William Blake and the Doors

Jim Morrison's 1960's rock group, The Doors, took its name from one of William Blake's poems, in which Blake laments the spiritual blindness of humans:

If the doors of perception were cleansed,
Everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.
For man has closed himself up,
Till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

Blake's concern here revolves around the relation between reality and perception. He sees that, as a result of the Fall, as a result of the imperfections which have become part of human nature, our perception of reality is inaccurate. Can we fix our perceptions? Can we learn to see things as they really are? In addition to being a poet and a painter, and engaging in other forms of the visual arts (e.g., drawings, engravings, etc.), Blake is here concerned with what is fundamentally a philosophical question: to what extent can humans have clear and unhindered access to reality? To what extent can I escape my own bias and prejudice to see things as they really are?

Blake's answer is found in the title of one of his short writings, "There is No Natural Religion", and places him into the midst of one of the great philosophical debates, not only of his era, but also of our era.

The discussion revolves around two possible versions of religious thought: "natural religion" is a view championed by rationalist philosophers, who thought that the most accurate information about God is available to human reason through the process of logical reflection; "revealed religion" is alternative, endorsed by empirical philosophers, who state that only by examining external evidence (mainly texts) can humans correctly inform themselves about God.

By endorsing the idea of "revealed religion" and rejecting the idea of "natural religion," Blake joins Issac Newton, John Locke, and Robert Boyle. For Blake, then, rational thinking and logical argumentation alone are not enough to fully inform us about reality. To "cleanse the doors of perception," Blake wants us to use our five senses to learn additional information, important information, about God. Logic and reason, says Blake, will tell us perhaps, at most, that God exists, and that He created the universe. But to learn the more interesting and relevant facts about God, i.e., that He loves all humans, that He forgives sins, etc., Blake tells us to use our senses, to study nature, to study texts and language, and to see the ultimate power which lies at the base of all which we experience.

Adam Smith - Then and Now

In the March 2008 issue of The Atlantic, author Walter Russell Mead notes that "in 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, a sly and subversive classic." Smith's book is "too often mistaken today for a mere lecture on the benefits of capitalism," continues Mead. In fact, the book probably contains comments of a wider interest about human nature and society: "Smith saw what we see: the progress of modernity, he noted, was not undermining religion in the Britain of his day. Instead, religious revivals were blooming. These new religious movements often rejected the liberal values."

It would be only a few years after Smith's The Wealth of Nations that John Stuart Mill would start modern political liberalism and its rejection of Locke's principle of majority rule.

Adam Smith, from Scotland, but familiar with the industrialization process throughout England, "observed a relationship between these revivals and the process that we now call urbanization." As the alienation, later identified by Marx, left the individual workingman without a sense of community, "the city's small sectarian religious congregations gave rural immigrants a social-support network and a moral code." In the experience of the individual, "these movements were a response to the dislocations of modernity."

In a different aspect of society, the technological innovations of the industrial revolution continued a trend which had begun in earlier centuries: the simultaneous deemphasis of organization religious institutions and the growth of individual religious spirituality. While technical geniuses like Michael Faraday grew increasingly unimpressed with the organized church, they became all the more committed to their individual religious faiths. So, while technological growth can undermine religious institutions, it seems to fuel increasingly serious personal commitments to spiritual beliefs: witness the missionary activities of chemist Robert Boyle, discover of Boyle's law.

"The symbiotic relationship between alienating, amoral modernity and fervent religion can still be seen," continues Mead. In modern education, in a technological society, "the intense competition for top university spots favors adolescents with steady homework habits, harmonious relationships with school authorities, and the ability" to control impulses when necessary to negotiate complex bureaucratic systems.

Technology, industry, and modern physics have not created a society of soulless robots; rather, it has reinvigorated personal spiritual activity. Isaac Newton symbolizes this well: while he was prone to disagree with a stuffy and inflexible Anglican church, he was even more prone to believe that "the Greek and Hebrew scriptures offer a wholly trustworthy guide to God's will for humankind."

It was, after all, not some conservative bishop or priest, but rather the radical Isaac Newton, who not only revolutionized physics and math, but also saw the events reported in the New Testament as central to the human experience.

How Faith Contributes to Society

It is clear that religion is, in many ways, the engine which drives history. Many, perhaps even most, significant historical events and trends find their roots in religion. Many pivotal people in history form their thoughts in the framework of spirituality, or, like Hitler or Stalin, react against traditional religion.

What are, then, the net impacts of religion on society? In Western Civilization, or European Culture, we see the rise of civil liberties: during the Middle Ages, the craftsmen who were members of the guild system practiced among themselves a form of democracy which was arguably much more direct and equal than anything found among the Greeks of the Classical era; in the settling of North America, even before we gained our independence from England, the churches began to operate with various forms of direct democracy; the view that we are obliged to respect every human life is part of a larger world-view. Gandhi's desire to dismantle the caste system was formed while he was a student in England.

A truly reflective spirituality, as opposed to astrologers and palm-readers, promotes scientific investigation: the medieval scholastic philosophers emphasized that God is rational, and that the universe is therefore structured on uniform mathematical principles, which paved the way for the development of modern chemistry and physics; European Culture, including America and Australia, have led the way in technical research and development; Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote, "The weapons of a Christian are not physical violence, but prayer and knowledge ... knowledge and learning fortify the mind with salutary precepts ... a sensible reading of the pagan poets and philsophers is a good preparation ... "

Erasmus is not only giving us the classical teaching of Western Civilization that intellectual knowledge is a better way to change the world than violence (Gandhi formulated his principles of non-violence while a he was studying in England), but is also calmly willing to study a diverse array of pagan opinions - and thereby modelling another typically Western trait, the openness to new ideas. One need only note that, in the universities of Western world, philosophies from every culture and country are studied, while in other parts of the world, studying European philosophy is forbidden.

One final religious trait can be seen in society: the willingness to serve in someone else's cause. It was free white people who fought for the liberty of black slaves; it was men who worked to give women the right to vote; it is adults who work to end child labor; it is the rich countries who offer help and hope to developing third-world countries; it is the educated who desire to create schools for those who have none. Varous phrases and words carry the same theme: altrusim, self-sacrifice, noblesse oblige.

Just Justinian

The Byzantine emperor Justinian was born in 482 A.D., just a few years after the fall of the Roman Empire, or technically, for those who view the Byzantine Empire as the continuation of the eastern half of the Roman Empire, just a few years after the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire. In any case, he did not come from a rich aristocratic family, but rather from a poor rural family. He worked his way up the political ladder, finally as an assistant to the emperor Justin. When Justin died, Justinian became emperor.

Justinian had a keen interest in philosophy and religion, and wanted to carefully define words like "trinity" and "incarnation" and supervised the re-building of the Hagia Sophia. His reign was marked by alternating political tensions and friendship between his empire and remnants of the western Roman Empire. These political ups and downs were accompanied by varying emphases on the similarities and dissimilarities between the eastern and western branches of the Christian church. In reality, the belief systems were very similar, but at times of political tensions, attempts were made to make them seem different.

He also did much to popularize the Christian faith, although, at times, he became too enthusiastic and wanted to force people to believe in the new religion. But he never completely illegalized Judaism or paganism, figuring that it is better to persuade people with ideas and not with swords.

The Greatest Goth

Before I tell you that Theodoric was the greatest ruler among the Goths, I need to clarify that there were many Gothic kings named Theodoric. I'm talking about Theodoric the Great, who was born in 454 A.D. in what is now Austria.

His father, also king of the Goths, had defeated the Huns and sent them retreating back into Asia. As adult, Theodoric's first political move was to take over Italy, partly at the request of the Byzantine emperor, who wanted Theodoric as friendly government in Rome. Theodoric was happy to comply, and ruled as king of Italy and king of the Ostrogoth territories, in an alliance with the Byzantine empire. Eventually, he gained control over the Visigoth Empire as well, and formed a friendly alliance with the Frankish Merovingian dynasty.

Theodoric demonstrated the power and skill of the Germanic tribes as a ruler, and a high point of European culture. One story will suffice to demonstrate his spirit: In 519 A.D., when a mob of Italians had burned down the synagogues of Ravenna, Theodoric ordered the town to rebuild them at its own expense.

The Plague

[Norman F. Cantor taught at Princeton, the University of Chicago, and several other universities. The following is from his book about the Plague:] In the England of 1500 children were singing a rhyme and playing a game called "Ring Around the Rosies." Children holding hands in a circle still move around and sing:

Ring around the rosies
A pocketful of posies
Ashes, ashes
We all fall down

The origin of the rhyme is the flu-like symptoms, skin discoloring, and mortality caused by bubonic plague. The children were reflecting society's efforts to repress memory of the Black Death of 1348-49 and its lesser aftershocks. Children's games were - or used to be - a reflection of adult anxieties and efforts to pacify feelings of fright and concern at some devastating event. So say the folklorists and psychiatrists.

The meaning of the rhyme is that life is unimaginably beautiful - and the reality can be unbearably horrible.

In the late fourteenth century a London cleric, who previously served in a rural parish and who is known to us as William Langland, made severe reference to the impact of infectious diseases "pocks" (smallpox) and "pestilence" (plague) in Piers Plowman, a long, disorganized, and occasionally eloquent spiritual epic. As translated by Siegfried Wenzel:

So Nature killed many through corruptions,
Death came driving after her and dashed all to dust,
Kings and knights, emperors and popes;
He left no man standing, whether learned or ignorant;
Whatever he hit stirred never afterwards.
Many a lovely lady and their lover-knights
Swooned and died in sorrow of Death's blows....
For God is deaf nowadays and will not hear us,
And for our guilt he grinds good men to dust.

The playing children, arms joined in a circle and singing "Ring Around," and the gloomy, anguished London priest were each in their distinctive ways trying to come to psychological terms with an incomparable biomedical disaster that had struck England and most of Europe.

The Black Death of 1348-49 was the greatest biomedical disaster in European and possibly in world history.

A third at least of Western Europe's population died in what contemporaries called "the pestilence" (the term the Black Death was not invented until after 1800). This meant that somewhere around twenty million people died of the pestilence from 1347 to 1350. The so-called Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918 killed possibly fifty million people worldwide. But the mortality rate in proportion to total population was obviously relatively small compared to the impact of the Black Death - between 30 percent and 50 percent of Europe's population.

The Black Death affected most parts of the Mediterranean world and Western Europe. Some historians believe that the Black Death, which reached Sweden by 1350, caused an era of intense pessimism and widespread feelings of dread and futility. Others see that people rose to the occasion, nobly enduring hardship and danger, to see that their communities survived. After the devastation, the core of the civilization had been preserved, and new creativity could be based on it.

But the great medical devastation hit no country harder than England in 1348-49 and because of the rich documentation surviving on fourteenth-century England it is in that country that we can best examine its personal and social impact in detail. Furthermore, there were at least three waves of the Black Death falling upon England over the century following 1350, nowhere near as severe as the cataclysm of the late 1340s, whose severity was unique in human history. But the succeeding outbreaks generated a high mortality nonetheless.

The Effect of the Crusades on European Civilization

Much is said and written about the Crusades - and some of it is even true! We may note three phases: from 637 A.D. (Islamic armies conquer Jerusalem) until 1095 A.D., there is a period of unchallenged Muslim military expansion, included the invasion and sacking of Spanish cities, and southwestern France. The second period would start in 1098 (the beginning of the first Crusade) and end in 1250 (the end of significant Crusades); this would be the phase of counter-attack by Europe in response to the first phase. The third and final phase would begin in 1250 (the last serious attempt to settle or calm the source of attacks on Europe; after this, the aggression toward Europe, displayed prior to the beginning of the first Crusade in 1098, reappears.

But what is the cultural legacy of the Crusades? In a book entitled The Humanities in the Western Tradition, written jointly by The City University of New York and The University of Akron, the authors note that an important architectural example, "the cathedral Santiago de Compostela ... was destroyed by Muslims in 997." Much valuable artwork was lost in the Islamic attacks on Europe, attacks to which the Crusades were a response.

The same book notes that the scientific, philosophical, mathematical, and political developments of Europe would have been lost "if the Arabs had been able to break through Byzantine defenses and advance into eastern Europe." Imagine - no calculus, no modern physics, and no theory of government resting upon equal participation and freedom of expression!

If Europe had not been defended, history would indeed be very different!