Who wrote: "We hold these truths to be self evident"?

Every American schoolchild learns that it was Thomas Jefferson who penned the mighty words "We hold these truths to be self-evident ...." But recently there has been more than a little confusion on this point.

In part the confusion is an honest and long-standing uncertainty due to the fact that in addition to Jefferson, both John Adams and Benjamin Franklin helped to forge the final version of the Declaration of Independence that was ratified by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. And in addition to Jeferson, Adams and Franklin there were also two lesser known members of drafting committee: Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston.

But Walter Isaacson has greatly exacerbated this honest uncertainty by stupidly declaring, in his biography of Benjamin Franklin, the following:

Franklin made only a few changes, some of which can be viewed written in his own hand on what Jefferson referred to as the "rough draft" of the Declaration. (This remarkable document is at the Library of Congress and on its Web site.) The most important of his edits was small but resounding. He crossed out, using the heavy backslashed that he often employed, the last three words of Jefferson's phrase 'We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable' and changed them to the words now enshrined in history: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident.'"
[pp. 311-312]

The only people who agree with Isaacson on this issue are those who rely exclusively on Isaacson as their only source on the question. Everyone who has done independent research on the matter is either meticulously equivocal, or tends toward the accepted attribution of the words to Jefferson.

"Possibly it was Franklin, or Jefferson himself, who made the small but inspired change in the second paragraph. Where, in the initial draft certain 'truths' were described as 'sacred and undeniable,' a simpler, stronger 'self-evident' was substituted."
[David McCullough, John Adams, p. 122. Look here for a much longer excerpt of the relevant passage in McCullough.]

"The phrase 'sacred & undeniable' was changed to 'self-evident' before Adams made his copy. This change has been attributed to Franklin, but the opinion rests on no conclusive evidence, and there seems to be even stronger evidence that the change was made by TJ or at least that it is in his handwriting."
[Boyd, Declaration of Independence, 1945, p. 22-3." (link)]

Pauline Maier, in her "American Scripture: The Making of Declaration of Independence" simply says "the phrase is perhaps Franklin's". [p. 136]

Carl Lotus Becker, in his 1922 classic The Declaration of Independence: A Study on the History of Political Ideas, states that in his opinion the phrase "self-evident" was already in place before Benjamin Franklin had seen the working draft:

"Jefferson first wrote 'we hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable.' In the Rough Draft as it now reads, the words 'sacred & undeniable' are crossed out, and 'self-evident' is written in above the line. Was this correction made by Jefferson in process of composition? Or by the Committee of Five? Or by Congress? There is nothing in the Rough Draft itself to tell us. As it happens, John Adams made a copy of the Declaration which still exists. Comparing this copy with the corrected Rough Draft, we find that it incorporates only a very few of the corrections: one of the two corrections which Adams himself wrote into the Rough Draft; one, or possibly two, of the five corrections which Franklin wrote in; and eight verbal changes apparently in Jefferson’s hand. This indicates that Adams must have made his copy from the Rough Draft when it was first submitted to him; and we may assume that the eight verbal changes, if in Jefferson’s hand, which we find incorporated in Adams’ copy, were there when Jefferson first submitted the Draft to Adams — that is, they were corrections which Jefferson made in process of composing the Rough Draft in the first instance. With Adams’ copy in hand it is therefore possible to reconstruct the Rough Draft as it probably read when first submitted to Franklin."
[Chapter Four: Drafting the Declaration: link]

This is a case where there is room for some small amount of reasonable doubt. But there is in fact very little evidence against the traditional and accepted attribution of the phrase "We hold these truths to be self-evident" to Thomas Jefferson.

Happy Fourth of July!!

[This is an old post, but I thought it was appropriate for the 4th of July. It was originally posted on August 25, 2010, under the title "Gay Rights, Gun Rights, Birthrights, Inalienable Rights & Other Self Evident Truths".]


What we most often think of as "Constitutional rights" are actually found in the Amendments to the Constitution. There are twenty seven such Amendments, and the first ten are traditionally known as the Bill of Rights.

Many of the other seventeen Amendments (after the Bill of Rights) are not concerned with basic, fundamental "rights." But five of them are: the 13th, 14th & 15th Amendments (abolishing slavery and related issues); the 19th Amendment (women's suffrage); and the 24th Amendment (abolishing "poll taxes").

The 13th Amendment abolishes slavery. It was actually proposed in Congress on January 31, 1865, just under a month before the surrender of General Lee. It became law on December 6 of that year, eight months after the assassination of President Lincoln.

The 14th Amendment (adopted July 9, 1868) has four major components:
The citizenship clause grants citizenship to everyone born in the United States (except for Native Americans!).
The due process clause protects individual rights against arbitrary government actions.
The equal protection clause guarantees all US citizens equality before the law.
The incorporation clause prohibits individual states from violating rights protected under the Constitution (yes, this was necessary!).

The 15th Amendment guarantees the right to vote for all citizens.

Taken together, the 13th through 15th Amendments were necessary to extend full citizenship to former slaves. Even with these amendments there still came into being an odious system of second class citizenship, which was only possible because the 13th through 15th amendments were not rigorously enforced.

The whole bullshit argument over "States Rights" arose as an attempt (successful for almost a full century) by racist Southerners to exempt themselves from abiding by the Constitution of the United States! This is precisely the reason for the "incorporation clause" in the 14th Amendment - to ensure that no State can deny its citizens any of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

The other two major "rights" oriented Amendments are the 19th, which extended voting rights to women; and the 24th, which prohibits the use of the so-called "poll tax" to deny any citizen the right to vote.

People should study the simplicity and forcefulness of the language in these fifteen Amendments. Then compare this stirring language with the (often) tortuously obtuse, mind-numbing legalese of the rest of the Constitution. In fact, the primary function of much, arguably most, of the Constitution is to carefully define and legally enshrine property rights, whereas these fifteen amendments are where our rights as human beings are addressed.

As everyone knows, the original framers of the Constitution fell far short of fully implementing the ideals espoused in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. And the same was sadly true of the implementation of the 13th through 15th Amendments.

Even today, in the 21st century, the power of the 14th Amendment has yet to be fully realized. How can anyone claim that we have equality before the law when same-sex marriage is barred by law? In fact, how can anyone claim that we have true separation of church and state when religiously inspired homophobia is allowed to influence our laws in ways that have a direct and pervasive effect on the lives of citizens?

Some people want to monkey with the 14th Amendment. Some people want to tinker with the 2nd Amendment. Some people don't realize that Sharia Law is incompatible with equality before the law -- the same law for all citizens. Some people don't want equal protection to be applied in the case of same-sex marriage. Some people want to make a fetish out of the idea of the Constitution, to turn it into an empty symbol and a political marketing ploy. Some people think religious freedom is an outmoded idea because we should get rid of religion altogether. Some people think freedom of speech is an outmoded idea because they want to criminalize "hate speech." But mostly people just don't want to bother with trying to understand the issues and ideas that Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison, and others wrestled with and that we have to still wrestle with today.

Sakura (Cherry Blossoms) -- Haunting Ukulele Cover

Will This Be On The Turing Test??

I first posted this almost three years ago (August '09). I am reposting it now.

According to the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

The phrase “The Turing Test” is most properly used to refer to a proposal made by Turing (1950) as a way of dealing with the question whether machines can think. According to Turing, the question whether machines can think is itself “too meaningless” to deserve discussion. However, if we consider the more precise—and somehow related—question whether a digital computer can do well in a certain kind of game that Turing describes (“The Imitation Game”), then—at least in Turing's eyes—we do have a question that admits of precise discussion. Moreover, as we shall see, Turing himself thought that it would not be too long before we did have digital computers that could “do well” in the Imitation Game.

The phrase “The Turing Test” is sometimes used more generally to refer to some kinds of behavioural tests for the presence of mind, or thought, or intelligence in putatively minded entities.

Alan Turing first proposed this idea in 1950, but nearly 400 years earlier Rene Descartes had written in his Discourses:

If there were machines which bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated our actions as closely as possible for all practical purposes, we should still have two very certain means of recognizing that they were not real men. The first is that they could never use words, or put together signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others. For we can certainly conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words, and even utters words that correspond to bodily actions causing a change in its organs. … But it is not conceivable that such a machine should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as the dullest of men can do. Secondly, even though some machines might do some things as well as we do them, or perhaps even better, they would inevitably fail in others, which would reveal that they are acting not from understanding, but only from the disposition of their organs. For whereas reason is a universal instrument, which can be used in all kinds of situations, these organs need some particular action; hence it is for all practical purposes impossible for a machine to have enough different organs to make it act in all the contingencies of life in the way in which our reason makes us act.

If you are still a little fuzzy about exactly what a Turing test is, here is a definition from the Dictionary of Cognitive Science:

The Turing test is a behavioural approach to determining whether or not a system is intelligent. It was originally proposed by mathematician Alan Turing, one of the founding figures in computing. Turing argued in a 1950 paper that conversation was the key to judging intelligence. In the Turing test, a judge has conversations (via teletype) with two systems, one human, the other a machine. The conversations can be about anything, and proceed for a set period of time (e.g., an hour). If, at the end of this time, the judge cannot distinguish the machine from the human on the basis of the conversation, then Turing argued that we would have to say that the machine was intelligent.

But how many of us could pass a "Turing test"? To do so one would have to show that one's actions are not pre-programmed, but that they are appropriate and responsive to one's environment -- in other words, that one is acting in a way that is simultaneously rational and spontaneous. The real issue is whether or not there is someone there -- someone who is choosing deliberately to act in this way. As opposed, that is, to just a machine following instructions given to it by a human being.

To reason means to apply one's capacity for reasoning to situations in which there is no previously agreed upon "right" answer. This, it turns out, is Stoic philosophy 101 - it is the central theme of the opening chapter of Epictetus' Discourses, which in translation is usually given the title "Of the things which are in our power, and not in our power", or something similar. The point being that the only thing that is truly "in our power" is precisely our ability to apply our reasoning and make choices.

There is nothing "robotic" about Epictetus' conception of reasoning. The volitional character of reasoning arises from the fact that it is the only faculty of the mind "which contemplates both itself and all other things." Furthermore, this "rational faculty" is "the only faculty that we have received which examines itself, what it is, and what power it has." The rational faculty, in fact, is the only means we have for making any kind of assessment or choice about anything: "for what else is there which tells us that golden things are beautiful, for they do not say so themselves?" The importance of this, in Epictetus' estimation, cannot be overstated:

That which is best of all and supreme over all is the only thing which the Gods have placed in our power.

What got me thinking about this was a very interesting post over at Prometheus Unbound, which includes a beautiful video by Marina and the Diamonds called simply I am not a Robot (also, here's a UK Guardian article on the band from Sept. '08):

You’ve been acting awful tough lately
Smoking a lot of cigarettes lately
But inside, you’re just a little baby
It’s okay to say you’ve got a weak spot
You don’t always have to be on top
Better to be hated than love, love, loved for what you’re not

You’re vulnerable, you’re vulnerable
You are not a robot
You’re loveable, so loveable
But you’re just troubled

Guess what? I’m not a robot, a robot
Guess what? I’m not a robot, a robot

You’ve been hanging with the unloved kids
Who you never really liked and you never trusted
But you are so magnetic, you pick up all the pins
Never committing to anything
You don’t pick up the phone when it ring, ring, rings
Don’t be so pathetic, just open up and sing

I’m vulnerable, I’m vulnerable
I am not a robot
You’re loveable, so loveable
But you’re just troubled

Guess what? I’m not a robot, a robot
Guess what? I’m not a robot, a robot

Can you teach me how to feel real?
Can you turn my power on?
Well, let the drum beat drop

Guess what? I’m not a robot
Guess what? I’m not a robot

Guess what? I’m not a robot, a robot
Guess what? I’m not a robot, a robot
Guess what? I’m not a robot, a robot
Guess what? I’m not a robot, a robot

"Faith In A Man" by Danielle Ate the Sandwich

.
This is pretty fucking amazing:



For more along these lines, check out:
Danielle Ate the Sandwich

"There have been Witches in all ages."

One of the things that most irritates some modern Pagans about Ronald Hutton is his refusal to admit to the simple fact that there have always been people like us. Pagans living in the 21st century were, as a general rule, not only not born in Pagan cultures, but we were born and raised in an environment openly hostile to Paganism.

In many ways, modern "secular" culture is, in fact, even more antithetical to Paganism than the cultures of medieval Christendom. And yet we have managed, somehow, to find our ways back to the old Gods. To many modern day Pagans it is inconceivable how anyone could deny that even during the darkest of the Dark Ages, at least some people managed to do the same.

As to evidence, there is evidence galore. There is, literally, evidence "high" and "low". That is to say, there is (1) evidence that the masses of European common-folk remained merely "nominal" Christians who were, in their hearts, still "submerged" Pagans (to use the terminology of the modern scholar of anthropology and missiology Alan Tippett), up to the Early Modern period, and there is also (2) plenty of evidence of Paganistical shenanigans among learned (but not, in many highly significant cases such as Marsilio Ficino, Cornelius Agrippa, and Giordano Bruno, by any stretch of the imagination "aristocratic") Mages, Kabbalists, Hermeticists, Rosicrucians, Alchemists, etc. And there is overwhelming evidence of overlap and interaction between "high" and "low" Paganisms, to the point where such a division becomes completely artificial and highly misleading.

The title of this post is taken from the title of Chapter Two of Gerald Gardner's 1954 book Witchcraft Today. That chapter is full of speculations about the history of Witchcraft that have not necessarily stood the test of time (and advances in scholarship) well. But Gardner would have no problem with that, as he makes clear, for example, when discussing his "impression" that the Witch Cult in Britain was the original religion of the pre-Celtic peoples of those isles, and that the Cult slowly changed under the influence of Celtic ideas. For immediately after relating this theory of his, Gardner states matter-of-factly "This is simply a wild guess on my part .... of course, the reverse may have happened; it may have been an orthodox Celtic cult into which more primitive beliefs and practices infiltrated ...."

Here endeth the lesson.

On "The Platonist golden chain linking Proclos to Plethon." (Niketas Siniossoglou on Plethon, Platonism, Paganism and Mistra)

One important thing to note about the following excerpt from Niketas Siniossoglou's Radical Platonism: Illumination and Utopia in Gemistos Plethon, is that Siniossoglou traces the history of Mistra as an oasis for "renegade philosophers and humanists", including those like Plethon and Kabakes who have consciously and decisively broken with Christianity, all the way back to the period of Manuel Kantakouzenos, who ruled Mistra from 1349-1380 AD. Furthermore, according to Siniossoglou, this milieu of religious dissidents already existed throughout what remained of Byzantium in the 14th century, and it was only because of the victory of the "Palamite" reaction that they were forced to coalesce in the Peloponnese.

I should also point out that Siniossoglou has made a very unfortunate choice of words in casting Plethon as the "last" ring in the Golden Chain of Platonic Paganism, despite the fact that, as Siniossoglou knows very well, scholars continue to debate the extent, and the nature, of Plethon's influence. In fact, this excerpt starts off with Siniossoglou drawing our attention to Scholarios' concern, more than a decade after Plethon's death, about those who continue to persist in following Plethon's Platonic Paganism.

I have resisted most (but not quite all) temptations to insert comments or add emphases. For references please refer to the original.

p. 119
The Last Ring of the Platonist Golden Chain: the Platonic fraternity of Mistra

Scholarios' Refutio erroris Judaeorum is dated to around 1464, fourteen years after Plethon's death. This is long after Scholarios confronted Plethon's Paganism and physically destroyed the Nomoi. But most significantly, it is long after the rupture with the past signified by the Turkish occupation and the election of

p. 120
Scholarios to the patriarchy. In a note in passing Scholarios recalls his old enemy and considers whether Pagans will still carry on his legacy. There are no Hellenes around, says Scholarios, with the possible exception of any decaying cell credulously following Plethon's nonsense and the deceiving fame of his wisdom. Owing to ignorance, these people may resurrect in their souls the Hellenic error, continues Scholarios, the one extinguished by divine epiphany. This is intriguing. By now more powerful than any other living Greek in the Ottoman Empire, Scholarios is still concerned with the impact that Plethon's personality and fame had on people many years before. Apparently the marginal group of extravagant Pagans that operated in Mistra under the auspices of Plethon was not as yet delivered to the damnatio memoriae normally reserved for religious apostates in Byzantium.

Since the publication of Masai's Pléthon [full title: Pléthon et le platonisme de Mistra (Paris, 1956)] in 1956 the idea of a Pagan ritualistic fraternity operating in the fifteenth century during the last years of Plethon's life has understandably captivated modern researches [although I must insert parenthetically that those who claim to be "Pagan scholars" have gone out of their way to completely ignore Plethon, or to systematically misrepresent him and try in every conceivable way to deny his Paganism and to deny his central importance and influence]. Its influence may be traced beyond the late Byzantine contenxt in the Paganism of the 'soldier of the Renaissance' Marullus Tarcaniota and of Cyriaco d' Ancona. John Monfasani has argued that such a brotherhood may well never have existed. His argument is that the people usually associated with the much-debated fraternity that Scholarios hunted down cannot be conclusively shown to have had any substantial connection to the presumed Plethonean project of reinsituting ancient Gods. For example, the Pagan most famously assocated with Plethon, Raoul Kabakes, 'may have been merely a Christian with some bizarre Paganising ideas. But whatever the extent of his Paganism, it was sui generis, and to a substantial degree independent of Pletho.' Kabakes is credited with collecting the remnants of

p. 121
Plethon's Nomoi after Scholarios destroyed the manuscript. He was one of the people closest to Plethon, shared Plethon's protonationalism, and described himself as a 'Hellene Lakedaemonean'. This man, who studied Julian's Hymn to King Helios, making notes in the margins like: 'Julian: Iamblichus: Sallust: divine men?' and who confessed that at the age of seventy-four, when copying Julian, his pothos for the Sun God was even greater than when he first began to revere the sun at the age of seventeen, can hardly be rehabilitated as a Christian with some bizarre paganising ideas. yet I do not intend to defend Masai's thesis at this point, the core of which seems to me to be able to withstand attacks.

Gregory Palamas, Patriarch Neilos, Philotheos Kokkinos and Scholarios, were worred about paganism as a philosophical paradigm rather than about its ritual and sectarian aspects possibly pursued by by marginal intellectuals. Neilos concluded that according to Barlaam 'there was nothing superior to Hellenic wisdom', and we have seen that here 'Hellenic' encompasses both the late antique sense of 'pagan' philosophical notions and the the Byzantine meaning of 'secular' wisdom. The Palamites would have little understanding of modern periodisation, as well as of our heuristic application of such terms as 'pagan', 'secularism' and 'humanism'. They saw Hellenism and Christianity as intellectual camps vying for hegemony. In this they certainly were at one with Plethon. It might well be that the real members of the Pagan fraternity of Mistra were not ritual Pagans like Kabakes, but philosophical Pagans of a quite different order.

Since 1348 Mistra was the heart of a despotate, a semi-autonomous state ruled by younger members of the Palaiologean imperial family. When Plethon appeared in Mistra around 1409 he found it to be an intellectual outpost nourished by philhellenic theological and philosophical concerns. In the words of Donald Nicol, the 'intellectuals of Mistra were without a doubt a tiny minority, living on an island of culture in what they themselves

p. 122
described as a sea of barbarism and ignorance'. For the present purposes it is worth delving into the history of this circle. This constitutes the last ring in the Platonist golden chain linking Proclos to Plethon.

The intellectual circle of Mistra was largely formed as a collateral result of the hegemony of Palamism in the main theological and political centers. Mistra provided shelter to intellectuals and literati forced by circumstances to leave Constantinople and Thessaloniki. Unable to cope any longer with the new Palamite establishment in Constantinople and Thessaloniki, renegade philosophers and humanists arrived in the Despotate of Mistra first under the reign of the Despot Manuel Kantakouzenos and after 1383 under the reign of Palaiologues. There they formed a circle of little known intellectuals who escaped the status quo of the Palamite Counter-Reformation. The most prominent intellectuals active in Mistra before Plethon, George Gavrielopoulos, known as George the Philosopher, and Manuel Raoul Metochites, appear to have found refuge in Mistra. The activity of copyists in Morea in the second half of the fourteenth century is witness to the profound influence exercised by the Hesychast controversy. The contemporary authors copied are mainly Prochoros Kydones, Demetrios Kydones, John Kantakouzenos and, later, Nikephorous Gregoras. It appears that during this period the Peloponnese witnessed a revival of ancient themes in visual art. This created the ideal framework for Plethon's project.

George the Philosopher and Manuel Raoul Methochites were confessed Platonists, anti-Palamites and well acquainted with Demetrios Kydones, though favouring Plato over Aquinas. George's extreme enthusiasm for Plato and his eagerness to 'listen to Lycurgus' laws' out of 'an extreme philhellenism (το λίαν είναι φιλελλην), as Kydones said of him, have been perceptively seen

p. 123
as anticipating Plethon's Platonism and enthusiasm for Sparta in the next century.

George's criticism of Kydones' fondness of Aquinas highlights the fact that not all anti-Palamites were eventually absorbed by late Byzantine Thomism and that philhellenism presented an alternative even if that meant 'parting from one's friens'. Another good friend of Kydones with philosophical interests who appears to have arrived in Morea in 1381/2 is the adventurer John Laskaris Kalopheros. The monk Agathias also abandoned Constantinople for Mistra under mysterious circumstances and emerges in Kydones' epistles as fully mesmerized by Hellenism. We may surmise that the inclusiveness of the Mistra intellectual circle grew in significance in the aftermath of the final defeat of the mainstream humanist movement. It appears that Kydones maintained contact with this circle of secular intellectuals, functioning as the link between Constantinople and an amalgam of anti-Palamites, philhellenes, and anti-Thomists who opted for a very different path from his. It has been plausibly argued that Plethon may well have known through Kydones about this marginal and remote close-knit group of Hellenising intellectual fugitives who shared a common interest in Greek antiquity, one occasionally bordering on romantic nostalgia. This information might have led Plethon to discover in Mistra the ideal framework for setting up a Hellenic cell beyond the reach of central imperial institutions.

Two factors make this a particularly appealing and plausible theory. First, it has been recently shown that in the fifteenth century the Peloponnese was a site of ongoing political and ideological experimentation. Only faint echoes of the anaemic central authority of Constantinople reached the borderland of the Peloponnese, a country 'under construction', as a modern scholar put it, marred by the mortal conflict between local landowners and the political representatives of Constantinople, that is to say the despots of Mistra and their consellors -- Plethon included. Secondly, we may

p. 124
recall that Kydones turned to Thomism long before his death in 1397 and that George the Philosopher, who had been the mentor of Platonist Raoul Metochites as early as 1362/5 would not take up the task of instructing a new generation into the mysteries of Platonism. Plethon was the only intellectual at the time capable of offering an ideological direction to anyone not sharing Palamite mysticism, Kydones' Thomism or Scholarios' millenarianism -- but also to advise the despots on political matters.

It is plausible that around 1409 Plethon was more than happy to leave behind a philosophically and theologically exhausted Constantinople, to discover a safe haven for his private immersion into Platonist philosophy and to pursue the application of radical reformist measures in a newly established court whose viability required extensive socio-economic experimentation. Beyond the reach of central clerical authorities, Plethon was free to take Platonims to its extreme conclusion, transforming the pre-existing philhellenic ambience of Mistra (one that nevertheless lacked proper spiritual guidance) into philosophical Paganism, able to articulate an alternative to both Palamite Orthodoxy and Thomism.

What is my problem? (In which I inform Caroline Tully that I do not love her.)

So, one of Caroline Tully's fans took offense at my recent post about her, and proceeded to pound out a few paragraphs of substance-free self-righteous indignation in my general direction on his blog: Caroline Tully and one noisy critic... (I am the "noisy critic" in question). As happens so often on teh interwebs, the real fun came in the comments section.

None other than Caroline Tully was the first to comment on the post. She posed the question: What is Apuleius' problem? In all, three different answers were provided to that enquiry.

The first answer was given by Tully herself, who proposed the following explanation for my criticisms of her: "He must secretly be in love with me!" To which I can only reply: No, Caroline, I'm sorry but I don't think of you that way.

The second answer was proffered by Ethan Doyle White, whose original blog post had prompted all this speculation about my "problem" in the first place. Ethan's hypothesis was that I am "an individual who is certainly disgruntled with academia." I replied to Ethan to inform him that the scholars who are praised in my blog greatly outnumber those that I criticize. I provided Ethan with a list of some of these academics whom I have cited with admiration and (sometimes quite lavish) approval, including: Sarah Iles Johnston, Pierre Hadot, Eva Pocs, Jan Assmann, Ramsay MacMullen, Ruth Martin, James B. Rives, Anthony Kaldellis, Niketas Siniossoglou, Christina Larner, Julia Annas, Dorothy Watts, Charles W. Hedrick, Jr, Joscelyn Godwin, Arthur Versluis and Stefano Gasparri.

The third proposed solution to the puzzle posed by Tully came from a blogger named "Phoenix" who at first stated that she had "no idea who this person is and what his gripe with Caroline is all about," but then immediately added that "the palpable envy and inferiority issues he displays should be apparent to any discerning reader."

I found Phoenix's answer to be the most curious of them all. What is Caroline Tully supposed to have done to create such feelings of envy and inferiority in those unworthy fortunates who behold these accomplishments? I posted that question in the comments section, and, not to put too fine a point on things, I ventured that as far as I was aware, Tully is just a graduate student who has precisely one peer-reviewed academic publication to her credit (and good for her, as far as that goes, which, it must unfortunately be stipulated, is not very far when it comes to inducing feelings of inferiority).

Phoenix did not respond to my request for further information regarding Tully's supposedly intimidating scholarly oeuvre, but Ethan leaped to Caroline Tully's defense and claimed to know of four different "scholarly" publications by her. But three of these publications do not meet even the most liberal definition of "peer-reviewed academic publications" (leaving only the one I had already mentioned as not being, in itself, particularly awe-inspiring).

Now see here, sir! Isn't it impolite to focus on the deficiencies of another person's curriculum vitae? Of course it is. But the thing is, you see, in the first place I was responding to the claim that my criticisms of Tully were motivated by envy, and so I was trying to find out what precisely it is that I am supposed to be envious of?

But in the second place, Caroline Tully has made a point of promoting herself as an authoritative interpreter of "academic research on archaeology and history," while at the same time claiming that those Pagans who criticize her hero Ronald Hutton, or who find value in the work of Marija Gimbutas, a scholar that Tully sneeringly disdains, are unlearned simpletons to whom scholarly research is "a foreign country" and to whom the published works of scholars (or at least those scholars who meet Tully's approval) appear to be written in "an undecipherable language." Therefore, qualms about good manners notwithstanding, Tully has by her own arrogant posturing made the issue of her own rather negligible academic credentials "fair game".

But none of this answers the question: what is my problem??

Well, I'll tell you what my problem is. My problem is this:

When a situation arises in which Pagans do not like what they hear from academics, the conceptual spaces from which they can speak and be heard, and from where they produce their own counter-narratives, are primarily the Internet, self-publishing and the Pagan conference. Particularly in the case of the Internet, the material Pagans produce ends up being more widely distributed and easily accessible than academic texts can ever hope to be. It is at these sorts of sites that some Pagans have assumed the discourse of oppressing the perceived academic coloniser. A recent example that we would all be familiar with is the vitriol generated as a consequence of the criticism by two academic bloggers, Peg Aloi and Chas S. Clifton, of Ben Whitmore’s book Trials of the Moon.

This is part of a larger situation whereby Pagans who dislike British historian Ronald Hutton’s book The Triumph of the Moon have participated in an internet smear campaign against him, motivated by Whitmore’s attempted criticism of Hutton’s work. While the dependence of modern Witchcraft on late nineteenth and early twentieth century scholarship has been evident to scholars for decades, it appears to have only been grasped by the majority of Pagans themselves in the wake of the 1999 publication of Triumph of the Moon. As we know, Wicca’s foundation claim used to correlate with historical research, but the supportive scholarly interpretation of witchcraft popularised by Margaret Murray was discredited in the 1970s. It is obvious that many Pagans, including those that so vehemently oppose Hutton’s work, are unaware of the evolution of witchcraft scholarship. Nor do they understand the rigors of historical methodology, and that Whitmore’s book has, in fact, not in any way demolished Hutton’s research. Anti-Huttonists have gleefully lionised Whitmore, seeing him as a noble “man of the people” defeating the assault by malevolent academics such as Hutton who obviously have the destruction of the Wiccan religion in mind.

A simple internet search reveals that—despite Hutton’s recent article on Witchcraft historiography and Peg Aloi’s review of Whitmore’s book, published in The Pomegranate, and which are both freely accessible on the internet—Whitmore’s Trials of the Moon is thought to have vindicated the Murrayite standpoint and he has been made a hero, fans of his work not understanding that pointing out a few mistakes or omissions does not a successful refutation make. In comments on internet discussion boards, fans of Whitmore freely admit that they cannot tell whether his observations are correct. The important thing is that they seem correct, they claim to take down Hutton, and that feels good so it must be right. Carla O’Harris sums up this attitude with her vitriolic comment on Clifton’s blog: “Hutton is a second-rate hack-artist whose cult is completely undeserving.”

The above three paragraphs are taken from Tully's Pomengranate "opinion piece" that is at the heart of "my problem" (link). Tully makes a very serious accusation, and one that is aimed in part at Yours Truly. Have critics of Ronald Hutton, and especially those who have praised Ben Whitmore's book, Trials of the Moon, engaged in a "smear campaign"? I challenge Caroline Tully or anyone else to answer a few simple questions about this "smear campaign":

1. What are the "smears" that have been made against Ronald Hutton?
2. Who has made these "smears"? In particular, what role does Tully assign to Ben Whitmore in this "smear campaign"?
3. What are the objective criteria applied to determine what constitutes a "smear"? And how do these "smears" against Hutton differ qualitatively from the often personally insulting criticisms that have been directed against Ben Whitmore and other critics of Hutton by Tully, Peg Aloi, Chas Clifton, Ronald Hutton, and others?
4. Can Tully produce specific links to the internet sources that make up the evidence upon which she based her conclusion that an "internet smear campaign" exists?
5. Can Tully produce specific links to internet sources in which Ben Whitmore is "gleefully lionised as ... a 'noble man of the people'", or in which he is referred to as a "hero", or any of the other extravagant and idiotic characterizations she makes about the debate surrounding Whitmore's book?
6. If Tully cannot substantiate what she has written, will she retract it?
7. If Caroline Tully neither substantiates her claim about a "smear campaign", nor retracts her accusation, should anyone take her seriously?


Related linkage:

• Pre-emptive response to the forthcoming adulation for Caroline Tully
• Silly, Ignorant Goddess Worshippers
  
• Theoretical Archaeology is a Foreign Country
• Caroline Tully and the "Internet Smear Campaign" Against Ronald Hutton. meh.
• Ronald Hutton on Pagan History: "a demonstrable continuity, text to text and person to person, across the centuries."
• Trials of the Moon by Ben Whitmore
• Max Dashu's review of Trials of the Moon
• "The simplest explanation is that the essential foundation already existed." (Suggested Reading on Pagan History)
  

Christopher Livanos on the 15th century resurgence of Paganism in Mistra

Christopher Livanos is an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin. His paper, excerpted below, “Monotheists, Dualists and Pagans” appeared in The Byzantine World edited by Paul Stephenson (Routledge, 2010).

Livanos joins with many other contemporary scholars in identifying George Gemistos Plethon as a Pagan, and in identifying Mistra, where Plethon spent the last five decades of his life, as an important center of a "genuine but small resurgence of Paganism". See the bottom of this post for a selection of other contemporary sources supporting these same conclusions.

In my opinion, Livanos' analysis is not without serious defects, especially when it comes to the uses and abuses to which he subjects the terms "monotheist" and "polytheist", and, most specifically, his insistence on finding "monotheistic" tendencies not only in Plethon but also Plotinus and in Pagan Greek philosophers generally. Nevertheless, Livanos' discussion of contemporary sources is quite useful (if far from complete), as is his overview of the dispute between Plethon and his arch-enemy Scholarios.

The following excerpt is presented not as an endorsement of Livanos' views, but only to provide yet another example of contemporary scholarship supporting the contention that underground Paganism is an established fact of European history.

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The very final years of the Byzantine empire witnessed a genuine but small resurgence of Paganism in the circle of George Gemisthos Plethon of Mistra. The Peloponnese during the late Palaiologan period was also the site of a renewed interest in classical themes in visual art, so Plethon's turn to Paganism did not take place in a cultural vacuum. (30) It is not clear from his surviving work when Plethon abandoned the Christian faith and became a Pagan, but it seems likely that his conversion coincided roughly with the Council of Florence in 1438-9, which Plethon attended. Perhaps the failed attempt at union left him disillusioned with Christianity and in search of another belief system to guide the Greek people.

Plethon attempted to reconstruct the ancient religion of the Hellenes and incorporate into it the best features of other ancient belief systems, especially those of Persia. In addition to the philosophy of Plato, one of his major influences is the book of the Chaldean Oracles, which he believed were written by Zoroaster. (31) Kristeller has argued that what survives of Plethon's philosophy is a hatchet job, made to seem particularly offensive by the editing of Plethon's rival George Scholarios. (32) Kristeller's reading of Plethon is probably colored, however, by his expertise in western Renaissance philosophy. Renaissance humanists in the West commonly used deeply Pagan imagery, although in most cases it would be wrong to question the sincerity of their Christian beliefs. There was likewise a tradition of allegorical, Christianizing reading of seemingly secular, even Pagan, literature in Byzantium, so Kristeller is not without basis. The case that Plethon was indeed a Pagan who sought a revival of the ancient religion was put forward convincingly by C.M. Woodhouse. (33)

One of the most important studies of Plethon undertaken in the two decades since the publication of Woodhouse's book is Polymnia Athanassiadi's examination of Plethon's use of the Chaldean Oracles, which he attributed to Zoroaster. (34) Woodhouse concentrated on Plethon's antiquarianism. Athanassiadi builds upon the work that has been done on Plethon's debt to antiquity, the focus of her article is Plethon's formulation of 'a new spiritual way.' (35)

Although Plethon's Paganism, as Woodhouse demonstrates, was not allegorical, he was an important influence on the tradition of Christian humanist Platonism that flourished in Renaissance Italy, particularly in Florence. The 'Plato versus Aristotle' controversy that bitterly divided Renaissance humanists began in late Byzantium with the divide between followers of Plethon and Scholarios. George of Trebizond, a member of the Aristotelian camp, went so far as to declare Plato and Plethon two of the three most wicked men who ever lived, joining the ranks with none other than Muhammad. (36)

In part, what led Kristeller to suspect that Scholarios creatively edited Plethon to make the philosopher of Mistra's views seem less crude and more allegorical was probably a subtle monotheism underlying the complex belief system that Plethon devised. it is not, as I have attempted to show in this chapter, accurate to equate "Pagan" and "polytheist." However one may choose to define "Pagan," it must surely include Plotinus, whose philosophy was more monist than polytheist in any practical sense. What offended Scholarios so deeply was that Plethon rejected Jesus

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Christ. Compared to that, the number of Gods Plethon substituted in his place was probably less important in the patriarch's eyes.

True polytheism had since pre-Christian times been exceedingly rare or non-existent in complex learned theology of the sort that interested Plethon. It has been stated that Scholarios distorted Plethon's views in order to enhance the polytheistic aspects of Plethon's beliefs and obscure an allegorical and ore orthodox meaning. There is no reason to suppose that Scholarios misunderstood Plethon's monotheism or that he deliberately hid it. What would have mattered to Scholarios in formulating the opinion that Plethon had lapsed into Hellenism was not the question of whether or not he believed ultimately in one God or in many but the fact that Plethon's God was the One of Porphyry and Plotinus rather than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

One point in common between Scholarios and Plethon is that both men turned to late antiquity in their search for religious inspiration to guide the Greek people. (37) The two men lived at a time when Greeks and Latins alike were becoming increasingly drawn to the study of the first 500 years of the Christian era. We can look to Byzantium in the mid-fifteenth century to find important influences on several Renaissance humanist traditions, including Protestantism. In one of his letters to a churchman named Joseph, Scholarios wrote that the situation of the Greeks after the Turkish conquest had some similarities to that of the early Church before Constantine. He urged a relaxation of canonical rigor, arguing that the canons did not exist before the Church won the empire and did not need to be enforced in quite the same way now that the Christian empire was no more. Though Plethon did not live to see the conquest of Constantinople, having died in 1450, it was clear to him (as it was to everyone) that the empire was in danger. Like Scholarios, he looked to the time before Constantine for guidance, though he turned to Paganism rather than to primitive Christianity.

Scholarios' religious beliefs were entirely Orthodox, and there is in his work no sense of the reformist zeal that would shake the foundations of western Europe some forty-five years after his death, but it is still significant to the ecclesiastical historian that Scholarios drew a clear distinction between pre- and post-Constantinian Christianity and recognized that church practice was dynamic, evolving and able to change to meet the needs of a changing world. For purposes of this chapter, he is perhaps the villain who prevents us from seeing the Pagan ideas of Plethon in their fullest form, yet, for someone whose motivation was supposedly to censor the apostate and preserve only enough to tell us how horribly Plethon had allowed the devil to delude him, he preserved a tremendous amount of Plethon's Book of the Laws.

One of the most significant contributions of scholarship on Plethon over the past ten years has been to show the diversity of his philosophical influences and his apparent desire to establish a syncretistic, universal religion. Woodhouse was concerned with Plethon's intellectual debt to Greek antiquity. The debt cannot be overstated, but Athanassiadi is right to emphasize what she calls Plethon's "cosmopolitanism." (38) Stausberg (see footnote ) discusses the significance of Zarathustra in Plethon's religious writings in great depth, and Athanassiadi traces possible patterns of influence from the Iranian scholar Sohrawardi through the Jewish esoteric teacher Elissaeus to Plethon. If late Byzantine Paganism was a very minor religion in terms of the number of adherents, it was nonetheless vibrant and internationally focussed, and the influence it had on the Italian Renaissance through Florentine Platonism and the

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works of humanist scholars such as Marsilio Ficino marks it as a spiritual and intellectual tradition worthy of our attention and respect.

Notes:
30. Mouriki 1983, "Revival Themes with Elements of Daily Life in Two Palaeologan Frescoes Depicting the Baptism", Harvard Ukrainian Studies Vol. 7, pp. 458-488
31. Stausberg 1998, Faszination Zarathustra: pp.35-923
32. Kristeller 1979, Renaissance Thought And Its Sources: p. 156
33. Woodhouse 1986, George Gemistos Plethon: the last of the Hellenes
34. Athanassiadi 2002, "Byzantine Commentators on the Chaldean Oracles: Psellos and Plethon," in Byzantine Philosophy and Its Ancient Sources, ed. Katerina Ierodiakonou
35. Athanassiadi 2002, p. 251
36. quoted in Woodhouse 1986, 367-8
37. Livanos 2006, Greek Tradition and Latin Influence in the Work of George Scholarios: 89-94
38. Athanassiadi 2002: 251
39. Woodhouse 1986: 357-79

Related posts from this blog:

• George Gemistos Plethon: Sources May 27, 2009
• Which Plato, and which Platonism? July 11, 2009
• Seek, and ye shall find July 12, 2009
• "Gotta Serve Somebody" (on the religious identity of Marsilio Ficino) July 24, 2009
• C.M. Woodhouse: scholar-soldier and philhellene August 31, 2009
• Ficinus. Paganus? More on the religious identity of Marsilio Ficino. Juy 13, 2010
• "A Different World"? (more on Ficino) March 6, 2011
• An Inconvenient Pagan: The Story of George Gemistos Plethon March 7, 2011
• "George Gemistos Plethon was a crypto-Pagan." March 16, 2011
• Hanegraaff on Plethon: "The Pagan cat was out of the box." March 16, 2011
• "The Christian appropriation of Platonic philosophy and the Hellenic intellectual resistance" April 27, 2011
• How To Look for Crypto-Pagans, 2.0 May 6, 2011
• "More than one source of valid religious knowledge." Moshe Idel on Ficino (and Plethon) on Prisci Theologi (and Kabbalah) May 22, 2012
• Proclus and Polytheism June 8, 2012

The Heathen-Minded Humanists: On The Revolutionary Pagan Conspiracy of 1468
Part One provides the background of the struggle between Pope Paul II and the Roman Academy
Part Two describes the crisis of 1468
Part Three (which I haven't posted yet) presents the denouement, in which all charges are dropped and the Heathen Academy survives intact
Part Four tells the tale of the surprising evidence discovered four centuries later of the literally underground Paganism that existed in Rome in the 15th century
Part Five looks at the other Roman Academy and its head, Cardinal Bessarion.

Forsaking Christ to Follow Plato (Or, Was Michael Psellos a Christian?)
Part One: Mostly Basil Tatakis' Byzantine Philosophy, with a little help from Jaroslav Pelikan, Katerina Ierandiokonou, John Myendorff, and even C.M. Woodhouse
Part Two: N.G. Wilson's Scholars of Byzantium
Part Three: Anthony Kaldellis' The Argument of Psellos' Chronographia
Part Four: Michael Psellos and the Chaldean Oracles
Part Five: Michael Psellos and "Ho Ellênikos Logos" (this is the post you are reading right now)