gun myth in terms of the Trinitarian doctrine, Hulbert then linked the myth to a concept that was universally familiar to Koreans: Hananim. Hananim—synonymously referred to as Hanu˘nim or Hanu˘lnim—was the Korean word for what anthropologists called a high god, the deity atop a hierarchy of gods; the word also connoted oneness and the sky. Despite its henotheistic connotation, already by 1882 (about two decades before Hulbert was developing his Trinitarian notion about Tan’gun) this term had been used in a Korean translation of Luke and John, the first two books of the Bible to be translated into Korean, translated by the Scottish missionary to Manchuria John Ross and his Korean collaborators.43 Initially the term did not enjoy universal acceptance among Korea missionaries. One of its opposers was Horace G. Underwood, who resisted it on the suspicion that it might have been tainted with polytheistic connotations. Underwood himself preferred Sangju (“Lord of Heaven”), a Sinitic-sounding neologism he himself coined. To Hulbert, however, as Godhead was to the Trinitarian doctrine, Hananim was to the Tan’gun myth. This exegesis was convincing to other missionaries, since, in the light of the fulfillment theory, the kernel of truth embodied in the word Hananim could be seen as having been fulfilled in the God of Christianity. Moreover, the exegesis seemed to be corroborated by the fact that Koreans of all echelons regarded Hananim as a high god and by the alacrity with which many of them responded to the Gospel 41 Sung Deuk Oak, “The Indigenization of Christianity in Korea: North American Missionaries’ Attitudes Towards Korean Religions, 1884–1910” (Ph.D. diss., University of Boston, 2002). 42 Ibid., 202. 43 Han’guk Kidokkyo yo˘ksa yo˘n’guso [Institute of Korean Church History Studies] (hereafter IKCHS), Han’guk kidokkyo u˘i yo˘ksa I [A History of the Korean Church, I] (Seoul: Kidokkyomunsa, 1989), 148.

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message.44 By 1910, Hulbert’s analysis became widely accepted among Korea missionaries, including Underwood, who conceded that further study had led him to agree with Hulbert.45 Consequently, since 1910, Hananim has been the term the evangelicals have used to refer to God.46 This fact—and the fact that the doctrine of the Trinity has been a sine qua non for evangelical orthodoxy—might lead one to infer that Tan’gun, too, would have been incorporated into the working theology of the evangelical church during the colonial period. But that has not happened. Several reasons may account for this fact. For one thing, theologizing about Tan’gun was limited to missionaries and scholars of religions, their discussion carried out mainly in English in conferences and in journals and treatises— making them inaccessible to all but a few Koreans. It was important for the missionaries to interpret Tan’gun, but sharing that interpretation with Koreans was not necessary. It was only since the early 1950s that Koreans themselves began theologizing about Tan’gun, especially with the publication of Yun So˘ngbo˘m’s “Hwanin-hwanung-hwango˘m u˘n kot hananim ita” [Hwaninhwanung-hwan’go˘m is Very God] in Sasanggye [Thought World] in May 1963—and then only by a handful of the more progressive theologians who operated outside the evangelicals’ circles.47 Secondly, Tan’gun was just an adumbration of Christ—an old wineskin capable of holding only the most tepid version of the truth, deserving to fade out now that the Gospel had arrived in its evangelical form. After all, there could only be one historical— revealed—Christ, Jesus of Nazareth. Finally, there was the danger of persecution from the Japanese Government General, which had always been wary of the linkage between Tan’gun and Korean nationalism. Indeed, such persecution had fallen on Taejonggyoists, who were harried out of the country, with their founder Na Choˇl committing suicide in 1916. 44 David Chung, Syncretism: The Religious Context of Christian Beginnings in Korea (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). 45 Oak, “The Indigenization of Christianity in Korea,” 301. 46 The term was also adopted by the Catholics, though they also use Ch’o˘nju (Lord of Heaven), formed from two Chinese characters. 47 Kang Ton’gu, “Tan’gun sinhwa u˘i minsokhak mit ch’o˘lhak: Sasang punya u˘i yo˘n’gu” [Tan’gun Myth in Folklore Studies and Philosophy: A Study in the Field of Intellectual Studies], in Tan’gun: Ku˘ ihae wa charyo, chu˘ngbo p’an [Tan’gun: How to Understand Him and Sources, enlarged edition], ed. Yun Ihu˘m (Seoul: Seoul University Press, 2001), 244; Ch’a Oksung, ed., Kdiokkyosa charyojip kwo˘n 4: T’ajonggyo mit cho˘nt’ongmunhwa u˘i ihae rul chungsim u˘ro [A Collection of Sources on Christianity, Book 4: Focusing on the Understanding of Foreign and Traditional Religions (after 1945)] (Seoul: Koryo˘ hallimwo˘n, 1993): 37–38. That evangelicals regarded theologians who embraced non-Christian religions to be beyond the pale of orthodoxy was pointed up in the experience of Chung Hyun Kyung, a feminist theologian from Korea. Dubbed “survival-syncretist” by the Christian Century, she was denounced and harassed by conservative Protestants in Korea after she openly expressed pluralistic sentiments in her controversial address at the 1991 World Council of Church’s conference held in Canberra, Australia. Christian Century (March 11, 1992).


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V. EVANGELICALS’ CONTRIBUTION TO KOREAN NATIONALISM: THE 1919 MARCH FIRST INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT That the evangelicals did not incorporate Tan’gun into their theology did not mean that they lacked sympathy for Korean nationalism or that they did not play a significant role in its development. Indeed, evangelicals played a key role in the rise of Korean nationalism during the colonial period, enabling their religion to become positively associated with it. Early converts to evangelicalism were mostly lower-class Koreans from northern parts of the country, but by the late 1890s, evangelicalism was also making inroads into the ranks of the politically minded upper class, or yangban. Like commoners, yangban, too, started to join the church in the 1880s when the country was still under Korean sovereignty. Most of them, like Yun Ch’iho and So˘ Chaepil (also known as Philip Jaisohn), were from the disaffected portion of their class. In their adoption and support of the religion, politics played a role. And believing that evangelicalism could help reform their people and nation, they encouraged their countrymen to embrace it.48 Moreover, after the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905, Korean officials who had discountenanced the religion earlier also endorsed it, perhaps out of a sense of desperation for the reformation of their society. In part influenced by such endorsements, many Korean nationalists turned to evangelicalism to find ways to ameliorate their nation’s woes.49 Faced with politically motivated seekers, the missionaries, on the one hand, did not quibble over such motives. They were simply glad to have as much raw material as they could for evangelism.50 On the other hand, with the nation’s politics becoming increasingly volatile, they were leery of the church turning into a hotbed of the independence movement. As a result, they began to emphasize to the Koreans, especially to the converts, a policy of disallowing political activities within the church.51 By disallowing political activities within the church, the missionaries believed they were taking a nonpartisan stance.52 In actual fact, in Korea at the time achieving such a stance was extremely difficult, if not impossible. Indeed, except in the minds of certain Koreans whom later generations

48 For a useful analysis of Korean Christian nationalists’ critique of their society and their endorsement of Protestantism as the antidote, see Wells, New God, New Nation. 49 C. E. Sharpe, “Motive for Seeking Christ,” KMF 2 (August 1906): 182–183, and C. A. Clark, “Not Unpromising Now,” KMF 2 (August 1906): 198– 199. 50 “Evangelistic Work at Kunsan,” KMF 2 (April 1906): 106 –107. 51 IKCHS, History of Korean Church, vol. 1, 303. 52 Cf.: “A strict neutrality has been maintained and a determination to keep hands out of politics is a well known fact to all who are acquainted with the missionary plans and policy of the Christian Church.” Editorial. KMF 3 (October 1907): 153–156.

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stigmatized as collaborators between Japanese colonialism and Korean nationalism, there was little (if any) middle ground.53 Moreover, though espousing political neutrality, the missionaries did more than disallow political activities within the church. They discouraged their flock from harboring nationalistic sentiments. And from 1910, when Japanese rule over Korea began in earnest, the missionaries made it clear they were willing not only to accept the status quo but also to regard the Japanese as a partner in their self-appointed task to enlighten Koreans. Thus, in 1918, the editorial of the Korea Mission Field stated the following as it welcomed the arrival of the second governor-general of Korea, Hasegawa Yoshimichi: We are pleased thus to honor our Governor General; firstly because the Bible commands us to honor the Powers that be; . . . thirdly, because the Governor General and the missionaries are both interested in the Koreans to improve their condition. Though methods employed are different they need not conflict, but, on the other hand, should be mutually helpful and complementary.54 The missionaries, to be sure, had good reasons to discountenance Korean nationalism. For after 1905, to safeguard and continue their evangelistic work in Korea, it was crucial for them to win Japanese toleration. But having led the church to accept the status quo—the Japanese rule—they could not help but disappoint Korean nationalists within the church and alienate those outside it. Inevitably, many Koreans left the church—at least the church as institutionally conceived.55 Had the evangelical church maintained its apolitical stance throughout the colonial period, the Korean church might have taken the path taken by the Protestant churches of Japan and China, where Protestantism was seen as part and parcel of Western imperialism. It might not have become positively associated with Korean national interests; it might not have developed any differently than it did in China or Japan.56 Evangelicalism in Korea, as it turned out, did not follow that path. Unlike its Japanese and Chinese 53 Apropos here is the caution voiced by Gi-wook Shin and Michael E. Robinson against “the unitary focus, artificial unity, and binary-producing tendencies of older assumptions about nationalism that have too often dominated Korean historiography”: see Shin and Robinson, Colonial Modernity in Korea, 2. 54 “Editorial Notes,” KMF 14 (January 1918): 1 –3. 55 Min Kyoung-bae, “Han’guk kidokkyo isso˘so˘ minjok munje” [The Problem of Nation in Korean Christianity] in Han’guk Yo˘ksawa Kidokkyo [Korean History and Christianity], ed. Kidokkyo sasang (Seoul: Literature Society of Korea, 1983): 111. See also “Some Changes in the Korean Church,” KMF 10 (March 1914): 69. 56 On nationalist Christians in Japan, see Irwin Scheiner, Christian Converts and Social Protest in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); for the same in China, see Philip West, “Christianity and Nationalism: The Career of Wu Lei-ch’uan at Yenching University,” in John


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counterparts, the evangelical church deeply shared in and contributed to Koreans’ collective aspiration. And this happened despite the missionaries’ effort to depoliticize the church. For though the missionaries succeeded in depoliticizing the church qua an institution, they failed to depoliticize it qua Korean men and women. That this was the case was attested by the 1919 March First Independence Movement. The March First Movement marked a turning point in modern Korean history.57 It was a nation-wide uprising in which Koreans of different backgrounds came together en masse to defy their Japanese colonizers and to regain their national independence. In the end, the movement failed to achieve its objective of Korean independence; however, it succeeded in galvanizing and uniting Koreans. And as Michael E. Robinson states, “The memory of this uprising plays a significant role in the narrative of modern Korea and the evolution of Korean nationalism.”58 In the background of the March First Movement was Japan’s harsh rule over Korea and Koreans’ persistent desire for independence. But the more immediate factor was the Fourteen Points speech made by President Woodrow Wilson of the United States. First delivered in January 1918, nine months after he had persuaded Americans to join the Allies in World War I, Wilson’s speech seemed to promise the right of self-determination to colonized people everywhere.59 Later, this ideal would turn hollow, as it was not applied to the colonies held by Allies such as Japan. But when the speech was first aired, Korean nationalists embraced it as a clarion call to action. This clarion call was embraced by the evangelicals and adherents of Ch’o˘ndokyo (Heavenly Way), and to a lesser extent by the Buddhists. Initially the evangelicals and the Ch’o˘ndyoists planned on holding separate rallies in response to Wilson’s proclamation to demand Korea’s independence from Japan. But, realizing that they shared much in common, the two camps combined their efforts. Later the Buddhists joined them, completing the triumvirate of the religious leadership at the helm of the movement.60 As the

Fairbank, ed., Missionary Enterprise in China and America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 226– 246. 57 For detailed treatment of this event, see Frank Baldwin, Jr., “The March First Movement: Korean Challenge and Japanese Response” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1969). See also Han’guk yo˘ksa Yo˘n’hoe and Yo˘ksa munje yo˘n’guhoe [Institute for the Study of Korean History and Institute for the Study of Historical Problems], eds., 3.1 minjok haebang undong yo˘ngu [A Study of the March First National Liberation Movement] (Seoul: Ch’o˘ngnyo˘nsa, 1989). 58 Michael E. Robinson, Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey: A Short History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 47. 59 On the influence of the Versailles Peace Conference on the March First Movement, see Baldwin, “March First Movement,” 14– 51. 60 By this time, the more radical members of the Korean independence movement were either imprisoned or exiled, prompting the moderate religionists to step forward.

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last preparatory step, thirty-three of the top leaders of the triumvirate inscribed their names on a Declaration of Independence, copies of which were to be distributed to people on the eventful day. On March 1, 1919, evangelicalism’s most potent encounter with Korean nationalism took place. On that day, in Seoul’s Pagoda Park, thousands of Koreans—men and women, young and old—had been gathering since the morning for a rally. Then, at two o’clock in the afternoon, a young Protestant man mounted the platform in the middle of the park and stirred the crowd by reading the Declaration of Independence. As soon as he was finished, the crowd burst into deliriously resounding cheers: “Taehan Tongnip Manse!” (Long Live Korean Independence!). Shortly after the Declaration of Independence was read in Pagoda Park, Koreans elsewhere in the city and in the country at large staged similar demonstrations. Within days, the movement for independence erupted in virtually every corner of the country, in nearly all segments of the Korean society, with about two million people directly participating in more than fifteen hundred gatherings, occurring in all but seven of Korea’s 281 country administrations.61 The March First Independence Movement was meant to be nonviolent. It started out that way, but in the end it failed to remain so. The leaders intended to appeal to the conscience of the Japanese colonizers and, more important, to the Wilson-led victors at the Paris Peace Conference, by using peaceful demonstrations.62 But instead of affecting the Japanese conscience, the demonstrations only galled the gendarmes, who, assisted by Japanese residents in Korea, indiscriminately beat and shot at the demonstrators. In the face of such reaction, the peaceful demonstrations soon turned into riots, which continued sporadically through the summer. The situation came under full control only with the arrival of additional troops. By that time a great many casualties had been suffered by the Koreans: 7,645 killed and 15,961 injured—with 715 houses, 47 churches, and 2 schools destroyed and burned.63

61 Lee Ki-baik, A New History of Korea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 344. There is some dispute over the number of Korean participants in the uprising. Robinson cites the conservative figure of one million: Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey, 48. Baldwin cautiously endorses the figure of two million. He adds that even if the conservative figure of one million is assumed, given that in 1919 the Korean population was about 16 million, and if half of the number represents women, then “Of the remaining 8,000,000 Korean males, perhaps a quarter may be excluded as either too young, under fourteen years of age, or too old and infirm. Thus the one million demonstrators were from a potential ‘pool’ of six million. It appears then that approximately one out of six Korean males old enough to understand the meaning of the independence movement demonstrated against Japanese rule”: “March First Movement,” 231. 62 Baldwin, “March First Movement,” 53. 63 Lee, A New History of Korea, 344; Baldwin, “March First Movement,” 232– 235.


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Despite their espousal of neutrality, the missionaries could not stand aloof when innocent people—especially their converts—were brutalized by the police and gendarmes. They became actively involved in caring for the injured. Moreover, insisting on “no neutrality for brutality,” they urged Japanese authorities to desist from using brutal tactics against the demonstrators.64 Failing to make much impact by a direct appeal, they drew on the resources of their overseas contacts. They documented clear cases of Japanese atrocities and, using unofficial channels, reported to mission boards and influential friends in Europe and America.65 The uprising and the publicizing of it proved to be a public relations nightmare for the Japanese government, as it provoked international outcries and, in the United States, provided ammunition to senatorial critics of Japan.66 Consequently, the Japanese government was compelled not only to renounce using brutal tactics against the demonstrators but also to overhaul its colonial policy in Korea. The evangelicals’ contribution to the 1919 March First Movement was significant. Granted, the movement was a pan-Korean phenomenon to which no single group could lay an exclusive claim. Nevertheless, it must be noted that, once the movement got under way, the contributions rendered by Korean evangelicals—roles played and sufferings borne by them—stood out. For example, of the thirty-three signers of the Declaration of Independence, nearly half (sixteen) were evangelicals (as opposed to two Buddhists and fifteen Ch’o˘ndokyoists).67 For the movement to have spread so quickly and cohesively, communication and organization were key. Here the evangelical church’s national network and local leadership played crucial roles. How significantly evangelicalism contributed to the March First Movement could be gauged also by analyzing figures concerning those arrested during the demonstrations. According to a report issued by the Japanese military police near the end of 1919, 19,525 persons were arrested in connection with the demonstrations. Of these, 3,371 were evangelicals—more than 17 percent of the arrested—an impressive figure considering that, by 1919, the evangelicals comprised only about 1 percent of the total population.68 Of the arrested, 6,310 were religionists; among them, evangelicals predominated, accounting 64

Baldwin, “Missionaries and the March First Movement,” 197. Also see Wi Jo Kang, “Relation between the Japanese Colonial Government and the American Missionary Community in Korea, 1905–1945,” in Yur-bok Lee and Wayne Patterson, ed., One Hundred Years of KoreanAmerican Relations, 1882–1982 (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1986), 68–85. 65 Federal Council of the Churches of Christ of America (FCCCA), comp., The Korean Situation: Authentic Accounts of Recent Events by Eye Witnesses (New York: FCCCA, 1920). 66 Baldwin, “March First Movement,” 185. 67 Kim Su˘ng-t’ae, “Chonggyoin u˘i 3.1 undong ch’amyo˘ wa kidokkyo u˘i yo˘khar” [Religionists’ Participation in the March First Movement and the Role of Christianity] in Journal of the Institute of Korean Church History Studies 25 (April 1989): 17–24. 68 Ibid., 39.

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for 53 percent (3,376). Furthermore, of the arrested, 489 were clergy; among them, evangelicals comprised nearly half (244)—more than twice the Buddhists (120) and almost twice the Ch’o˘ndokyoists (125). Finally, of the 471 women arrested, evangelicals accounted for more than 65 percent (309), attesting to the empowering effect the religion had on Korean women.69 By taking a leading role in the March First Movement, evangelicalism stood to gain greatly. It recouped the appeal it had lost among the Korean populace. A new upturn in its membership enrollment concretely reflected this gain: “Since 1910 the curve representing the total number of Southern Methodist members and probationers had been steadily going downward; in 1920 the curve turned sharply upward again, and within five years there was a net gain of 102 percent. In each of the other churches in Korea also the year 1920 marks the beginning of a period of growth. . . . This period of rapid growth was ushered in by the Independence Movement.”70 In addition, evangelicalism gained something much more enduring—its right to be considered a legitimate religion of Korea. By virtue of its participation in Korea’s struggle for political freedom, evangelicalism acquired nationalist credentials few Koreans could gainsay. During the remainder of the colonial period, the evangelicals underwent further trials; but when liberation finally came, the nationalist credentials they had gained in the Movement stood them in good stead. In the latter half of the century, it gave them a backbone as they spoke up in behalf of their faith vis-a`-vis Tan’gunism.

VI. THE SHINTO RITES CONTROVERSY AND THE AFFIRMATION CONSERVATIVE ORIENTATION IN KOREAN EVANGELICALISM

OF

With Japan’s defeat in 1945, Korea was liberated—and then divided along the 38th parallel. In the North, communism became the basis of its distinct society, brooking no competition.71 There, Christians were persecuted. By the end of 1953 when the Korean War ended, a great many evangelicals had fled to the South, where they became ardent anti-communists and supported (and were supported by) the dictatorial regimes whose only platform was anticommunism.72 In the South, homegrown socialists and communists were 69

Ibid., 39. Alfred W. Wasson, Church Growth in Korea (New York: International Missionary Council, 1934), 98. 71 Charles Armstrong, North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). 72 Kang Inch’o˘l estimates that in 1945 the number of northern Protestants was about 200,000, about 2.2 percent of the population. Among them, he estimates 70,000 to 80,000 might have migrated to the south, constituting 35 to 40 percent of the Protestant population in the North and 6 to 7 percent of all the northerners who migrated. Kang Inch’o˘l, Han’guk u˘i kaesin’gyo wa panggongjuu˘i: Posujo˘k kaesin’gyo u˘i cho˘ngch’ijo˘k haendongjuu˘i t’amgu [Korean Protestantism 70


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rooted out, such that by the war’s end they had either been eliminated or fled to the North.73 In the North, Tan’gun was now deemed a primitive relic, unworthy of a society that had advanced so far in history—a tune that would change in the 1990s. In the South, it was a different story. There Tan’gun continued to be esteemed as a national icon. This development was attested in 1948, when the national assembly passed legislation that made tan’gi the official dating system of the country, though in the end it proved impractical and was abandoned in 1961 in favor of the Western system.74 In 1949 another law was passed to establish the National Founding Day (kaech’o˘njo˘l) to celebrate the founding of Kojoso˘n by Tan’gun—it remains a national holiday, celebrated on October 3. This legislation was accepted by the evangelicals without protest. Indeed, the laws were passed when the sitting president, Syngman Rhee, was Protestant and when evangelicals wielded considerable clout in the government, far disproportionate to their number. In 1949, the South Korean population was about 20 million. Of this number, Christians constituted about 600,000 (3 percent). Among them, Catholics numbered about 260,000 (1.3 percent), the rest, 340,000 (1.7 percent), were Protestants.75 In light of these figures, the following observation is noteworthy: In 1946, of fifty Koreans who were in official positions in the Korean government, 35 were professing Christians. Of the ninety members of the Korean Interim Legislative Assembly in 1946, the number of professing Christians was 21, including seven ordained ministers. In the first Korean Legislative Assembly, of 190 members (from August, 1948), the number of Christians is reported to be 38, of whom thirteen were ordained Christian ministers.76 This state of affairs, however, did not signal that evangelicals were ready to theologize about Tan’gun after 1945—that they would seek to fuse the

and Anti-communism: An Examination of Conservative Protestants’ Political Behaviorism] (Seoul: Chungsim, 2006), 418. 73 Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, updated ed. (New York: Norton, 2005). 74 Empas paekkwasajo˘n [Empas (Internet) Encyclopedia]. 2007. s.v. t’angun kiwo˘n [The Origin of the Tan’gun Dating System] http://100.empas.com/dicsearch/pentry.html?s¼K&i¼255048 &v¼45 (accessed on 23 December 2008). 75 The figure for the general population is from Kim Doo-Sub and Kim Cheng-Seok, The Population of Korea (Seoul: Korea National Statistics Office, 2004). The Christian figures are estimates by Samuel H. Moffett in Han’guk kyohoe 100-yo˘n chonghap chosa yo˘n’gu (Centennial Comprehensive Study of the Korean [Protestant] Church), 144. As can be surmised from these figures, the rapid growth of the Korean Protestant Church took place only after the Korean War. 76 Harry A. Rhodes and Archibald Campbell, History of the Korea Mission: Presbyterian Churches in the U.S.A., Volume I: 1935–1945 (New York: Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations, the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., 1964), 381. It is safe to assume that almost all the “Professing Christians” referred to in this report were evangelicals.

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horizons between the Tan’gun myth and their theology, continuing the task started by Hulbert and Underwood. Such theologizing did not occur for two reasons. For one, it was preempted by a Shinto obeisance controversy that traced its roots to the colonial period. For another, such theologizing was out of place in the post-war churches where conservatism in theology was in ascendance. During the last ten years of its rule in Korea, Japan sought to integrate Korea more closely into its empire by imposing Shinto rites on its inhabitants. Beginning in 1935, the Government General compelled all civic and private assemblies to begin their activities with a brief Shinto ritual. Many evangelicals saw this ritual to be idolatrous and resisted it—especially the Presbyterians who chose to close all their mission schools and the seminary rather than submit to the rites. By 1938, all denominations had been forced to comply with the rites. Resistance continued, however. When liberation came, more than fifty evangelicals had died as martyrs to the cause, more than two thousand were languishing in prison, and multitudes were engaged in clandestine resistance in and outside Korea.77 Now in a development reminiscent of what occurred in North Africa in the aftermath of the Decian and Diocletian persecutions, the surviving resisters—the confessors—insisted on a purification of the church.78 They demanded that the “lapsed” clergy undergo a period of atonement before continuing their pastoral roles. The compliers, however, rebuffed them, insisting that they had endured hardships to keep the church open under the oppressive regime. In the end this issue failed to achieve a satisfactory resolution, partly due to the eruption of the Korean War. As a result the South Korean Protestant church—like other institutions of the society—remains conflicted over the colonial legacy of collaboration.79 Among the former resisters in the Presbyterian church, many refused to associate with the compliers. These Presbyterians, who tended to be vociferous opponents of communism and liberal theology, eventually formed a separate denomination in 1952 known as the Kosin ch’onghoe (The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Korea) or simply Kosin, after the name of its seminary (Koryo˘ sinhak taehakwo˘n [Korea Theological Seminary]). It became a redoubt of conservatism in Korean evangelicalism. Kosin’s emergence 77 Kim Su˘ng-t’ae, ed., Han’guk kidokkyo wa sinsa ch’ambae munje [Korean Christianity and the Shinto Worship Problem], (Seoul: Han’guk kidokkyo yo˘ksa yo˘n’guso, 1991); and Kim Yangso˘n, “Compulsory Shinto Shrine Worship and Persecution,” in Korea and Christianity, ed. Chai-Shin Yu, 87– 120 (Seoul: Korean Scholar Press, 1996). 78 On the Decian and Diocletian persecutions, see W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 318– 324, and Justo L. Gonzales, The Story of Christianity, Vol. I (New York: HarperSan Francisco, 1984): 102–109. 79 Bruce Cumings, “The Legacy of Japanese Colonialism in Korea,” The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895– 1945, ed. Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press), 478– 496.


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signaled a further conservative turn in Korean evangelicalism—a development filliped by the Korean War, which forced multitudes of northern evangelicals to relocate to the South, where they built churches steeped in anti-communism and conservative theology.80 Theological conservatism also characterized many missionaries who came to Korea after 1945. Historically, the Korea missionaries tended to be more conservative than their counterparts in China or Japan.81 Now their conservatism was even more pronounced, partly owing to the arrival of numerous fundamentalist missionaries from the United States. Among them, for example, was Bruce F. Hunt, a second-generation Korea missionary, who returned to Korea in 1946. Originally he was a missionary of the Northern Presbyterian Church. In 1936, however, he left that denomination to go to Manchuria to join Koreans resisting Shinto worship—for a while suffering imprisonment for it. When he returned to Korea, he did so as a missionary of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which he had helped found in collaboration with J. Gresham Machen, the preeminent leader of the fundamentalist camp. In Korea, Hunt contributed to the founding of the Korea Theological Seminary, helping to burnish its conservative identity.82 In 1954 Kosin’s conservative reputation was strengthened when it joined the International Council of Christian Churches, led by Carl McIntire, whose reputation as a militant conservative was even stronger than Machen’s. Since its founding, the Kosin Presbyterian church has represented a smaller and the rightmost end of the evangelical spectrum in Korean Presbyterianism, but, theologically speaking, the spectrum has not been wide. To the left of Kosin, in the center, has been the much larger Yejang hapdong (The General Council of the Presbyterian Church of Korea), the mainstay of Han’guk kidokkyo ch’ong yo˘nhaphoe (Christian Council of Korea), the largest evangelical umbrella organization in Korea, composed of sixty-two Protestant denominations at the turn of the twenty-first century. To the left of the center has been Yejang t’onghap (The Presbyterian Church of Korea)—nearly as large as Hapdong and a member of both the CCK and the Korean National 80 Kang, Han’guk u˘i kaesin’gyo wa panggongjuu˘i: Posujo˘k kaesin’gyo u˘i cho˘ngch’ijo˘k haendongjuu˘i t’amgu [Korean Protestantism and Anti-communism: An Examination of Conservative Protestants’ Political Behaviorism], 403–567. 81 Lee, “Beleaguered Success,” 331 –332. 82 Han’guk kidokkyo yo˘ksa yo˘nguso [Institute of Korean Church History Studies], Naehan so˘n’gyosa ch’ongnam [A Conspectus of Korea Missionaries, 1884– 1984] (Seoul: Han’guk kidokkyo yo˘ksa yo˘nguso, 1994); Bruce F. Hunt, For a Testimony: The Story of Bruce Hunt Imprisoned for the Gospel ([1966] Philadelphia: The Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 2000); see also an article by Hunt on a web page of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church: http://opc.org/cfm/HuntMissions.html (accessed on June 19, 2007); Pak Yong Kyu, Han’guk kidokkyohoesa, 1910–1960, 2 [A History of the Korean Church, 1910– 1960, vol. 2] (Seoul: Saengmyo˘ng u˘i malssu˘msa, 2004), 919–992.

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Council of Church (KNCC), which is affiliated with the World Council of Churches. Despite its embrace of ecumenism, T’onghap has remained solidly evangelical in its theology, thanks in part to the guidance given it by Han Kyo˘ngjik (Han Kyung Chik), founder of the Yo˘ngnak Presbyterian Church in Seoul, who may have been the most influential Protestant in Korea in the second half of the twentieth century.83 Conservatism, to be sure, prevailed in the other denominations as well—in Methodist, Baptist, pentecostal, and Holiness churches, for example—but the focus on the Presbyterians is warranted given that they constituted the bulk of the Protestant population in Korea.84 An important exception here is Han’guk kidokkyo changnohoe (or simply Kichang), the Presbyterian Church of the Republic of Korea—the only denomination that has avowed progressive theology.85 Since the late 1940s, aside from Kichang and pockets in the Methodist church and the T’onghap Presbyterian church, evangelicals have shown little interest in theologizing about the Tan’gun myth using indigenous idioms.86 This conservative tendency left them few options when attempts were made to officialize Tan’gun—to sacralize an ethnic nationalism.

VII. EVANGELICALS AND CONTROVERSIES OVER TAN’GUN SHRINES AND STATUES Despite their conservative theology, most evangelicals did not object when their government valorized Tan’gun by enacting tan’gi and kaech’o˘njo˘l. This was because, despite the trappings of civil religion, Tan’gun’s official status was left 83 Lee, “Conversion Narratives in Korean Evangelicalism”; Han Kyo˘ngjik p’yo˘njo˘n [A Critical Biography of Han Kyo˘ngjik] (Seoul: Kimyo˘ngsa, 2003). 84 In 1954, Presbyterians constituted about 70 percent of the entire Protestant population: Sung C. Chan, Schism and Unity in the Protestant Churches of Korea (Seoul: Christian Literature Society of Korea, 1979), 260. According to the 2005 munhwa cho˘ngch’aek paekso [The 2005 White Paper on Cultural Policy] published by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of South Korea, in 2005, South Korea had 170 Protestant denominations, 100 (59 percent) of which were Presbyterian (Han’guk kyo˘ngjae sinmun [Korean Economic Daily] 2006). 85 Kichang became a distinct denomination in 1953, in the wake of a Korean version of the Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy. It has been a smaller denomination than Hapdong or T’onghap, but one that has exerted significant influence on Korean society. This was especially the case in the 1970s and 1980s when many of its ministers led in struggles against the dictatorial regimes, including Suh Nam Dong and Ahn Byungmu. Both Suh and Ahn were pivotal in creating the Minjung [People] Theology. Kijang has not shared the evangelicals’ alarm over Tan’gun nationalism. See Commission on Theological Concerns of the Christian Conference of Asia, ed., Minjung Theology: People as the Subjects of History (Toa Payoh, Singapore: Commission on Theological Concerns of the Christian Conference of Asia, 1981). 86 Along with the Minjung theologians, also worthy of note is a group of progressive Methodist theologians, led by Pyo˘n So˘nhwan, Yu Tongsik (Ryu Tong-shik), and Yun So˘ngbo˘m, who have cultivated a t’och’akhwa sinhak (indigenized theology). See Andrew Sung Park, “Minjung and Pungryu Theologies in Contemporary Korea: A Critical and Comparative Examination” (Ph.D. diss., Graduate Theological Union, 1985).


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ambiguous. No attempt was made to create a civic cult around him, and a wide spectrum of interpretations about him was allowed to exist. At one end of this spectrum was the view that Tan’gun was not only historic but also deific; the middle view regarded Tan’gun as not so much a person as a religio-political office; and at the other end was the view that Tan’gun was a mythic figure, fictive but important as a symbol of the Korean nation. The first view was favored by Tan’gunists, such as adherents of Taejonggyoist; the middle view, by scholars and others influenced by Ch’oe Namson; and the last, by evangelicals and others who harbored skepticism toward the figure’s historicity. These different interpretations, so long as they coexisted on equal footing, did not cause a problem for the evangelicals. Problems—and conflict—arose when attempts were made to elevate one of them as official.87 The first public conflict over Tan’gun occurred on January 31, 1966, a year after Park Chung Hee’s regime had normalized relations between Korea and Japan. On that date, Park issued a presidential directive—that a giant statue of Tan’gun be built, largely at public expense, at the site in Namsan Park (the largest park in the capital) where during the colonial period a Shinto shrine had stood. Park used to be a lieutenant in the Japanese Imperial Army and had come into power by coup d’etat in 1961. He had been seeking means to legitimize his power, especially after the unpopular normalization treaty. Building this statue was a move toward securing such legitimization. Park’s directive, however, was vigorously contested by evangelicals, most of whom were loyal supporters of his anti-communist policy. The evangelicals insisted that Tan’gun was merely a mythic figure, not worthy of an official status as national progenitor. Their adamancy was recognized by Park, who was probably unwilling to jeopardize the evangelical support. So Park rescinded the directive; and in 1968 his government, in lieu of erecting the statue, allowed a private organization called hyo˘njo˘nghoe (Association for Manifesting True Law) to build a modest shrine dedicated to Tan’gun in the smaller Sajik Park. In the remainder of his rule, Park refrained from antagonizing the evangelicals over Tan’gun.88 The matter flared up again after Park’s assassination in 1979, during the regime of his prote´ge´ Chun Doo Hwan, who also came into power by military coup. In February 1985, a newspaper reported that Chun’s government planned to enlarge the Tan’gun shrine at Sajik Park. The construction was set to be 87 Yi Mahn-yol, Tan’gun sinhwa munje e taehan kidokkyohoe u˘i ipchang [The Christian (Protestant) Church’s Position on the Tan’gun Myth Problem]. In Han’guk kidokkyosa yo˘ngu: Hanguk kidokkyo wa minjok t’ongil undong [Studies in Korean Christianity: Korean Christianity and a Movement for National Unification] (Seoul: Han’guk kidokkyo yo˘ksa yo˘nguso, 2001), 317. 88 Yi Ku˘mdo, “Tan’gunjo˘n ko˘llip undong e taehan yo˘ksajo˘k koch’al” [A Historical Examination of the Movement to Construct Tan’gun Shrines] in Tangunjo˘n ko˘llip undong pip’an kwa onu˘l u˘i kido undong [Criticizing the Movement to Build Tan’gun Shrines and Today’s Prayer Movement], ed. Kim Myo˘ngho˘k (Seoul: Korean Evangelical Fellowship, 1987).

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completed in 1987 so that it could be showcased during the Seoul Olympics in the following year. This report once again galvanized the evangelical community against the government, especially when it was exposed that, in addition to Seoul, other large cities and even provinces had been planning to construct Tan’gun shrines. The evangelicals decried such plans, protesting that they violated the constitutional guarantee of separation between religion and state. The Kosin Presbyterian denomination, in particular, saw it as its calling to undermine the plan. Its leaders led in the protests, staging an outdoor demonstration in November 1985.89 Others followed suit with further rallies, prayer meetings, and petition drives to press the government into abandoning all such plans.90 Finally, in December 1985, Prime Minister No Sinyo˘ng invited twenty-four leaders of the Protestant church to the Shilla Hotel to discuss the matter. There he denied the government had ever planned to expand the Tan’gun shrine at Sajik Park, or that it had plans to do so in the future. After the 1985 incident, evangelicals were ever more vigilant of the way the government treated Tan’gun, becoming alarmed at the slightest hint of valorizing him. Such hypersensitivity was displayed in 1987. That year, newspapers reported on a synopsis of the new national history textbooks planned to be released in 1989 and 1990 for secondary and high school students, written by the Committee for the Compilation of National History (Kuksa py’o˘nch’an wiwo˘nhoe).91 Included in the synopsis was the following statement about Old Choso˘n: “The Tan’gun myth will be understood as reflecting historical facts; the establishment of Kojoso˘n will be stressed as the first instance of our nation’s state formation on the basis of bronze culture, and that its political and cultural levels have reached a developed stage will be specified (it will be made definite that Kojoso˘n’s starting point was the Bronze Age).”92 Having almost allowed the government to stealthily build shrines and statues dedicated to Tan’gun, evangelicals took exception to the first part of this synopsis. That is, they—perhaps willfully—misread “the Tan’gun myth will be understood as reflecting historical facts” to mean that the committee was conceding Tan’gun’s historicity. In response to this alleged error, the evangelicals issued the following declaration: “Factualization of the Tan’gun myth is idolatry. If mythical figures are factualized into historical figures, Tan’gun will not only become a national god, but also there is a concern that 89 “Han’guk kyohoe tan’gunsang munje e kwansimu˘l” [Korean Christian Churches Should Pay Attention to the Problem of Tan’gun Statues]. Han’guk kidokkyo sinmun [The Korean Christian Newspaper] (August 14, 2004). 90 Yi Ku˘mdo, “Tan’gunjo˘n Ko˘nnip undong e taehan yo˘ksajo˘k Koch’al” [A Historical Examination of the Movement to Construct Tan’gun Shrines], 50. 91 Yun Chongyo˘ng, Kuksa kyokwaso˘ p’adong [A Controversy over the National History textbook] (Seoul: Haean, 1999). 92 Yun, Kuksa kyokwaso˘ p’adong [A Controversy over the National History Textbook ], 172. My translation.


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idolatrous religions may be established as state religions. Myths exist in every nation, but there is no instance of their being made into facts. If the Tan’gun myth is factualized, our nation would become descendants of a bear. How could humans created by God become descendants of a bear?”93 The evangelicals demanded that the part about Tan’gun be rewritten in the history textbooks. They reinforced this demand with the usual demonstrations, prayer meetings, and petition drives, paralyzing the committee’s operation at times. It is worth noting that their demonstrations were part of a larger, frenzied protest scene in South Korea at the time—the scene that included student-led minjungjuu˘i (People Movement) demonstrations aimed at overthrowing Chun’s autocratic government, where shamanistic trappings were sported as autochthonous symbols of Korea.94 The evangelicals’ demand compelled not only the committee but also the Ministry of Education to go out of its way to explain the intended meaning of the disputed phrases. By the year’s end, the evangelicals relented, but only after indelibly imprinting in the minds of the officials exactly where they stood on Tan’gun. After this textbook incident, for about a decade, no Tan’gun controversy erupted in Korea. Then it flared up again in 1999. This time, however, it was not the government that was at the receiving end of evangelical ire: it was the Korean Cultural Campaigns Association (Hanmunhwa undonghoe), a coalition of religious and semi-religious organizations with a nativistic agenda. Between November 1998 and November 1999, this group had quietly erected, at its own expense, 369 statues of Tan’gun, made of fiberglass-reinforced plastic, on the grounds of secondary schools and other public institutions after securing permission from the principals or other local authorities. Their eventual aim was to erect a Tan’gun statue in every public school ground in Korea.95 KCCA’s rationale was that since all Koreans recognize (or should recognize) Tan’gun as their national founder, children who grow up paying honor to his statue in their schools will ensure Korea of future generations being surefooted in their national identity. This, in turn, would contribute to national unity, a desideratum at a time when baneful influences of globalization permeated South Korea. The statutes, however, infuriated evangelicals. They denounced them as idols, pointing to the explanatory plaque, affixed to each pedestal, that specifically mentions Tan’gun in connection with the scripture of a nativist religion, once again reminding the Korean public of the link between Tan’gun and indigenous 93

Yun, Kuksa kyokwaso˘ p’adong [A Controversy over the National History Textbook], 178. My translation. 94 Timothy R. Tangherlini, “Shamans, Students, and the State,” in Nationalism and the Construction of Korean Identity, ed. Hyung Il Pai and Timothy R. Tangherlini (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1998), 126 –147. 95 Sunday Seoul, “Nuga Tan’gun u˘i mogu˘l penu˘n’ga?” [Who is decapitating Tan’gun?]. (April 29, 2000): E-26.

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religions. The evangelicals also questioned the constitutionality of KCCA’s action, since the schools’ requiring students to pay respect before the statues, they argued, amounted to infringing on their religious freedom. They countered the Tan’gunists’ contention that due process was observed because the statues were placed in the schools with the principals’ permission with the retort that an endeavor as grave as KCCA’s should not have been left to the principals’ discretion. On June 14, 1999, a joint statement was issued by several evangelical organizations in Korea, including the Christian Council of Korea. The statement asserted 1) that it was inappropriate to recognize a mythical figure as a national progenitor worthy of homage when his true identity was being debated by scholars; 2) that it contravened the constitution to erect a structure belonging to a specific religious organization (to be placed in public spaces); and 3) that the educators were remiss when they condoned the placement in their school grounds of a structure that looked like an image kept in the Tan’gun shrine (Tan’gun samyo).96 In 1999, a Christian Committee to Oppose Tan’gun Statues was established and housed in the Christian Council of Korea. The committee called on the government to have the statues removed immediately. The government, however, responded indecisively, stating that each case should be handled by local authorities. Not satisfied, some evangelicals took the matter into their own hands. Already in April 1999, the first instance of damage to a Tan’gun statue had been reported, though it was unclear who the culprit was. By April 2000, thirty-seven more Tan’gun statues were either removed or damaged, with some of the culprits identified as evangelicals.97 This controversy between the evangelicals and Tan’gunists entered a new phase in 2003 as the result of a decision rendered in a Seoul district court. The decision stemmed from an injunction filed in September 2003 by Hongik munhwa yo˘nhap (The Association for [Promoting] the Culture of Great Benefit), a coalition of pro-Tan’gun groups, including KCCA, and Uri yo˘ksa paro argi siminyo˘ndae (Citizens’ Coalition for Correctly Understanding Our History). The injunction was directed against the Christian Council of Korea, aimed at preventing it from publishing and distributing a set of Sunday-school lessons called Tan’gun munje t’onghap konggwa: yo˘ksa ru˘l paru˘ge somang u˘l chunim’kke (Integrated Lessons on the Tan’gun Problem: To Correct the History and to Place Hope in the Lord). These lessons were published in August 2003 and copies sent to CCK’s member denominations to be used in their churches in order to expose the fallacies and dangers of the Tan’gun myth. The lessons were targeted at various age levels—from elementary and middle schoolers to high schoolers 96

Posted on the website of Sunggyul Theology Institute: http://sgti.kehc.org/myhome/colume/07. htm (accessed on June 13, 2007). 97 Sunday Seoul, “Nuga Tan’gun u˘i mogu˘l penu˘n’ga?” [Who is decapitating Tan’gun?].


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and adults. “Claiming that Tan’gun was a mythical figure,” the injunction charged, “is a distortion of history and an unpatriotic act, and since it [the alleged distortion] is like the Japanese colonialists’ policy aimed at eradicating Korea’s historical spirit, it affords ground for defamation.”98 In December 2003, however, the court dismissed the suit, stating that it had no cause. What is more, in the course of its ruling, the court recognized that the statutes did indeed possess religious attributes, notwithstanding Hongik munhwa yo˘nhaps’s claim to the contrary. This recognition strengthened the evangelicals’ hands; they now ratcheted up their campaign from simply stopping the erection of the statues to dismantling them. The Tan’gunists, however, have not relented in their quest to Tan’gunize Korea in this generation, as they continue to appeal to their compatriots’ nationalist sentiments to offset their setback. So the controversy continues.

VIII. TAN’GUN AS NOAH’S DESCENDANT In December 1999, as controversy swirled over Tan’gun statues, Kim So˘ngil, a well-known evangelical author, made an observation that was somewhat at odds with the views of both Tan’gunists and his co-religionists. His observation bespoke yet another way in which evangelicals could assimilate Tan’gun into a Christian framework—this time in the form of an epic novel. Kim observed that it was wrong to regard “Tan’gun” as a proper noun referring to a particular person, for the term is actually a title referring to a lineage of high priest-chieftains who used to offer sacrifices to Hananim, or God.99 If any pronoun is to be brought to bear on the issue, it should be wanggo˘m, the one mentioned in the myth itself, since, Kim contended, it is the name of the very first individual who occupied the office of Tan’gun. Kim’s observation was not entirely novel. That Tan’gun was probably the title of a (shamanic) priestly office had already been proposed by Ch’oe Namso˘n during the colonial period, and it remains a favored hypothesis among Korean historians and anthropologists. But unlike Kim, these scholars do not typically hold that wanggo˘m was the name of an individual, their preferred interpretation being that it too was a title, perhaps of chieftaincy.100 Be that as it may, for Kim, it was important that wanggo˘m be the name of an individual and Tan’gun the title of a priesthood, if only for the interest of his two huge and successful epic novels: the four-volume Hongsu ihu (After the Flood) and the five-volume Tongbang (The East).101 There is no need to 98

Yo˘nhap nus [Yo˘nhap News], February 8, 2004. Korean Christian Times (December 1, 1999). Andrew Nahm, An Introduction to Korean History and Culture (Seoul: Hollym, 1993), 16. 101 Hongsu ihu [After the Flood] (Seoul: Hongso˘nsa, 1990); Tongbang [The East] (Seoul: Hongso˘ngsa, 2000). 99

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expatiate on these novels here. But this much should be stated: After the Flood centers on a character from the family of Shem, one of Noah’s three sons, called hanus or Hwanu˘ng, who migrates from Mesopotamia to the East at the head of three thousand followers. He marries a young maiden who was raised by a shebear and reigns as high priest and chieftain to his people, called tongi, which was actually what the Han Chinese called peoples of Northeast Asia in ancient times. Hanus/Hwangu˘ng also teaches his people the ways of Hananim, including the principle of hongik in’gan (devotion to the welfare of humankind), the signature doctrine of Tangunism. This epic ends with the birth of his son, called kun or wanggo˘m. The sequel The East then picks up the story and carries it forward to about the 670s—that is, to the end of the Three Kingdoms period in Korean history, when Buddhism’s rise eclipsed the religion of Hananim. Throughout the narrative, the plot centers on the lives of individuals who serve as Tan’gun (later changed to ch’o˘ngun, Lord of Heaven). Their lives intersect with various junctures in ancient Korean history, and the tongi’s piety toward Hananim deteriorates over time. In these two epics, what Kim attempts is to Christianize the Tan’gun myth in a narrative that is a version of the “lost tribes of Israel,” only in this case it is one of Noah’s tribe that is lost. Evident in these narratives is the assumption of the fulfillment theory of religions: primitive monotheism is represented by the faith of Hwanung; that faith’s degeneration in history is illustrated by the deterioration of the faith in Hananim among Hwanung’s descendents; and the obscuring and distorting of the true religion is conveyed by the eclipse of Hananim by Buddha. Kim’s epics may be seen as a creative retort to an accusation a Tan’gunist might level at evangelicals—that Christianity is utterly foreign and has no place in the land of Tan’gun. To this, Kim’s epical retort amounts to this: quite the contrary, Christianity does indeed belong in Korea; for Tan’guns themselves descended from Noah, the chosen one of Hananim, very God. For Kim, a devout evangelical, such a retort is more than a creative apologetic. He, after all, is a literalist when it comes to biblical hermeneutics. He accepts Noah as a historical personage, just as he accepts Tan’gun as historical. This means Kim must assume a connection between the two at some point in the past. Lacking conventional sources to attest to such a connection, he has espoused a strategy like the one he demonstrated in After the Flood and The East. He has called it one of “creative history” (ch’angjak yo˘ksa), raising quite a few eyebrows in the process.102 Despite such espousal, Kim would not embrace what he deems to be “mythological” elements in the Tan’gun story, 102

There is an organization devoted to this view of “history” called Ch’angjo sahakhoe (their own English translation of the Korean appellation is Research Institute of Creation History); see their website at www.theorich.com.


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such as the idea that Tan’gun was an actual person or that he was the offspring of a bear-woman. Consequently, Kim ends up demythologizing the Tan’gun story only to re-mythologize it in evangelical garb. Kim’s narrative strategy to accommodate the Tan’gun myth is redolent of Hulbert’s exegetical strategy to accommodate the myth. Neither strategy is in the mainstream of Korean evangelicalism, yet each reflects a serious and civil effort by evangelicals to come to terms with a central narrative of Korea in the context of their faith. In contrast, the response of mainstream evangelicals has been much more confrontational—at times uncivil. At a deeper level, though, both the accommodationists and iconoclasts share the basic spirit of the replacement model: all religions of Korea at best adumbrate the Gospel of Jesus Christ and wait to be fulfilled and superseded by it.

IX. CONCLUSION In Ethnic Nationalism in Korea, Gi-Wook Shin argues that, in the course of the past century, partly through historical contingency, ethnic nationalism has emerged as the paramount collective identity of Koreans. And the touchstone of that identity has been Tan’gun. He observes that Tan’gun has cachet not only in South Korea but also in the North. This was apparent when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, when North Korea further refined its juche ideology (“socialism of our style”)— which by then had already moved beyond Marxism—by redefining its leader Kim Il Sung (and later Kim Jong Il as well) as the true inheritor of the Tan’gun legacy.103 North Korea reinforced this redefinition in a striking way in 1993 when it announced that it had discovered the tomb of Tan’gun and his queen near P’yo˘ngyang. Few scholars outside the North accept this “discovery” to be authentic, yet the announcement underscores Tan’gun’s potency as a touchstone of identity and legitimacy for Korean people.104 In the penultimate section of the book, Shin expresses his ambivalence toward his subject. This ambivalence is revealed in the title “The Prize and Price of Ethnic Nationalism in Korea.”105 Ethnic nationalism, he observes, has played a positive role in modern Korean history: it has enabled Koreans 103 Kim Jong Il, On the Juche Idea (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1982); Eun Hee Shin, “The Sociopolitical Organism: The Religious Dimension of Juche Philosophy,” in Religions of Korea in Practice, ed. Robert E. Buswell (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press), 517 –533. 104 Shin, Gi-Wook, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy, 206; Yun, Ihu˘m, ed., Tan’gun: Ku˘ ihae wa charyo, chu˘ngbo p’an [Tan’gun: Understanding and Sources, enlarged ed.] Chu˘ngbo p’an [Tan’gun: Understanding and Sources, enlarged ed.], 831–833; Charles Armstrong, “Centering the Periphery: Manchurian Exile(s) and the North Korean State,” Korean Studies 19 (1995): 1– 19. 105 Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea, 230.

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to resist imperialism and maintain their cultural integrity when they were robbed of sovereignty. Moreover, “Ethnic nationalism could play an integrative role as well in a unification process [between North and South Korea].”106 On the other hand, he sees drawbacks. For ethnic nationalism could also be “used as a trump card to override other identities as well as to justify violations of human and civic rights in both Koreas.”107 What then should be done about ethnic nationalism in Korea in the future? Shin offers this: The answer is not to ignore ethnic national identity, treating it as a mere myth or fantasy, or to remain simply content with its current role. Instead, it should be first and foremost recognized that ethnic nationalism has become a considerable force in Korean society and politics and that it can be dangerous and oppressive when fused with racism and other essentialist ideologies.108 For evangelicals, recognizing “that ethnic nationalism has become a considerable force in Korean society and politics” went without saying when they rallied against Tan’gun shrines and statues. In doing so, they directly challenged those who would sacralize Tan’gun or elevate Tan’gunism (ethnic nationalism) to a state ideology. It is interesting that this clash between evangelicals and Tan’gun nationalists has escaped Shin’s notice. Indeed, Christianity as such is barely noticed in his discussion, the only mention of it being that of Minjung theologians in the 1970s and 1980s.109 Shin wholly omits the evangelicals and their attempt to propagate an alternative vision of Korea. That evangelicals oppose Tan’gun nationalism, that they constitute a fifth of the South Korean population, and that they are among the most influential members of civil society in Korea at the turn of the twenty-first century does not undermine Shin’s argument that ethnic nationalism is “a considerable force in Korean society and politics.” But those facts do mitigate the concern that ethnic nationalism might become “dangerous and oppressive” in Korea. For if Tan’gunism is local and blood-based, evangelicalism is global (if not universal) and trans-ethnic: it is not in the interest of evangelicalism to let Tan’gunism flourish, and vice versa.

106

Ibid., 230. Ibid., 230. 108 Ibid., 232– 233. As of February 2008, slightly more than one million residents of Korea, or 2 percent of the general population, are not ethnic Koreans. Most of them are laborers or foreign wives of Korean men. Their numbers are likely to increase in the future, perhaps challenging Korea’s ethno-national identity. See “Diversity Causes Korea to Face New Challenges,” in Korea Times, February 24, 2008. 109 Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea, 171. 107

Church History 78:1 (March 2009), 99– 133. # 2009, American Society of Church History doi:10.1017/S0009640709000043 Printed in the USA

The Great War, Religious Authority, and the American Fighting Man1 JONATHAN EBEL

B

ETWEEN April 6, 1917, and November 11, 1918, the United States called into service a military force four million strong. Members of the comparatively minuscule professional military trained the citizensoldiers. The U.S. government, helped significantly by the militaries of Britain and France, sent roughly half of them to Europe to fight. Many arrived in France never having handled the weapons with which they would wage war. Though sometimes unprepared for combat and frequently overly enthusiastic in pursuit of military objectives—some thought reckless and foolhardy—this American Expeditionary Force and the promise of its replenishment helped bring the Great War to an end. When the guns finally fell silent, nearly eight million soldiers from the warring nations were dead. More than 115,000 of those were American.2 American involvement in wars and state-sanctioned violence outside of North America was not entirely unheard of in 1917. Many soldiers who waged the Great War for America had come of age aware of the exploits associated with the Spanish-American War, if not with vivid memories of the war itself or a clear

1 I would like to thank Catherine Brekus, W. Clark Gilpin, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Kathryn Lofton, Ned O’Gorman, and the graduate and faculty fellows of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank the two anonymous readers from Church History who provided such helpful guidance in the revision process, and to acknowledge with gratitude the support of the University of Illinois, the Louisville Institute, the Gilder Lehrman Center, the New York Public Library, and the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. I cannot begin to thank my wife, Meredith, for her support, patience, and willingness to read and comment on draft after draft after draft. This article first saw the light of day at a seminar hosted by the Newberry Library and organized by Catherine Brekus and Peter D’Agostino. After two hours of lively and constructive conversation, Peter, whom I had met for the first time that day, walked me to the nearest El stop offering words of encouragement and sharing his thoughts on this fascinating period in American religious history. I hope that this piece reflects even a fraction of the diligence and insight that he brought to his craft. 2 Michael Howard, The First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 146. This figure includes deaths from combat, accident, and illness but does not include those whose lives were likely dramatically shortened by physical and psychological injuries that occurred during the war.

Jonathan Ebel is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Illinois.

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sense of the extent to which it had expanded America’s empire. But the eventual scale of American involvement in Europe’s “fratricidal strife” was unprecedented for an overseas conflict. Only those who had lived through America’s Civil War had experienced a military mobilization like it, and the stakes in that war had been undeniably concrete and, for many, painfully local. The Great War, with its tangled web of causes, not to mention its distance from the United States, allowed for a far higher degree of ambiguity. America’s Protestant and Catholic clergy did their best to annihilate the war’s ambiguity in a hail of rhetoric, image, and action.3 If they doubted the course that Christ commanded Christian men to take in the Great War, they gave little indication. Christian clergy argued frequently and vociferously that a marauding, demonic German foe threatened vital American interests and precious American ideals. Monsignor C. F. Thomas of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C., used the occasion of George Washington’s birthday in 1918 to make these points with force. “The cause is just and righteous. Our sanctuary has been violated. Our rights despised. Our honor assailed in its tenderest spot. Our champions have gone forth to avenge the insult, to regain the confidence of the world in our greatness and power.”4 Aside from a (deliberately?) vague reference to a violated sanctuary, Monsignor Thomas built his case for war out of abstractions: despised rights, assailed honor, insults; the goal of the war was, in his eyes, also rather abstract: to regain the world’s confidence. The absence of concrete, material interests was, in fact, a key theme in American discussions of the war. Throughout the war, religious leaders echoed President Woodrow Wilson in establishing a direct connection between the absence of an immediate national interest and the righteousness of America’s involvement in the war. True virtue, many proclaimed, was modeled by those who, to quote the famous war poet Alan Seeger, fought “for honor, not for gain.”5 But to say that America and Americans had no immediate material stake in Europe’s war—at best a half-truth, but a conceit not central to this piece—is not 3

For a catalogue of clerical excess, see Ray H. Abrams, Preachers Present Arms: The Role of the American Churches and Clergy in the World Wars I and II, with Some Observations on the War in Vietnam (Scottsdale, Pa.: Herald, 1969). For a more measured, though also quite critical, discussion of clerical involvement in the march toward war, see Richard M. Gamble, The War for Righteousness: The Great War, Progressive Christianity, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (Wilmington, Del.: ISI, 2003). 4 Right Reverend Monsignor C. F. Thomas, “Patriotism,” in Conrad Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 278. He continued, “And it is incumbent upon every man and woman who glories in the name of American, and who lives under the protection of American freedom and enjoys the benefits of American liberty, to strengthen the arms of those champions.” 5 Alan Seeger, Poems (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1919), 171. Seeger’s poem is titled, “Ode in Memory of American Volunteers Fallen for France.” See James Anderson Winn, The Poetry of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) for an incisive history of the change in conceptions of honor from booty and material gain to the absence thereof.

THE GREAT WAR AND THE AMERICAN FIGHTING MAN

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to say that Americans entered the war without intense and ulterior motives. As David Kennedy established a quarter century ago and Richard Slotkin argued again recently, many groups of Americans looked for immediate domestic gains as a result of their involvement in the war. Left-leaning progressives, many of whom had a healthy skepticism of war in general, saw in this particular war an opportunity to “end all war” and also to challenge the hold of large industry on the means of production and distribution. African Americans, most famously W. E. B. DuBois, rallied to the flag in the hope that service in war would finally purchase equality.6 Recent immigrants to the United States sought removal of their hyphenate identity and access to full “Americanism” through the fires of combat.7 In this attempt to find an increased measure of acceptance, influence, and authority through war, two groups often found themselves at cross-purposes: American ministers and the young American men who filled the Army’s ranks. Clergy in America had long been concerned about the state of their social, cultural, and moral authority. As Gail Bederman and Clifford Putney have argued, clergymen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were haunted by ghosts of effeminacy and worked tirelessly to convince men that Christianity was for them, implicitly linking their own cultural capital to the religious lives of men.8 The young men who served in the American Expeditionary Force, though generally less troubled than American clergy by perceptions of decline or marginalization, still saw in war the age-old opportunity to be baptized by fire into manhood and, further, to use their service and sacrifice as a basis for cultural and civic authority in the post-war world. This article examines the wartime relationship between these two groups and argues that, in an ironic turn, American soldiers used muscular Christian ideas and images—ideas and images of which Protestant and Catholic clergy were 6 Historians Jim Cullen and Drew Gilpin Faust would agree that the sentiments voiced by DuBois and others with regard to the First World War echoed those voiced by Frederick Douglass and other African Americans with regard to the Civil War. See Jim Cullen, “I’s a Man Now: Gender and African American Men,” in Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, ed., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008). 7 David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Richard Slotkin, Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality (New York: Henry Holt, 2005). 8 Gail Bederman, “‘Women Have Had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough’: The Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911– 1912 and the Masculinization of Middle-Class Protestantism,” American Quarterly 41:3 (September 1989); Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). See also Edward Blum, “‘Paul Has Been Forgotten’: Women, Gender, and Revivalism during the Gilded Age,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 3:3 (July 2004). For a different, though not contradictory, perspective on the gendered root of religious authority, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Noonday, 1998).

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the primary developers and traffickers—to critique and marginalize chaplains and, more generally, to re-imagine religious authority in ways that placed soldiers beyond reproach. Rather than submit to the religious leadership and moralist critiques of questionable men, soldiers often leveled their own critiques and authorized or marginalized chaplains based largely on their willingness to preach and live a “muscular” faith defined by a direct, unadorned preaching style, a permissive moral code, and a desire to encounter and even participate in battle. The Great War brought clergy and young men together in an environment fraught with uncertainties both age-old and specific to the moment. Like all men and women who have encountered and waged war, the young men and chaplains who traveled to France wondered what combat would be like. Would they hold up to the physical and psychological strains? Would they ever see their loved ones and their homes again? The young men who volunteered or were drafted to fight the Great War left behind them a nation in transition and joined an organization, the military, that was adjusting on the fly to the demands of fighting a major overseas conflict. In addition to uncertainties about who would lead them, how they would be outfitted, and where they would serve, soldiers faced significant questions about the kind of nation to which they would return and their place in it. Would soldiers be able to return to their old jobs, assuming they were physically able? Would the nation embrace its newest veterans or keep them at arm’s length? Would war truly forge America’s increasingly diverse population into one nation, or would ethnic and religious differences, not to mention radically different visions of the political, social, and economic order, prove insoluble? On top of persistent concerns about their status in the United States, chaplains in the American Expeditionary Force and its auxiliary support services faced a great deal of uncertainty as to their place in the war effort. Like much of the U.S. military in 1917, the U.S. military chaplaincy was unprepared for a major overseas war. There were no uniform standards in place for the appointment of chaplains, no policies governing the assignment of rank or promotion; and the storied heroism of Civil War chaplains was a distant memory clouded by a recent history of incompetence, disrespect, and political favoritism.9 Moreover, Christian authority relationships—Protestant 9 Richard M. Budd, Serving Two Masters: The Development of American Military Chaplaincy, 1860–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 121– 153. John F. Piper, American Churches in World War I (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), entire (esp. 119– 122). Budd describes in great detail the disarray into which military chaplaincy fell in the post–Civil War era and the efforts to professionalize the chaplaincy in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Great War, in Budd’s account, was a pivotal moment for the development of chaplaincy as a profession insofar as it led to the standardization of appointment practices and clarified such issues as rank and promotion. But Budd does not concern himself with soldiers’ views of chaplains and other religious authorities, which complicate the picture significantly.


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and Catholic—were complicated by life on the Western Front.10 The diverse religious and regional identities of the soldiery meant that chaplains could hardly take legitimacy for granted. The exigencies of war trumped existing personal relationships and denominationally specific legitimating criteria. More fundamentally, the form and content of revelation changed on the Western Front. War, combat, and violence—already viewed by many as paths to a more authentic experience of life—took on a religious, revelatory significance to soldiers and to many clergymen as well.11 The Great War, many soldiers and chaplains proclaimed, was a new Sinai or Golgotha on which a world-changing religious event was occurring. Those present could testify most reliably to the doctrinal content of this new revelation, and those present in greatest number, those most involved in the event, were the soldiers themselves. This rather contained discussion of religious authority as imagined, critiqued, and exercised in the American Expeditionary Force is one piece of a larger story of the place of religion in the American war effort, but it contains many of the themes of that story and follows its general trajectory.12 To wit, religion infused soldiers’ experiences of war and gave them a vocabulary for discussing and rendering meaningful both tragedy and triumph; further, soldiers demonstrated a significant degree of theological 10

In this article, “religious authority” refers to the public recognition of an individual’s ability to interpret Christian revelation for the purpose of guiding a community in matters of faith. I understand religious authority to be necessarily public, necessarily communal. I also understand authority in the Christian tradition to involve three basic elements: 1) revelation—in most cases the scriptures and traditions of Christianity, 2) an authority figure whose status is achieved either through institutional affiliation, charisma, or a combination thereof, and 3) a community that both recognizes that some measure of truth resides in revelation and is willing to accept and heed an authority figure. Within the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions, and in most Protestant churches as well, the authority figure is a priest, minister, or pastor, either assigned by a hierarchy or called by a congregation. Whether educated according to accepted standards or considered to be inspired, the minister depends for authority on public recognition of special abilities that qualify her or him to guide a community according to revealed Christian truth. This conception of religious authority was shaped by Max Weber’s The Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 190; and Bruce Lincoln’s Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion After September 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 51–61, 79–81, 84–85. I was introduced to the triangular formation that I describe (community, authority, revelation) through coursework at the University of Chicago with Professor Bernard McGinn. His interest was in describing the more specific though related task of exegesis, but the formulation remains, to my mind, both elegant and useful. 11 T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880– 1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 98. For additional, generally supporting perspectives on Progressive Era American culture and religion, see Henry May, The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Times, 1912–1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); and Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). 12 Jonathan Ebel, Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).

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creativity in imagining the metaphysical and applying religious images and narratives to their lives, sufferings, and deaths. Prior works on religion in the United States during the Great War era have missed much of this story due to their focus on clergy and denominational and extra-denominational organizations.13 The broader historiography of the Great War has understandably focused on soldiers as victims of callous, even murderous leaders and of increasingly sophisticated propaganda. The theme of victimization is of vital importance to any discussion of the First World War (and all war, for that matter), but it has pushed from our gaze the soldier as agent, not to mention the soldier as theologian; it has also obscured several important truths about war—its magnetism, its centrality to the construction of western manhood, and the degree to which war experiences are converted into valuable social, cultural, political, and religious capital.

I. “DOMINIES AND DOUGHBOYS” As America’s religious leaders pondered with measures of enthusiasm and dread the nation’s declaration of war with Germany, quite a few were sanguine about the opportunity war presented for clergymen. The adventures and trials of war, they proclaimed, would place religious leaders in the advantageous position of living and dying among the soldiers, coming to know and be known by young men. Henry Hallam Tweedy of Yale Divinity School imagined the benefits of this experience for America’s churches. [Soldiers] will recall days in the dugouts and nights in the hospitals, when they came to know a different type of minister, a “beloved captain,” who marched through the mire with song and laughter, and crept with them through the darkness and shadow of death in No Man’s Land. An almost irresistible attraction will draw them to the churches of such ministers. To their leadership they will be inclined to render obedience; to their messages they will listen with respect.14 13 The two most widely read such books, both classics in the field, are William Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); and George M. Marsden Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870– 1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). Jay Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1992), briefly discusses American Catholics’ responses to the war. Two more recent, excellent additions to the field—Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Diane Winston, Red Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999)—continue the pattern of dealing intelligently and eloquently with the war, without attending to those who fought it. 14 Henry Hallam Tweedy, “The Ministry and the War,” in E. Hershey Sneath, ed., Religion and the War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1918), 96– 97, cited in Clifford Putney,


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According to Tweedy, the masculinity and courage of ministers would engender new reverence, new obedience in young men. War’s dark cloud was threatening, but its silver lining for American churches was brilliant indeed. Episcopal Bishop Charles Brent, chief of chaplains for the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), expressed sentiments similar to Tweedy’s in an article published on May 10, 1918, by Stars and Stripes, the official newspaper of the AEF in France.15 Citing the “experiences of our Allies,” Brent hoped that the chaplain would emerge “from the obscurity of rather an anomalous adjunct of the Army into one of the most honored and essential agencies in the military establishment.” Brent wrote of the chaplain, “He is capable of giving a morale that no one else can, and in heroism and virility he has been found second to none. Even in our young history, chaplains have already displayed those characteristics which make them powerful for good and conspicuous as leaders.”16 The Stars and Stripes’ soldier-editors did Brent a favor by substantiating his claim with an article, printed on the same page, that reported on Chaplain William J. Farrell’s recognition for “personally [conducting] an ambulance along a heavily-shelled road, and helping to gather and comfort the wounded.”17

Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 183. 15 The Stars and Stripes, still a fixture on American military bases, was first published for American servicemen and -women during the Great War. It was written and edited by American soldiers, many of whom had backgrounds in journalism, and was printed weekly from 8 February 1918 through 13 June 1919. At the height of its print run, the Stars and Stripes put 500,000 copies in circulation among deployed American soldiers and war workers, along with interested readers on the home front. For more on the Stars and Stripes, see Alfred E. Cornbeise, The Stars and Stripes: Doughboy Journalism in World War I (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1984). 16 Stars and Stripes, 10 May 1918, 2. Emphasis added. 17 Ibid. The Federal Council of Churches of Christ and the Catholic Church in America had worked from the moment war was declared to provide adequate numbers of chaplains to the Army. In this effort they encountered resistance from the War Department and from Congress, and grew increasingly frustrated—as Chief of Chaplains Charles Brent indicated—with their inability to provide “the boys” with pastors and sacraments. “We are dreadfully shorthanded here. . . . Last Sunday I was with our 1st Division on the eve of their going into the greatest battle of the war. Men in the ranks were asking for spiritual ministrations which we were unable to provide. . . . It is cruel beyond words to send our young men across the sea to live in conditions of unwonted hardship and temptation, to encourage them to be ready to die for the country, and then neglect to furnish them with those spiritual ministrations which are at the door of every citizen in home life.” At this point in the war, official numbers put the chaplain-tosoldier ratio at 1:3600; Brent estimated that it was closer to 1:5000. Pro-chaplain lobbying efforts in Washington finally bore fruit in the spring of 1918, when President Wilson signed a bill authorizing an increase from one to three chaplains per regiment. This should have reduced the ratio to 1:1200. A Stars and Stripes article, published 2 August 1918, greeted tepidly the news of this victory for home-front religious leaders. The Stars and Stripes reported this news

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Tweedy and Brent imagined the Great War as an opportunity for ministers to make reputations as men and to establish themselves among young men as relevant, authoritative voices.18 The reality of religious leaders’ presence among American fighting men on the Western Front was, however, more complicated. Throughout the course of the war, AEF chaplains and auxiliary workers from the YMCA and the Knights of Columbus would prove themselves “virile” and “heroic.” Some, at least, would give “morale as no one else [could].” But the meaning of these “gains” would be contested at many turns by a skeptical soldiery. In the Stars and Stripes article cited above, Charles Brent also wrote of the Army’s decision to remove rank insignia from chaplains: “With or without rank the commission by which the chaplain acts is the supreme commission of the ministry of the church which he represents, and of the One Commander of the Army of God.”19 Brent

three months later under the headline, “Three Chaplains To Each Regiment Watch Your Step.” Far from the relief one might expect from spiritually neglected soldiers, and still further from the automatic respect that Chaplain Brent and Yale’s Professor Tweedy anticipated in print, the article expressed continuing skepticism, deploying old, unflattering images of religious leaders. “No chance for members of the A.E.F. to stumble off the Straight and Narrow now. . . . For the Thin Highway has a triple guard in place of the lone chaplain sentry who used to patrol the narrow beat, herding lost souls back into the proper fold.” The author explained that the increase had nothing to do with “wickedness or . . . any growing sin in the A.E.F.” but was instead meant to provide assistance to “an overworked organization, where the spiritual odds of 1 to 3600 had become a trifle lopsided.” In addition to depicting chaplains as one-dimensional moral policemen, the writer recalled the problems outlined in the editorial “Dominies and Doughboys” in his description of the recently established school for new chaplains. “Its main purpose is to offer a course in human nature where chaplains who have served up with the men and know their needs and ways can instruct the new chaplains in the right ways to get to the men . . . All creeds gather at one school. The work is far beyond any one sect. It is no longer a matter of narrow religious belief, but of the greater gospel of care, fellowship, and friendly aid” (Stars and Stripes, 2 August 1918, 1). Without this “course in human nature,” the writer believed, pastors would not know the “needs and ways” of the men, and would struggle to rise above sectarianism and other “matter[s] of narrow religious belief.” But all was not lost. Men at war had shown some chaplains the light; those chaplains could now evangelize among their unconverted professional kin. 18 See Budd, Serving Two Masters, and Piper, American Churches in World War I. These two studies of the chaplaincy, one focused on the Great War, the other a survey of the “rise” of the modern chaplaincy, leave the doughboy out of the narrative. They thus create an impression of widespread acceptance of chaplains on the chaplains’ terms. Soldiers are an essential part of the narrative and were not passive receptacles for chaplains’ messages. Another recent study describes negative aspects of relations between soldiers and religious workers (YMCA men in particular) stemming from the religious jingoism of the latter. Relations between soldiers and chaplains were sometimes hostile, sometimes amiable. The most common cause of discontent among soldiers was not, however, chaplains’ efforts to “position Christ in the trenches” (Putney, Muscular Christianity, 192). Rather, soldiers’ discontents with religious workers arose from concerns about their masculinity. 19 Stars and Stripes, 10 May 1918, 2.


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believed chaplains to be authorized from above. Historically and militarily, he was correct. Practically speaking, he was wrong. One indication of an alternate view of religious authorities as a group and of religious authority more generally came less than a week after Easter Sunday, 1918, in a Stars and Stripes editorial titled “Dominies and Doughboys.” The author of the piece agreed with Tweedy and Brent that the Great War presented an opportunity for clergymen. However, he perceived that opportunity somewhat differently. One of the benefits to arise from this war is going to be the knowledge that the average parson (meaning the lucky parson in khaki) will gain about the average soldier (meaning the average man). This knowledge will do to the parson a world of good. In the light of that knowledge, he may be able, in turn, to do a world of good to the average man—in time.20 The assumption, here in print for the consumption of fighting man and “lucky parson” alike, was that religious leaders would have their eyes opened on the Western Front. They would begin their assignments out of touch with “the men”—the “average man” being unknown to the “average parson”—but would receive an education in Christian living by walking among them. Would parsons be influenced by these models? The prognosis was uncertain. Change depended on the dominies. “Taking it by and large . . . it is safe to say that if the parson is a ‘regular guy’ at heart, he will learn that the average man has an awful lot more good in him than the whole brood of parsons (and those who train parsons) ever suspected; and the average man is a lot more responsive to the things of the spirit—though in his own way— than the average parson could have dreamed possible.” According to the editorialist, religious leaders and those who trained them had failed, and would continue to fail, to recognize Christian goodness in regular men. They had shown themselves unwilling or unable to validate men’s varied and often personal responses to spiritual influences. If the religious leader was, in his heart, a “regular guy”—he was apparently not a “regular guy” on the surface—he would see how wrong he had been. 20

Stars and Stripes, 5 April 1918, 4. See also Putney, Muscular Christianity, 125. This was not the first time that ministers and the young men with whom they walked were placed in this inverted relationship. As Clifford Putney writes, in 1911 Alan Hoben wondered whether ministers leading boys’ groups were converting the boys or vice versa. The truth was, Hoben concluded, that boys “saved” the minister more often than he saved them. After all, he reasoned, by associating with boys the minister not only regained those qualities of youthfulness he had lost, he also “retains the sense of fun, fights on in good humor, detects and saves himself on the verge of pious caricature and solemn pathos . . . Life cannot grow stale; and by letting the boys lead him forth by the streams of living water and into the whispering woods he catches again the wild charm of that all-possible past: the smell of the campfire, the joyous freedom and good health of God’s great out-of-doors.”

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The chaplain would then admit that his Christianity had been shallow and uninformed and that “it is not always the man, say, who cusses the worst who is bound for perdition.” He will have seen that same man comfort children frightened by bombardment, with the tenderness and skill which their own mothers could not bring to bear. He will have seen that same man go out and rescue a wounded comrade under fire. He may see that man pay the supreme sacrifice without a whimper. And having seen all that, the parson will be mighty lenient judging that man on little scores.21 Soldiers, the author wrote, were virtuosos whose skills respected none of the boundaries set by traditional wartime gender roles. They could comfort, rescue, and silently sacrifice better than any woman, all while they fought and killed better than any man. In light of these soaring moral examples, the Stars and Stripes’ advice for chaplains in France was simple: watch and learn; see true Christianity in action; turn to it. Then and only then, the editorial concluded, will “the parson . . . get down to bedrock in his appraisal of men, and not spend too much time fussing about their exterior embellishments. When he gets down there, the doughboy can understand the dominie. The former will lose his distrust of the latter, and the latter will lose his skepticism about the former.”22 “Dominies and Doughboys” is shot through with a spirit of inversion which, if taken seriously, could not but destabilize religious authority on the Western Front. The author’s jumping-off point, estrangement between young men and clergy, was, as we will see, nothing new. But his analysis of the cause of estrangement and his vision of the route to reconciliation pinned blame entirely on the clergy. Young soldiers were the embodiment of manly and womanly virtues—they were the true church. Clergy had missed these truths and needed to realize them if they hoped to be blessed by the soldiery. Without that blessing, a chaplain’s work would fail. What is one to make of such an editorial? Was it an isolated opinion piece pointing to sentiments held only by its soldier-author? What can one learn from Tweedy, Brent, and the Stars and Stripes about the state of religious authority and religious authorities on the Western Front? To begin answering these questions, it is important to note the similarities among the voices. All agreed that a problem existed in relationships between young men—the soldiers—and their appointed spiritual keepers. Tweedy sensed a lack of respect for and attention to clergy; Brent wrote of obscurity and lingering 21

Stars and Stripes, 5 April 1918, 4. Ibid. See Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Drew Gilpin Faust, “Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War,” in Divided Houses, eds. Clinton and Silber, for useful discussions of wartime gender roles. 22


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doubts as to chaplains’ masculinity and capacity for heroism. The Stars and Stripes editorialist confirmed these perceptions and added that chaplains were unduly concerned with matters of superficial morality. All also agreed that demonstrations of masculinity, virility, and heroism would be central to mending the relationship. Tweedy and Brent believed that when ministers revealed their true virile selves to the world, the men would automatically recognize their value and religious authority. The editorialist believed that if ministers were “regular guys,” they would come to understand the deep connection between a soldier’s sublime masculinity and his essential Christianity, and thus halt all clerical “fussing” about superficialities. All three voices confronted the stereotype of the effeminate minister abroad in early twentieth-century America as either misperception or fact, and saw masculinity—either revealed to the troops or acquired by contact with them—as part of the solution. Finally, Tweedy, Brent, and the editorialist all looked to war as the event that would make right what was wrong between clergy and young men. War would, in their eyes, reveal the truth. Each of these authors expressed understandings of the relationship between masculinity and religious authority widespread in both Progressive-era American culture and the American Expeditionary Force. For at least four decades before the Great War, clergy had been hard at work arguing that Christianity was not only a masculine religion, but that muscular men embodied the spirit of Christ most perfectly. Their treatises, sermons, and institutions defined a Christian ideal that placed manliness and physicality, vigor and strenuousness, above theological erudition, pastoral service, and other allegedly sissified, overcivilized pursuits.23 This program, known generally as “muscular Christianity,” emerged out of efforts to bring men back into the Christian fold, the feminization of which had long been a source of concern for clergy. In the second decade of the twentieth century, muscular Christianity appeared to be ascending. As Clifford Putney writes, proponents of muscular Christianity and the institutions associated with it were widespread and influential in the 1910s.24 Episodic revivals, such as those sponsored by the Men and Religion Forward Movement, and the rising popularity of the YMCA, placed muscular Christianity and its spokesmen near the center of American Christian life. One senses, though, in the words of Tweedy and Brent, a deep and enduring concern for the state of relations 23

See Lears, No Place of Grace, ch. 3; and Putney, Muscular Christianity, entire. A roster of the men involved in wartime religious councils, responsible for the approval of men for the chaplaincy, and the assessment of their work, reads like a “Who’s Who” of muscular Christianity. Charles Brent served as chief of chaplains. Members of the Committee on the War and the Religious Outlook included Harry Emerson Fosdick, Charles W. Gilkey, Henry Churchill King, John R. Mott, Robert Speer, and James I. Vance. 24 Putney, Muscular Christianity, 116–126.

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between men and the churches. It is clear that somehow, in spite of all the successes, American clergymen still found themselves facing a “man problem.” Yet it is also clear that muscular Christianity exerted a powerful influence on many members of the Great War generation. Theirs was the world of the YMCA, church-sponsored Boy Scout troops and numerous other church-related organizations for boys. Anglo-Protestant cultural icons such as Teddy Roosevelt, Billy Sunday, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert W. Service filled pages with speeches, sermons, and poems that made strenuousness and virility the highest virtues of western Christian manhood.25 Evidence of the effects of muscular Christianity appears frequently in writings by and about American soldiers. Some, like Dinsmore Ely, who flew with the famous FrancoAmerican Lafayette Escadrille in the Great War, were allegedly reciting militarist Christian dicta at the tender age of four. Ely was raised in Winnetka, Illinois, but in 1898 or 1899 traveled to his family’s ancestral Presbyterian church in Pennsylvania for a centennial celebration. There, according to his father, young Dinsmore stood before the church and spoke the following poem. My name is Dinsmore Ely, I’m only four years old; I want to fight for Jesus and wear a crown of gold; I know he’ll make me happy, be with me all the day; I mean to fight for Jesus, the Bible says I may.26 John Jay Chapman recalled the presence of similarly militaristic turns of phrase in the religious practices of his fallen son Victor: “He continued to the end of 25

Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), entire; Putney, Muscular Christianity, entire; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic, 1993), 233. The ideal man was tough, stalwart, determined, and independent; he was the author of his own future and bore the future of the nation on his broad shoulders. He was also, much to the dismay of cultural custodians of all types, a vanishing breed. In early twentieth-century America, the professional and geographical spaces in which he could exist were vanishing if not already gone, and the rugged physicality that defined him was, more and more, the possession of “inferior races” newly arrived from Europe or on the move from the rural South to the urban North and willing to do the physical labor that built muscles and invigorated spirits. “We need the iron qualities that must go with true manhood,” intoned Teddy Roosevelt. “We need the positive virtues of resolution, of courage, of indomitable will, of power to do without shirking the rough work that must always be done, and to persevere through the long days of slow progress or seeming failure which always come before any final triumph.” Indeed, consciousness of the decline of white manhood and white masculinity and the perceived decline of white American civilization led to a simultaneous re-articulation of the myth of the rugged (white, male) individual and an institutionalization of mechanisms to propagate it, thus molding a new generation of heroes. The popularity of such male-oriented, generally Christian groups as the Boy Scouts and the YMCA, among others, and the blossoming of college athletics can all be attributed to an effort, led by white American men, to revive and develop white masculinity. 26 Dinsmore Ely, Dinsmore Ely, One Who Served (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1919), vii. Ely’s letters and diary were edited for publication by his father, Dr. James O. Ely.


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his life to make the sign of the cross in saying the same prayers that [his mother] had taught him—which ended with the phrase—‘and make me a big soldier of Jesus Christ who is the Lord and Light of the world.’ He folded his hands like a crusader as he said them. He was a part of the middle ages in this piety.”27 Though Victor Chapman’s father chose to locate his son’s “piety” in the Middle Ages, it was decidedly twentieth century.28 Chapman, Ely, and countless other American men who fought the Great War had been raised to see being “a big soldier of Jesus Christ” as a grand—if not the grandest— expression of the Christian faith. And though “soldiering for Christ” often served as a metaphor for mission work, evangelism, or other non-military Christian endeavors, the advent of a war pitting “Christian” armies against the anti-Christian German “Hun” gave these young men the opportunity truly to “fight for Jesus.” What Tweedy’s fictive “beloved captains” and Brent’s actual chaplains faced on the Western Front, and what we find distilled in the “Dominies and Doughboys” editorial, was not the failure of muscular Christianity among young men, but the powerful appeal of muscular Christian equations between the masculine virtues of struggle and strenuousness and the ideal Christian life. Moreover, the Stars and Stripes’ critique of chaplains was not exceptional in anything other than its length and the breadth of its readership. Soldiers used muscular Christian caricatures of effeminate, misguided, small-minded Christian ministers to marginalize spiritual shepherds who sought to counsel or critique the American soldier. Thus did early twentieth-century efforts to masculinize the Church provide young men with the basis for keeping churchmen at arm’s length in the complex moral circumstances of war.

II. HOME-FRONT CONCERNS, WESTERN-FRONT CRITIQUES In the decades prior to the Great War, masculine Christian leaders, often spouting chauvinist discourse, had sought to undermine the “narrow-minded moralist” and the “weak, forgiving, putative Christian” with self-consciously “masculine,” self-consciously corrective Christian polemic and instruction for men.29 American soldiers were aware of and engaged in these struggles 27 Victor Chapman, Victor Chapman’s Letters from France, with Memoir by John Jay Chapman (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 8. 28 Winn, The Poetry of War, 143. Winn’s discussion of poetry and the myth of chivalry in war is as penetrating as it is concise. To wit: “The myth of chivalry celebrates a time that never was. It falsifies the past to evade the present.” 29 Putney, Muscular Christianity, 32. “But while such ‘delicate’ types might appeal to women, argued Oberlin president Henry C. King, men found them ‘especially repulsive.’ Men preferred ministers ‘of blood earnest spirit,’ he averred. Or, as the Reverend James Vance wrote in reference to the sentimental clergyman, ‘Where in all the sweep of freaks and failures, of

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within American Christianity and applied the masculine, muscular critique to religious leaders on the home front. They maintained in their public and personal correspondence that there was something wrong with religion in America and that religious authorities in the United States did not understand the true nature of the World War. In church-centered attempts to sculpt the moral worldview of Americans at war, soldiers and war workers saw further evidence that clergymen remained mired in questionable teachings and creeds while war was revealing new and profound truths. In the end, many home-front clergy and faithful just didn’t get it. The Stars and Stripes, like the letters and diaries of the men who read it, was dominated by news of the war and by stories of the lives of those fighting it. Both the men and the paper, however, kept an eye on events in America, particularly events pertaining to the war. Some of the harshest prose published by the Stars and Stripes was directed toward those who detracted from the importance of the war or the heroism of the soldiers. Home-front religious leaders were frequent objects of this type of ire. Moralistic men and women, the paper’s soldier-authors wrote, undercut and insulted the character of the AEF by worrying openly to congregations and other audiences about soldiers’ moral shortcomings. One historian has described the concern with soldierly morality as a somewhat misguided outgrowth of the Progressive, reformist mentality.30 Whether misguided or not in terms of moral history, this wartime “crusade against vice” provoked soldiers to rail against the “narrow minded” and “effeminate” Christian leaders who preached it. An editorial in the June 28, 1918, issue of the Stars and Stripes captures this critical tone perfectly. “Onward Christian Soldiers” responded to a fundraising “offensive” launched by the YMCA on the home front. The goal of this “drive” was to raise one hundred million dollars to benefit soldiers through YMCA services and ministries on the Western Front. The Stars and Stripes supported the campaign on the grounds that “it means shelters and new stages for [stage and screen actress] Elsie Janis and those who are to follow in her fancy steps. It means movies and music, huts and hospitality,

mawkish sentiments and senseless blathery, can there be found an object of deeper disgust than one of these thin, vapid, affected, driveling little doodles dressed up in men’s clothes, but without a thimbleful of brains in his pate or an ounce of manhood in his anatomy? He is worse than weak—he is a weaklet.’” 30 Jennifer D. Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 24. “Rather than concentrating on the immorality of the war’s catastrophic violence, Americans focused on monitoring the aspects of army life over which they could exercise some control. Progressive reformers, who had avidly campaigned to eliminate drinking and prostitution from civilian society before the war, now undertook a crusade against vice in the wartime army.”


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chocolate and cheer.” Yet the writer was suspicious of YMCA fundraising tactics and, citing a YMCA hymn—“Lift up the Red Triangle/Against the things that maim—/It conquers booze the wrecker, /It shuts the house of shame”—he questioned the sincerity, masculinity, and authority of the campaign’s leaders and donors. “We most devoutly hope that no old ladies of either sex will be beguiled into contributing a single centime to that $100,000,000 in the delusion that, without our brothers of the Red Triangle, the A.E.F. would relapse into a riotous group of venereal drunkards.”31 The Stars and Stripes’ soldier-authors found this moralistic faith and its focus on alcohol consumption, venereal disease, and other matters of ill conduct both corrosive and corrupt. In order to fill church coffers, home-front clergy unscrupulously tainted the reputations of men fighting for Good and Right with tales of sin and vice convincing only to those with the rusted moral compass, if not the outward appearance, of an elderly woman. The Stars and Stripes argued more forcefully against narrow-minded moralism and in favor of the soldier’s absolute moral rectitude in a July 26, 1918, editorial discussion of foul language. In the piece, titled “Just Plain Cussing,” the editors admitted that swearing was “a careless habit born of sometimes years of careless speech” but asserted also that “it doesn’t at all imply blasphemous thoughts or irreverence towards the Deity on the part of the doughboy.” This doctrine was not simply constructed of convenience, the editors continued; soldiers had encountered “the holy” in combat and had demonstrated their Christian virtue in its presence. A soldier who cusses may not be what the ladies call a “nice” man, but it doesn’t follow that he’s an irreverent, godless wretch. He has seen too much of the works and wonders of God, too much of the divine in the actions of God’s children around him to be blasphemous at heart. So, when some of our brethren, both here and at home, are inclined to be captious, we ask them to hold up a bit and reflect. 31 Stars and Stripes, 28 June 1918, 4. Emphasis added. See also Stars and Stripes, 8 February 1918, 4. The author of an editorial “To The Folks Back Home” focused on the “alarming stories about us of the A.E.F. and our conduct here in France” that had been circulating in America. The stories had to do with the bad behavior of soldiers and, he wrote, “if they weren’t so far from the truth, we might be inclined to get really mad.” In describing the source of these stories the editorialist named no professions, but appeared to finger clergymen and religiously affiliated reform groups. “It’s no laughing matter to be talked about behind our backs in such a reckless and irresponsible way by reckless and irresponsible people, though no doubt some of them have the best intentions in the world and think that they, and they alone, can save us. (They probably told you that and asked you to contribute money to their worthy cause, haven’t they?)” This damning “letter” was certainly read by many more soldiers in France than “Folks Back Home,” and its message was clear. The A.E.F. is a morally solid and upright community. Those who characterize it differently—and likely ask for money to help “save” it—are cowardly, reckless, and irresponsible regardless of the nature of their position or the benevolence of their intentions.

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How could a man who had seen and known God in combat be considered anything like blasphemous or irreverent? Didn’t the work that he was performing in the cause of God, civilization, and his fellow man make all such “sins” shrink to nothingness?32 Infantry officer Lambert Wood and war nurse Helen Dore Boylston agreed with the Stars and Stripes that home-front moral standards and those who trumpeted them were irrelevant in the context of war. Wood, a twenty-twoyear-old Oregonian serving with the First Division, used a letter to his mother to voice his disdain for hometown agencies, “Podunk Relief Societ[ies],” in his words—that facilely demonstrated “great patriotism by giving a chicken dinner.” Yet he saved the balance of his frustration for the home-front Christian moralist. Every time I see an article headed, “Is the Youth of Our Country Becoming Atheists?” or “What of the Morals of Our Soldiers?” it is to laugh! They are all right, thank you. Please send more men and ammunition! We haven’t got time to worry about our morals! Otherwise engaged at present. After the war, you will read articles and try to figure it out. Maybe they aren’t all right—but anyway, we are healthy and happy.33 It was hard for those back home to see, Wood complained, but there were more important enemies to fight than alcohol, swearing, and promiscuity. Let’s save civilization first, he suggested, and then worry about clean living. Describing a mid-September 1918 incident in which her orderly had gotten drunk and slept through his shift, Helen Boylston asked, “How is one to judge them? Ordinary standards are no good here. My boys have always worked for me with all their might. Why should I turn on them when they are foolish?”34 Sexual encounters with French women presented a more complex problem than profanity and alcohol, and raised the concern of officials at home and in France for a number of reasons. First and most practically, as David Kennedy and Jennifer Keene point out, venereal diseases, passed from prostitutes to soldiers and back again, threatened to reduce troop strength.35 To limit the military effects of sexual misconduct, the AEF made houses of prostitution off-limits to soldiers, instituted a sexual education program to dissuade soldiers inclined to visit prostitutes, and distributed prophylaxes to contain the problem among the insistent. The program worked to drive VD rates to historic lows in the Army. Second, as already noted, the image of the 32

Stars and Stripes, 26 July 1918, 4. Lambert Wood, His Job: Letters Written by a 22-year-old Lieutenant in the World War to His Parents and Others in Oregon (Portland, Ore.: Metropolitan, 1932), 51. Emphasis added. 34 Helen Dore Boylston, “Sister”: The Diary of a War Nurse (New York: Ives Washburn, 1927), 156. 35 Keene, Doughboys, 24. 33


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AEF mattered greatly to its supporters, commanders, and soldiers. Many within and without the military had argued that military life could, generally speaking, straighten crooked arrows. France was known, however, to be a more permissive moral environment than the United States, and military life there might well allow crooked arrows to fly their “natural” course while also bending more than a few who had once been straight. Had the problem of venereal disease spread rapidly and given legitimacy to such concerns, the war effort, the AEF, and the righteousness of American soldiers might have come under attack.36 Despite campaigns and warnings, there were those who availed themselves of the opportunity to have sex as they would not have at home. There were also those, like American pilot Kenneth MacLeish, who resisted but were sympathetic toward those who did not. MacLeish wrote to his fianceé, Priscilla, on December 4, 1917, “I’m beginning to understand why so many soldiers go wrong in Paris. Of course temptations now . . . are perfectly frightful.”37 Every night, he continued, at least two women approached him to grab his arm. He found them “repulsive,” but confessed, “just lately some ideas have entered my head that scared me.” MacLeish’s moral anchors were his family, his ideals, and the woman he hoped to marry. Yet he was confronted with the painful fact that he might never see his family or his fianceé again. Danger demands its rewards in excitement. The greater the danger, the stronger the desire. Why should I refrain? These are some of the thoughts that have arisen lately. They aren’t very powerful in me because I have decided to live, while I live in a way which would make you happy and, if I must die, in a way which would make you proud. But I guess there are many men in our service who aren’t as lucky as I am. . . . I don’t blame them nearly so much now. I’m inclined to pity them.38

36 Keene, Doughboys, 24; Kennedy, Over Here, 186– 187. This was the backdrop for Secretary of War Newton Baker’s rejection of French Premier Clemenceau’s offer to provide licensed houses of prostitution for American servicemen. The offer made its way via Pershing and Raymond Fosdick, head of the Commission on Training Camp Activities, to the Secretary’s desk. Baker reportedly exclaimed, “For God’s sake, Raymond, don’t show this to the President or he’ll stop the war.” 37 Geoffrey I. Rossano, ed., The Price of Honor: The World War One Letters of Naval Aviator Kenneth MacLeish (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1991), 54. Rossano wrote a full and concise biography of MacLeish as an introduction to his edition of MacLeish’s correspondence with Priscilla Murdock. See also Emmett Britton, As It Looked to Him: Intimate Letters on the War (San Francisco: privately printed, 1919), 26–27. Britton wrote in a letter dated 17 July 1918: “Thank God I am married, for this is no place for a single man. . . . If I ever had any illusions about fighting for La Belle France they are gone; I am fighting for the sanctity of womanhood and the protection of my home, my wife and my kiddies.” 38 Ibid.

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MacLeish understood the forces driving men to “sin.” He admitted to feeling them himself. The moral circumstances of war in France combined with uncertainty regarding the future led men to seek what pleasure was left in life. Some could resist, MacLeish wrote, but those who could not did not deserve chastisement from home-front moralists. Their behavior, he thought, indicated that the faith and values that were supposed to rein them in were woefully inadequate. MacLeish then pinned the blame for the flimsiness of soldiers’ morals on America’s religious leaders and institutions. “[Soldiers] don’t need to have what remnants of their religion remain to them collected and strengthened. Their crying need is for something practical and tangible which will drive the old saying, ‘Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you may die,’ out of their heads. That’s why I think people and churches back in America are on the wrong track.”39 Repackaging a broken faith would serve no one well. But as MacLeish observed further, there was a “crying need” for some sort of remedy. The problem of morally questionable behavior was not merely a figment of the moralist imagination; nor was concern about soldierly conduct confined to the home front. Life in France gave soldiers access to alcohol, tobacco, and prostitutes, as well as the means, the time, and a rationale for overindulgence. Many soldiers and war workers commented privately on the prevalence of foul language, drinking, and other “questionable” activity. From very early in the war effort, though, soldiers, war workers, and their official public voice attempted to shape the conversation about wartime moral lapses and their potential consequences. What was at stake in such conversations? Of the many possible answers, two are especially relevant to this discussion. First, by arguing that soldiers’ moral shortcomings were divorced from their “true morality,” the soldier-authors of the Stars and Stripes, soldier-poets, and the doughboys whose words were read only by loved ones could short-circuit concerns about soldiers’ eternal fates. Though some soldiers appeared to be sinners, the argument went, they were really and truly saints. Second, assertions of soldierly virtue implicitly questioned the need for clergy and their saving ministrations on the front lines (with doughboys like these, who needs dominies?), thereby keeping religious authorities off balance and focused, perhaps, on offering the praise and support that the American Expeditionary Force and its soldiers wanted. The critiques of religion and religious leadership abroad in early twentiethcentury America were not issued to every soldier along with his boots, pack, rifle, and gas mask.40 Not all recoiled at Christian moralism and derisively 39

Ibid. Kenneth MacLeish, Kenneth: A Collection of Letters Written By Lieutenant Kenneth MacLeish, U.S.N.R.F.C., Dating from His Enlistment and During His Services in the Aviation Corps of the 40


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gendered its proponents feminine. But these critiques of home-front Christianity and this masculinist dynamic were taken up by many American soldiers, and often provided the criteria by which religious authorities’ reflections on war were judged as either legitimate or not.41 Soldiers’ active engagement in the framing of moral issues and the concomitant undermining of religious authorities provided a clear and concise defense against those who questioned in any way the righteousness of the war. Critics were effeminate, superficial, out-of-touch pseudo-Christians. We can see this logic at work in the writings of Charles Biddle, who twice voiced concerns, like those expressed in the Stars and Stripes, about the falsity and effeminacy of home-front religion. Biddle, a pilot first with the Lafayette Escadrille and later with the American Air Service, reacted critically to Harry Emerson Fosdick’s tract The Challenge of the Present Crisis and the type of Christianity that Biddle thought it represented. He did not dismiss Fosdick’s thoughts out of hand (“I think [the book] is excellent and contains much food for thought”), but he took strong issue with the reverend’s stance toward Germany. “I cannot . . . at all agree with the author in his prayer to God to bless Germany (see p. 54– 55).”42 Fosdick’s prayer read, in part, “O God, bless Germany! At war with her people we hate them not at all . . . We acknowledge before Thee our part in the world’s

United States Navy, Edited and Arranged by His Mother (Chicago: privately printed, 1919), 92–94. Though vehemently resentful of negative characterizations of their morality back home, America’s fighting men were not of one suspicious voice on the topic of home-front religious leadership. Shailer Mathews, Billy Sunday, and William B. Riley had sons in the war, and family affections endured. Two other soldiers’ voices indicate that all was not lost in relationships between fighting men and home-front religious leaders not related by blood. Kenneth MacLeish corresponded with his pastor, Dr. Stifler, on the topic of whether Stifler ought to become an Army chaplain or a “Y” man. The correspondence was cordial, thoughtful, and poignant. After sharing his thoughts on the YMCA and military chaplains, MacLeish asked Stifler if praying during a recent combat mission marked him as a coward. Harry Butters, an American volunteer in the English Army and a lapsed Catholic, wrote to his sister Lucille that he had found a book given him by “Father George” to be “the greatest inspiration in the world” and asked her to tell the father so: see Harry Butters, Harry Butters, R.F.A. “An American Citizen,” Life and War Letters . . . The Brief Record of a California Boy who Gave his Life for England (New York: John Lane, 1918), 101; 29 March 1915. But he also wrote, “To go back to your letter to him, which he did not read to me, but of which he told me the contents, it was your idea that I might possibly at this time be leaning back towards the Church, in which case, as Father Tim [Carey] said, now was certainly the time of all times to return to the Sacraments. . . . And for me, dearest heart, the Church is far more impossible to return to to-day than it was the day I first left it, when I felt that I was no longer of its faith in articles of doctrine. It is no good, dear—you must continue to have faith in my spiritual progress alone as I stand. . . . I am happy and hopeful in my own faith . . . and have no fear of the future.” In spite of warm feelings for Father George and for the Catholic Church, Harry Butters thought himself the best keeper of his spiritual welfare. 41 MacLeish, Kenneth, 54. 42 Charles J. Biddle, The Way of the Eagle (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 170.

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iniquity . . . We dare not stand in thy sight and accuse Germany as though she alone were guilty of our international disgrace. We all are guilty.”43 In Biddle’s opinion, Fosdick did not have it quite right. He was shamefully soft on a savage enemy. You remember the picture I sent you, “Ne leur pardonnez pas, mon pere, car ils savent ce qu’ils font.” [Father, do not forgive them, for they know what they do.] The same thing applies to the methods of the Huns in general and not simply to their bombing of women and children. During this war I shall kill as many Huns as possible . . . Fosdick in his book quotes Walt Whitman as having said “God damn the Turk.” I think the same prayer would be even more suitable in the case of the Hun. You will say I am bitter. I am and I should be ashamed of myself if I were not.44 Biddle had no trouble pinpointing responsibility for the outbreak of the war and for its ruthless conduct. Guilt resided in Germany and was shared little, if at all. In Biddle’s eyes, Germany deserved not forgiveness but damnation. The softness of which Charles Biddle found Harry Fosdick guilty was, on his reading, a wider phenomenon. Indeed, he believed it to be characteristic of a strain of Christian faith with which he had no desire to be identified. Having survived a shelling of the hospital where he was recovering from a bullet wound, Biddle turned his thoughts again to forgiveness. “Forgiving and forgetting with regard to such a thing, is to my mind, as I have said before, not a sign of Christian spirit but of pure weakness. If Christianity requires us to forgive them I am afraid I am no Christian.”45 The object of his critique was more general than earlier, the tone harsher. Biddle was convinced that weakness and “the Christian spirit” had been confused, and was unwilling to identify himself with such an error. Asking God to bless or forgive the Germans demonstrated, in his mind, a misunderstanding of the Christian message. And though Biddle did not say it outright, we can speculate that he had a cure in mind for Fosdickian forgivers and effeminate “Christian” weaklings. Send them to feel the heat of battle and see the viciousness of the enemy. War will make true Christians of them.

III. MEN OF GOD, MEN OF WAR: RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY ON THE WESTERN FRONT Soldiers and their official newspaper critiqued religious leaders on the Western Front as frequently as they critiqued those at home and used similar criteria in their evaluations: moral tolerance, masculine style, and appreciation of the 43 Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Challenge of the Present Crisis (New York: George H. Doran, 1917), 54– 55. 44 Biddle, 170– 171. 45 Ibid., 206.


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gravity of the war. To these they added a more explicit statement of the importance of clergy encountering combat. War, they proclaimed, would reveal both Truth and true manhood, and would substantiate or undermine religious authority. The editorial staff of the Stars and Stripes described quite clearly their ideal chaplain in a poem titled simply “The Chaplain” and published on March 8, 1918, as part of a series on figures in army life. The poem, it is safe to assume, was more prescriptive than descriptive. He doesn’t pull no highbrow stuff, or talk of Kingdom come, But any “cit’ clothes” parson he can sure make out a bum; He doesn’t mind mild cussin’ and he’ll smoke a cigarette, And doesn’t say you’ll go to hell for swiggin’ somethin’ wet. Still, if you ask him for it, he will tell you ‘bout the Lord. The First and bravest Christian, Who would never sheathe the sword Until all wrongs were righted; how He set His people free Although the Romans nailed Him to the Cross o’ Calvary. He doesn’t force his preachin’ down a helpless feller’s trap, But if a feller wants it, he has got it right on tap; He’ll send the folks a letter if your arm’s too sore to write, And if you feel like prayin’ he’ll stay up with you all night. He’ll do the things your folks would do if they were only here; He’ll jolly you and brace you up and tell you not to fear ‘Bout gettin’ by the sentry, old Saint Peter, ‘way up there If you only do your duty. On the level, he’s a bear’!46 The poem’s stanzas follow an A-B-B-A format with regard to theme. Theme “A” is the relationship between soldierly behavior and salvation; theme “B” is the relationship between the ideal chaplain and the soldier. The crux of theme “B,” as stanzas 2 and 3 demonstrate, is that chaplains should speak when asked either for a sermon or a prayer, and should then serve the soldier eagerly. To expand a bit a metaphor from stanza 3, the chaplain is like a bartender, with a message “right on tap” and ready to pour. According to the poet, that message should always feature a Christ fully at home in the American Expeditionary Force: setting “His people free” and righting wrongs even unto death. As important as the ideal chaplain’s pastoral demeanor and Christology, however, is his soteriology, the subject of theme “A.” As stanza 1 states and stanza 4 echoes, salvation has nothing to do with swearing, smoking, or drinking. All that Peter the heavenly “sentry” needs to know is that a soldier did his duty and fought as the officers appointed over 46

Stars and Stripes, 8 March 1918, 3. Original emphasis.

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him ordered. To prove himself legitimate, “the Chaplain” had to walk a narrow path indeed; he could never express a doubt as to the fates of those waging violence in support of the Allied cause. The place of the chaplain in the AEF was taken up again in “Etiquette Hints for Doughboys,” a regular tongue-in-cheek feature written for the Stars and Stripes by Private Hudson Hawley under the pseudonym “Bran Mash.” On April 26, Mash turned his attention to “Church Manners.” He wrote for the benefit of those “who have not been in the habit of going to church before joining the Army” and thus may be unfamiliar with “certain rules of deportment which must be lived up to,” to satisfy “visiting brethren and sistren.”47 Mash sympathized with the men who “may be inveighed into attending a service” and recognized that “some colonels anxious to coddle the mother vote at home, institute church services for the whole regiment, and get everybody to go by the simple expedient of falling everybody in, presumably for wood detail, and then springing church on them.”48 The advice offered to those caught so unscrupulously contained an antiauthoritarian, mildly anticlerical edge. After warning soldiers not to spit tobacco juice in ranks but rather to “let it trickle gently, and . . . try to conceal it by use of a handkerchief,” Mash counseled them not to be “in too much of a hurry to time the preacher . . . you’ll get plenty of time to inspect the face of that interesting piece of chronometry when the Good Man begins on his 20-minute prayer.” He also reminded soldiers not to embarrass the chaplain by exposing him as out of step with the flock: “Don’t snicker,” he wrote, “when he prattles on about the evils of shooting craps.”49 47

Cornbeise, The Stars and Stripes, 12. Stars and Stripes, 26 April 1918, 5. See also Edwin J. Tippet, Who Won the War: Letters and Notes of an M.P. In Dixie, England, France and Flanders (Toledo, Ohio: Toledo Type-Setting and Printing Co., ca. 1920), 21– 22. Tippet, who served as a corporal in Company “A,” 112th Military Police, Thirty-seventh Division, recorded one example of religious entrapment in a 23 September 1917 letter to his parents. He wrote, “They are trying to force us to go down to the mess hall for ‘divine services,’—i.e., to hear a Jewish rabbi talk. If I don’t go Ill have to work. I won’t go. In order to insure attendance, no one is allowed to leave the confines of our battalion camp, tho there is a ‘Brotherhood’ meeting at the Y.M.C.A. I would like to attend. Army life is a reversion to the Dark Ages—a man is allowed no freedom of mind or will, let alone body.” Then continued, “One hour later” “Just as I thought—because I refused to hear the rabbi, I had to help ‘police’ the camp—pick up bits of paper, cigarette butts, tobacco quids, etc. Oh, it’s great!”; Roger I. Lee, Letters from Roger I. Lee (Brookline, Mass.: privately printed, 1962), 228. Roger Lee, who served in the medical corps, also wrote in a 7 May 1918 letter of a more general perception of chaplains held by one grizzled lieutenant in his company. “Hep [Lt. Hepburn, 53, veteran of army life] told us of his philosophy of life which is most amusing. It seems that he is a Mason. He says that he is a Catholic, although his father is a Presbyterian. But he isn’t a church-going Catholic, and when he puts his religion down on any army form, he always puts down ‘non-sectarian.’ ‘Never,’ says he, ‘should any priest or parson get a hold of you, because if you admit that you are this or that, the particular this or that chaplain gets you to round up all the patients of this or that sect and then you are done for and you have to go to church.” 49 Stars and Stripes, 26 April 1918, 5. 48


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It is not surprising that a humor piece would paint the chaplain in such negative hues. But the characterization of the chaplain as long-winded, moralistic, and capable of drawing a crowd only by trickery hit American chaplains where they were most vulnerable: in the soft spot that was their connection to American soldiers. Bran Mash’s portrayal, though clearly not representative of the full mosaic of relationships between soldiers and religious leaders, did distill a series of sentiments particularly corrosive to clerical authority. It portrayed the chaplain as an inept outsider, one who gains an audience with true men only by mother-coddling subterfuge and alienates the gathered men further with an off-key message played at length. The importance of anything the chaplain might say was trumped, in Mash’s opinion, by the pressing question of how to dispose discreetly of tobaccoinfused spit. We can read these portrayals of Christian ministers in many ways. One can interpret them as an official attempt to correct clerical attitudes and behaviors— to mold religious authorities to the culture of a military at war. The poem “The Chaplain,” described above, is a rather clear example. One can also look at these writings as attempts to entertain the soldiery—bits of prose designed to bring young men facing death to laugh a bit at the personalities around them and, perhaps, even at themselves. The Bran Mash piece, as noted, certainly has this flavor. As the “official” newspaper of an army at war, the Stars and Stripes had a vested interest in countering all forces that might drag down morale or, more critically, undermine the will to fight. A chaplain or other religious figure was potentially well positioned to do either by raising moral questions about war in general, the Great War in particular, or the eternal consequences of a soldier’s behavior. In this light, the preceding Stars and Stripes articles seem to administer a prophylaxis against “effeminate” theologies inimical to the enthusiastic pursuit of victory and to offer not-sosubtle guidance to newly minted chaplains. Whether corrective and coercive, or demeaning and entertaining, these pieces also shared a third quality, namely, they expressed to a great extent the beliefs and opinions of the Stars and Stripes soldier readers. These articles and many others are, in fact, accurate expressions of soldierly likes and dislikes vis-a`-vis religion and the men charged with propagating and maintaining it. As described in the personal writings of American soldiers and war workers, the situation of the would-be religious leader on the Western Front was precarious. Some wrote of genuine dislike for chaplains and YMCA workers; others admired them as “men” and appreciated their religious work.50 50

Doris Kellog, Canteening Under Two Flags: Letters of Doris Kellogg (East Aurora, N.Y.: Roycrofters, 1919), 153. “For goodness’ sake, please don’t anyone I love come over with the YMCA. . . . As an organization, it has certainly made an awful fiasco of its work here”; Julia

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Individual soldiers and war workers did not, however, treat a chaplain’s commission or his presence as necessarily indicative of religious authority. They required proof of his embrace of a direct, unsentimental approach to faith, his acceptance of soldierly moral imperfections, and his willingness to be tested in the cauldron of combat. These criteria functioned both positively and negatively; they legitimized and delegitimized those who would speak in God’s name. The importance of “manly” personality and style as foundation stones of religious authority and legitimacy emerges in account after account written by soldiers, war workers, and chaplains as well. This approach to matters of faith was defined by plain speech, good humor, and moral tolerance. Soldiers embraced those who displayed these qualities and dismissed those who did not. Sergeant Peyton Campbell, an advertising copywriter turned soldier, praised his unit’s “Chaplain Urge” for knowing precisely how to speak to young men, and asserted that soldiers embraced him because of his style. Campbell observed in a July 7, 1918, “diary-letter” to his parents that Urge “has a great deal of influence over the fellows because of his personality, and incidentally because he doesn’t ‘preach.’”51 In a letter to an unknown recipient, Robert Kean described the positive impression made by his chaplain, the morally tolerant John B. McCormick. McCormick, a “small good-looking, pink cheeked” Episcopalian originally from Michigan, “seemed very young for a spiritual adviser,” but had nothing of the moralist in him. Kean wrote, “He . . . always finds the best wine in town, plays poker and is my idea of a regular minister. Nothing hypocritical about him.”52 McCormick had shown himself to be—in the words of the Stars and Stripes editorial—“a regular guy.” Chaplains who knew how to talk to soldiers also needed to develop a good sense of how (and how not) to judge them. Chaplains could gain good standing or reaffirm their marginality based on the moral code they espoused and on which they acted. Richard Ashley Blodgett was put off by a chaplain whose preaching included judgment of those who swore, and wrote of the experience in a February 2, 1918, letter to his mother. “Last Sunday a priest held a service here and I attended in the proper manner, though quite disgusted because he held forth for half an hour on swearing. Anyway,

Catherine Stimson, Finding Themselves: The Letters of an American Army Chief Nurse in a British Hospital in France (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 10. Stimson, the eventual head of Red Cross nurses in France, wrote, “Our [chaplain] Dean Davis is a real man. We got a choir together and last evening had some fancy singing.” 51 Peyton R. Campbell, Diary-Letters of Peyton Randolph Campbell (Buffalo, N.Y.: Pratt and Lambert, 1919), 96. 52 Robert W. Kean, Dear Marraine (1917–1919) (Livingston, N.J.: n.p., 1969), 174– 175.


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he meant well though he was slightly tiring.”53 While recovering in a Paris hospital, Torrey Ford came across a “Methodist minister from Rockland, Maine”—emphatically not a “regular guy”—who was “taking a slight furlough from his Y.M.C.A. services while he has something or other cut out.” Ford indicated to his parents in a February 1918 letter that he and some friends had some fun at the minister’s expense. “We have a good time hooting his ideas on low-necks, dancing, cards and rum. His troubles are more painful than the rest of ours are. We even curse for him when the worst he can get out is ‘Cracky!’”54 The minister’s moralism was, to Ford, laughable.55 As important as a masculine style and moral tolerance were to a chaplain’s legitimacy, nothing could make or break his reputation as a man and as a minister like his actions in and around combat. Time and again public and personal literature took note of a chaplain’s composure or lack thereof under fire and related his battle demeanor to his standing among men.56 With shells exploding and bullets tearing through dirt and cloth and flesh, one learned what was hidden beneath the literal and figurative surface—whether the chaplain (or, for that matter, any man) was a “regular guy” at heart. The Stars and Stripes published many accounts of chaplains being decorated for bravery in combat, making clear that the masculine ideal of religious leadership could be realized. A September 13, 1918, story about “Doc,” a Baptist pastor from Arizona, described encounters with combat as required of chaplains while also asserting that specifically religious benefits came with them. Doc had become a YMCA chaplain with a combat unit in France and, the author wrote, “like all good chaplains he was in the thick of things at the Marne and would come out wild-eyed and reverent after each 53 Richard A. Blodgett, Life and Letters of Richard Ashley Blodgett, First Lieutenant, United States Air Service (Boston: Macdonald and Evans, 1920), 131– 132. See also Kathleen Duncan Morse, The Uncensored Letters of a Canteen Girl (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), 16. Canteen worker Kathleen Morse described one encounter with a “visiting clergyman . . . a meek and long-suffering little man” who, though he did not “preach” per se, alienated himself nonetheless. When asked to say grace at breakfast, the man offered a “long and earnest exhortation” during which he proclaimed “Oh Lord, Thou knowest we are apt to grow lean and starve in Thy service!” Morse recalled that she nearly laughed out loud at the clergyman’s unintentionally accurate summary of the moment his lengthy prayer had created. 54 Torrey Ford, Cheer-up Letters from a Private with Pershing (New York: E. J. Clode, 1918), 172. 55 The anonymous author of One Woman’s War wrote a critique of the YMCA in July of 1918 that beat at the same drum but with greater fervor. She chastised religious leaders for “trying to preach platitudes to these poor Yanks, while the Yanks want to drink a little cognac and sleep with a few girls and then go back to the Front to be bumped off perhaps.” Insufficiently attentive to the strains of war, this ministry, she concluded, should “either be washed out or done properly”: Anonymous, One Woman’s War (New York: Macaulay, 1930), 265. 56 Lears, 102, 112. As Lears wrote of the militarist reaction to a false and degenerate American culture in the years preceding the war, men sought something of the military in their lives less out of a thirst for blood and more out of a hunger for authenticity in life, experience, self, and emotion.

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engagement.” He always carried his own pack, went on foot, and never attempted to set himself apart. “None come out of such an adventure saying that Old Doc doesn’t know what it’s like.”57 The article reported further that in a recent engagement Doc had attempted to rescue his wounded colonel and had, in the effort, been gassed and wounded by shrapnel. In the eyes of his men, Doc had been revealed as one of them. They acted accordingly. When Doc came to in the evacuation hospital, he found that his outfit had stealthily cut-off and confiscated all his Y.M.C.A. insignia and sewn on their own emblem instead. Later, in Paris, he was ordered to resume his proper decorations, but once he had crossed the line into Battle Land once more, there was an immediate and violent order restoring the Army escutcheon. Whereat Doc, who never can remember whether he is a doughboy or a Baptist or what, roared with laughter.58 Having been revealed as a masculine “regular guy” by the light of combat, Doc no longer belonged in a YMCA uniform. Having shown himself to be unconcerned about the distinction between doughboy and Baptist, Doc and those like him could be ordained finally and truly. The traditionally congregational polity of Doc’s church and other churches aside, the inversion of the religious authority relationship here is telling. Soldiers evaluated and blessed the chaplain, not vice versa. In their personal writings, soldiers remembered how chaplains stood the test of combat and recalled fondly those who showed themselves to be true heroes. Michael Donaldson of the 165th Infantry—the nationalized version of New York’s famous Fighting Sixty-Ninth—wrote glowingly of his chaplain, the famous Father Francis Duffy, that “he was with us in all our trials and weary marches, the dreary days in the trenches, when it seemed next to impossible that we would ever come out alive, and by his example, his brave understanding, comradeship and his great spirituality, he breathed the fire of life into the soul of the Sixty-ninth.”59 Chaplain Benjamin Lacey, 57

Stars and Stripes, 13 September 1918, 2, emphasis added. See also Stars and Stripes, 15 March 1918. Father Osias Boucher, “sent over by the Knights of Columbus,” was among sixteen men of a “New England Outfit” to win the Croix de Guerre, according to a front-page story on 15 March 1918. “As battalions have gone into the front line, a chaplain has always gone, too. And it happened that Father Boucher’s battalion got in on a party or two. His coolness, his steady work under fire among the men won its reward.” The Croix de Guerre signified a great deal to the military community that a clerical collar or even a thick neck and broad shoulders could not. Father Boucher had faced the battle and been proven true. In March of 1918 he could speak of war from experience, as few other Americans could. 58 Ibid. 59 Craig Hamilton and Louise Corbin, Echoes from Over There (New York: The Soldiers’ Publishing Company, 1919), 235, 243. Donaldson praised the unit’s other chaplain, Father Hanley, similarly: “He was a real fighting man and the army missed a great captain when Hanley went into the priesthood, but he certainly made it up as he cheered us through those bloody days.” See also Theodore Roosevelt III, Average Americans (New York: G. P. Putnam’s


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a Presbyterian from North Carolina, acted notably enough under fire to gain mention in Private Clarence Lindner’s letter dated October 16, 1918. We have the original “fighting parson.” . . . He is an Oxonian, and a scholar of merit—and he is by way of being an artilleryman of some note hereabout. Well, we captured some big German guns and Chaplain Lacey got a gun crew together, put the whole German battery in a position to shoot its former owners, and boomed away a whole night at the German lines with German munitions.60 A captain in Lindner’s unit asked him who was running the German battery, to which Lindner replied, “Our parson.” The captain rushed to confirm “the marvel” of militant Christianity, an act that secured the chaplain’s standing in Lindner’s mind and likely in his battalion as well. “A big two-legged man is Parson Lacey, and a soldier, by Heaven.” Once again, the soldier blessed the chaplain. When a chaplain did not prove himself to be a “big two-legged man and a soldier,” soldiers were not surprised. The weight of much of the Stars and Stripes’ writing on top of muscular Christian caricatures of the “meek and long-suffering” clergyman certainly tilted soldiers’ expectations away from truly masculine clergy.61 Thomas Barber wrote hauntingly of his encounter with an anonymous chaplain who “had a face typical of weak clergymen the world over,—thin, high-strung, somewhat ascetic, and utterly unused to looking at the disagreeable facts of life.” The disagreeable facts of life—in war so vivid, so disagreeable—included a staggering number of dead bodies for the chaplain to bury. According to Barber’s memoir, this chaplain reacted by embracing his task with an enthusiasm indicative of madness. He talked in a disjointed, excited manner. His discourse ran something as follows,—“Let’s see—I buried forty-seven between Esnes and the top of that hill, and seven up there; that makes fifty-four; I’ll bury a hundred before night! Nobody ever buried so many men before. I am out for a record!” He would laugh hysterically,—“Any of you fellows seen any

Sons, 1919), 92– 93. The authority that could be demonstrated or accrued in battle extended as well to whole organizations, most notably the Salvation Army. Theodore Roosevelt III wrote in his memoir of the transformation wrought in his attitudes toward Salvationists by their conduct in the war. “Before the war I felt that the Salvation Army was composed of a well-meaning lot of cranks. Now what help I can give them is theirs”: Albert Ettinger, A Doughboy with the Fighting Sixty-Ninth: A Remembrance of World War I (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane, 1992), 73. Private Albert Ettinger, who had his share of run-ins with Father Duffy, recalled Duffy’s presence in combat as almost god-like. “On the open battlefield, he was everywhere. He would appear like a gigantic apparition, emerging from a haze of smoke, undaunted by shell fire or machine gun bullets.” 60 Clarence Lindner, Private Lindner’s Letters, Censored and Uncensored (San Francisco: n.p., 1939), 76–77. 61 Morse, The Uncensored Letters of a Canteen Girl (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), 16.

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dead ones around here?” . . . His eyes were brilliant, burning with feverish excitement. Clearly, he was utterly beyond himself with the general horror of the situation and for the moment, at least, utterly insane.62 The chaplain’s response was certainly understandable. The shock of seeing the dead and the horror of having to handle corpses evoked (and evokes) reactions from madness to anger, laughter to tears.63 The anonymous chaplain, “so manifestly drunk with horror,” was in good company in his madness. Barber realized this; he had seen similar cases, but, he added, “never such an aggravated one.” Yet his assessment of the chaplain reflected no sympathy. Barber knew simply that this chaplain was “a weak man.” Soldiers believed that in testing the masculine bodies and hearts of clergymen, the war separated strong from weak, manly from effeminate, legitimate from illegitimate. Those chaplains and religious leaders found masculine were, to borrow a phrase from the editorialist who penned “Dominies and Doughboys,” “able to do a world of good” for the men whom they served. Shifting notions of authority do not imply hostility or out-of-hand rejection. But chaplains had much to overcome, much that they themselves had forged. And for every soldier like Bogart Rogers who wrote fondly of chaplains as “a fine lot of fellows . . . who have seen the war, know what it is, and act accordingly,” there were those, like Thomas Barber, who judged chaplains harshly for their weakness. The creator of a March 7, 1919, Stars and Stripes editorial cartoon titled “Twenty Years After” was of the latter sort.64 He looked at the future of the relationship between soldiers and clergy, doughboys and dominies, and saw a reflection of the rather bleak present. The cartoon juxtaposes the first and twentieth reunions of a fictitious group, “Punkville’s A.E.F. Veterans” (fig. 1). In each frame, the soldiers are gathered around a banquet table, arranged in a style vaguely reminiscent of Da Vinci’s Last Supper, though with word bubbles and commentary to aid in interpretation. The men pictured are caricatures of memorable wartime personality types: the braggart, the gambler, the French speaker, the drinker, the loquacious commander and his mousy clerk. In the first panel all are dressed in civilian clothes signifying their relief at being

62

Thomas Barber, Along the Road (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1924), 90– 91. Gary Laderman, Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), xv–xvii. 64 John H. Morrow, Jr., and Earl Rogers, ed., A Yankee Ace in the R.A.F.: The World War I Letters of Captain Bogart Rogers (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996), 182. As clear as Rogers’s affections are the reasons for them. The “padres” of whom he wrote were not moralists; they were “regular guys” who had encountered and understood war and had the decorations to prove it. And those deeming their authority legitimate were not military hierarchs or the church leaders, Catholic and Protestant, who so eagerly and with such dedication fought to make adequate ministers and ministrations available to the men. Those authorizing the chaplains were the men themselves. 63


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Fig. 1. “Twenty Years After,” Stars and Stripes, March 7, 1919.

released from military duty. In the second panel, they are older, more laughable, and dressed in uniform, signifying nostalgia for their days of glory. This rule of dress holds for all but the chaplain. In both frames he sits on the right side of the table not conversing but staring straight out at the reader. He is overweight, bespectacled, and apparently very uncomfortable. In the first frame he says to the reader, “I Feel So Out of Place.” “The Chaplain,” reads the commentary, “wishes he hadn’t come in uniform.” Twenty years later, surrounded by uniformed men, he has gained weight, lost hair, and come dressed in clerical garb. Again, he stares directly at the reader and says, “I Feel So Out’a Place I Do.” Commentary again informs the reader, “He wishes he’d worn his uniform even if it doesn’t fit.”65

65

Stars and Stripes, 7 March 1919, 5.

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The message of this cartoon is clear as far as the chaplain is concerned. He is in the army but not of the army. He is hopelessly, somewhat pathetically, and enduringly out of touch with the men. One or twenty years from now, the braggart will brag, the drinker will drink, the gambler will gamble, and the chaplain, like the uniform he has outgrown, will not fit. Though the chaplain is not painted as a Judas, the cartoon asserts once and for all that with or without his involvement, soldiers will always be who they will be and do what they wish to do.66

IV. “DOMINIES”

AMONG THE

DOUGHBOYS

Because writings from the pens of chaplains themselves are less robust, it is difficult to close the circle completely to say that chaplains altered their approaches to ministry to suit the soldiers’ publicly and privately described masculine ideal. Extracts from the writings of a young Reinhold Niebuhr, and Catholic chaplains Francis Duffy and George McCarthy, do, however, indicate concern for perceptions of clerical masculinity and for a chaplain’s standing among the soldiers. This admittedly small sample, coupled with soldiers’ voices from across the confessional spectrum, indicates that 66 Stars and Stripes, 23 May 1919, 4. A 23 May 1919 letter to the editor of the Stars and Stripes indicates that these sentiments were shared beyond the paper’s editorial desk. By May of 1919 the American Legion had absorbed the Comrades in Arms and was front and center among veterans’ organizations. J. H. Gaston and eighteen unnamed members expressed their hopes for the Legion and for the composition of its membership. Gaston began by proclaiming in vaguely socialist tones, “Our battle over here is not finished until we apply the 14 points of President Wilson to the United States and make the country a better place to live in, with laws that will provide a surer and better share of the profits to the workers.” He called not for the root-and-branch change being fought for in Russia, but for reforms that would at least put an end to “the ring that makes for favoritism and graft.” Purporting to speak for a body larger than his eighteen comrades, he continued, “If this is what the American Legion stands for, then you will find that the men who joined the colors will be for it, one and all.” For Gaston as for many American soldiers, the Great War did not end with the Armistice. Soldiers would shed their uniforms and return to their homes, he conceded, but “the work that the boys fought for, or were ready to fight for, but had to take jobs back of the lines instead, will be carried on when we are in civilian garb.” Interestingly, Gaston and his cohort ended their letter not with a call to action, but with a call to exclusion. They offered that the American Legion ought to be composed “of men who served under the colors.” They had heard rumors “that an effort is to be made to include in its membership men who served with welfare organizations,” such as the YMCA, the Knights of Columbus, and the Red Cross. “There are a few of them who did a good job,” Gaston wrote, “but they are not soldiers, and there is no more reason why they should belong than there is why the women who drove automobiles around in the States and wore fancy uniforms should be included in a veteran corps.” In his eyes, the chasm that separated the doughboy from the “Y” man, both of whom had served in France, was wider than the ocean that separated the battle-tested veteran from the green draftee. The latter made for suitable post-war company; the former belonged among fancily dressed women.


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denominational and traditional lines were no barrier to wartime equations of masculinity and religious authority. Reinhold Niebuhr was the twenty-five-year-old pastor of Detroit’s Bethel Evangelical Church when he toured local camps where young men were training for war. His reflections on the experience indicted all clergymen who walked among the soldiery. “Like myself, [chaplains] have mixed the worship of the God of Love and the God of battles. But unlike myself, they have adequate symbols of this double devotion.” The division within Niebuhr’s clerical guild between those in official service and those merely lending their voices to the cause extended beyond uniforms and insignia to masculine affect. Niebuhr knew why. “Ministers are not used to authority and revel in it when acquired. The rather too obvious masculinity which they try to suggest by word and action is meant to remove any possible taint which the Christian faith might be suspected to have left upon them in the minds of the he-men in the army.” In order to preach to “he-men,” these chaplains felt they needed to become he-men. Father Francis Duffy, a man of significant military experience and imposing stature, described himself in his memoir as “a soldier” and wrote proudly of his boys’ physiques and aggressive, violent physicality.67 He also responded directly to those who might equate religiosity with effeminacy, drawing on his “sturdy,” “broad-shouldered” men for support. “It was the vogue at one time to say with an air of contempt that religion is a woman’s affair. I would like to have such people come up here [to the front lines]—if they dared: and say the same thing to the soldiers of this Company and of this Regiment—if they dared.”68 In other words, those who thought “religion” effeminate or feminizing were likely themselves cowards vis-a`-vis the war and would probably find themselves set upon by angry Christian soldiers if, once at the front, they repeated their views. In Duffy’s eyes, the truly weak were those unaware of Christianity’s masculine face. Father George McCarthy was more concerned than Duffy with establishing his masculinity by writing of his war work. In the opening pages of his memoir, McCarthy pointedly gave his reason for requesting transfer from the Red Cross to the AEF: “[The Red Cross] did not authorize frontline service [and] this would not do.”69 He also wrote frequently of the risks that he faced and of their broad masculinizing effects. “Entering that forest was like going into some vast fatal Iroquois Theater saturated with death-dealing gas. It was even then being swept by a tornado of screaming, bursting shells, scattering 67 Francis P. Duffy, Father Duffy’s Story: A Tale of Humor and Heroism, Of Life and Death with The Fighting Sixty-Ninth (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1919), 25–29. 68 Ibid., 66–67. 69 George T. McCarthy, “The Greater Love” (Chicago: Extension, 1920), 21.

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far and wide fumes of mustard and chlorine, a single inhalation of which meant unspeakable agony and death. But our brave boys were there with souls to be prepared.”70 Writing of the general effects of his experiences—part seventeenth-century Jesuit mission, part twentieth-century chaplaincy— McCarthy stated, “Boys went into the trenches, but men came out of them.”71 McCarthy, having been there, was now unimpeachably, on his own account, a man. What was at stake for McCarthy and these other men of God? Were they driven to think and write, to act as they did by a desire to establish themselves as necessary members of the community and legitimate voices of religion? Were they simply acting as they felt they should, unconscious of the soldiers’ masculine standard? The wartime environment makes one set of motivations difficult to disentwine from the other.72 The answer is made somewhat clearer by the public, post-war masculine displays of two AEF chaplains. On February 7, 1919, American soldiers waiting to return home from France opened the Stars and Stripes and saw the sporting page headline: “Chaplains Matched For Ten Round Fight/To Lay Down Bibles For Boxing Gloves/Fighting Parsons Matched for Ten Round Go at Palais de Glace/Both Men Are Athletes/Bout Will Mark Epoch in A.E.F. Fistic History—Chaplains Will Also Act As Seconds.” The article began somewhat wryly: Two preachers, men of peaceful and lamblike disposition, becoming fired with a war-like spirit, will temporarily put behind them such phrases as

70

Ibid., 92. Ibid., 81. Original emphasis. 72 Methodist William Leach’s concerns for masculinity preceded his war experiences. Prior to the war he authored and published a poem, “To Be A Man,” which began with the prayer, “Save me, my Father, from the creeping/And insidious weakness/Which has robbed so many of their manhood.” Yet Leach recorded a wartime incident in which his usefulness and position in the community, and therefore his religious authority, were explicitly called into question. During the “Soissons drive,” launched on 18 July 1918, he and others had been carrying and caring for wounded soldiers in withering heat when Leach encountered a senior army officer. “As I lugged one end of a stretcher up to the open place under the trees where the wounded were being almost corded up, a lieutenant-colonel came up, saw that I was a Y man and began to sputter. ‘Why in the name of—don’t you Y.M.C.A. people do something? Here are dying men, and not even a drink of hot coffee for them. You are a hell of a bunch.’” Leach had run out of coffee, sent for more, and taken up the work of carrying wounded until the coffee arrived. He was doing more than was required of him and was clearly unjustly accused, “But you can’t say all that to a lieutenantcolonel . . . So I walked away into the brush and bawled all to myself just like a kid.” The emotions of the moment were complex, their intensity likely heightened by the danger and the death. Was Leach only reacting to the officer’s unfair diatribe? Was he upset by the stereotype that was clearly at work? Was he disappointed that, in spite of important contributions, he remained at the margins of the military community? 71


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“Turn the other cheek” and “Forgive thy brother” and, donning boxing gloves, will engage in a real ten round nip and tuck boxing contest. The scrap will mark an epoch in the boxing game. If not the first battle of its kind, it will be at least one of the very few of its kind ever held anywhere.73 The fight was to pit Chaplain Earl A. Blackman of the 130th Field Artillery against the Reverend Charles Rexrode of the 316th Military Police. Blackman had sought an opponent through the sporting editor of the Stars and Stripes, and Rexrode was the first of two chaplains to respond. The author wrote playfully of Rexrode’s response: “When he read the challenge he was ‘exceedingly wroth’ and desiring to uphold the fighting record of the 316th Military Police, he communicated with the Y.M.C.A. athletic director of the 91st Division and made known his willingness to “smite” the challenger “hip and thigh.”74 We can read this event as a simple novelty fight, and it clearly had some novelty to it. But something significant and religious was also at stake in the very idea of this post-war masculine display. Perhaps since the trench was no longer available, Blackman and Rexrode stepped into the ring to challenge the perception that they were men of “lamblike disposition” living lives of meek forgiveness. Despite its clever deployment of scriptural language, the paper too acknowledged that a religious lesson was to be learned from this event. A poem that appeared in the sporting page’s header read: Preachers boxing! O, my eye, But what will Dr. Doney say When reading, ‘Rev’rend Wildcat Bligh Puts Pastor Knockout Jenks away? Preachers scrapping! What a lark To greet on balmy Sunday morn A shepherd preaching to his flock With two black eyes and ears all torn!75 In its opening lines the poem juxtaposes the “scrapping” preachers and reviled moralist Dr. Carl Doney. According to a November 1, 1918, editorial in the Stars and Stripes, Doney, then president of Willamette University, had returned home from a trip to the front and delivered a series of alarmist antitobacco, anti-alcohol speeches titled “What I Saw In France.” He called for a halt to tobacco sales to soldiers and, according to the piece, authorized himself by claiming that his work had taken him “within three miles of the German trenches.” Doney represented all that the Stars and Stripes and 73

Stars and Stripes, 7 February 1919, 6. Ibid. 75 Ibid. 74

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many of its readers disliked in American Christianity. He was unwilling to look beyond superficial behaviors to recognize a man’s true goodness, and he shamelessly invoked the power of the war to lend more authority to his position. The poem’s message to Doney and other “effeminate” moralists is one of utter disdain.76 The message to Blackman and Rexrode is more subtle. They were clearly more acceptable to the doughboy than the illegitimate Doney and his ilk. But what of their masculinity and their authority? Would their boxing accomplish what clerical heroics and sacrifices in wartime could? The playful tone of the article and poem suggest that the standard masculine activity of boxing would not force soldiers to revise their stereotypes of Christian clergy. The poet remarked that seeing “Wildcat Bligh” or “Knockout Jenks” at the altar bearing the marks of his boxing match would be amusing, novel, “a lark.” By way of comparison, a March 15, 1918, piece comparing the fighting prowess of four heavyweight contenders, Jack Johnson, Peter Jackson, Bob Fitzsimmons, and Peter Slavin, referred to Jackson, the speculated victor, as “the greatest man in that group of four immortal gladiators.”77 In wartime, a chaplain could approach and even claim kinship with his soldiers by imitating their masculine Christian ideal. Once the war ended and the struggle returned to the smaller stage of athletics, that opportunity was gone. The masculine chaplain eager to display his toughness was again to the soldier as Rexrode and Blackman were to boxing phenom Jack Johnson. The former was a battered shepherd, the latter an “immortal gladiator.”78 But it is hard to keep a good man down, and less than two years later, former chaplain Earl A. Blackman was back in the headlines. This time the publication was The American Legion Weekly and the article, “The Parson with a Punch,” announced that Blackman, of Chanute, Kansas, had been elected National Chaplain of the American Legion. The Legion was founded in March of 1919 by veterans of the Great War to “keep alive the spirit” of the war and to give a national voice to those who had served in the war. One set of issues addressed by the Legion was the persistence of religious division and moralistic pettiness on the home front. Earl Blackman was a near perfect choice to lead the counterattack. As the article announcing Blackman’s election proclaimed, he had sparked controversy among the moralists in his church by attending a dance, but rather than answer his critics’ calls for reckoning, he tendered his resignation and went fishing for two weeks. Upon returning, Blackman learned that the 76

Stars and Stripes, 1 November 1918, 4– 5. Stars and Stripes, 15 March 1918, 6. 78 Much to the disappointment of the paper’s staff and, though for different reasons, to Blackman and Rexrode, the AEF “put a K.O. instead of an O.K.” on the fight before the opening bell. 77


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majority of his congregation had refused to accept his resignation and wanted him back in the pulpit. With their imprimatur he set about refashioning the church in his image—building a gymnasium in the basement, offering instruction in boxing, and working in every way that he knew to “put religion over” on the members of his community. Blackman was, by his own estimation, a modernizer and popularizer of the faith. He had no use for Sunday blue laws and Prohibition; he argued that dance was not sinful per se but that the church had ceded control of dance to “the devil” and needed to take it back. Most of all, the American Legion Weekly proclaimed, Blackman was “at all times a man’s man.”79 And what could be more Christian than that?

V. CONCLUSION Since the days of the Great War, much has changed about the relationship between the military and society, and between religious institutions and the military. Today, media, politicians, and wide swaths of the American public—not to mention the armed services themselves—hold up servicemen and servicewomen as moral exemplars. The values of the military, we hear from many corners, are American values lived out, refined, perfected. Crises and scandals influence such rhetoric in ways that seem, at times, counterintuitive. The moral failings of a soldier or group of soldiers are, invariably, an occasion for reassurances that the few bad apples prove the rule of soldierly virtue. The battle of words, ideas, and soteriologies waged aggressively by the Stars and Stripes and its soldier-readers in World War I is over.80 The military chaplaincy is no longer, to use Charles Brent’s words, “an anomalous adjunct” of the military, but a fully professionalized, fully integrated service with a wide range of pastoral tasks, from the mundane to the exciting, the grim to the joyous. Nothing about the current state of these institutions was presupposed by those waging the Great War. Indeed, as I have attempted to show, the terms of their “armistice” were worked out on the march. But as we look at the relationship between young men and clergy, soldiers and chaplains at war in France in 1917 and 1918, it looks more and more as if the doughboys forced a victor’s peace on the “dominies.”

79

American Legion Weekly, September 1920. Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), chapters 3– 5. 80

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CHURCH HISTORY doi:10.1017/S0009640709000055

Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism. By Angela M. Lahr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xiiþ284 pp. $49.95 cloth. Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. By Michael Phayer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. xviþ333 pp. $29.95 cloth. In April 2000, at the Royal Foundation of St. Katharine’s in the East End of London, a small gathering of scholars from across the disciplines and around the world came together to discuss “Religion and the Cold War.” The simplistic, crudely reductionist view that religion was merely an instrument of propaganda and manipulation used by “cold warriors” for purposes that could be adequately defined and understood without reference to religion was roundly rejected. Rather, a variety of diverse insights materialized that presented religion, in all its complexity and variations, as having played a rich, multifaceted, multidimensional role during the Cold War era.1 The two books under review are important additions to what now appears to be an emerging field within Cold War history that explores its religious dimension. The Cold War was, of course, fought on the home front as well as abroad. Both research monographs illustrate the significance of the roles accorded to and assumed by religion in the domestic and international arenas. The subject of religion and the Cold War undoubtedly benefited from the apparent resurgence in global society of militant Islam, which heightened awareness of religion’s relevance and potency as a political force and hence re-legitimized it as an object of study. Unfortunately, September 11, 2001, and the War on Terror unleashed a plethora of pseudoscholarly works. Neither of these works falls into that category. Indeed, Angela M. Lahr’s monograph is notably erudite and scholarly. Michael Phayer’s monograph brings a wealth of new archival evidence to bear. Both bring forth exciting new perspectives on the different ways Christians responded to the evolving Cold War both in the United States and in the wider world. In addition to providing important insights into Cold War politico-religion and helping us understand our recent past, these books illustrate that this is a subject crucial for understanding the contemporary significance that religion appears to be assuming. The Catholic theologian John Henry Newman noted 1 A selection of papers subsequently appeared in Dianne Kirby, ed., Religion and the Cold War (Houndmills, U.K.: Palgrave, 2003).

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that the church is not “placed in a void, but in the crowded world,” meaning that it must adapt to “persons and circumstances, and must be thrown into new shapes according to the form of society” in which it exists.2 The Cold War, a ubiquitous presence pervading virtually every facet of the latter half of the twentieth century, proved an opportunity as well as a challenge to Christianity and its churches. Lahr explores how the Cold War climate provided evangelicals with the chance to merge with mainstream culture to generate a political-religious power base for the new Christian Right. Phayer examines the attempts of the Vatican to influence American attitudes toward the Soviet Union and exploit the rivalry between the two superpowers to protect and promote papal interests. Viewed by many contemporaries as one of history’s great religious wars, it should not be surprising that religion was a key variable in the Cold War or that the conduct of the conflict had a major impact on religion. Yet for a long time religion was neglected in Cold War histories, and the Cold War was often absent from religious histories. Quite clearly, however, if the role of religion is truly significant, then some explanation is required as to why it has taken so long to address it, particularly in the United States. At the most mundane level, the neglect of the religious dimension can be attributed, in part, to the fact that American scholars working in North American “secular” universities for a long time dominated the historiography of the Cold War. These adopted rather a frigid attitude toward church history and religious studies. Defended by many as a necessary adjunct to the separation of church and state, the disdain, as John Conway has pointed out, “was in fact due to the ideological hostility of the majority of the professorate towards religion in general and Christianity in particular.”3 Conway argues that the controversial misinterpretation of the alleged conflict between science and religion took an unfortunate toll. Consequently, although for most history departments it was inconceivable to teach the history of the Middle Ages without reference to religion, the opposite was true for more recent centuries. In addition, despite the emergence of departments devoted to religion, the frequent tossing of the subject between departments of religion and history had adverse repercussions, with departmental barriers too often preventing profitable collaboration. Perhaps more instrumental still in the neglect of religion was the fact that it is too complex and too intertwined with other cultural and social forms to be easily isolated. With religion constituting a very complex category for analysis and 2 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Penguin, 1974), 131–150. 3 John Conway, “Editorial,” Association of Contemporary Church Historians’ Newsletter, September 2000, 2.

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the Cold War remaining a contested and contentious era that continues to defy any single narrative, Lahr and Phayer are to be commended for undertaking so daunting a challenge. Lahr in particular presents a thoughtful and thought-provoking analysis that engages with the questions surrounding evangelical and national identities and how they evolved in the context of a Cold War presented as an anti-communist crusade against evil. She emphasizes the indispensable role played by the atomic bomb and how it inspired deliberations on the end of human history among believers and non-believers alike. While premillennial dispensationalists conceptualized history as time partitioned into certain ages and with a definite end, secular critics of nuclear weapons postulated global annihilation. The seemingly real possibility of nuclear war in the context of the worldview induced by Manichaean Cold War rhetoric reduced the distinctions that had separated secular and evangelical America. Lahr acknowledges the considerable disparities between different groupings of evangelicals: “Far-right Christian organizations that took anti-communism to the extreme often criticised more moderate evangelicals, who in turn tried to distance themselves from fundamentalists” (26). Nonetheless, the nuclear threat and the religious dimension of Cold War anti-communism allowed evangelicals of all stripes to construct a closer relational identity with the rest of the United States than had previously been the case. The potential for nuclear conflict, moreover, made foreign relations important for everyone. Lahr points out how the pivotal Cold War document NSC 68, drafted by Paul Nitze, revealed the extent to which the American government reflected the premillennial, apocalyptic conceptualization of the Cold War world as it sought to exaggerate the Soviet threat. Although NSC 68 remained classified until 1975, government policy, statements, and propaganda were based on it. NSC 68 was one example of how the Truman administration used the concept of an evil “other” to secure a Cold War consensus and strengthen nationalism. In addition, Truman invoked the tradition of a divinely inspired nation that derived from the image of America as a city upon a hill and contributed to ideas of manifest destiny. The political culture of the early Cold War, based on apocalypticism and anti-communism, eroded under the impact on American society of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, both of which contributed to the further political and social diversification of evangelicalism. More important, however, the demarginalization of evangelicals during the early Cold War helped them assimilate into mainstream culture, which meant political participation. Conservative evangelicals, who retained their eschatological anti-communism, entered into the political arena in alliance with fundamentalist organizations, such as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, albeit

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increasingly absorbed by moral crises at home. Further, evangelicals had embedded born-again Christianity into America’s cultural landscape, with telling implications for the rise of the religious right in the 1970s and early 1980s. Lahr’s meticulous scholarship and carefully constructed arguments convincingly show how conservative evangelicals were able to move from a tangential to a central subculture owing to Cold War discourse and the way it intensified strands of premillennialism. Reinforced by key historical events with portentous significance for those of faith, such as the potential for global destruction and the creation of Israel, evangelicals were able to renegotiate and redefine their place in American political culture. The emergence of a new patriotic evangelicalism during the Cold War strengthened the religious right and enabled its criticism of those aspects of secular America to which it was opposed, namely abortion, feminism, and gay rights. Phayer presents a more exuberant account of the Cold War, replete with spies and conspiracy theories, papal politics and corrupt clerics. In addition to having the hint of a thriller, Phayer has combined scholarship and solid archival research with imaginative interpretations that involve a substantial degree of speculation—informed, certainly, but speculation still. Nonetheless, Phayer reinforces and adds to the growing scholarship surrounding U.S.-Vatican relations and Pius XII’s role as an exceptionally significant cold warrior. In addition to adding to the existing knowledge about Pius XII’s role in the Cold War, Phayer makes a notable contribution to the ongoing debate about its significance. However contentious the views Phayer presents about Pius XII’s Cold War policies, it will be his treatment of Pius XII and the Holocaust that will arouse criticism. Phayer is a Holocaust scholar and educator and a noted authority on the responses of the Roman Catholic Church to what came to be known as the “Final Solution.” Despite the new material that Phayer introduces, the defenders of Pius XII remain likely to dismiss his approach as ahistorical political polemic. They will place this new book along with his previous treatment of this subject, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930 – 1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), once again with what are regarded as the pope’s primary detractors: James Carroll (Constantine’s Sword [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001]), John Cornwell (Hitler’s Pope [New York: Viking, 1999]), Susan Zuccotti (Under His Very Windows [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000]), and Garry Wills (Papal Sin [New York: Doubleday, 2000]). Phayer’s condemnation of Pius XII’s perceived failure to respond adequately to the horrors of what is now known as the Holocaust reflects a very contemporary revulsion to Nazi crimes. Retrospectively our own age has found the murder of Europe’s Jews to be the ultimate atrocity. But that was

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not the understanding of, or reaction to, the Nazi state and its policies toward the Jews at the time or in the immediate aftermath. The first investigations into the inadequacies of reactions to the genocidal policies effected toward Europe’s Jews were published in the 1960s and excoriated, in particular, the British and American governments. As Holocaust scholar Tom Lawson has observed, “The argument that the Vatican’s response to Jewish suffering was overly diplomatic and lacking in compassion, or that the US and British governments could have rescued more Jews if their policies had been governed by more humanitarian concerns, are commonly heard. These are moral judgements of which the historian should be nervous.”4 The logic of Christian anti-Semitism has assured an extensive examination of Christian responses to the Holocaust. The common perception is that Christian leadership collapsed, illustrated above all by Vatican and papal silence. There was also the participation of Hungarian and Slovakian bishoprics in the politics of anti-Semitism as it unfolded, plus the complicity of Germany’s evangelical churches.5 Phayer’s analysis of Christ’s representatives measures their Christian worthiness by the caliber and strength of their protests and active opposition to Nazi anti-Semitism. It is an approach that critics will claim moves beyond the boundaries of history. Phayer bases his analysis on archival research. Nonetheless, Pius XII defenders and critics of Holocaust scholarship remain likely to challenge his conclusions. They will charge that Phayer has succumbed to the temptation to move outside the traditionally conceived limits of historical investigation to assess, against some universal moral criteria, those caught up in the drama of history. The emergence of Holocaust studies at a time when Pius XII was, as he still is, a potential candidate for canonization rendered him the most controversial religious leader of the twentieth century. Phayer acknowledges that “historians must not be acolytes lighting the path for Pius XII’s canonization, nor should they play devil’s advocates who try to derail it” (x). Nonetheless, despite the discernible caution with which the author attempts to address his subject, his approach can be categorized as “bystander” historiography, which is morally conceived, based on a religious conception of the

4 Tom Lawson, The Church of England and the Holocaust: Christianity, Memory and Nazism (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell & Brewer, 2006), 2. A notable example is Daniel Goldhagen’s A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). 5 David P. Gushee, “Learning from Christian Rescuers: Lessons for the Churches,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science vol. 548 (November 1996): 153; Wolfgang Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews, trans. and ed. Victoria Barnett (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).

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obligation of witness.6 It judges individuals, suggesting what they could or should have done in the past confronted with Nazi atrocities against the Jews. Pius XII is accorded particular opprobrium owing to his elevated position, but other Christian leaders during and after the war shared his attitudes, fears, and mindset. Many other Christian leaders, clerical and lay, shared Pius XII’s tendency to see Nazism and communism as attacks first and foremost on Christian civilization, with communism the more dangerous of the two.7 British propagandists greatly emphasized the persecution of Christian churches in Europe, yet their sufferings did not compare to those of the Jews. Wary that too much horror would repel the normal mind, the Planning Committee of the Ministry of Information had in July 1941 stated: “A certain amount of horror is needed but it must be used very sparingly and must deal always with treatment of indisputably innocent people. Not with violent political opponents. And not with Jews.”8 The propagandists considered that the British people would identify and sympathize with Christian victims of Nazism. Evidence from Home Intelligence reports of growing anti-Semitism during the war possibly deterred the propagandists from trying to use crimes against the Jewish population in the same way.9 Although a Jewish Section was set up in July 1941 as part of the Ministry of Information’s Religions Division, it was not allowed to touch political problems. After the war, the revelations of the death camps and the suffering of the Jews created a well of sympathy. During the war, however, even respected Christian ministers reflected antiSemitic prejudices. Visser ‘t Hooft, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches in Formation, observed at a Peace Aims Group meeting, at which the Jewish question was discussed by some of Europe’s most prominent Christians, that Our failure has been at this point. We say, let the Jews behave better. God has had His experience with those Jews a long time ago. They were behaving like that then. Do we say as Christians that our principles hold only for pleasant people, or also for unpleasant people? I do not see the slightest hope for any real change of attitude to the Jews on the purely “natural” level. The natural man is anti-Semitic.10 6 Victoria Barnett, Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999), 10. 7 Lawson, The Church of England and the Holocaust. 8 Public Record Office, Kew, Ministry of Information files, INF 1 251. 9 Ibid., INF 1 264 & 292. 10 Quoted in Kirby, Church, State and Propaganda: The Archbishop of York and International Relations; a Political Study of Cyril Forster Garbett, 1942–1955 (Hull, U.K.: University of Hull Press, 1999), 64.

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Lahr and Phayer have written very different books, each of which makes a valuable contribution to the burgeoning interest in religion as a political, social, and cultural force in the international as well as the domestic arenas. Both are salutary reminders that, like class, race, and gender, the impact of religion cannot be ignored. Dianne Kirby University of Ulster

Church History 78:1 (March 2009), 159– 170. # 2009, American Society of Church History Printed in the USA

BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS doi:10.1017/S0009640709000067

Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St. Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695 – 1615. By Virginia Blanton. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2007. xviiiþ350 pp. $65.00 cloth. Late Medieval Monasteries and their Patrons: England and Wales, c. 1300 – 1540. By Karen Sto¨ber. Studies in the History of Medieval Religion. Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2007. xiiþ285. $80.00 cloth. St. David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Edited by J. Wyn Evans and Jonathan M. Wooding. Studies in Celtic History. Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2007. xivþ395 pp. $115.00 cloth. Virginia Blanton’s fine study traces English devotion to St. Æthelthryth, a seventh-century nun and foundress, from the period after her death until the seventeenth century. The latter date may surprise some readers since the English Reformation was presumably well along by that time, but, as Blanton correctly points out, what was decreed in London did not always play well in the provinces. A major factor in the preservation of Æthelthryth’s cult was the constant reworking of it by devotees, so that the virgin of the eighth century became the monastic reformer of the tenth century and even metamorphosed into an aristocratic patron of monasteries and nunneries by the late Middle Ages. The changing image of the saint took on more than literary forms. Blanton includes some prominent visual images of Æthelthryth, and she also provides a detailed list of images with their type, such as glass, sculptures in both stone and metal, and paintings on manuscripts, roodscreens, and textiles. She even found a few on pilgrims’ badges. Blanton introduces the topic by explaining that in the Middle Ages the perceptions and the cult of the saint counted for more than historical information. She focuses particularly on Æthelthryth’s body in all its manifestations: the body as physical object, the virgin body, the healing of the body, the body as metaphor, and others. In many ways, this book provides a fine introduction to medieval devotional piety since Blanton demonstrates that different medieval groups employed various modes of piety and the groups morphed their image of Æthelthryth to meet their

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devotional needs. Even the destruction of the saint’s shrine in the Reformation proves the author’s point. Æthelthryth was an Anglo-Saxon princess who had an arranged marriage during which she retained her virginity. Upon her husband’s death she withdrew to the Isle of Ely to live a life of prayer and continence but, five years later, her relatives convinced her to leave Ely and marry Ecgfrith, king of Northumbria and patron of the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow, which, of course, brought Æthelthryth to the attention of the Venerable Bede. Throughout the twelve years of this second marriage she again preserved her virginity; her husband finally agreed to let her become a nun, receiving the veil from no less than Wilfrid (she was a queen). She returned to Ely where she founded a double monastery over which she served as abbess until her death in 679. Bede gave two accounts of her, once in prose, once as a hymn, stressing her strength in preserving her virginity through two marriages. He also used a familiar topos about saintly virgins, namely, the preservation of her body after death, in this case, sixteen years later and with Wilfrid among the witnesses at the disinterment of the body. Like Jerome, Bede spoke glowingly of aristocratic women who abandoned marriage for virginity, and he naturally accepted the medieval scale of female goodness: virginity, widowhood, marriage. Additionally, women who preferred the nunnery to the court provided fine examples of humility. Bede alludes to the testimony of a medicus named Cynefrith who lanced a tumor in the saint’s jaw, leaving a scar still visible on the body. The scar became a standard element in pictorial images of the saint. Late in the Anglo-Saxon period, monastic reformers headed the church. The reforming bishop Æthelwold chose Ely as a house to reform and to support financially, which caused him to learn of Æthelthryth. Unlike Bede, the bishop did not look to a larger world but focused on monasteries. It did not take long for Æthelthryth the virgin to become Æthelthryth the monastic foundress. Æthelwold did not see her body as a proof of virginity but as a center for a cult that included a feast for the saint and a new liturgy prepared for her. Later generations of monks at Ely would use the saint’s residence at their monastery to proclaim themselves custodians of her body. This custody gave the English monks and to them only a sacred task that could not be denied to them by the ever-rapacious Norman bishops. But the monastery soon had Norman monks, who created their own Æthelthryth, a virago who protected her property against exploitation. When a Norman tried to appropriate Ely’s property, Æthelthryth, in a vision, frightened him into abandoning his efforts. Blanton insightfully observes, “Instead of focusing on the shrine as a material body that keeps the corpse from view, the

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narrative [of the vision] now imagines the saint’s corporeality as viable, active matter” (168). Development of the cult could even reverse earlier practices. Bede the monk thrilled to the idea of a queen abandoning her proud crown to lead the humble life of a nun. But by the late Middle Ages many English monasteries depended heavily on aristocratic and royal patronage. Such patrons emphatically did not abandon their lives, and they did not need to be told of the spiritual superiority of someone who did. The “facts” of Æthelthryth’s life as told by Bede could not be altered, but they could be reinterpreted. An Anglo-Norman woman known only as Marie created a poem in honor of the saint, La Vie Seinte Audreé (French shortening of Æthelthryth) that stresses how the saint founded three houses. “In effect, Marie demonstrates how a patron can build upon the success of previous donations and expand her ecclesiastical authority by linking the various institutions that she sponsors” (186), Blanton writes. Marie also illustrated “how the queen lived her daily life, how she exercised her responsibilities as a noblewoman, how she used her talents well” (189). Blanton finishes with Æthelthryth’s final manifestation as a patron of lay women but also “the persuasive voice of spiritual authority regarding marriage and purity” (252). The virgin-reformer-virago-donor became the most popular English female saint, and images of her multiplied. Only with difficulty could the Reformers dislodge her. Blanton has produced a thorough, valuable study of interest not only to specialists in medieval English church history but also to scholars interested in the reception of saintly cults in general and of female saints in particular. Scholars of women in religion will find Blanton’s treatment of the role Æthelthryth’s body played in her cult particularly important. Just one oddity sticks out: the citation of Bede as EH, followed by the page number of the edition used rather than by book and chapter, the more common and helpful method. Karen Sto¨ber’s book, by contrast, has a very limited historical focus and thus is of interest primarily to scholars of medieval English ecclesiastical history. She expresses her concern “to improve the reputation of late medieval monastic lay patrons” (3). The reviewer includes that information for the benefit of Church History readers who may not have known that the reputation of late medieval monastic lay patrons needed improvement. Sto¨ber has organized the material well into five chapters in which she explains the process of patronage, characterizes the late medieval aspects of the process, deals with specifics of burial preferences of the patrons, traces the patronage carried on by five noble families, and finishes with the state of patronage at the Dissolution of the sixteenth century. She demonstrates that

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patronage played a great role in the religious life of noble families, whose patronage was recognized in canon law. If possible, noble families maintained patronage of a particular house for generations; only when they no longer had the requisite funds to support the house did they abandon the project. Patronage began well before the period under discussion. Most houses acquiring patrons were Benedictine, and their patrons were either important nobles or members of the royal family, including monarchs. When lesser nobility and financially comfortable commoners wished to become patrons, Benedictine houses were not, so to speak, “available,” and so these patronsto-be turned to the newer orders, especially the Augustinian canons. Often the patronage preceded the founding of the house; the “majority of England’s nine Carthusian monasteries . . . were lay foundations” (42). Although the majority of houses patronized were those of men, women’s houses also had patrons with “female foundresses and co-foundresses among (the patrons’) ranks. One important category of founders of nunneries was that of aristocratic widows, who often entered their foundations as abbesses or prioresses” (54). The number of female founders may be even higher because very often a nunnery will list a husband and wife as founders and then patrons, but scholars cannot determine whether the wife played a greater role in the foundation than her husband. Because being a patron had social status, in the late Middle Ages patrons increasingly insisted that new foundations be on their own land. Nobles also often insisted that their heraldic devices be displayed prominently in the monastery or nunnery, a request that was usually met. In return for their patronage, the laity received a number of spiritual benefits, such as many prayers on their behalf, although the prayers of the more austere orders, such as the Carthusians, were thought to be the most effective. Patrons could also request hospitality at a religious house. Since they rarely arrived alone, the monks or nuns had to feed and house a sizeable number of guests. At times patrons, especially older ones, would retire to the house, taking part in the community activities and occasionally joining the community. But people who pay expect to have some control, and patrons demanded to assent to the election of an abbot or prior. Rarely did this cause a problem, probably because both parties knew one another well and spoke about matters in advance. Conflicts arose occasionally, at which point the house would appeal to the pope while the patron might appeal to force. But Sto¨ber emphasizes that continuity and harmony characterized most relationships, especially since the patrons hoped to be buried in the monastery’s cemetery, and the graves of past noble patrons offered visual proof of the monastery’s importance.

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Although Sto¨ber focuses on the late Middle Ages, her chapter on the Dissolution makes fascinating reading on a little-known aspect of the English Reformation. This thorough, well-detailed book closes with a chart of houses and their patrons from the founding dates to the Dissolution. J. Wyn Evans and Jonathan M. Wooding’s volume is a collection of essays about the cult of Saint David of Wales. It focuses not on the saint but rather on his role in Welsh Christianity. Inevitably in a collection, the contributions are very diverse, including a new edition of the standard hagiography of the sixth-century David by Rhygyfarch, an eleventh-century bishop, by Richard Sharpe and John Reuben Davies. There is also an essay on a ringed pin of the tenth century. Only one essay deals with the realia of David, but realia of a debatable variety, David’s relics, specifically a body that might have been his (it disappeared in the Reformation). Authenticated by a vision, the body was divided up, and various pieces had a peripatetic afterlife in England and Wales. Of interest to the non-specialist would be Jane Cartwright’s account of “The Cult of St. Non,” the mythical mother of David who, according to tradition, was raped and impregnated by a Welsh king. Cartwright well demonstrates the importance of Non as a female saint who was not a virgin and who was a rape victim in an era when women were assumed to have had some if not much responsibility for the attacks on them. Rather strangely, Cartwright twice uses the redundant phrase “raped against her will” (200, 203). The late Glanmore Williams provides a brief but fact-filled description of David and his cult in the Dissolution, while W. N. Yates offers a clear account of the role of David’s image in the nineteenth-century struggles between the established church and Calvinism throughout the diocese named after the saint. Because written records about David himself are few and late, many authors must resort to information of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries to reconstruct the cult. These include church windows, poems, monuments of debatable date, and even a play. This makes fascinating reading for scholars accustomed to working with sources contemporary with their subjects. Joseph F. Kelly John Carroll University


BOOK REVIEW FORUM doi:10.1017/S0009640709000079

Japan’s Modern Prophet: Uchimura Kanzo¯, 1861 –1930. By John F. Howes. Vancouver: UBC, 2005. xviii þ 446 pp. $43.95 paper.

WHAT MAKES A PROPHET: THE CASE FOR UCHIMURA KANZO¯ “Japanese Christianity had its origins in the upheavals of the Restoration, when samurai lost their former status in society. It was samurai who became converts, in fact, samurai from domains that had not joined in the Meiji Restoration.”1 So writes University of California, Berkeley, History Professor Irwin Scheiner in a statement that links the coming of Christianity to Japan in the nineteenth century to the foundational changes that were occurring at the time. This delineation of those who were most likely to become Christians there during this period marks key issues that will occupy center stage in University of British Columbia Professor Emeritus John Howes’s comprehensive examination of an integral figure in the development of Christianity in Japan. In his Japan’s Modern Prophet, Dr. Howes uses three significant turning points in the life of an influential Japanese Christian to construct an in-depth analysis of how this individual came to a commitment to Christianity, lived his resulting faith, and affected the lives of those around him through his adherence to that faith. However, from the book’s opening pages, the reader immediately becomes aware that Howes’s presentation of Uchimura is much more than the story of a lone figure’s simple pilgrimage toward a set of beliefs whose origins were far beyond the shores of his native land. Rather, through embracing what he describes as “Uchimura’s spiritual odyssey as a teacher and writer” (1), Professor Howes has produced a multifaceted study that explores the influences on and the ramifications of an individual whose lifetime spanned one of the most dynamic periods of cross-cultural interaction in Japanese history. By employing methodologies ranging from literary analysis of Uchimura’s voluminous writings to insightful discussions concerning the psychological forces affecting Uchimura’s actions in a given situation, Howes paints an offering that perceptively portrays a man of conscience, independence, and passion, one who, in substantial ways, was a 1 Irwin Scheiner, Christian Converts and Social Protest in Meiji Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 5– 6.

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product of the times in which he lived. Within this consideration of Uchimura’s context, we find the threads that form the crux of the book’s central theme: that Uchimura transcended the crosscurrents of cultural and national identity resulting from his acceptance of a non-native religion to the level of one who could speak as a representative of his subsequent faith with equal criticalness to the dichotomous sources of his makeup. In short, Uchimura Kanzo¯ became prophet to both Japan and the source of his adopted Christianity, the Western world. Any evaluation of the foundational argumentation of Professor Howes’s work must start with a consideration of Howes’s presentation of the book’s principal character, Uchimura himself. Here, we encounter an individual born into a samurai family on March 26, 1861. His birth coming seven years before the fall of the Tokugawa bakufu, Uchimura grew to adulthood during the Meiji Restoration, a season of monumental changes within Japan. As a product of Confucian-based and English-based education in Japan, as well as extended study in the United States, he became what Howes describes as “equipped . . . for a position of national leadership and cut . . . off from much of what his fellow Japanese held dear” (26). Indeed, Uchimura’s was a life of significant transformations that reflected the unorthodox nature of both his training and his religiosity: from samurai’s son to Christian, from an idealistic supporter of America and Americans to an advocate of Japanese rejection of American conduct toward Japan, from a believer in Japan’s selfdescribed mission to China in 1894 to a pacifist. Through his career as a respected teacher, prolific writer, and social critic, Uchimura would become a vivid embodiment of the conflicts encountered by those Japanese desiring to assert their cultural identity while practicing Christianity. Indeed, as Howes develops carefully throughout his work, Uchimura “wanted modern Japan to act according to his ideals of a benevolent nation. When its leaders failed to perform as he thought Christian rulers should, he berated them. When Christian missionaries failed to accord him what he considered due respect for his achievements as a Christian leader, he berated them” (3). This ability of Uchimura to communicate with such authenticity his commitment to his beliefs that he openly courted isolation from his recipients runs throughout a career that Professor Howes chooses to portray as containing three crucial turning points. The first of these occurs after the winter of 1891, when Uchimura’s hesitation to accord a picture of the Meiji emperor proper respect during a ceremonial reading stirs up a firestorm that cuts a swath destroying Uchimura’s job, second wife, and much of his personal standing within those who considered themselves patriotic Japanese. Uchimura, however, would recover and, in the process, concluded that “the Meiji government could not act as an instrument of God’s will” (12). The second revolved around Uchimura’s resignation from his editor’s

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position at the Yorozu Cho¯ho¯, a leading newspaper, in 1903. This decision was prompted by Uchimura’s embrace of pacifism at a time when Japan was girding for war with Russia. With even the newspaper itself indicating its support of the Japanese government’s course of action, Uchimura stepped off the stage of national acclaim he had built through his writings of the previous decade. Now, he was free to concentrate on a magazine he had established three years earlier for the purpose of instructing Japan about the foundation from which he derived his beliefs through building a readership grounded in biblical teaching. The resulting journal, Seisho no Kenkyu¯, remained in publication until Uchimura’s death in 1930, playing an integral role in establishing the collection of followers with whom he would be associated for the remainder of his career. While subsequently engaged in writing and teaching for a much more intimate audience than the national arena he had reached in the years between his first and second turning points, a series of profoundly influential occurrences culminating with the devastation and disillusionment wrought by the First World War convinced Uchimura that the most effective way to convey what would now become his message— that the current world situation made clear the need to prepare for Christ’s imminent return—as widely yet as quickly as possible was to broaden significantly the scope of his audience. To that end, in the winter of 1918 Uchimura, in conjunction with two other evangelists, launched his Second Coming Movement, a public campaign resembling a religious revival that saw him speaking to large audiences across Japan until the following spring. This radical shift in his methodology, which represents Uchimura’s third turning point, set in motion changes to the number and makeup of those with whom he interacted on a regular basis that, in turn, proved monumental in affecting the agenda of the final decade of Uchimura’s work. His organization established, Professor Howes engages the whole of Uchimura’s life. Far from encountering merely an informational biography, however, the reader is immediately introduced to the author’s message: that this extraordinary writer and thinker is most certainly a prophet, one whose impact extends beyond his borders and his lifetime. Howes’s words eloquently set the stage: His writings locate Uchimura well within the history of Japan, but he himself can best be viewed in comparison with two very different groups of individuals outside Japan. There are few if any Japanese with whom he can be compared. One cannot make of him a case study for some facet of modern Japanese intellectual history. One who seeks to consider him as representative of a group must go beyond the bounds of Japan and of the modern world to the few intellectuals in history who have attempted what he attempted. Every now and then an individual appears who judges his or her community ruthlessly in terms of a transcendent ethic. Any period

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in history can tolerate only so many such individuals. Uchimura was one of them, and if we are to find a group of individuals he seems to resemble we must look into the lives of others who embraced similar ideals in different historical surroundings. Any list of such persons would include the Old Testament prophets, Dante, Luther, Kierkegaard, Carlyle, and Gandhi. Uchimura identified with each of them, and consideration of his life leads to the conclusion that he more nearly resembles them than any Japanese. He stands among Japanese aloof and alone, a rare man of genius who incorporated the spirit and concerns of his times in his pursuit of truth. (11) Such an unequivocal articulation of Uchimura’s place among Japanese invites immediate curiosity. Is such a vision of Uchimura warranted? Certainly, Howes’s painstakingly persuasive presentation leaves the reader by book’s end with great admiration for Uchimura’s accomplishments. However, the subtle but inescapable argumentation that runs throughout the book in support of this theme suggests Howes’s awareness of the vast range of considered opinions concerning Uchimura’s impact. One Uchimura biographer, Aoyama Gakuin Professor Emeritus Ohara Shin, uses the word “polyhedron”2 to encapsulate what he describes as the multifaceted nature of Uchimura that must be taken into account when determining his legacy. Two other biographers, Tatsuo Arima3 and Kimitada Miwa, are far less charitable. Arima sees in Uchimura the opportunity to “understand the nature of the intellectual anxiety the Japanese experienced as they began to adapt to the changing realities of life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”4 Miwa points to “a certain eloquence”5 contained within Uchimura’s commentaries on conditions within Japan. However, in their comparisons of Uchimura to some of his more notable contemporaries, both identify Uchimura’s adherence to Christianity as the reason for Uchimura’s inability to grasp “the real nature of politics, either national or international.”6 In contrast with Arima and Miwa is the praise ravished upon Uchimura by Professor Robert Lee: “In modern Japanese history one figure is outstanding for his personal independence and integrity, yet he remained all his life a patriot for his country . . . to many Japanese, especially in the post – Second 2

Ohara Shin, Hyo¯den Uchimura Kanzo¯ [Uchimura Kanzo¯: His Life and Thought] (Tokyo: Chu¯o¯ Ko¯ronsha, 1976), 8. 3 For the most part, I have followed Japanese custom in placing names of Japanese individuals in proper order, that is, surname first. However, in the case of Japanese authors of English-language works, I have rendered their names in the order they appear on their publications. 4 Tatsuo Arima, The Failure of Freedom: A Portrait of Modern Japanese Intellectuals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 16. 5 Kimitada Miwa, “Crossroads of Patriotism in Imperial Japan: Shiga Shigetaka (1863–1927), Uchimura Kanzo¯ (1861–1930), and Nitobe Inazo¯ (1862– 1933),” unpublished Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1967, 245. 6 Ibid., 245.

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World War period, Uchimura Kanzo¯ (1861 – 1930) became the paradigmatic hero of personal independence.”7 For Lee, the events for which Uchimura is well known within Japanese history, his refusal to bow before the imperial portrait in 1891 and his decision to become a pacifist in 1903, stand as beacons of conscience that demonstrate principled resistance to the prevailing attitudes within and conduct of affairs by Japan during his lifetime. More recently, Hiroshi Miura comes even closer to Professor Howes’s interpretation of Uchimura’s importance. In his short yet engaging work, he also advances the notion of Uchimura as prophet, equating his role in Japan to that of Martin Luther in Germany, John Knox in Scotland, and John Calvin in France and Switzerland.8 For Miura, Uchimura’s greatest impact as a prophet is the most apparent through the actions of his followers during and after the Second World War. Yet Miura, Lee, Miwa, Arima, and Ohara all evaluate Uchimura within the context of his compatriots, as opposed to Howes’s position that such a consideration limits the ability of scholars of Uchimura to assess his true worth. To his credit, Dr. Howes does acknowledge that acceptance of the idea of Uchimura as prophet is not universal, even to the point of including the objections of one such writer in his text (12). Still, the dissenting comments offered by this source hardly reflect the wide-ranging, principled discussion concerning the nature and degree of Uchimura’s impact on both Japan and the world at large. One wonders if, in the midst of his carefully developed discourse supporting the appropriateness of Uchimura’s prophetic stature, Howes might have more strongly emphasized that Uchimura’s impact on his followers, on Japan, and on Christianity as a whole represents a defining that is ongoing and that remains widely at variance. Laying aside the issue of Uchimura as prophet, it is essential to note the encyclopedic nature of Dr. Howes’s treatment of Uchimura. His own recognition of the depth of his work notwithstanding (12),9 Japan’s Modern Prophet undoubtedly ranks as the most exhaustive treatment of Uchimura available in English. An early offering to Uchimura scholarship, Raymond Jennings’s Jesus, Japan, and Kanzo¯ Uchimura10 followed what became the standard premise of the time, that Uchimura’s creation of mukyo¯kai represented Japan’s first truly indigenous church. Dr. Howes himself 7 Robert Lee, “The Individuation of the Self in Japanese History,” in Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 4:1 (March 1977): 19. 8 Hiroshi Miura, The Life and Thought of Kanzo Uchimura, 1861–1930 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1996), 128. 9 Howes writes, “What follows constitutes the most comprehensive research on Uchimura in any language” (12). 10 Raymond Jenning, Jesus, Japan, and Kanzo¯ Uchimura: A Study of the View of the Church of Kanzo¯ Uchimura and its Significance for Japanese Christianity (Tokyo: Christian Literature Society, 1958).

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contributed to the deepening of work on Uchimura through the completion of his 1965 dissertation, advancing the notion of Uchimura as an enigma.11 Earlier mention of the work of Kimitada Miwa and Arima Tatsuo appears above. Carlo Caldarola greatly extended the interpretation of Raymond Jennings, focusing exclusively on the “institution” of mukyo¯kai in his offering, Christianity: The Japanese Way.12 After his self-description of the completeness of his work, Howes goes on to write that Japan’s Modern Prophet is a shortened version of a 1982 draft (12). Still, while other scholarship in English on Uchimura has continued to emerge, none has taken up the period from Uchimura’s decision to leave the Yorozu Cho¯ho¯ in 1903 until his death to the same degree as Professor Howes. Consequently, Howes’s descriptions of the nature of Uchimura’s followers, his coverage of the factors leading to Uchimura’s involvement in the Second Coming Movement and, most important, his analysis of Uchimura’s path toward disassociation from his most promising follower13 with its resulting aftereffects stand as vital additions to the body of knowledge on Uchimura within English-language scholarship. One arena that demonstrates the all-encompassing analysis to which Howes subjects Uchimura in the book is his efforts to ascertain Uchimura’s psychological makeup and then to subsequently demonstrate how his determinations influenced Uchimura’s life choices. A biographer engaging in psychoanalysis without adequate preparatory background should give room for pause to both reader and writer; Professor Howes, however, carries out this method of evaluation with great care and demonstrates the usefulness of such a methodology. Consider, for example, this opening evaluation of Uchimura: Three personality traits reappear in Kanzo¯ as an adolescent and young man. They form a triangle of forces like those of a vector diagram. At one moment one predominates, at another moment one of the others is stronger, yet all three continue as important in his personality equation. The three are a desire for affection, an oppressive sense of responsibility, and a need to dominate his surroundings. The last trait expresses itself in two ways: at times through a kind of undifferentiated fear and at other times through an overweening ambition. The ambition seems to exist to enable Kanzo¯ to overcome the fear; he hopes that with continued success he will feel strong and confident. He tries, therefore, to delimit his world and to dominate it like a pioneer in a clearing who must remain vigilant lest the surrounding verdure and its creatures consume him. (19) 11 John Forman Howes, “Japan’s Enigma: The Young Uchimura Kanzo¯,” unpublished Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1965. 12 Raymond Jennings, Christianity: The Japanese Way (Leiden: Brill, 1979). 13 Tsukamoto Toraji.

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Almost immediately one grasps the implications of these characteristics, that this is an individual with the potential for great strength and for debilitating—even isolating—weaknesses. As the book unfolds and more of Uchimura’s life comes into view, the interaction of these traits becomes readily apparent. Howes has established a means by which the reader can understand, appreciate, react viscerally to, and even empathize with the actions Uchimura takes as he interacts with his world. Moreover, continued commentary along these lines helps prepare the reader for the psychological ramifications of the context in which Uchimura lived as an individual who had first received a traditional Confucian education at home but who then went on to be “taught by Western instructors, tutored in freshly translated Western texts, and proselytized by newly arrived missionaries.”14 University of Washington Professor Kenneth Pyle writes that “graduates of these schools entered society with divided minds: they felt themselves torn between the familiar, comfortable values of their childhood and the new, liberating values of their later education.”15 This certainly fits Uchimura’s situation, and throughout the book Howes brings to his readers’ attention examples of how Uchimura was both a product of and wrestled with his existence in these realms. Another arena that demonstrates the diversification of Professor Howes’s treatment of Uchimura is his usage of literary analysis in considering Uchimura’s writings. With the latest edition of his collected works comprising a forty-volume set, Uchimura has certainly left behind a gold mine’s worth of information through which one can seek to understand the man and his times. Howes contributes detailed consideration of many of Uchimura’s written materials, ranging from magazine articles to diary entries, from standalone books to letters to friends, and from Bible commentaries to poetry. Indeed, concerning Uchimura’s extended lecture series on many of the books of the Bible, Howes points out that Uchimura has produced the largest single collection of Bible commentaries in the Japanese language (283). Professor Howes goes on to provide the reader with excerpts of Uchimura’s lectures on Job and Romans,16 which introduce excellent material through which to gauge Uchimura’s interpretation of scripture and application of biblical passages to Christian living. In doing so, however, Howes also reminds the reader of a still-existing challenge: that the vast majority of Uchimura’s commentaries will remain inaccessible to the English-speaking world until they are translated from Japanese and then subjected to analysis. Through the author’s consideration of Uchimura’s 14 Kenneth B. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1969), 7. 15 Ibid. 16 See Howes, Japan’s Modern Prophet, 284 –297.

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writings the reader is directly exposed to the depth of Uchimura’s angst, the hopefulness and sense of duty through which he glimpsed his and his nation’s mission, the vitriolic nature of his ire, and the forcefulness of his intellect. In so copiously including sections of Uchimura’s written work, Professor Howes provides us with yet another facet of Ohara Shin’s polyhedron. By now, it should be apparent that Japan’s Modern Prophet represents no less than the culminating work of this hemisphere’s dean of Uchimura scholars. It carries the impetus of three decades’ worth of research while pointing out numerous opportunities for further consideration by new generations of researchers. Throughout, Professor Howes mentions episodes where he personally interviewed noted followers who were taught by Uchimura such as Takagi Yasaka, Yamamoto Taijiro¯, and Yanaihara Tadao. Clearly, the breadth of experience Howes brings to the table in writing about Uchimura is unmatched by anyone outside Japan. Yet even a work as monumental as this from so thorough an author as John Howes contains areas that warrant a cautionary note before concluding this consideration of the book. One such concern revolves around the author’s statement that this book represents “the most comprehensive research on Uchimura in any language.” There is absolutely no room for doubt of this claim where English-language treatises on Uchimura are at issue. In the Japanese arena, however, there is, perhaps, at least room for curiosity before displaying unquestioned acceptance. Here, in fact, two intertwining issues are at play. The first revolves around the date the book was actually completed. It was earlier established that a two-decade gap exists between the writing of the base manuscript and actual publication. That after twenty years no researcher of Uchimura outside Japan has matched this book’s coverage of him is an unqualified testimony to the impressiveness of Howes’s work. Yet one does wonder if the same situation holds true in Japan. Is it not possible that Japanese scholarship on Uchimura improved in the years between Howes’s completion of his primary research and his book’s publication? Howes, for example, cites Uchimura follower Masaike Megumu’s book, Uchimura Kanzo¯ den17 [Uchimura Kanzo¯ Biography] throughout his notes. Does not the updated version of Masaike’s book that was published in 197718 contain an even greater depth of scholarship than does the first? The earlier cited Ohara Shin book, Hyo¯den Uchimura Kanzo¯, is a critical biography of 17 Masaike Megumu, Uchimura Kanzo¯ den [Uchimura Kanzo¯ Biography] (Shizuoka: San’ichi Shoten, 1953). 18 Masaike Megumu, Uchimura Kanzo¯ den [Uchimura Kanzo¯ Biography] (Tokyo: Kyo¯bunkan, 1977).

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Uchimura that covers his life up to 1900, ending with Uchimura’s first publication of Seisho no Kenkyu¯. In 1992, Ohara completed a second book, Uchimura Kanzo¯ no sho¯gai: Kindai Nippon to Kirisutokyo¯ no ko¯gen o megutte [The Life of Uchimura Kanzo¯: Gazing at the Source of Light Illuminating Modern Japan and Christianity].19 This book carries to completion Ohara’s treatment of Uchimura’s life and includes many of the issues that Howes discusses such as the Second Coming Movement, the tension between Uchimura and his followers over the need to define mukyo¯kai, and the separation between Uchimura and Tsukamoto. Moreover, both Masaike and Ohara raise at least one issue that has garnered nary a mention in any English language treatment of Uchimura: the possibility that Uchimura endured not one divorce but two, the second being from a woman named Tsukiyama Motoko.20 Thus, taken collectively, it seems safe to conclude that Japanese scholarship on Uchimura has at least matched the depth of Howes’s work. It is time to bring this matter to a close. John Howes has produced a book that will prove indispensable for any future study on Uchimura. The factual material presented alone is far beyond that available in any other English language work in existence today. Of even greater importance are the issues of interpretation Howes has entered into in the debate over Uchimura’s legacy. This book urges us to consider the degree to which Uchimura’s struggle to link his national identity to a Christianity transmitted from a culture different from his own represents the transformation Christianity undergoes as it spreads around the world—especially during an age when Christianity’s most rapid growth is occurring not in the West, but in locations such as Africa and Asia. Surely, the possibility of such a connection between Uchimura’s embrace of Christianity and that which is ongoing suggests a timelessness in the impact of Uchimura and renders unto the work arguing its case a respect that inspires consideration. Darrell E. Allen Seattle Pacific University

19

Uchimura Kanzo¯ no sho¯gai: Kindai Nippon to Kirisutokyo¯ no ko¯gen o megutte [The Life of Uchimura Kanzo¯: Gazing at the Source of Light Illuminating Modern Japan and Christianity] (Tokyo: PHP Kenkyu¯jo, 1992). 20 See, for example, Ohara, Uchimura no sho¯gai, 278–279. Masaike Megumu actually discusses her case to a greater degree in his book and concludes that while this incident is plausible, Motoko’s name does not appear in the Uchimura family registry. The standard listing of Uchimura’s wives is Take (divorced, 1884), Kazuko (died of illness, 1891), and Shizuko (lived until 1945).

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doi:10.1017/S0009640709000080

THE LIMITATIONS OF THE GENRE HEROIC INDIVIDUAL BIOGRAPHY

OF THE

Howes’s Japan’s Modern Prophet is the most detailed study of Uchimura Kanzo¯ (1861–1930) in a Western language. Uchimura, a Christian convert, is best known in the West for three things: 1) his refusal as a young high school teacher to bow deeply before a copy of the Imperial Rescript on Education; 2) his book How I Became a Christian (1893); and 3) his concept of mukyo¯kai, or non-affiliation with any church denomination. Readers will learn much about this enigmatic figure in modern Japanese history from this hefty study of just under four hundred pages of text. Still, in spite of the many insights into Uchimura’s life that Howes provides, I ultimately found this study unsatisfying. I will try to elucidate the reasons for this below. This is an old-fashioned biography in many respects. It follows Uchimura’s life chronologically from childhood to death, using his diaries, letters, published work, and the writings and reminiscences of students and friends as the main documents. In classical historiographical fashion, Howes assumes a natural unity between the man/author, his writings, his ideas, and his lived experience. In this form of intellectual history, an individual— precisely an individual—is heroic exactly insofar as he resists the prevailing Zeitgeist. The biographer conjures the figure of the heroic individual out of writings cut and pasted into “evidence” of the unity and integrity of his ideas and actions as a guise for his own ideology or theology. In other words, the texts authored by Uchimura are a pretext for the verbal effect of the biographer’s act of conjuring up the past for present purposes. In his biography, Howes’s depiction of Uchimura’s world rarely moves outside of the circles he moved in, so the reader has little sense of the swirl of events in Japan and the many other intellectual and non-intellectual critics of the government. The broader world—the context for Howes’s own text— is sketched out, like a flimsy cardboard backdrop for a play, only to the extent necessary to provide a horizon for the protagonist to strut around on the stage delivering monologues. In Howes’s hands, Uchimura’s correspondence is revelatory, providing immediate insight into his “ongoing attempts to live his faith.” Given his own defining focus on Uchimura’s struggles to live a Christian life, Howes feels little compunction to bring in external (extraneous?) matters and figures. Thus, he writes, “This work uses these autobiographical revelations plus the reactions of numerous followers who preserved letters from him and noted their reactions to him. During his long and distinguished career as a writer, Uchimura commented on much

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that was going on around him in Japanese society. I mention these contacts but leave their analysis to others” (2). Howes’s tight focus on Uchimura also means that the reader hears little about other leading Japanese figures in the worlds of politics, education, journalism, and religion. As a result, most readers will have little basis for evaluating Howes’s claims concerning either Uchimura’s uniqueness or, at other times, his representative nature. Howes can blithely claim that “there are few if any Japanese with whom [Uchimura] can be compared” (11) only because he does not look beyond Uchimura’s immediate world. This claim for uniqueness is, of course, unwarranted hyperbole. Yet, it is important to note how it functions rhetorically as a warrant for Howes’s myopic focus. Whether this rhetorical move will be successful or not remains to be seen. I suspect that readers who possess some knowledge of modern Japanese history and society will feel, as I did, a sense of claustrophobia while reading this study. Howes begins by probing the psychological development of his subject from childhood to young adulthood, following Erik Erikson’s model of psychobiography. Some readers might enjoy this literary genre; in Howes’s hands, I found it to be unremarkable and unconvincing, while the claims flowing from his psychologizing are often overblown. Not surprisingly, the biography of the heroic individual requires a narrative structure and plot involving repeated episodes of struggle and the overcoming of obstacles in the journey to individuation. One example of Howes’s mode of argumentation must suffice to illustrate how he works. Early on he writes: Looking back, Uchimura realized that as a boy he had been a “fretful and timid child,” and this timidity seems to have been directly related to the conditions that affected his family as he grew up. Three personality traits reappear in Kanzo¯ as an adolescent and young man. They form a triangle of forces like those of a vector diagram. At one moment one predominates, at another moment one of the others is stronger, yet all three continue as important in his personality equation. The three are a desire for affection, an oppressive sense of responsibility, and a need to dominate his surroundings. (19) In and of themselves, none of these three “forces” is remarkable. After all, who among us does not desire affection? Who, in growing up, does not have to learn to dominate her or his surroundings or need to internalize a sense of responsibility? Howes’s emphasis on Uchimura’s timidity as a child, though, is required here precisely so that his later public speaking can be seen as evidence of his heroic journey to the status of an autonomous individual. Similarly, by stressing the force of the young Kanzo¯’s desire and need for affection, Howes can then present the mature Uchimura as a heroic figure of integrity, standing alone in speaking truth to power.

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Let me return to Howes’s characterization of Uchimura as an incomparable individual in modern Japan. First, let us look at Howes’s list of “great men”— and they are all men—to which he would add Uchimura. “Every now and then an individual appears,” he writes, “who judges his or her community ruthlessly in terms of a transcendent ethic. . . . Any list of such persons would include the Old Testament prophets, Dante, Luther, Kierkegaard, Carlyle, and Gandhi” (11). Note that, save for Gandhi, all of these figures are identified with Western Christianity (even the prophets of the Hebrew Bible are Christianized through Howes’s referring to them as “Old Testament prophets”). The implicit terms and norms of “greatness” used by Howes are, to begin with, Western, Christian, and tied to the value of individualism (Gandhi appears on this list, no doubt, because of his pacifism, a core value for Howes). There is more at work here, however, that should give us great pause. Leaving aside the biblical prophets, all of the “great men” are highly educated intellectuals and writers. Uchimura’s greatness, too, we are told, came in no small part through his lifelong publishing activities, although he never embraced modern scholarly approaches to the study of the Bible. The unspoken implication here is that uneducated persons (peasants, factory workers, et cetera) could not meet the criteria for greatness. Moreover, given the educational situation in late nineteenth-century Japan, when few girls were permitted to pursue higher education, women are seemingly excluded from achieving greatness. Even more troubling, perhaps, is Howes’s implication that only a “transcendent ethic” (read “transcendent deity”) can provide a valid basis for a serious social and political critique. Yet, years ago Joseph M. Kitagawa noted that, throughout history, the Japanese created and re-created religious worlds of meaning through different versions of an “immanental theocracy,” through “a synthesis of polity, religion, society, and culture.”1 The native kami cults were (and are) this-worldly in orientation, while the deities— anything but transcendent beings—also inhabit this world in mountains, rivers, trees, waterfalls, and other natural phenomena, as well as in material objects (bronze mirrors, swords, and so on). By implication, Howes continues the charge against Shinto, proffered by early Christian missionaries and other Western observers, that Shinto had no system of ethics. Indeed, it is implied that by its very nature it could not have any; Shinto must be defined by its lack of a transcendent deity and a transcendent ethic. In sum, then, religious participants in the kami cults are, by definition, excluded from “greatness” insofar as they cannot assume an authentic prophetic role. 1 Joseph M. Kitagawa, On Understanding Japanese Religions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), xii.

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Taking the prophets of the Hebrew Bible as the normative measure of prophethood is problematic in and of itself, but Howes’s seeming denial of the very possibility of a powerful sociopolitical critique coming from anything but a transcendent (male) ethic is an unexamined and historically untenable assumption. Even if we confine ourselves to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan, there were other persons—specifically non-Christian Japanese—who offered powerful critiques of Japanese society and the government based on religious ethical values. Take Deguchi Nao (1836 – 1912), an older contemporary of Uchimura’s, to mention just one such individual. The ¯ moto-kyo¯, this uneducated and foundress of the so-called “new religion” O illiterate woman became a vocal and vociferous critic of the Meiji government, as well as of many aspects of industrialization and modernization. Howes’s criteria for greatness would seemingly exclude Deguchi Nao, yet Helen Hardacre has called her “one of the great geniuses of Japanese religious history.”2 In a common pattern in the history of religions in Japan and its patriarchal social structure, Deguchi Nao’s religious career began when, at age fifty-six, she was possessed by a kami who revealed himself to be the “Great Source” of the universe. In the following years and decades, she also offered a powerful critique of the patriarchal social structure in Japan, something the socially conservative Uchimura never did. Then, too, Deguchi Nao was imprisoned by the government for her expressed views; Uchimura always managed to stay out of prison by judiciously tempering his criticism of the state. Uchimura saved his strongest words, his so-called “ruthless” criticism, for the ecclesiastical structure of Christian churches and foreign missionaries. Yet, one must ask, how much courage did it take to criticize organized Christian churches and missionaries in Japan in the Meiji and Taisho¯ eras? For three centuries, Christianity had been demonized by the government in Japan. (On this, see Nam-lin Hur, Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, AntiChristianity, and the Danka System [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007]). This is not to imply that Uchimura was not a significant figure in modern Japan; he was. But, like all historical figures, his popular image is a constructed one and contested, with a complex history of its own. This history is not explored by Howes at all. Rather, his biography in large measure seeks to buttress and legitimate the popular image of Uchimaru as a 2 ¯ moto Kyo¯dan: The Limits of Religious See Helen Hardacre, “Gender and the Millennium in O Innovation,” in Innovation in Religious Traditions: Essays in the Interpretation of Religious Change, ed. Michael A. Williams, Collett Cox, and Martin S. Jaffe (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), 215 –240.

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heroic individual of conscience who stood up to the state. Howes’s heroic portrayal of Uchimura as “Japan’s modern prophet” is made possible only because he largely ignores other individuals who spoke out, as well as how broader cultural developments in Japan led Uchimura to represent himself and, posthumously, others to represent him to the world as a heroic individual of conscience. For instance, readers of Howes’s biography will search in vain for any mention, let alone serious consideration, of the Meiji government’s legal actions to define “religion” (shu¯kyo¯, a neologism) and, then, to control “religions” in the face of pressure from Western powers. Religions at this time were defined as “foreign” religious groups and communities, while State Shinto—a blatant “invented tradition”—was declared not to be a religion at all. Rather, the government educational and propaganda operations presented the newly established state cult, commonly known as State Shinto (kokka shinto¯), as the timeless expression of the nature of the Japanese people and their proper relationship to the imperial family. It is essential to engage the extensive and ever-growing scholarly literature on this topic in Japanese and Western languages if one is to appreciate Uchimura’s own understanding of religion and the reception of his ideas in Japan. Would that Howes had undertaken this task. There is no doubt still an audience for “great man” biographies. Professional historians, though, with a critical eye to the unspoken and unwarranted assumptions underlying this genre, will not be satisfied. Gary L. Ebersole University of Missouri – Kansas City

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000092

AN IMPRESSION OF J. F. HOWES’S JAPAN’S MODERN PROPHET The theme of Howes’s book is the psychological observation of Uchimura as a teacher and writer, not as an evangelist. Professor Howes says that “one sees in Uchimura’s life a classic study of the psychological implications that attend commitment to the religious life” (395). Moreover, he adds, “This study introduces Uchimura’s spiritual odyssey as a teacher and writer” (1). But as Uchimura commits deeply to Christianity, the author has to try to understand his religious logic. However, it is not necessarily inevitable that he follow faithfully after Uchimura’s spiritual pilgrimage; the necessary understanding is enough for the grasp of the process of development of an impressive individual character in Uchimura, who was one of the representative

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heroic individual of conscience who stood up to the state. Howes’s heroic portrayal of Uchimura as “Japan’s modern prophet” is made possible only because he largely ignores other individuals who spoke out, as well as how broader cultural developments in Japan led Uchimura to represent himself and, posthumously, others to represent him to the world as a heroic individual of conscience. For instance, readers of Howes’s biography will search in vain for any mention, let alone serious consideration, of the Meiji government’s legal actions to define “religion” (shu¯kyo¯, a neologism) and, then, to control “religions” in the face of pressure from Western powers. Religions at this time were defined as “foreign” religious groups and communities, while State Shinto—a blatant “invented tradition”—was declared not to be a religion at all. Rather, the government educational and propaganda operations presented the newly established state cult, commonly known as State Shinto (kokka shinto¯), as the timeless expression of the nature of the Japanese people and their proper relationship to the imperial family. It is essential to engage the extensive and ever-growing scholarly literature on this topic in Japanese and Western languages if one is to appreciate Uchimura’s own understanding of religion and the reception of his ideas in Japan. Would that Howes had undertaken this task. There is no doubt still an audience for “great man” biographies. Professional historians, though, with a critical eye to the unspoken and unwarranted assumptions underlying this genre, will not be satisfied. Gary L. Ebersole University of Missouri – Kansas City

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000092

AN IMPRESSION OF J. F. HOWES’S JAPAN’S MODERN PROPHET The theme of Howes’s book is the psychological observation of Uchimura as a teacher and writer, not as an evangelist. Professor Howes says that “one sees in Uchimura’s life a classic study of the psychological implications that attend commitment to the religious life” (395). Moreover, he adds, “This study introduces Uchimura’s spiritual odyssey as a teacher and writer” (1). But as Uchimura commits deeply to Christianity, the author has to try to understand his religious logic. However, it is not necessarily inevitable that he follow faithfully after Uchimura’s spiritual pilgrimage; the necessary understanding is enough for the grasp of the process of development of an impressive individual character in Uchimura, who was one of the representative

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intellectuals of modern Japan. He was indeed a modern Japanese with an intense individuality. The author succeeds in depicting its intensity. Nevertheless, these questions might be posed: whether the orientation of the Christian Uchimura’s life can be rightly grasped when the author’s concern is in drawing out the spiritual pilgrimage of Uchimura not as a Christian but as an ordinary Japanese; and, as a result, whether even the grasp of Uchimura as an ordinary Japanese does not have a certain danger of losing its depth. Two instances will be cited. Firstly, the problem of Uchimura’s conversion; that is a most delicate spiritual and psychological process for him both as a Christian and as an ordinary Japanese. In March 1884, he married Take, a woman educated in the two famous mission schools for girls. In those days, it meant she had received the highest level of women’s education in Japan. She and her husband began to live with his parents according to an age-old custom. Before long there occurred a sharp confrontation between Take and her mother-in-law, who was a nervous, old-fashioned woman. In the conflict, which was growing stormy, Uchimura finally stood on the side of his mother, and Take left his house. The Christian community of Early Meiji Japan in which Uchimura and Take were promising young leaders was quite young and small. Therefore, their divorce was no minor scandal for that community. The letters between the end of 1884 and that of 1885 show Uchimura had been stirred up by a sense of sin. But what kind of sin? It seems the sin was understood in terms of Confucianism during at least the early days of his stay in America. In the Confucian ethical system, the cornerstone is filial duty. Standing on this foundation, he affirmed, “If such a Biblical expression that man should leave his parents and cling to his wife is taken literally, a great damage must fall upon humanness and the world” (36–151; New Works, vol. 36, p. 151). The author, however, questions and answers: Why did Uchimura feel so driven by sin? Christian confessional writings so take for granted this condition that readers tend to accept Uchimura’s experience as but one more example of a common phenomenon. Yet depth psychology indicates the important role that consciousness of sin may play in masking more specific concerns. Little in How I Became a Christian would indicate that Uchimura had particular cause for such feelings . . . In the absence of direct statement on this crisis, one must depend on scattered references, most of which appear in three Japanese works. They indicate that the sense of sin originated in the conflicting loyalties that Kanzo felt to his mother and Take. (105) The plots of the author are sometimes not a little complicated, especially in important themes such as those of sin and mukyo¯kai. Correctly, he does not put full credit on How I Became as an accurate autobiography, because it

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takes no account of the divorce problem. If you avoid this problem and write a life of Uchimura, “readers tend to accept Uchimura’s experience as but one more example of a common phenomenon,” as did the readers of his biographies published before the new edition of his complete works appeared. The old editions excluded some letters to his father owing to their too strong expressions of feeling against Take. The new edition restored all of them. I think the author would have done better to have used the restored letters as material. But he says, “They indicate that the sense of sin originated in the conflicting loyalties that Kanzo felt to his mother and to Take.” Loyalties to his mother and to Take? Suggesting that this is the split of loyalties from which Uchimura’s feelings of sin spouted? Uchimura himself, however, declared to his father at home, “I am never afraid concerning . . . this point [of divorce] even if I am called before the Heavenly Father” (3 – 122). This audacious declaration that was erased from the old edition seems to deny the possibility of Uchimura’s loyalty to Take. I said the sin, for the young Uchimura was understood in terms of Confucianism. Namely, the sin was failure of filial duty owing to his “wandering” in America. While this interpretation is not entirely mistaken, “depth psychology” will indicate another construction. Frustrated amourpropre; it was for him a source of feeling of sin, at least between October 1884 and a certain day in the first half of 1886. Uchimura in his youthful days was called a genius and was watched as a future leader of the Japanese Christian society, so his pride grew higher than others. When this pride was turned upside down by the divorce, he sank deep to the bottom of shame. This depression was the source of the feeling of sin. Indeed, it may be a rather common human mode of life, but especially more common in Ruth Benedict’s world of “shame culture.” It was at Amherst College, with President J. H. Seelye’s excellent pastoral advices, that Uchimura was taught to the quick that self-love is sin, and that that sin was redeemed only by Christ. And it was after this experience of conversion that he recovered from depression. For me, the most impressive words of the author concerning Uchimura’s conversion are thus: “At one time, Uchimura recalled in later life, he had written of his second conversion in America but had burned the manuscript [in 1895] in dejection with the English-language remonstrance to God that ‘Thou has [sic] deceived me’” (108). The author seems to negate the significance of conversion in Uchimura’s life. It is one of the cruxes in his book for the readers to solve. In fact, maybe, this sort of crux would dissolve if the author, who could not be supposed to be internally indifferent to Uchimura’s most precious axiom of belief, should shake off a little of his indifference and express a bit of sympathy for Uchimura. Secondly, the other problem I would like to single out is that of “Two J’s” (Jesus and Japan, the two objects of Uchimura’s love); I think this one has

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relation to mukyo¯kai. “In this way,” the author says, “the ultimate result of faith for the patriotic Christian is responsibility for one’s nation’s acts. The faithful should make their convictions known. When they do, evangelism becomes an imperative of true patriotism. Faith alone is not enough” (235). The author does not employ Uchimura’s phrase, “Two J’s,” in place of which “patriotic Christian” is used in the quotation above. Those sentences bear a radical criticism of Uchimura’s “Two J’s.” However, the “faith alone” principle belongs to the soteriology while “patriotic Christian” belongs to the ecclesiology. Discussing two principles, each of which belongs to different sections of doctrine on the same dimension, only invites confusion. Of course we can first of all discuss which of the two subjects belongs to more basic doctrine. To this question, Uchimura himself gives the answer in the form of an unprinted manuscript without the signature and the date. This memorandum may be a kind of testament, presumably written shortly before his death. In this paper, Uchimura says, “My Mukyokai-shugi [mukyo¯kai-ism] was not principle for principle’s sake. It was a principle for faith. I advocated it as a result of the belief that a man is not justified by the works but by the faith. . . . The faith in the Cross was the first principle; Mukyokaishugi was the second or the third principle. . . . Not for winning the churches’ favor but to clean my standpoint, I will say this; I am not a believer in Mukyokai of today’s fashion” (32 – 347). According to Uchimura, as the visible churches are historically built organizations, they have historical and national characters; and mukyo¯kaitype fellowship is best suitable to the Japanese religiosity. Then, in Uchimura’s view, nationalism is tightly connected with ecclesiology, as mentioned above. However, here he gives priority to soteriology over ecclesiology. The author, too, shows interest in this “testament”; interest not in comparing soteriology with ecclesiology but in Uchimura’s “disassociation from mukyokaishugi.” He says, “Uchimura’s final act of independence, his disassociation from mukyokaishugi, seems to date from these days in January [1930]. Uchimura wrote the undated manuscript that would cause such a stir. . . . It would announce Uchimura’s final renunciation” (377). Again I am afraid the author’s view of this might invite readers’ misunderstanding. Uchimura renounced not Mukyokaishugi in general, but just that of today’s fashion, namely that which gave priority to ecclesiology over soteriology. It was a tragedy that he who was advocating “fashionable” mukyo¯kai was Tsukamoto Toraji. He was Uchimura’s brightest disciple, like Martin Luther’s Philipp Melanchthon or John Calvin’s Theodore Beza. And to tell the truth, it would not be possible to say that Tsukamoto’s theory was in fashion among the mukyo¯kai group in about 1930. Uchimura was an

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ironist of Carlylean style. In his journalist days, he had been a great success owing to skillful application of this sort of irony. Therefore we must take care that we should not be carried off our feet by Uchimura’s ironies. It is a point of skill on which Uchimura students are tested. Shibuya Hiroshi Emeritus, Meiji-gakuin University, Tokyo

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000109

RESPONSE TO COMMENTS ON JAPAN’S MODERN PROPHET Thanks to the editors of Church History for what amounts to a panel discussion of my book. What a humbling idea for an author. With the rapid development of the Christian faith outside what used to be called “Christendom,” its readers should be introduced to the trenchant criticism of American Protestantism that developed in Japan a century ago. Church History assembled a most capable group of individuals for this task. Darrell Allen is a young historian interested in the development of Christianity in Japan. He has read widely in secondary sources about Uchimura in preparation for his own research. Gary Ebersole specializes on the history of traditional Japan with his own particular interest in the literature of Japan’s Buddhist tradition. Shibuya Hiroshi comes out of the Japanese Christian tradition. Uchimura’s great ego and frequent contradictions make him a stern taskmaster for those who would assess his contribution to history. Each of the reviewers of Japan’s Modern Prophet follows its arguments with care and poses penetrating questions. Allen follows an analysis of other works on Uchimura’s life with the question of why the publication of this work took so long. The answer is that, in its original form, no one found it interesting enough to warrant publication. Ebersole alludes to some of the problems. Was the subject sufficiently “Japanese” to merit recognition by those interested in Japanese history? Who would consider Christianity in Japan a worthy topic? The manuscript had lain unpublished for over two decades when a graduate student who read some of my short articles about Uchimura that mentioned a long unpublished manuscript telephoned to ask if he could look at it. I sent him a copy and after reading it myself revised it. A year’s work reduced the length of the manuscript by about 20 percent. The desire to get it out overcame the opposite desire to see what had been done meanwhile. Study

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ironist of Carlylean style. In his journalist days, he had been a great success owing to skillful application of this sort of irony. Therefore we must take care that we should not be carried off our feet by Uchimura’s ironies. It is a point of skill on which Uchimura students are tested. Shibuya Hiroshi Emeritus, Meiji-gakuin University, Tokyo

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000109

RESPONSE TO COMMENTS ON JAPAN’S MODERN PROPHET Thanks to the editors of Church History for what amounts to a panel discussion of my book. What a humbling idea for an author. With the rapid development of the Christian faith outside what used to be called “Christendom,” its readers should be introduced to the trenchant criticism of American Protestantism that developed in Japan a century ago. Church History assembled a most capable group of individuals for this task. Darrell Allen is a young historian interested in the development of Christianity in Japan. He has read widely in secondary sources about Uchimura in preparation for his own research. Gary Ebersole specializes on the history of traditional Japan with his own particular interest in the literature of Japan’s Buddhist tradition. Shibuya Hiroshi comes out of the Japanese Christian tradition. Uchimura’s great ego and frequent contradictions make him a stern taskmaster for those who would assess his contribution to history. Each of the reviewers of Japan’s Modern Prophet follows its arguments with care and poses penetrating questions. Allen follows an analysis of other works on Uchimura’s life with the question of why the publication of this work took so long. The answer is that, in its original form, no one found it interesting enough to warrant publication. Ebersole alludes to some of the problems. Was the subject sufficiently “Japanese” to merit recognition by those interested in Japanese history? Who would consider Christianity in Japan a worthy topic? The manuscript had lain unpublished for over two decades when a graduate student who read some of my short articles about Uchimura that mentioned a long unpublished manuscript telephoned to ask if he could look at it. I sent him a copy and after reading it myself revised it. A year’s work reduced the length of the manuscript by about 20 percent. The desire to get it out overcame the opposite desire to see what had been done meanwhile. Study

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of new works could be done by someone else. In fact, few new studies had appeared, but they included Ohara’s second volume, which Allen mentions. During the intervening years, the number of Christians has increased exponentially in many of the lands to which missionaries took it over the last two centuries. Direction no longer comes from missionaries but from leaders in the local Christian communities. They demand to be heard at the headquarters of the European and American churches that sent out the original missionaries. In these circumstances, the story of a young Japanese convert who a century ago severely criticized the assumptions of the missionary movement in the lands from which it originated merits attention. In the young, developing churches, Christianity is no longer an alien import associated with imperialism. Rather, it is a living movement at home in various cultures. Local Christian histories differ to the extent that earlier traditions have been integrated into them. This is exactly Uchimura’s point. His Christianity in Japan, he felt, had to reflect traditional Japanese attitudes toward religious questions. Denominational differences in Western Christianity seemed to him in the same way to reflect elements in the varying traditions of the countries of Europe and America. In like manner, Christianity in Japan should reflect that which is distinctly Christian yet does not at the same time try to impose on Japanese Christians elements of Western tradition that reflect secular rather than religious values. For Uchimura, Japanese Christianity, and the basis of Christianity elsewhere, consisted simply of the individual’s sense of personal salvation nourished by careful study of the Bible. The intervening years from the original manuscript have thus brought about a shift in opinion about the relation between Christianity and secular culture that makes Uchimura’s words seem very apt. In retrospect, it seems that the numerous widely available secondary sources on Uchimura in the 1950s did not address questions that occurred to me. The many books consisted for the most part of reminiscences and of elements in Uchimura’s lectures that dealt with problems faced by students in Uchimura’s audiences. Uchimura dealt with the interpretation and importance of various texts. Many of his analyses must have gone over the heads of the members of his audiences who heard of the Bible for the first time through him. Their adult recollections provided few answers. One scholar whose research used a historical method that promised to help solve my problems was Ozawa Saburo¯. He had founded the Protestant History Society (Purotestanto shi gakkai), the monthly meetings of which helped introduce the wealth of Christian history in Japan to numerous young scholars. Ozawa died relatively young, and his main study analyzed the first act that makes Uchimura live on in history, his refusal to bow before the signature of the emperor. For his research, Ozawa used more than two

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thousand books and articles, patiently harvested from many archives. His tenacity and the number of primary sources he consulted became my model. Allen also notes that Ohara Shin in his Uchimura Kanzoˆ no shoˆgai (The Life of Uchimura Kanzoˆ) mentions that Uchimura may have married a fourth time in addition to the three wives usually mentioned. If there was a fourth wife, she would have come between Kazuko, who died shortly after Uchimura’s refusal to bow, and Shizuko, who outlived him by fifteen years. These allegations have been around for many years. None of them seems credible. Even if they were proved, one could only with great difficulty find, on the basis of Uchimura’s writings, that his involvement with this third wife noticeably affected him. Under these circumstances, it seems needless to introduce such speculation into an introductory general English-language biography. Further evidence that supports belief in the existence of such a wife will of course be of great interest. In distinction to Allen’s concern with other biographies of Uchimura and the lack of reference to two of them, Ebersole expresses general dissatisfaction with the work, though he found it provided “many insights” into Uchimura’s significance. He suggests that the reason lies in the book’s general approach to Uchimura that results in an “old-fashioned biography in many respects” and then introduces a paradigm that describes how biographers plan their work and marshal evidence to substantiate their theses. He regrets that Japan’s Modern Prophet constrains its interpretation of Uchimura to his writings and neglects the contributions to history of those who are not professional writers, and, in particular, women. And he finds the lack of information about the Japan in which Uchimura worked leaves him “claustrophobic.” In the first place, it seems common sense to base a study of a famous writer and lecturer on his legacy in print. The many articles and books describe what he did, and they along with the reminiscences of those who heard his lectures form the basis of any interpretation of his life. Next, in the terms of a life of Uchimura, there are numerous examples of his interaction with young followers in the countryside. They include his trip standing on an overnight train to a 4 a.m. arrival in a provincial town where a female underage follower had repeatedly run away from home to join him in his work in Tokyo. He tried to dissuade her and reassured her family members that he wanted her to remain home, at least until she obtained her majority. Uchimura’s diary for the last twelve years of his life also records a number of trips into the countryside to visit with followers, and an analysis of letters to the editor of his Bible-study magazine from readers throughout Japan reflects the opinions of numerous readers in rural areas. For a short time Uchimura even published a magazine the aim of which was to allow his followers to communicate with one another.

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One of the alternatives for an author to writing a biography of Uchimura would have been dealing with his life and times, which would have included more about the Japanese intellectual world Uchimura inhabited. It would have helped the reader understand why the Meiji Era (1868 – 1912) was “simultaneously so confused and so dynamic.”1 In fact, when the original form of this work was finished in the early 1980s, it was to be followed by a general study of Christianity in modern Japan. Events made that impossible. When I did return to Uchimura two decades later, the more important need was for an introduction of the man and his thought to readers of English. They would best be served by a work that introduced Uchimura in terms of their interests, which, in terms of the later Uchimura, approximated his own: dedication to a life of faith based on one’s understanding of the Bible. Rather than continue this discussion of how Ebersole assumes the topic was chosen, here is my understanding of how it came about. I grew up in a family that had helped introduce Christianity to India and China for eighty years, and so work in the Allied Occupation of Japan from 1946 to 1948 provided the opportunity to observe what had resulted from the similar effort of Protestant missionaries to Japan. My interest at the time centered on how Japanese Christians had distinguished their faith from the more general influence of Western culture. After return home and entrance into graduate school, a fellow graduate student from Japan suggested Uchimura, and I wrote a master’s essay about him and applied for a grant for further study in Japan. My research proposal specified a comparison between him and two of the other great Meiji Japanese Christian intellectuals, Uemura Masahisa and Ebina Danjo¯, with the hope that this analysis of three leaders would find similarities that typified Japanese attitudes in general toward Christianity, as opposed to what was then often called “Christian”—which in fact was “Western”—society. Events quickly demonstrated the impossibility of this task. Japanese intellectual leaders were interested in meeting me as one of the first Fulbright grantees. That my research had started with Uchimura drew fervent replies, pro and con. I had unexpectedly stumbled into what Ebersole calls the “constructed” and “contested” history of attitudes toward Uchimura. Some, upon hearing of the work on Uchimura, replied that Western students found the most interesting topics and that Uchimura was one of the most important figures in Japanese intellectual history. Others responded that Uchimura was dull and overrated. My complacent assumption that I had done with him and could move on seemed to have missed the point. Only a more detailed study of Uchimura could help explain why firmly held opinions on him differed so. Uchimura’s disciples were at the peak of their careers, and interviews with them offered promise of help. No one refused my request, but the interviews 1

James L. Huffman, book review in Monumenta Nipponica 62:3 (Autumn 2007): 369.

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produced little that answered my many questions. I learned that the writings and lectures of this compelling figure had deeply influenced many who became later leaders in Japanese society, but I learned little about how his words compared with those of other students of the Bible. So I set about to read Uchimura’s complete works, a task the young Yuzo Ota helped me finish. Ota later became a distinguished specialist on Uchimura in his own right and has taught for many years at McGill University. An example of the disciples who helped me was Yanaihara Tadao. He studied political economy under Nitobe Inazo¯, a close friend and colleague of Uchimura, and later succeeded Nitobe in the chair of colonial administration that Nitobe had founded at Tokyo University. This was the only professorship in the world devoted to the management of colonies. At the same time as he studied under Nitobe, Yanaihara attended Uchimura’s Sunday lectures on the Bible and himself became a scholar of the Bible. When Nitobe resigned from Tokyo University in order to become one of the directors of the League of Nations, Yanaihara took his place at the university. He remained in this position as Japan took over Manchuria, now known as “Northeast China,” and a few years later most of China’s heavily populated areas. All of this expanse now constituted part of what Japan considered its “colonies.” When Japanese troops “raped” Nanking in 1937, Yanaihara, in his professional role, traveled to China to observe what had happened. On returning, he published in a leading journal of opinion a scathing critique that blamed the whole event on the Japanese army. The subsequent furor cost him his job and caused the government great embarrassment. Bereft of dependable income, Yanaihara subsisted on the fees from his Sunday lectures on the Bible. The gist of these lectures was published and widely distributed in a monthly pamphlet. Under wartime conditions, paper was rationed. When authorities informed Yanaihara that he could no longer get a ration for his pamphlet, he printed the gist of the lectures on postcards and sent one to each subscriber monthly. Reinstated at the University of Tokyo after World War II, he reformed the curriculum to broaden the intellectual horizons of the students and became one among many of Uchimura’s followers who strengthened democratic institutions in the more liberal conditions after the war. As he so effectively spoke “truth to power,” to adopt Ebersole’s beautiful phrase, Yanaihara had great influence. This is how Japan’s Modern Prophet began. Twenty-three years after Uchimura’s death, strongly held opinions of his significance differed greatly. At the same time, individuals like Yanaihara personified the type of individual Uchimura had nurtured for future leadership in Japan. Neither Yanaihara nor any of the others among Uchimura’s students who opposed the war spent time in jail while, as Ebersole points out, many Marxists did. There was a good reason for this. Marxists advocated the

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overthrow of the government in the interests of a utopia where members of the same class would ally themselves with their colleagues in other countries. Yanaihara and his fellow followers of Uchimura did not advocate the overthrow of the government but tried to change it from within. The third reviewer chosen by the editors of Church History is Shibuya Hiroshi, who begins with reference to Uchimura’s divorce from his first wife, Take. While still in his early twenties, Uchimura married, subsequently returned his young pregnant bride to her family home, and then fled to study in North America. His move abroad resulted directly from the embarrassment of the divorce. Uchimura’s headstrong union with a woman of his own choice contrasted with the normal calculation by elders as to whom among available candidates would most strengthen the family. The choice of the wife for an eldest son, as Uchimura was, required particular care, since her groom would share the home of his parents where she would become a junior partner in the management of the house. The groom’s mother would also consider it her duty to train her new daughter-in-law in household management. Take’s new-style education in missionary schools would have informed her of the heady individual freedom that in America accompanied either proposals of marriage or their acceptance. Allen mentions Kenneth Pyle’s description of the effect of such training. Swept along by this attitude, Uchimura entreated his parents to accept Take as his bride. They objected, but he won out. Shibuya describes what happened next. Shibuya then introduces one of Uchimura’s letters home from his refuge in the United States and suggests that these letters should have been used “as material.” The letters were used to develop my analysis of Uchimura’s feelings of sin and their relation to his divorce, but they are not referred to specifically in the footnotes. There was certainly no intention to “negate the significance of conversion” in Uchimura’s life, as Shibuya suggests, and my description of the conversion notes his occasional doubts about it. There was no consideration of whether to insert words of sympathy for him in my text. Rather than include words of compassion, I would have assumed the mere mention of his occasional doubts would automatically evoke feelings of sympathy from readers. They could hardly avoid such feelings as they read how Uchimura’s acceptance of American attitudes toward marriage had occasioned such pain in him. Shibuya then discusses a very famous article by Uchimura titled “Two J’s.”2 It was first published in September 1926 and written in English for the missionaries who read Uchimura’s English-language magazine aimed at them. Here is what he wrote: 2 The Japan Christian Intelligencer, I, 7; as quoted in Uchimura Kanzo¯ Zenshuˆ (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1982), 30, 53– 54.

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I love two J’s and no third; one is Jesus, and the other is Japan. I do not know which I love more, Jesus or Japan. I am hated by my countrymen for Jesus’ sake . . . , and I am disliked by foreign missionaries for Japan’s sake as national and narrow. No matter; I may lose all my friends, but I cannot lose Jesus and Japan. For Jesus’ sake, I cannot own any other God than His Father as my God and Father; and for Japan’s sake, I cannot accept any faith which comes in the name of foreigners. Come starvation; come death; I cannot disown Jesus and Japan; I am emphatically a Japanese Christian, though I know missionaries in general do not like that name. Jesus and Japan; my faith is not a circle with one centre; it is an ellipse with two centres. My heart and mind revolve around the two dear names. And I know that one strengthens the other; Jesus strengthens and purifies my love for Japan; and Japan clarifies and objectivises my love for Jesus. Were it not for the two, I would become a mere dreamer, a fanatic, an amorphous universal man. Jesus makes me a world-man, friend of humanity; Japan makes me a lover of my country, and through it binds me firmly to the terrestrial globe. I am neither too narrow nor too broad by loving the two at the same time. O Jesus, thou art the sun of my soul, the saviour dear; I have given my all to thee! O Japan, “Land of lands, for thee we give, Our hearts, our pray’rs, our service free; For thee thy sons shall nobly live, And at thy need shall die for thee.” —J. G. Whittier This passage, one of Uchimura’s most frequently quoted, and, incidentally, a fine example of his superb control of the English language, extremely rare for a Japanese of his generation, comprises his best statement of the twin demands that his faith and nationality impose on him. Shibuya points out that Uchimura’s first “J,” Jesus, is a statement of faith, and therefore soteriology, while his second “J,” Japan, refers to ecclesiology, or theory of the church. Shibuya also translates most of Uchimura’s final manuscript. It deals with mukyo¯kai and was discovered only after he died.3 It seems to disassociate his name from his own movement. Shibuya fears that my words will be understood by readers to mean that Uchimura did distance himself from his theory of the church; he points out that in fact Uchimura renounced only that interpretation of mukyo¯kai associated with his most famous and voluble disciple, Tsukamoto Toraji. Shibuya is correct. Thanks to him for his concern that the issue be clarified. 3

My analysis of this statement is given on 381–382 of Japan’s Modern Prophet.

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Finally, a word about mukyo¯kai. The term literally translates as “without or lacking a church.” Uchimura himself translated it as “We-Need-no-Church principle.” It results from his concern over the sectarian nature of Protestantism. Mukyo¯kai describes his interpretation of the Bible and its faith. At the same time as Uchimura thus declared his independence from Western denominations, he felt that there should be a form of Christianity particularly suited to Japan’s circumstances, as the Lutheran Church is said to represent a typically German attitude toward Christianity. He believed that mukyo¯kai as a Japanese interpretation of Christianity without reference to Western denominations best suits Japanese society. Uchimura’s simple conclusion, with its recognition of the many secular matters that affected the development of denominations in their homelands, became a source of considerable recrimination and debate between followers of mukyo¯kai and various Protestant denominations. John F. Howes Emeritus, University of British Columbia


BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES doi:10.1017/S0009640709000110

Origen and the History of Justification: The Legacy of Origen’s Commentary on Romans. By Thomas P. Scheck. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. xii þ 300 pp. $60.00 cloth. Origen has often served as a protean figure in historical theology. Tarred by Adolf von Harnack’s Hellenism brush for Protestants and the condemnation of Origenism for Catholics, the figure of Origen has had both the stigma and attraction of being outside the mainstream. Modern scholarship has reclaimed Origen in a number of ways—his spirituality, his biblical theology, his role as an ecclesial figure, and, most recently, his exegesis. Thomas Scheck’s work represents a significant contribution to this enterprise. His Origen, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (The Fathers of the Church, A New Translation, vol. 103, 104 [Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001]) opened up Rufinus’s version of Origen’s Romans commentary for English readers. This current volume investigates the contribution of Origen’s Romans commentary to the area where he otherwise has perhaps been considered most the outsider—the controversies on justification from Pelagius to the Reformation. Scheck argues that from the point when Rufinus’s translation became available, through the Reformation, and perhaps even into current “new perspectives” on Romans, Origen’s exegesis of Romans laid the groundwork and provided much of the material for the persistent debates on justification in Western theology. Focusing on faith, law, freedom, works, and predestination, Scheck first identifies central themes in Origen’s own interpretations, and then follows them in the interpretations of Pelagius and Augustine, William of St. Thierry in the twelfth century, Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, and Phillip Melanchthon in the sixteenth century, and in post-Reformation debates among Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Calvinist theologians. His conclusion is that Origen’s influence is immense and determinative and that, far from being forgotten or ignored, Origen’s Paul, either tacitly or explicitly, appears in most of the significant theological debates of the Western tradition. For Scheck, Origen’s interpretation of Romans, especially the significant passages in chapters 1, 3, and 5, is influenced by his concern to refute the Valentinians on the one hand and Marcion on the other. Against what he sees as Gnostic determinism, Origen asserts the freedom of the will and

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human responsibility while affirming Paul’s language of justification by faith. Origen sees justification as a process that begins with grace and proceeds with human cooperation and good works. For Scheck, Origen’s great accomplishment is to reconcile faith, grace, and human good works in his interpretation of Romans. Origen’s interpretation then is widely used in the western exegetical tradition by a variety of theologians, rejected by Luther, but endorsed even by subsequent Protestants. Scheck begins his review with the Pelagian controversy. He argues that in their own commentaries both Pelagius and Augustine are dependent on Origen, and where Augustine (especially the later Augustine) criticized Origen it was largely not in regard to his Romans commentary. Scheck then examines the Exposition on Romans of William St. Thierry, a twelfth-century Cistercian. While William was self-consciously an Augustinian, he depends heavily on Origen in his own commentary on Romans, often drawing directly from Origen. William follows Augustine when he depends on Origen but prefers Augustine when he disagrees with Origen. For William, Origen’s commentary serves as a significant exegetical resource for his own Augustinian approach. Scheck then turns to the perhaps better known Erasmian reliance on Origen, and notes the impact of Rufinus’s translation newly printed in 1506. For Erasmus, Origen is a source for both grammatical and theological solutions to Pauline theology and serves as the transmitter of the apostolic consensus of the early church. In contrast, for Luther and Melanchthon, Origen serves as a focal point for their attack on Catholic views of justification. According to Scheck, for Melanchthon, Origen plays the key role in the church’s abandonment of the gospel when he misinterprets Paul to include virtue with faith as the grounds for justification. Scheck succeeds in demonstrating the significance of Origen’s Romans commentary for subsequent debates on justification. Origen’s potential as an alternative and mediating source for resolving early and Reformation debates about faith and works, predestination and free will, or even insight into the ways Origen’s exegesis is appropriated in the varying historical and cultural contexts is less evident in this book. Scheck’s thesis is that Origen interprets Paul in a way that “reconciles the diverse statements of Scripture” (217) and incorporates both faith and works into a progressive view of justification—in short, that he affirms the decrees on justification of the Council of Trent, where, Scheck notes, his interpretations of Paul’s language were read with approval. Scheck’s work here seems less an analysis of the impact and use of Origen’s commentary than a prehistory of the Reformation debates and subsequent post-Tridentine Catholic-Protestant polemic. Nearly every chapter includes an excursus in which Scheck takes up traditional Catholic vs. Protestant arguments, critiques Protestant (often traditional Protestant) scholarship, and emphasizes the orthodoxy of Origen’s readings. This is

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often at the expense of further analysis. Abelard is neglected in the chapter on William of St. Thierry, although the two engaged in a debate in which Origen featured heavily. The orthodoxy of Erasmus is defended, but little effort is made to analyze the interest Origen held for the humanists, or the rhetorical or polemical strategies of Erasmus, other humanists, or Luther in their employment of Origen. The chapter on post-Reformation controversies wanders rather far afield in an effort to defend the fifteenth-century Gabriel Biel and the seventeenth-century Molinists from ascriptions of Pelagianism by modern scholars, with little attention to Origen or the way in which such theologians might have used him. While Scheck’s work provides a helpful review of Origen’s reception, a more sensitive analysis of the uses of Origen’s commentary in the particular historical settings of the justification debates would be welcome. Robert J. Hauck Gonzaga University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000122

The Power of Sacrifice: Roman and Christian Discourses in Conflict. By George Heyman. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2007. xxv þ 256 pp. $69.95 cloth. Early Christian martyrdom is a crowded field, so that it is a challenge to contribute a new perspective, especially in a synthetic study such as this. Heyman’s project is to explain why early Christians chose to die rather than participate in standard Roman religious life, and his particular angle is the overlapping rhetoric of sacrifice, which he approaches through discourse theory. The first chapter presents an overview of Roman religion with particular reference to its traditions of sacrifice, though also with information on the priestly colleges in order to establish the interconnections of religion and power. Chapter 2 proceeds to consider the impact on religion of the political transition from republic to principate to urge the centrality in the new order of the sacrificial cult associated with the emperor. Chapter 3 turns to the Christian angle and reviews how Christ’s problematic death as a common criminal was presented as a self-sacrifice for humanity that fulfilled important Old Testament predictions. Finally, in chapter 4 we reach the central topic of martyrdom where the rhetoric of martyrdom is investigated from different perspectives—classical, Jewish, and Christian—to demonstrate how Christians from the mid-second century on used the powerful rhetoric of their bodily destruction to confront the apparently superior might of Rome.

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often at the expense of further analysis. Abelard is neglected in the chapter on William of St. Thierry, although the two engaged in a debate in which Origen featured heavily. The orthodoxy of Erasmus is defended, but little effort is made to analyze the interest Origen held for the humanists, or the rhetorical or polemical strategies of Erasmus, other humanists, or Luther in their employment of Origen. The chapter on post-Reformation controversies wanders rather far afield in an effort to defend the fifteenth-century Gabriel Biel and the seventeenth-century Molinists from ascriptions of Pelagianism by modern scholars, with little attention to Origen or the way in which such theologians might have used him. While Scheck’s work provides a helpful review of Origen’s reception, a more sensitive analysis of the uses of Origen’s commentary in the particular historical settings of the justification debates would be welcome. Robert J. Hauck Gonzaga University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000122

The Power of Sacrifice: Roman and Christian Discourses in Conflict. By George Heyman. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2007. xxv þ 256 pp. $69.95 cloth. Early Christian martyrdom is a crowded field, so that it is a challenge to contribute a new perspective, especially in a synthetic study such as this. Heyman’s project is to explain why early Christians chose to die rather than participate in standard Roman religious life, and his particular angle is the overlapping rhetoric of sacrifice, which he approaches through discourse theory. The first chapter presents an overview of Roman religion with particular reference to its traditions of sacrifice, though also with information on the priestly colleges in order to establish the interconnections of religion and power. Chapter 2 proceeds to consider the impact on religion of the political transition from republic to principate to urge the centrality in the new order of the sacrificial cult associated with the emperor. Chapter 3 turns to the Christian angle and reviews how Christ’s problematic death as a common criminal was presented as a self-sacrifice for humanity that fulfilled important Old Testament predictions. Finally, in chapter 4 we reach the central topic of martyrdom where the rhetoric of martyrdom is investigated from different perspectives—classical, Jewish, and Christian—to demonstrate how Christians from the mid-second century on used the powerful rhetoric of their bodily destruction to confront the apparently superior might of Rome.

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Balance is one obvious concern: only a quarter of the text relates to the main thesis, with the rest providing diverse background material. But the space allocated for such massive topics as Roman religious practice or the imperial cult is too limited, so that Heyman can only offer a general overview of issues. In these circumstances it might have been better simply to have stated certain key points, for example that sacrifice played a central role in classical religion and the worship of rulers was a standard way of smoothing the imbalances of power between king and subjects, thereby leaving more space for martyrs. This approach would also have saved Heyman from some embarrassments, since various minor errors reveal that Heyman is not an ancient historian, for example, the chronology of Cicero and Clodius (48 – 49) or of Sulla and Pompey (58). Of greater significance is the attitude to the complex ancient sources, with Cicero, Livy, and Ovid being presented as a sort of Capitoline Triad of authorities for religious developments, with no thought for the different agendas of these authors or the differences among, say, particular works of Cicero. All this can perhaps be tolerated, since the material relates to the pagan background. But, with regard to martyrs, the use of source material is also problematic. One notable absentee is Pliny the Younger, though it is his exchange of letters with Emperor Trajan in 112, when his governorship of Bithynia brought him into contact with the Christian “problem” (10.96 – 97), that provides us with our earliest direct evidence for official Roman concerns about the new religion. Heyman should have considered how Pliny’s evidence, in particular the lack of reference to the imperial cult and the instruction from Trajan that Christians are not to be specially sought out, is compatible with his own thesis: there is no suggestion here that it was a display of power by the Christians that the empire perceived as a threat (162). This silence might be explained by Heyman’s decision to restrict the appellation of martyr to those who died after Polycarp in the 150s (174), on the grounds that this is the earliest attestation of the term. However, few ancient historians would automatically assume that the first usage of a term necessarily marks the point at which the word was first applied to a phenomenon, and the fact that the proto-martyr Stephen was actually referred to as a martus in Acts (22.20) meant that he offered a model for description as well as action. G. E. M. de Ste. Croix’s classic study, “Why were the Early Christians Persecuted?” (Past & Present 26 [November 1963]: 6 – 38) is briefly dismissed (161, 163 n. 3), but there is no engagement with the various reasons that Ste. Croix extracted from the ancient evidence for persecution at different times and places, merely the complaint that he had not attached sufficient importance to emperor worship. One relevant issue is that a number of persecutions were driven by popular feeling rather than

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governmental fear, with superstition about Christian practices being a more potent factor for concern among the masses than the proper fulfillment of the imperial cult: their fears related to the non-performance of standard cult acts as well as to the stories of Christian abominations, both of which might bring divine vengeance down on the whole community. Another relevant issue is that a significant number of martyrdoms, as well as the libelli from the Decian persecution, refer to the need for Christians to conform to Roman rites or sacrifice to the gods, and thus to the broad complex of Roman ritual practices rather than just the imperial cult. Only a minority of martyrs secured a full rhetorical account of their ordeal, and there is a danger that Heyman has focused on a subset of the available evidence that is not fully representative. The living sacrifice of the early martyrs was undoubtedly a powerful action, and the martyr acts unsurprisingly develop this as persuasively as possible. The phenomenon of volunteer martyrs also testifies to the attractions of martyrdom, but Heyman does not prove his case that it was a clash of sacrificing modes that lay at the heart of Roman persecution. Even in those texts where the cult or genius of the emperor plays a role, we cannot be certain that this was partly because the Christian author wanted to stress the clash of church and state whereas the Roman authorities may not have seen matters in such a light. Michael Whitby University of Warwick

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000134

The Roman Revolution of Constantine. By Raymond Van Dam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xvi þ 446 pp. $85.00 cloth. Raymond Van Dam’s latest monograph is an important contribution to recent research on Constantine and early fourth-century history. Van Dam introduces his own study of the “Constantinian revolution” by invoking two classic studies of Augustus—Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution (Oxford, 1939) and Paul Zanker’s The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988). Like Syme, Van Dam traces the political maneuverings and networks of power that brought Constantine to power and solidified his rule. Like Zanker, he considers Constantine’s reign in terms various, and sometimes competing, processes of public representation. And like these classics, Van Dam’s book aims at explaining broad social and political continuities and transformations in the

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governmental fear, with superstition about Christian practices being a more potent factor for concern among the masses than the proper fulfillment of the imperial cult: their fears related to the non-performance of standard cult acts as well as to the stories of Christian abominations, both of which might bring divine vengeance down on the whole community. Another relevant issue is that a significant number of martyrdoms, as well as the libelli from the Decian persecution, refer to the need for Christians to conform to Roman rites or sacrifice to the gods, and thus to the broad complex of Roman ritual practices rather than just the imperial cult. Only a minority of martyrs secured a full rhetorical account of their ordeal, and there is a danger that Heyman has focused on a subset of the available evidence that is not fully representative. The living sacrifice of the early martyrs was undoubtedly a powerful action, and the martyr acts unsurprisingly develop this as persuasively as possible. The phenomenon of volunteer martyrs also testifies to the attractions of martyrdom, but Heyman does not prove his case that it was a clash of sacrificing modes that lay at the heart of Roman persecution. Even in those texts where the cult or genius of the emperor plays a role, we cannot be certain that this was partly because the Christian author wanted to stress the clash of church and state whereas the Roman authorities may not have seen matters in such a light. Michael Whitby University of Warwick

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000134

The Roman Revolution of Constantine. By Raymond Van Dam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xvi þ 446 pp. $85.00 cloth. Raymond Van Dam’s latest monograph is an important contribution to recent research on Constantine and early fourth-century history. Van Dam introduces his own study of the “Constantinian revolution” by invoking two classic studies of Augustus—Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution (Oxford, 1939) and Paul Zanker’s The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988). Like Syme, Van Dam traces the political maneuverings and networks of power that brought Constantine to power and solidified his rule. Like Zanker, he considers Constantine’s reign in terms various, and sometimes competing, processes of public representation. And like these classics, Van Dam’s book aims at explaining broad social and political continuities and transformations in the

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Roman Empire. At the same time, Van Dam avoids—and insightfully critiques—reductive narratives of Constantine, both those that focus myopically on the emperor’s relationship with Christianity and those that would interpret Constantine’s attitudes toward religion as either “purely” religious or “merely” political. Instead, Van Dam “highlights different, and often alternative, perspectives on the significance of his reign” (11). He is largely successful. Van Dam addresses all of the well-trodden, classic primary sources while bringing other equally important but less well-known sources to the fore of his analysis. The result is a study that explores complex historical interrelationships between imperial politics, dynastic ideologies, civic and ethnic identities, and religious discourses. The book is divided into three sections. The first, “A Roman Empire without Rome,” is organized around a close reading of a rescript of Constantine granting a priesthood and temple of the Flavian dynasty and the honorific name of Flavia Constans to the central Italian city of Hispellum. Where previous scholarship has looked to this document as evidence of either waffling or ambiguity in Constantine’s religious policies, Van Dam examines the text in terms of Constantine’s efforts to replace the Tetrarchic model of collegial imperial succession with a return to a dynastic system. In these chapters, Van Dam pays as much attention to Hispellum’s perception of Constantine as to the emperor’s self-presentation. Constantine’s imperial representation was mutually constructed in the interactions between petitioning cities and the emperor. Van Dam’s analysis thus highlights the importance of local politics in Constantine’s efforts to establish a new dynasty. Here Van Dam also considers Constantine’s changing attitudes toward the city of Rome itself. Maxentius, whom Constantine defeated in 312, had been based in Rome, and Van Dam interprets Constantine’s monumental building projects in the city as ways of displacing his rival and establishing his own relationship with the city. At the same time, Constantine shifted his attention away from Rome, first to the Balkans and then, after defeating Licinius in 324, to the eastern provinces. Van Dam argues that Constantine’s patronage of Rome was an ambivalent imperial gesture. While establishing Constantine’s imperial presence in the city, such monuments pointed simultaneously to his absence. Rome, like provincial cities, became the beneficiary of the patronage of a distant emperor whose imperial image was conveyed through monumental building projects. The second section of chapters is organized around a contextualized reading of petitions of the Phrygian city of Orcistus to Constantine. These chapters benefit from Van Dam’s earlier research into the social and religious history of Cappadocia. Here, Van Dam sets questions of religious identity—both Constantine’s and that of local populations in the East—within the contexts of late antique civic diplomacy and the politics of cultural identity.


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Assertions of shared piety and religious preference had long been a means for provincial communities to establish ties with Roman imperial regimes. Van Dam argues that the changing religious policies of first, the Tetrarchy, and later, Constantine, had problematized “religion” as a category within early fourth-century diplomatic discourse. The ambiguity of religious language in Orcistus’s petitions was a calculated effort on the part of the city to negotiate the political uncertainties of a new imperial regime. Van Dam also discusses the ways Diocletian and the Tetrarchs promoted Roman imperial unity through the hegemonic use of Latin in their administration of the East. Van Dam argues that the gradual Christianization of the East paralleled the Hellenization of imperial administration and elite culture in the nascent Byzantine Empire. In this assessment, Constantine appears as a cultural conservative. Like the Tetrarchs, he was a native Latin speaker and maintained the cultural political hegemony of Latin in his administration of the East. The book’s final chapters examine interconnections between theological and political discourses. Van Dam does an excellent job of analyzing the political theology of the Tetrarchs, showing how Diocletian’s new imperial model was based on a tension between rhetorics of hierarchy and concord. This political theology, the author contends, was emerging at the same time that Christians were grappling with a theology based on concepts of unity and multiplicity. The rise of Constantine as a monarchic, Christian ruler prompted Christians to consider both the emperor’s relationship to God and the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. Van Dam presents “Arian” theologies of the Son’s subordination and political theologies of Constantine’s divine election as mutually reinforcing discourses of power. The articulation of pro-Nicene theologies, he argues, in turn reinforced and was buttressed by post-Constantinian political philosophies that located Christian emperors as human servants of Christ rather than as earthly analogues to God’s Son. Van Dam does a fine job elucidating the blurriness of the distinctions between political and theological discourses. Both served as figurative media for theorizing and publicizing power. This focus on Flavian and Tetrachic political philosophies, however, does obscure the classical and Hellenistic political philosophies of kingship that had long been part of Roman imperial rhetoric and Christian theology. Reading Van Dam’s skillful analysis of the interrelatedness of imperial representation and theological rhetorics alongside other recent studies of the linguistic and social aspects of the “Arian” controversy, though, offers a richer, better contextualized account of the development of early fourth-century theologies. This book is highly recommended for specialists and graduate students in early fourth-century history and theology. Van Dam also provides introductions, editions, and translations of the Hispellum and Orcistus

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documents in appendices, adding to the utility of the volume for graduate seminars. Van Dam’s clear, readable style is accessible to non-specialists as well. Jeremy M. Schott University of North Carolina at Charlotte

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000146

Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire. By Judith Herrin. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. xxiv þ 393 pp. $29.95 cloth. Inspired by the questions of curious construction workers, Judith Herrin, professor of Byzantine studies at King’s College, London, has written a “different” Byzantine history for readers seeking a first exposure to Byzantium. In the past two decades, Byzantine history has been transformed by a generation of scholars who have applied the perspectives of social and economic history, archaeology, material culture, and art history to emphasize its change over time and interconnection with other medieval societies. But to many, the image of Byzantium remains the unchanging, rigid, exotic, often effete and duplicitous stereotype developed during the Enlightenment, an image all too often reinforced in traditional narrative histories when it is portrayed as an incomprehensible parade of emperors, battles, and religious controversies. This work succeeds in blending contemporary scholarly reinterpretations of Byzantine historical development with engaging explorations of monuments, events, and unique topics like Greek fire and eunuchs to make a strong case for Byzantium as a resilient and creative civilization throughout its long history. The work opens with Byzantine institutions foundational throughout its history: Constantinople, the imperial system and its court, orthodoxy, and Roman law, accompanied with special sections on the Hagia Sophia and the Ravenna mosaics, the latter introduced with a personal reminiscence of their impact on Herrin as a young viewer. Herrin’s approach is clear and concrete, describing the appearance of Constantinople, the imperial court, citizen life, and the way the law worked in practice, and explaining theological differences between east and west in comprehensible terms. The second section, “The Transition from Ancient to Medieval,” introduces one of Herrin’s strongest themes: that Byzantine success in resisting Arab conquest, especially of Constantinople in the sieges of 678 and 717, halted a probable Islamic expansion into Europe. Herrin argues that it was Byzantine survival

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documents in appendices, adding to the utility of the volume for graduate seminars. Van Dam’s clear, readable style is accessible to non-specialists as well. Jeremy M. Schott University of North Carolina at Charlotte

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000146

Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire. By Judith Herrin. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. xxiv þ 393 pp. $29.95 cloth. Inspired by the questions of curious construction workers, Judith Herrin, professor of Byzantine studies at King’s College, London, has written a “different” Byzantine history for readers seeking a first exposure to Byzantium. In the past two decades, Byzantine history has been transformed by a generation of scholars who have applied the perspectives of social and economic history, archaeology, material culture, and art history to emphasize its change over time and interconnection with other medieval societies. But to many, the image of Byzantium remains the unchanging, rigid, exotic, often effete and duplicitous stereotype developed during the Enlightenment, an image all too often reinforced in traditional narrative histories when it is portrayed as an incomprehensible parade of emperors, battles, and religious controversies. This work succeeds in blending contemporary scholarly reinterpretations of Byzantine historical development with engaging explorations of monuments, events, and unique topics like Greek fire and eunuchs to make a strong case for Byzantium as a resilient and creative civilization throughout its long history. The work opens with Byzantine institutions foundational throughout its history: Constantinople, the imperial system and its court, orthodoxy, and Roman law, accompanied with special sections on the Hagia Sophia and the Ravenna mosaics, the latter introduced with a personal reminiscence of their impact on Herrin as a young viewer. Herrin’s approach is clear and concrete, describing the appearance of Constantinople, the imperial court, citizen life, and the way the law worked in practice, and explaining theological differences between east and west in comprehensible terms. The second section, “The Transition from Ancient to Medieval,” introduces one of Herrin’s strongest themes: that Byzantine success in resisting Arab conquest, especially of Constantinople in the sieges of 678 and 717, halted a probable Islamic expansion into Europe. Herrin argues that it was Byzantine survival


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against Arab invasions in the early Middle Ages that shielded Europe from Islamic conquest and allowed medieval development of the west: “Without Byzantium there would have been no Europe” (323). In addition to chapters on icons, iconoclasm, and the missions of Cyril and Methodius, this section also includes an excellent chapter, “A Literate and Articulate Society,” that describes education and learning from the survival of the classical schooling system to record keeping, oral and monastic learning, the transmission of Greek science and literature, and the project of copying ancient texts onto parchment codices in minuscule, which preserved them for posterity and allowed the Renaissance humanist recovery of Greek classics. In section 3, “Byzantium Becomes a Medieval State,” Herrin hits her stride in producing a “different” history. Greek fire (including an account of a modern re-creation), Byzantium’s secret weapon, provides an entreé into the military reconquests of the tenth century, and the porphyra (purple chamber) where empresses gave birth is the focus for a discussion of dynasticism and imperial marriages, domestic and foreign. Herrin includes an excellent chapter demystifying the roles and origins of eunuchs in the middle Byzantine period, followed by a “what you would have seen” description of the imperial court. She focuses a chapter on Venice as an economic and cultural bridge between east and west with the story of the golden fork introduced to the west by a Byzantine aristocratic bride. Herrin, who is the author of a recent book on Byzantine empresses, includes a persuasive portrait of Anna Komnene as writer, princess, and political actor, and emphasizes women’s roles throughout the work. More general chapters in this section reflect recent reinterpretations of the eleventh and twelfth centuries as periods of intellectual and cultural growth, economic expansion, and cosmopolitanism despite military and political crises, rather than as centuries of decline inevitably leading to the 1204 conquest of Constantinople. Herrin argues that modern negative stereotypes of Byzantium ultimately derive from the Crusaders themselves, who needed to justify their desecration of the Christian city of Constantinople: “The negative stereotype of the term ‘Byzantine,’ as if it characterizes a culture which does not deserve to exist, stretches back to the bad faith of the sack of 1204” (268). Instead of the expected “centuries of decline,” Herrin titles her section on the late empire “Varieties of Byzantium” to emphasize the vitality of provincial centers that allowed Byzantium to survive for 250 years after 1204 and which served as cultural centers, sometimes even beyond 1453. These are demonstrated not only in the “mini-empires” of Nicea, Epiros, and Trebizond, but in a portrait of Mistras, the hilltop fortress above Sparta, and its Platonist philosopher Gemistos Plethon. Her description of the convoluted negotiations over religious union with the west and the long process of Ottoman conquest are admirably comprehensible and nuanced, ending not

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with the heroic but doomed defense of the city, but rather with the heritage of Byzantium in cosmopolitan Istanbul, and of the transmission of its learning and culture to western humanism. Professor Herrin’s “surprising” history concludes with a strong defense of Byzantium as a creative and resourceful society, based in its unique fusion of Christianity, classical Greek culture and education, Roman law and imperial government, and a cosmopolitan population. How well does this work succeed in bringing Byzantium alive to the uninitiated but curious? Its engaging writing, down-to-earth explanations of difficult beliefs and controversies, and vivid portraits of a wide range of individuals make it accessible and compelling, and Herrin’s arguments for Byzantium’s significance and heritage are forceful. She conveys recent scholarship effectively to non-specialists and introduces them to a wide variety of source material. Byzantinists will certainly have wish lists of things that should have received more emphasis, and they may contest the positive interpretation. The work clearly sees the misrepresentation of Byzantium in the context of western civilization and emphasizes culture, classical institutions, and religion as its most significant heritage for the modern world. A different book could be written about Byzantium as a Mediterranean power, emphasizing its interactions with Islam, or as an overlooked civilization in premodern world history. Even in a book for beginners, should some still-contested issues and developing scholarship and methodology receive more focus, as, for example, the emerging contributions of archaeology to the history of cities and settlements? Perhaps, but Professor Herrin’s choice of focus is compelling, and this excellent book is definitely the work I would recommend to friends as a first introduction to Byzantium. With additional materials to address the historiographical issues raised here, it should also work well in an introductory survey of Byzantium. Its affordability and well-selected illustrations add to the attractiveness of the work. Dorothy de F. Abrahamse California State University, Long Beach

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000158

The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West. By Gary Macy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xiv þ 264 pp. $25.00 cloth. Although the title of Gary Macy’s study is strictly accurate, it may put off some potential readers, which would be a shame. Read on. This is an important book

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with the heroic but doomed defense of the city, but rather with the heritage of Byzantium in cosmopolitan Istanbul, and of the transmission of its learning and culture to western humanism. Professor Herrin’s “surprising” history concludes with a strong defense of Byzantium as a creative and resourceful society, based in its unique fusion of Christianity, classical Greek culture and education, Roman law and imperial government, and a cosmopolitan population. How well does this work succeed in bringing Byzantium alive to the uninitiated but curious? Its engaging writing, down-to-earth explanations of difficult beliefs and controversies, and vivid portraits of a wide range of individuals make it accessible and compelling, and Herrin’s arguments for Byzantium’s significance and heritage are forceful. She conveys recent scholarship effectively to non-specialists and introduces them to a wide variety of source material. Byzantinists will certainly have wish lists of things that should have received more emphasis, and they may contest the positive interpretation. The work clearly sees the misrepresentation of Byzantium in the context of western civilization and emphasizes culture, classical institutions, and religion as its most significant heritage for the modern world. A different book could be written about Byzantium as a Mediterranean power, emphasizing its interactions with Islam, or as an overlooked civilization in premodern world history. Even in a book for beginners, should some still-contested issues and developing scholarship and methodology receive more focus, as, for example, the emerging contributions of archaeology to the history of cities and settlements? Perhaps, but Professor Herrin’s choice of focus is compelling, and this excellent book is definitely the work I would recommend to friends as a first introduction to Byzantium. With additional materials to address the historiographical issues raised here, it should also work well in an introductory survey of Byzantium. Its affordability and well-selected illustrations add to the attractiveness of the work. Dorothy de F. Abrahamse California State University, Long Beach

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000158

The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West. By Gary Macy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xiv þ 264 pp. $25.00 cloth. Although the title of Gary Macy’s study is strictly accurate, it may put off some potential readers, which would be a shame. Read on. This is an important book


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that brings together and makes sense of a series of recent findings about the history of women’s ordination. Such findings have been dismissed by those who have failed to make the careful distinctions between history and theology that Macy makes here. This is a book of history, with implications for its readers about theology—but it is not about theology per se—and although Macy has personal opinions about women’s ordination in the present, his presentation of the evidence has all the requisite scholarly detachment that should make it possible for individuals on all sides of the debate to use it as a starting point. Macy traces the surviving vestiges of a history of women’s ordination to particular tasks within the Church from early Christianity to the central Middle Ages. He then shows how that history comes to be hidden by developments in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—clerical hegemony led to changed meanings for ordination, limiting it to male clergy and service at the altar. While depending on earlier studies such as that in German on Merovingian nuns’ liturgy by Gisela Muschiol (Famula Dei: Zur Liturgie in merowingischen Frauenklo¨stern [Munster: Aschendorff, 1994]), not widely known among English speakers, Macy brings a welcome clarity to the evaluation of that evidence. Most critical and most original for our understanding of women’s ordination in the early Middle Ages is an argument in Macy’s fourth and fifth chapters in which he collects the various threads that were woven together in the central Middle Ages to deny earlier practices of women’s ordination. He shows evidence of a new and selective reading of scripture that became dominant in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—a reading that need not have been accepted, but was. In discussing that alternate view he points to and acknowledges the arguments for Abelard’s stance on this issue outlined by Mary Martin McLaughlin in her 1975 article, “Peter Abelard and the Dignity of Women: Twelfth Century ‘Feminism’ in Theory and Practice” (in Pierre Abe´lard/Pierre le Veńe´rable: Les courants philosophiques, litte´raires et artistiques en occident au milieu du XIIe sie`cle [Paris: Editions du Centre National de la recherches scientifiques, 1975], 287 – 333). Thus Macy says, “Medieval theologians could have read scripture differently, . . . [but instead] . . . men wanted to believe the worst about women and so they found justification to do so” (124). Macy establishes that such justification was based on two things. First it derived from the increased power of the priest that came with the elevation at the altar as the center of Christian liturgical life and with the transformation of the Eucharist into a relic of Christ. But second, that justification also went hand in hand with a series of selective and misogynist readings (or misreadings in some cases) of the early Church fathers, Church law, Roman law, Greek philosophy, and scripture that would be incorporated

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into the major textbooks as the standard university curriculum. Thus on page 100 and the following pages, he describes how women were defined “out of ordination,” in the period “from the council of Benevento in 1091 until the publication of Huguccio’s commentary some time after 1188.” This is a careful, well-argued study that justifies its assertive title by its rather slow opening chapters that outline the evidence and earlier interpretations. Macy’s arguments about how even the role of abbesses came to be reduced by the combined assemblage of university-trained canonists, theologians, philosophers, and popes are compelling. A minor quibble may lead in fact to further clarification as to the precise dating for all these changes to be in place in the first half of the thirteenth century. In a forthcoming publication I intend to argue that the famous attack on the abbesses of the Cistercian Order in the diocese of Burgos and Palencia (usually identified as those of las Huelgas), which has been famously attributed to Innocent III and then “reiterated” by Innocent IV (as Macy describes it on p. 103) should probably be attributed to Innocent IV alone. The assertion that it is scandalous for abbesses to bless, hear confession, read the Gospels, or preach to their nuns is, as Macy recognizes, an assertion against the last vestige of women’s ordination—that of the abbess as deaconess. The document trail to Innocent III is vague and cloudy, while that to Innocent IV is strong. In the considerable regularization of religious women over the course of the first half of the thirteenth century, the reign of Innocent III is too early, preceding as it does by a good decade any other activity in this regard. Innocent IV’s concern about all aspects of religious women’s lives was much stronger than that Innocent III. Moreover, it is documented (in Les Registres d’Innocent IV, ed. Elie Berger [Paris: 1884– 1921], 4 vols., no. 589, given at the Lateran, March 14, 1244, and addressed to the abbot of Cıˆteaux): De insana temeritate arrogantissimae abbatissae monasterie sanctae Mariae regalis cisterciensis ordinis in que Berengariae sanctimoniali earum, immo exercrandum consecratum velum praesumpserit imponere, contradicente Burgensis episcopo, abbas Cistercii poenum eiusdem abbatissae per modo culpae imponat et omnibus abbatissis sui ordinis in Hispania constitutis inhibeat ne id ulterius praesumant attentare. This is not well known in the literature, but indeed something I came across when looking for something else. But in my mind that this accusation against abbesses happened twice in two reigns of popes both named Innocent seems extremely unlikely, and the reference to Berenguela is clearly to the later time period. If we knew nothing else, the tendency would be to associate it with Innocent IV as the papal register does. This should not detract from, but indeed confirms, the findings about canon lawyers, Aristotle, theologians, and others whose denial of women’s ordination

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had become such a tight web in the mid-thirteenth century that it was possible to ignore a thousand years of earlier history, which Macy lays out so well. The book is beautifully produced and will change how we teach and think about the medieval church. It already has for my classes. Constance H. Berman University of Iowa

doi:10.1017/S000964070900016X

Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: The Cluniac Tradition, c. 900 – 1200. By Scott G. Bruce. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 4th Series 68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xiv þ 216 pp. $95.00 cloth. The discipline of silence was a core element of monastic life, at least in Cluniac tradition, for much of the Middle Ages and beyond. Scott Bruce is to be congratulated for tackling a subject that has for too long been simply taken for granted. In the process of exploring the codes of communication that were devised to maintain this discipline, he has helped illuminate significant aspects of monastic culture. Bruce’s central argument is that the monks of Cluny played a key role in developing the ethos that monastic life ought to anticipate that of the angels, and that through the cultivation of reverential silence they could create liturgical worship that anticipated the angelic worship of heaven. The injunction to keep silence, particularly at night, had always been a core precept of Benedictine tradition. Bruce’s focus is not so much on the ethos of reverential silence within monasticism as a whole as it is on the development of codes of sign language to help facilitate communication while preserving silence. The only way to circumvent chatter was thought to be through the creation of sign systems. Bruce observes that there was a late antique system of signs to denote numbers that Bede discusses as a mode of communication, and was likely in use in monasteries in the early medieval period. John of Salerno, biographer of Odo (925– 942), Cluny’s second abbot, indicates that it had already become more detailed in the early tenth century. Our major witnesses to the system, however, are the customaries of Bernard and of Ulrich, from the late eleventh century. The expansion in size of the monastery in the eleventh century, from 100 to 300, demanded that such measures be taken. Bruce supplies in a table the 118 words for which signs are given, the great majority specific names for daily objects in monastic life, with only a minimal number of verbs.

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had become such a tight web in the mid-thirteenth century that it was possible to ignore a thousand years of earlier history, which Macy lays out so well. The book is beautifully produced and will change how we teach and think about the medieval church. It already has for my classes. Constance H. Berman University of Iowa

doi:10.1017/S000964070900016X

Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: The Cluniac Tradition, c. 900 – 1200. By Scott G. Bruce. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 4th Series 68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xiv þ 216 pp. $95.00 cloth. The discipline of silence was a core element of monastic life, at least in Cluniac tradition, for much of the Middle Ages and beyond. Scott Bruce is to be congratulated for tackling a subject that has for too long been simply taken for granted. In the process of exploring the codes of communication that were devised to maintain this discipline, he has helped illuminate significant aspects of monastic culture. Bruce’s central argument is that the monks of Cluny played a key role in developing the ethos that monastic life ought to anticipate that of the angels, and that through the cultivation of reverential silence they could create liturgical worship that anticipated the angelic worship of heaven. The injunction to keep silence, particularly at night, had always been a core precept of Benedictine tradition. Bruce’s focus is not so much on the ethos of reverential silence within monasticism as a whole as it is on the development of codes of sign language to help facilitate communication while preserving silence. The only way to circumvent chatter was thought to be through the creation of sign systems. Bruce observes that there was a late antique system of signs to denote numbers that Bede discusses as a mode of communication, and was likely in use in monasteries in the early medieval period. John of Salerno, biographer of Odo (925– 942), Cluny’s second abbot, indicates that it had already become more detailed in the early tenth century. Our major witnesses to the system, however, are the customaries of Bernard and of Ulrich, from the late eleventh century. The expansion in size of the monastery in the eleventh century, from 100 to 300, demanded that such measures be taken. Bruce supplies in a table the 118 words for which signs are given, the great majority specific names for daily objects in monastic life, with only a minimal number of verbs.

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There is inevitably a descriptive quality to much of this monograph, in keeping with the character of the customaries Bruce analyzes. We learn a lot from the customaries about the elaborate diet of fish that monks could consume, and which would be satirized by Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century. Effectively, the sign system created a speech community that was at odds with the discipline of interior silence that the Rule of Benedict sought to instill. Perhaps of particular interest are the conclusions Bruce draws about the ethnic and linguistic diversity of large monastic communities such as Cluny. Combing through monastic literature for any references to spoken language shows that, despite the universality of Latin within liturgy and intellectual life, various vernaculars were in use. Because many German monks came to Burgundy in the late eleventh century, it was necessary to devise a communication system that transcended local interest groups. A helpful aspect of Bruce’s study is that his focus on sign language helps confirm our understanding of Cluny’s influence outside Burgundy between the tenth and twelfth centuries. He looks in detail at the customaries of Fleury in the Loire valley, and at Christ Church in Canterbury, which itself came under the influence of Fleury in the tenth century. Sign systems that were preserved here show how a system Cluniac in inspiration could be adapted in different contexts. Our richest example of such influence is that of Hirsau, established in the late eleventh century in order to introduce its discipline into Germany. Its customary rivals that of Cluny in its detail and provides vivid insight into the detail of the monastic diet (and thus the aquatic system) within the region. Because the focus is so resolutely on the inspiration of Cluny, the reader gets only limited discussion of perhaps the most intriguing question raised in this study, namely, the place of silence outside the monastic cloister. Bruce comments more briefly on the way the discipline of silence was preserved in a Cistercian milieu, although the assumption is that it was just as important. Only in writers like Hildegard do we get a sense that strict imposition of silence was cruel, and contrary to the spirit that guided Benedictine precepts. His comments, too brief, on how Augustinian canons sought a more balanced attitude toward silence provide a way of understanding the attractiveness of a movement that has still not been as well analyzed as monasticism. Because their way of life was pastoral in emphasis, silence was simply impractical. One would have liked to learn more about how the monastic rule was interpreted at St. Victor, where much of the discipline was Cluniac in inspiration, but canons were required to discern the most appropriate time to speak. Because the book defines itself as narrowly concerned with monasticism before 1200, the reader misses out on a larger reflection about the place of silence within religious life as a whole in the

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medieval period. In particular, one would like to know about how communities reconciled the code of silence with the demands of education. The major pedagogical development in the twelfth century was in the realm of disputation. How did communities reconcile the ideals of contemplative silence with those of education through argument? Bruce is to be commended for closely scrutinizing an aspect of monastic life that has for too long been simply taken for granted. Sign language has a history that (as he observes) can be traced into the modern period to education for the deaf. He has analyzed Cluniac documentation with admirable thoroughness. Yet there are larger answers that one would still like to know, not just about sign language, but about the nature of silence. Monasticism did not stop after the twelfth century. The longer history of silence still has to be told. Constant J. Mews Monash University, Australia

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000171

The Children’s Crusade: Medieval History, Modern Mythistory. By Gary Dickson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. xviii þ 247 pp. $35.00 cloth. Gary Dickson asks how a minor thirteenth-century event, which left no institutional legacy, was poorly recorded, and has not been written about much by historians since, could nonetheless become “part of the collective memory of western society” (195). Today, playwrights, novelists, librettists, and no doubt preachers can assume that their audiences will recognize a reference to the pueri. By a close analysis of the texts, brief and conflicting as they are, and by carefully placing the events of 1212 in a context of revivalistic religion, Dickson gives us a breakthrough interpretation of the Children’s Crusade. Although the Crusade was unofficial, neither led by clergy nor sanctioned by the papacy, Dickson convinces that it must be taken seriously and has much to teach us about medieval popular religion. His study touches on issues of lay leadership, attitudes toward children, charismatic authority, mythistory, and crowd psychology, and is enlightening on them all. Wanting us to see the pueri as part of an important tradition of religious enthusiasm, Dickson compares them to our young people of the 1960s; both were idealistic, rebellious against their elders, dreaming of impossible goals—yet ultimately admirable in their single-mindedness, courage, and nonviolence. (The pueri did not use weapons, which could use more reflection than Dickson gives it.) It is in looking backward rather than

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medieval period. In particular, one would like to know about how communities reconciled the code of silence with the demands of education. The major pedagogical development in the twelfth century was in the realm of disputation. How did communities reconcile the ideals of contemplative silence with those of education through argument? Bruce is to be commended for closely scrutinizing an aspect of monastic life that has for too long been simply taken for granted. Sign language has a history that (as he observes) can be traced into the modern period to education for the deaf. He has analyzed Cluniac documentation with admirable thoroughness. Yet there are larger answers that one would still like to know, not just about sign language, but about the nature of silence. Monasticism did not stop after the twelfth century. The longer history of silence still has to be told. Constant J. Mews Monash University, Australia

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000171

The Children’s Crusade: Medieval History, Modern Mythistory. By Gary Dickson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. xviii þ 247 pp. $35.00 cloth. Gary Dickson asks how a minor thirteenth-century event, which left no institutional legacy, was poorly recorded, and has not been written about much by historians since, could nonetheless become “part of the collective memory of western society” (195). Today, playwrights, novelists, librettists, and no doubt preachers can assume that their audiences will recognize a reference to the pueri. By a close analysis of the texts, brief and conflicting as they are, and by carefully placing the events of 1212 in a context of revivalistic religion, Dickson gives us a breakthrough interpretation of the Children’s Crusade. Although the Crusade was unofficial, neither led by clergy nor sanctioned by the papacy, Dickson convinces that it must be taken seriously and has much to teach us about medieval popular religion. His study touches on issues of lay leadership, attitudes toward children, charismatic authority, mythistory, and crowd psychology, and is enlightening on them all. Wanting us to see the pueri as part of an important tradition of religious enthusiasm, Dickson compares them to our young people of the 1960s; both were idealistic, rebellious against their elders, dreaming of impossible goals—yet ultimately admirable in their single-mindedness, courage, and nonviolence. (The pueri did not use weapons, which could use more reflection than Dickson gives it.) It is in looking backward rather than

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forward, however, that Dickson is most helpful: seeing the unbroken century or more of crusades preaching that had kept much of Europe inflamed with religious fervor, he calls northern France and the Rhineland (the locus of both youth movements) “burned-over districts” (42). By borrowing this nineteenth-century description of western New York State, he shows how an entire area can experience intense spiritual revivals. Pointing out that early thirteenth-century France and Germany were being stirred by calls to join crusades against the Albigensian heretics and the Almohad Moors, and that even members of religions other than Christianity or Islam were responding to a crisis call (three hundred western European rabbis set out on pilgrimage to Jerusalem just months before the children began their march), Dickson notes the ecstatic quality of all of these ventures: the fanaticism of the Moorish warriors; the singing, dancing, weeping, and even flagellation of the Christian popular groups. Dickson has the unusual gift of taking possession religion seriously and seeing the power in prophetic enthusiasm. By the time he finishes his description of grassroots lay religion at the time of Innocent III, one is ready to ask, how could there not have been a crusading response from the children? Dickson does not succeed in convincing on every point. He spends far too long arguing the remote possibility that French young people started the German movement yet never makes it seem possible that, having gathered near Paris, the French then headed northeast to Cologne when their direct route to Jerusalem lay due south, to Marseilles. Besides, he never tells us what difference it would make if the French origins were proven. Nor is he convincing that it was the children who inspired Innocent to preach the Fifth Crusade as a popular crusade, open to all; surely what drove the pope’s action was the opportunity to sell more crusade indulgences. Nor does he persuade that the pueri inspired Francis of Assisi to set out on his first, abortive attempt at crusade. A further lack is the absence of gender analysis; the fact that many of the accounts mention “boys and girls, men and women” as marching together requires that this not be a story of men only. And Dickson has a gripe against mythistory. Even while admitting the role of mythistoricizing in keeping this story alive, he bludgeons its current practitioners as “well-paid blenders of stingy portions of historical fact and generous, tasty dollops of mythistorical fiction [who] regularly offer us factoid films, docudramas, and ‘live’ re-enactments of medieval battles. It is enough to make poorly paid historians, mere purveyors of truth, burst a blood vessel” (132). This is an unfair dismissal of the field of historical fiction and the role of the media in popularizing the past. Yet overall this is an extraordinary study, original, delightful to read. Considering that there has not been a book-length study of the pueri in English since 1870, we can be grateful for Dickson’s attention to them.

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His work opens many avenues for thinking about popular, ecstatic religion and about how these events are remembered; by tracing the influence of the pueri over time he argues that the myths that develop around the founding event become part of its history and enable it to live on, even without an institutional structure. One hopes this study will be widely read and emulated. Anne Llewellyn Barstow SUNY College at Old Westbury

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000183

So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke: The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc. By Louisa A. Burnham. Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008. xvi þ 222 pp. $39.95 cloth. To use a word well suited to Louisa A. Burnham’s So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke, it is shocking that Beguins are not more prominent in the religious history of the European Middle Ages. Overshadowed by crusade-inspiring Cathars, and more evanescent than Waldenses, Beguins—Franciscan tertiaries, lay adherents of the order’s Spiritual wing—have attracted scholarly interest in lamentable disproportion to the acute attention they received from inquisitors in southern France during a brief period in the fourteenth century. Yet to medievalists worrying the historical and analytical differences between “heresy” and “orthodoxy,” Beguins offer what Burnham characterizes with apt concision as their “fundamental problematic . . . radical and apocalyptic on the one hand, [and] a spirituality and practice only minimally divergent from the norm on the other” (139). Using chiefly inquisitorial records, the notarial registers of Montpellier, and a Beguin martyrology, Burnham seeks illuminatively to “evoke . . . the texture of their world, to personalize their struggle, and to make their choices, their sacrifices, and their resistance come to life” (4). Burnham begins by recounting the conflict over evangelical poverty that rent the Franciscans into “Conventuals” and condemned “Spirituals,” and by introducing friar and theologian of poverty Peter John Olivi. Olivi, lauded by Beguins as a saint after his death in 1298, centered them and their apocalyptic vision, a perspective sharpened by the persecution that began in the 1310s. Chapter 2, following James Given, analyzes Beguins’ “weak” forms of resistance to inquisitors (evasion, humor). Montpellier, the site of chapter 3, was a refuge for those evaders, and Beguins’ wide support there is illustrated by Peire de Tornamira—priest, Beguin, and member of a

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His work opens many avenues for thinking about popular, ecstatic religion and about how these events are remembered; by tracing the influence of the pueri over time he argues that the myths that develop around the founding event become part of its history and enable it to live on, even without an institutional structure. One hopes this study will be widely read and emulated. Anne Llewellyn Barstow SUNY College at Old Westbury

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000183

So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke: The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc. By Louisa A. Burnham. Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008. xvi þ 222 pp. $39.95 cloth. To use a word well suited to Louisa A. Burnham’s So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke, it is shocking that Beguins are not more prominent in the religious history of the European Middle Ages. Overshadowed by crusade-inspiring Cathars, and more evanescent than Waldenses, Beguins—Franciscan tertiaries, lay adherents of the order’s Spiritual wing—have attracted scholarly interest in lamentable disproportion to the acute attention they received from inquisitors in southern France during a brief period in the fourteenth century. Yet to medievalists worrying the historical and analytical differences between “heresy” and “orthodoxy,” Beguins offer what Burnham characterizes with apt concision as their “fundamental problematic . . . radical and apocalyptic on the one hand, [and] a spirituality and practice only minimally divergent from the norm on the other” (139). Using chiefly inquisitorial records, the notarial registers of Montpellier, and a Beguin martyrology, Burnham seeks illuminatively to “evoke . . . the texture of their world, to personalize their struggle, and to make their choices, their sacrifices, and their resistance come to life” (4). Burnham begins by recounting the conflict over evangelical poverty that rent the Franciscans into “Conventuals” and condemned “Spirituals,” and by introducing friar and theologian of poverty Peter John Olivi. Olivi, lauded by Beguins as a saint after his death in 1298, centered them and their apocalyptic vision, a perspective sharpened by the persecution that began in the 1310s. Chapter 2, following James Given, analyzes Beguins’ “weak” forms of resistance to inquisitors (evasion, humor). Montpellier, the site of chapter 3, was a refuge for those evaders, and Beguins’ wide support there is illustrated by Peire de Tornamira—priest, Beguin, and member of a

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prominent urban family—and by one Lady Gaucelina’s mysterious property sale, theorized here as proving that patronage reached beyond known Beguins and even to local Conventuals. The final chapter studies two models of leadership within the Beguin community, practical and inspirational, respectively: Peire Trencavel, who escaped to Italy, and the fascinating visionary Prous Boneta, executed in 1328. So Great a Light is powerfully distinguished by two related senses: the dramatic and the intimate. It is highly visual and even tense, replete with failed escapes, secret meetings, inquisitors in pursuit, an “underground railroad,” and vividly depicted scenery. Several references to films and novels heighten this tone and narrative feel; for example, inquisitorial torture is exemplified by an episode from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (56). Burnham is a skilful cartographer and a very visible guide in mapping finely the terrain of Languedoc, settling herself into the rhythms of the Beguins’ life, dissolving into their atmosphere and environment. The book pulses with an unconcealed sympathy; it is dedicated to the executed Beguins (“requiescant in pace”), and its acknowledgments reiterate the dedication “with respect to those who lost their liberty and their lives in passionate pursuit of their religious aspirations” (xi). Impeccable historical precision thus allies with sympathetic mood and interpretation, as of, say, Beguins’ hagiographically consistent testimony to their executed fellows’ unfailing fortitude at the stake (“as the flames licked around their feet, the Beguins were all stalwart” [77]). Actions more achingly human than saintly, and wholly comprehensible if not literally admirable—doubt, denial, betraying companions, absconding rather than suffering an excruciating death—are sensitively credited to the strain of victimhood, a laudable independence even from Beguin “orthodoxy,” and loving parenting (115–116, 169). Burnham exhorts readers to “admire their courage and determination,” concluding that “it is time to let the light shine through the clouds once again” (177, 188). The union of drama and intimacy then responds to and reflects Burnham’s open self-identification as an affectionate fautrix beguinorum. This identification both demands and explains her near presence, and interrelates with the book’s structure of stark, deadly opposition between pious Christians devoutly and in increasing desperation averring poverty, and church leadership manifest only in its mistaken “cruelty” (75). In this presentation, and by seeking to publicize the hardships and virtues of those who conducted that “passionate pursuit” (xi) Burnham is heir to Beguins who collected relics at execution sites, defended their slain colleagues’ sanctity to inquisitors, or treasured a martyrology. (Persecuting smoke may have obscured their light, but it ironically brightened it too.) The close attachment to “personaliz[ing] their struggle” (14) does, however, subdue a more panoramic view of Beguins’ significance for other pertinent fourteenth-century dynamics: lay

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religiosity, biblical interpretation, ideologies of the papacy. The short-lived Beguins’ actions were shaped by apocalypticism, and perhaps there was little but the confrontations and escapes that fed it. But Burnham’s own commitment generates further curiosity about the “religious aspirations” she eulogistically notes, about what peaceful success beyond “struggle”—not for the Spirituals, but for their own lay lives—would have looked like and meant. So Great a Light’s forthright intention that we not only meet the Beguins, but also esteem them, situates it notably within current scholarship on medieval heresy. It clearly continues the 1970s and 1980s tradition of historians like Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, whose opposition of lay religious autonomy to blunt orthodox obstructionism, brilliant surveying of terroir, and flair for presenting data visually Burnham has inherited. But Burnham recognizes the succeeding skeptical call to problematize the use of mediated inquisitorial texts that, pace Ladurie, cannot be read as transparent windows onto “lay belief,” and the related interest to deconstruct “heresy” and heresies as discursive clerical fantasy (5 – 6, 57 –59). If the former approach risked its own fantasies about heresy, the latter exchanges courageous, creative rebels for empty, ecclesiastically tailored costumes. While to study that tailoring has its own historical rewards for scholars like Mark Gregory Pegg, it displaces or denies recapturing the “religious aspirations” of those deemed heretics. Burnham here significantly seeks to restore knowable heretics to the center in a reading that is, finally, faithful. It is difficult to conclude whether Burnham’s confessed faith in the Beguins, or her faith in the past’s power to present them before us, is most invigorating, but readers may end with their own greatest faith in Burnham’s impressive ability to forge in her work a passionate alliance of equally deep erudition and engagement. Christine Caldwell Ames University of South Carolina

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000195

Picturing the Celestial City: The Medieval Stained Glass of Beauvais Cathedral. By Michael Cothren. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. xiv þ 280 pp. $95.00 cloth. As Michael Cothren writes in Picturing the Celestial City, the stained glass of Beauvais Cathedral, unlike its architecture, has been dismissed as fragmentary and second rate, and consequently neglected. His book corrects these misconceptions through an exemplary and careful study of what he calls the four campaigns of glass painting during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and early

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religiosity, biblical interpretation, ideologies of the papacy. The short-lived Beguins’ actions were shaped by apocalypticism, and perhaps there was little but the confrontations and escapes that fed it. But Burnham’s own commitment generates further curiosity about the “religious aspirations” she eulogistically notes, about what peaceful success beyond “struggle”—not for the Spirituals, but for their own lay lives—would have looked like and meant. So Great a Light’s forthright intention that we not only meet the Beguins, but also esteem them, situates it notably within current scholarship on medieval heresy. It clearly continues the 1970s and 1980s tradition of historians like Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, whose opposition of lay religious autonomy to blunt orthodox obstructionism, brilliant surveying of terroir, and flair for presenting data visually Burnham has inherited. But Burnham recognizes the succeeding skeptical call to problematize the use of mediated inquisitorial texts that, pace Ladurie, cannot be read as transparent windows onto “lay belief,” and the related interest to deconstruct “heresy” and heresies as discursive clerical fantasy (5 – 6, 57 –59). If the former approach risked its own fantasies about heresy, the latter exchanges courageous, creative rebels for empty, ecclesiastically tailored costumes. While to study that tailoring has its own historical rewards for scholars like Mark Gregory Pegg, it displaces or denies recapturing the “religious aspirations” of those deemed heretics. Burnham here significantly seeks to restore knowable heretics to the center in a reading that is, finally, faithful. It is difficult to conclude whether Burnham’s confessed faith in the Beguins, or her faith in the past’s power to present them before us, is most invigorating, but readers may end with their own greatest faith in Burnham’s impressive ability to forge in her work a passionate alliance of equally deep erudition and engagement. Christine Caldwell Ames University of South Carolina

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000195

Picturing the Celestial City: The Medieval Stained Glass of Beauvais Cathedral. By Michael Cothren. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. xiv þ 280 pp. $95.00 cloth. As Michael Cothren writes in Picturing the Celestial City, the stained glass of Beauvais Cathedral, unlike its architecture, has been dismissed as fragmentary and second rate, and consequently neglected. His book corrects these misconceptions through an exemplary and careful study of what he calls the four campaigns of glass painting during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and early

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fifteenth centuries. But his book goes far beyond its purported subject of bringing into prominence a previously undervalued treasure by meticulously examining the glazing program from many different points of view. As such, it is a model of methodology and suggests that a comprehensive, specific, and detailed treatment of one monument can be adapted not only to other glazing studies but to other projects in diverse media. Cothren’s work might be viewed as historically eclectic, drawing as it does on both traditional as well as more recent approaches to art historical issues. Describing the medieval glazing of Beauvais as a “bricolage,” or collage, he thereby signals its sporadic evolution over a period of about two centuries. Cothren leads the reader through this intricate narrative in a detective-like manner. The wealth of information—visual, archival, historical, cultural, and iconographical—is presented in such a way that the reader is encouraged to participate as the mystery of the creation of this “celestial city” is unraveled. For each glazing campaign, which corresponds to a chapter of the book, Cothren establishes first the historical setting and the material condition and then the subject and style, and then finally explains how these components work in the larger context. As he raises many of the vexing issues involved in the glazing itself, Cothren poses these issues as questions and then offers diverse but plausible answers for each of the possible solutions that he carefully considers. The author’s recognition of the value of diverse approaches in all of these areas is one of the many intriguing aspects of his examination of the Beauvais glazing project. To take one instance of Cothren’s eclectic approach, we might consider some issues involved in the glazing of the Virgin Chapel. As he examines the design problems presented by the Jesse Tree lancet, he uncovers for the reader, step by step, the process followed by the Gothic glaziers in finding appropriate solutions. How were they to treat the compartments enclosing the prophets on the upper levels of the window given the fact that it gradually narrows near the top? According to Cothren, the visual evidence indicates that these artisans elected to choose, as design principles, regularity, repetition, and pattern over variety and individualization. In his efforts to plumb significance and meaning in the glazing program, the author often challenges traditional assumptions and interpretations. For example, regarding the presence of artisans and merchants in the Infancy Cycle lancet, he raises questions of whether their appearance is due to local circumstance, as Jane Williams claims for a similar case at Chartres Cathedral, or to some other reason for which textual evidence is now lacking. A lengthy examination of the Crucifixion, which is situated in the Rose Window of the Virgin Chapel, affords him the opportunity to demonstrate how the visual and the iconographic elements of all three parts of the central window come together to produce the overriding message the Church intended to inculcate in

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its members, that of Christian salvation through Christ’s sacrifice. The architecture and the stained glass directly above and on axis with the high altar (Crucifixion, Jesse Tree, Infancy Cycle) provide the fixed backdrop against which, at each Mass, the Eucharist is celebrated as a living performance. In this connection, Cothren also notes that the ritual of the Elevation of the Host, begun in the twelfth century, became especially important during the first half of the thirteenth as the sign of the doctrine of transubstantiation. For the worshipers witnessing the transformation of the wafer into the body of Christ, the ritual was itself proof that the miracle had occurred. Cothren’s agility in choosing the appropriate means with which to tease out a possible solution to a given problem allows him to embrace the multifaceted approach crucial to an understanding of the monument as a whole. His visual observations of the figural as well as physiognomic style in each window, carried out on a microanalytic level, elicit questions and suggestions that lead to the most complete investigation of the glazing program of Beauvais up to the present time. For example, minute descriptions of facial features, hair, and drapery in the St. Vincent Chapel bring out distinct differences that must be due to the participation of more than one workshop. This conclusion in turn opens the possibility of the existence of a regional style visible in manuscripts of the thirteenth century in northern France, such as the Psalter of Yolande de Soissons (1280s, Amiens). Cothren’s fine distinctions convey the complexity of the Beauvais undertaking and thus contribute to our understanding and appreciation of its importance. By reading Cothren’s amazing tale one can begin to grasp the richness of the glass that transformed the structure into a “celestial city.” The quality of the illustrations, both color and black and white, add much to support his outstanding text, although a visit to Beauvais is indispensable for experiencing the splendor of the stained glass within its proper context. Mary Weitzel Gibbons Monterey, Mass.

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000201

The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500– 1648. By Bridget Heal. Past and Present Publications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xvi þ 344 pp. $99.00 cloth. In this erudite and nuanced book, Bridget Heal explains the diversity of pious attitudes and practices associated with the Virgin Mary in Germany during the

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that Baptists served as justices (264 n. 73; 259 n. 20), but a closer examination of this key index of social and political power might have helped her argue even more persuasively that Baptists were fairly quickly absorbed into the prevailing structures and matrices of power in this agricultural society. Spangler knows that Virginia was also home to non-Anglophone Protestants, but her acknowledgement of German speakers appears to be confined to the Shenandoah Valley communities. As a result she misses the rather important fact that the earliest petition for exemption from the compulsory support of the Anglican Church (22 October 1776) came from the German Lutherans in (present-day) Madison County, an especially significant vote of dissent from a Protestant group that had historically enjoyed rather close ties with the established Church. These are, however, minor quibbles that do little to detract from the power of her argument. One might have wished for a more explicit reminder from her that her research seems to confirm once again the familiar argument put forth by historians such as Jackson Turner Main on the expansion of political power in post-Revolutionary states among a broader spectrum of white smallholders. If this study does not fundamentally revise our understanding of Protestantism in late eighteenth-century Virginia, it nonetheless shows just how quickly Baptist dissent, and indeed other forms of evangelical Protestantism, adjusted to the prevailing economic, racial, and social norms of the emerging new states. For that reason alone, hers is an important study not only for church historians, but for anyone interested in pondering the question of how much culture and convention continue to shape, and quite often co-opt, religious conviction. Spangler’s conclusions illustrate once again in this particular North American Protestant context how difficult it seems to be for believers, no matter how much they deem themselves agents of change, or radical critics of those who have previously succumbed to compromise and accommodation, to transform economic, social, and racial self-interest, even in themselves. A. G. Roeber Penn State University –University Park

doi:10.1017/S000964070900033X

Frontiers of Faith: Bringing Catholicism to the West in the Early Republic. By John R. Dichtl. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. x þ 241 pp. $50.00 cloth. The history of Catholicism in the early American Republic is a history of people and ideas moving from Europe to the nascent United States and deep

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into the backcountry of the trans-Appalachian West. Though a handful of historians have discovered the richness of this subject in recent decades, only John Dichtl, executive director of the National Council on Public History at IUPUI, has devoted an entire book to the complex network of Catholic priests and laypeople stretching from Maryland and Pennsylvania through the Ohio River Valley to the edges of Kentucky and Indiana. Dichtl’s Frontiers of Faith, born out of a dissertation conducted at Indiana University, combines a broad array of methodological and historiographical perspectives to produce a unique glimpse into the lives of Catholic frontiersmen (and some women) in a way that enhances the overall narrative of American religion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Dichtl carefully situates the history of Catholicism within the context of the American frontier in his introduction to Frontiers of Faith. He builds on the concept of “contact points,” a theme popular in the study of frontier societies, by incorporating Catholics into the crucible of encounter that was the West in the early republic. He also takes notice of the fact that despite the pivotal works of Nathan Hatch, Jon Butler, and Christine Heyrman on frontier religions, there has been very little consideration given to the role of Catholicism in the evangelization of western and southern regions in the United States. Perhaps less pioneering, though no less insightful, Dichtl accepts the standard narrative of American Catholicism as articulated by Jay P. Dolan and others that “although the frontier was a cultural meeting ground open to adaptation, innovation, and deviance, it also strengthened traditional features of Catholicism” (4). In other words, what was initially a more open and fluid form of missionary Catholicism ultimately transformed into “a defensive and insular immigrant church” by the end of the 1830s (7). The first three chapters of Frontiers of Faith examine the ecclesiastical politics of evangelizing the West in the early republic. Dichtl begins by illustrating how the first generation of Catholic priests in the United States viewed the West as a place dominated by Protestants who were inhospitable to a foreign clergy. John Carroll, the first bishop and later archbishop of Baltimore, encouraged the likes of Stephen Badin, Demetrius Gallitzin, Edward Fenwick, Charles Nerinckx, and Benedict Flaget to establish a Catholic institutional presence in regions rarely visited by the clergy. Dichtl describes their endeavor as an “errand into the wilderness” (10). Chapter 2 goes into the role of priests as “men who worked to make themselves crucial to the Catholic march inland and to become the central points of interaction with non-Catholics” (20). The fragility of ecclesiastical authority was a persistent concern of priests in the transAppalachian West, as demonstrated in chapter 3’s emphasis on the measures taken to control the religious behavior of both the clergy and the laity. The last three chapters provide a glimpse into the methods by which the clergy sought to convert Protestants and create a lasting Catholic foothold in the


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trans-Appalachian West. First, Dichtl explains how the clergy “sacralized” the frontier landscape with churches and religious objects, in effect “re-creating a Catholic world within a Protestant context” (87). The process of making sacred places in the West, according to Dichtl, reinforced ecclesiastical authority and produced “contact points” where Protestants and Catholics interacted (111). In chapter 5, Dichtl weighs the risks and benefits associated with such close proximity to non-Catholics. By the 1820s, the accumulation of so many close encounters convinced many priests that “an imagined window of opportunity seemed to be closing” on their missionary experiment (143). Finally, Dichtl uses chapter 6 to highlight the effects of catechesis, religious processions, preaching, and polemics in frontier settings, all of which convinced priests to be “more confident about standing out and more willing to display their Catholic identity” (146). By the 1830s, Dichtl concludes that “Catholicism was firmly ensconced in the trans-Appalachian West, and the clergy had the means, and the need, to formally display, explain, and defend it” against a growing level of anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States (175). The takeaway from Dichtl’s Frontiers of Faith is at least twofold. First, the growth of Catholicism in the trans-Appalachian West was as much a consequence of contact with Protestants and non-Catholics as it was a matter of sheer ecclesiastical will. Second, the frontier experiences of priests did not have a substantial “Americanizing” effect on the Catholic Church as a whole. Rather, life in the West “reinforced and invigorated the distinctiveness of the Roman confession” (181), thus preparing the Catholic clergy for the “era of nativism” (184) that followed the 1830s. It is somewhat unclear, however, why Dichtl confidently finishes Frontiers of Faith with the statement “Catholic and Protestant would live side by side but draw no closer” (184), as if to suggest that they would no longer interact with each other. Surely it was also the case that many priests would go on to strongly support slavery and to a lesser extent abolitionism with Protestants later in the antebellum period. Moreover, priests in what were once frontier environments usually sided with either the Confederate or Union causes during the Civil War, again reiterating the close interaction that continued to exist between Catholics and nonCatholics. More might also be made of the trans-Atlantic connections between the American clergy and their European benefactors that were so essential to the development of the Catholic Church in the early republic. These cautions aside, Dichtl’s Frontiers of Faith remains a significant contribution to the history of Catholicism in the trans-Appalachian West and an example of what good scholarship can do to reshape the way historians conceive of the relationship between region and religion. Michael Pasquier Louisiana State University

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its members, that of Christian salvation through Christ’s sacrifice. The architecture and the stained glass directly above and on axis with the high altar (Crucifixion, Jesse Tree, Infancy Cycle) provide the fixed backdrop against which, at each Mass, the Eucharist is celebrated as a living performance. In this connection, Cothren also notes that the ritual of the Elevation of the Host, begun in the twelfth century, became especially important during the first half of the thirteenth as the sign of the doctrine of transubstantiation. For the worshipers witnessing the transformation of the wafer into the body of Christ, the ritual was itself proof that the miracle had occurred. Cothren’s agility in choosing the appropriate means with which to tease out a possible solution to a given problem allows him to embrace the multifaceted approach crucial to an understanding of the monument as a whole. His visual observations of the figural as well as physiognomic style in each window, carried out on a microanalytic level, elicit questions and suggestions that lead to the most complete investigation of the glazing program of Beauvais up to the present time. For example, minute descriptions of facial features, hair, and drapery in the St. Vincent Chapel bring out distinct differences that must be due to the participation of more than one workshop. This conclusion in turn opens the possibility of the existence of a regional style visible in manuscripts of the thirteenth century in northern France, such as the Psalter of Yolande de Soissons (1280s, Amiens). Cothren’s fine distinctions convey the complexity of the Beauvais undertaking and thus contribute to our understanding and appreciation of its importance. By reading Cothren’s amazing tale one can begin to grasp the richness of the glass that transformed the structure into a “celestial city.” The quality of the illustrations, both color and black and white, add much to support his outstanding text, although a visit to Beauvais is indispensable for experiencing the splendor of the stained glass within its proper context. Mary Weitzel Gibbons Monterey, Mass.

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000201

The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500– 1648. By Bridget Heal. Past and Present Publications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xvi þ 344 pp. $99.00 cloth. In this erudite and nuanced book, Bridget Heal explains the diversity of pious attitudes and practices associated with the Virgin Mary in Germany during the

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sixteenth-century Reformation. She accomplishes two significant tasks especially well: first, she marshals an impressive range of sources—literary, liturgical, legal, and above all artistic (the book is marvelously illustrated with 64 images)—to make her points. Second, she coherently analyzes her subject both across and within the confessions that shaped religious culture in this period. She not only compares Marian piety in Catholic, Lutheran, Zwinglian, and Calvinist worlds but also considers its diversity within each of these Christian communities. After offering the reader helpful historical and methodological introductions, Heal turns in chapter 2 to the effects of the Lutheran reform in Nuremberg on Marian piety. Veit Stoss’s Annunciation—still today a striking part of any visit to Nuremberg—is only the first of several dozen reference points she uses in explaining the theological, cultural, social, and financial forces that resulted in what she characterizes as a moderate transformation of Marian piety. In chapter 3, the author persuasively gainsays any notion of a single Protestant devotional stance vis-a`-vis the Virgin Mary by outlining first the repudiatory approaches of Augsburg’s earliest, Swiss-influenced reformers and then the qualified reanimation of Marian devotion once the Reformed preachers were replaced with Lutheran ones following the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. Heal highlights the differences between Lutheran attitudes in Augsburg and Nuremberg and explains the particularities of Marian piety among Lutherans in Augsburg with reference to the Zwinglian and Calvinist rejection of Marian devotion and the more elaborate, contemporaneous piety of the Catholic population in the bi-confessional Imperial free city. In chapters 4 and 5, Heal examines Marian piety in Catholic Cologne, where she sheds light on a range of devotional practices, some of which evolved seamlessly out of the late Middle Ages, and others of which were inspired by new reforming ideas associated with the Council of Trent. These chapters are important for illuminating the multifarious world of sixteenth-century Catholicism in the empire and for the evidence they offer against exaggerated estimations of Jesuit influence and the order’s centripetal effect on the organization of Catholic Europe. In Cologne, Heal shows, the Society of Jesus did not always get its way in attempting to supplant local practices with its own Counter-Reformation tactics. Of the three cities the author focuses on, Cologne is probably the least well known and understood in the world of Anglophone scholarship. The author’s astute analysis of devotional life there is thus an especially welcome corrective to the crude, conventional characterization of the sixteenth-century city as a Hochburg of stagnant traditionalism. One aspect of The Cult of the Virgin Mary that this reviewer regards with ambivalence is the author’s extensive reference to secondary literature in the text. On the one hand, the author’s index of secondary sources and her thoroughgoing examination of recent scholarship is an indicator of her own breadth and of her material’s relevance to issues of current scholarly

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concern. On the other hand, it must be admitted that hardly a reader will come to this book unconversant with the works of, for example, Caroline Walker Bynum and Bob Scribner. The author’s continual reference in the text to these and other scholars of lesser significance distracts the reader from the great strength of the book, which is the author’s own original research and analysis of primary materials, especially the works of art. Many readers will also be confused as they attempt to distinguish the interpretations Heal wishes only to refer to from those she is making her own. This problem is most evident in chapter 6, in which she presents multiple sides to the argument over the misogyny of the early modern fashionings of the Virgin Mary. Here Heal does not clearly explain why she finds some scholars more persuasive than others, and her resolution of the 42-page chapter with passing reference to Victor Turner’s notion of symbolic polyvalence (302) is ultimately unsatisfying. Finally, the extensive reference to so many contemporary scholars in the text brings the absence of others into high relief: how, for example, could she write about early modern religiosity in Germany without addressing the work of Berndt Hamm, about humanist devotions without reference to Dieter Wuttke, and about religion in Cologne without citing Klaus Meuthen or James Mehl; and is it really fair to dismiss in passing the pertinent arguments of Klaus Schreiner as oversimplifications (268, 276)? In the final analysis, this criticism has more to do with style than with substance; and there is no shortage of high-quality substance in Heal’s study. The sheer quantity and diversity of sources she brings together, the nimbleness with which she moves between sources, and the discernment with which she analyzes them make The Cult of the Virgin Mary a significant piece of interdisciplinary scholarship and a necessary reference for any serious scholar of Christian piety in the long sixteenth century. David J. Collins, S.J. Georgetown University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000213

Orientalism, Aramaic and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation: The First Printing of the Syriac New Testament. By Robert J. Wilkinson. Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 137. Leiden: Brill, 2007. xvi þ 225 pp. $129.00 cloth. Robert Wilkinson, currently a research fellow at Wesley College in Bristol, U.K., completed his Ph.D. in history at the University of the West of

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concern. On the other hand, it must be admitted that hardly a reader will come to this book unconversant with the works of, for example, Caroline Walker Bynum and Bob Scribner. The author’s continual reference in the text to these and other scholars of lesser significance distracts the reader from the great strength of the book, which is the author’s own original research and analysis of primary materials, especially the works of art. Many readers will also be confused as they attempt to distinguish the interpretations Heal wishes only to refer to from those she is making her own. This problem is most evident in chapter 6, in which she presents multiple sides to the argument over the misogyny of the early modern fashionings of the Virgin Mary. Here Heal does not clearly explain why she finds some scholars more persuasive than others, and her resolution of the 42-page chapter with passing reference to Victor Turner’s notion of symbolic polyvalence (302) is ultimately unsatisfying. Finally, the extensive reference to so many contemporary scholars in the text brings the absence of others into high relief: how, for example, could she write about early modern religiosity in Germany without addressing the work of Berndt Hamm, about humanist devotions without reference to Dieter Wuttke, and about religion in Cologne without citing Klaus Meuthen or James Mehl; and is it really fair to dismiss in passing the pertinent arguments of Klaus Schreiner as oversimplifications (268, 276)? In the final analysis, this criticism has more to do with style than with substance; and there is no shortage of high-quality substance in Heal’s study. The sheer quantity and diversity of sources she brings together, the nimbleness with which she moves between sources, and the discernment with which she analyzes them make The Cult of the Virgin Mary a significant piece of interdisciplinary scholarship and a necessary reference for any serious scholar of Christian piety in the long sixteenth century. David J. Collins, S.J. Georgetown University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000213

Orientalism, Aramaic and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation: The First Printing of the Syriac New Testament. By Robert J. Wilkinson. Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 137. Leiden: Brill, 2007. xvi þ 225 pp. $129.00 cloth. Robert Wilkinson, currently a research fellow at Wesley College in Bristol, U.K., completed his Ph.D. in history at the University of the West of

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England in 2004 after reading Oriental Studies at Cambridge. The present work and its companion volume, Kabbalistic Scholars of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (Leiden: Brill, 2007), flow directly from work on his dissertation, “Origins of Syriac Studies in the Sixteenth Century.” On one level, Orientalism is a specialist’s study that provides and corrects important details in the fortyyear history of the publication of the 1555 editio princeps of the New Testament in Syriac in Vienna. On another, however, it is a well-crafted and readable narrative of the introduction of Syriac studies into the circles of Roman intelligentsia between the Fifth Lateran Council and the middle stages of the Council of Trent. On yet a third level Wilkinson paints in broad strokes an intriguing picture of the reasons behind and the state of Semitic language study in mid-century Rome. Though the subject has generated ample scholarship, with which Wilkinson maintains a steady and unobtrusive dialogue, the story of the publication of the Syriac New Testament is not widely known. It centers on a single manuscript brought by a small delegation of Maronite Christians to the Lateran Council at the invitation of Pope Leo X. This came into the hands of the perfect recipient, the lawyer and canon at St. John Lateran, Teseo Ambrogio, a pioneering linguistic and liturgical scholar who had produced a parallel edition of Eucharistic liturgies in Latin, Greek, Armenian, Ethiopic, and Syriac. Though tasked with publishing this text and a Syriac psalter, Tesio experienced delays and ended up losing the psalter manuscript during the battle of Pavia in 1527. In 1529, at the age of sixty, Tesio passed the text to the young German scholar Johann Widmanstetter, who was accompanying Charles Habsburg to his imperial coronation in Bologna. Tesio went on to publish the first Western study of Syriac and Armenian (Introductio, 1539) but died a year later. In 1555 Widmanstetter published the New Testament in Vienna with the aid of the relatively well-known French scholar Guillaume Postel, with whom Tesio had earlier studied Armenian in Venice. On the eve of Luther’s revolt many Catholic intellectuals had been linking the recent geographical “discoveries” by the Spanish and Portuguese with the beginning of the end times and the associated imperative to unite the Christian Church, east and west. This eschatological imperative fueled the efforts of men like Tesio to bridge the linguistic and ecclesiological gaps and to provide the printed Bibles and other texts in the many languages— including Syriac and related Semitic languages—needed to complete the conversion of the world. Wilkerson further links this impulse and the progress of the Syriac New Testament to another, parallel strand, the Roman intellectuals’ interest in Jewish Kabbalah, which had been piqued by members of the Medici popes’ entourages with roots in the syncretic interests of the Florentine Academy of Pico della Mirandola’s day. For Tesio and others the Syriac language was related closely enough to Hebrew to

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shed important light on the esoteric intricacies of the Jewish texts. These, they believed, held further keys to understanding eschatological matters. Wilkinson introduces the reader to Egidio (Giles) of Viterbo, the cardinal, humanist, supporter of Reuchlin, and general of the Augustinian Order, as a major proponent of this movement, which died or scattered during the anti-Talmud activities of the Roman Inquisition beginning in 1553. With support from the esoterically inclined Ferdinand I, however, Widmanstetter and Postel, at the time a professor of Arabic at Vienna’s University, published the work two years later as the first Oriental-language text printed in Vienna. This short overview suggests the ways in which Wilkinson’s story is interwoven with the events, personalities, and trends of mid-sixteenthcentury Catholic intellectual and religious history. For the non-specialist with knowledge of the period, the story provides new and insightful narrative layers that interlink major phenomena and personalities. Wilkerson chose to organize his chapters by focusing each on one of the key players, which allows him to develop each person’s thread, but necessitates foreshadowing and backfilling that disturb the narrative flow. For the specialist, Wilkerson explains important links between the era’s kabbalistic interests and the study of Syriac in Rome, a linkage that came naturally to Renaissance scholars but has been missed by historians. He also places Postel, excluded from Widmanstetter’s dedication, in his rightful place as associate in the project, a role generally denied him by history. In addition, Wilkerson delineates the otherwise unacknowledged patronal role of Marcello Cardinal Cervini, the briefly serving Pope Marcellus II. Marring this edition is a series of proper noun variations that may lead to confusion and should have been caught during proofreading—for example, Padua for Pavia, Padova/Padua, Striedl/Streidl, de la Foreˆt/de la Forest, Giorgio/ Georgio—a reminder of the care that should go into a fine scholarly publication. Joseph P. Byrne Belmont University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000225

Divided By Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. By Benjamin J. Kaplan. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. xiv þ 418 pp. $29.95 cloth. The image of early modern Europe as plagued by religious persecution and confessional violence is familiar. In recent years, however, historians have

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shed important light on the esoteric intricacies of the Jewish texts. These, they believed, held further keys to understanding eschatological matters. Wilkinson introduces the reader to Egidio (Giles) of Viterbo, the cardinal, humanist, supporter of Reuchlin, and general of the Augustinian Order, as a major proponent of this movement, which died or scattered during the anti-Talmud activities of the Roman Inquisition beginning in 1553. With support from the esoterically inclined Ferdinand I, however, Widmanstetter and Postel, at the time a professor of Arabic at Vienna’s University, published the work two years later as the first Oriental-language text printed in Vienna. This short overview suggests the ways in which Wilkinson’s story is interwoven with the events, personalities, and trends of mid-sixteenthcentury Catholic intellectual and religious history. For the non-specialist with knowledge of the period, the story provides new and insightful narrative layers that interlink major phenomena and personalities. Wilkerson chose to organize his chapters by focusing each on one of the key players, which allows him to develop each person’s thread, but necessitates foreshadowing and backfilling that disturb the narrative flow. For the specialist, Wilkerson explains important links between the era’s kabbalistic interests and the study of Syriac in Rome, a linkage that came naturally to Renaissance scholars but has been missed by historians. He also places Postel, excluded from Widmanstetter’s dedication, in his rightful place as associate in the project, a role generally denied him by history. In addition, Wilkerson delineates the otherwise unacknowledged patronal role of Marcello Cardinal Cervini, the briefly serving Pope Marcellus II. Marring this edition is a series of proper noun variations that may lead to confusion and should have been caught during proofreading—for example, Padua for Pavia, Padova/Padua, Striedl/Streidl, de la Foreˆt/de la Forest, Giorgio/ Georgio—a reminder of the care that should go into a fine scholarly publication. Joseph P. Byrne Belmont University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000225

Divided By Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. By Benjamin J. Kaplan. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. xiv þ 418 pp. $29.95 cloth. The image of early modern Europe as plagued by religious persecution and confessional violence is familiar. In recent years, however, historians have

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begun to paint a more complex picture in which people of different faiths found ways to live together. In Divided by Faith, Benjamin J. Kaplan draws on their work to provide an overview and an important new analysis of how Europeans constructed religious pluralism. The book makes use of examples ranging from Ireland to Lithuania to show how Europeans practiced what Kaplan calls “toleration.” Since not all the means Europeans of different faiths found to live together would strike us as very tolerant, some historians might prefer a more neutral noun like “coexistence.” But it is central to Kaplan’s argument that we cannot think of toleration only in Enlightenment terms, as a willingness to accept individual freedom of conscience and the right to worship as one sees fit. Toleration came in many forms, and Europeans found a variety of ways to practice it. Their understanding of toleration was pragmatic, based on the need to contain religious conflict. The division of Christianity in Europe into competing churches sparked horrible violence, and Kaplan devotes the first part of his book to explaining the reasons behind it. But for some, strife was worse than disunity. Kaplan’s most important contribution is his discussion of how toleration could be constructed in the midst of confessional conflict. An irenic strain in religious thought suggested ways to seek compromises by stressing what the faiths had in common and by downplaying differences as adiaphora, indifferent matters. Some churches, for example the Church of England, simply allowed a good deal of latitude in their members’ beliefs. Elsewhere differences in belief remained sharp, but rival faiths found themselves forced into accepting each other’s legal existence. In Transylvania, from 1568, Reformed, Catholic, Lutheran, and Unitarian Churches received official status. Under the Warsaw Confederation (1573) the noble-dominated Catholic, Reformed, and Socinian churches of Poland agreed to respect one another’s rights. The majority Catholic Church of France had to suffer the existence of the Reformed Church after the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes (1598). In the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the Peace of Westphalia (1648), Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed rulers of the Empire determined the faith of their territories while respecting that of their neighbors, the principle known as cuius regio, eius religio. Thus while some political authorities pursued confessional uniformity through intolerance, others sought peace by protecting pluralism among their subjects. Those subjects often found their own means of toleration. In some places the integration of confessional groups, noticeable, for example, in frequent mixed marriages, promoted a tolerant atmosphere. But toleration often depended less on integration than on segregation. Citizens of different faiths agreed, either tacitly or in formal contracts, to separate their religious practices. One way to do so was through the practice of Auslauf, in which a religious minority


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agreed to establish its church outside a city. Viennese Protestants from the 1570s to the 1620s—sometimes as many as ten thousand on a Sunday— marched to an estate at Hernals to worship. The Austrian state prohibited Auslauf, but Viennese of both faiths accepted it. Auslauf constructed a visible separation between the observances of rival groups. It invented a fiction of religious uniformity within city walls and thereby set up a way for a religious majority to accept the existence of a minority in its midst. The same result could be achieved inside cities through other practices, such as the establishment of supposedly clandestine churches. Catholics used them in the Dutch Republic, where they were known as schuilkerken. They were not really secret, but they allowed confessional majorities and minorities to engage in a pretense: minorities agreed to confine their observances to buildings that looked like houses, not churches, and majorities agreed not to bother them. Of course, clandestineness did not always work; in England, secret Catholic worship did not escape official persecution. Elsewhere, toleration did not depend on pretense and fictions, but rather on public arrangements. Such was the case with Simultankirchen, churches Catholics and Protestants shared, which were numerous along the Rhine. This required each group to accept religious observances deemed heretical in its sacred space. Sharing churches led to numerous petty quarrels. But the disputes were what Kaplan calls “a form of essentially peaceful engagement,” a “relatively harmless outlet for antagonisms” (216 – 217). In the most thorough form of separation, rival groups regulated not only their religious practices but other aspects of their civic lives as well—schools, hospitals, roles in city governance, and judicial affairs. Carefully demarcated confessional communities developed, and parity arrangements or quota systems that fixed each confession’s seats on city councils protected group interests. The Edict of Nantes dictated such settlements in biconfessional French towns, but the arrangements in the Empire were more long-lasting. The classic case was Augsburg, where the laws on separation promoted among Catholics and Lutherans a “mania for differentiating themselves” (217) but also stability and peace in the city. Toleration through segregation could serve the interests of minorities. Such was the case in the most notorious cases of segregation, the Jewish ghettos of Italian cities, established first in Venice in 1516. Venice’s response to Christian anxieties about Jews was to segregate them behind ghetto walls at night. The ghetto has become a symbol of religious persecution but, as Kaplan shows, it offered Christians a means by which to accept the presence of Jews in their community by reducing the occasions for tension over nighttime activities, for example, sexual relations between Jews and Christians. It also protected Jews from attack and may have led to the development of a distinctive Jewish culture.

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Segregation, accommodation, agreements, pretense: these were the tools of practical toleration in biconfessional communities. They did not depend on the Enlightenment idea that European society had “matured” beyond religious violence. Indeed, as Kaplan reminds us, religious conflicts hardly ended by the eighteenth century. Instead, they depended on a pragmatic realization of the need to contain conflict through coexistence. Kaplan’s masterful account demonstrates that even during a time when religious antagonism remained fierce, people could and did find ways to live together peacefully. Keith P. Luria North Carolina State University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000237

Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570– 1625. By Stefania Tutino. Catholic Christendom, 1300 – 1700. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2007. viii þ 258 pp. $99.95 cloth. To the ever-growing number of publications on the history of Catholics in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, Stefania Tutino has added her study of the evolving understanding of the relationship between English Catholics and the English regime and of their efforts to reconcile political loyalty and religious beliefs. A reader lacking a good general knowledge of the history of English Catholics in their homeland and on the Continent in those years would not be able fully to appreciate the author’s presentation, for she does not attempt to narrate events; she presupposes a familiarity with them. Instead, utilizing both manuscript and contemporary printed sources, she has judiciously collected and analyzed in roughly chronological order opposing texts by Catholics and Protestants and traced the dependence of the latter on the former. Tutino begins by considering the controversy between the imprisoned abbot of Westminster Abbey, John Feckenham, and the bishop of Winchester, Robert Horne, in the 1560s, which was “a juridical dispute over the origin and extent of the temporal sovereign’s power in relation to that of ecclesiastical authority” (13), and then goes on to the response of the Catholic theologian at Louvain, Thomas Stapleton. Immediately after Pope Pius V’s excommunication of Elizabeth (1570), another theologian at Louvain, Nicholas Sander(s), entered the fray, and the Protestant theologian John Bridges replied to him. Thus the doctrinal and theological differences assumed central importance, while the dispute passed from the academic to the public forum. Tutino devotes considerable attention to the first mission of the Jesuits to England (1580)

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Segregation, accommodation, agreements, pretense: these were the tools of practical toleration in biconfessional communities. They did not depend on the Enlightenment idea that European society had “matured” beyond religious violence. Indeed, as Kaplan reminds us, religious conflicts hardly ended by the eighteenth century. Instead, they depended on a pragmatic realization of the need to contain conflict through coexistence. Kaplan’s masterful account demonstrates that even during a time when religious antagonism remained fierce, people could and did find ways to live together peacefully. Keith P. Luria North Carolina State University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000237

Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570– 1625. By Stefania Tutino. Catholic Christendom, 1300 – 1700. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2007. viii þ 258 pp. $99.95 cloth. To the ever-growing number of publications on the history of Catholics in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, Stefania Tutino has added her study of the evolving understanding of the relationship between English Catholics and the English regime and of their efforts to reconcile political loyalty and religious beliefs. A reader lacking a good general knowledge of the history of English Catholics in their homeland and on the Continent in those years would not be able fully to appreciate the author’s presentation, for she does not attempt to narrate events; she presupposes a familiarity with them. Instead, utilizing both manuscript and contemporary printed sources, she has judiciously collected and analyzed in roughly chronological order opposing texts by Catholics and Protestants and traced the dependence of the latter on the former. Tutino begins by considering the controversy between the imprisoned abbot of Westminster Abbey, John Feckenham, and the bishop of Winchester, Robert Horne, in the 1560s, which was “a juridical dispute over the origin and extent of the temporal sovereign’s power in relation to that of ecclesiastical authority” (13), and then goes on to the response of the Catholic theologian at Louvain, Thomas Stapleton. Immediately after Pope Pius V’s excommunication of Elizabeth (1570), another theologian at Louvain, Nicholas Sander(s), entered the fray, and the Protestant theologian John Bridges replied to him. Thus the doctrinal and theological differences assumed central importance, while the dispute passed from the academic to the public forum. Tutino devotes considerable attention to the first mission of the Jesuits to England (1580)


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and to the publications of one of them, Robert Persons, after he returned to the Continent. However, she is mistaken in asserting that Gregory XIII repeated or reiterated the excommunication in 1580 (20, 111); he reinterpreted the bull and partially suspended it but never reissued it. The more conciliatory Richard Bristow strove to prove that the Catholics’ religion did not interfere with their loyalty in the temporal sphere. Richard Verstegan’s polemic against William Cecil exposes another aspect of the debate within the Catholic camp. Following the interpretation of John Bossy, Tutino dwells on the division between the archpriest with his Jesuit and secular supporters and the other secular clergy called Appellants. She shows how the contribution of the English Benedictines to the discussion fostered the search for an alternative to Persons’s strategy. The accession of James I to the throne of England opened a new chapter in the relations of the Catholics to the civil power. Tutino analyzes the king’s thought on the subject and in this connection the manuscript letters of the Jesuit lay brother Thomas Pounde on the one hand and, at much greater length, the strongly anti-Catholic book of Andrew Willet on the other. Tutino has chosen Thomas Egerton Lord Ellesmere to illustrate the complex nature of James’s early religious policy. The Jacobean Oath of Allegiance, which was to be the long-term response to the Gunpowder Plot, changed the ways the English Catholics understood parts of their past and present and provoked the hostile pamphlets of Robert Cecil and the Calvinist bishop Thomas Morton. She does not share the opinion of Michael Questier that the purpose of the oath was to wipe out Catholicism. The Archpriest George Blackwell’s acceptance of the oath, which Pope Paul V had condemned, brought Cardinal Robert Bellarmine into the debate, which was focused on the papal potestas indirecta. Tutino scrutinizes the responses of Francis Bunny and Matthew Sutcliffe to the Italian Jesuit prelate and then takes up the further duel between James and Bellarmine. In the last two chapters Tutino traces the changes in the political and theological debates caused by the oath. First she uses the writings of Lancelot Andrewes and Andrew Willet against Bellarmine to demonstrate the change in the political debate from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century as both the cardinal and the king championed the control of the jurisdiction of bodies through the jurisdiction of souls or consciences. Next she studies at length a treatise of the Scottish Catholic jurist William Barclay, who also disagreed with Bellarmine’s thesis, and finally she summarizes the writings of another Catholic, Thomas Fitzherbert, who opposed the separation of temporal government from religion in contrast to the Politiques and upheld the inadmissibility of the oath against the Benedictine Thomas Preston (alias Roger Widdrington). To understand the religious issues raised by the oath, Tutino examines treatises of two Catholics, Matthew Kellison and James

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Anderton, who were influenced by the new political situation in their views of the nature of Catholic orthodoxy. As a counterweight to them, Tutino selects another work of the staunchly intolerant Sutcliffe and one by the Calvinist theologian John White. She studies her final pair of adversaries, the Catholic physician Matthew Pattenson and the bishop of Norwich, Richard Montagu, in the light of the Synod of Dort. She concludes that between 1570 and 1625 Catholic thought was modified from theological, political, and historical standpoints until it “could adapt to the new context the Church of Rome’s prerogative to be a catholic church,” and she considers Bellarmine’s theory of indirecta potestas papalis in temporalibus “one of the most coherent and influential attempts to provide a solution to this question” (223). The book contains a fourteen-page bibliography of secondary literature, which is abundantly cited in the footnotes. There are numerous typographical errors, not all of which are immediately obvious (for example, “Philip II” for Philip III, 87, and in the index). The author often does not translate brief Latin phrases, but when she quotes longer excerpts in the footnotes and gives a translation in the body, she has not avoided errors and perhaps omissions of words in the transcriptions and inaccuracies in the translations (that is, “vindicet” does not mean “vindicates” but rather “avenges” or “makes compensation for,” 173 and n. 49). Her literary style is characterized by long and involved sentences, the meaning of which is not always evident at first reading. Nevertheless, it is worth the reader’s effort to grasp the rich content of this original study. Robert Trisco The Catholic University of America

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000249

Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents. By James Simpson. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. xiv þ 349 pp. $27.95 cloth. James Simpson has an ax to grind. His ax is sharp and his blows are relentless against the cultural textus receptus. Conventional wisdom argues that the liberal cultural tradition is greatly indebted to the Protestant Reformation for initiating a reading culture. Protestant insistence on vernacular Bible translation (even to the point of martyrdom, thus the title) generated a sea change from the unwritten tradition to the centrality of the text as the source of authority. Opponents of the Reformation, both religious and secular, may disagree vehemently with the theology, but they are nonetheless beneficiaries of a

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Anderton, who were influenced by the new political situation in their views of the nature of Catholic orthodoxy. As a counterweight to them, Tutino selects another work of the staunchly intolerant Sutcliffe and one by the Calvinist theologian John White. She studies her final pair of adversaries, the Catholic physician Matthew Pattenson and the bishop of Norwich, Richard Montagu, in the light of the Synod of Dort. She concludes that between 1570 and 1625 Catholic thought was modified from theological, political, and historical standpoints until it “could adapt to the new context the Church of Rome’s prerogative to be a catholic church,” and she considers Bellarmine’s theory of indirecta potestas papalis in temporalibus “one of the most coherent and influential attempts to provide a solution to this question” (223). The book contains a fourteen-page bibliography of secondary literature, which is abundantly cited in the footnotes. There are numerous typographical errors, not all of which are immediately obvious (for example, “Philip II” for Philip III, 87, and in the index). The author often does not translate brief Latin phrases, but when she quotes longer excerpts in the footnotes and gives a translation in the body, she has not avoided errors and perhaps omissions of words in the transcriptions and inaccuracies in the translations (that is, “vindicet” does not mean “vindicates” but rather “avenges” or “makes compensation for,” 173 and n. 49). Her literary style is characterized by long and involved sentences, the meaning of which is not always evident at first reading. Nevertheless, it is worth the reader’s effort to grasp the rich content of this original study. Robert Trisco The Catholic University of America

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000249

Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents. By James Simpson. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. xiv þ 349 pp. $27.95 cloth. James Simpson has an ax to grind. His ax is sharp and his blows are relentless against the cultural textus receptus. Conventional wisdom argues that the liberal cultural tradition is greatly indebted to the Protestant Reformation for initiating a reading culture. Protestant insistence on vernacular Bible translation (even to the point of martyrdom, thus the title) generated a sea change from the unwritten tradition to the centrality of the text as the source of authority. Opponents of the Reformation, both religious and secular, may disagree vehemently with the theology, but they are nonetheless beneficiaries of a


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culture that began with the sixteenth-century Reformers. The Reformers unwittingly planted the seed that eventually flowered in the Enlightenment. Lutheranism promoted the individual over the power of the institution. Widespread literacy resulted. The foundation of modernity rests on the survival of individual conscience and liberty grounded in unfettered reading. This conventional wisdom, Simpson claims, is all so much sophomoric bunk. It is in fact 180 degrees out of phase. A literalist reading of 2 Kings by William Tyndale and John Foxe, who found parallels between King Josiah and boy King Edward VI, contributed to 200 years of violence in Western Europe, according to Simpson. This, he argues, is not the fruit of the liberal tradition but the fruit of the fundamentalist womb. Simpson argues that the liberal tradition needs to search for its real parents. The legitimate offspring of sixteenth-century literalism is violent, authoritarian fundamentalism, not the liberal tradition. For Simpson, the legitimate offspring of this literalist Bible-reading tradition are in fact cultural bastards. Generally speaking, the more provocative the thesis, the better the book. Simpson delivers admirably on this score. Whether he defends the thesis in a convincing way is quite another matter. It is a tour de force as an interdisciplinary essay touching on history, historiography, philology, theology, and hermeneutics. No doubt, scholars in each of these fields will want to have a go at Simpson where they see him especially vulnerable. The book is great fodder for scholars who will both hate him and love him. In the end his critique is more provocative than his solution. He provides few clues to help the liberal tradition actually find its true birth parents. Readers of Church History drawn to the book by its title will quickly find it is not a narrative of the Reformation, English or otherwise. Simpson believes Protestantism has enjoyed a cultural hegemony that is unwarranted. He wants to balance the score somewhat, though he despairs of persuading “the fundamentalist of the error of literalist reading” (7– 8). Simpson adds his voice to the growing body of revisionist scholarship, joining John Scarisbrick, Christopher Haigh, Eamon Duffy, and many others. Simpson’s contribution is to correct the historiographical course beginning with literacy. He gently chides his fellow revisionists for their failure to address literacy and Bible reading. Simpson saves his most vicious backhand for Shakespeare scholar David Daniell. Daniell’s admirable scholarship promotes English Bible translator William Tyndale as the source for modern liberty and freedom “in the face of tyranny” (28). This is too much for Simpson! Daniell is an “imperialist,” “ignorant of the history of language” who makes “elementary errors” and “silly claims” (28, 117 –118). The fundamental disagreement between professors Simpson and Daniell is hermeneutical. Simpson built his work around a series of paradoxes that the evangelical reader (that is, a literalist) must inevitably face. Simpson argues

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passionately for a figural hermeneutic. He considers a literal interpretation of the biblical text the scientific equivalent of a flat-earth perspective. Furthermore, evangelicals who bought into literalism suffer an untold number of maladies. A literalist understanding of predestination left Bible readers uncertain of their own status or plight. They believed the true meaning of the text was written on the heart of the elect. For all their rejection of the institutional church as the official interpreter of scripture, evangelicals were forced to admit another institutional authority: the truth written on the heart. Lack of personal assurance of salvation thus left the evangelical unsure where he or she stood, searching frantically for signs of divine election by a capricious God. Often, the suffering and persecution of the evangelical served as signs of election. Paranoia, Simpson tells us, “is the predictable characteristic of a literalist culture” (143). Evangelicals suffer an “intense experience of abjection,” a feeling of “worthlessness,” “anxiety,” “self-loathing” “persecution,” and “paranoia” (29, 69– 70, 90, 106, 140ff.). According to Simpson the evangelical victim must hate scripture in order to love it and is traumatized by predestination because he or she cannot placate an angry God. Literalists who in times of trouble identify with the Psalmist will “hear voices” and “feel cut off,” “isolated,” and “betrayed by enemies” (143). Simpson argues that the heroic men who risked and gave their lives for vernacular translation suffered these additional internal traumas because they found parallels in scripture through a literalist reading of the text. At this point, the reader may be confused. Is this an accurate portrayal of evangelicals in the sixteenth century? The author must perform some highly selective cherry picking from history to make such a claim. Throughout the book, Simpson wants to validate, or rails at the injustice of, a God who rejects good works. He agrees with his hero Thomas More’s assessment of predestination. For Simpson, predestination makes “a cruel and sadistic tyrant of God and produces a Kafkaesque world of tormented uncertainty for readers” (253). This point of view reflects the understanding of someone who argues relentlessly for works righteousness rather than grace. For all his defense of church councils and church tradition, Simpson surely knows that the semi-Pelagianism he promotes was rejected at the second Synod of Orange in 529 A.D. His basic arguments here echo those of Erasmus in De Libero arbitrio that are answered in Luther’s De Servo arbitrio. Erasmus claimed ignorance regarding the Synod of Orange. Simpson’s most serious weakness is his portrayal of a literalist hermeneutic. It is true that Luther largely rejected the medieval fourfold sense of interpretation for the sensus literalis. Luther, however, recognized that the Bible contained typology, figures of speech, symbolism, and allegory. Simpson insists on forcing the straitjacket of Deuteronomy 4 and 12 on all Protestant Reformers as if it provided the key to unlocking the Bible.

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The Deuteronomy passages warn of the dangers of adding to or taking anything away from scripture. A literalist reading of Deuteronomy creates manifold problems for the evangelical interpreter. The fourfold scheme did not entirely disappear, however, in Luther’s literal-prophetic hermeneutic. In his 1519 lectures on Galatians, Luther acknowledged the limited value of the fourfold sense. Furthermore, his lectures on Isaiah and Genesis reveal extensive use of allegory as he applied the message of the Old Testament to his own day. Simpson acknowledges that Tyndale resorted to allegory on occasion but interpreted it merely as a “waste-disposal” technique of evangelicals (211). How, Simpson wonders, can you hold to a literalist reading of an Old Testament text that commands the follower of God to wipe out completely the Canaanites, Jebusites, Hevites, et cetera? Where, he wonders, could you actually find a Hevite in England in the sixteenth century? His tongue-incheek question would be a good one if it were not so silly. Evangelicals, Simpson argues, suffered a “tortured reading of the Old Testament” where nothing could be added or subtracted (220). Furthermore, the specific requirements of the faithful follower of God in the Old Testament suggest a confidence in (good) works. Simpson’s own portrayal of a literalist hermeneutic is the proverbial straw man. The Old Testament sacrificial system looked forward to the coming of the Messiah, the perfect Lamb of God whose own sacrifice fulfills the demands and eliminates the need for further animal sacrifice. Simpson wants to lock the literalist into a hermeneutic that denies any development or progressive revelation between the Old and New Covenant. Every important book is measured by the enduring conversation it generates. The conversation will not only continue from this book; I suspect listeners will hear the shouts from long distances. We thus thank Professor Simpson for picking the fight. Let the conversation, the cheering, the muttering, the whining, whimpering, and shouting begin! Dale Walden Johnson Erskine Theological Seminary

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000250

English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology. By Jonathan D. Moore. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2007. xx þ 306 pp. $36.00 paper. John Preston was a person of influence at the court of James I as a chaplain to Prince Charles and on those of Puritan sympathies as master of Emmanuel

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The Deuteronomy passages warn of the dangers of adding to or taking anything away from scripture. A literalist reading of Deuteronomy creates manifold problems for the evangelical interpreter. The fourfold scheme did not entirely disappear, however, in Luther’s literal-prophetic hermeneutic. In his 1519 lectures on Galatians, Luther acknowledged the limited value of the fourfold sense. Furthermore, his lectures on Isaiah and Genesis reveal extensive use of allegory as he applied the message of the Old Testament to his own day. Simpson acknowledges that Tyndale resorted to allegory on occasion but interpreted it merely as a “waste-disposal” technique of evangelicals (211). How, Simpson wonders, can you hold to a literalist reading of an Old Testament text that commands the follower of God to wipe out completely the Canaanites, Jebusites, Hevites, et cetera? Where, he wonders, could you actually find a Hevite in England in the sixteenth century? His tongue-incheek question would be a good one if it were not so silly. Evangelicals, Simpson argues, suffered a “tortured reading of the Old Testament” where nothing could be added or subtracted (220). Furthermore, the specific requirements of the faithful follower of God in the Old Testament suggest a confidence in (good) works. Simpson’s own portrayal of a literalist hermeneutic is the proverbial straw man. The Old Testament sacrificial system looked forward to the coming of the Messiah, the perfect Lamb of God whose own sacrifice fulfills the demands and eliminates the need for further animal sacrifice. Simpson wants to lock the literalist into a hermeneutic that denies any development or progressive revelation between the Old and New Covenant. Every important book is measured by the enduring conversation it generates. The conversation will not only continue from this book; I suspect listeners will hear the shouts from long distances. We thus thank Professor Simpson for picking the fight. Let the conversation, the cheering, the muttering, the whining, whimpering, and shouting begin! Dale Walden Johnson Erskine Theological Seminary

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000250

English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology. By Jonathan D. Moore. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2007. xx þ 306 pp. $36.00 paper. John Preston was a person of influence at the court of James I as a chaplain to Prince Charles and on those of Puritan sympathies as master of Emmanuel

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College, Cambridge. Many books during the past generation have broadly redrawn the picture of the ecclesiastical and theological life of late Elizabethan and early Stuart England, and yet, in spite of his importance, there has not been a narrowly focused monograph on the career, theology, and significance of John Preston in the light of that scholarship. Jonathan Moore has filled this gap in the four sections of this book, which take up Preston’s life, theological heritage, theological reformulations, and the sources of those reformulations. In the process Moore seeks to establish a number of points, beginning with the centrality of the high Calvinism of William Perkins in the late Elizabethan Church of England. Perkins’s supralapsarian and atonement-limiting version of Reformed theology, which Moore dubs “strict Elizabethan particularism” (68), led Perkins to deny that the call of the gospel for sinners to believe implied that God desired to save the reprobate. Preston, often taken as a follower of Perkins, is shown by Moore to have developed a “low” infralapsarian Calvinism featuring a universal gospel call and promise grounded in an English version of hypothetical universalism that made possible a sincere offer of salvation to the reprobate. For Preston, the atonement was universal, while Christ’s priestly work of intercession was only for the elect; this entailed for Preston a covenant that was in one respect conditional and in another respect unconditional. Moore also argues that it was his familiarity with medieval scholastic method and terminology that enabled Preston to carry out this softening of Calvinism, turning the tables on the argument that Reformed scholasticism was necessarily a factor in hardening that theology. Moore further maintains that Preston’s hypothetical universalism was unrelated to the apparently similar theological moves of the Huguenot theologian Moise Amyraux and his mentor John Cameron, which Moore sees as a more radical revision of particular redemption than Preston’s insofar as it depended on reordering the eternal decree of redemption to make election follow the decree of the atonement. Instead, Moore claims that Preston’s version of hypothetical universalism came from his contacts with two prominent Calvinist bishops of the Irish and English established churches, James Ussher and John Davenant, both of whom earlier laid out some of the formulations concerning covenant, gospel call, and atonement taken up by Preston. Richard Baxter claimed that his version of hypothetical universalism was supported by both Preston and Amyraux; Moore thinks Baxter failed to recognize the differences between the Amyraldian and English versions of hypothetical universalism. These conclusions become ecclesiastically significant when Moore shows that the position argued by the English delegates at the Synod of Dort, including Davenant and Samuel Ward, reflected this English hypothetical universalism as did Preston’s performance at the York House Conference


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in 1629. Contrary to the standard view that Preston at York House was an unyielding high Calvinist, he probably disappointed some of his high Calvinist and political Puritan patrons such as Lord Say and Sele by his reticence and caution there. This leads to the further point that while there was a firm opposition by Reformed thinkers, including Preston, to Arminianism, there was a willingness on the part of some, again including Preston, to make adjustments at those points where there was the greatest vulnerability to Arminian critique, such as limited atonement and the genuineness of the gospel call. For Preston, and certainly for Davenant and Ussher, this was important as a way to strive for some unity in the Church of England without succumbing to outright anti-Calvinism (136). Thus resolutely anti-Arminian the Reformed may have been, but there was also variety in the Reformed response to the Arminian challenge. Finally, Moore turns his argument against the view that the later Calvinists departed from Calvin on the atonement—if Calvin did not teach a strictly limited atonement, as is arguable, then later Calvinists like Preston, far from departing from Calvin, returned to him after a Perkinsian detour. And if Calvin is understood as teaching limited atonement, then Preston softened Calvin’s version of Reformed theology. Moore does not think this altered picture compromises the conclusion that the Jacobean Church of England was committed to Reformed theology, but it does add complexity to that picture. With his close reading of the relevant sources, Moore has made a convincing case for these conclusions and the revisions that they entail for understanding Preston and his theological and ecclesiastical world. But some reflections, reservations, and caveats are in order. A reflection: though not intended, the author’s treatment of Perkins’s fine-tuned arguments will for some readers make that theologian’s views appear, in the light of the gospel message he intended to advance, somewhat appalling. And perhaps surprisingly, even Preston’s moderating modifications of Perkins come across as hairsplitting, though in both cases there is evidence of the precision with which they strove to carry on their theological work. A caveat: sometimes Moore’s tone seems more dismissive and polemical toward other views than is necessary to establish his argument. A reservation: I cannot agree that “the Thirty-Nine Articles did not clinch the victory for the English reformation” (143); their openings to Lutheran adiaphorism and predestinarian moderation perhaps meant that they failed to clinch the victory for anti-Arminian Reformed theology, but the Protestantism of the Articles was uncompromising. Finally, a further word about outcomes would have been interesting: while hints from Baxter in relation to Preston are followed up by the author, something might have been suggested about Preston, Davenant, and Ussher as part of a trajectory leading to the moderate Calvinism of others besides Baxter as time

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went on. But it is clear that Moore has made a significant and important contribution to our understanding of Preston and English Calvinism in the first half of the seventeenth century. Dewey D. Wallace, Jr. George Washington University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000262

The Reconstruction of the Church of Ireland: Bishop Bramhall and the Laudian Reforms, 1633 –1641. By John McCafferty. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xiv þ 275 pp. $99.00 cloth. This study of the attempt by William Laud, Thomas Wentworth, and John Bramhall to “reconstruct” the Church of Ireland during the 1630s adds new and useful perspectives to the longstanding historical debates over the ecclesiastical history of Charles I’s Personal Rule. Arguing that this reconstruction effort failed “because it was a variant of the reconstruction of the Church of England” (223), McCafferty examines not simply the issues of Laudianism-versus-puritanism and Protestantism-versus-recusancy but also Irish ecclesiastical independence versus congruity with the Church of England, church property resumption versus lay attempts to keep impropriations, and local independence versus central control. Readers may at times be confused when McCafferty jumbles these issues together, but they are inherently difficult to disentangle. One should read the concluding summary in chapter 7 before starting the book. Arguing that the reconstruction effort “can only really be judged in the context of that decade” (152), McCafferty defends the logic behind that effort while showing that, though Bramhall, Wentworth, and Laud were effective in carrying it out, they alienated powerful lay and clerical interests with their overdependence on prerogative, their strategy of putting off the problem of recusancy while reconstruction proceeded, and their inability to see many of the difficulties in “Anglicizing” the Irish Church. Wentworth’s hard-working “plenipotentiary,” Bishop John Bramhall of Derry, often comes across as more pragmatic than the deputy but as one whose effectiveness depended on the latter’s power, and who, for all his political skill, possessed the same weaknesses of judgment. By concentrating on this earlier and more administrative stage of Bramhall’s career, McCafferty’s book complements Jack Cunningham’s James Ussher and John Bramhall (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2007) and Nicholas D. Jackson’s Hobbes, Bramhall, and the

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went on. But it is clear that Moore has made a significant and important contribution to our understanding of Preston and English Calvinism in the first half of the seventeenth century. Dewey D. Wallace, Jr. George Washington University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000262

The Reconstruction of the Church of Ireland: Bishop Bramhall and the Laudian Reforms, 1633 –1641. By John McCafferty. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xiv þ 275 pp. $99.00 cloth. This study of the attempt by William Laud, Thomas Wentworth, and John Bramhall to “reconstruct” the Church of Ireland during the 1630s adds new and useful perspectives to the longstanding historical debates over the ecclesiastical history of Charles I’s Personal Rule. Arguing that this reconstruction effort failed “because it was a variant of the reconstruction of the Church of England” (223), McCafferty examines not simply the issues of Laudianism-versus-puritanism and Protestantism-versus-recusancy but also Irish ecclesiastical independence versus congruity with the Church of England, church property resumption versus lay attempts to keep impropriations, and local independence versus central control. Readers may at times be confused when McCafferty jumbles these issues together, but they are inherently difficult to disentangle. One should read the concluding summary in chapter 7 before starting the book. Arguing that the reconstruction effort “can only really be judged in the context of that decade” (152), McCafferty defends the logic behind that effort while showing that, though Bramhall, Wentworth, and Laud were effective in carrying it out, they alienated powerful lay and clerical interests with their overdependence on prerogative, their strategy of putting off the problem of recusancy while reconstruction proceeded, and their inability to see many of the difficulties in “Anglicizing” the Irish Church. Wentworth’s hard-working “plenipotentiary,” Bishop John Bramhall of Derry, often comes across as more pragmatic than the deputy but as one whose effectiveness depended on the latter’s power, and who, for all his political skill, possessed the same weaknesses of judgment. By concentrating on this earlier and more administrative stage of Bramhall’s career, McCafferty’s book complements Jack Cunningham’s James Ussher and John Bramhall (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2007) and Nicholas D. Jackson’s Hobbes, Bramhall, and the


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Politics of Liberty and Necessity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). The book’s most valuable contribution is its detailed analysis of the cooperation between Bramhall, Wentworth, and Laud as seen in their 1630s correspondence. It is doubtful that McCafferty has missed any extant letters in his examination of collections at Dublin, Belfast, Edinburgh, London, Oxford, Cambridge, Sheffield, and the Huntingdon Library, together with the published collections of works by these men and other figures such as James Ussher. Similarly exhaustive is McCafferty’s use of act books, state papers, visitation records, parliamentary accounts, and convocation records. He is meticulous in his interpretation of documents, frequently noting when there is a paucity of extant records. He uses more than 70 seventeenth-century tracts and more than 400 secondary sources, including recent work by Nicholas Canny, Aidan Clarke, Kenneth Fincham, Alan Ford, Felicity Heal, Brian Jackson, Colm Lennon, Patrick Little, Anthony Milton, Jane Ohlmeyer, Clodagh Tait, and Nicholas Tyacke. In the first chapter McCafferty explains that the Old English and Gaelic Irish were still solidly Catholic in the early seventeenth century because the very conditions that had worked for Protestant reformation in England worked against it in Ireland. In the second chapter he concludes that, prior to the arrival of Wentworth and Bramhall in 1633, there were reform plans aplenty for the Church of Ireland, but consistent application was lacking. This chapter continues with a brief biography of Bramhall and a description of his and Wentworth’s efforts to restore impropriations and church property through high-profile prosecutions. The third chapter compares the canons produced by the 1634 Irish convocation with English canons and articles, and also with the Irish convocation articles of 1613 – 1615. In this chapter especially the writing style can be unclear, and McCafferty’s themes occasionally lack coherency amid the mass of detail, but there are many issues to weave together. We see the differences with Archbishop James Ussher primarily through Bramhall’s perspective, with the Primate often appearing jealous of his prerogatives. McCafferty does well, however, to counter the traditional view of Ussher as an otherworldly scholar and ecumenist by showing him as a Jacobean churchman with a limited willingness to overlook nonconformity and as a politician capable of looking after his own interests. For a more sympathetic and nuanced view of Ussher vis-a`-vis Bramhall, see Jack Cunningham’s abovementioned James Ussher and John Bramhall. In chapters 4 and 5 McCafferty examines the Bramhall-Wentworth effort to reform Irish ecclesiastical jurisdiction and rejects many of the negative, post1640 views of that effort. A strong clericalist, Bramhall nevertheless sought

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to restrict some episcopal powers in order to eliminate ecclesiastical court abuses and to prevent bishops from alienating episcopal property. Far from being originally designed to suppress puritan nonconformity, the Irish High Commission was intended to assist with all of the moral, legal, and economic parts of reconstruction and also to “bring recusants into line with the official church courts” (158– 159). Although the policy toward recusants and the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Ireland was one of tactical toleration until the Church of Ireland could be reconstructed, Wentworth and Bramhall were willing to foment division among the Catholics and seize their financial resources (174 – 175). The nonconformist myth of a puritan-friendly Ulster Church of Ireland “strangled” by the 1634 convocation and Wentworth’s Black Oath founders upon closer examination, with McCafferty suggesting that no Church of Ireland bishop of any stripe was willing to permit preaching against the Church’s “English constitution or its [Prayer] book” (181, 185). Bramhall’s association of puritan nonconformity with the plundering of church property, however, together with his failure to see puritan opposition as heartfelt or principled, led to overconfidence and stubbornness (187 – 188, 194, 197). Chapter 6 is a detailed narrative of the dismantling of the reconstruction program in 1640 – 1641, as opponents simultaneously complained that promised reforms had not been made and that the methods used to implement reforms had been arbitrary and tyrannical. For McCafferty this dismantling owed much to the economic interests of the Irish Protestant gentry and to the personal and structural weaknesses of the Bramhall-Wentworth team, but there is also a sense of the injustice with which opponents misunderstood or misrepresented these men’s goals, some of which, under different circumstances, would have had puritan support. William M. Abbott Fairfield University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000274

Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, AntiChristianity, and the Danka System. By Nam-lin Hur. Harvard East Asian Monographs 282. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007. xvi þ 566 pp. $55.00 cloth. In Tokugawa Japan (1600 – 1868), Buddhism held an anomalous position. It was not formally a state religion, it played no part in government rituals, and

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to restrict some episcopal powers in order to eliminate ecclesiastical court abuses and to prevent bishops from alienating episcopal property. Far from being originally designed to suppress puritan nonconformity, the Irish High Commission was intended to assist with all of the moral, legal, and economic parts of reconstruction and also to “bring recusants into line with the official church courts” (158– 159). Although the policy toward recusants and the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Ireland was one of tactical toleration until the Church of Ireland could be reconstructed, Wentworth and Bramhall were willing to foment division among the Catholics and seize their financial resources (174 – 175). The nonconformist myth of a puritan-friendly Ulster Church of Ireland “strangled” by the 1634 convocation and Wentworth’s Black Oath founders upon closer examination, with McCafferty suggesting that no Church of Ireland bishop of any stripe was willing to permit preaching against the Church’s “English constitution or its [Prayer] book” (181, 185). Bramhall’s association of puritan nonconformity with the plundering of church property, however, together with his failure to see puritan opposition as heartfelt or principled, led to overconfidence and stubbornness (187 – 188, 194, 197). Chapter 6 is a detailed narrative of the dismantling of the reconstruction program in 1640 – 1641, as opponents simultaneously complained that promised reforms had not been made and that the methods used to implement reforms had been arbitrary and tyrannical. For McCafferty this dismantling owed much to the economic interests of the Irish Protestant gentry and to the personal and structural weaknesses of the Bramhall-Wentworth team, but there is also a sense of the injustice with which opponents misunderstood or misrepresented these men’s goals, some of which, under different circumstances, would have had puritan support. William M. Abbott Fairfield University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000274

Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, AntiChristianity, and the Danka System. By Nam-lin Hur. Harvard East Asian Monographs 282. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007. xvi þ 566 pp. $55.00 cloth. In Tokugawa Japan (1600 – 1868), Buddhism held an anomalous position. It was not formally a state religion, it played no part in government rituals, and


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the Tokugawa government seems to have been little influenced by Buddhist principles. Yet all families were required by law to be registered in a Buddhist temple, and everyone was buried in a Buddhist funeral. Fees for these services, institutionalized in the danka system of “the funerary patron household or individual who supports a temple,” were in fact the main source of income for Buddhist temples. This practice directly resulted from the anti-Christian policies of the Tokugawa regime, which required Japanese to be certified by a temple to prove they were not secret Christians. As Namlin Hur demonstrates in Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan, the danka system’s “economy of death” met the needs of both the government and the Buddhist establishment. Hur, a historian at the University of British Columbia, examines several major themes: how the government utilized Buddhist institutions for the suppression of Christianity, leading to the development of the danka system; how the system transformed Japanese religious practice by making funerals and ancestral rituals Buddhist in character; and how under the danka system “the paradigm of Japanese Buddhist death was imposed, contested, and negotiated among the danna [alms-giving] households, Buddhist temples, and the state—a process that eventually resulted in the backlash of the Shinto funeral movement” (28). The danka system originated in the evolving policies of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa shogun, and his predecessors and successors, toward Christianity. Despite an early tolerance of Christianity motivated by the desire for western trade, by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Japan’s rulers became increasingly concerned that Japan’s political and religious order, based on a synthesis of Shinto and Buddhism, was incompatible with Christianity. The new religion, inseparable from Spanish and Portuguese expansion, had no place in Japan, the “land of the gods” and “the country of Buddha.” After the consolidation of the Tokugawa shogunate in the early seventeenth century, Japan expelled foreign clergy and eventually all Spanish and Portuguese merchants as well. Authorities forced the apostasy of most Japanese Christians and even some European missionaries, although tens of thousands of Kakure Kirishitan (hidden Christians) practiced their religion clandestinely. Korobi Kirishitan—literally “turned-over Christians”—swore oaths, ironically in the name of God and Mary, to renounce their faith. Anti-Christian writings, such as Hayashi Razan’s Hai Yaso (Rejecting Jesus), provided intellectual support to the campaign against Christianity. Inoue Masahige, an official immortalized as the antagonist of Endo Shusaku’s novel Silence, was particularly effective in using persuasion as well as coercion in suppressing Christianity. (Readers of the novel will be surprised to learn from Hur’s book that Inoue was eventually dismissed for “being senile,” for being in fact too soft on Christians.)

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Certification by Buddhist temples eventually became the centerpiece of government policies toward Christianity. This policy greatly augmented the power of the central government. The task of suppressing the religion resulted in bringing the formerly autonomous feudal domains and their rulers more directly under the control of the shogunate. Moreover, turning Buddhist temples into instruments of social control brought them, too, more directly under government regulation. At the same time, the privileges won by Buddhist temples ensured them an income and “often spawned spoilage, corruption, and even exploitation” (88). Decades ago, George Elison (Jurgis Elisonas) described the anti-Christian cultural milieu of the early Tokugawa era in Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973). Japanese scholars such as Miyazaki Kentaro and Shimizu Hirokazu, among others, have examined the underground Kakure Kirishitan. Tamamura Fumio, one of Hur’s mentors, pioneered in the study of funerary Buddhism in the Tokugawa era. Hur’s thoroughly researched work, including over 150 pages of reference matter (notes, bibliography, and glossary of Japanese characters), builds on these earlier studies. He places the Tokugawa regime’s anti-Christian policies in the context of Tokugawa Buddhism in both its institutions and its practices. Moreover, as Hur demonstrates, the campaign against Christianity—which by the eighteenth century was not even a negligible threat to the political and religious order—was central to the government’s expansion of power. The suppression of Christianity, “subjugating the entire populace to Buddhist death,” provided a pretext for social control. Indeed, Hur writes, “Anti-Christianity was the cornerstone of Tokugawa Japan’s statehood” (364). Hur also argues convincingly that Buddhist funerary services and ancestral veneration reinforced the household as the basis of the Tokugawa social order. Moreover, Buddhism offered “peace in this world” and “a good place in the next life” in a way that Christianity might have but Shinto and Confucianism could not. But the danka system also shaped Tokugawa Buddhism by emphasizing its social and familial role over individual devotion and morality. This in part explains the state-sponsored shift toward Shinto in the late nineteenth century. But, as Hur shows, Tokugawa funerary Buddhism was absorbed into the “family state” ideology of Meiji Japan. This tradition, originating in the early Tokugawa attempt to eliminate Christianity, continues to be central to Japanese religious practice.

Robert Entenmann St. Olaf College


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doi:10.1017/S0009640709000286

Last Witnesses: The Muggletonian History, 1652 – 1979. By William Lamont. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2006. xvi þ 271 pp. $99.95 cloth. In this handsomely published (though pricey to North American readers) and richly illustrated volume, the Muggletonians, a little-known religious sect with origins in seventeenth-century England, reappear. Muggletonians were followers of Lodowick Muggleton (1609 – 1698) and John Reeve (1608 – 1658), millenarian writers who spawned a religious movement that survived down to 1979 when the last of the sect, Philip Noakes, died. Their teachings have now taken on a new life through 89 volumes of archives material discovered on Noakes’s farm in Kent and transferred to the British Library. In recent historiography, Christopher Hill and other seventeenth-century specialists had known and written about them; Michael Watts, Richard Greaves, and Patrick Collinson all catalogued them in their treatments of the various sects comprising “dissent”; T. L. Underwood produced an edition of Muggleton’s memoirs that I have found a useful reference tool, and now William Lamont has brought them into focus in his “horizontal history” that shows much admiration for the work of Christopher Hill. In six illuminating chapters, Lamont brings the Muggletonians out of their archive and into a “proper” historical context. Initially, Muggletonianism is characterized in seventeen assertions encompassing pacifism, new interpretations of hell, angels, the Elect, and the Serpent, a new form of dispensations, a vehement anticlericalism, and a redrawn eschatology that emphasized mortalism. In another chapter the author draws a contrast with Quakers, who held to a different morphology of conversion and believed in the immortality of the soul. Lamont even goes so far as to accuse those who previously thought of Muggletonians as a form of Quakerism of intellectual laziness. John Reeve’s writings do reveal a kind of Quakerish religious enthusiasm and proselytizing, but there was a distinct difference between the Quakers’ “inner light” and the Muggletonians’ “spiritual light.” The chief theological contribution of the Muggletonians was the reinterpretation of the Apocalypse—namely that John Reeve and Lodovick Muggleton were the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11. The Two Witnesses announced the advent of a “Third Commission,” that of the Spirit, which was derived from the Apocalypse. This commission (a type of dispensation) followed the earlier “commissions” given to Moses in the Law and the Apostles in the Gospel. The original vision of the Two Witnesses conveyed the impression that the Cromwell Revolution was the establishment of the kingdom of Christ through Christian civil rulers. Here the Muggletonian position follows

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closely those of Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, and some Baptists before 1655. Following the Restoration, however, Muggleton and his following were left to reinterpret events in increasingly disjointed ways, ultimately teaching that the end of the world was a long time off. In the 1660s the Muggletonians were deeply divided internally; when Lodowick died at the end of the seventeenth century, his mantle fell to Thomas Tompkinson, who busied himself with attacking false Christians, the National Church, witchcraft, and Calvinists. A succession of others followed. Noteworthy were William Cates and Thomas Robinson in the Victorian era, who were renowned for their opposition to public worship and their belief that prayer was futile. In the late 1860s there was a notable shift in the Muggletonian movement in that outsiders became part of the narrative. The brothers William and Isaac Frost widely published the writings of the Witnesses beyond the group itself. Outstanding among the new devotees was Alexander Gordon, a Unitarian historian who defined the Muggletonians for the British Dictionary of National Biography. Lamont argues finally that two world wars and inadequate hermeneutics cost the sect its last chance in the twentieth century. By the 1950s there was more interest in the Old Muggletonians than in the surviving members. Although the narrative suffers at points from mild turgidity and overindulgence in references to historical colleagues, which is not enabled by an adequate subject reference index, this foray into Muggletonianism is a must-read for several reasons. First, in the archived materials, Muggleton reveals much about the Puritan circles in which he traveled. He exemplified the quiet growth of Puritanism beyond its origins and, as a result, we bump into the likes of Thomas Hobbes, Lawrence Clarkson, John Milton, William Blake, William Penn, Richard Baxter, and even Benjamin Franklin. Second, the role of women in dissent is given new detail, as many of Muggleton’s correspondents were female. Women appear in a variety of circumstances, including the trials of widowhood, needing advice on estate probation, matchmaking, and theological interactions. Third, Lamont warns of the perils suffered by other biblicists in the seventeenth century of taking the Bible too literally and asserts that, with a single bound, the Muggletonians leaped into more imaginative interpretations. While this may be salve for nonfundamentalists, it offers little comfort to serious apocalyptic scholars. Finally, Lamont tells us that Muggletonians were not true millenarians at all, largely because the Two Witnesses did not set specific dates for endtime events and did not seek to evangelize in light of the Second Coming. They were both merely to announce and testify in the sense of prophets. Their following was composed of seeker-disciples who validated their teachings in each generation by publishing their books and commenting on current events. A kind of elite, the Muggletonians yearned to be part of the once and future community that Muggleton and Reeve envisioned. Understanding the

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Muggletonians over the entire course of their history, therefore, helps us to place both Ellen G. White and David Koresh in proper context. That is a significant achievement for a variety of readers. William H. Brackney Acadia Divinity College Acadia University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000298

The Clerical Profession in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1680 – 1840. By W. M. Jacob. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. viii þ 360 pp. $99.00 cloth. It was once customary to describe the Church of England in the eighteenth century as a morass of corruption, indifference, and mediocrity. From Alfred Plummer and Lewis Namier to Christopher Hill and J. H. Plumb, the story was pretty miserable. During the 1980s, such historians as Norman Sykes, Gordon Rupp, Norman Ravitch, and John Pocock accomplished a significant revision that restored some respect to the priests, bishops, and laity of the eighteenth-century church and found far more vitality than earlier critics had ever discovered. Jacob’s thorough and comprehensive study of the clergy of the Church of England from 1680 to 1840 enhances that revisionary turn and depicts an English Church that enjoyed remarkable success in large part because of a conscientious, competent, well-educated clergy. Readers would do well to turn first to the online version of Guglielmo Sanna’s “The Eighteenth Century Church of England in Historical Writing” (http://www. cromohs.unifi.it/seminari/sanna_church.html) in order to grasp the full significance of Jacob’s conclusions in the light of recent historiography. Jacob not only argues that the clergy were the closest group in the eighteenth century to a profession in the modern sense, he also suggests that they enjoyed considerable success in their ecclesiastical, social, and governmental functions, which integrated them at every level of society in leadership positions. They came mostly from the “middling” sort of society, but the status of their work, their relatively high levels of education, and the demand for their services meant that they enjoyed close relations not only with ordinary English people but also with the urban elite and the county gentry. Usually beginning their work as curates, they advanced through a system of preferment and patronage that, for all its faults, “produced able and distinguished” clerics (93). Not all was rosy. Salaries were acceptable but modest, and they usually required pluralism and nonresidence because it often took two or three

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Muggletonians over the entire course of their history, therefore, helps us to place both Ellen G. White and David Koresh in proper context. That is a significant achievement for a variety of readers. William H. Brackney Acadia Divinity College Acadia University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000298

The Clerical Profession in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1680 – 1840. By W. M. Jacob. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. viii þ 360 pp. $99.00 cloth. It was once customary to describe the Church of England in the eighteenth century as a morass of corruption, indifference, and mediocrity. From Alfred Plummer and Lewis Namier to Christopher Hill and J. H. Plumb, the story was pretty miserable. During the 1980s, such historians as Norman Sykes, Gordon Rupp, Norman Ravitch, and John Pocock accomplished a significant revision that restored some respect to the priests, bishops, and laity of the eighteenth-century church and found far more vitality than earlier critics had ever discovered. Jacob’s thorough and comprehensive study of the clergy of the Church of England from 1680 to 1840 enhances that revisionary turn and depicts an English Church that enjoyed remarkable success in large part because of a conscientious, competent, well-educated clergy. Readers would do well to turn first to the online version of Guglielmo Sanna’s “The Eighteenth Century Church of England in Historical Writing” (http://www. cromohs.unifi.it/seminari/sanna_church.html) in order to grasp the full significance of Jacob’s conclusions in the light of recent historiography. Jacob not only argues that the clergy were the closest group in the eighteenth century to a profession in the modern sense, he also suggests that they enjoyed considerable success in their ecclesiastical, social, and governmental functions, which integrated them at every level of society in leadership positions. They came mostly from the “middling” sort of society, but the status of their work, their relatively high levels of education, and the demand for their services meant that they enjoyed close relations not only with ordinary English people but also with the urban elite and the county gentry. Usually beginning their work as curates, they advanced through a system of preferment and patronage that, for all its faults, “produced able and distinguished” clerics (93). Not all was rosy. Salaries were acceptable but modest, and they usually required pluralism and nonresidence because it often took two or three

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parishes to scrape together enough money to sustain a priest and his family. The bishops disliked the pluralism, but the ideal of one resident incumbent in every parish did not flourish until the Victorian era. Clergy made their money from glebe lands, tithes, fees, and patrons, and they often had to endure conflict with tightfisted farmers to get their accustomed pay, but Jacobs does not think that the tithe disputes seriously undermined their position of respect. In their parishes, they had to manage the glebe lands, keep up a modest residence, and carry out a full range of religious functions. They preached, usually twice, on Sundays, and they also had services on other days of the week. The laity demanded frequent preaching and seemed, for the most part, to like what they heard. Clergy led other weekday services, officiated at monthly communion, oversaw festivals and fasts, directed choirs, and performed the conventional rites of passage. They visited parishioners, especially the sick and dying, and they oversaw charity in the parish, often administering the poor laws and acting as bankers for their parishioners. They led religious societies, labored at reconciliation, and performed the functions of magistrates. In addition, they catechized regularly, organized charity schools, oversaw Sunday schools, distributed tracts, and erected libraries. On occasion they misbehaved, but not much and not often. The rates of complaint ranged from 2 percent in some areas to 10 percent in others, figures similar to the findings in the American colonies. But anticlericalism was subdued, and the integration of clergy into the economic and communal life of English society did not represent, Jacobs argues, any secularizing tendency or failure in spirituality. They handled their multiple responsibilities “creatively” (315). The depiction that emerges is close to the account one finds in John K. Nelson’s A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Jacob treats the chronology early and briefly, in his introduction, and then organizes the book topically, with examples illustrating each topic taken from 160 years of history, often juxtaposing events and figures separated from each other by a century or more. A topical approach of this kind can be somewhat static, and the context can fade into the distant background. But the alternative also has its own drawbacks, including the need to return again and again to the same topic in different periods. On balance, I find Jacob’s topical approach more helpful as a means to gather information and insight quickly, even though it loses a little in the way of dramatic effect. The research is impressive. Jacob scoured archives, manuscripts, and hundreds of printed sources. This is now the book to go to in order to learn about the eighteenth-century clergy of the Church of England. It is a superior work of scholarship. E. Brooks Holifield Emory University


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doi:10.1017/S0009640709000304

Anglicanism and the British Empire, c. 1700– 1850. By Rowan Strong. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xii þ 325 pp. $110.00 cloth. This book provides an analysis of Anglican attitudes toward empire, based centrally on printed sources relating to the two major Church of England missionary societies, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), founded in 1701, and the Church Missionary Society (CMS), founded in 1799. There is an initial useful survey of the literature that highlights particularly the relative scholarly neglect hitherto of the SPG during the eighteenth century. Two very long chapters follow, accounting between them for more than half the book. The first discusses Anglican attitudes toward North America in the eighteenth century, drawing particularly on the sequence of annual SPG sermons, and the second examines the development of Church views and policy toward India between 1790 and 1830. A much shorter chapter then describes the establishment of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund in 1840– 1841, and the final main chapter explores the development of Anglicanism in Australia and New Zealand during the first half of the nineteenth century. Strong’s central conclusion is that “there were aspects of a theological construction of empire that persisted throughout the century and a half under investigation” (285). These included a sharp sense of moral and spiritual polarity between Christians and “heathen” (including the adherents of South Asian religions), although it was recognized that degenerate Anglicans among the colonizers could be counterproductive as representatives of Christianity. The acquisition of Britain’s overseas possessions was a mark of divine favor and providential purpose that implied a corresponding national obligation to God to engage in mission to nominal Christians and nonChristians. As the principal state church, the Church of England was primarily responsible for the discharge of that responsibility. Toward the end of Strong’s period, however, the loosening of ties between church and state inherent in the “constitutional revolution” (284) of 1828 – 1832 led to the advocacy of self-governing colonial churches rather than the earlier vision of integrated imperial Anglicanism as the most realistic means to achieving that end. Australia, Strong suggests, was the most important early exemplification of this new paradigm. The book’s limitation to printed and largely metropolitan sources permits clarity of analysis and useful chronological and geographical breadth, but it comes at a price. The views presented are very much those of an official and predominantly episcopal leadership, and there are only limited glimpses of

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the perspectives of rank-and-file supporters in England, or of chaplains and missionaries on the ground in North America, India, and Australasia. While one sympathizes with Strong’s logistical difficulties in carrying out archival research from an institutional base in Perth, Australia, some attention to the rich surviving manuscript records of the SPG and the CMS would have added important nuance to his account. It would also have been helpful to have given more comparative attention to the views on empire of the other missionary societies founded in the 1790s, for example the Baptist Missionary Society and the London Missionary Society, in order to clarify the extent to which the views described were specifically Anglican as opposed to exemplifying a broader British Protestant consensus. There are quite a few factual and typographical errors that, although trivial in themselves, are sufficiently numerous to somewhat weaken confidence in the rigor of the book as a whole. For example, Charles Sumner was bishop of Winchester, not Worcester (136), John Angell James was a Congregationalist, not a Baptist (181), Henry Phillpotts’s name is misspelled (217, 320), and William Van Mildert, described as “young” in 1822 (177), was in fact 57 in that year. Most seriously, Catholic Emancipation and the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts are both misdated and the sequence of events in 1828 to 1832 thus misunderstood (213). There is much that is very worthwhile in this book, particularly in the thorough exposition of SPG attitudes in the eighteenth century, and in the lucid and well-informed account of the early development of Anglicanism in Australasia. Nevertheless, a narrow source base and a degree of carelessness mean that an opportunity to provide a definitive treatment of this important subject has been missed. John Wolffe The Open University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000316

The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. By Thomas S. Kidd. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. xx þ 394 pp. $35.00 cloth. Was there a Great Awakening? Historians of colonial American religion have debated this question for more than twenty-five years, since Jon Butler recommended, in his controversial article “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction,” that the term “Great Awakening” be abandoned because it misrepresents not only the

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the perspectives of rank-and-file supporters in England, or of chaplains and missionaries on the ground in North America, India, and Australasia. While one sympathizes with Strong’s logistical difficulties in carrying out archival research from an institutional base in Perth, Australia, some attention to the rich surviving manuscript records of the SPG and the CMS would have added important nuance to his account. It would also have been helpful to have given more comparative attention to the views on empire of the other missionary societies founded in the 1790s, for example the Baptist Missionary Society and the London Missionary Society, in order to clarify the extent to which the views described were specifically Anglican as opposed to exemplifying a broader British Protestant consensus. There are quite a few factual and typographical errors that, although trivial in themselves, are sufficiently numerous to somewhat weaken confidence in the rigor of the book as a whole. For example, Charles Sumner was bishop of Winchester, not Worcester (136), John Angell James was a Congregationalist, not a Baptist (181), Henry Phillpotts’s name is misspelled (217, 320), and William Van Mildert, described as “young” in 1822 (177), was in fact 57 in that year. Most seriously, Catholic Emancipation and the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts are both misdated and the sequence of events in 1828 to 1832 thus misunderstood (213). There is much that is very worthwhile in this book, particularly in the thorough exposition of SPG attitudes in the eighteenth century, and in the lucid and well-informed account of the early development of Anglicanism in Australasia. Nevertheless, a narrow source base and a degree of carelessness mean that an opportunity to provide a definitive treatment of this important subject has been missed. John Wolffe The Open University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000316

The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. By Thomas S. Kidd. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. xx þ 394 pp. $35.00 cloth. Was there a Great Awakening? Historians of colonial American religion have debated this question for more than twenty-five years, since Jon Butler recommended, in his controversial article “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction,” that the term “Great Awakening” be abandoned because it misrepresents not only the


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extent of the revivals but also their explanatory power (Journal of American History 69:2 [September 1982]: 322). As the title of Thomas Kidd’s new book illustrates, however, this recommendation has not received universal support. Maintaining that “there actually was a Great Awakening in the eighteenth century,” Kidd rejects Butler’s argument on its face (xviii). In narrating the history of the eighteenth-century revivals, however, Kidd only rarely engages Butler’s thesis or the arguments of subsequent historians, like Joseph Conforti and Frank Lambert, who also view the Great Awakening as a socially constructed event. Emphasizing narration over analysis, he draws on the wealth of primary source materials that document the emergence of evangelicalism in colonial America and the controversy this new religious movement generated. By allowing the voices of revivalists and their opponents to speak for themselves, he tells a story of the eighteenth-century revivals that is both familiar in its general outline and rich in new detail. This narrative is Kidd’s argument; through his construction of this story, he attempts to demonstrate that the Great Awakening is not, in Butler’s memorable phrase, “interpretative fiction.” Kidd’s dating of the story, however, suggests that he accepts Butler’s view that, as commonly defined, the Great Awakening cannot bear the interpretive weight traditionally placed on it. He pushes the starting point of the Awakening back into the seventeenth century and brings it to a close in the last decades of the eighteenth century. This chronological framework permits him to expand the Great Awakening both temporally and geographically beyond the New England revivals of the early 1740s. The earliest stirrings of revival occurred in New England parishes in the 1670s, Kidd observes, as a result of covenant renewal ceremonies or the powerful preaching of such “early evangelicals” as Solomon Stoddard and Samuel Torrey (8). The end point of the Awakening being more difficult to identify, he picks the New Light Stir of 1776–1783 as the “arbitrary point” at which to end his narrative (321). During this “long First Great Awakening,” revivals occurred in Protestant parishes “from Nova Scotia to Georgia,” but their geographical distribution was not spread evenly throughout the colonies (xix, xvi). Given that the largest and best-documented series of revivals occurred in New England in the 1740s, Kidd cannot escape devoting close to half his book to this region. While George Whitefield, James Davenport, Jonathan Edwards, and Charles Chauncey remain central to this part of the story, Kidd complicates the narrative by also focusing on the contributions of such lesser known revivalists as David McGregore and Samuel Buell. Kidd also brings to life such fascinating figures as Samuel Davies and Elhanan Winchester in his description of the revivals that occurred outside New England in subsequent decades in several of the middle and southern colonies. Also included within

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the scope of the early evangelical movement are Native American and African American missions. In two of the book’s most interesting chapters, Kidd traces how evangelicalism generated a new commitment to bringing these marginalized peoples into the Christian fold. And throughout his account of the eighteenth-century revivals, he emphasizes evangelicalism’s “spiritually inclusive mandate” as a central theme (212). In telling the story of the “long First Great Awakening,” Kidd has provided historians of early American religion with the “comprehensive general history” that Jon Butler noted a quarter of a century ago was lacking in the scholarship on the Awakening (Butler, 306). He has not, however, escaped the force of Butler’s critique. Kidd’s expansive definition of the “Great Awakening” effectively eliminates the usefulness of the concept. “There was,” Kidd admits, “really, no Second Great Awakening, but rather a long-term turn toward Baptist and Methodist piety from the American Revolution to the Civil War, punctuated by new revivals like the one at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801” (321). Without the Second Great Awakening, however, the concept of the First Great Awakening loses its coherence. Furthermore, although Kidd clearly documents that a series of revivals occurred throughout the colonies in the eighteenth century, he does not demonstrate that these local and regional events constituted one unified intercolonial awakening. Recognizing these objections, Kidd acknowledges that the term “First Great Awakening” is “misleading” (321). In retaining this term he signals his commitment not so much to the “firstness” of the Awakening as to its “greatness.” Kidd accepts Butler’s view that “the link between the revivals and the American Revolution is virtually nonexistent” (Butler, 324). In the book’s most closely reasoned chapter, he shows “that there was no one evangelical response to the American Revolution” (306). Some revivalists remained loyal to the crown, while others took a neutral position. And even the many “evangelicals that became Patriots,” Kidd asserts, “did not necessarily become Patriots because they were evangelicals” (289). Having severed the connection between the Awakening and the Revolution, Kidd attributes to the eighteenth-century revivals a twofold historical significance. First, this new religious movement contained within itself a “powerful egalitarian impulse” (289). A “defining characteristic of early evangelicalism,” Kidd notes, was its “tendency to take ethnic and racial boundaries lightly” (30). This tendency manifested itself in George Whitefield’s ministry to slaves in Georgia, David Brainerd’s mission to the Delaware Indians, and the empowerment of poor, female, and uneducated exhorters throughout the colonies. Kidd acknowledges, however, that the spiritual equality preached by many early evangelicals rarely challenged the legal or social subordination of marginalized groups; George Whitefield, James Davenport, and Jonathan Edwards were, after all, slave owners.

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And although inclusion is a dominant theme in Kidd’s story of the rise of evangelicalism in early America, so also is conflict. Old Lights viciously attacked their revivalist opponents, while New Lights split into hostile camps to debate the limits of revivalism itself. Believing that the converted formed a new spiritual elite, evangelicals maintained an uncompromising approach to religious difference whether it occurred within or without the fold. A less contested effect of the eighteenth-century revivals is the establishment of evangelical Protestantism itself. As Kidd observes, “The Great Awakening can be acknowledged as ‘great’ because it produced the evangelical movement” (323). The revivalists who preached conversion to sermonhungry congregations throughout the colonies, and who defended the gospel of the new birth against its critics, defined a style of piety that quickly grew to dominate the American religious landscape. This legacy is more obvious today than it was several decades ago. When Heimert linked the Awakening to the Revolution, the political mobilization of evangelical Protestants was in its infancy, and when Butler placed this link in question Ronald Reagan was still in his first term. No religious historian can now, however, ignore the significance of evangelicalism in modern American culture. The roots of this movement lie, as the subtitle of Kidd’s volume suggests, in the revivals of the eighteenth century. Whether this lineage is sufficient to justify retaining the term “Great Awakening” is less clearly established. Ava Chamberlain Wright State University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000328

Virginians Reborn: Anglican Monopoly, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century. By Jewel L. Spangler. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2008. x þ 293 pp. $45.00 cloth. Did “evangelical dissent” actually change in any significant manner the social, racial, and political landscape of once-Anglican Virginia by the end of the eighteenth century? Attempting to answer this question, Jewel Spangler has placed the rise of the Baptists in the center of a debate that has been going on now since the 1970s. Spangler ably summarizes the conditions of British North American Anglicanism in the Old Dominion before turning to the challenge posed by the Presbyterians at mid-century. She argues that the Virginia Anglican parishes by the 1760s had become far more successful than at any time in Virginia’s past, in part because a good number of parish ministers were

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And although inclusion is a dominant theme in Kidd’s story of the rise of evangelicalism in early America, so also is conflict. Old Lights viciously attacked their revivalist opponents, while New Lights split into hostile camps to debate the limits of revivalism itself. Believing that the converted formed a new spiritual elite, evangelicals maintained an uncompromising approach to religious difference whether it occurred within or without the fold. A less contested effect of the eighteenth-century revivals is the establishment of evangelical Protestantism itself. As Kidd observes, “The Great Awakening can be acknowledged as ‘great’ because it produced the evangelical movement” (323). The revivalists who preached conversion to sermonhungry congregations throughout the colonies, and who defended the gospel of the new birth against its critics, defined a style of piety that quickly grew to dominate the American religious landscape. This legacy is more obvious today than it was several decades ago. When Heimert linked the Awakening to the Revolution, the political mobilization of evangelical Protestants was in its infancy, and when Butler placed this link in question Ronald Reagan was still in his first term. No religious historian can now, however, ignore the significance of evangelicalism in modern American culture. The roots of this movement lie, as the subtitle of Kidd’s volume suggests, in the revivals of the eighteenth century. Whether this lineage is sufficient to justify retaining the term “Great Awakening” is less clearly established. Ava Chamberlain Wright State University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000328

Virginians Reborn: Anglican Monopoly, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century. By Jewel L. Spangler. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2008. x þ 293 pp. $45.00 cloth. Did “evangelical dissent” actually change in any significant manner the social, racial, and political landscape of once-Anglican Virginia by the end of the eighteenth century? Attempting to answer this question, Jewel Spangler has placed the rise of the Baptists in the center of a debate that has been going on now since the 1970s. Spangler ably summarizes the conditions of British North American Anglicanism in the Old Dominion before turning to the challenge posed by the Presbyterians at mid-century. She argues that the Virginia Anglican parishes by the 1760s had become far more successful than at any time in Virginia’s past, in part because a good number of parish ministers were

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either homegrown or Scottish imports. The number of English parsons declined overall, and a fair degree of mutual understanding characterized clerical-lay relationships at the parish level. Even outside the relatively well-paying Tidewater parishes, Anglicanism as a “way of life” apparently reached a significant part of the colony’s population. Although she knows the literature on the devotional life of Anglicans, one might wish that she could have provided a bit more insight into whether sermons and devotional literature such as the famous Virginia edition of the Whole Duty of Man actually made a difference in deepening the attractions of the English Church among Virginians. Spangler knows that little success attended Anglican forays into the religious life of enslaved Africans (27–28), and she wisely concludes that the rise of the Presbyterians did nothing to challenge prevailing social or racial conventions in Virginia, in either the Tidewater or the Piedmont (71–75). What, then, does one make of the rise of the early Baptist dissent? Spengler’s research turns to this question by devoting three chapters of the book to the rise of the dissenting evangelicals in the decade and a half before the outbreak of the Revolution. She then turns in a final summary to the “second generation” whose members absorbed and made their own some aspects of the revolution’s rhetoric in favor of egalitarian social relations before they themselves became increasingly conventional Protestants in much, but not all, of their social relationships and notions about Christianity in the decades following the war of American independence. Baptist dissent, Spangler argues, took aim only at the public hierarchical structures in church and society. She sensibly concludes that in household and meetinghouse management the Baptists remained firm supporters of “the subordination of women,” treating “female members as decidedly unequal persons in the church” (152–153). Still, in her assessment of the evidence and the work of previous historians, she attempts to steer her position between the shoals of those who have seen the Baptists as progenitors of “egalitarian, democratic, and inclusive” evangelicalism, and others who conclude that Baptist success was purchased at the price of accommodation to “planter rule, patriarchy, and slavery” (197). In the end, however, Spangler’s evidence compels her to conclude that Baptists may have aided and abetted the value placed on the political value of virtuous behavior and an accompanying uneasiness with conspicuously aristocratic private or public display. But, on balance, these mostly “yeomen planters” (257 n. 6) maintained and perpetuated social and racial inequality in Virginia society (228–229). Spangler knows both her secondary literature and the primary sources of this story, and the book provides a real service in bringing most recent research to bear in support of her position. Oddly enough, however, her concentration on the religious source material causes her to refer only occasionally to the other center of local life in Virginia, the county courts. She does notice occasionally

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that Baptists served as justices (264 n. 73; 259 n. 20), but a closer examination of this key index of social and political power might have helped her argue even more persuasively that Baptists were fairly quickly absorbed into the prevailing structures and matrices of power in this agricultural society. Spangler knows that Virginia was also home to non-Anglophone Protestants, but her acknowledgement of German speakers appears to be confined to the Shenandoah Valley communities. As a result she misses the rather important fact that the earliest petition for exemption from the compulsory support of the Anglican Church (22 October 1776) came from the German Lutherans in (present-day) Madison County, an especially significant vote of dissent from a Protestant group that had historically enjoyed rather close ties with the established Church. These are, however, minor quibbles that do little to detract from the power of her argument. One might have wished for a more explicit reminder from her that her research seems to confirm once again the familiar argument put forth by historians such as Jackson Turner Main on the expansion of political power in post-Revolutionary states among a broader spectrum of white smallholders. If this study does not fundamentally revise our understanding of Protestantism in late eighteenth-century Virginia, it nonetheless shows just how quickly Baptist dissent, and indeed other forms of evangelical Protestantism, adjusted to the prevailing economic, racial, and social norms of the emerging new states. For that reason alone, hers is an important study not only for church historians, but for anyone interested in pondering the question of how much culture and convention continue to shape, and quite often co-opt, religious conviction. Spangler’s conclusions illustrate once again in this particular North American Protestant context how difficult it seems to be for believers, no matter how much they deem themselves agents of change, or radical critics of those who have previously succumbed to compromise and accommodation, to transform economic, social, and racial self-interest, even in themselves. A. G. Roeber Penn State University –University Park

doi:10.1017/S000964070900033X

Frontiers of Faith: Bringing Catholicism to the West in the Early Republic. By John R. Dichtl. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. x þ 241 pp. $50.00 cloth. The history of Catholicism in the early American Republic is a history of people and ideas moving from Europe to the nascent United States and deep

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Piety and Dissent: Race, Gender, and Biblical Rhetoric in Early American Autobiography. By Eileen Razzari Elrod. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. xiv þ 233 pp. $80.00 cloth; $24.95 paper. The perceptive student of American autobiography William L. Andrews has observed that American autobiography is fundamentally a hybrid, at once confession and memoir, self-revelation and self-celebration. In many ways in her probing excursion into late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American religious autobiographies, literary scholar Eileen Razzari Elrod follows that lead. But in her close examination of six individuals who were “outsiders” in the social, cultural, and political Anglo-American world ruled by white men, she also charts a new course by insisting that we read religious autobiography especially from multiple perspectives and through the critical lenses of feminism, border theory, critical race theory, and postcolonialism. To show the way, she parses the narratives of Samson Occom, Olaudah Equiano, John Marrant, Abigail Abbot Bailey, Jarena Lee, and William Apess, all of whom were converts to Anglo-American Protestantism, strong witnesses to their faith, and challengers of conventional authority, even as, and sometimes even because, they suffered from the strictures of race and gender inside and outside their respective churches. As Elrod shows, the writers used different vehicles to relate their stories of redemption—for example, the Indian captivity narrative, the slave narrative, the narrative of an abused woman—but they adopted the shared language and theology of the religious revivals, from the Great Awakening and after, to make experiential religion the true test of salvation, faith, and authority. Importantly, even as these narrators sometimes stood against, or outside, their Anglo-American Protestant churches, they never abandoned them. These writers crafted their life histories within traditions of conversion narratives but also with a keen sense of their “outsider sensibility.” As such, Elrod argues, the narratives offer sometimes contradictory messages of oppression and liberation but in the end attest to the power of saving grace and the need to have one’s own say about God’s place in shaping one’s life and worth. Elrod makes the important point that historians and literary scholars are often embarrassed in reading the unashamed religiosity of such writers and that they wrongly dismiss such witness by socially and economically “marginal” people as being only a disguise or a coded language of social and political protest rather than understanding its deeply personal, honest expression of belief. She takes them at their word. She insists that the narrators’ biblical voices were authentic because they were grounded in scripture and experience and because the narrators cared about the religious fates of their churches and

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their people. She rightly reminds us that spiritual and religious impetuses pushed these pilgrims toward piety and dissent, with the one necessarily begetting the other. That Elrod recognizes that these blacks, Indians, and women accepted, even sought, the fullness of an Anglo-American Protestantism while standing as critics of it further recommends her work, for their stories run against the historians’ commonplace that such outsiders had no place within that religious framework. Indeed, the narrators’ very willingness to examine their own faith and life and to criticize conventional Christianity in the context of the dominant New England narrative adds to their interest as examples of dissenters working within established institutions. If Elrod’s thicket of theoretical apparatus sometimes obscures her arguments, her reasoned and respectful reading of these texts should encourage scholars to consider how and why, in an American context of proliferating religious choices, “outsiders,” like those Elrod discovers, chose to claim AngloAmerican Protestantism for themselves. These narratives of piety and dissent further suggest that the pulls and obligations of faith were not only or simply decided by race, gender, class, or circumstance, potent and pervasive though they be; nor were they simply reiterations or adaptations within the conversion narrative genre. The rhetorical strategies that these narrators used made their life histories all of that and more. The narratives became and remain plain-speaking personal life histories addressed to all people seeking the truth and purpose of God’s saving grace. Randall M. Miller Saint Joseph’s University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000353

Opening China: Karl F. A. Gu¨tzlaff and Sino-Western Relations, 1827 – 1852. By Jessie Gregory Lutz. Studies in the History of Christian Missions. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008. xx þ 364 pages. $45.00 paper. In the mid-nineteenth century, evangelical missionaries from Europe and America played a crucial role as pioneering scholars and cultural intermediaries when their nations compelled Qing dynasty China to submit to the realities of Western expansionism. Several recently published studies of the missionary enterprise in China have greatly expanded our knowledge of the profound historical significance of those who sought to convert the Chinese masses over to their vision of a Christian world order. Jessie Gregory Lutz contributes yet another important dimension to our understanding of

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their people. She rightly reminds us that spiritual and religious impetuses pushed these pilgrims toward piety and dissent, with the one necessarily begetting the other. That Elrod recognizes that these blacks, Indians, and women accepted, even sought, the fullness of an Anglo-American Protestantism while standing as critics of it further recommends her work, for their stories run against the historians’ commonplace that such outsiders had no place within that religious framework. Indeed, the narrators’ very willingness to examine their own faith and life and to criticize conventional Christianity in the context of the dominant New England narrative adds to their interest as examples of dissenters working within established institutions. If Elrod’s thicket of theoretical apparatus sometimes obscures her arguments, her reasoned and respectful reading of these texts should encourage scholars to consider how and why, in an American context of proliferating religious choices, “outsiders,” like those Elrod discovers, chose to claim AngloAmerican Protestantism for themselves. These narratives of piety and dissent further suggest that the pulls and obligations of faith were not only or simply decided by race, gender, class, or circumstance, potent and pervasive though they be; nor were they simply reiterations or adaptations within the conversion narrative genre. The rhetorical strategies that these narrators used made their life histories all of that and more. The narratives became and remain plain-speaking personal life histories addressed to all people seeking the truth and purpose of God’s saving grace. Randall M. Miller Saint Joseph’s University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000353

Opening China: Karl F. A. Gu¨tzlaff and Sino-Western Relations, 1827 – 1852. By Jessie Gregory Lutz. Studies in the History of Christian Missions. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008. xx þ 364 pages. $45.00 paper. In the mid-nineteenth century, evangelical missionaries from Europe and America played a crucial role as pioneering scholars and cultural intermediaries when their nations compelled Qing dynasty China to submit to the realities of Western expansionism. Several recently published studies of the missionary enterprise in China have greatly expanded our knowledge of the profound historical significance of those who sought to convert the Chinese masses over to their vision of a Christian world order. Jessie Gregory Lutz contributes yet another important dimension to our understanding of

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this episode in Sino-Western relations by critically analyzing the deeds and accomplishments of one of the most intriguing and controversial figures in the history of the missionary movement in China: Karl F. A. Gu¨tzlaff. Drawing skillfully on the vast store of information available in missionary archives, along with the published tracts, periodicals, and books of Gu¨tzlaff and his contemporaries in China, Lutz traces the life of her subject from the time of his youth and conversion in Germany to his eventful and productive career as a missionary in Southeast Asia and China. Gu¨tzlaff was without a doubt one of the most enigmatic of the early pioneers of the Protestant missionary movement in Asia, and Lutz’s insightful analysis of his role and legacy in shaping Sino-Western relations provides a nuanced and sophisticated evaluation of his life and times. Lutz begins her narrative with a thoughtful and informative overview of the changing context of Sino-Western relations during the nineteenth century and the strains of European Protestantism that shaped Gu¨tzlaff’s training and conversion at the Berlin Mission Institute. After three years of subsequent study and training at the Dutch Missionary Society in Rotterdam, Gu¨tzlaff began his career as a missionary in Southeast Asia, where he would eventually marry the English missionary Maria Newell and serve for a time at a pioneering post in Thailand. During his stay in Southeast Asia, Gu¨tzlaff developed a particular interest in the Chinese and China as a promising field of missionary endeavor, and several months after his wife’s tragic death from childbirth in February 1831, he arranged passage aboard a Chinese junk as its navigator and physician and traveled along the coast of China, distributing medicines and religious tracts during his stops at various coastal ports. The journal he recorded during this remarkable voyage would eventually be published in the Chinese Repository, a periodical produced by the American missionary E. C. Bridgman, in a series of articles that would firmly establish his reputation as a courageous and intrepid proponent of China missions. In time, Gu¨tzlaff became an integral part of the tiny missionary community that existed in Canton and Macao in the years before the Opium War. During this period he contributed significantly to the efforts of the renowned British missionary, Robert Morrison, E. C. Bridgman, and the small number of other early Protestant missionaries who sought tirelessly to convert the Chinese and to win additional support from the West for their varied enterprises. Gu¨tzlaff’s prodigious talents in both the written language and various dialects of spoken Chinese, along with his flair for publicizing and promoting his dramatic accomplishments, made him a key member of this fledgling community and a major contributor to the many groundbreaking publications in both Chinese and English that would become one of the most fascinating hallmarks of this era in Sino-Western relations.

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Gu¨tzlaff was also one of the most controversial figures in the history of China missions. His flamboyant personality and eccentric behavior was frequently criticized by his more cautious colleagues, and his relative independence from any supervising missionary organization compelled him to rely occasionally on morally questionable means of support, such as interpreting for English opium smugglers who operated secretly and illegally along the China coast. His long years of service to the English East India Company and later British consular authorities in China would also involve him in what many have criticized as compromising or hypocritical ventures, such as his services as an official for the British during their occupation of coastal territory in the Opium War. The most vocal and damaging criticism of Gu¨tzlaff’s activities came from his own missionary colleagues during the final years of his career. His extravagant claims regarding the Christian Union that he had helped to establish, which had reportedly converted hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese in the interior, were refuted by many who came to question Gu¨tzlaff’s integrity over this and other questionable reports and undertakings. Actually, this portion of Lutz’s study is perhaps the most insightful and significant of the entire work, as she explores the possible connections between the Christian Union and the devastating Taiping Rebellion led by the Christian-inspired Chinese revolutionary, Hong Xiuquan. Lutz’s incisive analysis of the intriguing connections between these two movements, and her carefully balanced evaluation of Gu¨tzlaff’s activities at this point in his career, offer a profoundly interesting perspective of the missionary movement and its impact on nineteenth-century China. Indeed, in general, Lutz’s compelling study of Gu¨tzlaff and his checkered contribution to the shaping of Sino-Western relations adds immensely to our understanding of the complex religious and political dynamics of this pivotal era. Michael Lazich Buffalo State College

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000365

“Ethos” and the Oxford Movement: At the Heart of Tractarianism. By James Pereiro. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xxx þ 324 pp. $150.00 cloth. This is probably the most important book on the history of the Oxford Movement to be published in the past decade. James Pereiro has explored the concept of “ethos” as a foundational theological motif of the Tractarians,

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Gu¨tzlaff was also one of the most controversial figures in the history of China missions. His flamboyant personality and eccentric behavior was frequently criticized by his more cautious colleagues, and his relative independence from any supervising missionary organization compelled him to rely occasionally on morally questionable means of support, such as interpreting for English opium smugglers who operated secretly and illegally along the China coast. His long years of service to the English East India Company and later British consular authorities in China would also involve him in what many have criticized as compromising or hypocritical ventures, such as his services as an official for the British during their occupation of coastal territory in the Opium War. The most vocal and damaging criticism of Gu¨tzlaff’s activities came from his own missionary colleagues during the final years of his career. His extravagant claims regarding the Christian Union that he had helped to establish, which had reportedly converted hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese in the interior, were refuted by many who came to question Gu¨tzlaff’s integrity over this and other questionable reports and undertakings. Actually, this portion of Lutz’s study is perhaps the most insightful and significant of the entire work, as she explores the possible connections between the Christian Union and the devastating Taiping Rebellion led by the Christian-inspired Chinese revolutionary, Hong Xiuquan. Lutz’s incisive analysis of the intriguing connections between these two movements, and her carefully balanced evaluation of Gu¨tzlaff’s activities at this point in his career, offer a profoundly interesting perspective of the missionary movement and its impact on nineteenth-century China. Indeed, in general, Lutz’s compelling study of Gu¨tzlaff and his checkered contribution to the shaping of Sino-Western relations adds immensely to our understanding of the complex religious and political dynamics of this pivotal era. Michael Lazich Buffalo State College

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000365

“Ethos” and the Oxford Movement: At the Heart of Tractarianism. By James Pereiro. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xxx þ 324 pp. $150.00 cloth. This is probably the most important book on the history of the Oxford Movement to be published in the past decade. James Pereiro has explored the concept of “ethos” as a foundational theological motif of the Tractarians,

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arguing that it expresses a theory of religious knowledge that was fundamental to their theological position. The definition of this seminal idea is not an easy one, for, while the word was used by early Tractarian writers, the idea behind it was variously expressed. Pereiro comes at the concept through the early writing of Samuel Wood, an early Tractarian convert and London lawyer who wrote an unpublished paper titled “Revival of Primitive Doctrine” in 1840, making it the earliest account of the movement. Using Wood’s paper and the writings of John Keble, Hurrell Froude, and John Henry Newman, Pereiro presents Tractarian “ethos” as “a moral temper involving openness to God’s action in the soul” (109). Holiness of life gave the sanctified a divinely inspired insight into religious truth. Truth and holiness were interconnected. Ethos, thus conceived, was not merely a personal quality of holiness, it was also a communal one, principally found in the centuries of the early church. For the Tractarians this made the early church an absolute paradigm for the recovery of a Catholic ethos for the Church of England because it was in those centuries that theologians exhibited the necessary moral holiness requisite for the discovery of divine truth. Appalled at the less-thanexemplary lives of the English Reformers, and their abuse toward Catholic doctrine and piety, the Tractarians, under the influence of James Anthony Froude, recoiled from the Reformation as a guide to a Catholic ethos and the divine truth it contained. Pereiro then explores, largely through the medium of Newman and the concept of the development of doctrine, how Newman came to believe that the recovery of a catholic ethos could not be a return of the Church of England to Antiquity, statically conceived. Newman, reluctantly and gradually influenced by the insights of Woods and Froude, came to accept that an idea, an ethos, could and should develop within the church. Finally, the book has a chapter on how ethos, as a primary concept of Tractarianism, came to drive a wedge between the High Church and the Tractarians as the early church came to be paramount over the Reformation for the latter. Against some contemporary interpretations, Pereiro maintains that no such wedge was necessary with regard to the Evangelicals as Tractarians and High Church were already, theologically, at odds with the Evangelical party from the commencement of the Oxford Movement. Tractarians, however, did often admire the serious piety of Evangelicals. There is an interesting section in the book that looks at the revisionist histories of the Oxford Movement over the past two decades which have stressed its continuities with High Church teaching and maintained that late Georgian High Churchmanship was not as moribund as earlier scholarship had maintained. Pereiro raises some important questions about this largely


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accepted viewpoint on the basis that High Church reform was both patchy and had largely run its course by the 1830s. He also believes that the revisionist scholars also rather obscure the revivalist energy and innovation of the Oxford Movement, as well as glossing over many contemporary expressions of concern at the state of the Church of England in the 1820s and 1830s. Personally, this reviewer believes that Pereiro rather downplays the vitality of High Churchmen in the 1830s. Walter Hook, George Selwyn, and Henry Manning, for example, though undoubtedly later inspired by Tractarianism, began their clerical work as energetic young High Churchmen. Notwithstanding such cavils, it seems that with this book Oxford Movement historiography is set for another substantive debate. Pereiro’s work recovers the Oxford Movement as a movement of theological substance. Scholars from Owen Chadwick to John Reed have tended to focus on the devotionalism and ritualism of the Tractarians and their Anglo-Catholic progeny. Pereiro has produced a salutary reminder that the Oxford Movement was, in its own eyes, first and foremost a substantive theological and intellectual challenge to the status quo in the Church of England in the 1830s and 1840s. By focusing on Samuel Wood, Pereiro provides an important focus on what he calls “the supporting cast of secondary figures” among the Tractarians. However, as the book develops, the work of Newman yet again reasserts itself as the principle focus of the Oxford Movement, as had been the case with many, if not most, scholarly works of the past decades. The very long chapter 4, “Ethos and Development,” mostly follows the theological unfolding of Newman’s thought about ethos, leading him to convert to Rome in 1845. However, if Tractarian “ethos” was as fundamental as Pereiro convincingly argues it was for the Tractarians, then perhaps more weight could have been given to those Tractarian thinkers for whom “ethos” did not necessitate a path to Rome, but who remained in the Church of England. Yet Pereiro’s highlighting of Froude as a seminal figure behind the more elaborated thought of Newman is a further step toward recovering the Oxford Movement as something wider than its undeniably greatest theologian. The Tractarian paradigm of the early church as the exemplar of the catholic ethos inevitably raised the question of how to decide between the variants and contradictions of theological truth in that period. Holiness of life was the Tractarian answer; but this, they came to realize, was insufficient when deciding between the lives and works of obviously holy writers. In the end the Roman converts opted for the papacy as the adjudicating authority. Any continuing use of the Early Church within Anglicanism’s rule of faith certainly still raises the question of an adjudicating authority, if the Christian past is to be in any sense authoritative for the present-day Church

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and not merely a matter of the “private judgement” that the Tractarians so abhorred. Rowan Strong Murdoch University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000377

Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia. By Laurie Manchester. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008. xiv þ 290 pp. $43.00 cloth. Laurie Manchester opens her innovative and insightful book on the sons of Russian Orthodox priests by evoking—and dispensing with—the literary stereotype of the drunken and dissipated village cleric. The great progressive literary critic, Vissarion Belinskii (1811 – 1848), asked the writer Nikolai Gogol (1809– 1852) in 1847, “Is not the Russian priest regarded by everyone as a symbol of gluttony, avarice, sycophancy, bawdiness?” (14). Yet, even as he attacked the clergy, Belinskii himself could not deny his own heritage; his grandfather had been a priest, a member of that curious, peculiarly Russian caste-like social estate from whose ranks came so many members of the intelligentsia. In fact, Manchester argues that the sons of priests (known as popovichi in Russian) played a crucial role in the development of the ethos of the Russian intelligentsia in the century before the revolutions of 1917. Despite his denigration of the clergy, many of the secular Belinskii’s values—his didacticism, his strong sense of morality, his service ethic, and his inability to compromise—had also been cultivated in the families of priests. From the 1860s, when increasing numbers of clerical sons left their estate to enter government service or the professions, the popovichi exerted an ever greater influence over the intelligenty whose ranks they joined. Through his tax policies, Peter the Great (ruled 1682 – 1725) had inadvertently created the caste-like character of the clerical estate. Because priests were exempt from Peter’s new poll tax, introduced in 1718, members of the taxable estates (peasants and townsmen) could not join the clergy without burdening their communes, who would have had to make up the state’s lost revenue. Likewise, the Russian nobility had to serve the state in the military or the state administration, and few nobles desired to give up their privileges for a life as a village pastor. Over time, the system of clerical education further differentiated the clergy and their families from the rest of Russian society. Priests, deacons, and their children attended special schools

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and not merely a matter of the “private judgement” that the Tractarians so abhorred. Rowan Strong Murdoch University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000377

Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia. By Laurie Manchester. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008. xiv þ 290 pp. $43.00 cloth. Laurie Manchester opens her innovative and insightful book on the sons of Russian Orthodox priests by evoking—and dispensing with—the literary stereotype of the drunken and dissipated village cleric. The great progressive literary critic, Vissarion Belinskii (1811 – 1848), asked the writer Nikolai Gogol (1809– 1852) in 1847, “Is not the Russian priest regarded by everyone as a symbol of gluttony, avarice, sycophancy, bawdiness?” (14). Yet, even as he attacked the clergy, Belinskii himself could not deny his own heritage; his grandfather had been a priest, a member of that curious, peculiarly Russian caste-like social estate from whose ranks came so many members of the intelligentsia. In fact, Manchester argues that the sons of priests (known as popovichi in Russian) played a crucial role in the development of the ethos of the Russian intelligentsia in the century before the revolutions of 1917. Despite his denigration of the clergy, many of the secular Belinskii’s values—his didacticism, his strong sense of morality, his service ethic, and his inability to compromise—had also been cultivated in the families of priests. From the 1860s, when increasing numbers of clerical sons left their estate to enter government service or the professions, the popovichi exerted an ever greater influence over the intelligenty whose ranks they joined. Through his tax policies, Peter the Great (ruled 1682 – 1725) had inadvertently created the caste-like character of the clerical estate. Because priests were exempt from Peter’s new poll tax, introduced in 1718, members of the taxable estates (peasants and townsmen) could not join the clergy without burdening their communes, who would have had to make up the state’s lost revenue. Likewise, the Russian nobility had to serve the state in the military or the state administration, and few nobles desired to give up their privileges for a life as a village pastor. Over time, the system of clerical education further differentiated the clergy and their families from the rest of Russian society. Priests, deacons, and their children attended special schools


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with subjects such as Latin and theology that almost no one else studied. Only in the 1860s did a series of reforms designed to modernize Russian society and break down the old estate system allow large numbers of popovichi to leave the service of the church. But even as they gave up their traditional calling to be priests and pastors, the popovichi brought with them their family values, which, Manchester argues, significantly shaped the Russian intelligentsia in the years leading to 1917. Whether atheist or pious, popovichi valued selfsacrifice, sought to serve the people, believed in causes greater than themselves, idolized their clerical fathers, emphasized the moral struggle between good and evil, strongly identified themselves with the Russian nation, and were suspicious of foreign, especially Western, influences. The intelligentsia, originally formed by disaffected cosmopolitan nobles in the 1830s and 1840s, dramatically changed its character as these “new men” from the clergy joined it. To demonstrate her case, Manchester has tirelessly mined both unpublished sources in central and provincial archives and the extensive ecclesiastical press to identify 207 individuals (listed in an appendix) who left the clerical estate and composed personal texts (such as autobiographies, diaries, confessions) recounting their lives. The book consists primarily in an engaging analysis of these texts. The first three chapters put the clerical estate in its historical context by describing its formation (chapter 1), clerical critiques of other social estates, especially the nobility (chapter 2), and the prescriptive norms of piety and patriarchy that governed the lives of priests, deacons, sacristans, and their families (chapter 3). The next three chapters analyze the three phases in the life of the popovich: a childhood at home, which was almost always remembered as idyllic, despite hardship and poverty (chapter 4); the bursa, a pre-seminary boarding school for priests’ sons, always remembered as a hellish experience (chapter 5); and the exit from the clerical estate for those popovichi who did not follow their fathers’ vocation (chapter 6). The final chapter describes how these secularized popovichi created secular versions of salvation, often through professional success, political action, or scholarly work. Manchester’s approach works well for eliciting the common values shared by clerical sons. She also effectively contrasts those values with the aristocratic ethos of the cosmopolitan nobility, the rival social estate, by citing vivid examples of priestly alienation from the gentry. One popovich, hired as a tutor for noble children, described his embarrassment when he was addressed in French by his employer’s foreign guests: “I was completely dumbfounded and, like a madman, I cast my eyes upon them, opened my mouth, and spread my arms” (38). Always a sympathetic and careful reader of her sources, Manchester maintains the necessary critical distance as she analyzes the cultural values expressed in their letters and autobiographies.

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Manchester makes a few errors and omissions. Arguably, the earliest autobiography of a popovich was written not in 1802 (9) but in the 1670s by the defrocked Archpriest Avvakum Petrov (1620 – 1682), a leader of the Old Believer schism, while he was in an underground prison in Pustozersk. Manchester curiously never mentions the prominent figure Ale¨sha Popovich, the trickster hero of Russian epic tales [byliny], known for his cunning. And, contrary to Manchester’s claim (21), priests did indeed occasionally violate the confidentiality of the rite of confession and report crimes to the authorities, as Nikolai G. Vysotskii demonstrated in his publication of trial transcripts. Most significantly, Manchester makes a carefully nuanced case for Russian exceptionalism and a unique Russian path to modernity. Although the Russian intelligentsia certainly adopted Western ideas, much of its character in the last decades of the old regime was the result of distinctively Russian conditions. With its tradition of a married parish clergy organized as a caste-like estate, the Orthodox Church created a cadre of young men with a peculiar upbringing. Self-conscious, resentful of the nobility, committed to service, these men “believed they could shape themselves and control their universe” (5). Curiously, these profoundly modern ideas arose from a deeply traditional Russian religious environment. By elucidating the peculiarly Russian features of the intelligentsia and its hidden links to the Orthodox Church, Manchester has made a major contribution to the historiography not only of Russia, but of European modernity. Manchester’s work supplements and corrects the works of earlier cultural historians, such as Reinhard Bendix and Liah Greenfeld, who have tried to discern religion’s role in the rise of modernity. J. Eugene Clay Arizona State University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000389

Saving the Holy Sepulchre: How Rival Groups Came Together to Rescue their Holiest Shrine. By Raymond Cohen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xxvi þ 315 pp. $29.99 cloth. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is an extraordinary building. Unlike the great cathedrals, it is an architectural mess, thanks both to successive rebuilding over the centuries and to competitive architectural hooliganism between rival sects. Yet somehow its combination of layers of history and sanctity, and its place in the imagination of warriors and artists and religious

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Manchester makes a few errors and omissions. Arguably, the earliest autobiography of a popovich was written not in 1802 (9) but in the 1670s by the defrocked Archpriest Avvakum Petrov (1620 – 1682), a leader of the Old Believer schism, while he was in an underground prison in Pustozersk. Manchester curiously never mentions the prominent figure Ale¨sha Popovich, the trickster hero of Russian epic tales [byliny], known for his cunning. And, contrary to Manchester’s claim (21), priests did indeed occasionally violate the confidentiality of the rite of confession and report crimes to the authorities, as Nikolai G. Vysotskii demonstrated in his publication of trial transcripts. Most significantly, Manchester makes a carefully nuanced case for Russian exceptionalism and a unique Russian path to modernity. Although the Russian intelligentsia certainly adopted Western ideas, much of its character in the last decades of the old regime was the result of distinctively Russian conditions. With its tradition of a married parish clergy organized as a caste-like estate, the Orthodox Church created a cadre of young men with a peculiar upbringing. Self-conscious, resentful of the nobility, committed to service, these men “believed they could shape themselves and control their universe” (5). Curiously, these profoundly modern ideas arose from a deeply traditional Russian religious environment. By elucidating the peculiarly Russian features of the intelligentsia and its hidden links to the Orthodox Church, Manchester has made a major contribution to the historiography not only of Russia, but of European modernity. Manchester’s work supplements and corrects the works of earlier cultural historians, such as Reinhard Bendix and Liah Greenfeld, who have tried to discern religion’s role in the rise of modernity. J. Eugene Clay Arizona State University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000389

Saving the Holy Sepulchre: How Rival Groups Came Together to Rescue their Holiest Shrine. By Raymond Cohen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xxvi þ 315 pp. $29.99 cloth. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is an extraordinary building. Unlike the great cathedrals, it is an architectural mess, thanks both to successive rebuilding over the centuries and to competitive architectural hooliganism between rival sects. Yet somehow its combination of layers of history and sanctity, and its place in the imagination of warriors and artists and religious


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thinkers, can lift it above its own physical limitations—at least for some visitors. Generations of Protestants have been very leery indeed about this much-fought-over center of Christian worship. Mark Twain saw there nothing but “clap-trap side-shows and unseemly impostures of every kind” (The Innocents Abroad [Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co., 1869], 573); the famous Victorian archaeologist Edward Robinson coined the phrase “pious fraud” (Biblical Researches in Palestine, 1838 – 52 [Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1856], I:251) for the relics on show, including the sepulchre itself; and Herman Melville wrote, “All is glitter and nothing is gold. A sickening cheat” ([1857] Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1955], 281). One element that particularly amazed and disgusted visitors was the fighting between priests and monks within the church. Alexander William Kinglake, the snidely ironic old Etonian travel writer and historian, describes how a monk, forgetting “his monkish humility, as well as the duties of hospitality” (Eothen; or, Traces of Travel [London: John Ollivier, 1847], 166) criticized an Englishman for accepting food and drink at the monastery but then not being prepared to join in a punch-up on the side of the monks. Robert Curzon, more painfully, gives a lurid description of a battle in 1834 that left many dead, suffocated in the crush or ripped apart by violent assault. To the outsider, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has often seemed an image of everything that could go wrong with a Christian institution—infighting and aggression and prejudice in place of love, humility, and charity. Raymond Cohen, the Chaim Weizmann professor of International Relations at the Hebrew University and a graduate of Oxford, is an outsider to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. But he has made himself an insider—in the sense that he has done what no previous historian has attempted and spent many years in the archives of the various groups who use the church, talked to many witnesses, explored the documents, and tried to understand exactly what has been happening between the rival forces in the church. The story he has come up with from this detailed research is something of a surprise. As his subtitle suggests, “How Rival Christians Came Together to Rescue their Holiest Shrine,” Cohen argues that there has actually been a real shift in recent years toward a working solution on the ground. And I use that cliche´d phrase with its broader political overtones designedly, because, as Cohen clearly knows, the story he tells of groups fighting over the same patch of holy ground, but finally, after centuries of warring, reaching some sort of solution of how to live together evokes conflicts across the world from Northern Ireland to the Middle East itself. It would be quite wrong, however, to see this rapprochement as a tale of Christian feelings at last outweighing evil impulses, and former combatants coming together in a spirit of love and harmony. Rather, as in Northern

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Ireland, the peace, inasmuch as it exists, is a product of exhaustion, external pressures—financial as well as political—and self-interest drawing the differing parties together in a more productive encounter. Cohen’s history starts with the terrible earthquake in 1927. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre survived, apparently intact, but as became gradually clear, there was deep-seated damage to the structure. It is the attempt to diagnose this damage and finally put it right that forms the central narrative of this engrossing book. To understand the opposed groups, Cohen takes us back to the Status Quo agreement. This is the contract drawn up by the Ottomans and formally upheld by the British Mandate that possession, usage, and ceremony in the holy site should not change but “will all remain forever in their present state” (8). Hence the ladder leaning against a first-floor window above the entrance: since it was there in 1852, there it will always remain, replaced if necessary by an identical ladder. The Status Quo agreement drew up immutable boundaries—and it is over these boundaries that all the fighting takes place. The focus of the book means that Cohen does not go back much further in the history of the building than the Status Quo agreement and is not distracted by its role in such world-stage events as the Crimean War. This account maintains a close gaze at who said what to whom and who did what to whom inside the church and its committee rooms. The best aspect of the book is that Cohen not only has done the sort of properly conducted historical research that is rarely done on institutions with such huge religious stakes, but also that he manages to make the detailed story of bickering and nastiness so riveting. He uncovers bizarre plans from the Vatican in Mussolini’s time for the rebuilding of the whole site in neoclassical splendor; traces how good and honest men got sucked into the rivalries and rows of petty officialdom; and narrates how, step by laborious step, an agreed plan was formulated and completed. It is a good read, almost never pompous or judgmental—which too few books on such contentious sites manage. Is the overall story convincing? The detailed study of what happened, even where small differences of opinion or judgment are of course possible, is undoubtedly the best account available for the modern development of this major religious site, and is well worth reading for any religious or cultural historian interested in the connection between religion, politics, and architecture. But I am not sure everyone will share Cohen’s optimism. The rotunda has indeed been restored. But since then, the same old rows broke out over mending the toilets, with the Armenians refusing permission for repairs until the Greeks agreed to their demands on another issue: an unpleasantly smelly Easter resulted. It is still impossible to open a second entrance or exit door anywhere in the building, since no side will allow such precedence to another group. The new breeze-block walls of the Catholicon

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still stand, the ugliest sign of lingering aggressive partisanship. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre has been restored, and Cohen tells very well indeed how this came about: whether this should be called a story of triumphant international relations brokering a treaty, or an uneasy and fragile truce enforced by necessity, remains less clear. Simon Goldhill King’s College, Cambridge

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000390

Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism. By Kevin P. Spicer. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008. xvi þ 374 pp. $34.95 cloth. There is an interesting and instructive parallel to be drawn between Germany’s scientists during the Nazi era and Germany’s churchmen. Yet critiques of the conduct of Germany’s scientists during Hitler’s era have been far more penetrating, if not actually more prolific, than studies of churchmen. Historians of science such as Alan Beyerchen, Klaus Hentschel, Mark Walker, and Robert Proctor have focused on the theme of the fellow traveler rather than the rank Nazi enthusiast. The argument of Professor Walker, particularly, is that fellow traveling did more to encourage support for National Socialism, and with more disastrous consequences, than did the fanatics—who were largely despised and ineffectual. Fellow traveling in this context involved accepting benefits from the dictator while maintaining a perceived moral distance from his policies and actions. An example of fellow traveling among the scientific majority was the failure to demonstrate or object when colleagues were dismissed from their posts in 1933 as a result of being Jewish. Many senior scientists—such as Carl Friedrich Weizsacker, Werner Heisenberg, and Max Planck, who constantly denied that they were Nazis, acquiesced in the dismissals while distancing themselves from Nazism itself. Meanwhile, enthusiastic Nazi scientists such as Philip Lenard and Joannes Stark, while having a small following within their research communities, were largely ignored by the majority. Why was fellow traveling so dangerous? Because it demoralized those who were tempted to resist, gave comfort to the Nazis, and dignified them in the eyes of the world. Most scandalously, moreover, fellow traveling persuaded the undecided that there was nothing to fear and mollified the young. The issue of fellow traveling, and its consequences, within the German churches has not been explored to anything like the same extent. Its neglect in

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still stand, the ugliest sign of lingering aggressive partisanship. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre has been restored, and Cohen tells very well indeed how this came about: whether this should be called a story of triumphant international relations brokering a treaty, or an uneasy and fragile truce enforced by necessity, remains less clear. Simon Goldhill King’s College, Cambridge

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000390

Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism. By Kevin P. Spicer. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008. xvi þ 374 pp. $34.95 cloth. There is an interesting and instructive parallel to be drawn between Germany’s scientists during the Nazi era and Germany’s churchmen. Yet critiques of the conduct of Germany’s scientists during Hitler’s era have been far more penetrating, if not actually more prolific, than studies of churchmen. Historians of science such as Alan Beyerchen, Klaus Hentschel, Mark Walker, and Robert Proctor have focused on the theme of the fellow traveler rather than the rank Nazi enthusiast. The argument of Professor Walker, particularly, is that fellow traveling did more to encourage support for National Socialism, and with more disastrous consequences, than did the fanatics—who were largely despised and ineffectual. Fellow traveling in this context involved accepting benefits from the dictator while maintaining a perceived moral distance from his policies and actions. An example of fellow traveling among the scientific majority was the failure to demonstrate or object when colleagues were dismissed from their posts in 1933 as a result of being Jewish. Many senior scientists—such as Carl Friedrich Weizsacker, Werner Heisenberg, and Max Planck, who constantly denied that they were Nazis, acquiesced in the dismissals while distancing themselves from Nazism itself. Meanwhile, enthusiastic Nazi scientists such as Philip Lenard and Joannes Stark, while having a small following within their research communities, were largely ignored by the majority. Why was fellow traveling so dangerous? Because it demoralized those who were tempted to resist, gave comfort to the Nazis, and dignified them in the eyes of the world. Most scandalously, moreover, fellow traveling persuaded the undecided that there was nothing to fear and mollified the young. The issue of fellow traveling, and its consequences, within the German churches has not been explored to anything like the same extent. Its neglect in

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Professor Kevin Spicer’s otherwise admirable study of Nazi Catholic priests unfortunately enfeebles his overview, which appears to make no distinction between non-Nazis, fellow travelers, and keen Nazis within the priesthood. He sets out to identify those priests, widely known as “brown priests,” who were manifest supporters of Hitler. As it turns out, there were very few, and they were not particularly distinguished or powerful. He has found 138, of whom 109 were diocesan or secular priests within Germany, 19 were members of religious orders, and 10 came from outside Germany. He has done a thorough job tracing these individuals in the German Federal Archives in BerlinLichterfelde and the U.S. National Archives. They are mostly sad, faintly ridiculous individuals whose motives ranged from patriotism and a Germanic sense of injured merit post-Versailles to disgruntlement with Church authority. There were clearly those, moreover, who saw opportunities for advancement and power within the Nazi party. The consequences of their priestly Nazism are more difficult to gauge. Spicer cites, for example, the instance of a certain Father Anton Heuberger of Hizhofen, a “latent anti-Semite” who rejected the Versailles Treaty and looked forward to a patriotic destiny of greatness for Germany. Heuberger wrote a letter to an inquirer proclaiming that a German priest could embrace the tenets of Nazism and remain a good priest. The letter was printed and distributed by the Nazis, spreading like wildfire to all parts of Germany. But there is no indication as to its impact and lasting effect. Fellow traveling by those who would never appear in a roll call of “brown priests,” however, had profound and far-reaching consequences. The most historic example in ecclesiastic affairs was surely the negotiation conducted between Hitler and Vatican secretary of state Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pius XII). Pacelli of course was Italian, but it should be remembered that he spent from 1917 to 1930 in Germany involved in Vatican diplomacy on behalf of the German hierarchy. Back in the Vatican, as secretary of state, he spent more time on Germany than on all other countries put together. Early in 1933 Hitler and Pacelli agreed to a Reich Concordat, an international treaty between the Holy See and the German state. Hitler had urgent reasons: he wanted to avoid another Kulturkampf; Pacelli, who had pursued such a concordat since 1917 unsuccessfully, wanted the 1917 Code of Canon Law, the modernizing instrument of Church centralization, imposed on Germany—a rich, educated, and recalcitrant local Church. The jewel in the Code’s crown was a new decree stating that the pope and only the pope was entitled to nominate new bishops. Hitler, however, sought through the Concordat to abolish Germany’s Catholic political and social associations—more or less any form of Catholic communal activity from newspapers to sewing circles. In exchange for Catholic withdrawal from social and political action, he offered certain benefits and privileges, especially educational, to the Catholic Church.


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Hitler offered the Catholic Church in Germany more teachers, more school buildings, more Catholic pupil places. At the same time, as was known to Catholic bishops, and indeed to Pacelli and the then-pope, Pius XI, Hitler was withdrawing wide-ranging educational benefits from Jews. Hitler’s generosity toward Catholic education in Germany coincided with the mass dismissals of Jewish teachers and university professors and a drastic reduction in Jewish pupil places. Pacelli and the hierarchy’s willingness to accept educational benefits from the selfsame source of power that withdrew them from Jews signaled an eloquent collusion with, if not intentional endorsement of, Jewish persecution. Hence they behaved like fellow travelers to the Nazi cause: aloof from Hitler’s ideology while accepting his beneficence. The greatest absence in Professor Spicer’s study, however, is that of Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, head of the Catholic Center Party at the time of the concordat negotiations. Kaas persuaded his colleagues in the party (the last remaining democratic party in Germany in the summer of 1933) to vote for Hitler’s bid to assume total dictatorial powers in a one-party state. Kaas was Pacelli’s close confidante and an acquiescent subordinate throughout these events. The center Party’s vote for the “enabling act” was decisive in establishing Hitler’s all-embracing tyranny. This done, Monsignor Kaas, on Pacelli’s urgent prompting, disbanded the party. That the party dissolved itself voluntarily rather than compulsorily conveyed an impression of Catholic endorsement of Hitler in the eyes of Germany and the world. Professor Owen Chadwick, the recognized authority on church history in the period, has written that Kaas’s vote for Hitler’s dictatorship is “one of the most controversial acts of Germany history.” Kaas would have been horrified had anyone accused him of being a brown priest, and yet he did more to support Hitler’s regime than all the brown priests put together. John Cornwell Science and Human Dimension Project, Jesus College, Cambridge

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000407

Religion, Identity, and Politics in Northern Ireland: Boundaries of Belonging and Belief. By Claire Mitchell. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2006. xii þ 179 pp. $29.95 paper. In Religion, Identity, and Politics, Claire Mitchell argues, quite forcefully, that religion plays an essential and constitutive role in the formation of ethnonational identities, not just in Northern Ireland but, by implication, elsewhere as well. While this assertion will strike many readers as rather obvious given


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Hitler offered the Catholic Church in Germany more teachers, more school buildings, more Catholic pupil places. At the same time, as was known to Catholic bishops, and indeed to Pacelli and the then-pope, Pius XI, Hitler was withdrawing wide-ranging educational benefits from Jews. Hitler’s generosity toward Catholic education in Germany coincided with the mass dismissals of Jewish teachers and university professors and a drastic reduction in Jewish pupil places. Pacelli and the hierarchy’s willingness to accept educational benefits from the selfsame source of power that withdrew them from Jews signaled an eloquent collusion with, if not intentional endorsement of, Jewish persecution. Hence they behaved like fellow travelers to the Nazi cause: aloof from Hitler’s ideology while accepting his beneficence. The greatest absence in Professor Spicer’s study, however, is that of Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, head of the Catholic Center Party at the time of the concordat negotiations. Kaas persuaded his colleagues in the party (the last remaining democratic party in Germany in the summer of 1933) to vote for Hitler’s bid to assume total dictatorial powers in a one-party state. Kaas was Pacelli’s close confidante and an acquiescent subordinate throughout these events. The center Party’s vote for the “enabling act” was decisive in establishing Hitler’s all-embracing tyranny. This done, Monsignor Kaas, on Pacelli’s urgent prompting, disbanded the party. That the party dissolved itself voluntarily rather than compulsorily conveyed an impression of Catholic endorsement of Hitler in the eyes of Germany and the world. Professor Owen Chadwick, the recognized authority on church history in the period, has written that Kaas’s vote for Hitler’s dictatorship is “one of the most controversial acts of Germany history.” Kaas would have been horrified had anyone accused him of being a brown priest, and yet he did more to support Hitler’s regime than all the brown priests put together. John Cornwell Science and Human Dimension Project, Jesus College, Cambridge

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000407

Religion, Identity, and Politics in Northern Ireland: Boundaries of Belonging and Belief. By Claire Mitchell. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2006. xii þ 179 pp. $29.95 paper. In Religion, Identity, and Politics, Claire Mitchell argues, quite forcefully, that religion plays an essential and constitutive role in the formation of ethnonational identities, not just in Northern Ireland but, by implication, elsewhere as well. While this assertion will strike many readers as rather obvious given

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the book’s context, Northern Ireland, Mitchell is writing against a stable of scholars who have either minimalized or ignored religion’s import in their work on nationalism, including studies of Northern Ireland. This devaluation has various sources, yet it often springs from the belief that secularization and modernization—that is, the building of nation-states and the correlated emergence of national identities—are equivalent processes and therefore interchangeable and synonymous. Mitchell is not the first to challenge this assertion, of course. Nevertheless, she does make a provocative incursion in what is still a lively debate in studies of ethno-national identities. To combat this secularization model, Mitchell does not attempt to overinflate the institutional power of the church or overplay the particular influence of individual clerics, although she does maintain their significance. Instead she capaciously reconceptualizes the category of religion. It covers not just theology, beliefs, and rituals, but what Mitchell calls “religious ideology,” defined as a “system of concepts about self and others, informed by religious doctrine,” albeit ultimately “unconcerned with answering spiritual questions” (91). It incorporates not simply true believers, those church members who show up at every gathering; it also encompasses those who were reared within, baptized, and educated by the church but who may or may not attend on a weekly or occasional basis, or, for that matter, at all (so long as their sense of identity is, as with religious ideology, “informed” by the religion of their youth). Therefore, the notion of “boundaries” works on various levels in Mitchell’s argument, denoting not only the markers that distinguish the two dominant communal identities within Northern Ireland, but also the sometimes subtler differences within these communities. Mitchell argues that religion contributes to the construction of individual and communal identities in five demonstrable ways: it establishes practices and rituals to reinforce community membership, marks out identity boundaries, provides religious ideas and theological beliefs that sustain and reproduce divisions, and, finally, offers institutional support for boundary maintenance. To sustain this argument, Mitchell takes a two-pronged approach. Of them, the first will prove less interesting to readers who are already familiar with the history of modern Northern Ireland. Taking up nearly two-thirds of the book, it is a conventional argument for religion’s continued relevance, based on survey data, some interviews, and a lot of secondary literature (indeed, one chapter reads like a concatenating summation of the preexisting literature; and another is essentially a commentary on several surveys, with the bulk of the discussion devoted to the 2003 North Ireland Life and Times Surveys). Mitchell’s second approach is theoretically more ambitious. This is where she reinforces the argument for relevance by expanding the boundaries of religion to include non-church attendees and faith-informed ideologies. Instead of focusing on the straightforward self-identification of insiders,


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Mitchell looks to the margins and analyzes how people illumine their own communal identities in the process of talking about their perceptions of “the other.” She observes that Protestant interviewees tended, for example, to emphasize what they felt to be a strong sense of community among Catholics while, conversely, Catholics tended to focus on the perceived religious fervor of Protestant peers. Flipping this valuation on its head, Mitchell argues that a Catholic’s comment about Protestant fervor inherently reveals the perceived lack of Catholic religious fervor, and so on and so forth. Identities, thus, form around, and express themselves through, a variety of dialectics, she asserts. Mitchell is not the first scholar of ethnonational identities to focus on the “‘othering’ of the other”—indeed, scholars in subaltern studies long ago made it the cornerstone of their intellectual reputation—yet this argument is the book’s most effective and suggestive contribution, providing a thicker description at the margins for what often falls under flatter designation of (mere) “religious affiliation.” Although Mitchell’s book admirably reinserts religion back into the center of debates about ethno-national identities, it falls short on several fronts—the first of which relates to the book’s intended audience. The book is targeted at undergraduates: a short list of “key points” is included at the beginning of each chapter to guide the student’s reading, important ideas and conclusions are frequently reiterated, and inserted at the end of the book is a small glossary of such basic terms as “born-again,” “evangelicalism,” and “saved.” Nevertheless, portions of the book do read like a literature review with seemingly little thought for how an undergraduate might be engaged by the scholarship. And on another front, despite the author’s expressed interest in accepting the claims of believers at “face value,” she too often relies on an interpretive framework of incredulous instrumentalism when explaining people’s intentions. This reviewer could not help but wonder if this arises from Mitchell’s own belief that, “To a large extent, group or communal identification is about competition for power” (14). One of the lesser shortcomings of the book is Mitchell’s other predilection, which is to give Catholicism a pass. She argues, “Protestantism has provided the language and ideas for moral evaluations of the boundary [between Catholics and Protestants],” and highlights Protestant “inflexibility and arrogance” (114), yet she pays little attention to Catholic anti-Protestant attitudes and offers little justification for why she thinks Protestants control this moral boundary. Nor does she sufficiently justify other similar conclusions about Protestantism that seem to arise out of the author’s own “religious ideology” (1). Notwithstanding, the book has serious merit and is worthy of attention. Edward J. K. Gitre University of Virginia

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It’s a New Day: Race and Gender in the Modern Charismatic Movement. By Scott Billingsley. Religion and American Culture. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008. xii þ 204 pp. $34.50 cloth. Commentators, historians, and sociologists have often ignored subgroups within the American charismatic movement. Thankfully, Scott Billingsley correctly turns our attention to two groups within the larger whole and how they negotiated the gendered and racial boundaries of Holiness and pentecostal culture. Working with such figures as Daisy Osborn, Gloria Copeland, and T. D. Jakes, Billingsley demonstrates that these people on the margins of the leadership of charismatic denominations and nondenominational groups managed to find ways to subvert the social order that kept women and minorities largely out of leadership roles. In doing so, these “pioneers” managed to introduce such controversial ideas as equal and civil rights into a culture that did not initially (and some would argue still does not) support them. It’s a New Day begins with a brief examination of the roots of pentecostalism and its first leaders—Aimee Semple McPherson, Oral Roberts, Kathryn Kuhlman, A. A. Allen, and Kenneth E. Hagin. The book then devotes two chapters to women in the movement, moving from the 1940s through the late 1990s. Finally, Billingsley turns his attention to the African American preachers, including Jakes, Frederick K. C. Price, and Creflo Dollar. Throughout, Billingsley makes good use of sources, including the magazine Charisma and Christian Life, various secular and religious periodicals, memoirs, and occasionally sound cassettes and videos. The author’s choice of examples, his prose, and his arguments all combine to make It’s a New Day an interesting and informative work. To make his argument that women and African Americans managed to move charismatics into a more “mainstream” position, Billingsley relies heavily on an economic theory of religion that views churches as providing a commodity for consumption. While Billingsley formally eschews a focus on sociology and theology (3), his argument rests on the notion that pentecostalism has a broad appeal for marginalized people. Many of his protagonists, both male and female and white and black, came from the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, and all of his African American ministers had to deal with racial discrimination. While Billingsley does not dwell on their backgrounds, he implies that the hard times they experienced in the past made them more willing to accept the controversial theology known as Word of Faith. This idea, also known as the prosperity


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gospel and first enunciated by Hagin, holds that when a believer puts his or her faith in God, he or she will see rewards that are both psychological and financial. The theology has drawn its share of criticism, and here Billingsley’s use of an economic model works well, with both women and African American men embracing Word of Faith and employing it in their outreach. Billingsley, though, omits another idea from his analysis, one that would have strengthened this already interesting and needed monograph. His subjects are part of the larger evangelical movement, and that movement has wrestled with the issue of who can preach, given the Pauline injunction against women speaking in church. The evangelical insistence on biblical inerrancy leads to the question of whether women can be ordained or can be recognized as preachers. Billingsley’s subjects wade into this fray, but the discussion of their navigation of the conflict does not appear in the book. Instead, Billingsley tends to gloss over the debate and give the women an apparent victory. The women of his study do make enormous progress in pushing the role of women from that of subservient churchgoer to that of behind-the-scenes and sometimes on-the-scene organizers and leaders, but their place in the pulpit is still tenuous at best. Some of this difficulty could have been addressed if the author had provided a more nuanced discussion of the subtle and occasionally conflicting language the women used. For instance, Billingsley quotes Daisy Osborn, who wrote that mothers should not stay home when their children are at school. Instead they should “become a student . . . you got twenty years that your husband’s gonna pick up the tab and you can get an education! Keep learning! Free education!” (54, italics original). Rather than address the power struggle inherent in that statement, Billingsley moves on to a concluding sentence that both Daisy and her husband, T. L., argued against the psychological and physical abuse of women. He could have pressed the analysis here and elsewhere further. On the other hand, Billingsley’s analysis of the racial discrimination that African Americans faced works well and provides insight into the occasional interracial cooperation (although not always between two equal parties) that has occurred since the initial split of pentecostals after the Asuza Street revivals of 1906. Oral Roberts’s mentoring of Carlton Pearson, while motivated by racially questionable reasons, did result in an initial boost for Pearson’s fledgling ministry. The African Americans in Billingsley’s study are able to rise to positions of importance and prominence in large part because many charismatic leaders were looking to increase the number of African Americans in their pews. In sum, It’s a New Day provides readers with a concise, well-written overview of the inner workings of the pentecostal and Holiness movements

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and their encounters with the controversial issues of twentieth-century American culture. Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews University of Mary Washington

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000420

From Pews to Polling Places: Faith and Politics in the American Religious Mosaic. Edited by J. Matthew Wilson. Religion and Politics. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2007. xii þ 325 pp. $49.95 cloth; $26.95 paper. Faith matters a lot when it comes to electoral politics in America these days, and in scrutinizing the political characteristics of the country’s salient religious groups the authors have contributed much to our understanding of how the country works. Be warned: These political scientists make recourse to multiple regression analyses from time to time. Mathematically challenged readers of this journal should not be put off, however; a little empirical analysis is good for the souls of even the most humanistically inclined. And for the most part the volume avoids the dreary assumption of all too many political science treatments of religious phenomena that a single data set, sufficiently manipulated, can do the work of narrative and “qualitative” assessment. This is a valuable book, though not without a major weakness. Among the most valuable chapters is Stephen T. Mockabee’s portrait of change and continuity in the political behavior of white Catholics. This segment of the population, which once upon a time could be singled out as a highly coherent voting bloc, now bids fair to defy generalization; but Mockabee is able to make some hay with a generational analysis. What matters to white Catholics as a whole, however, is not what most people think. Indeed, given the amount of public attention paid to the importance of abortion for Catholics, it is little short of stunning to learn that, after demographic factors from age to income are taken into account, a candidate’s position on abortion makes no difference in the way white Catholics vote. Let me move quickly through some of the volume’s more noteworthy accomplishments. David E. Campbell and J. Quin Monson make a fine argument for the powerful but episodic role of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the mobilization of Mormon voters. Melissa HarrisLacewell undertakes a heroic, if not entirely successful, effort to assess African-American political activism by differentiating adherence to black

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and their encounters with the controversial issues of twentieth-century American culture. Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews University of Mary Washington

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000420

From Pews to Polling Places: Faith and Politics in the American Religious Mosaic. Edited by J. Matthew Wilson. Religion and Politics. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2007. xii þ 325 pp. $49.95 cloth; $26.95 paper. Faith matters a lot when it comes to electoral politics in America these days, and in scrutinizing the political characteristics of the country’s salient religious groups the authors have contributed much to our understanding of how the country works. Be warned: These political scientists make recourse to multiple regression analyses from time to time. Mathematically challenged readers of this journal should not be put off, however; a little empirical analysis is good for the souls of even the most humanistically inclined. And for the most part the volume avoids the dreary assumption of all too many political science treatments of religious phenomena that a single data set, sufficiently manipulated, can do the work of narrative and “qualitative” assessment. This is a valuable book, though not without a major weakness. Among the most valuable chapters is Stephen T. Mockabee’s portrait of change and continuity in the political behavior of white Catholics. This segment of the population, which once upon a time could be singled out as a highly coherent voting bloc, now bids fair to defy generalization; but Mockabee is able to make some hay with a generational analysis. What matters to white Catholics as a whole, however, is not what most people think. Indeed, given the amount of public attention paid to the importance of abortion for Catholics, it is little short of stunning to learn that, after demographic factors from age to income are taken into account, a candidate’s position on abortion makes no difference in the way white Catholics vote. Let me move quickly through some of the volume’s more noteworthy accomplishments. David E. Campbell and J. Quin Monson make a fine argument for the powerful but episodic role of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the mobilization of Mormon voters. Melissa HarrisLacewell undertakes a heroic, if not entirely successful, effort to assess African-American political activism by differentiating adherence to black


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liberation theology and the prosperity gospel. Louis DeSipio provides a reliable guide to Latino politics based on religious affiliation, while Paul A. Djupe offers as good a short account as I know of the persistence of Jewish Democratic voting patterns. Djupe and John C. Green’s portrait of American Muslim politics nicely traces the evolution of that buffeted community in the wake of September 11, 2001. Of particular importance, the book concludes (before a short wrap-up) with a chapter by Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio on the voting patterns of the nonreligious: secularists and anti-fundamentalists, as they are termed here. Over the past generation, in reaction to the rise of the religious right, this segment of the population has increasingly understood itself as voting against a religious agenda. And, as the authors point out, a trend that first manifested itself at the level of political activist or elites has now worked its way down to the rank and file. Put together the tendency of the more religious to vote Republican and the less religious to vote Democratic, and you’ve got the most salient divide in American politics—a religion gap (or more popularly, a “God Gap”) wider than the well-known gender gap ever was. It is, to be sure, a little odd to treat this gap in a chapter on the non-religious— inasmuch as it was the drift of the religiously committed toward the GOP that, more than anything else, brought it about. But this is a volume long in the gestation, and one gets the sense that the importance of the subject became clear relatively late in the planning stages. The book’s major disappointment—and it is no small one—is Corwin E. Smidt’s account of evangelical and mainline Protestants. Together, these two groups constitute 40 percent of the American electorate, and over the past generation evangelicals have been the biggest story in American party politics. Under the circumstances, it is beyond me why they should not have been accorded a chapter all their own. It is particularly problematic that Smidt relies for the bulk of his analysis on a survey conducted in the early months of 2000—before the election of George Bush. An immense amount of water has poured over the dam since then; compared to the other chapters in the volume, this one is badly out of date. Although the breakdown of the 2000 and 2004 presidential votes by religious tradition are shoehorned in at the end, it barely conveys the extent to which white evangelicals mobilized for President Bush and the GOP after the attacks of 9/11, nor does it call attention to the drift of mainline Protestants—and notably the most religious among them—toward the Democrats. But any edited volume will have its strengths and weaknesses, and it is in the nature of such volumes that the weak do not detract from the strong. Mark Silk Trinity College

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Religious Liberty in America: The First Amendment in Historical and Contemporary Perspective. By Bruce T. Murray. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. xviii þ 214 pp. $80.00 cloth; $19.95 paper. Murray has set out to provide students, fellow journalists, and the general public a primer on the complicated field of religious liberty in the United States. Likely intended as a survey of the field, this work ambles through a variety of issues (civil religion, school vouchers, “faith-based initiatives”) and historical documents (speeches, court decisions) to provide, as the subtitle puts it, a historical as well as a contemporary perspective on the current debates. Murray writes in the preface: “The issues involved with religious liberty are too important to be muddled down in legalese, political double-talk, or even the language of my own profession, the dreaded journalese.” His goal is to “boil the issues down to the journalist’s proverbial ‘nut graph’” (xv). ’Tis more the pity. The resulting work—which is, to be fair, quite accessible to a general audience—never really provides more than a passing glimpse at the rich tapestry and (maybe to him, unnecessarily) complex history of religious liberty in America. Murray never clearly defines the term “religious liberty”—which is unfortunate given how much the debate involving the First Amendment has pivoted on this very fundamental dispute. He also clings to a sense of historic nostalgia by leaping from the lofty rhetoric of the late eighteenth-century framers of the First Amendment to the Supreme Court decisions beginning in the 1940s, noting misleadingly that “the Supreme Court began enforcing a ‘separation of church and state’ doctrine” (xii) only in the past sixty years. In so doing, he overlooks almost everything related to even the most narrow conceptualization of religious liberty that took place in the intervening years—the good and the bad. Seemingly unconcerned with the developing relationship between the Court, the First Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, federalism, and religion during that century and a half—as well as the more than three dozen Supreme Court cases involving religion (and maybe even “religious liberty”)—Murray is then trapped into using an eighteenth-century vision of religion, religious institutions, and religious identity while imposing a twenty-first century understanding of religious liberty. As readers of this journal well know, a static vision of American religious history overlooks radical transformations in American culture over time, most of which had some impact on the way the culture (and the law) has come to define religious liberty. A view of history less romantic than


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Murray’s (and, alas, far too many other religious liberty “theologians”) suggests that the First Amendment was penned (third, by the way, behind amendments addressing apportionment and congressional pay) to safeguard the new federal government against competition between sectarian powers that differed from colony to colony; Protestant state establishments survived until 1833, and state restrictions on political participation based on (nonProtestant) religious identity survived until the end of the nineteenth century. It is likely that the words and opinions of early practitioners of the law, like nineteenth-century Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story (on the Court from 1811 – 1845)—as much or more than the rhetoricians of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, like Roger Williams, John Winthrop, and Thomas Jefferson—had a profound effect on the definition and development of religious liberty in America as it has come to be understood. Set in this historic context, the history of First Amendment litigation—over both its “free exercise” and its “no establishment” clauses—can be more easily explained within the larger history of the loss of a Protestant monopoly in American public institutions (such as its laws): in school curricula, public rituals (like Christian nativity displays), Sunday (“blue”) laws, and other areas of public culture in which relative religious homogeneity slowly gave way to extraordinary religious diversity, and in which monopoly (for the most part) slowly gave way to competition. Somehow, Murray misses this story, either in his reception of it from his sources or in his transmission of it to his readers, and the work suffers as a result. Overemphasis on the “No Establishment” clause (the “Free Exercise” clause finally sees some light in the final chapter), combined with rather lengthy discussions of school voucher programs and of President George W. Bush’s “faith-based initiatives,” presents a rather narrow—or shallow— view of religious liberty as it has come to be imagined and debated. The complex history and the legalese lamented by Murray is part of that history, and explaining it (rather than explaining it away) would be of greater use to those—as Murray himself argues—who are in need of a deeper understanding. Murray proposes to provide the background that students and journalists need to approach the field of religious liberty in America; unfortunately, he has not. An ahistorical oversimplification and a meandering through a serious subject to which the author seems to have had only fleeting exposure—mostly from a series of workshops for journalists with a few (to be sure, well-regarded) religious liberty scholars—this work may be appealing to journalists, students, and the general public, but it is not highly recommended. Eric Michael Mazur Virginia Wesleyan College

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Supernaturalism in Christianity: Its Growth and Cure. By William E. Phipps. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2008. xviii þ 373 pp. $23.00 paper. Phipps, a Pauline scholar by training, finds the near obsession with supernaturalism in contemporary Christianity troubling. He offers this book as a way not only to examine how supernatural elements became increasingly layered on to the original message of Christianity, but also to strip that supernatural veneer away so that Christianity will retain plausibility for a rational, scientifically inclined, post-Enlightenment, and postmodern humanity. The nub of Phipps’s argument is that the apostle Paul provides the best entreé into the earliest expression of Christianity. New Testament scholars have long known that the Pauline letters represent the oldest material in the canon, and some even start beginning courses in New Testament studies with a careful examination of Paul rather than of the gospels, which appear first in the received text. Phipps lucidly shows how, based on the precise meaning of Greek words in the Pauline epistles, neither Paul nor those who were associated with him saw Jesus as a cosmic superman or some hybrid divine-human being—of which he was the only one in history. Rather, Phipps insists that Paul’s Damascus Road experience, in which the apostle claimed to have seen the post-resurrection Jesus, was akin to other mystical experiences, one that occurred within the inner recesses of the self and thus had no metaphysical content per se. He also argues that Paul never claimed that Jesus had appeared to any in a postmortem resuscitated body, the physical resurrection so central to many conservative and especially fundamentalist believers in the twenty-first century. Rather, the resurrection body was a spiritual body, again without metaphysical reality. Yet Phipps knows—and demonstrates—that within a generation or two after Paul, supernatural aspects abounded in Christian writing. The evangelists added them in the gospels, particularly in some of the miracle stories (though Phipps discerns a non-supernatural core for many of them), claims for a virginal birth in two of the gospels, and many grandiose assertions in non-canonical materials that portray even the child Jesus as possessed of more power than a comic book hero. The original message became a kernel while the popular tradition became the husk. Besides Paul, only the hypothetical Q source behind some of the gospels escaped corruption, in the case of Q most likely because it antedated the passion for turning Jesus from the model human in whom the image of God shone brightly into an


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unbelievable being whose character denied all reason and science. A legendary superman replaced ideal human. For Phipps, the real miracle was not a reanimated corpse that frightened female followers on the first Easter morning, but the claim that agape, the highest expression of divine love, could actually exist in human form. Part of what propelled even early Christianity to shed its sensible and sensitive understanding of Jesus was the felt need to compete with other religions, Hellenistic hero cults, and even with Roman emperors acclaimed as gods. The more the masses became fascinated with miraculous powers, the more Christianity added them, as did virtually every religious system. The “super, natural” (not supernatural) Jesus (361) scorned those who looked for signs and wonders. Thus for Phipps, this development represents a dangerous corruption of the original Christian message, for quickly miracles attributed to the apostles—even Paul—outdid those of Jesus, and soon popes required miracles that suspended the rational and scientific for one to be called a saint. This crass supernaturalism still threatens to render authentic Christianity a laughingstock, in Phipps’s view. What is the antidote or cure? For Phipps, it is simply to peel away the layers of legend and recapture the original myth articulated by Paul. As he says in the final paragraph, “The best vaccination for supernaturalism is Pauline Christianity” (362). But can the tradition now shed those layers? In some ways, the agenda Phipps proposes is akin to that advanced by Adolf von Harnack more than a century ago in his search for the pure gospel, one untainted especially by Hellenistic culture. But for Harnack, Paul was the culprit who started the transformation of a Hebraic gospel of monotheism marked by a love that united all humanity into one people. One also thinks of Rudolf Bultmann’s efforts to demythologize Jesus and the gospels, though Bultmann, too, was smitten by a supposed Pauline-Hellenistic overlay he thought mutilated the word proclaimed by Jesus. Harnack’s quest and Bultmann’s endeavors both represented impossible tasks, of course. Phipps’s may be impossible as well. From the vantage of the twenty-first century, it seems absurd to think that one could strip Christianity of every vestige of supernaturalism, one layer at a time, and thus bask in its original Pauline essence. Organic growth, the complex character of how a mythos develops, and even the continuing yearning of people for something that is other than human to endow life with some transcendent meaning offer challenges to Phipps’s task that may be impossible to overcome. Phipps is right on target in understanding Pauline Christianity and the vortex of forces that took an embryonic tradition and made it into a supernatural religion. Yet it is also worth pondering how and why that which is transcendent—even if not as mind-boggling as a supernatural Jesus walking around in a reanimated corpse—meets a basic human need for millions.

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Sensitivity to the human psyche offers yet a different angle of vision from a naturalistic Pauline gospel, but the two together may help illuminate the continuing hold that an idealized human from Nazareth continues to exercise across the globe. Charles H. Lippy Emeritus, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000456

Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism; An Historical Analysis of the Theology of Holiness in the Quaker Tradition. By Carole Dale Spencer. Studies in Christian History and Thought. Milton Keynes, U.K.: Paternoster, 2007. xvi þ 319 pp. $41.00 paper. In this irenic intellectual history Carole Spencer presents Quakerism as distinctively embodying the mystical core of Christianity. Illustrating relations between liberal silence-based and evangelical sermon-based Friends, she argues that throughout its history Quakerism has been centered on holiness. Defined as union with God through balancing apophatic and kataphatic mysticism, holiness is evident in early Friends’ communal worship. Beginning in “deep [apophatic] silence beyond words and thoughts,” it ends “in a luxuriant [kataphatic] cascading of religious images” (31). Unlike previous evangelical Quaker historians, Spencer seeks to recover the mystical essence of Quakerism for evangelical Friends while beckoning liberal Friends to reconsider Christ’s centrality from its beginnings. Christ-centered Quaker holiness, she insists, issues in orthodox beliefs. Applying a grid (Scripture, Eschatology, Conversion, Charisma, Evangelism, Mysticism, Suffering, Perfection), she shows the presence of holiness in thinkers of each phase of Quaker thought, assessing their divergence toward non-orthodox mysticism or non-mystical orthodoxy. With this focus she traces continuities between mid-seventeenth-century Quaker origins, late nineteenth-century revivalism, and twentieth-century evangelicalism; assesses imbalances of the 1827 Orthodox-Hicksite split; and identifies holiness not only in evangelicalism but in parts of liberalmodernist thought. Insisting that forms of worship are unimportant, she affirms the value of orthodox holiness whether in silence- or sermon-based services. Quaker history is complex and since 1827 riven with divisions between evangelicals and liberals. Embodying great contemporary diversity, it is

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Sensitivity to the human psyche offers yet a different angle of vision from a naturalistic Pauline gospel, but the two together may help illuminate the continuing hold that an idealized human from Nazareth continues to exercise across the globe. Charles H. Lippy Emeritus, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000456

Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism; An Historical Analysis of the Theology of Holiness in the Quaker Tradition. By Carole Dale Spencer. Studies in Christian History and Thought. Milton Keynes, U.K.: Paternoster, 2007. xvi þ 319 pp. $41.00 paper. In this irenic intellectual history Carole Spencer presents Quakerism as distinctively embodying the mystical core of Christianity. Illustrating relations between liberal silence-based and evangelical sermon-based Friends, she argues that throughout its history Quakerism has been centered on holiness. Defined as union with God through balancing apophatic and kataphatic mysticism, holiness is evident in early Friends’ communal worship. Beginning in “deep [apophatic] silence beyond words and thoughts,” it ends “in a luxuriant [kataphatic] cascading of religious images” (31). Unlike previous evangelical Quaker historians, Spencer seeks to recover the mystical essence of Quakerism for evangelical Friends while beckoning liberal Friends to reconsider Christ’s centrality from its beginnings. Christ-centered Quaker holiness, she insists, issues in orthodox beliefs. Applying a grid (Scripture, Eschatology, Conversion, Charisma, Evangelism, Mysticism, Suffering, Perfection), she shows the presence of holiness in thinkers of each phase of Quaker thought, assessing their divergence toward non-orthodox mysticism or non-mystical orthodoxy. With this focus she traces continuities between mid-seventeenth-century Quaker origins, late nineteenth-century revivalism, and twentieth-century evangelicalism; assesses imbalances of the 1827 Orthodox-Hicksite split; and identifies holiness not only in evangelicalism but in parts of liberalmodernist thought. Insisting that forms of worship are unimportant, she affirms the value of orthodox holiness whether in silence- or sermon-based services. Quaker history is complex and since 1827 riven with divisions between evangelicals and liberals. Embodying great contemporary diversity, it is


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nearly impossible to speak of a commonality of “Quaker.” While Spencer is creative in naming “holiness” as the unrecognized essence, it is not deep and supple enough to embrace fundamental discontinuities in Quaker history and has the bias of being located historically in nineteenth-century revivalism. Acknowledging Friends departing from their founders in the Orthodox/ Hicksite split and in the shift to sermon-based churches through revivalism, she nevertheless sees Orthodox, revivalist, and evangelical holiness as the same as seventeenth-century Quaker origins in their heartfelt experiences, stress on perfection, and affirmation of orthodox beliefs in trinity and atonement. Spencer deplores the doctrinal polemical excesses of revivalism; yet these divisions, from a liberal viewpoint, were inevitable once Quakers shifted toward a kataphatic starting point. The shift in form of worship from silence- to sermon-based, in fact, means shifting primacy from apophatic to kataphatic. While she says the goal of kataphatic revivalism is to reach the apophatic, orthodox beliefs control Divine Mystery and our experience of it through preconceived ideas. Silent worship’s spontaneous, creative expressions are curtailed or rejected by “right belief.” “Continuing revelation,” measured by, and subject to communal discerning of, the degree of being filled with Spirit, is replaced by conformity to tradition. Early Friends’ language, I would agree, was unequivocally biblical. While she recognizes that early Friends rejected the trinity as a doctrine because it does not exist in the Bible, she insists they affirmed it practically, not seeing that Friends’ concepts were distinctively grounded in metaphors, rooting in apophatic depths. Attacked by English Protestants as unorthodox, Friends interchanged Christ and Spirit as well as other metaphors, such as Light, Seed, Truth, and Life. Within early Friends’ metaphoric consciousness, self, world, and God are experientially interrelated in a mysterious dynamism that “right belief” seeks to control. Unlike Reformation imputed righteousness, early Friends, she observes, embraced inward transformation (sanctification) as essential to atonement. Life’s goal is “perfection,” divinization (humans becoming divine through a restored imago dei), like Greek patristic “theosis.” While affirming revivalists’ similarity, she does not explore their different views of “atonement.” She overlooks that early Friends affirmed Christ’s atonement as revelation, revivalists as transaction. As nineteenth-century Quakers shifted toward mainstream Protestantism, atonement was redefined as the Anselmian transaction of God sacrificing his Son. Affirming that early Friends, like the church fathers, did not emphasize the crucified Christ, she asserts Quaker revivalists’ continuity while quoting approvingly their emphasis on sacrificial atonement.

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Reconceiving Jesus’ death as divine sacrifice in the nineteenth century changes the meaning of holiness. Even though recognizing early Friends’ Johannine affirmation of Light present in all, which held together the outward and inward Christ, Spencer does not see that the outward transaction of God sacrificing his Son requires prior belief in this external event before the Holy Spirit enters the believer. Infuriating orthodox Puritans, seventeenth-century Friends affirmed Christ indwelling already as Seed in everyone’s apophatic depths. Though Jesus’ life and death were understood as the fullest revelation of divine-human indwelling, this grace is present in everyone in some measure and can grow without knowledge of the Bible. From a liberal perspective, holiness shifts from early Friends’ letting go of self and security by entering and being moved spontaneously by formless Divine Mystery, to revivalist Friends’ gaining security and certainty about self and God through orthodox beliefs. “Perfection” shifts from the reality of sinking into Presence to a goal to be striven for. The radical social ethic arising from apophatic depths, which led early Friends to transform unjust forms of British society to achieve liberty of Spirit-led lives in “unity with creation,” shifts under orthodoxy toward conservative exclusivism. While Spencer sees early Friends balancing spiritual and ethical, and celebrates eighteenth-century abolitionist Anthony Benezet as exemplifying this balance, she does not explore how this radical ethic manifests subsequently. For her the real turning point in Quaker history is in twentieth-century liberal modernism to non-mystical spirituality. While appreciating Rufus Jones’s defining Quakerism’s essence as mystical, she finds his mysticism to be “intensified self-awareness.” Conceiving God and self as “unsundered,” he denies the Fall, making sacrificial atonement unnecessary; thus failing to rest in the trinity, he cannot transcend his human essence. Her account of recent holiness is limited by her evangelical AngloAmerican perspective, overlooking both mystical liberals—such as Douglas Steere, Howard Brinton, Helen Hole, Elise Boulding, Rex Ambler—and holiness among African and Latin American evangelical Friends. However, up to the 1940s the book’s historical sweep is fascinatingly inclusive. It challenges liberals and evangelicals to recognize the centrality of mysticism to Quaker faith across the centuries. Friends and others will be provoked to reflect on how we enter divine Mystery and bring that experience to form. R. Melvin Keiser Emeritus, Guilford College


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doi:10.1017/S0009640709000468

Wales and the Word: Historical Perspectives on Religion and Welsh Identity. By D. Densil Morgan. Cardiff, U.K.: University of Wales Press, 2008. xii þ 266 pp. $85.00 cloth. When I served as director of the Madog Center for Welsh Studies at The University of Rio Grande in Ohio, I was struck by the power of Welsh national identity and culture that in large part was due to the extraordinary commitment of so many Welsh people to their history and culture. By studying the importance of religion in Welsh identity, D. Densil Morgan has developed a facet of the Welsh spirit that indeed defines Welsh national identity. Morgan reaches back to Celtic Christianity in the fifth century A.D. but concentrates on the Protestant Reformation, when Christianity in Wales changed. A chapter is devoted to John Myles, who established the modern Baptist movement early in the Reformation. Indeed, Puritanism and Dissent flourished during the years of persecution that followed. Finally, after the Act of Toleration (1689), Welsh Dissenters became Nonconformists who were free to develop their own churchly communities. A different kind of change characterized the eighteenth century. The Evangelical Revival of 1735 set the stage for such evangelical ministers as Christmas Evans, whose life and ministry is detailed by Morgan. Protestant evangelicalism continued into the nineteenth century when preachers such as Llewelyn Ioan Evans emigrated to America. Morgan devotes a chapter to the impact of the movement in America, including discussion of the difference between the theologies taught at Princeton University in New Jersey and Lane Seminary in Cincinnati. The issue was interpretation of the Bible. In Wales, Owen Thomas, a Calvinist Methodist, clashed with Rowland Williams over his “Rational Godliness,” an article published in Y Traethodydd, a non-sectarian quarterly. Williams, a social and political liberal, claimed scripture was not supernatural revelation from God. Thomas insisted that scripture was revelation, an objective reality given by God. In America, the traditionalists taught at Princeton while theologians such as Llewelyn Evans taught at Lane. Evans insisted that the Bible was the message of Christ and his incarnation but that it could also be interpreted in the light of the latest science. Theological issues and interpretation of the Bible remained an integral part of religion in Wales and America. Yet, religion was affected by other movements. By the late nineteenth century Wales underwent fundamental social and cultural changes. Secondary education in English became compulsory; the University of Wales was established. Moreover, the Welsh shared in the benefits of Victorian

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progress even though it meant embracing English. The twentieth century brought new ideas and challenges to religion. The 1904 religious revival did not change the trend toward secularism that was obvious by the 1920s. Yet religion remained viable. To show the continued connection between religion and identity, Morgan devotes a chapter to the influence of Karl Barth, who perpetuated the concept of religion and identity in groups who shared speech and customs. Barth’s theology influenced J. D. Vernon Lewis, who saw parallels between Swiss Calvinism and Welsh Nonconformity. In fact, Morgan discusses numerous preachers and theologians and even devotes a chapter to David Gwenalltl Jones, a twentieth-century poet. In the twentieth century, Welsh Nonconformity was superseded by the rise of socialism and the Labour movement. The Great War was followed by depression and the collapse of the coal and steel industries in Wales. At the same time, the theological base strengthened as orthodox ministers challenged doctrinal liberalism. Nonconformist ministers continued to stress the importance of revelation and the Word of God. To explain the changes from a religious standpoint, Morgan devotes a chapter to historians of Welsh Protestant Nonconformity. It is an erudite look at the historical perspective of historians and theologians who began to use the manuscript collections and sources in a new, disciplined way. The historians discussed were mostly Nonconformists and included Thomas Shankland, Richard Bennett, Thomas Richards and R. T. Jenkins. Yet, changes also came in the episcopal church. In August 1914 the Liberal government established an independent Anglican church in Wales. During the same period, Pope Benedict XV announced the formation of two dioceses in Wales; however, most Welsh continued to see the Roman Catholic Church as foreign and even as a threatening institution. From a political standpoint, by the 1930s many Welsh rejected liberal individualism in favor of collectivism. Yet Keir Hardie, the founder of the Independent Labour Party, used biblical language and religiously inspired idealism to convince Welsh chapel-goers that socialism was compatible with Christianity. In spite of his efforts, religious conviction weakened. The austerity of the 1940s and 1950s was followed by a period of economic stability and growing affluence. By 1947 coal mining and steel manufacturing were nationalized. It made people feel as if they had a stake in their future. However, the brighter outlook brought increased Anglicization and secularization. Between 1950 and 1979, there was a rejuvenation of Welsh Anglicanism. The Prayer Book liturgy, sacramentalism, and doctrines of creation and incarnation brought a beauty that coincided with the Welsh sensitivity to the spiritual side of life. Nevertheless, traditional Christianity


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lost ground in the 1980s to pentecostalism. By 2005 pluralism characterized religious life. Wales, like many Western countries, faced new challenges with the Gulf War in 1991 and the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center by radical Islamists in 2001. These traumatic and unexpected developments helped bring religion back into public consciousness. As Morgan puts it, that event reminded the secular generation that some aspects of reality demanded religious imagination to understand. He ends his book with a call for renewal. This excellent book is meticulously researched. Moreover, it is an exceptional source for short biographies of a myriad of Welsh ministers and scholars. Morgan looks at the Welsh from the perspective of theology, religion, literature, and experiences. It is worth reading for an understanding of the Welsh and the influences on them. Marcella Biro Barton University of North Florida

BOOKS RECEIVED Barbosa, Jose´ Carlos, Slavery and Protestant Missions in Imperial Brazil. Trans. Fraser G. MacHaffie and Richard K. Danford. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2008. Bauman, Chad M., Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868– 1947. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008. Beaudoin, Tom, Witness to Dispossession: The Vocation of a Post-modern Theologian. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. Beale, Timothy, Religion in America: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Beeley, Christopher A., Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We See Light. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Benedetto, Robert, ed., The New Westminster Dictionary of Church History. vol. 1. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. Betz, John R., After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann. Illuminations: Theory and Religion. Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley and Sons, 2009. Bouteneff, Peter C., Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2008. Bowes, Kim, Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Byrd, James P., Jonathan Edwards for Armchair Theologians. Armchair Series. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. Canning, Raymond, ed., Responses to Miscellaneous Questions. The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City, 2008. Cobb, L. Stephanie, Dying to be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts. Gender, Theory, and Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Cole, Andrew, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Coomans, Thomas, and Anna Bergmans, eds., In Zuiverheid Leven Het SintAgnesbegijnhof van Sint-Truiden. Relicta MonoGrafiee¨n 2. Brussels: Vlaams Instituut voor het Onoerend Erfgoed, 2008.

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255

Crick, Julia, ed., Charters of St. Albans. Anglo Saxon Charters. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Daly, Peter, ed., Companion to Emblem Studies. New York: AMS, 2008. Davidson, Audrey Ekdahl, Aspects of Early Music and Performance. AMS Studies in Music. New York: AMS, 2008. Davis, Ellen F., Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. Cambridge.: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Dobkin de Rios, Marlene, and Roger Rumrrill, A Hallucinogenic Tea, Laced with Controversy: Ayahuasca in the Amazon and the United States. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008. Dunn, Geoffrey D., Tertullian’s Aduersus Iudaeos: A Rhetorical Analysis. Patristic Monograph Series 19. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008. Dutton, Elisabeth, Julian of Norwich: The Influence of Late-Medieval Devotional Compilations. Studies in Medieval Mysticism. Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2008. Forster, Greg, The Contested Public Square: The Crisis of Christianity and Politics. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2008. Garrard, John, and Carol Garrard, Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent: Faith and Power in New Russia. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. Gonza´lez, Justio L., and Catherine Gunsalus Gonza´lez, Heretics for Armchair Theologians. Armchair Series. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. Hall, David D., Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Hempton, David, Evangelical Disenchantment: 9 Portraits of Faith and Doubt. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. Hampton, Stephen, Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I. Oxford Theological Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Harper, Keith, ed., American Denominational History: Perspectives on the Past, Prospects for the Future. Religion and American Culture. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008. Harvey, Susan Ashbrook, and David G. Hunter, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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Henold, Mary J., Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Hill, Harvey, Louis-Pierre Sardella, and C. J. T. Talar, By Those Who Know Them: French Modernists Left, Right, & Center. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008. Inboden, William, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Irving, Sarah, Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire. Empires in Perspective 5. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008. Kalu, Ogbu U., and Alaine Low, eds., Interpreting Contemporary Christianity: Global Processes and Local Identities. Studies in the History of Christian Missions. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008. Keogh, Daíre, Edmund Rice and the First Christian Brothers. Portland, Ore.: Four Courts, 2008. Kupfer, Marcia, The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Lindley, Susan Hill, and Eleanor J. Stebner, eds., The Westminster Handbook to Women in American Religious History. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. Lenain, Philippe, Histoire Litte´raire des Beńe´dictins de Saint-Maur. vol. 1. Revue D’Histoire Eccle´siastique. Louvain-la-Nueve, Belgium: Universite´ Catholique de Louvain, 2006. Lenain, Philippe, Histoire Litte´raire des Beńe´dictins de Saint-Maur. vol. 2. Revue D’Histoire Eccle´siastique. Louvain-la-Nueve, Belgium: Universite´ Catholique de Louvain, 2008. Marsden, George M., A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards. Library of Religious Biography. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008. Marsh, Margaret, and Wanda Ronner, The Fertility Doctor: John Rock and the Reproductive Revolution. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. McGuckin, John Anthony, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008. McNeil, Lou F., Recovering American Catholic Inculturation: John England’s Jacksonian Populism and Romanticist Adaptation. Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2008.

BOOKS RECEIVED

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Meerbeeck, Michael Van, Ernest Ruth D’ans «Patriarche des Janseńistes» (1653– 1728): Une Biographie. Revue D’Histoire Eccle´siastique. Louvain-la-Nueve, Belgium: Universite´ Catholique de Louvain, 2006. Morgan, D. Densil, Wales and the Word: Historical Perspectives on Welsh Identity and Religion. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008. Muller, Richard A., Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2008. Murphy, Andrew R., Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Myers, Ched, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus. Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. Nelson, Jonathan K., ed., Plautilla Nelli (1524–1588): The Painter-Prioress of Renaissance Florence. Intercultural Perspectives on Italy and Europe. Florence, Italy: Syracuse University Press, 2008. Numbers, Ronald L., Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White. 3rd ed. Library of Religious Biography. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008. O’Murchu, Diarmuid, Ancestral Grace: Meeting God in Our Human Story. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. Orobator, Agbonkhianmeghe E., Theology Brewed in an American Melting Pot. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. Parsons, Gerald, The Cult of Saint Catherine of Siena: A Study in Civil Religion. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008. Peterson, Anna L., and Manual A. Va´squez, eds., Latin American Religions: Histories and Documents in Context. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Poloma, Margaret M., and Ralph W. Hood, Jr., Blood and Fire: Godly Love in a Pentecostal Emerging Church. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Primavesi, Anne, Gaia and Climate Change: A Theology of Gift Events. New York: Routledge, 2009. Purkis, William J., Crusading and Spirituality in the Holy Land and Iberia, c. 1095– c. 1187. Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2008. Rist, John M., What is Truth?: From the Academy to the Vatican. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

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Robbins, Jeffrey W., and Neal Magee, eds., The Sleeping Giant Has Awoken: The New Politics of Religion in the United States. New York: Continuum, 2008. Rowe, David L., God’s Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World. Library of Religious Biography. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008. Rushforth, Rebecca, Saints in English Kalendars Before A.D. 1100. Henry Bradshaw Society for the Editing of Rare Liturgical Texts. Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2008. Savage, Barbara Dianne, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008. Schroeder, Roger P., What is the Mission of the Church?: A Guide for Catholics. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. Schleiesser, Christine, Everyone Who Acts Responsibly Becomes Guilty: Bonhoeffer’s Concept of Accepting Guilt. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. Shepardson, Christine, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria. Patristic Monographs Series. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008. Svelmoe, William Lawrence, A New Vision for Missions: William Cameron Townsend, the Wycliffe Bible Translators, and the Culture of Early Evangelical Faith, 1896– 1945. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008. Sweeney, Douglas A., and Charles Hambrick-Stowe, eds., Holding on to the Faith: Confessional Traditions and American Christianity. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2008. Tilly, Terrence W., The Disciples’ Jesus: Christology and Reconciling Practice. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. Tinker, George E., American Indian Liberation: A Theology of Sovereignty. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. White, Paul Whitfield, Drama and Religion in English Provincial Society, 1485– 1660. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Worchester, Thomas, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits. Cambridge Companions to Religion. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Wright, J. Robert, A Companion to Bede: A Reader’s Commentary on The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008.

BOOKS RECEIVED

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Zendri, Christian, Pierre Gre´goire tra Leges e Mores: Ricerchie Sulla Pubblicistica Francese del Tardo Cinquecento. Bologna: Monduzzi Editore, 2007. Zuckerman, Phil, Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment. New York: New York University Press, 2008.

Church History Studies in Christianity and Culture INSTRUCTIONS FOR CONTRIBUTORS Send manuscripts and books for review to the editorial office. Manuscripts should run 6,000 – 11,000 words (or approximately 20– 35 pages), not including endnotes, and should be printed double-spaced in 11- or 12-point font; endnotes must be printed double-spaced on separate pages following the text. The editors request an electronic submission (either by email attachment or by 312” disk or cd-rom sent to the address below) of the following items: (1) the manuscript (in order to protect the author’s anonymity during the review process, the author’s name should appear only on the title page of the essay); (2) a 200-word abstract (this is used during the review process and if Church History publishes the essay, the abstract may be included on the Church History web page at www.churchhistory.org). Please see www.churchhistory.org/churchhistoryguidelines.html for further manuscript submission guidelines. The editors will consider submissions of 70– 90 pages for publication as “extended articles.” Persons wishing to submit such manuscripts should query before sending them.

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CONTENTS ARTICLES 1 Trent and the Clergy in Late Eighteenth-Century Malta Frans Ciappara

26 Joseph (Smith) in Egypt: Babel, Hieroglyphs, and the Pure Language of Eden Samuel Brown

66 What Should Christians Do about a ShamanProgenitor?: Evangelicals and Ethnic Nationalism in South Korea Timothy S. Lee

99 The Great War, Religious Authority, and the American Fighting Man Jonathan Ebel

134 BOOK REVIEW FORUM 159 BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS 171 BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES 254 BOOKS RECEIVED

The Holy Hiëronymus by Jheronimus Bosch (1440–1516). Royal Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent)—Photo copyright Lukas-Art in Flanders VZW. Cambridge Journals Online For further information about this journal please go to the journal website at: journals.cambridge.org/chh

Church History Studies in Christianity and Culture 2009-1

Church History Studies in Christianity and Culture 2009-4

Church History Studies in Christianity and Culture 2009-2

Church History Studies in Christianity and Culture 2009-3

Studies in Church History and Patristics

Studies in Church History and Patristics

Councils and Assemblies (Studies in Church History)

Studies in Church Leadership

Christianity and History

Christianity and History

Church and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France

Studies in Syriac Christianity: history, literature, and theology

Studies in Syriac Christianity: history, literature, and theology

The Roots of Egyptian Christianity (Studies in Antiquity and Christianity)

A History of Christianity in Indonesia (Studies in Christian Mission)

Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda (African Studies)

Early Christianity and Judaism (Studies in Early Christianity)

Apostolic Christianity: History Of The Christian Church Volume I

Ante-Nicene Christianity: History Of The Christian Church Volume II

Shabbatai Donnolo's Sefer Ḥakhmoni (Studies in Jewish History and Culture)

The Jews of Yemen: Studies in Their History and Culture

The Church of England and the Holocaust: Christianity, Memory and Nazism (Studies in Modern British Religious History)

"Gypsies" in European Literature and Culture (Studies in European Culture and History)

''Gypsies'' in European Literature and Culture (Studies in European Culture and History)

Audience, Agency and Identity in Black Popular Culture (Studies in African American History and Culture)

Studies in Jaina History and Culture: Disputes and Dialogues (Routledge Advances in Jaina Studies)

A History Of Christianity

Ancient Church History

Word and Church: Essays in Church Dogmatics

History of Christianity

The Cambridge History of Christianity: Eastern Christianity

Church History Studies in Christianity and Culture 2009-1

Church History Studies in Christianity and Culture 2009-4

Church History Studies in Christianity and Culture 2009-2

Church History Studies in Christianity and Culture 2009-3

Studies in Church History and Patristics

Studies in Church History and Patristics

Councils and Assemblies (Studies in Church History)

Studies in Church Leadership

Christianity and History

Christianity and History

Church and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France

Studies in Syriac Christianity: history, literature, and theology

Studies in Syriac Christianity: history, literature, and theology

The Roots of Egyptian Christianity (Studies in Antiquity and Christianity)

A History of Christianity in Indonesia (Studies in Christian Mission)

Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda (African Studies)

Early Christianity and Judaism (Studies in Early Christianity)

Apostolic Christianity: History Of The Christian Church Volume I

Ante-Nicene Christianity: History Of The Christian Church Volume II

Shabbatai Donnolo's Sefer Ḥakhmoni (Studies in Jewish History and Culture)

The Jews of Yemen: Studies in Their History and Culture

The Church of England and the Holocaust: Christianity, Memory and Nazism (Studies in Modern British Religious History)

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