Prof. Jeffrey Stout - Religion since Cicero

let me extend to you all a very warm welcome to the series of gford lectures at the University of Edinburgh for the academic session 2016 to 2017 my name is steuart brown and I am professor of ecclesiastical history and also Deputy convenor of the gford lectureships committee allow me first to say a few words about the gford lectures before I introduce our speaker the gford lectures were established in 1885 by a gift from Adam Lord gford a Justice of the court of session and a man of broad learning compassion and cultivation he endowed a series of public lectures at each of the four older Scottish universities Edinburough St Andrews Glasgow and Aberdine for as he put it promoting advancing teaching and diffusing the study of natural theology with natural theology defined as the knowledge of God and the foundation of Ethics or morals the first gford lectures were delivered in 1888 and at the University of Edinburgh our past gford lectures have included such luminaries as William James hre beron James G Fraser Albert Schweitzer Reinhold neore Iris Murdoch Charles Taylor and Rowan Williams our differred lecture for the session 2016 to17 is a worthy member of this distinguished company he is Professor Jeffrey Stout professor of religion at Princeton University and a philosopher of considerable breadth of interests who's perhaps best known for his analysis of religious involvement in politics and his critical explorations of secularism and traditionalism his recent writings have focused on conceptions of religion and critiques of arbitrary power Jeffrey Stout was born in New Jersey and educated at Brown University and at Princeton University where he earned his Doctorate in religious studies Princeton recognized his quality and kept him giving him his first teaching position in 1975 he was appointed professor of religion in 1988 and he continues in that position to the present day he chaired the department of religion at Princeton for several years and he has won awards for teaching Excellence he's lectured widely across North America and Europe and he was elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008 his books include the flight from Authority religion morality and the Quest for autonomy 1981 which was the first volume of the distinguished revisions series edited by Alistair McIntyre and Stanley howas then there was ethics after Babel the languages of morals and their discontents 1988 which was the winner of the 1989 American Academy of religion award for excellence then democracy and tradition 2004 which was winner of the 2004 American Academy of religion award for excellence grammar and Grace reformulations of aquinus and binstein 2004 and blessed are the organized Grassroots Democracy in America 2010 he is also the author of some 80 Journal articles and contributed book chapters ranging widely across his disciplines the title of his series of gford lectures is religion Unbound ideals and powers from ciso to King and over the next two weeks we will have six lectures the lecture and the question time this evening are being recorded and the video will shortly be available online on the University's gford website Professor Stout could I now invite you to present the first of your gford lectures on religion since cisero which among other themes will explore the ideals of ethical religion which have played such a vital role in modern Freedom movements Professor [Applause] Stout thank you for uh Professor Brown for that wonderful generous introduction thanks to the gford committee for inviting me to speak uh to Anna Conroy and various others for assistance and to many others for Hospitality it is a humbling honor to stand where my standard Setters stood as saying ideals and powers in troubled times William James in a gford lecture lecture on the sick Soul said that quote the real core of the religious problem is help help I shall be focusing on cries for help in the face of tyranny and oppression the topic is timely and long bound to religion it was a topic close to the heart of James Godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson when he delivered at least 10 lectures in Scotland in 1848 at a moment when revolutionary fervor and reactionary fear were sweeping through Europe Adam Lord gford recalled having attended four lectures by Emerson in that year at the age of 27 a quarter Century later speaking in Glasgow City Hall all Lord gford confessed that the quote unquote overflowing enthusiasm he felt while listening to Emerson back when he was 27 when Lord gford was 27 had not subsided some of the young man's elders and peers sought to dampen such enthusiasm for Emerson pamphleteers and journalists described him as a heretic an atomistic individual and a chimera stirring dangerously Republican passions Scott read Emerson's 1844 essay collection in pirated as well as lit editions carile consoled Emerson by saying that while Pirates Rob your gold they do carry you faster abroad young people hoping for reform form had been disappointed by carlile's slide from their admiration Emerson was their new West Wind pamphlet versions of man the reformer and Emerson's first abolitionist address were being read across class lines in Liverpool and Manchester but not in Edinburgh Emerson scheduled lectures for workingclass people the great hunger had entered its third year newspapers reported riots Emerson dined with Aristocrats Ted British slums and twice posed for uh David Scott's portrait of him uh during that visit to Scotland in 1872 in that speech in Glasgow gford remarked that quote authentic invitations onward and upward seem to come to us in a Brother's voice when Emerson speaks or writes he calls us out of tyranny and slavery he endorses no separation of religion from political action because as gford put it religion will not be separated from anything whatever true relig embodies worthy ideals in action you cannot produce and you cannot maintain a religious vacuum said gford and if you could even secularism would die in it Emerson had recently said religion is as inexp punible as the use of lamps or of Wells or of chimneys perhaps I should po use his clenched fist a characteristic gesture of Emerson's uh the portra has got that right the dkes we erect to contain religion's influence are more permeable and fragile than we suppose a sudden storm of moral indignation can wash them away religion has political effects whenever the stakes are high the effects are good if the religion is good and bad if the religion is bad religion is good when it embodies the highest ideals we know it goes bad when infected by Injustice as gford said on another occasion if Injustice Reigns and wrong prevails around us it is impossible for us to avoid the contact and the contagion because Bernard of clairo on whom gford gave lord gford gave another lecture hated all tyranny but the tyranny of the church his considerable virtue left much to be desired in Lord gord's eyes Latter Day Christians should know better and do better it is caused for shame from Lord gord's point of view that modern Christians were quote Proprietors of slave ships Christian Planters bought cargos of SL slaves Christian churches and ministers were supported by the labor of the stolen Negroes unquote the religious Defenders of tyranny and oppression bind religion to Vice the remedy is not to secularize politics according to Lord gford but to rectify religious attitudes and practices when religion abides by Justice and Liberty rather than bowing to arbitrary power it lifts each of us and promotes the common good this was Emerson's hope as well as Lord gords it was the hope of William Wilberforce Thomas Clarkson and Abraham Lincoln David Walker Henry Highland Garnett and Frederick Douglas Margaret Fuller Jose Marti and John mure Mary walstone craft lucrecia m and Jane Adams mandas Gandhi Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X Abraham Joshua hesel Thomas Merton and William R Johnson to my knowledge we have no adequate analysis of this hope no adequate history of it I cannot fill that Gap in these uh six lectures but I can give my reasons for wanting it filled many intellectuals posit a great separation of religion from politics and modernity there are disputes over how the great separation was achieved whether its effects were good bad or mixed whether it was permanent or temporary the disputes assume however that a great separation took place that we know what it was and that it set the terms in which politics was conducted where and while it lasted what then are we to make of the names that I listed a moment ago Gandhi aspired to integrate his religious commitments and public witness he thought that India's struggle for Independence would fail if the religious and secular opponents of Imperial rule did not cooperate while denying that religion and politics could be neatly separated he strove to free Indian religion as well as Indian Society from tyranny and oppression King did something similar on behalf of the American Coalition that mixed religious and secular elements a photograph that shows King the Baptist preacher and James Baldwin the secular essayist standing arm in arm condenses The Cooperative structure of the Civil Rights Movement into a single image there are similar photos of Gandhi and Neu tutu and Mandela fessa and mnik each of the underlying movements consisted in Myriad less visible friendships across lines of difference for the sake of a shared concern like Baldwin Emerson was an ex preacher turned essayist at abolitionist rallies he shared the speakers platform with white preachers and fugitive slaves the movement was a coalition of religious and secular citizens aligned against a coalition of religious and secular citizens the same is true of feminism the labor movement the base communities in Latin America solidarity in Poland the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa the gay rights alliances that formed in San Francisco New York and Ottawa in the 1960s and the environmentalist communities now forming nearly everywhere that's a lot of political activity to go missing from one's account of modernity and it covers nearly it covers every decade since Lord the future Lord GF heard Emerson lecture in Edinburgh where was it then that the great separation transpired what was separated from what and in what ways if you only had the most prominent theorists of modernity to go on you might not know that Gandhi and King existed it's hard to find their names in those books you might think that until the recent Resurgence of Theocratic right-wing movements religion had long been privatized and politics thoroughly secularized you might think that the Medieval World gathered harmoniously under a sacred canopy worshiping a Transcendent God inculcating the virtues once there was no secular then everything changed belief became a choice rights vanquished virtue religion was privatized so we are told my question is this how would our understanding of religion and politics have to change if the religious voices and egalitarian Freedom movements were given their due that's the question that I hope to answer in this series my answer will be historical philosophical and somewhat personal a choice of inheritance explains my motivation as well as my selection and juxtaposition of examples I became interested in religion and politics while participating in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement as a teenager among the among the writers who mattered most to me then were Baldwin King Gandhi and Emerson these modern opponents of tyranny and oppression also said a great deal about religion and its relation to politics they distinguished ethical virtuous or True Religion from unethical vicious or false religion I was puzzled about how to reconcile my own own version of that distinction with my reading in philosophy political Theory and religious studies disciplines where the great separation story held Sway and still hold sway I gradually realized that if I wanted to make sense of my own thinking about religion and politics I needed to locate it in a broader history I first tried doing that moving back several centuries and then realized that to have real success I'd have to locate my own uh thinking and the struggles of my own times in a history that goes back as far as ancient Rome a history of contestation over the key terms religion tyranny oppression liberal secularism ideology critique the genealogy of morals value free social science and King's letter from a Birmingham Jail all make more sense when we take that history into account over and over again in an Ever widening International context someone has referred to something or other as religion and drawn political implications from this someone else has disagreed and conflict has ensued one of my tasks will be to clarify the topic being disputed and the stakes of the dispute what the key terms denote what reasons are given for their application what consequences are said to follow from their proper application and how religion differs from other kinds of things in religion talk the relevant kinds are often species of good and Bad Religion has been said to be virtuous and vicious rational and irrational sane and delusory essential to the common good and Best Kept private beneficial to freedom and detrimental to it morality's Foundation its fruit and its Nemesis a pillar of just order and the Opium of the people an indispensable source of meaning and a conversation stopper religion talk can be as confusing then as it is contentious it's not clear what's being referred to when the term is used it requires philosophical clarification lock Hume walstone craft Marx Emerson nche Pope Leo I 13th and G did not all have the same thing in mind when they spoke of religion the disputes I am analyzing in these lectures are not disputes over the same thing quite different matters have been contested Under The Heading of religion there is no such thing as the modern conception of religion to analyze endorse or vilify so I shall speak instead of the modern discourse of religion meaning by this the many uses of a single vocabulary rooted in ancient Rome the earliest extent writings on our topic in those writings the Latin term religio is used to discuss a wide range of topics Divine worship sacrifice supplication divination consecration avow prayer and Associated practices the moral and political functions of these practices the beliefs passions and dispositions Acquired and expressed by participating in these practices the rules for conducting and scheduling public rights and the duties and ins institutions of the priesthood that's already a very wide range of meanings okay but they're all related to one another the Roman writers uh often used the term religion in neutral descriptions of these things but in contexts where religion is implicitly or explicitly contrasted with Superstition use of the former term religion expresses a positive valuation of something while use of the latter term is pejorative the first century writer varo tied down the contrast according to St Augustin by saying that whereas the superstitious fear the gods the religious Revere the gods as benevolent parents so there's one way of drawing the distinction many Roman writers alternate between neutral and value Laden ways of referring to acts attitudes dispositions practices obligations roles and institutions that are related in some way or other to Divine worship and devotion a concept that permits such variation alternation is what philosophers call a dual character concept so the term scientist has a dual character in English in contemporary English some scientists in the sense of people who in fact earned their living by studying science are said to be true or real scientists While others are said not to be true scientists belong to the relevant profession but are also thought to ex [Music] and piety he distinguished between religion and Superstition from a point of view favorable to Liberty as he understood it and unfavorable to tyranny and oppression the ideals of the Roman Republic informed his view of the public practices that should be used to Foster virtuous reverence and devotion in the populace Cicero's philosophical doubts about one or another theological claim did not diminish his commitment to viewing religion as an Excellence conducive to the common good as a virtue when the historian Livy cited a deterioration of religion as a moral cause of political ills he too was referring to a virtue and invoking evaluative standards his history of Rome is a compendium of instructive examples good examples such as numa's establishment of State religion for the cultivation of popular virtue are useful for imitation according to liby bad examples such as Manlius religious demagoguery are precedents to avoid each Chief example discussed in book five of Livy's history makes clear that National piety leads to success piety and impiety respectively explain good and bad outcomes and do so in a way that does not necessarily depend on divine intervention from liby's point of view senca though an apologist for monarchy rejected use of public worship on its half True Religion he thought is something the stoic philosopher acquires in dispassionate communion with the gods whereas public worship cannot help being superstitious many other monarchist from Horus to Mobius agreed with Cicero and Livy that public worship has beneficial political effects that it tends to be both expressive of virtue and conducive to its formation and that officials would be wise to make Provisions for inculcating and expressing it because these monarchists differed from Republicans over what habits of reverence devotion and deference to express and cultivate they also differed over what rituals to conduct and whom to worship not all EV valuative uses of the concept of religion in ancient Rome were positive the most influential precedent for using the term negatively was a poem by lucretius a follower of epicurus and the late Roman Republic that poem entitled on the nature of things repeatedly uses religio as the name of something inherently oppressive religion is not something that needs to be freed from oppression as Lord gford and Cicero thought but rather something from which we need to be freed or something from which we need to free ourselves as the poet surveys the world around him he finds humankind quote miserably crushed before all eyes uh by religion and he seeks to quote loose from r the Mind religions tightened coils the ties That Bind human beings to the gods are shackles to be thrown off not obligations to be honored for lucretius religion Unbound or ethical religion would be a contradiction in terms after constant Constantine's conversion uh beginning with the Divine Institutes of Lonas Christians adapted the positive use of religion to their own ecclesial and political purposes avoiding negative uses of the term Augustine treated it as the name of a moral virtue and contrasted it with the vices of superp I he took to be characteristic of Greek and Roman paganism his value Laden religion talk anointed a pagan concept for use against pagans and Heretics while the rulers of medieval Christendom settled for the status of divinely sanctioned sovereignty rather than the still higher status of divinity they maintained the Pagan tradition of treating religion as a virtue term like Augustus before them they had a political interest in harnessing the formative and expressive functions of religion to monarchical power the European Middle Ages were never as Christian however as Christian monarchs and prelates wished the Jews Moors Turks slaves sectarians dissident and countless undocumented sacrament evaders of the medieval period resisted assimilation into what Christendom called True Religion there would have been no need to classify such people as superstitious or heretical had they not posed significant threats to religious unity a value Laden contrast between the virtue of religion and contrasting vices was one of the primary means the medieval Church used to maintain and extend its hegemony but the suppression of superstition and heresy were always expensive sometimes violent and much less than perfectly successful eraser of premodern difference is a disturbingly common plot device in books on religion and modern politics my reason for not telling a story about the modern loss of an earlier religious Harmony is that there was no such Harmony to be lost the most systematic account of a positive conception of religion is to be found in Thomas aquinas's summary of theology a work undertaken between between 1265 and 1274 in order to improve the instruction of his fellow Dominicans Thomas sometimes used the term religio neutrally to describe practices related to worship and devotion but never negatively when he wished to underscore a positive value judgment he spoke of True Religion as Augustine and others had done before him Thomas theorizes religion as a virtue while also using the term to designate any attitude practice or institution thought to express or Foster the authentic virtue his talk of virtue and vice is of course evaluative that's what virtue and vice talk is supposed to be it invokes standard of proper valuation regarding the character of persons and communities the Suma makes explicit What It Takes those standards to be that's part of the point of the book Superstition is the book's umbrella concept for various worship related vices when he uses religio positively to refer to practices and institutions Thomas assumes these to have formative and expressive functions in a life of Christian virtue the practices form the worshipper soul to act in accord with virtue and they do this by orienting the soul attitudinally toward the true God and by giving the soul fitting interior and outward means of expressing honor veneration reverence and Devotion to God repeated use of those means ideally builds up the good habit in which the virtue consists virtues for aquinus are good habits officials are responsible for orienting ritual practice to its proper formative and expressive ends that is its intended mundane functions in the background is Cicero's schema of cardinal moral virtues which Thomas elaborates in precise detail Thomas aquinus being one of the most precise Minds uh ever to put pen to paper a virtue is an Excellence of character which disposes the person who has it to have appropriate passions and to act rightly for the the right reasons across many circumstances there are four cardinal virtues all of which bear on political as well as personal life courage Temperance practical wisdom and Justice are cardinal virtues Justice is the virtue According to which each person in a relationship receives his or her due from another it is the virtue directly concerned with bringing relationships among persons into right order in many relationships for example among neighbors Justice is a reciprocal Affair suppose I am your neighbor and you borrow my axe if you return it in good condition in timely fashion and with appropriate thanks and if you show a willingness to help me out and similar ways on other occasions our relationship is square suppose however that you break my axe through negligence or simply fail to return it or withhold appropriate thanks refuse to reciprocate don't repair the broken act well then our relationship is out of whack doing this sort of thing habitually would make you unjust in so far as you habitually set your neighbor neighborly relations right you are a just neighbor that's the lingo here now not all relationships according to Thomas are govern governed by simple reciprocity my parents are in Thomas's words sources of my existence and progress through life I am indebted to them for my life and for my upbringing repaying them in kind is impossible nothing I could do would make the relationship Square we will never be even other things being equal however I am obliged to honor them express my gratitude to them them and acknowledge my dependence on them if I do do these things well and for the right reasons I am acting justly but without setting our relationship Square piety is the virtue that concerns giving due honor and Devotion to my parents or my people religion for Thomas is the virtue that concerns giving due honor and Devotion to God Thomas usually reserves the term petas for filial and patriotic piety but recognizes that in the tradition it is sometimes used more broadly to cover religion as well and we will see this uh throughout this lecture Series in the broader usage the paradigma atic fosi of piety are one's parents one's people notables Thomas calls them including uh holders of high office people whose actions have contributed greatly to the development of one's culture people like that and God so parents people notables God with respect to our relationships to each of those they are sources of our existence and progress through life and from Thomas's according to Thomas uh Thomas's account we have certain obligations of Justice to them but they aren't such that we can put the relationship Square so Thomas describes both religion and piety piety in the strict sense as potential itial parts of justice and this technical term distinguishes these virtues from justice among equals which can reasonably aspire to completion in symmetrical mutuality setting Square the relationship religion and piety are concerned with relationships of dependence that must by their nature remain asymmetrical these virtues are concerned with what we owee to the sources of our existence and progress through life they are virtues of justly acknowledged irreversible relations of dependence when the term religion is used to designate a virtue the terms application to someone this person has religion this person's religious the terms application to someone involves a positive Judgment of her or him use of the term is constrained by an ideal of worship devotion so forth similarly for Thomas applying the term King to someone implies a positive Judgment of that person's entitlement to rule he doesn't call tyrants Kings they are not true Kings they are false right see how the terminology works so using the term King applying it to someone implies a positive Judgment of that person's entitlement to rule and of his character given that he cannot possess the enti M to rule for reasons we'll discover in this lecture series while ruling primarily for the sake of his own private good rather than for the common good if his character is so constituted that he rules for his own private good or for the good of a faction over against the common good he's a tyrant so use of certain terms is constrained by ideals King by an ideal of proper rule entitlement to rule religion by an ideal of uh proper worship devotion and so forth religion in the positive sense is both essentially good and from Thomas's point of view essentially uh connected to public political life in locating religion among the virtues Thomas contrasts it with the corresponding uh Vice of superstition and he uses a perfectionist Christian vocabulary to pinpoint how potential converts Wayward Christian lay people popes magistrates and others fall short of virtue while rela in themselves to the Divine source of their existence and progress through life our creator according to Thomas is the perfectly good God who desires that we enter fully into proper relationship with one another and proper relationship with God God created us for this excellent rightly ordered Fellowship among human beings and proper relation to God is the end for for which human beings have been created and the condition in which our true happiness consists the virtues are excellent in themselves indispensable as means for the achievement of proper relationship and essential to what makes proper relationship excellent behaving viciously as in Murder rape tyranny oppression and Superstition tends by nature to alienate us from God and from fellowship in virtue with our fellow human beings and God religion is the virtue that bears most directly on Perfection of our relationship to God God now the trouble with virtues says Thomas is that they have semblances false lookalikes the semblances of Virtues are vices murder and theft can masquerade as Justice vengeance is a semblance of retributive justice rashness is a semblance of courage indifference to evil can be a semblance of Tolerance the semblances of religion are The Vices of superstition a superstitious person either worships what is Unworthy of worship or worships God in an undue manner idolatry gives to a creature the due uh the honor due to the Creator whereas various divin atory uh practices get the means of devotion wrong so you can get wrong what object is the worship or devotion is being directed to or you can get the the means wrong okay Superstition is not religion strictly speaking because it is not virtuous it has the same relation to True Religion that counter fit money has to legal tender or that climate change denial has to True science Superstition like the virtue of True Religion is psychologically rooted in the natural human inclination to seek help from to honor and to achieve right relation to a benevolent higher power but someone giving expression to that inclination can easily go wrong so everybody has that inclination built in and then can go wrong a person can confuse a parent sources of help with true the true ultimate completely Dependable source of help it is possible to conflate a glorious feature of creation such as the sun with its Creator we can honor a worthless artifact an imaginary being or an emperor as the highest one people can also entreat honor or otherwise relate to the highest one in inappropriate ways we can but we shouldn't according to Thomas religion strictly speaking is virtuous or ethical religion okay on our mad rush through conceptual history we now turn to the modern period my reason for introducing Thomas's account of religion at some length and I will say more about Thomas in the next couple of lectures but my reason for introducing it is not to treat it as the hegemonic medieval View it wasn't but rather to use it as a baseline of comparison when discussing modern writers in this and later lectures next time I shall be discussing lassus and sarola mainly laskasas two Dominicans so members of the same order that Thomas was writing for and belonged to who were required to read Thomas's summary of theology uh in seminary and uh used its carefully defined terminology when discussing religion in their own context more than two centuries after Thomas's death it is hardly surprising to find Tom mistic religion talk among Tomas what do we discover when we turn to makavelli althusius Hooker Ferguson Wilberforce walstone craft Harriet Martino em Lord gford Kyper Pope Leo I 13th Gandhi and King well we find I think that all of these writers took True Religion as they conceived of it to be virtuous they connected it to piety and Justice and distinguished it from Superstition most of them explicitly described it as a virtue of properly acknowledged dependence and remarked on the ethical and political significance of its formative and expressive functions of course not all value Laden uses of the term religion in the modern period have been positive a scribe who later served as a Papal secretary rediscovered the lucretius poem in 1417 and several printed editions were issued before 1500 by 1700 negative uses of the term religion had caught on a bit but without ever pushing the positive uses of the term out of circulation Baron dbak Robert Owen Marx Engles lenon ma Freud Richard Dawkins Christopher Hitchens Gloria steinm and Bill Maher have largely used the term prativa president in their usage religion is essentially oppressive religions cause Wars hold back progress soow irrationality and fear oppress the human mind and legitimize domination so positive and negative uses of the terms and the characters involved often talking past each other makavelli copied out the lucretian poem in in his own hand in its entirety as a young man in the 1490s but later cast his own influential account of religion as a series of discourses on Livy's History of Rome mavelli favored the Ian over the lucretian usage because he wanted to use the contrast between True Religion and its semblances in explanations of good and bad outcomes in a way modeled somewhat on Livy's way in his discourses book 1 chapter 10 after noting that founders of religion are the most praised of men he warned that nearly everyone is deceived by semblances of the good now many of the examples makavelli discusses in chapters 11 through 15 of book one of the discourses turn out to be more ambiguous than they initially appear and more ambiguous than their analogues in Livy's history it's part of the pedagogical purpose of M these discourses to create problems for the reader to to make it hard to figure out what are the semblances and what are in his view but a few clear points emerge chapter 11 refers to keeping men good as a function of religion chapter 12 advises anyone who wishes to keep a republic free from corruption to keep its religious practices free of corruption the prime example of a corrupted political use of religion is appeal is appealing to oracles or by implication scriptures so as to make them and here's another makavelli phrase so as to make them speak in the mode of the powerful in other words so as to make the scriptures support the interest of the powerful respectful fear of God melds with the common good in the heart of a good citizen according to makavelli prudent leaders help the melding along moral corruption often in the form of avarice is a greater threat to the Commonwealth than false belief Italy had suffered both politically and religiously as a result of corruption in the church according to makavelli it was proximity to the bad example of the um Court of Rome that explained loss of religion loss of true religion in Italy so proximity to that bad example was what this is this uh is a passage of mavelli that um will have echoes in later lectures as we turn to later figures while the voluntary um Poverty of the franciscans and the Dominicans had reduced religious corruption their misinterpretation of Christian love according to makavelli had left Italian city states weak to put it in contemporary language um they confused love with neness the armed Christian Patriots of the Swiss cantons were maki's uh model modern citizens it should be kept in mind that he entered the Florentine Chancery just after the execution of sath arola a Dominican frier with no adequate means to defend either himself or the Florentine Republic from Vatican tyranny okay baruk Spinoza James Harrington Jean jaac rouso and jeppi mazini were Republican admirers of macelli who contributed heavily to Modern thinking about the political importance of virtuous religion Alexis dville republicanism was less indebted to makavelli but no less concerned with the public effects of Good and Bad Religion Emil durkheim defined so another Republican somewhat less influenced by makavelli than um the four I mentioned a moment ago defined religion as a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to Sacred things that unite its adherence in a single moral Community again religion is essentially public okay religion's unifying public function is evident toim thought when one looks at societies with minimal division of labor a central challenge for modern republics and this is another theorist of Republican life right a central challenge for modern republics is to unite multiple secondary groups in commitment to a shared conception of the Sacred which according to durkheim need not be linked to a shared conception of divinity because republicanism is largely missing from most overviews of religion and modern thought the significance of attempts to modify or reject its main ideas tends to be obscured one effect of leaving republicanism out of the story is the false impression now widespread among academics that there is something worth calling the the modern conception of religion According to which religion is essentially or ideally A Private Matter to be screened out of public life to the extent possible David hume's criticisms of Monkish virtue were as harsh as macelli's but not motivated by a republican ideal of true religion's public role or a republican ideal of Liberty Hume granted that true religion is essentially good but also hinted that its Rarity and lack of determinant practical implications left it irrelevant to politics it is a virtue possessed by only a handful of skeptical philosophers and consists in a calm piety for a vaguely defined first cause so if it is that no positive practical implications follow from it the first cause on which we depend does not appear to be much of a lover benev belief in a benevolent deity with maximal power is hard to reconcile with the evils all around us a wise philosopher does not Place much confidence in beliefs about first things or infer political conclusions from those beliefs no established religion can be expected to instill the true virtue according to Hume because that is accessible only to True philosophers but this conclusion does not prevent us from asking which religion that could be established in some territory strikes the best balance between Authority and Liberty on such credential grounds Hume endorsed moderate anglicanism as a way of cultivating a somewhat virtuous po uh populace in England but hume's notion of Liberty as we will see in later lectures was not makaveli's and a natural history of religion leaves little reason to think that True Religion can get a stable foothold in human nature as Hume understands it hume's essay on two species of false religion Superstition and enthusiasm reinforces the suspicion worship administered by Priestly Elites tends toward Superstition in his use of the word and Superstition inhibits the progress of enlightened sentiments spontaneous worship tends toward enthusiasm which FS violence and faction Superstition is imposed from above whereas enthusiasm erupts From Below hume's admission that enthusiasm is friendly to Liberty by which he really meant license the freedom to do as you wish without being AB rued okay did not prevent him from classifying enthusiasm as a vice too much Liberty too much license undermines The Authority needed to maintain order and peace an acceptable religious establishment exerts Authority gently while leaving some room but not too much for Liberty old Bach's friends rejected this credential argument and mocked hume's refusal to avow atheism Hume viewed Parisian atheism with suspicion it was another species of enthusiasm a rationalist Ally of unmitigated Republican Liberty hume's genius can blind us to what was going on around him Thomas anert of the Edinburgh faculty has demonstrated that the Scottish Enlightenment was largely a religious Affair for Hutcheson Ferguson Reed batty James osw Oswald and William Robertson true religion is indeed a moral virtue of great importance to political life it has mundane as well as Supernatural ends it needs cultivation its interpretation has implications for ref form two concerns United the Scottish Enlightenment to the moderates of the 1750s and the heterodox Presbyterians who came before them the first concern was a down-to-earth interest in setting right the morally formative function of religion the second was a suspicion of speculation tendency to distract a thinker from the demands of living well these themes are developed beautifully and in on Earth's book on the Scottish Enlightenment batty is an interesting figure batty was a an important philosopher in the Scottish Enlightenment religiously disposed influenced by Thomas Reed also an important abolitionist Batty's abolitionist allies outside the academy shared these concerns that I just outlined historians have recently done much to highlight the role of religious voices in such movements in uh reform movements as well as in the enlightenment but it seems to me that the deeper significance of such scholarship has yet to be adequately stated let alone publicized or plumbed if the enlightenment era didn't achieve a great separation of religion from politics which is what's suggested by the close order historical will work on both the Enlightenment and reform movements in this period Then what account should we be giving well you'll be pleased to hear that I'm nearing my conclusion Lord gford chose his words carefully when he spoke of his overflowing enthusiasm for Emerson that word enthusiasm mattered the American visitors enthusiasm for liberty liberty in something more like makaveli's sense than Humes we'll talk about what that difference involves in later lectures but the American visitors enthusiasm for Liberty in a sense that would align Emerson with abolition of slavery right as a reform movement was proof that religious enthusiasm M can bear public fruit but Emerson also denied hume's claim that enthusiasm is inherently vicious what beneficial transformation has ever transpired in human history without enthusiasm Emerson asked and his answer not the emergence of Christianity not the Protestant Reformation and and not the abolition of slavery in the British Empire Lord gford agreed gford lecturers according to the B Quest are to discuss natural theology in the widest sense of that term that's the way the gford bequest puts it and to treat their subject as a strictly Natural Science do we know what he meant by that if his own public lectures are any indication he did not mean value free inquiry gford lecturers may be as the beest puts it of any denomination whatever or of no denomination at all but need to be reverent I have my doubts about some previous gford lectures on these point their task is to address such topics as the foundation of Ethics or morals without taking for granted as the bequest puts it faith in socalled miraculous Revelation Lord gord's admiration of what he called the anti-slavery feelings which are manifest throughout Emerson's writings comes across strongly in the 1872 lecture on Emerson and Glasgow after a long quotation from an ode that includes the line go put your Creed in your deed and the wish that the Atlantic will become quote a fairy of the free this is Emerson saying not the place where slav ships go all right Lord gford concludes the lecture by saying ladies and gentlemen I can read you nothing better than that one of the British abolitionists who pushed Emerson to join the movement and did so somewhat too publicly he thought was Harriet Martino when a threatening mob formed after Martino's anti-slavery speech in Boston in 1835 her Refuge was Emerson's farm and conquered her ethnography rhy Society in America includes chapters entitled religion science of religion and spirit of religion she looks forward to a Day quote when all shall have the comprehension of mind and range of knowledge which are requisite for investigating spiritual relations testing the interpretations which have been put upon them from age to age the time may possibly come when all may be able thus to be scientific in theology unquote she says quote the only test by which religion and Superstition can be ultimately tried is by their fruits ye shall know them unquote it would be Superstition to worship a God who tolerated slavery such a being would be an idol not the true God quote the office of theological science is to trace Corruptions of religion to their source and separate them from the pure Waters of Truth un quote the scientific test Martino proposes is essentially moral because as she puts it quote religion comes out of morals if religion Springs from morals the religion must be most faulty where the morals are so unquote I wonder whether Lord gford read those lines religion according to Martino in 1837 is a moral matter it is not going away it is most faulty where the morals are so to distinguish its corrupt from True its corrupt from its true forms we must assess its fruits she offered the following assessment of American Presbyterians quote some of the most noble of the abolitionists of the north are Presbyterians and from the lips and pens of Presbyterians in the South come some of the defenses of slavery which Evin the deepest deepest depravity of principle and feeling with a few exceptions the religion of the South strictly Accords with the morals of the South Christianity is severed there from its radical principles of justice and Liberty and it will have to be cast out as a rotten Branch four days before Emerson concluded his Edinburgh lectures in February 1848 revolution broke out in Paris when he left Edinburgh he visited Martino who was undergoing a crisis of Faith he was now a prominent abolitionist as she had hoped a decade earlier he was he was wondering what the current moment demanded of him after a brief stay in Amble side and a disappointing conversation with an aging poet named woodsworth Emerson headed off to Paris to witness the revolution firsthand thank you very much as you began to speak I began to ask myself why you were beginning with Cicero and senica rather than Plato Sophocles and Ides um but then it became obvious as you linked what you had said to a pus and um to melli had it ever struck you that you could have gone further back than Cicero to um early Roman private law to the law of the 12 tables which were formulated to broker the rights between the pans and the pans and that might have given you another non-religious point of entry so let's get the uh [Laughter] [Music] move from Republican Rome to its successor and that contrast between Republican thinking and monarchical thinking is going to be very important for what I'm doing in the later lectures so that's why I'm emphasizing it um the the the Notions of freedom and religion in Roman law are extremely important to the to the whole story though actually so the on the freedom side the the contrast between the status of a citizen and the status of a slave and then the cont the contrast between a free man and a slave this is an extremely important contrast for the later the the early modern and later modern writers and um this is going to play an important role this is why I'm emphasizing the um the transition from Republican Rome to the loss of the Republic I should I should just add that the that a reason that I'm not going back into the Greek sources is that I'm trying to take seriously the the semantics of the the the terminology itself yeah thank you very much for for your talk um and this is probably going to be quite an obvious question from the end of your talk which comes up if you're going to judge religion by its moral outcomes by its fruits does that mean then that morality precedes that religion and if so then where does that morality come from because it cannot be based on religion it has to come from somewhere else and I wonder uh what your take is on that right so um the the the first thing to emphasize is that within Thomas's framework religion is a moral virtue it's uh we we will see when we get to lecture three that it contrasts with his account of Faith as a theological virtue when we get to lecture three we're going to be looking at early modern controversies over the relation between religion as a moral virtue and Faith as a divinely given infused virtue and the real answer to your question will be developed in that lecture so the but it's it's it's important to keep in mind that for this long tradition religion is understood as a moral notion and and not to be conflated with the theological virtue of faith I won't say much about faith at all until lecture three because we're going to stay in the um in in the part of Thomas's schema that falls under the four cardinal moral virtues now religion is important as a moral virtue because the practices of religion help on this conception to shapee someone into a moral being It Is by engaging in repeated acts of worship and devotion that that the moral self is formed so that's partly why religion is given so much political emphasis uh because the this act of the this soulcraft as a um as something for which leaders are responsible um the the question is how can the sorts of people be created uh who will be responsible members of society now what kind of person that would be is looks like one thing if you're a Republican and like another thing if you're a monarchist and that's one of the contrasts that we'll be discussing in later lectures so does this help at all you see the uh it's somewhat anachronistic to use our Notions of religion and morality as separate spheres uh and project them back onto this earlier period part of what I'm doing in this lecture series is in effect an anti- anachronistic method of looking at the history seeing if we can get a different angle on the present by taking seriously how people from earlier centuries use the key terms and by shedding light on that allowing some aspects of very recent history to come to light in a way that um helps overcome the eclipse to which they've been subjected thank you very much well forgive me for asking this very simplistic question and uh but do you have a spectrum by which you would George uh Obama and Trump and do you have a spectrum that wish you would George Obama and Trump based on aquinus cardinal virtues if at all if at all uh religion is worship uh developing the moral virtues etc etc one you have Obama who went to church every Sunday you've got Trump who doesn't go to church at all you've got Trump who is supported by quote unquote the Evangelical movement uh so and um Obama been the first black president you also had uh your colleague uh Dr Corell West and T TR Smiley uh being Nemesis to Obama criticizing him for everything he did so in that light do you have a spectrum by which you can judge these two people in light of the cardinal virtue of uh aquinus well I um I think you will find as the lecture series unfolds that more and more implications most of them left at the level of implication and not drawn out explicitly will emerge for the present including Judgment of figures like these but let's on on the issue of religion um it's hard to know what to say about them what's much clearer is what would need to be said about their habits of rule in relation to the categories of tyranny and oppression now in this lecture I haven't even defined those categories yet but at the beginning of the next one the first section of that lecture will be a discussion of the Notions of tyranny and oppression and the importance of distinguishing them now to be very brief to give you uh a foretaste if tyranny is by definition for this Dominican tradition um rule that is for some motive or reason other than genuine concern for the Comm good typically avarus right well you can you can put Trump pretty far out on the spectrum of on on the Tyranny spectrum because of the all of these concerns about ignoring issues with respect to conflict of interest um having his own family members and his own businesses benefit from his rule not releasing the tax forms these are all um the sorts of issues that the tradition I'm explicating in the lecture series um theorize under the category of tyranny personal benefit rather than benefit to the common good or benefit to a faction or a family um so we have to think about that but notice Obama has just taken a a $400,000 fee from a wall from Wall Street in order to give a speech so the line I'm not going to put Obama um as far out on the Spectrum As Trump trump has been the most egregious violator of anti- tyranny concerns of any recent American president any pres American president I can think of but Obama is is still implicated in in my view in blurring the relevant lines between um uh concern demonstrably uh exemplifying concern for the common good and what what does that require requires making sacrifices with respect to your own private gain on matters relating to government it would have been a splendid thing had Obama said when he stepped down from the presidency that he would step down in the Way Washington did as a self-conscious imitation of Cincinnatus which is returning to private life in a way that cuts off the continued connection between private gain and governmental influence but the issue of Oppression ties into the notion of domination and domination is is a matter of being at the mercy of arbitrary power the Trump Administration is in various ways um putting itself forward quite overtly as um opposed to all checks on arbitrary power with the with the model of Hungary being the Hungary Poland turkey being the scariest precedence um hungary's case being especially Salient because of the wall and the and certain other features but systematically going after all of the Salient possible checks on executive power beginning with the Press but extending to judicial uh counterpower um so on and so forth well all of the the separations of powers in a republic are designed as blocks on domination blocks on um checks and balances to prevent uh citizens from being subjected being placed at the mercy of arbitrary power that's a different matter from tyranny though they often are linked because the motives of the Tyrant ruling for private gain give additional reasons to op press to reduce others to conditions of servitude where you have complete control over them when Plato theorizes this to go back to uh the Greeks um he develops a psychological profile of the Tyrant as one who um has a natural tendency toward domination because domination rep is is a matter of subjecting others to absolute control which Plato rightly in my view views as a form of self-deception on the on the tyrant's part but look Trump very bad on both of the Tyranny but now think about Obama on the issues relating to domination uh on on matters relating to us militar militarism and its domination of other countries uh Obama made slight window dressing adjustments but no serious attention to the basic issue and on matters relating to surveillance he basically left the keys to a domination surveillance machine sitting on the on the desk of the Oval Office for uh for for Trump for Trump to uh make use of but uh he was already making extensive use of it himself and he was relying on the Public's view of him as benevolent to draw attention away from the basic issue of domination which is a matter of power IM balance if you have a if you have a benevolent master you're still a slave hello you said you didn't want to go back to the Greeks because of the ethology but you use one term of Greek orig which in a way was very important in the second part of your lecture namely enthusiasm and how it changed drastically from hum to to Emerson and 19th century what I was wondering is to what extent was it really kind of hum's personal view or was it just a shift in the view of or in the term of ENT enthusiasm and the move from pejorative to positive meaning H that happened between 16 17 18th century and then the 19th and connected with that has got with it in being in in God so how so I mean when did this term become secularized because I presume in the beginning the people were still probably him was very aware of the fact that Theos is part of enthusiasm whereas I think people writing in CVS nowadays I'm very enthusiastic about this and this probably are not right well I I I don't know the whole history of that term there might be people in this audience who do um it was the it's it's the it's the language of religion itself that goes back into the Latin roots but part of what I want to bring out in um the entire lecture series is the thought that um how can I put this until relatively recently the most [Music] influential users of the discourse of religion and the contrasting terms were educated in the classics and that includes Greek and Latin and it's if we if we take this seriously um we will have an important set of Clues to seeing what the what the main ideas mean and that's that's partly because um for makavelli for Milton for Harrington for Hume for Hobs it's another matter but we'll I'll talk about him somewhat in lecture three um down through Emerson and Lincoln or someone like Edmund Burke these are people who expect their audiences Lincoln and Emerson it starts to get more ambiguous but they expect their audiences or at least a primary target aspect of Their audience to have been educated in the same way they have to recognize the deployment of certain sentences as common places as the way you make moves in the relevant arguments so that leaving one word out or adding a word to a recognizable sentence is um is uh the way you make your points and and it's because you know that your audience can recognize what you're doing and have also been trained in rhetoric so they will recognize the overall stylistic effect of what you're doing um once you get that in the picture the history starts to make much more sense um in hume's case I think a primary precursor for him is plutar on Superstition so that might help draw the you know connect the dots a little bit but I I I'd love to know more I think think we will need to draw the evening to a close um we've had an excellent first gford lecture which is defined the problem to be explored the parameters uh the terms that he'll be using it's he opened with a a a very important reminder about how religion can Inspire can motivate selfless actions for social good Style is both the art of the inclusion and the exclusion and I think this was a brilliantly structured lecture um he spoke it clearly succinctly but um included what was needed excluded what was needed to take us through 2,000 years of a narrative of of religious discourse in the public sphere Livy aquinus makavelli bringing us to Hume um important ideas social justice Liberty under law I was very pleased that he concluded with uh by citing my friend Thomas anor's recent book on the moral culture of the Scottish Enlightenment which he commended to all of us and rightfully so Lord gford would have been very pleased I was particularly uh uh I was struck by Lord gord's abolitionist commitments it's something I wasn't aware of I was very pleased that was that was drawn forward because I think one of the themes of the of of this lectures will will not only be freedom but also the continuing struggle Against Racism which remains very real to us we've had a superb first lecture could you join me please in thanking our speaker once again [Applause]

Channel: The University of Edinburgh

Views: 4,955

Keywords: Jeffrey Stout, Gifford Lecture, religion, politics, Cicero, divine, worship, Ancient Rome

Id: 6bImzSAdwRY

Length: 96min 9sec (5769 seconds)

Published: Tue May 02 2017