Footnotes

FOOTNOTES to Where's The Greek?

¹Cur Deus Homo, (Why God Became Man) Book I Chapter I, "Hence, I fear that just as I am accustomed to become indignant with untalented artists when I see the Lord Himself portrayed with an uncomely countenance, so it may happen to me if I presume to explore such an elegant topic by an inelegant and contemptible discourse."

²Ideology or parochialism? From the Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XI, (1911) "Paganism" entry:

"Omnia plena deo: the nearer God is realized to be, the richer the efflorescence of religious art and ritual; and the purer the concept of His nature, the nobler the sense-worship that greets it. Hence the world's grandest art has grown round Christ's Real Presence, though Christ said no word of art. Thus, heresy has always been iconoclastic; the distant God of Puritanism, the disincarnate Allah of Islam must be worshipped, but not in beauty. To Hindus, gods were near, but vile; and their art went mad. To the Greeks, save to a smaller band of mystics, whose enthusiasm annihilated external beauty in the effort after spiritual loveliness, all comeliness was bodily; hence the splendid soulless statues of gods…"

And yet this is a comparatively liberal article, on the whole, and quite positive by comparison to many "Traditional" Catholic attitudes towards other religions in the past...

³ And, indeed, I do —

Dialogue with Trypho the Jew

"Be well assured, then, Trypho," I continued, "that I am established in the knowledge of and faith in the Scriptures by those counterfeits which he who is called the devil is said to have performed among the Greeks; just as some were wrought by the Magi in Egypt, and others by the false prophets in Elijah’s days. For when they tell that Bacchus, son of Jupiter, was begotten by intercourse with Semele, and that he was the discoverer of the vine; and when they relate, that being torn in pieces, and having died, he rose again, and ascended to heaven; and when they introduce wine into his mysteries, do I not perceive that has imitated the prophecy announced by the patriarch Jacob, and recorded by Moses? And when they tell that Hercules was strong, and travelled over all the world, and was begotten by Jove of Alcmene, and ascended to heaven when he died, do I not perceive that the Scripture which speaks of Christ, ‘strong as a giant to run his race,’ has been in like manner imitated? And when he brings forward Æsculapius as the raiser of the dead and healer of all diseases, may I not say that in this matter likewise he has imitated the prophecies about Christ?

⁴There's a very funny bit of exegesis over at this "Traditional Catholic" website, explaining that because the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome was proclaimed inerrant by the Council of Trent, even though his version differs from almost all existing Hebrew manuscripts in saying "the woman shall crush the head of the serpent" instead of the woman's child, in Genesis — this isn't a mistake, it's because Jerome was divinely inspired to correct the mistaken originals! —It's like movie purists praising Peter Jackson for correcting Tolkien's mistakes…

⁵Yes, I know "British" and "skewed sense of humour" are redundant.

⁶Society of St. Pius the Tenth
Society of St. Pius the Fifth
Most Holy Family Monastery condemning SSPV

The doctrine extra ecclesiam nulla salus "Without [or, outside] the Church no salvation" — goes back at least to the 200s when St. Cyprian wrote it in a letter complaining about schismatics. Some have interpreted it most narrowly, excluding even other Christians; others, like even Justin Martyr, have interpreted it broadly enough to allow Socrates to be a "virtual Christian," by the principle that those who try to live righteously are part of a "Church" that is nothing more or less than the community of all people who try to live according to what Christians believe is God's will, whether they formally acknowledge Christian theology or not. (Which is, yes, very patronizing, but at least it's a much more liberal attitude than "You're all going to Hell! Nyah!") Why we should accept it as authoritative or binding at all, in any form, just because a lot of people said so a long time ago, is an issue I'm not going to get into here. (q.v. terms like "Magisterium," "Deposit of Faith" for more confusing statements on the subject.) But even "Ye Olde Dayes" were not uniform in interpreting it narrowly, as Dante's Divine Comedy shows.

⁷I first began to realize that we who called ourselves "conservative" Catholics in my own community of origin — but again, there are so many radically different subgroups who do, that the term is essentially meaningless — were speaking an obscure private language when at a Catholic school mind you, using the word orthodox got me involved in a confused discussion over whether or not my family was Greek.

⁸ I loathe the Counter-Reformation and the art (by and large) which it produced, but more especially the spirit of its anti-reforms. Dig in, muzzle dissent, ignore the problems so that they'll go away — yes, it's exactly the spirit in which the sex-abuse scandals have been handled. A partisan, positive view of the Counter-Reformation is found here which nevertheless explains a lot of the historical references.

The very idea of religious tolerance was (sorry) anathema to the Counter-Reformation, and to the authorities of the Vatican, even into the last century (though the fact that an awful lot of clergy as well as laity did believe in it as an ideal is manifested in many writings and practices along with the official condemnation of such toleration, well before Vatican II made the idea of respect for other faiths and individual conscience in matters of belief, official Church policy.) I particularly like the way the "self-evident" right of the Church to censorship and thought control is defended by appealing to that of secular governments to do the same — yet another check to those who think that there was a "Good Old Days."

⁹It may legitimately be wondered then why I still consider myself a Catholic. That is a complicated answer, and in part I would be inclined to declare questions of what faith another individual professes, if any, a matter like sexual orientation, not anyone else's business but a prospective spouse; the short answer is that I have no overwhelming reason to be anything else. — Despite the failure of Christianity to ever have transformed the world, rather than adapting itself to it; despite the existence of pious frauds; despite the poisonous fruits of Church power. Logically I cannot disprove the possibility of the supernatural; I have no absolute historical proof that the Gospels are frauds; I have no overwhelming reason to choose another different belief system. This could of course change, if discoveries (say among the recently discovered carbonized papyri being carefully examined from Pompeii) were to make it undeniable that the New Testament was a pious fraud (say, an edition of Mark dating before the fall of Jerusalem lacking the specific prophecies concerning the Temple) — that would be an overwhelming reason to admit that Christianity is on the whole as much wishthink as the Shroud of Turin. At the moment that paleographical gap is — and fundamentalist Christians should recognize this with fear and trembling — a buffer zone for belief, as much as it is reason for skepticism. Finding of earlier MS might not be a good thing.

¹⁰ In and of itself there is nothing wrong with Bible fanfic, of course. Some of it is excellent fun and informative as any historical fiction can be.

¹¹However — It is also possible that the painful swellings should not be translated as either hemherroids or tumours (as now it is sometimes rendered) but that the translations which have them as boils is correct and this was an early form of bubonic plague. Afaik I am the only one to suggest it, but the fact that after the Ark comes back, 50,000 of the Hebrews are said to have been killed in the district to which the Ark was returned, by the wrath of the Lord for having dared to open the Ark of the Covenant, sounds rather like an epidemic striking indiscriminately; perhaps a plague carried by rodents, even, as the Black Death was? The mice are very suspicious in this context. And it makes a heck of a lot more sense than a God who just curses His loyal followers along with His foes, indiscriminately, because His privacy was disturbed like Artemis by Actaeon. Remember, before you gasp at the irreverence of such naturalistic explanations, that the Lord helped Joshua invade all of Canaan except for the industralized bits, 'cause those dudes had tanks. (q.v. Judges 1:19) Apparently even Divine Might works better against unarmed farmers and poorly defended villages than against fortified cities with iron-wheeled chariots. Obviously God left enemies all over the place in ancient Philistia — Palestine, that is — to give people a chance to fall into sin, and test their faith, and to have someone to practice war against. Not a bug, but a feature…

¹²From "Censorship of Books" (Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume III, 1908)

During the Middle Ages prohibitions of books were far more numerous than in ancient times. Their history is chiefly connected with the names of medieval heretics like Berengarius of Tours, Abelard, John Wyclif, and John Hus. However, especially in the thirteenth and fourteen century, there were also issued prohibitions against various kinds of superstition writings, among them the Talmud and other Jewish books. In this period also, the first decrees about the reading of various translations of the Bible were called forth by the abuses of the Waldenses and Albigensians. What these decrees (e.g., of the synod of Toulouse in 1129, Tarragona in 1234, Oxford in 1408) aimed at was the restriction of Bible-reading in the vernacular. A general prohibition was never in existence.

(P@L —No, only in the language that ordinary people could understand. Not until circumstances forced the Curia's hand, in that people were translating it and reading it anyway, was an approved-for-Catholics English translation of the Bible allowed, the Douay-Rheims, produced a little before the KJV at the end of Elizabeth I's reign.)

¹³ mirantist — from "mira," to stare at, to wonder at, the root word of miracle: a coinage describing those who are exessively concerned with the supernatural and strange, not necessarily religious in nature. Faithful readers of the National Enquirer are secular mirantists, though the spheres frequently overlap.

¹⁴Note: Kate Elliott has interestingly presented the contrast between such ostentatious and morbid piety, and true holiness, in a fantasy setting (Crown of Stars), contrasting a sincere but completely phony "saint" with an unrecognized miracle-worker of genuine faith — faith which is more real for the true saint's doubt and struggles with the challenges of life. That outsiders cannot tell which is which, in the story, is very plausible.

¹⁵ The gender-linked aspect of fanfiction strengthens the parallels — despite claims to the contrary, Passion is not a work empowering to women or portraying them in a good light. Yes, almost all the women in the film are on the Good side, but female nobility is limited to the traditional passive roles of mourning, pleading, and watching with anguish as men do all the heavy lifting. (There are also a few women who fit other traditional stereotypes, the harem girls in the court of "King Herod.") Longtime readers know my dim opinion of the fanfic portrayal of female characters (though I am not the only one to object by any means) as soppy goops, noble sufferers or helpless pawns, whose virtue consists in enduring merely, and who can take no other action than those inspired by sympathy. The cold dawn duty of the Women at the Tomb, going out to the thankless task of cleaning up after excitement — however traditional a duty, in the Gospels set in striking contrast to all the male apostles huddling furtively in the back rooms and hoping that there is no more official notice taken of their quashed movement — is ommitted from the narrative; the film ends before then, does not cut to show the female disciples beginning their cheerless activity as they make ready to go forth and bear witness—

—Why? Why not?

¹⁶Ctesiphon is the name of the ancient capital city of the Persian empire. It has no sacred significance whatsoever for Judeo-Christian tradition, not like Jerusalem or Shiloh or other place names. Why anyone would have taken it for a baptismal name is anybody's guess...

¹⁷This is due to Emmerich, or Brentano, being taken in by the folk etymology that says that "Veronica," the traditional name for the woman with the issue of blood healed by touching Jesus' robe, is actually a title formed by the corruption of the words "vera icona" referring to the "true image" of Jesus' face impressed upon her veil. (I am not a linguist, and I know that some consonant swapping does happen, e.g. "brennt" and "burnt" but still this seems improbable given what little I know of such shifts.) This legend seems to come out of a fusion of several elements, first the connection of the woman healed with blood and with cloth, then the assignment of the Greek (Macedonian) name (possibly genuine of course) Veronica (or Berenice) to her in an apocryphal ancient book, the Gospel of Pilate/Gospel of Nicodemus; the story that Jesus sent a photographic image of himself upon request to King Abgar of Syria made by the same method (the Mandylion, a famous icon in Byzantine spirituality); and the mention of a cloth separate from the main shroud, used to cover the face of the dead, in the scene of the three Marys at the Tomb. There was a Saint Seraphia (or Serapia) much later, but she was never connected with the Gospels except in the usual way.

¹⁸Catholic Encyclopedia Volume IV (1908), Archeology of the Cross & Crucifix.

There are some errors in this article, but overall it is a good, if dated, use of ancient first-hand source materials. (For example, it is not true that no ancient depiction of the Crucifixion shows the seat — the only image of such, in fact, which dates from the time when Romans were still crucifying people, is a satirical cartoon from a Roman government building accusing a coworker of Christianity, with the caption (in Greek!) "Alexamenos adores his god" showing nudity, the straddled pose, the seat as a horizontal line at hip-height, and the four-nail placement of the feet on a transverse footrest in accordance with Byzantine crosses. It is particularly relevant, in that this analysis is solidly in the Pre-Vatican II era, untainted by unorthodoxy or modern liberal academics.

¹⁹Catholic Encyclopedia Volume XI (1911), Devotion to the Passion of Christ

Apostrophising the people of Israel, he says: "Thou slewest thy Lord and He was lifted up upon a tree and a tablet was fixed up to denote who He was that was put to death — And who was this? — Listen while ye tremble: — He on whose account the earth quaked; He that suspended the earth was hanged up; He that fixed the heavens was fixed with nails; He that supported the earth was supported upon a tree; the Lord was exposed to ignominy with a naked body; God put to death; the King of Israel slain by an Israelitish right hand. Ah! the fresh wickedness of the fresh murder! The Lord was exposed with a naked body, He was not deemed worthy even of covering, but in order that He might not be seen, the lights were turned away, and the day became dark because they were slaying God, who was naked upon the tree"

²⁰A classmate of Fulco's has attested to this.

²¹Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio, Horace: "Captive Greece conquered her savage captor, and brought the arts into wild Italy."

²² Soreg Inscriptions
Only the priests and levites could enter the court of sacrifice, and only the chief priest, once a year, could enter the inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies, which was set off from the rest of the temple by a heavy curtain (which arrangement is mirrored in Byzantine rite churches' altar screen, symbolically). The middle court was only open to Jewish males, the outer court to all except women, who were only permitted entry during a chronological "safe zone" of ritual cleanliness when there was no chance that they might be anywhere near menstruating or still bleeding from childbirth or other medical conditions. The woman healed of the issue of blood in the Gospels, for example, would have been barred from any participation in communal religious activity during her illness. To prevent (male) foreigners and native pagans from accidentally wandering into the tabu areas, these signs were posted all around the outer gallery (soreg).

²³Ancient writings leave curious hints that there might have been early efforts at reconstructive surgery, or more likely perhaps, prosthetic foreskins; or, perhaps, merely a willingness to wear a g-string in order to "conceal circumcision" as was reported.

²⁴Cleopatra is a common name among the old Macedonian aristocracy, like Berenice (dialect form of Pherenike, "Victory-Bearer") Alexander had a younger sister named Cleopatra.

²⁵ The ancient world's dangerous combustible of choice.

²⁶Note: going by mere contemporary comparisons, it seems quite probable, in fact, even though it would give the lie to all those who make much of Jesus' presumed dirt-poverty and utterly obscure origins and use them for rhetorical effect in preaching. Many an idealist, reformer, and religious teacher has come from a background of financial privilege and education — q.v.. St. Francis of Assisi, or the Buddha. And a building construction company would not be a background that would in itself arouse much respect for claims of religious and teaching authority: "Hey, who does he think he is? That's the guy whose dad ran Vitelli Bros. Marble & Granite, back in Jersey! What does he know about theology? Who made you Pope, huh?"

²⁷I think this is by I. Shawn McElhinney; I'm not exactly sure who the poster is, but the Royal We seems to refer to Rerum Novarum. (I hope, at least.) It's very hard to tell from the setup, which provides another example of Bad Christian Web Design. (To be fair, I've seen bad Pagan HTML, too.) The grammatical errors are all authentic.

²⁸gymnos per Mark 14, which is exactly, inescapably, the same word as the nudity which scandalized good Hasidic Jews in the midst of such secular mainstream cultural invasions as "gymnasiums"...

²⁹It is really ironic that the religious movement which makes such hard-ass claims to be the sole location for Objective Truth and Morality in a sea of relativism &c, is founded on an essentially-subjective, emotion-based spirituality. More on that later.

³⁰"I chased thee, for in this was my pleasure," says the voice of Love to Mechthild of Magdeburg; "I captured thee, for this was my desire; I bound thee, and I rejoice in thy bonds; I have wounded thee, that thou mayst be united to me. If I gave thee blows, it was that I might be possessed of thee."

From Mysticism:a study in the nature and development of spiritual consciousness by Evelyn Underhill (1911), who quotes this passage approvingly, and sees all such spirituality as normal and healthy:

To women mystics of the Catholic Church, familiar with the antique and poetic metaphor which called every cloistered nun the Bride of Christ, that crisis in their spiritual history in which they definitely vowed themselves to the service of Transcendent Reality seemed, naturally enough, the veritable betrothal of the soul. Often, in a dynamic vision, they saw as in a picture the binding vows exchanged between their spirits and their God. That further progress on the mystic way which brought with it a sharp and permanent consciousness of union with the Divine Will, the constant sustaining presence of a Divine Companion, became, by an extension of the original simile, Spiritual Marriage. The elements of duty, constancy, irrevocableness, and loving obedience involved in the mediaeval conception of the marriage tie, made it an apt image of a spiritual state in which humility, intimacy, and love were the dominant characteristics. There is really no need to seek a pathological explanation of these simple facts. Moreover with few exceptions, the descriptions of spiritual marriage which the great mystics have left are singularly free from physical imagery.

[…]

Richard of St. Victor's "steep stairway of Love" goes on: with the result that this is almost the only symbolic system bequeathed to us by the great contemplatives in which all the implications contained in the idea of the spiritual marriage have been worked out to their term. He saw clearly that the union of the soul with its Source could not be a barren ecstasy. That was to mistake a means for an end; and to frustrate the whole intention of life, which is, on all levels, fruitful and creative. Therefore he says that in the fourth degree, the Bride who has been so greatly honoured, caught up to such unspeakable delight, sinks her own will and "is humiliated below herself." She accepts the pains and duties in the place of the raptures of love; and becomes a source, a "parent" of fresh spiritual life. The Sponsa Dei develops into the Mater Divinae gratiae. That imperative need of life, to push on, to create, to spread, is here seen operating in the spiritual sphere.

³¹Rabbula Gospels, Syrian, late 500s
Holy Land souvenier box, again 500s, for pilgrims to bring home from their journey. (My guess is that you would use the box to put relics, or maybe earth, in.)

³²St. John Damascene, who is here concerned with the Iconoclastic controversy both in terms of the internal Christian debate, and as an 8th century native of Syria, externally against Islamic and Jewish prohibitions, as well as — possibly — secular skeptics (I am not certain about this because I do not know how much secularism was in open practice at this late time, and also because of the chronic tendency of people to call those of other religions "atheists" and because it seems as if he is addressing Jewish debaters here) from In defense of the Holy Icons:

"Again, atheists mock at us concerning the Holy Cross and the worship of divine images, calling us idolators and worshippers of wooden gods. Now, if I am a worshipper of wood, as you say, I am a worshipper of many, and, if so, I should swear by many, and say, "By the gods," just as you at the sight of one calf said, "These are thy gods, O Israel." You could not maintain that Christian lips had used the expression, but the adulterous and unbelieving synagogue is wont ever to cast infamy upon the all-wise Church of Christ. We do not adore as gods the figures and images of the saints. For if it was the mere wood of the image that we adored as God, we should likewise adore all wood, and not, as often happens, when the form grows faint, throw the image into the fire. And again, as long as the wood remains in the form of a cross, I adore it on account of Christ who was crucified upon it. When it falls to pieces, I throw them into the fire. just as the man who receives the sealed orders of the king and embraces the seal, looks upon the dust and paper and wax as honourable in their reference to the king's service, so we Christians, in worshipping the Cross, do not worship the wood for itself, but seeing in it the impress and seal and figure of Christ Himself, crucified through it and on it, we fall down and adore.

On this account I depict Christ and His sufferings in churches, and houses, and public places, and images, on clothes, and store-houses, and in every available place, so that ever before me, I may bear them in lasting memory, and not be unmindful, as you are, of my Lord God. In worshipping the book of the law, you are not worshipping parchment or colour, but God's words contained in it. So do I worship the image of Christ, neither wood nor colouring for themselves. Adoring an inanimate figure of Christ through the Cross, I seem to possess and to adore Christ. Jacob received Joseph's cloak of many colours from his brothers who had sold him, (Gen. 37.32ff) and he caressed it with tears as he gazed at it. He did not weep over the cloak, but considered it a way of showing his love for Joseph and of embracing him. Thus do we Christians embrace with our lips the image of Christ, or the apostles, or the martyrs, whilst in spirit we deem that we are embracing Christ Himself or His martyr. As I have often said, the end in view must always be considered in all greeting and worship. If you upbraid me because I worship the wood of the Cross, why do you not upbraid Jacob for worshipping on the point of Joseph's staff? (epi to akron thV rabdou). It is evident that it was not the wood he honoured by his worship, but Joseph, as we adore Christ through the Cross."

³³Suffice it to say that if I believed in the God that Gibson et al believe in, I would not be an atheist, but an anti-theist — I would hold it my bounden duty to battle such a Deity with every atom of my being, as futilely as Prometheus, but with no less commitment. Why? Because such a God would be worse than a demon. Abusive, arbitrary, manipulative, brutal, fickle — this God, if He had created the universe, would be the Enemy the Gnostics and Manichees envisioned. He would have no qualifications, no traits worthy of recognition — nothing except mere brute power.

Like G.K. Chesterton, I refuse to submit spiritually to mere power. Power can compel outward obedience, but never love, respect, or faith. Power to harm implies no right to those things, but rather the reverse. The fideist answer that God has the right to do whatever He wishes to us and the world, because He made us, makes you wonder what exactly they think is wrong with child abuse — if indeed they do! To define Justice as secondary to Power is to reduce God to an arbitrary tyrant worse than any of the pagan gods of ancient or modern mythology, because they at least were never pretended to be anything but fickle and spiritually as frail as any of us. Indeed, it was the unadmirable nature of their deities that made ancient Greeks start questioning their own mythologies, with the instinctive sense that, as Aeschylus put it, "If the gods are evil they are not the gods," resulting in Socrates' thorny question, is something good because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is good? and if the latter, then it would seem that there is something superior to the gods, which is Goodness, so where does that come from...

—As to those who argue that whatever God wills is good because God wills it, even if it contradicts not only natural law ethics but other divine mandates, and reason is irrelevant as is inconsistency — the God they worship is Melkor. And the Lord of the World whatever his guise is to be fought, not praised. Satis dico.

³⁴"The Reality of Matam" — this is a really interesting article, because the very conservative Muslim author is against the practice, and in his condemnation of it . . . compares it to Christian practices of corporal mortification! (The conservative Muslim articles defending the state of women in traditional Islam (it's out of respect for their/our dignity!) also sound exactly like the Christian ones from repressive "Traditionalists," giving more weight to my half-joking arguments that the only reason these people are Christians is that it gives them a convenient cover for their sexism.

³⁵Poor Weininger was an Austrian philosophy student who killed himself at age 23 in 1903, despairing over the convictions he had that love was hopelessly impossible, women inferior unless they became manly, sex debasing and procreation a creation of more misery, (added to which was the complication that he was Jewish and convinced of Aryan superiority) leaving behind the work Sex and Character, (and yes I did try to restrain myself from making the obvious pun) which some people take as a model for ideal society, and justification of male chauvinism (which isn't where Weininger ended up if you read to the end) and others simply revile without examination because his prinicples are so vile — but since they are the explicit statement of/recognition of what underlies the unexamined sexist attitudes of "civilized" modern bourgeoisie, they are well worth reading.

³⁶Yes, missionaries and clerics, back in the old days as well as more recently, really did go around teaching people that it was immoral, even blasphemous, to have sex any other way than face to face, man on top, because it goes against St. Paul and the "spiritual headship" of man over woman. What this means, in context of the heirarchy which explains how that headship of male=> female is justified by by the headship of God => males, (or as Milton put it, "He for God only, She for God in him") is something that defenders of female submission (women shall not teach males, etc etc) never seem to follow through to its implicit conclusion...

³⁷A succubus is literally "one who lies under" and an incubus "one who lies on top," frex.

³⁸The Four Loves, "Eros". Also have read it in secular 1950's family/sex books for liberated 20th century couples, that it's a good way for a husband to get rid of the tensions of work so he can keep his job, by being "forceful" and overmastering, even "cruel" with his "beloved wife" sometimes... A non-religious version of the same ethic can be found at www.submissivewives.com.

³⁹Senior editor of Touchstone Magazine and author of The Church Impotent, a book on how too much female influence has ruined the Roman Catholic Church since the Middle Ages, and "God Has No Daughters", an article explaining why possessing a womb and being in God's image are incompatible.

⁴⁰Less Than Legendary Journeys — also the among the few who can write good "drabbles" imo.

⁴¹The Catholic Encyclopedia (Volume VIII, 1910) entry on The History of the Jews gives the old official position of the Church, including the fact that forcing Jews to wear identifying marks was crucial to prevent racial mixing! (Specifically, the "corrupting" of good Christian women, who otherwise mightn't know they were about to make out with a Jew until they saw his circumcision...Damn, it's hard to do this racism thing right, when they look just like us!)

...The obligation of wearing a distinguishing badge was of course obnoxious to the Jews. At the same time, Church authorities deemed its injunction necessary to prevent effectively moral offences between Jews and Christian women. The decrees forbidding the Jews from appearing in public at Eastertide may be justified on the ground that some of them mocked at the Christian processions at that time; those against baptized Jews retaining distinctly Jewish customs find their ready explanation in the necessity for the Church to maintain the purity of the Faith in its members, while those forbidding the Jews from molesting converts to Christianity are no less naturally explained by the desire of doing away with a manifest obstacle to future conversions.

It was for the laudable reason of protecting social morality and securing the maintenance of the Christian Faith, that canonical decrees were framed and repeatedly enforced against free and constant intercourse between Christians and Jews, against, for instance, bathing, living, etc., with Jews. To some extent, likewise, these were the reasons for the institution of the Ghetto or confinement of the Jews to a special quarter, for the prohibition of the Jews from exercising medicine, or other professions. The inhibition of intermarriage between Jews and Christians, which is yet in vigour, is clearly justified by reason of the obvious danger for the faith of the Christian party and for the spiritual welfare of the children born of such alliances. With regard to the special legislation against printing, circulating, etc., the Talmud, there was the particular grievance that the Talmud contained at the time scurrilous attacks upon Jesus and the Christians (cf. Pick, "The Personality of Jesus in the Talmud" in the "Monist", Jan., 1910), and the permanent reason that "that extraordinary compilation, with much that is grave and noble, contains also so many puerilities, immoral precepts, and anti-social maxims, that Christian courts may well have deemed it right to resort to stringent measures to prevent Christians from being seduced into adhesion to a system so preposterous" (Catholic Dictionary, 484). History proves indeed that Church authorities exercised at times considerable pressure upon the Jews to promote their conversion; but it also proves that the same authorities generally deprecated the use of violence for the purpose. ...

⁴²Including leaving out that her carjacking and murder was to no small extent the result of her friendship with a Christian government official outraged at the increasing power that the more zealous of his coreligionists were ab/using, to do things like lynch people and have other cultural-religious groups expelled from the city, with clerical backing, and so she was a bystander casualty of an internal power struggle as well as a symbol of everything the zealots loathed.

⁴³ One of them is that I had read The Theory and Practice of Hell by age 12, and Babi Yar, and did not feel up to any cinematographic representation of those things when the film came out.

⁴⁴I have many strong opinions on the relationships between the civilian and the military worlds, as many as I have on everything else, but this is not the place to go into them. But that is not an idle poetic phrase, and readers in both spheres would do well to meditate on it.)

⁴⁵http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05615b.htm
Note the willingness to conjecture that the wrongdoing must have been all on the side of the opposition, right after admitting that nobody knows what Heraclius stood for or did, exactly, in all of this.

⁴⁶From Catholic Answers, Anti-Catholicism/Inquisition section:

...The Catharists’ beliefs entailed serious-truly civilization-destroying-social consequences.

Marriage was scorned because it legitimized sexual relations, which Catharists identified as the Original Sin. But fornication was permitted because it was temporary, secret, and was not generally approved of; while marriage was permanent, open, and publicly sanctioned.

The ramifications of such theories are not hard to imagine. In addition, ritualistic suicide was encouraged (those who would not take their own lives were frequently "helped" along), Catharists refused to take oaths, which, in a feudal society, meant they opposed all governmental authority. Thus, Catharism was both a moral and a political danger.

Even Lea, so strongly opposed to the Catholic Church, admitted: "The cause of orthodoxy was the cause of progress and civilization. Had Catharism become dominant, or even had it been allowed to exist on equal terms, its influence could not have failed to become disastrous."

[P@L: Compare with the reasons given by contemporary Roman sources for suppressing the radical Eastern cult that was catching on…]

⁴⁷I've read that asserted, by many Christian authors, but I'm not enough of a classicists to be able to answer that, and anyway there isn't a whole lot of discussion about the subject in classical literature; it was considered to be too low class and disgusting a subject, and besides, why talk about a gruesome unpleasant fact of life that everyone was familiar with and no one could do anything about, like car accidents?

⁴⁸Note: For the record, I liked Gibson in Conspiracy Theory and Chicken Run — two films he didn't make, and in which his onscreen character is a self-parody of his RL and filmic personae, and I thought he did a decent job as the voice of John Smith in Pocahontas, a film which I partly liked, and which of course Christian defenders of faith and family denounced for being pagan, feminist, one sided and Disney. And as I make clear in the artistic analysis section, I also considered aspects of Braveheart to be well done, while considering others to be worse than problematic. The first Mad Max film was so full of stupidity and plotholes that it deserves a Golden Raspberry. I have refused to see more than the trailers of Payback, the Patriot and Lethal Weapon, because I don't go to films which celebrate casual cruelty and disrespect for the human person, and because his falsification of history, not accidentally (as in all the Mummy films, Star Trek episodes, pretty much all of film and TV) and for entertainment alone (Gladiator, Anastasia, pretty much all of film and TV), but for ideology and deliberate propaganda, offends me even more than egregious violence. I watched Triumph of the Will to help me understand history, the culture in which things happened, and if I make myself watch Gibson's other films it will be for the same reason, as with Passion. But ars longa, especially when it's schlocky, and life is short, and I have other duties to attend.]

⁴⁹A Reuters report on research concerning an archeology discovery made in 1968.

⁵⁰aka The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, a small catechism dated circa 100 AD/CE but possibly a little older or later. Here we learn that the Early Christians forbade not only abortion but also, specifically, pederasty and deceit and fiscal corruption — I guess the bishops need to reread this! — and learn as well that the coda "For thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory forever" is no "Protestant invention" as I always heard from the Latin Mass absolutists, but was there from the beginning. The line, "And whoever shall say in the Spirit, Give me silver or anything else, you shall not listen to him; but if he tell you to give on behalf of others that are in need, let no man judge him" — referring to the fact that the equivalent of televangelists existed back in the earliest years — is also something that Christians today need to think hard about.

⁵¹I acknowledge that "evangelical establishment" is a generalization and term of convenience, and that there are apparently plenty of evangelicals who are not fundamentalists but frankly not only do I not know how to recognize any sectarian difference between the authors who are published by Wheaton Press and sold at the local Mustard Seed and the people who purchase and review them all on amazon glowingly for their doctrinal soundness and affirming of beliefs (which automatically makes them great art, just like The Passion) — but since they also all refer to themselves as "Christians" (or "Bible Christians"—!) there's no guidelines given to us outsiders to figure it out, if we don't already know the codes and keywords. It's the same as the problem with "Catholics" vs. "orthodox Catholics" from a different angle, which I've tried to sort out for the bewildered outsider who hasn't a clue that there are not only other kinds of Catholic than Roman, but also that there are many different Roman subsets. If anyone has anything useful like The Geek Heirarchy to set me straight on the spectrum of evangelical<=>fundamentalist, I would be very grateful.

⁵² Sure, there are plenty of anti-Catholic films and books and attitudes, not all of them justified either — the cluelessness of Disney staff as to why Catholics would be offended by many of the jokes in their Hunchback of Notre Dame was a classic example of a bias so deep that those who hold it don't even recognize it. But William Donohue is a hypocrite and a paranoiac and one of the biggest justifications for anti-Catholicism wandering around today. He and his minions really don't give a damn about anyone but those who fit their stringent definitions of Catholicism, and their rhetoric is or would be laughable if they didn't believe it themselves.

⁵³ I'm joking about the "slan" thing. Yes, I'm better-read and better-informed than most people I meet — but I don't think I belong to some ubermensch elite. I think everyone not brain-damaged and with access to books has the potential to become a slan — and the duty as well.

⁵⁴ I find it fascinating that Judaism's own internal battles so closely reflect those of the Christian sects, with ultra-extreme definitions of what it is to be faithful, a focus on externals, anti-intellectualism and self-isolation from corrupting society combined with hellfire and brimstone preaching, versus a tradition of engagement and intellectual reflection on tradition and distinctions between local custom and immutable principle — always the latter being mocked as evil humanism and liberalism — in a matrix of Mr. & Mrs. Joe Templegoer who just wants to be doing the right thing without having to worry about it because they have to get the kids dressed and fed and off to school in the morning. Haridi vs other Orthodox vs Reform. And similar rifts, though more obscure to me, I have heard occurring in Tibetan Buddhism, with the Dalai Lama, for all his conservativism, being condemned by coreligionists as a damned liberal for deliberately de-emphasizing the hellfire cultus of Emma-O, the Judge of the Dead, who occupies a mythic ground somewhere between St. Michael with the Scales and Sword and the Christ of Revelations "ruling with a rod of iron." It isn't just that things stay the same throughout history, it's that they're the same all over the place, too. And the key thing is that hellfire and brimstone are always used to control other people's behaviour, by those who (despite paying lip service to the notion that we are all sinners etc) think themselves quite impeccable. Literally.

⁵⁵ Here is a link to a scholarly, non-sensational history of the Spanish (& Portuguese) Inquisition by an author reliant on first-hand source materials, the which was condemned when it came out in 1905 by Catholic clergy as only focusing on the dark side of the medieval Church (sounds like what they were saying about the media in re the sex abuse scandals) and yet praised by scholars both Catholic and not, for being scrupulous and careful in his research. Lea condemns the sensationalism of popular fiction (I assume he's thinking of Edgar Allen Poe) when speaking of torture — but it's bad enough unsensationalized.

⁵⁶ Taking the valid ideas of Augustine and the Athenian philosophers (in sum, that outside factors can impair one's ability to judge rationally and act freely) to extremes which have always, always ended very badly for all concerned, both physically and spiritually, and whose damaging repercussions are still being felt in very worldly areas as well as religious to this day.

GLOSS OF RANDOM LATIN TERMS

volens nolens: "willy nilly" - linguistic evolution in action

satis dico: 'nuff said. Got that from St. Patrick's memoirs.

sed contra: au contraire, on the contrary, Aquinas' catchphrase when arguing both sides of a position.

Sic transit gloria mundi: thus passes the splendour of the world (or pride of the world)

in media res: in the middle of things

dulce et decorum: sweet and fitting [the rest of the traditional line is pro patria mori, to die for the fatherland.]

In Hoc Signo Vinces: in this sign, conquer - the omen that by legend made Constantine endorse Christianity.