TwoPhilip

On the Catholic-traditional OnePeterFive blog, David Mitchell put up a post contrasting the Anglican hymns he once loved, against the hymns in the Catholic Church today. The consensus of the comments there, was that the modern Catholic hymnal contains namby-pamby and/or even heretical content. I am not arguing with this much; the "Eccles And Bosco" parody blog has highlit an awful lot of cringe.

What I noticed in the comments, is a commenter "James" who said there should not be hymns at all in a Mass. And coming back to it now, I couldn't read my own comment until I signed into disqus. I believe this is known as a "Shadow Ban".

I am not going to argue the point, in this post. (My comment had suggested plainsong in presence of the Host; hymns before and after.) What I will do, is step back from the whole discussion, and observe how extremism happens, taking this discussion as evidence.

Rabbinic Judaism proposes the concept of the Fence Around Torah. The Torah - for rabbis - comes from the Most High God. A Jew must obey every injunction as far as possible unless a situation occurs where it cannot be obeyed, or it threatens the Jew's life directly. To avoid even the possibility of disobedience, the rabbis construct their "fence": for fear of the prohibition on mixing cow's milk and that cow's offspring's meat, the Jew cannot eat a cheeseburger. Before the rabbis, the priesthood had an analogous "fence" around the Temple; the Essenic Temple Scroll extended the Temple's holiness over all Jerusalem.

Every group of humans has a social hierarchy. Where a group is holy, that group contains a subgroup who assert dominance by claiming to be more holy. Synagogues today host Jews who love Torah more than the rabbi does; the Sadducees had the Essenes.

OnePeterFive has its Philip II Catholics, demanding an Escorial of our churches. And if they have a limit to how "Catholic" their commenters go, I haven't seen anyone run into that limit.

BACKDATING 8/12

Word On Fire

In your average Catholic parish, you may have been introduced to the Word On Fire videos. I recommend them to prospective converts, to observe what the bishops of the Vatican II era are asking Catholics to believe.

The "secrets" of Our Lady purportedly delivered at Fatima are a case in point. The reception of Fatima may even involve a revolution in the Faith. I don't, personally, believe a word of it; neither do secular critics. The Russian Orthodox have outright laughed it out the room:

So all these Latin dreams about “dedicating Russian [sic] to the Virgin Mary” and all the other ways to subjugating Russia to the Pope (which is, of course, the real objective here) have absolutely zero chance to succeed, at least long as a sufficient part of the Russian Orthodox people (not just clergy!) keep their traditional “collective/corporate” memory about the true history of the Church of Christ and the roots of Russian Orthodoxy.

Catholicism does not (yet) demand belief in Fatima in order to be Catholic. But many lay Catholics do believe in Fatima. Also, the Church has canonised many Fatima believers as saints (before Paul VI I'd have beatified Nestorius, but hey).

Today we watched WoF's video about John Cardinal Newman. This one started out in Oxford as an Anglican preacher and professor. He sincerely hoped Anglicanism could form a middle ground between Protestant and Roman excesses. He was, at home, a depressive who never got around to getting married.

At some point Newman published "Tract 90", about the Anglican Thirty Nine Articles. The Anglican establishment interpreted this tract as Catholic-curious and subversive. Newman got hounded out of Oxford; although the C of E did not formally excommunicate the man. Instead Newman excommunicated himself, and re-enrolled as a Catholic priest. The Catholic establishment didn't trust him either, up to Pius IX; but his successor Leo XIII loved him and made him a Cardinal.

Unlike the WoF Fatima series, which was - whatever you think of the event - very well done; the WoF piece on Newman didn't organise its topic as well as I would have liked. WoF also implies Pius IX was presiding over a decadent Church. I had to go elsewhere to read that he was the Pope during the Mortara scandal and the reinstitution of the Ghetto system. "Decadent" is not the word I would have used. "Reactionary reformer", is closer to it.

I haven't read Newman's thought myself. WoF presents Newman's philosophy as a necessary underpinning of Vatican II. Newman, in his way of thinking, does strike me as residing on the oecumenical side of Latin thought. On the other hand, WoF lets slip that Newman disapproved "liberalism", another emotive word I beware of using myself. I also wonder if Newman ever would have approved Fatima or similar Mary-centric movements of the twentieth-century Church.

Next week we're to watch a WoF on GK Chesterton - another convert. Chesterton had some real effect on Oxford Christian thought - famously on that "Ulster Protestant" CS Lewis. I am less sure about what fellow Catholic Tolkien made of Chesterton. If WoF has done anything on the French-born half-Anglo Hilaire Belloc, we're not watching that. NOTE 10/19 - both were dangerously naïve and, in fact, out of step with Leo XIII.

I'd already found Word On Fire to be tendentious where it dealt with Fatima. For John Newman, I suspect WoF is reading Vatican II whiggery into his thought. WoF also doesn't explain how Newman's thought advanced Catholic thought, nor on to what extent Newman influenced English thought; although it does well at Newman's theory of rhetoric.

I suggest that prospective Catholics and new Catholics watch Word On Fire videos with a notepad in hand, with a VERY skeptical approach.

Filioque, sed non per filium

OnePeterFive has published Nishant Xavier's dawa to the Greek churches, arguing for the Spirit as "proceeding" from the Son as well as from the Father. This "procession" is hypostatic, meaning it reflects the nature of the Godhead Himself, at least as far as humans can perceive Him. It isn't just energetic.

I am decidedly in the Dyothelete choir, as the saying goes. Still, the article is valuable for showing the career of "filioque" among the Nicene Christians. I'd thought it had been mooted first at Toledo, and therefore a Latin construct. Xavier knows Toledo; but explains how Leo the Great and Gregory the Great had - earlier - mooted filioque.

Also Cyril of Alexandria argues for it in his third letter to Nestorius. Nestorius agreed with that much, given that said letter challenges him from the Monophysite perspective. This implies a consensus in pre-Ephesian Christendom, extending perhaps as far as Iraq.

What should worry Xavier more is exactly Cyril's monophysitism where he is not making a rhetorical appeal to Nestorius' common ground. Dyotheletes insist on filioque to make that distinction between Father and Son and, thereby, between the secular and religious arms of the Christian state. I do infer this distinction from Nestorius. I am not seeing this from Cyril.

What also should worry Xavier is a parallel development in Christology, where the Spirit flows from the Father through the Son. Such Xavier quotes from Tarasius of Constantinople, Basil of Caesarea ("the Great"), and even Maximus (who I believe should have known better). On this language, Arius and Eusebius themselves might agree. I sense a danger in a religious authority asserting itself with the Father, and emitting pronouncements through a captive Church. (Although these instances assuredly have contexts which inspired those wordings, such as what I have adduced for Cyril.)

I don't know that Xavier is going to win many converts from his essay as a result.

SEQUEL 8/15/2021: Charlemagne sensed it too.

Monotheletism in the Torah

Within the Abraham-Lot cycle in Genesis, is an incident where the King of "Elam" gathers a flock of Mesopotamians and conquers Canaan. The Elam-led coalition gets as far as Sodom, whose King Bera cries for help. Abraham's family provides that help. After the victory, some "Melkizedeq (מלכי־צדק)" blesses Abraham; and then the king Bera shows up again.

I mooted a theory another year, at another blog and during another life, that this whole story is nativist (Samaritan?) propaganda against shahs Cyrus and Cambyses. These two styled themselves "king of Anshan", proposed Elamite as a national language, and conquered down to Egypt - reimposing the Jews upon a population who weren't all that keen to see them again. Since Herodotus we've been conditioned to see the Persian regime as Achaemenid, self-consciously Persian, and communicating in Aramaic. For Herodotus, writing about a series of Achaemenid attacks against his people, that's forgivable: it's what Darius wanted us to see. But Darius was a revolution and a reconquest. As Darius started over; when we look at Cyrus and Cambyses, we must start over.

Back to storyworld Neil Godfrey is relating Robert Cargill, that "Melkizedeq" is none other than Bera. Abraham was blessed by a Sodomite, and tithed to him. The scribes then changed everything, clumsily.

I'll be first to admit of much clumsiness in the Genesis. The sacrifice of Isaac is a horrid case in point: two men go up the mount of YHWH, one comes down, and in between the other one is saved (but is he?). And then there's that sordid tale of Sodom itself which is a clear plagiary of the Gibeah episode "later" under the Judges.

Against Sodom at the end, YHWH will call for fire from YHWH in heaven. I've always thought that this should read "from El" or maybe just from heaven, which a monotheist cannot allow; or that Lot had called for such celestial intercession, which goes against the negative portrayal of Lot elsewhere. Later the Christians (and Muslims) would argue for Lot's righteousness; and later still their Monothelete faction would use just that verse before the Muslims' amir when arguing against Maximus' party.

And then there's the question of how long the Torah trundled along the centuries with every sect adding its own little tweaks and harmonisations: the Samaritan Pentateuch, for instance, and several "rewritten" Bibles at Qumran.

Certainly if this part of the Genesis story started out as a nativist tract (or poem?), Sodom won't have been the enemy. But Yehud Medinata never did escape Satrap Ebernari in Achaemenid Persia. Only in Hasmonaean times did it attain autonomy. The Temple was loyal to Persia and could not have approved too much nativism against (coded) "Elam"; and under the Greeks later on, the Jews had become honestly nostalgic for their Persian messiahs. There was also a Prophetic proverb about the wickedness of Sodom, especially its inhospitality to guests - which, for returning Jews, they could re-apply to the Samaritans. To the extent the Samaritans approved Sodom, the Jews must disapprove. Eventually the Samaritans had to accept the Jewish version of the story too.

But anyway, so much for the textual integrity of Genesis 550-150 BC. What does the Melkizedeq story mean for Catholics today?

That Melkizedeq is both king and priest hints as a merger of the two functions. This is the confusion of state and church which, in the late Roman Empire, Dyotheletism arose to combat - first at Nicaea and then, more effectively, at Chalcedon.

Later, that Psalm we number #110 will cite the Melkizedeq account to support a priest-king in that psalmist's own day. This is, perhaps, early Hasmonaean. In Christianity the tractate for the Hebrews - certainly after the failure of their Temple - argues for "Christ" to be taken as priestly. After all, Genesis hardly speaks of Melkizedeq's royal מלכ; the anecdote is of his moral and priestly צדק.

Still, the whole Abraham section of Genesis remains a mess. It were better for Catholics that the whole story made more sense. Cargill might not have the answer, but we can all pray that the Torah's sources for this cycle be found.

OH LOOK 11/4/25: TheTorah caught up with me.

Why is late classical philosophy so boring?

When I entered college, we had a requirement in "the Humanities". (Later on they allowed for alternatives to HUMA 101-102; you could take a religious-studies course as well, so I did that instead of 102.) The Humanities, also known as The Liberal Arts, were - I later found out - the point of a Western education. I was introduced to Plato by way of The Republic; not actually a bad starting-point, especially to political thought, especially especially as pertains to Iran today. But then...

As we were learning about the history of the classical civilisation, we got into the history of Christianity, and - in early days - this involved Gnosticism. Plato, we learnt, had written other books. So had his students. Aristotle was the important one (unfortunately we didn't get to read him) but Plato's followers were the ones who influenced the Gnostics.

And the questions the Platonists were asking were... boring.

Specifically they were asking stuff like "what is matter" and "what is existence" (ontology) and "how do we know" (epistemology). I hadn't bothered asking this stuff. Aristotle touched on it too, being more interested in the world we got. The hardcore Platonists thought they could derive it from mathematical first-principles. All this without a working set-theory...

Take Numenius for instance. Numenius, defining matter, was stuck with Greek element theory. Moderns can work with that but if we do, we have to transpose our own consensus upon this frame: the Standard Model of particle-physics, perhaps. Worse: Numenius, although a reader (and fan) of Torah, didn't see spacetime as something bound into a finite-age Creation. As a result he inherited that ancient Near Eastern theory where some creator assembles matter into order; matter being coeternal. Again, we can work with that, but only if we refuse to define "matter" outside this universe.

I just couldn't help but think that the philosophers didn't know what they were talking about, either.

August 2019 status report

So Davidski describes David Anthony's latest, as Davidski annotates it. Anthony himself is basically annotating Wang although the bibliography on Anthony's link is truncated.

Anthony is probably the best archaeologist of Indo-European studies. His prose is still dry and his presentation still jumbled, but he has improved upon his work in The Horse, The Wheel, And Language. I recommend to my readers to go read Anthony's paper in full.

Over the last four to five years has come a veritable flood of genetic information, from the high steppes of Eurasia as much as from hinterland Africa. (And they intersect: this is whence we found the N1 mtDNA - Eurasian - in Somalia.) As of 2015 it all got rather overwhelming; we had to keep track of West Hunter Gatherer and East Hunter Gatherer, sometimes they mixed, and then we found out about Ancient North Eurasians somehow related to American Indians as well and... oh I give up.

Fortunately (for those keeping track of it all) the last four years have mostly resulted in consolidations. Anthony is, as best he can, laying down the consensus, to the extent there is one.

Ancient North Eurasians roamed around the Eurasian steppe accompanied by dogs and hunting the big beasts of the region. After the Ice Age, those who stayed in Eurasia became the East Hunter Gatherers. (Further east, the ANE mixed with Asians and moved to Alaska, no longer concerning us here.) Anthony calls it a "mating network", an amusing turn of phrase, but accurate enough, because when ANE>EHG met outsiders, they didn't accept much of their gene-flow. Not in central Asia anyway; we've already agreed not to speak of the East Asian branch.

On those outsiders, there was a Western Hunter Gatherer "network" too. I suppose these were the holdovers from the Magdalenians. Anthony thinks they were a springback from Spain and mainly even from North Africa. EHG and WHG met around the Danube 7000 "BC" (like me, Anthony has no truck with "BCE") and established a "frontier". If you were in EHG or WHG and you were really up for mating outside the network, the Danube is where you went. Otherwise you stayed home.

Further east meanwhile, a group of EHG met up with a third set of hunter-gatherers: from the Caucasus. (Nobody is farming up here yet.) Along the northern Black Sea, EHG and CHG formed their own frontier, mixing to 50/50 parity. I am unsure what happened to EHG further northeast; Anthony seems to accept they became Finns.

In 5000 BC, everything changed. For a start, pottery starts appearing. Because people were storing up for the winter. That's right: farming is starting up. Those farmers came from Anatolia. And - so Anthony and Davidski are deriving from Wang - this came straight across the Euxine or even from the Balkans; not from the Caucasus this time.

From the Caucasus was a different lot, centred around Maykop. Davidski adds a group in between them: Steppe Maykop, who were partly "Siberian foragers". Asian invaders so far into the west are hardly unheard of; witness the Mongols and (we now know) the Avars.

So Maykop and this EHG/CHG/Anatolian hybrid had little in common and didn't mix; and if Davidski is right, these two Mating Networks didn't even meet, because the Steppe Maykop were, er, cock-blocking them.

The EHG/CHG/farmer mix concocted a culture at Yamnaya and spoke a common language, IndoEuropean. The rest of the story went as it went, ending up with people like me.

One interesting remaining question is: what's up with those weird language-groups in the Caucasus today. Maykop proper is sometimes associated with the Circassian groups of the "northwest Caucasus". But there's also Kartveli, spoken in modern Georgia. We can add the old Caucasian Albanians, now the Udi, and related to the Chechens. During the Bronze Age, Anatolia further hosted the Hattians and the Hurrians. So anyone musing that Maykop is Circassia has, by my calculations, a 20% chance of being right. Maximum.

Some work on the Kura-Araxes culture might help. Pots Aren't People but, as symbols put to concrete form, pottery may well map to language.

UPDATE 9/27: Where we go from here.

Those dark-skinned Semites

Wesley Muhammad is at it again, now proposing Black Muhammad.

I'll point out here that Dr Muhammad is not entirely misguided. I was impressed by his ethnography of the Ọyọ, back in the day. I was very impressed actually. It led me to a wider study, or a deeper rabbithole if you like, on the phenomenon of paraIslamic prophethood generally. Check out the first essay in A Garden for the Poets.

Dr Muhammad's new article is like his other curates'-eggs: Good In Parts. It points out a longstanding linguistic relationship between those languages classed "Semitic" (including, now, Akkadian) and several language-families endemic to north and northwest Africa - and not further east of Sargon's Akkad. Indeed, the Tigris proved the end of the line for the Semites until the Assyrian Age. Where Dr Muhammad falls down, is on genealogy - on race.

Dr Muhammad is aware of this when he tries to slip in, “Semitic” is properly a linguistic designation, not racial. Much depends on "properly". In its base "Shem" is first seen in the Bible where it is a genealogic marker. It is only 19th-century linguists who noted the very-similar Near Eastern languages which mapped fairly-well to the Bible's Shem (appending, interestingly, Canaan ben Ham). 'Twere the linguists wot stuck Shem's name on the languages.

'Tis now 2019. We are no longer able to moot theories on race based on language alone. We have genetics these days.

Where it comes to the Horn of Africa and to the pre-Islamic "Berbers" in north Africa, we have evidence of vast population-movements during the worst winters of that last Ice Age, 14000 years BC. We know the African fringe's genetic turnover came from population-movements from two facts: they involved mitochondrial DNA - meaning, women; and they happened long before a commodity slave-trade was technologically feasible. (We could add a third fact, that the Horn of Africa was never wealthy enough on its own to import significant numbers of shiksas. Although Tunisia perhaps had its moments.)

It happens that the two Pleistocene Eurasian-to-Africa movements were of different peoples - at first. The Somalis got N1 women; the Algerians, U5. But there seems to be a movement from East Africa straight west, by land, toward the Green Sahara, after the Ice Age; then, from the Sahara, moving north. Certainly when the Garamantes went under, they exported many Imazighen northward (so say Elizabeth Fentress and Andrew Wilson); hence the Rif of today. If it happened in 400 AD it happened in 6000 BC.

To sum up, although the "AfroAsiatic" linguistic evidence is weighted toward the Afro Sahara as of, oh, 2000 BC (although, to turn around what I'd noted earlier, not south of that...), the genetic evidence points to a push from the north to the south in 14000 BC. And then we get to the linguistic nature of the AfroAsiatic languages themselves, which point to a very deep divergence between Semitic and, also, Egyptian, Tamazight, and Chadic. We're not dealing with anything like as recent as the separation between Sanskrit and Latin, here. Not even Hittite and Latin.

One more point, from the Bible which gave us the name "Shem"... "Ham" isn't so precise. Ham includes Egypt, and the Imazighen, and Lake Chad, and the Kushites of Somalia (and Canaan) - all alike. The Bible sees Shem as more-aligned with Ham. But it doesn't really know Ham; and its view of Ham will be weighted to the most-immediate trading-partners. That started with Egypt and moved more to the Mediterranean coast, where the Imazighen. These Hamites were darker than Greeks and Iranians; but they were not black.

As to Muhammad, he may not be the father of any of our men as the saying goes, but Muhammad's paternal grandfather was the father of a multitude. The male descendants of the Quraysh bear J-M267, sometimes named "J1". This is not a black gene; it is Near Eastern Farmer.

As to why the classical prohibition on sketching Muhammad as a Kushi, well... there was (and is) a lot of asabiya going on, in Islam as much as among whites. Much Islamic asabiya was shu'ubi from Iran, as Dr Muhammad notes, but it also existed on the Africans' behalf for instance in al-Jahiz's work. Pace Dr Muhammad I don't think the anti-black Muslims struck the first blow. I suspect that Yemeni or even Somali Muslims had made this play. This could not do other than annoy the ulema.

I desire no ill of Dr Muhammad, personally. But he is, sadly, zalam anfusah.