Hudson does history bad

Unz has a transcript of a Michael Hudson interview.

First, the good: Hudson demonises Cyril Alexandrine, as a demon deserves. We could quibble that Cyril at least did not murder Hypatia, despite what Cyril's Monophysite heirs like John of Nikiu have since claimed. Hudson also notes Cyril's antisemitism. But: was it as pronounced as that of Cyril's rival John "Chrysostom" up in Constantinople? And how many Chalcedonian-filioque Catholics even want to talk up Cyril these days?

Hudson claims himself a supporter of "industrial capitalism". Industrialists might not be wonderful people, but they produce. Hudson opposes "financial capitalism", which is capital as Number Go Up with nothing backing the number. Hudson doesn't cite Marx and Engels except to agree that blaming the Jews is "retarded". The economist he wants us to read is one Thorstein Veblen (whom I haven't read). As to usury, it's Hudson's thought that the worst offender in mediaeval Europe was the Church Herself.

As to the bad... wew. Start with, Cyril allegedly raising Mary to the Trinity. Didn't happen. I assume Hudson is pondering theotokos (=Latin deipara); if so, he's got the wrong take. Theotokos meant to muddy the human and divine natures in Christ, really before "Christ". Cyril foisted that title upon Mary to coöpt Marian devotion. We Latins prefer mater dei, more expansive than deipara. Such devotion was already prominent among such Latin protoCatholics as mah-boi Saint Jerome. There was no christology in here.

I further don't get how Hudson thinks any of this is bad. Hudson is by nature a Monothelete... like Cyril's heirs. He'd have executed Hypatia himself. Also his claim to support industry rings hollow given his comments against resource industries namely mining.

We get a slew of solecisms in this interview. Rome was the fifth-place Episcopy in the... 12th Century? Really? This doesn't even make sense in Hudson's more-accurate reportage. Rome had allied with the Normans in the 11th, exerting control over Britain. Gregory VII built upon that with the Gregorian Reform. My side of Europe was Latin, increasingly literate in classical Latin; Greek tended to be had secondhand here. The test of relative-importance must be by the economy and the military. Trade networks in the Pirenne-era Mediterreanean can be mapped by coinage (revived): a cluster in the bipartite-manorial world of the Rhine, and clusters around Byzantium and Alexandria. Yes, Rome is lower-tier. But if we are talking about "Catholicism" then we must define this as the Roman Christendom. That was driven by the Franks - and the Normans. The Norman superpower, then, supported Roman importance. (This pattern will continue deep into the High Middle Ages as postNorman England supported Rome over French-influenced Avignon, but we're not there yet.)

By the end of the 11th Century Urban II was able to mount the successful Crusade. Really not seeing that Antioch and Jerusalem, which Rome conquered, were more important than Rome by then. Constantinople and Alexandria were bystanders.

Beyond Cyril, who as I noted isn't in the Catholic top tier, Hudson takes Pelagius' side against Augustine, who I admit is. I hadn't looked into Pelagianism much except that they had a more works-based praxis and weren't predestinarian. The Pelagian Epistolary seems mostly Jerome's excepting they preserved an old reading of Philippians, wherein Paul pondered if he was Justified. Jerome's main problem was with their impietas. I catch the scent of African Donatism: peasants in debt running to a priesthood which will justify their uprising. They probably had a line to the Gaulish Bagaudae too.

I think in Augustine's day the Church wasn't the moneylender yet - that was still Rome. But the Latin church in Africa was assuredly a landholder. This mattered most in southeast Spain and in Africa, where agriculture was near-monocultural: farms were subsistence at the edge of Sahara, but flat-out haciendas facing the Med. It wouldn't take much to squeeze out a free peasant. It would take still less to recruit that peasant - say, to a Vandal host.

Augustine's relation to the civitas Romana is touchy. Maybe someone could write a book about it!

Luckily (for once) some of Unz's smarter commenters showed up to point out that, no, Augustine did not change the Lord's Prayer against "debt" toward "sin". Which means we might still have to host that conversation... but we'll need to exclude Hudson from it, because he doesn't know what he's talking about.