Stories are powerful delivery systems for ways of looking at and interpreting the world. A while ago, Grim posted Terry Jones's explanation that the medievals never believed the earth was flat and that Columbus never proved it was round. What a powerful story that had been; many still believe it. Jones drew heavily on the work of Prof. Jeffrey Burton Russell, whose book Inventing the Flat Earth shattered that myth for me. But Russell went beyond a simple explanation of how the story got started and why we shouldn't believe it today. His real question was why, even though the flat earth myth was repeatedly debunked by a number of historians, it persisted for a century and a half.
Part of the answer is that it was too good a story; it fit too well with what many Americans wanted to believe. There are two aspects to that, religion and progress. From the beginning, the English colonists in the Americas were staunchly anti-Catholic. The flat earth myth catered to this by portraying the Catholic hierarchy as idiots. Similarly, from the beginning the colonists believed in progress, expansion, making things better, what some call "the improvement ethic". From that standpoint, the flat earth myth powerfully differentiated the modern man from the medieval one, not just in knowledge (we know more), but in attitude (we are open to discovery, so we can make progress; they were not, so they couldn't). For many, of course, both of these aspects were useful in maintaining their world view. Now we know that it was all a big lie.
I was in graduate school in history when I discovered this. I started looking into other anti-religion, anti-faith stories from the past. Galileo and the Scopes Monkey Trial quickly fell; the details of both support very different conclusions than the common anti-religious stories tell. Religion vs. reason? One of the chief charges of the Renaissance humanists against the Roman Catholic Church was that it relied too much on logic. Aristotelian logic was one of the chief epistemological tools of the medieval Church for centuries. Any university-educated medieval bishop could out-logic most modern scientists, I believe. Additionally, most of the famous scientists up into the 19th century were sincerely religious: Kepler, Newton, and many others went so far as to believe science a way of learning about God and saw their scientific discoveries as evidence for God. For them, the practice of science was a religious exercise.
Learning all this initiated a paradigmatic crisis for me. The world obviously did not work the way I thought it did -- religion TOO reasoning? Science and faith supporting each other? All the stories that carried my belief in the science-religion dichotomies clearly lies? I had made some important decisions based on those myths.
It was a kind of insanity, but the evidence was all there. At some point, my world view fell off its shelf and fractured. So far, all of the king's horses and all of the king's men haven't been able to put it together again, not in any coherent form.
I tried out philosophy, but no matter what epistemology I found, it was always flawed. There are some very good systems out there, but at some point you have to step out on faith. In logic, there is that first unreasoned premise. In science, the unprovable premises of ubiquity and parsimony (not to mention scientific naturalism), and of course many scientists reject logic as a method of discovering knowledge. In religion, well, it starts for me with metaphysics.
So here I am, pondering the pieces, nursing my psychological fractures and a Bushmills, neat, wondering, what now?
I hope to flesh out the problem some more as well as make way toward some answers in future posts. Maybe you've had a similar experience, or know something that would help?
8 comments:
It's a hazard of studying the past. It really isn't the place we were taught it was, in high school or even as an undergraduate. Those educations are too governed by orthodoxy -- more than you find in religion, usually.
(An aside: I was discussing the syllabus for this year's middle school literature class with the teacher, who happens also to be the wrestling coach. The students will spend the year reading the following things: accounts of the internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II, accounts of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement, and a couple of currently popular young-adult novels. In addition to being a shockingly lightweight schedule -- those novels should be the work of not more than a week each, not a "unit" -- it's entirely devoid of direct encounters with the past. We read Shakespeare and Beowulf; they'll read modern, slimmed-down works filtered and pre-chewed. And of course the memoirs will focus on the evils of the American project, not its glories: reasons to be ashamed of it, not to love it.)
You're doing something very difficult, and very important. I'm honored that you sought our company for the journey.
Keep nursing the Bushmills.
In vino veritas.
Grim, you've made the Hall a welcoming place for this sort of inquiry, and my fellow bloggers and commenters here are both bright and good sports.
Eric, maybe in vino quies? I find one drink often calms me and lets the ideas flow better. Two starts detracting from the process, but one is nice. So, where are you finding truth these days?
Hm, maybe in vino tranquillitas, or serenitas.
Lovely sounding words. I wish I'd learned Latin as a boy; it's a bit late now, with everything else going on.
I have done some reading in the history of science. As the offspring of staunchly anti-Catholic Protestants, I was surprised to find out that the role of the Roman Catholic church in the Scientific Revolution was decidedly more helpful than harmful. As you point out, the emphasis on Aristotelian logic in the Church was of assistance. Second, the Church saw the world as being an ordered world, an order made by God. Many scientists saw themselves as uncovering the divine order in the universe. Third, many scientists were affiliated with the Church, such as Copernicus- nephew of a bishop- and Galileo.
Indeed, Gringo. Copernicus himself was a church canon, and all of the universities until the Reformation were Catholic.
The Catholic idea of an ordered world was quite important to science. As you probably know, they believed there were two sacred texts, Scripture and "The Book of Creation." By learning about God's creation, one could learn about the Creator, much as you can learn about an artist by studying his art.
It's impossible for a modern English speaker to read Beowulf without special training. What's always puzzled me is how a story about Geats became the great epic poem of the English.
That's true -- although school is a good place for 'special training,' Middle School may be a bit early. But there are good translations, including Tolkien's, and it's a good opportunity to begin introducing the history of the language. The history of English is fascinating in its own right.
The answer to the question you ask seems to be a felt historical connection between the early Anglo-Saxons and Ingeld. The Beowulf story isn't really about Ingeld except tangentially, and we don't have anything extant about Ingeld, but Tolkien makes a good argument in "The Monsters and the Critics" that the structure of the Beowulf is such that it must be a late part of a lost tradition that was chiefly about Ingeld -- like "Tristan and Isolde" is a late addition to stories about Arthur.
Supporting this is Alcuin's 797 letter condemning the way that monasteries were full of stories about Ingeld. "What has Ingeld to do with Christ?" is the name given to the letter.
So it's likely that the Beowulf was originally an offshoot story from Ingeld's heroic legendarium. By accident of fate, it's one of the very few Anglo-Saxon poems to survive, and the longest and best of them.
Thus, it has the huge place in history you're asking about. It's not that it was the core of Anglo-Saxon literature, it's just the best shard we have left.
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