Cold War may have been by mistake

It seems the Cold War may have happened by mistake. After Stalin’s death between 1953 and 1955 there was an opportunity for détente. The USSR applied to join NATO and offered to reunify Germany on condition of it being neutral and demilitarised. And they really meant it. They weren't acting the maggot, as they say here in Ireland. So says Prof. Geoff Roberts of University College Cork (UCC)..

This is not an original idea, he says, people in the West were saying this at the time. The point is, after going to Moscow to study the archives of the foreign ministry, he concludes this contemporary view, that the Soviet proposals were in earnest, was well-founded.

What about the West’s politicians? Did they (a) share his view of Soviet good faith, take it for a sign of weakness, and decide to put the boot in? Or (b) did they not believe that the Soviets' proposals were serious?

His answer - Western politicians genuinely doubted Russian good faith. So in this sense both sides were acting in good faith, insofar as both sides genuinely believed the other was in bad faith. Lefties and liberals in the West were for détente. Western governments feared these elements were being duped. The Soviets ran a sophisticated campaign amongst the populations of the West, they didn’t just rely on diplomatic channels.

All this is from a UCC History Postgraduate Seminar, 25.02.2009. Anyone is entitled to walk in off the street to attend these seminars, but so far as I can tell, I am the only one who does so.

Prof. Roberts has covered the Soviet collective security campaign in the 1950’s in “A Chance for Peace? The Soviet Campaign to End the Cold War, 1953-1955” (Cold War International History Project Working Paper No.57) (63 pages)

Catharina Hooft and Her Nurse

To the National Gallery in London to see Dutch portraits. Rembrandt and Frans Hals. A strange thing, they couldn’t paint children, they made them look like little adults. I was aware that medieval painters did this, but I was surprised to find that the Dutch masters still hadn’t mastered it. This one’s Frans Hals, Catharina Hooft and Her Nurse, around 1620.

Is the baby's head big enough? I'm not sure. Has the artist has made the head to body ratio that of an adult? But Betsy Wieseman, a curator at the National Gallery, points out that the picture is interesting in another way, that the nurse is not in a subservient role, and is just as much the subject of the painting as the rich child. In 17th century Netherlands, she says, if you encountered someone walking down the street or at market, you might not be able to distinguish from dress or demeanour whether they were servant or master. As portrayed in the film of Girl with the Pearl earring, she said.

The exhibition catalogue says that in the seventeenth-century the rising Dutch merchant class was eager to record its newly-found prosperity by commissioning an unprecedented number of portraits, of which this is a sample. It is now thought of as the golden age of Dutch Baroque portraiture.

Betsy Wieseman mentioned this picture on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week in August 2007.

Image courtesy of about.com (art history)

Muslim students and creationism

Harun Yahya - idiocy

I was dismayed by a Muslim meeting about creationism.

It was at University College Cork, held by the Muslim Cultural Society, on 18th Feb, and was billed as “The Atlas of Creation - a nightmare for Darwinism”. Never was an event more aptly named. The blurb said : “This conference will present the collapse of the theory of evolution because this theory constitutes the basis of all anti-spiritual philosophies. Since Darwinism rejects the fact of creation—and therefore, God's existence—over the last 140 years it has caused many people to abandon their faith or fall into doubt. This talk will focus on scientific refutation of Darwinism through fossil record and palaeontology.”

The extent to which my worst fears were exceeded, exceeded my worst fears.

It was a 4-hour event with two lectures plus Q&A. The audience consisted of 60 Muslim students and me. This must have been a very high proportion of the Muslim students at the college. What dismayed me, was not just that the event took place at all, but that the audience evidently lapped it up. Not a glimmer of dissent or debate.

Harun Yahya was the main speaker and you can get a flavour of his idiocy from his website . Here's a sentence plucked at random: "Harun Yahya is well-known as an author who has written very important works disclosing the imposture of evolutionists, the invalidity of their claims and the dark liaisons between Darwinism and bloody ideologies." 

I got my question in first, hoping that others would come in behind me. But none did so. I said I was disappointed the Muslim Cultural Society had chosen to make anti-science their theme, and asked, why didn’t they focus on the story of Arab and Muslim science being the foundation of European science?

Afterwards they were all very polite about it, thanked me for coming, and tried to convert me!  Jim al Khalili is the man they should be inviting, I suggested to one of the organisers.  I don’t think they will.

Are the Muslim students at UCC unusual?

Revealed : how a 2600 year old mistake caused problem of evil

Archbishop Rowan Williams

Just listened again to John Humphrys interviewing Rowan Williams on the BBC. The crux of the interview was the problem of evil. Rowan Williams had only the lamest of answers. It will all be healed by God in his good time, probably after death.

When Humphrys parodied this as “don’t worry, you’ll go to heaven”, Williams failed to convince. I’ve listened, and I’ve read the transcript, and all he has to offer is this:

“ My faith tells me, and it's very hard to believe in these circumstances, but it tells me and I trust this, that the world, yes, is such that suffering arises in these unspeakable ways. It also tells me that what God can do with those circumstances and those persons is not exhausted by the world, there's more.”

Yes that’s it. Really.

I trace his difficulty back to 600 BC. This is when the Jews invented their religion, and in doing so took a critical wrong turn. The elite were exiled by King Nebuchadnezzar to Babylon. Having sat down by the waters and wept as they remembered Zion, they assimilated a lot from Zoroastrianism. Already 400 years old at the time, this religion venerated a single, universal, merciful God. The exiled Jewish elite came to recognise this concept as far superior to the failed tribal warlord they had followed hitherto.

They didn’t overthrow Jehovah, they reformed him. But in doing so they made a bad mistake, the consequences of which poor old Rowan Williams is struggling with to this day. And their mistake was to reject the key point about Zoroaster‘s god (Ahura Mazda).

All-powerful is good, but weak is better

That key point is that Ahura Mazda was not all-powerful, but weak, engaged in unequal strife with the forces of evil, unable to prevail on his own, and needing humankind to come to his assistance.

If they’d taken my recommendation they would have stuck with this formula. But no, they made Jehovah all-powerful. It seemed a good idea at the time, I suppose.

If only they had got it right all those years ago. Then, instead of having to say how hard the problem of evil is, Williams could now say: yes indeed there is evil, but God doesn’t will it, nor does he allow it, he is powerless to prevent it; and will remain so until you lot forsake your sinful ways and come to his aid to combat the malign forces that have brought this state of affairs about.

He could hold has head high defending that sort of religion. Instead he's now stuck with stammering and stuttering his way through the problem of evil.

The interview was one of a 4-part series called Humphrys in Search of God: 31 October 2006. I can't find it any more on the BBC website so maybe it’s been deleted. But John Humphrys has made the interviews the basis of a book, In God We Doubt: Confession of a Failed Atheist (2007). (Subsequently bought it second hand in Cork 19/5/2010.)

Puzzled over English bible ban

To the Sacred exhibition at the British Library last month. A real wow. It's too late for me to recommend this exhibition, as it's now finished. My apologies for this.

Korans, Bibles and Torahs were laid side by side so you could see the artistic influences.  For example, the decoration on the Lindisfarne Gospel reminded me of a Koran. I want to say more about that, but first I'll need to look further into it, so for now I'll just have to let the images speak for themselves.  Here's the Lindisfarne Gospel. Has to be seen to be believed. The image is rather disappointing I'm afraid. Date: between 698 and 721.

Carpet page from Lindisfarne Gospel, England, between 698 and 721 (British Library)

Compare this to a Jewish illuminated manuscript from 1482

Carpet page from the Lisbon Bible, Portugal, 1482 (British Library)

The next thing that intrigued me was an English Bible of around 1020. Also Coptic, Slavonic, Armenian bibles of the same period. And a note beside the Lindisfarne Gospels contained a surprise too. Around 970 an Anglo-Saxon translation was added in red ink beneath the original Latin, and this is the oldest surviving version of the gospels in any form of English.
 
I was becoming puzzled. In 1523 John Tyndale wanted to translate the bible into English, he was refused permission, did it anyway, and got burnt at the stake for it.  So what I wanted to know was: exactly what happened between 1020 and 1523 to bring this state of affairs about? 

The awful irony is that Tyndale’s bible of 1534 (I have a copy of his New Testament) forms the basis of the King James Bible of 1611, justly regarded as one of the pinnacles of the English language.  I could digress on this theme at length, but back to the English and Armenian bibles on display. Now, I suppose you could say these vernacular bibles shouldn’t really have come as a surprise. After all, the very first bibles were in demotic Greek, which anyone could read, or have read to them.

The fly in the ointment seems to be the Latin Vulgate bible, dating from the 4th century. Here's a 13th century copy of a type of Vulgate bible which was mass produced and portable, even though before the age of print.

Latin Vulgate Bible, manuscript on parchment copied in France, c. 1250 (Newberry Library Chicago)

In Tyndale’s day the Vulgate was the only bible allowed, therefore none but priests and the educated elite could read it.  So the next question is: what, in the 4th century, was the Vulgate originally for?  Was it put into Latin with the express purpose of making it obscure?  No, it turns out.  Hannah Jenkins at the British Library tells me:

“St Jerome's Latin Vulgate (from the Latin vulgate, meaning 'common' or 'popular') was commissioned by Pope Damasus in 382. Based on translations then in use, it employed the everyday written Latin style of the fourth century, in contrast to the more formal, elegant Latin of Cicero. Jerome's Vulgate became the standard version of the Bible in the West for over a thousand years.”

So here’s the picture that's emerging. In the 4th century, and for hundreds of years after that, the hierarchy wanted the whole populace to read (or hear) the bible: the Vulgate was made for those who spoke popular Latin; and Syriac, Armenian, English versions for the rest.  And this was so up till at least 1020, the date of this English bible:-

The first six books of the Old Testament in Old English, c. 1020. Adam naming the beasts.

But at some time during the next few centuries the hierarchy made an about face. When? Why? Instead of wishing the bible to be accessible, they now wished it inaccessible. The Vulgate, no longer understood even in Italy, France and other Romance language regions, came to be used not to impart biblical knowledge, but to deny biblical knowledge.  The populace came to rely on the priest telling them what was in the bible without being able to check for themselves, and the hierarchy liked it this way. How so?

The answer, again from the British Library’s Hannah Jenkins, is the “Constitutions of Oxford”.

Under the 1408 Constitutions of Oxford, it was strictly forbidden to translate the Bible into the native tongue. This ban on vernacular bibles was a reaction to the English religious reformer Wyclif. The Constitutions of Oxford remained in effect for nearly 130 years until King Henry VIII licensed the Matthews Bible to circulate in 1537. More information from Hannah Jenkins and some links in this pdf file.

Turning to the Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature I find that the tradition of Englishing the Bible was kept alive, and the issue wasn’t actually that it had to be in Latin; the issue was the suspect motives and theology of the translators. 

I still don't feel I've got to the bottom of this.  If the authorities didn't like the vernacular bibles issued by Wyclif and other dissidents, what prevented them issuing modern translations of their own?  Henry VIII after all was no protestant.  And when, exactly, did the church authorities become opposed to the populace being able to read the bible?  Suddenly in 1408?  Or had a prejudice against knowledge of the bible been brewing for a long time?  There's a whole lot more to be found out.

Herodotus a true seeker after knowledge

The Greek historian Herodotus is someone I must find out more about.  He described how a Phoenician expedition circumnavigated Africa, or Libya as he called it, departing from the bottom of the Red Sea and returning through the Pillars of Hercules.  He met the crew it seems, and reported their story.  They told him amongst other things that when they were sailing west the sun rose and set in the wrong direction.  Herodotus reports this fact whilst commenting “I do not believe them”.

Herodotus died about 428 BCE.  What a wonderful man, a true seeker after knowledge. He didn’t believe them, but passed the account on anyway.  It is in fact precisely this detail which convinces that the story is true.  Sailing west – this is when they were rounding the Cape of Good Hope.    The sun rose and set in the wrong direction – this is exactly what happens when you are south of the equator, a  concept that was clearly foreign to Herodotus, hence his disbelief.

I picked this up browsing in a book ship in Kanturk, Co Cork.  There were many books there I should have liked to buy but I wouldn’t have had time to read them. 

More honoured in the breach

"More honoured in the breach" is habitually mis-used. This offends me. In Hamlet, Horatio is shocked to hear drums, trumpets and canon sounding off whenever the king drains his cup of wine. Is that the custom here he asks?  Sadly yes, replies Hamlet; but to my mind, though I am native here and to the manner born, it’s a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance.  Meaning : the custom is a disgrace, and it would be better for Denmark’s reputation not to do it, than to do it.

Instances of mis-alluding to this passage are numberless, but here’s an egregious one.  Jonathan Aitken on p 32 of The Guardian 3rd May 2007: 

“If ever there was a part of the law ‘more honoured in the breach than in the observance’ it is the statutes of perjury.”

We know what he intends – he intends to say that the statutes of perjury are rarely used and ought to be used more often. But by choosing to mis-allude to Hamlet, he actually says the opposite : he says the statutes of perjury are a disgrace, and it would be better if they were never to be used at all. 

Reference:  Hamlet, Act I, Sc 4, 12-16