The town is called "Anchor" on p. 104 but "Anker" on p. 109. The latter must be correct because it is the name of the philosopher who inspired Constitutionalism.
Joshua Coffin maintains his Biblical line of talk when he suggests that the dogs would have:
"'...raised a yell loud enough to wake Lazarus.'" (p. 109)
He just means "wake the dead" but he always takes a Biblical slant. Coffin must be the only Christian on Rustum. All the colonists were Constitutionalists fleeing persecution on Earth and Coffin joined them later for other reasons. He tells his children to:
"'...thank a just and merciful God...'" (p. 102)
Since the colonists, including the Coffins, have many children, it is predictable that some young Coffins will perpetuate their father's religious belief whereas others will reject it. But the rest of the population remains Constitutionalist or maybe just secularist.
23 comments:
I very much doubt he's the only Christian. He may be the only old-line Calvinist/Congregationalist on Rustum.
The colonists, apart from Coffin, were all Constitutionalists and their world view sounds secularist.
Kaor, Paul!
Stirling beat me to making a similar comment. I would add that Anderson may have thought mentioning Joshua Coffin's faith was enough for pointing out Christianity existed on Rustum.
The O'Malleys, for example, may have been Catholics.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But, if they were Catholics, then I don't think that they would have been Constitutionalists.
Paul.
OK. I have found this on p. 47:
"But few Constitutionalists had any religion; those who did were Romish, Jewish, Buddhist, or otherwise foreign to him."
I still think that Constitutionalism sounds anti-religious, though.
Kaor, Paul!
That settles it, there were some Catholics, Jews, Buddhists among the colonists.
I would still disagree about Constitutionalism being anti-religious. There is noting in it that I found hostile to religious believers.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
It says base what you do entirely on the constitution of this world. It is described as anti-mystical. Constitutionalists argue against mystical practices.
Paul.
Having said that, it is time for me to go and meditate, then do other things. Normal service will be resumed later.
Kaor, Paul!
When I can so easily list a long line of Catholic scientists who did FOUNDATIONAL works in their sciences as Louis Pasteur, Abbot Gregor Mendel, and Fr. Georges Lemaitre, I would still disagree with such a view.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Of course you disagree with such a view but I still think that Constitutionalism as demonstrated in part one is anti-religious.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Some Constitutionalists may have PERSONALLY thought like that, but hostility to religion was not INSTITUTIONALIZED, made part of their laws on Rustum. If anything, the mentions of the US Constitution in "Robin Hood's Barn" and THE FEDERALISTS PAPERS in "To Promote the General Welfare" made me think of the First Amendment of that Constitution, forbidding the gov't to hinder the free exercise of one's faith. An attitude which I believed was carried over to Rustum.
Ad astra! Sean
I would say the Constitutionalists are anti-superstition, rather than anti-religious.
Note that medieval Catholics of the educated, Aquinian type, were anti-superstition too: that was why the Catholic Church tended to deplore witch-hunting hysteria and to look on accusations of witchcraft very skeptically and punish what it regarded as false or unfounded accusations harshly.
It only really took off (on both sides) when the Reformation ushered in a more demotic, populist approach.
In part one, 4, nine-year-old David Svoboda sits cross-legged, swaying with half-shut eyes. Jan, his father, asks what he is dong. David says that it is homework, practicing elementary attunement to the Ineffable All. Jan asks what structure this identification has. He asks David to use his knowledge of basic semantics to show where definitions fail and ostensive experience takes over. David, repeating what he has been told at school about a truth higher than science, resents his father's interrogation. It seems to me that Jan would apply the same interrogation to any practice of prayer or meditation. He had been trying to teach his daughter the conformal-mapping theorem and how language functions so that she can think straight.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And that resistance of the Catholic Church to superstition remains, as this bit from the CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH (2111) shows: "Superstition is the deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices in otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition."
And your remarks about how, even during the witchcraft hysteria seen in Europe after 1517 was resisted by the Catholic Church reminded me of this text from the beginning of Chapter Eleven of Charles Williams' WITCHCRAFT (1941): "The Stuarts, while allowing the real existence of witches, had by their insistence on clear proof done as much against allowing the belief to produce its ordinary results. There was, in all Europe, one other country where similar action took place, where cool intellect considered not only the theory but the incidents, and that--a little surprisingly--was Spain. There were, certainly, writers elsewhere--scattered over Europe--but the one official body that appears to have deprecated the general belief and to have taken trouble to check, if not wholly to suppress, the clamour of accusation, was the Spanish Inquisition. The Roman Inquisition followed suit, a little later. But the Spaniards were the first and foremost."
A boring insistence by judges and lawyers of PROOFS of actual harm done by alleged witches would throw some cold water on this catastrophic mania!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Note that ordinary Catholic laymen -- including many in the aristocracy and some rulers -- believed in witches and feared them just as much as anyone. It was the hierarchy and particularly the theologians that resisted witchcraft hysteria.
Not that they didn't believe in witches and sorcerers; what they didn't believe was that witches were as common as many people thought.
And most important, they didn't believe that witches were as -powerful- as ordinary people thought; they considered that as a sign of blasphemous and heretical doubt of Divine omnipotence and benevolence.
There were exceptions, of course; the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, for example.
But it's notable that this was a German work -- Germany was the center of witch-hunting frenzy -- and that it was condemned by many theologians.
The heads of the Inquisition in the faculty of the University of Cologne denounced it as heretical, advocating illegal measures, and as violating the Church's teaching on demonology.
Basically, Aquinian rationalism tended to damp down that sort of superstition.
The reason the witch-hunting hysteria got relatively worse in Protestant areas was that Protestantism was much more decentralized -- "democratic" if you will -- than Catholicism, which had a more powerfully institutionalized theological consensus.
The ordinary people were, to put it mildly, grossly superstitious and generally surprisingly ignorant of theology, even the most basic parts of the Creed. In backward areas (Russia, for example) this persisted for a long time.
There were killings over witchraft panics in peasant villages not a hundred miles from Moscow as late as the 1920's.
What really expunged witch trials from Europe in the 18th century was a massive change of intellectual fashion, starting among the upper classes, towards Enlightenment rationalism, itself ultimately derived from Aquinas and other theologians.
Believing in witches and magic -- or at least admitting you did, or allowing the lower classes to act out their superstitions -- became after about the 1720's a mark of deeply unfashionable old-fashioned primitivism. It meant you were a hick, and that you'd be ridiculed and scorned... "cancelled", to use a contemporary term.
This gradually filtered down, but it was slow, particularly before compulsory mass education.
The police in London, for example, were still bringing cases against people who assaulted those they thought had laid "hexes" on them as late as the 1860's.
It's basically the case that Western Latin-Christian religion was in a sense anti-magical; that is, it emphasized the universe's obedience to a single, all-powerful Law.
It allowed exceptions -- miracles -- but in a strictly limited sense that didn't allow for flying on broomsticks because of a magical ointment.
And it didn't allow for omnipresent spirits; even demons, who were assumed to exist, could only do things by Divine permission.
So the consequence of the theology was a world that was governed, rational, and predictable -- not chaotic and ruled by personal will.
By way of contrast, popular worldviews tended far more to a 'magical' view of how reality function; much more dependent on spirits, and on the supernatural intruding into everyday life.
It wasn't quite as black and white as that brief summation, but I think that's substantially true.
Poul noted the same thing in stories like "Delenda Est" -- that monotheism, and in particular the version that came to dominate Western European religious thought, was a precondition for scientistic rationalism.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Fascinating, these mini essays you give us. And I agree with them. I'm glad the Catholic Church, by and large, resisted the witchcraft hysteria, for the reasons you gave.
Yes, I'm sure superstition was as widespread among ordinary Catholics, high and low, as it was among Protestants. I'm also reminded of how Jack Havig's Byzantine wife, Xenia, in THERE WILL BE TIME, was also superstitious.
Ditto, what you said about "Delenda Est" (to which I add IS THERE LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS?). For a more detailed discussion of Aquinian rationalism by Anderson.
I think, in western Europe, the very last time a so called witch was burned or hanged was in Scotland, in 1790.
Ad astra! Sean
I asked Mr Stirling a couple of times whether he would be able to write an article for the blog but I now think that he does it all the time in the combox.
Kaor, Paul!
And I hope Stirling, despite being so busy with his own writing, might indeed contribute a full scale article for this blog. Either about one of Anderson's stories or a topic spun off from one of them. Or, heck, anything he would like to write about.
But, he already does that in the comboxes!
Ad astra! Sean
Poul Anderson's works are a launching pad or springboard for the universe. We start by discussing specific works by PA but, from there, we can go anywhere.
Kaor, Paul!
Absolutely! And I think the same can be said of Stirling's own works.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I keep forgetting to mention it, but I even have a copy of the eccentric "Anglo/Catholic" Montague Summers' translation of the MALLEUS MALEIFICARUM. And that book was mentioned by Anderson in Chapter III, as pure an example of disastrously learned nonsense as one can find!
Another curiosity I have is Wallis Budge's translation of the Egyptian BOOK OF THE DEAD, from the Papyrus of Ani.
Ad astra! Sean
Drat. I meant Anderson mentioned the MALLEUS MALEFICARUM in Chapter III of A MIDSUMMER TEMPEST.
Sean
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