Madame's Nightshirt
Mrs. Peperium
Lambeth Palace, the official residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Also, the spot where on April 13, 1534 after refusing to swear to Henry VIII's new Act of Succession and Act of Supremacy, Saint Thomas More was carted away by the authorites and locked up in the Tower of London until his execution for treason on July 6, 1535.
[Thomas] More lived, as we live today, in a time of rapid social and cultural unraveling. The meaning of his life, at least for us, is not so much his worldly success and religious piety, extraordinary as both of these were, but rather the courage and consistency with which he opposed the forces of disintegration.The culture war of the early sixteenth century was fought over the breaking apart of Christianity, its loss of central authority, and the consequent fragmentation of European civilization. Our war rages about the collapse of traditional virtues across all of the West and the rise of moral indifference and cheerful nihilism. Many parallels between the two eras could be drawn, but a crucial similarity lies in the central role played by law in each. Though More was a profoundly religious man, it should not be forgotten that he was also a preeminent lawyer and judge. The law, quite as much as Catholicism, is crucial to an understanding of the man and the martyr. Law and its institutions were, of course, major forces of cohesion in More’s age, and are perhaps the primary symbols in ours of stability and continuity as well as justice. When moral consensus fades, as it did in More’s time and does in ours, we turn to law; when law falters, as it must when morality is no longer widely shared, society and culture teeter on the brink of chaos.
That is another way of saying that law cannot be divorced from morality — and, there is reason to think, morality, at least in the long run, cannot be divorced from religion. Law and religion are alike, therefore, as reinforcements of social order. It is a subject for speculation at least, whether either can long remain healthy and self-confident without the other. Each imposes obligations, but each is subject to the therapeutic heresy, softening those obligations to accommodate individual desires. It is a sign of our distemper that Thomas More is today so often regarded as a hero of civil disobedience, a man who refused to obey law with which he was in profound moral disagreement. That is a considerable distortion of the truth, and it was not More’s understanding of his motives. For him, in a very real sense, law was morality. It is equally true that for More morality was superior to law and was the standard by which law must be judged. If that seems a paradox, I do not think it truly is one. -Judge Bork
But then, Dr Williams [Archbishop of Canterbury] purports not to understand that this indeed the case. For he used Britain’s Jewish community to underpin his claim that there was nothing particularly untoward about multiple jurisdictions — but in the process significantly misrepresented Jewish practice to imply, entirely falsely, that British Jews aren't bound by the law of the land but get an exemption. He drew an analogy between Islamic sharia courts and Jewish religious courts. But there is an absolutely crucial difference between them.Yes, Jewish religious courts, like sharia courts, deal with such issues as dispute arbitration, family issues, marriage and divorce. But the Jewish courts have never sought official recognition of their rulings, and these are not recognised under English law. Their dispute resolution is informal and voluntary. Their religious marriage and divorce rituals have no status in English law (with the exception of one tiny wrinkle designed to help resolve an anomaly in Jewish divorce law which causes otherwise unavoidable distress); for the state to recognise their marriages or divorces, Jews have to marry or be divorced according to English law just like everyone else If sharia courts were to operate in this way, there would be no problem. Why should anyone care, after all, what minorities are doing in the private sphere as long as it doesn’t break the law? But the crucial difference is that such Muslims want their rulings to be accepted by the state as having the same legal authority as English law — and Dr Williams is endorsing this. But it breaks the fundamental precept that Jews have always acknowledged — that as a minority they live under the law of the land and do not seek to change it to accommodate them.
After the lecture, I challenged Dr Williams on this point Dr Williams on this point, and said he was wrong to claim that the state had delegated legal authority to Jewish religious courts. Jewish religious law was not recognised by or incorporated into English law, and so I wondered why he thought that Islam alone should be able to gain special status in opposition to the legal and cultural norms of this country. He replied:
"I didn’t say that Jewish law had been incorporated; I know very well that it is not. But it has established recognised practices with regard to marriage and divorce which the law doesn’t seek to override or displace. I used the analogy not to claim privileged access for Islam but to show where a parallel system of religious law was embedded in our social practice."
But in his lecture he had in fact spoken of whether there should be
"…a delegation [from the law of the land] of certain functions to the religious courts of a community; and this latter question, it should be remembered, is relevant not only to Islamic law but also to areas of Orthodox Jewish practice’.
On the contrary: it is not relevant to orthodox Jewish practice, because the state does not delegate any legal functions to Jewish law at all." -Melanie Phillips
I once heard David Pryce-Jones, the learned English novelist and historian, talking about a new instance of the phenomenon of fellow traveling: the fellow travelers of Palestine. This, of course, has its precedents in the blind but exuberant support given to both fascism and communism by intellectuals and clerics who had concealed from themselves the evils of these two ideologies. In England, Anglican clerics were part of the establishment ambit of fascist sympathizers disguising themselves as anti-war idealists. These were the folk who soiréed at Cliveden, read and wrote in the London Times, chatted wittily at All Souls—appeasers all, as seen in the movie, The Remains of the Day. And the Anglican Church also had its devotees of Stalin, the most noteworthy (or notorious) of whom was Dr. Hewlett Johnson, the “Red Dean of Canterbury,” who wrote the adoring agitprop volume, The Socialist Sixth of the World. He was a luminary in Henry Wallace’s pro-Soviet campaign for president of the United States on the Progressive Party ticket. Among Wallace’s most notable supporters were bishops and other high churchmen from the mainstream American Protestant denominations.They were silly, but they were at least prisoners of ideals. Fascist sympathizers feared the dread evil of communism, and communist sympathizers feared the dread evil of fascism. And communism purported to build a just society, a new relationship of man and man, though it turned out in many ways to be worse than fascism, more murderous, more delusional, more long-lasting. In any event, both of these armed doctrines tried hard to delude their followers with the lure of high ideals, some rooted in one or another version of the Christian ethic. But what vision of a good society do the ideologists of Palestine proffer to their boosters all over the world? Really nothing, except another miserable state like the others in the Arab Middle East. The new fellow travelers lack even the feeble extenuations of the old ones.
Indeed, anyone who envisions a future Palestinian polity must wrestle with the grim and ongoing realities of a stagnant class structure, unproductive economic habits, an uncurious and increasingly reactionary culture, deeply cruel relationships between the sexes and toward gays, no notion of an independent judiciary, and a primitive religious mentality that gains prestige in society even as it emphasizes the promise of sexual rewards in paradise for martyrs — a crude myth that has served successfully as an incentive for suicide bombings not only in Israel but also in Iraq and throughout the Arab world. And no real challenge to any of these backward actualities has arisen in all of the turmoil the movement has sown.
Which takes us back to the church deleriants for Palestine. What kindles the fire in their hearts for Palestine? There is little or nothing in Palestinian society that would fill a progressive with enthusiasm. And these churches do not generally exult in the promise of yet one more nation-state. In fact, these churches are against the nation-state, especially the U.S. nation-state. (In Nottingham last week, the Anglicans. demanded the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.) And, even if you take to the harshest reading of Israeli behavior in their ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, dozens and dozens of other peoples in the world, some of whom have a much sounder claim to be a real nation than those for whom the official Anglicans and Presbyterians shed so many tears, suffer infinitely more deprivation and indignity than they do. But tears are not shed for those people at Canterbury Cathedral in England or, for that matter, at Christ Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose rectors have for years been virtual street agitators against Israel.
So I come to an unavoidable conclusion. The obsession here is not positive, for one side, but rather negative, against the other side. The clerics and the lay leaders on this indefensible crusade are so fixated on Palestine because their obsession, which can be buttressed by various Christian sources and traditions, is really with the Jews. A close look at this morbid passion makes one realize that its roots include an ancient hostility for the House of Israel, an ugly survival of a hoary intolerance into some of the allegedly enlightened precincts of modern Christendom.-Martin Peretz, TNR
Now, see Dr. Azzan Tamimi again. (It is noted at Youtube that the men in the video dressed as elderly Orthodox Jews are not really Jewish, they just like to pretend they are at anti-Israel rallies.)
'We have received news of what the Archbishop of Canterbury allegedly said. If it is true that this statement about the inevitability of the introduction of Sharia law into the UK credited to Rowan Williams was actually said by him, it is most disturbing and most unfortunate. With what Christians are going through in Muslim lands around the world, it is unbelievable that any Christian leader - not to talk of an Archbishop - would make such a statement under whatever guise. This matter will be discussed at the next meeting of our House of Bishops.' - Peter Akinola, Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria
The Archbishop decided he needed to apologise. But he did not apologise for being wrong about Jewish courts in British law or making "constructive accomodation for Sharia law in British law, he apologised to his General Synod (the national assembly of C of E) that his remarks were mistunderstood by the media and the entire rest of the world. This was the reaction:
Obviously, Synod members don't understand that under Sharia law women don't drive up early from the farm to London to hear the Archbishop apologise for things other people did, not him.
Islam has a new convert. Some will be surprised, but I am not. The newest convert to the religion of the unshaven face is Archbishop Rowan Williams. Dr. Williams has been the spiritual leader of the Anglican Church in the UK. However, after his February 7 interview on the BBC I think we can all agree that he is not so much a spiritual leader as a spiritual capitulator.
(Big Snip)
At the outset of this column I mentioned that I am not surprised by the spiritual capitulation of the leader of the Anglican Church. Since the 1930s many in the church's leadership have been classic appeasers. They appeased the fascists. Why would we not expect them to appease religious fascists? It is true that as World War II recedes into the mists of time, almost all big-hearted progressives or liberals (or whatever self-congratulatory term they apply to themselves) denounce Nazism and fascism with the utmost ardor. Yet when these odious movements were on the rise many among the British elite cautioned prudence in dealing with them; and some actually admired them including members of the royal family and, of course, clerics in the Anglican Church.
The recent inclination of people like Dr. Williams to appease anti-democratic concoctions such as sharia law might move the real defenders of democracy among us to contemplate what causes this appeasement. It is not tolerance. Dr. Williams would not tolerate most forms of bigotry, yet he tolerates the religious bigotry and authoritarianism of sharia. Why? It is because he is, as were his antecedents who appeased Hitler, a coward. He is afraid of rousing himself from the comforts of his London manse to oppose even those who hate him. He calculates that someone else will do the job or that the threat will subside. Yet there is, I suspect, another more subtle cause for his appeasement.
The bien pensant of Dr. Williams's variety have lived in a self-contained society for the morally superior for several generations. They do not like their fellow countrymen who are not a part of that society. In a word, they do not like conservatives and others who, like conservatives, resist threats to Britain. We have the same sort of appeasers here. In both countries these self-regarding poseurs would rather proclaim tolerance toward those who hate our countries than work with the rest of us to defend our way of life. Have a lovely time at the mosque, archbishop. -R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.
[Thomas] More saw Luther’s advocacy of lawless law to be at the heart of their culture war. Luther spoke for the individual conscience and so necessarily attacked the authority of precedent and tradition in the law. More’s view of law and the duty of judges was quite different. R. W. Chambers quotes him as saying: “If the parties will at my hands call for justice, then, all were it my father stood on the one side, and the devil on the other, his cause being good, the devil should have right.” Luther and many modern jurists would reinterpret the law to do the devil down, and the moderns, at least, would reserve to themselves authority to decide which is the father and which the devil.Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons got More remarkably right. In one scene, More, then the Lord Chancellor, argues with family members who are urging him to arrest Richard Rich, the man who was later to betray him. More’s daughter, Margaret, says, “Father, that man’s bad.” More answers, “There is no law against that.” His son-in-law, William Roper: “There is! God’s law!” More: “Then God can arrest him. . . . The law, Roper, the law. I know what’s legal, not what’s right. And I’ll stick to what’s legal. . . . I’m not God. The currents and eddies of right and wrong, which you find such plain sailing, I can’t navigate. I’m no voyager. But in the thickets of the law, oh, there I’m a forester.”
Bolt, in a familiar passage, has More say when assailed by his son-in-law with the charge that he would give the devil the benefit of law:
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? . . . And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? . . . This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down . . . d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? . . . Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
To understand More, then, it is equally important to realize his absolute commitment to law and his recognition of the fallibility of human moral reasoning. To be ruled by each individual’s moral beliefs is to invite, indeed to guarantee, social tumult and disorder. The law alone is uniform, a composite or compromise of varying moral assessments, to be applied to all alike, regardless of personal attitudes about the persons involved: father or devil, it makes no difference. If an acceptable mix of freedom and order are to be maintained, obedience to law must be accepted as a primary moral duty.
(Gigantic snip)
The recalcitrance that brought More to the headsman was his refusal to take the oath that Henry was the Supreme Head of the Church in England and endorse a series of acts ending the supremacy of the Pope. The source of More’s devotion to papal supremacy illuminates the man. The point was not that the Pope’s authority had been instituted immediately by God (indeed Christianity was several centuries old before papal authority as it would come to be understood was clearly established), but that the Pope’s power rested upon the inherited traditions and beliefs and the general councils of the Church. The councils, of course, and the evolution of the Church were believed to be guided by God.. Here again, More’s faith and his view of law became almost indistinguishable.
His recalcitrance may be seen, as it often is, as More’s one great act of disobedience. Bolt writes that More seemed to him “a man with an adamantine sense of his own self.” “He knew where he began and left off, what areas of himself he could yield to the encroachments of his enemies, and what to the encroachments to those he loved. . . . But at length he was asked to retreat from that final area where he located his self. And there this supple, humorous, unassuming, and sophisticated person set like metal, was overtaken by an absolutely primitive rigor, and could no more be budged than a cliff.” It is this behavior that causes Bolt to refer to More as a “hero of selfhood.” Indeed it was extraordinary behavior: More was the only person not a member of the clergy who died rather than take the oath.
Yet it seems wrong, or at least potentially misleading, to attribute More’s behavior to “selfhood.” It is a symptom of our disorder that we glorify, practically deify, the individual conscience. It was not always so. It must have been well into this century before “civil disobedience” and “heresy” became terms of praise. To the contrary, More’s behavior may be seen as submission to external authority, a conscious and difficult denial of self.
The refusal to take the oath should not, of course, be viewed as disobedience at all. There was a law higher than Henry’s and Parliament’s, and More knew that the oath violated that law. There were few other occasions on which that could be said with certainty. More, an exemplary courtier, servant, and confidante of the king, did not suppose that God’s will was clear enough to require refusal to serve the king even when his purposes seemed to More unjust; he even assisted the king in temporal struggles against the Pope, as, given his understanding of his respective duties, he should have. God’s law is not often clear to the tangled mind of man, but there was a central fact about which More could have no doubt: Christ did not leave behind a book but a Church, and that Church must not be divided. As to this ultimate thing, he, at last, knew where God was and what He wanted. More was caught between two authorities and the question for him, the commands of both being clear, was which authority was superior. At this extremity, God was no longer too subtle for him, and More obeyed God’s law and went to his death. This was not disobedience but obedience, a thought he expressed in his last words as he placed his head on the block: “I die the king’s good servant, but God’s first.”-Judge Bork
...Rarely does philosophical inanity dovetail so neatly into total ignorance of concrete social realities: it is as though the archbishop were the product of the coupling of Goldilocks and Neville Chamberlain. Those more charitably inclined point out that the archbishop is an erudite man, a professor of theology who reads in eight languages and who was addressing a highly sophisticated audience, employing nuanced, subtle, caveat-laden arguments. He was not speaking in newspaper headlines, nor did he expect to make any headlines with his remarks.Charity is a virtue, of course, but so is clarity: and it is the latter virtue that the archbishop so signally lacks. He assumes that the benevolence of his manner will disguise the weakness of his thought, and that his opacity will be mistaken for profundity....-Theodore Dalrymple
Cardinal: "I don't believe in multiculturalism:
According to The Catholic Herald, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor has signalled a change of direction for the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales with a forthright rejection of the ideology of multiculturalism. The Cardinal said efforts to create a multicultural society had led to a “lessening of the kinds of unity that a country needs”."It is good to hear a clarity of religio-political thought after the rather opaque pronouncement emanating from Lambeth Palace. The Archbishop of Canterbury is manifestly in favour of multiculturalism since he asserts that Britain should accommodate religious legal codes, such as Shari'a law, in order to achieve community cohesion. While Dr Williams believes that the adoption of some aspects of the Shari'a in Britain 'seems unavoidable', the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster begs to differ. With the amended introduction, the article is reproduced below:
"The Cardinal intervened in the debate to say that migrants should embrace the idea of equality under the law rather than live by other legal codes. “I don’t believe in a multicultural society,” he told the Sunday Telegraph. “When people come into this country they have to obey the laws of the land. There are going to be certain things which might clash in the overall culture of the country. That’s where one has to make a judgment.
(big snip)
Clifford Longley, a Catholic commentator, said he believed the Cardinal’s latest comments represented an “adjustment” in his thinking. The Cardinal’s approach to the subject, he said, had been shaped by “the experience of the Irish community in which he grew up”. He said: “He’s very much assimilated into English culture and he expects a similar thing to happen to later generations of immigrants. “He believes that on a generational scale the differences will diminish and we must not prolong them beyond their natural life,” said Mr Longley.
"Robert Whelan, deputy director of Civitas, an independent think-tank, said the Cardinal had shown that
it was no longer taboo to criticise multiculturalism. He said: “Privately people have had doubts for years but now there has been a change in the climate and public figures are prepared to admit that multiculturalism doesn’t work.
"For a long time people felt they had to be in favour of it – to be against it was like being a Holocaust denier.”
The Madness of Prince Charles:
Whether induced by porphyria or not, Cranmer does not know, but the symptoms of mental instability, incomprehensible babbling and deranged behaviour were all manifest as the Prince of Wales declared himself a fan of the European Union. And it is looking increasingly likely that the man who has declared that he shall be ‘Defender of Faith’ and known as King George VII has indeed inherited the madness gene which afflicted a previous King George and other of his ancestors."In his Brussels speech, the Prince of Wales described the fight against global climate change as a war, with the Doomsday Clock ‘ticking ever closer to midnight’. Apparently, ‘the lives of billions of people depend on (the EU’s) response and none of us will be forgiven by our children and grandchildren if we falter and fail’.
He said it needed the biggest public private partnership in history to solve the crisis - along with greater leadership from Europe: ‘Determined and principled leadership has never been more needed. Surely this is just the moment in history for which the European Union was created,’ he told the gathered MEPs who hung on his every word.
But why was the Prince of Wales advocating an increase in EU powers at such a sensitive time?
(snip)
"It is, as The Daily Mail observed ‘a clear political move’. A senior member of the Royal Family asking for more ‘determined’ leadership from the EU
is evidence that the Royal Family may have been complicit in the whole EU project after all. And that all the protests about an infringed sovereignty, all the petitions for Her Majesty to defend our ancient rights, all the talk of treason against her person and status have all been ignored because they are all essentially in agreement with the formation of the new Empire.Prince Charles is the first Royal to give his overt blessing to the EU, yet it may now be surmised that others are covert europhiles.
"When a rump Parliament, corrupt Church and a compromised Crown are all united in favour of ‘ever closer union’, only divine intervention, revolution, or a latter-day Cromwell can save the British people from the 'unavoidable' tyranny. "
This will take two weeks to read...enjoy. If you don't feel like reading all of it, just watch the Youtube clips. Now Patum Peperium is officially on vacation. Until March then, Mrs. P.
What a well-stated argument. However, after viewing a Man for All Seasons, I did a little research. Thomas More did not mind putting men who he disagreed with to death. Au contraire. He also courted martyrdom. If he had been a sensible fellow, he would have fled to France, as many another did.
Posted by: miriam | March 01, 2008 at 05:49 PM
Welcome Miriam. Could you please flesh out a bit more:
"Thomas More did not mind putting men who he disagreed with to death."
The way it is stated is sounds as if there was no reason to put the men to death other than More disagreed with them. Which to modern ears sounds perfectly dreadful. But to ears of Thomas More's age those words would sound spot on. More was both the Lord Chancellor and "the King's Conscience." He was allowed to take in more than just common law went when helping to make his decisions of cases that went up before the High Courts. More was appointed by the King to do this and it was lawfully-held power. It was Thomas More's brilliant argument against the German (Luther) reformation that earned (if memory holds) Henry VIII, the much bandied about by the Anglican Church to this day, title of the Defender of the Faith. A title that HM Queen Elizabeth carries proudly but has done nothing herself to uphold the Faith except to not divorce her husband. (the Church of England has fallen under her reign, not flourished -check the stats on membeship, the sales of rectories for instance and how many C of E clerics are in same-sex civil unions instead of a Christian marriage with a member of the opposite sex.)
If simply doing you job makes one guilty of courting martyrdom, then by all means, Saint Thomas More, was brave enough to remain faithful to his job, the laws of his country, his King and his God and earned martyrdom the hard way. He lived in the tower of London as a prisoner for years and then lost his head, literally.
May we have more like him with the courage to court martyrdom than the King's favours.
Posted by: Mrs. Peperium | March 05, 2008 at 01:51 PM
By the way, I left out a most important fact, when one was made the "King's Conscience" one was given a real seal - and also not allowed to leave England as that is where the King was. The first time the "King's Conscience"was allowed to leave England (to visit Canada) was in about 1907.
For Thomas More to have fled England to avoid matrydom, then he would have gone not only against his conscrience as an Englishman but against the King's Conscience.
Posted by: Mrs. Peperium | March 12, 2008 at 08:49 AM