Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE

The Exoteric-Esoteric Distinction in Theology and the Changing Interests of the State: Handling 'Diversity' in the Teaching of Theology and Ethics

Author: Carys Moseley

Journal Title: Discourse

ISSN: 2040-3674

ISSN-L: 1741-4164

Volume: 10

Number: 1

Start page: 73

End page: 100

Return to vol. 10 no. 1 index page

If we are to handle diversity in the teaching of Christian theology and ethics in British state-funded universities (and indeed elsewhere), it would be good to take into account the historic interplay and clashes between exoteric and esoteric modes of theological discourse and Biblical exegesis. In the medieval era both modes were woven together in such a way that theology was 'the queen of sciences'. Priests trained in theology and the branches of knowledge were trained in esoteric discourses which contributed to cryptography, which enabled the defence of church and state from armed enemies without and within. It was first in Italy and then in Puritan Britain that cryptography was demythologised, as part of a revolution in theology and the sciences. The neglect of this reality has led to a state of affairs where much modern theology has become quasi-esoteric, far removed from ongoing political and scientific debates rooted in Biblical exegesis. This has gradually led to a vacuum concerning the depth of the relationship between theological disciplines and the interests of the state. 'Modernity criticism' has filled this vacuum in the 20th century, having a major impact on the teaching of Theology and Christian Ethics in the English-speaking world. This paper criticises the case of Alasdair MacIntyre in the light of the relationship between theological disciplines and cryptography. Benedict XVI parallels MacIntyre in diagnosing the problem of 'diversity' in theological and religious knowledge as being rooted in a 'fall from grace' since the high middle ages, when the Papacy and the Latin Church governed western Europe. The story is told in an idealised manner that focuses narrowly on the internal coherence of ethics and metaphysics, ignoring Biblical exegesis and theology as the roots of both. The result is that students are in danger of being fed a misleading understanding of the historic types of Christian thought and dissent that developed in Britain and migrated to other parts of the world. This makes it more difficult to handle the reality of historic and present diversity within Christian theology in teaching.

Why diversity in Theology and Ethics matters to the state

The mission, strategic aims and values of the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies (Subject Centre for PRS), which includes support for learning and teaching in Christian theology and ethics in its remit, endorse diversity. 1 The statement of values of the Subject Centre for PRS includes 'working for the public good', and highlights several concepts including 'accountability' and 'diversity'. Other values include 'collegiality', listing autonomy, trust, responsibility, openness and honesty; and innovation, specifying that 'evidence must inform all our work'. All of these values may be deemed exoteric, not esoteric. Management and valuing of diversity, of beliefs and values, is central to the ideology and practice of surveillance of the contemporary state. Diversity also of course denotes diversity of ethnic and religious backgrounds. In recent years the public concern about immigration has focused mostly on Muslims, and fears that some of them might want to attack the state and civil society. This is notwithstanding the fact that many immigrants to the UK are of Christian background and therefore enhancing the diversity within Christianity in the UK. Since 9/11 this concern about Muslims has frankly given the state a grand excuse for an ideology of surveillance of the population and of 'religion' in general.2 University teachers of Islamic Studies were very concerned that the government wanted to control what and how they taught the subject. From the standpoint of Christian theology and ethics, we should also be concerned in case any government would want to exert as much control as it clearly wanted with Islam. Is theology in a good place to critically engage with such surveillance, in order to handle issues of diversity? This paper takes some steps to address this problem. In order to do so, I shall argue that surveillance as we now know it developed partly from the secularisation of cryptography in Italy and then Britain in the early modern period.

Cryptography was originally expressed in the mode of esoteric modes of theology and scriptural exegesis. Before going on to recount the secularisation of cryptography, it is worth setting out a definition of what is 'esoteric' discourse, following Antoine Faivre.3 Esoteric doctrines are kept secret, for initiates only. Thus their intrinsic hiddenness is further socially and politically concealed. There is an assumption of the esoteric meaning of the apparent reality of texts, history and nature (a theological gnosis). There may be a belief in the transcendental unity or primordial unity of religions that was lost but needs to be rediscovered by esoteric hermeneutics and practices. This belief may not be a wholesale belief, however, but may only apply to an underlying natural philosophy rather than to beliefs about divine law and redemption. Faivre lists four 'intrinsic characteristics' of esotericism in religion: microcosm-macrocosm correspondences in the cosmos, the belief that nature is alive and permeated by a hidden fire, imagination and meditation as central faculties of knowing, and the experience of alchemical transmutation, either personal or of nature. Faivre also provides two lesser characteristics: concordance between several or all spiritual traditions, leading to comparative study of them in the hope of bringing out what is common but hidden; and transmission: from master to disciple; initiatory societies, sometimes 'secret'. The assumption of a concordance between different religious traditions and theologies enabled possessors of various kinds of knowledge to work together in situations of diversity (e.g. Christians living under Islamic rule in the Middle East), or also to pass on sensitive secrets to enemy powers. Many of Faivre's criteria for esotericism fit with medieval western and eastern theologies. Indeed we can begin to see that esotericism remained at the core of theology as long as the body politic was conceived in an organic and hierarchical fashion in Christendom. Furthermore, esotericism is first discussed in theology right at the birth of the discipline in Alexandria, at the time when it is reflected upon in Biblical exegesis and hermeneutics.4 Because esoteric modes of theology and exegesis typically claim that they are rendering visible truths that have been hidden for a long time, the question of whether Clement of Alexandria and Origen invented or discovered esoteric Biblical exegesis continues to be a very difficult one to answer. It is complicated by the question of the extent to which they could have been using Jewish esotericism, and whether this came mainly from Hellenistic Diaspora Judaism or from the Essene community. If the latter is the case, the question of the possibility of esoteric exegesis touches on debates about theological truth-norms, as the Essene or Enochian movement, far from being confined to Qumran, produced writings that were influential on the New Testament.5 This turn to Jewish esotericism is significant because it has occurred in both Biblical Studies and Patristics. In the early modern period, one motive for historical-critical study of the Bible was provided by Egyptophile exegesis of the Old Testament, a trend deriving from Hellenistic Judaism. This provided Renaissance-influenced Neoplatonists with the tools for reading behind the text against the Puritan preference for plain reading.6 This strand has repeatedly surfaced in 'high church' traditions, especially in the established churches wherein esoteric movements such as Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry have thrived.

Making esoteric assumptions about some aspects of reality would always be controversial. An esoteric approach to the doctrine of God always risked undermining a normative Christian or Islamic political order, whereas an esoteric approach to nature did not necessarily carry this danger. It could positively feed the development of the natural sciences. On the other hand, the esoteric idea that nature is alive could conceivably block the development of natural sciences by permitting the view that experimentation is an injury to nature. Esotericism could theoretically be a friend of diversity concerning religion and redemption whilst being an enemy of scientific progress. Thus more attention needs to be paid to the history of the interrelationship between exoteric and esoteric modes of theology and other disciplines if we are to gain a deeper understanding of the relation between theology and the arts and sciences, including those involved in statecraft.

Theology, cryptography and the state

A degree of secrecy is essential to any social group, including a religious group, and also to the workings of the state.7 Religions have typically kept knowledge of various kinds secret by shrouding them in esoteric forms of theology and scriptural exegesis. It is highly significant that we almost never teach this truth when we teach theology in universities. Yet to neglect this is to neglect the historic reality. Many different branches of knowledge were contained by esotericism, and these included the kinds of knowledge affording the most social and political power. Cryptography and cryptology, the encoding of messages and the science of their decoding in the service of combat, originated in esoteric theology. To be precise, it was found in all ancient civilizations and religions. In Judaism and Islam, it was developed from close reading of the sacred texts; Kabbalistic reading of the Torah, and gematriacal reading of the Qur'an. As the Kabbalistic tradition only kicked off after the Jews lost their state in AD 70, it did not contribute directly to a distinctly Jewish school of cryptography, but would later be a covert influence in western cryptography. The story of Islamic cryptography was different, as the Qur'an was the holy book of a religion that very early on became the ideology of Arab imperialists, and thus close reading of it, including esoteric reading, could feed the development of cryptography for the purpose of hiding military communications. 8 Cryptography underwent numerous transformations in the modern era. The first was by the use of numbers, specifically Arabic numerals. Before then, ciphers were only alphabetic (and only numeric insofar as letters were also used for numerals in many scripts). All of this changed in the Vatican in the 15th century, when Leon Battista Alberti claimed to have invented the polyalphabetic cipher, which also included Arabic numerals.9 David Kahn now suggests Alberti got the idea from Raymond Lull's quasi-kabbalistic machine, though I would suggest he got it from an Arabic source, as the Islamic 9th century cryptographer al-Kindi knew of polyalphabetic ciphers.10 This happened as the Papal states were pioneering the rise of the princely Renaissance state.11 Indeed Alberti's alleged invention was part of the Papacy's contest with the Republic of Venice for political supremacy in Italy.

Prior to these developments, the Dominican Order of Preachers produced the medieval church's most brilliant theologians, including Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, both of whom wrote about esoteric disciplines such as alchemy and astrology, viewing them as integrated within exoteric theology.12 Members of the Order continued their inquiries in this respect. The cryptographer Johannes Trithemius was a Dominican Abbot, and it has been argued, surely correctly, that had he lived further than 1516, he would have taken the side of his later Jesuit supporters.13 His most famous work was the Steganographia, written in 1499 and published posthumously in 1606. It was put on the Catholic Church's Index of Prohibited Books in 1609 as it appeared to be a book of magic teaching the use of spirits to communicate longdistance. It was removed from the Index in 1900. The decryption key was published in 1606, and since then many scholars have come to realise that the magical work functioned as a ciphertext for a treatise on cryptography and steganography.14 The controversies over Trithemius need to be understood in the light of ambiguities in Thomas Aquinas' hermeneutic of miracles and marvels, his writing on astrology, and his writing on alchemy.15 They also need to be understood in the light of the split mentality of the western church since Constantine, divided between Augustine's ambivalent attitude towards esotericism in general and Hermeticism in particular, and Lactantius' commendation of the latter as a praeparatio evangelii in the service of Constantine's Christianisation of the Roman Empire.16 Trithemius foolishly developed his cryptography via a cover text that was about magic (supposedly angelic magic), developing a practice expressly condemned by Augustine before his discussion of Hermeticism. The problem was that Trithemius had made some important advances in cryptography. Thus succeeding generations of savants tripped over themselves to defend him and absolve him of the charge of magic. They had to absolve themselves of the charge of defending magic and sorcery in the defence of Christian states. Blaise de Vigenère was both a cryptographer and an alchemist who had received a Kabbalistic vision, and he sought to reintegrate a demythologised version of Trithemian cryptography into a theological hierarchy of truths via alchemy.17 He argued that there were two kinds of writing—ordinary exoteric writing and secret enciphered script. The latter was of elevated origin, and was used by the Hebrews, Chaldeans, Egyptians, Ethiopians and Indians, among many other ancient civilizations, 'for the purpose of veiling their sacred secrets of theology and philosophy.'18 The Dutch Calvinist theologian Gerhard Voss (1577-1649) also argued that Trithemius' cryptography was merely a method of linguistic encipherment, in his De Arte Grammatica (1635).19

Trithemius' defenders in Britain were the Rosicrucian enthusiasts on the royalist side of the English Civil War. The Welsh Anglican priest and alchemist Thomas Vaughan (1622-1666), known as Eugenius Philalethes, and John Webster (1610-1662), both wanted to reform English education along Trithemian magical lines. Webster set this out in the 1653 book Academiarum Examen. Webster opposed both Henry More and Meric Casaubon, son of Isaac Casaubon who had conducted a historical-critical debunking of the Hermetica. More in return attacked Vaughn, whereas Casaubon attacked De Vigenère and John Dee, the magus of the Elizabethan court. The protestant polymath John Wilkins wrote a rejoinder in 1654 entitled Vindiciae Academiarum, directed at Webster. In it he differentiated between concealment and grammar, and between cryptography as magic and cryptography as grammar. As his biographer Noel L. Braun explains:

Wilkins' interest in Trithemian cryptography was prompted by his search for a universal language accessible, not just to a privileged few, but to all who were knowledgeable in the required experimental methods for ferreting out the truth of things.20

The distinction arose between the exotericism of the nascent Royal Society and the esoteric standards of Trithemius, continued by the Rosicrucians and the western esoteric tradition. Cryptography was to be based on the idea of a universal grammar or language. This kind of thinking had probably long been in the making since Arabic numerals had come to be used in cryptography. It was to be conceived of in exoteric terms that anybody could understand, not in magical terms that gave the impression that one had to be versed in the magical arts to be able to succeed, nor in hierocratic terms that dictated that one had to be a priest to learn this knowledge.21 By virtue of its being exoteric it became meritocratic rather than being the preserve of a clergy or priesthood trained in the occult disciplines. This shift was able to happen also because of the shift in trust in British society. Kings and priests were not necessarily fit to govern, as the Puritans had gained massive support over England and Wales (as had the Covenanters in Scotland) for their ideas. The methodological shift was paradoxical given the hidden nature of cryptographic communication, but it laid the groundwork for advancements in the field based on knowledge rather than fantasy. Thus the theoretical basis changed, from preoccupation with nature (or the Bible) as hiding secrets which required reading them as if they were ciphers, to preoccupation with inventing a universal language for secret communication. Out of this would come the idea of modern computing. If cryptography became exoteric and gradually more 'scientific', much Christian theology moved in the opposite direction. With the German mystic Jakob Boehme (1575-1624), magic became linked to 'unquantifiable religion', which meant he had an indirect connection back to Trithemius via the disciples of Paracelsus. He wrote that 'Magic is the best theology, for in it true faith is both grounded and discovered.'22

From then on, Britain would be the world leader in cryptography. 23 Black Chambers became common in the 17th century in Europe. They were organisations where teams of cryptographers worked on a daily basis on mail that had been intercepted by the state. The most reputed Black Chamber was in Vienna, the capital of the Roman Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire. England opened its Black Chamber in 1716, and it was run by the Anglican Wallis family, descended from John Wallis, the greatest English mathematician before Isaac Newton. By 1848, Britain, France and Austria had shut their Black Chambers. No sooner had they done this than they took up the telegraph, newly invented by Samuel Morse, as a better medium of cryptography. Morse used electromagnetism.24 In the 20th century Britain, alongside the United States, continued to be a world leader in cryptography and its offspring computing. This development would contribute to online encryption enabling citizens to protect their own privacy against state surveillance. This has been a key factor in the recent debate over civil liberties in Britain and elsewhere.25 The mathematical transformation of cryptography signalled a step towards its secularisation, because the ever-increasing complexity of mathematics turned the discipline away from correspondence to a language-oriented and language-derived account of reality. When we look at the time when this happened, we see that the mathematization of cryptography occurred just before the challenge to the power of the Papacy by the Reformation. Theological and religious thought was gradually dethroned from its hegemony over a hierarchy of truth and knowledge by the mathematization of natural philosophy and the transformation of mathematics into being a language in its own right.26

Alasdair MacIntyre's narrative of the decline of western ethics in the light of the rise of modern cryptography

The story of the decline of western ethics produced by Alasdair MacIntyre has influenced the scholarship and teaching of Christian theology and ethics over the past few decades.27 It is striking that it coincides with the story of the rise of cryptography. It is therefore possible to mount a critique of his narrative via attention to the account of cryptography's relation to theology. MacIntyre has always adhered to a story of the decline of ethics, both when he was a protestant and a Marxist and since he became Catholic. Pedagogically MacIntyre has been very influential in English-speaking theology and ethics since the 1980s. Arguing for the foundation of a Christian university in Britain, Gavin D'Costa sketches a Catholic narrative of how theology lost its position as the queen of sciences.28 Like most scholars advancing this narrative, D'Costa draws heavily on MacIntyre and completely ignores the esoteric dimension of theology. Factoring in this dimension, and asking about the extent to which at various times it was congruent with or radically departed in spirit and substance from the exoteric traditions, would likely complicate such stories of decline and the tendency to use them to propose reconstructions of a 'Catholic' unity of knowledge analogous to the unity of ethics.

Four aspects of MacIntyre's narrative require attention in relation to the link between theology and cryptography. First, he has always held that atheism is the end product of changes in doctrine which were preceded by institutional changes regarding authority.29 This is simply a disguised way of saying that because Papal authority was undermined at the Reformation by rising nation-states, pre-eminently the United Kingdom, the logical consequence of the doctrinal reforms proposed and effected by protestant clergy was mass atheism several centuries later. At the level of belief, the sociological surveys for Britain since the 1960s do not simply register a rise in atheism, but a decline in belief in a transcendent personal God, and a continuance of belief in 'the god within', along with a rise in pagan esotericist and paranormal beliefs.30 MacIntyre's theory deliberately ignores protestant theology both in its critical aspect towards the Papacy and in its positive aspects.31 It is not atheism that has been the result of the Reformation in Britain, but religious plurality in the form of established Anglicanism and Presbyterianism, protestant free churches, and forms of Deism. Esotericism as a mode of thinking broke free from ecclesiastical control after the Reformation. Socially, it is a diffuse and fragmented paganism, rather than atheism, that has been the major religious consequence in modernity. Yet because it has often been expressed in esoteric terms this has not been visible to exoteric modes of theology and sociology of religion.

Second, MacIntyre always portrayed Marxism as a sort of Christian heresy due to its being an inversion of Hegel's secularised Christianity.32 This thesis is misleading when inserted as part of his narrative of the decline of ethics, because Marx was in fact using the inversion of Hegel to attack Judaism, from which his own father had tried to escape.33 There is no Christology or ecclesiology in MacIntyre's description of Christianity. He could just as well have been talking about Arianism or Deism, both of which appealed to an understanding of ancient Judaism as the original natural and rational religion, thus the basis of 'true Christianity' and right secular order in the early modern period. As Marx was Jewish, and consciously repudiated and ridiculed religious Jews and Judaism, this omission is a problem for his theory. Marx was partly using his materialist inversion of Hegel to attack religious Jews whom he considered 'bourgeois' for wanting to assimilate into German 'Christian' society, or sectarian and reactionary for wanting to remain Orthodox. To further complicate things, it is now well established that Hegel's philosophy had deep roots in his interests in Hermeticism, alchemy and Kabbalah, none of which require a Trinitarian theology, and all of which can happily exist within the framework of a Deist or Arian or other kind of strictly monotheistic theology, e.g. Islamic theology.34 The difference here is that without a high Christology one cannot have a proper ecclesiology, and thus apocalyptic has to become wedded to the millenarian earthly society as it was in Marxism. Thus Marxism may be understood as an attack not only on Hegel, but on the 'secular' heresies that preceded his, early modern 'Hebraic' notions of polity that spanned protestant and heterodox thinking. Towards the end of his life, Marx reneged a little and encouraged his daughter Eleanor to learn the principles of socialism from the Biblical Jewish prophets.35 The test of my theory here is the fact that had Marx been reneging upon a Christian heresy, he would have told her to read the New Testament. It is hard to derive an ethic for the 'earthly city' and international socialism straightforwardly from the New Testament as it is so focused on the church vis-à-vis the state. Thus it could be argued that Marx was attempting a radical critique of the early modern respublica hebraica. Marx's materialising of Hegel led to jettisoning the esoteric disciplines that underlay the latter's theology, including the Jewish Kabbalah, and that of other mainline protestants influenced by Freemasonry. Marxism can thus be said to be thoroughgoing in its anti-esotericism. Third, MacIntyre's early work is more important for understanding his later work than some admirers will admit, for it reveals that he was never willing to respect critics and opponents of Marxism and Communism because they didn't seem to have an overarching metanarrative or metaphysic to back up their objections.36 It is very dangerous in a liberal democracy to think like this. As the Hungarian dissident philosopher of science and critic of Communism Michael Polanyi argued, having settled in Britain, that philosophy and other branches of knowledge are in danger of forgetting is the role of tacit reasoning and communities of inquiry which have wonder as their goal.37 Religiously, Polanyi was an agnostic. The kind of doctrinaire attitude pushed by MacIntyre, and easily propounded by Christian thinkers, excludes Polanyi's wisdom from education and marginalises agnosticism as somehow ignoble. MacIntyre is extreme in his exotericism, if unconscious of it. He strongly insists on Aquinas' prohibition on lying, even though Augustine would have been a better candidate for defending his stance. Fourth and last, MacIntyre has been said to espouse a 'patriotism' that is towards a way of life that celebrates practical wisdom and not toward any nation-state.38 The slide from Marxism to Thomism looks as if it was a little too easy, based on an internationalism that is rooted in institutions that themselves command a kind of patriotism. The long and short of this is that not only MacIntyre has not been sufficiently attentive to the role of theological disputes in forming modernity (a criticism made by earlier critics), but specifically that he has sidestepped theological doctrines about church and state that have shaped modernity in Britain and elsewhere. As Britain is the home of the toleration of religious diversity, this omission is a rather serious one. Religious toleration can never occur in a vacuum; it is the product of historical conflicts over doctrine. Continued interaction with those traditions which actually supported toleration and diversity is what is needed to maintain those values.

It is important to recall that Alasdair MacIntyre was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain until 1956, when he and many of its intellectuals left because they disagreed with the Party's stance over the Hungarian uprising.39 MI5 had in fact infiltrated the CPGB back in the 1930s, thanks to the advanced skills of Britain's cryptographers.40 The CPGB and the Fascist Blackshirts were under surveillance from the Security Services. Before the deciphering of the evidence about CPGB, MI5's knowledge of CPGB came from several sources: Special Branch reports of political meetings, surveillance by means of a microphone hidden in CPGB's headquarters at 16 King Street, Covent Garden, surveillance via intercept warrants on the telephones of selected members, and informants and directed agents. CPGB was under the control of the Third Communist International (Comintern), formed in March 1919 to promote the Bolshevik objective of a worldwide revolution. It was set up to support, co-ordinate and direct individual national Communist movements. It was involved in espionage, and its International Directorate communicated in codes to members of the organisation around the world. Agents had often spend up to two years at the Lenin School in Moscow, taking classes in political ideology, tradecraft and clandestine communications. The Soviet intelligence organisation involved in all of this was the OMS, the Comintern's Foreign Liaison Department. OMS had full confidence in its cipher system, and as such its messages were often informal and rather indiscreet, revealing the real names of the communicants. British cryptographers managed to crack the cipher system in an operation condenamed MASK, and this material became very useful for MI5 and the then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. MASK traffic was very important for two main reasons.

First, it proved that the Soviet government's pretence that the Comintern was an independent organisation outside of its control was nothing more than an artificial sham, and that it was really a covert instrument of the country's undeclared foreign policy...Second, it showed that the Comintern concealed the existence of a clandestine network that extended its activities beyond semi-legitimate political agitation and the dissemination of propaganda, into the field of espionage and the collection of military and political information that would be of use to an enemy.41

The CPGB was most popular during the Second World War.42 At first it opposed the war, but when Stalin joined the War it supported it as anti-fascist. Membership rose to its all-time high in 1942 at 56,000. The postwar leaders were the same as the prewar ones, but they no longer wanted violent overthrow of the state, rather 'a fundamental change in the way society was run'. In the 1945 elections, they had two MPs, lots of local councillors and trade union leaders. When they lost those in the 1950 general election, the general secretary Harry Pollitt travelled to Moscow to get advice from Stalin. He brought back a document that formed the basis for the Party's new manifesto, 'The British Road to Socialism', officially adopted at the 22nd Congress in April 1952. It advocated a peaceful reformist transition to socialism, but only after official personal approval by Josef Stalin!43 This irony, given that Stalin was no advocate of peaceful socialism in his own country, is a clue to the fact that CPGB had not in the 1950s severed its ties with Moscow, and thus not ceased to be an arm of Soviet foreign policy, designed to bring down the British state.44 By this time MI5 had the names of roughly 90% of the Party's membership list, and was aware that it was secretly funded from Moscow.45 It was only in 1957, after leaving the CPGB, that MacIntyre first published his comparative study of Marxism and Christianity discussed above. He moved on to the Socialist Labour League led by Gerry Healy, a Trotskyist outfit founded in 1959. He left in 1960 and moved on to Tony Cliff's Socialist Review/International Socialists, and was on the editorial board of its new journal International Socialism. He resigned abruptly in the summer of 1968. MacIntyre's view by this time was that the proletariat was irretrievably fragmented, such that revolutionary organisations would inevitably become mirrors of managerialism and capitalist bureaucracy. One recent Communist critic has argued as follows about his subsequent Catholic conversion:

At the end of the day MacIntyre falsified all of his own line of argument on this front by adhering to the Catholic church. The reason is that the Catholic church is a beautiful demonstration of the fact that bureaucratic hierarchy and the authority of 'experts' is not the product of the attempt to do predictive social science.46

Yet the Catholic Church sees itself as the fulfilment of Old Testament predictive prophecy, in being the body of the Messiah. Its authoritative hierarchy and bureaucracy is comprised of priests who inherit the role of the Levitical priesthood, who were also experts in various sciences such as medicine, later incorporated into the esoteric disciplines. Roman Catholicism has historically preceded Communism in its internationalism and attempts at affecting the policies of nation-states. The difference is that for centuries it aspired to rule over Europe as a sovereign state and had its own territories, army and cryptographers. This only ceased when its army was defeated by the Italian nationalist army in 1870.47 The papal army of the Zouaves is commemorated annually in a Mass in Rome. This celebration declined after Vatican II but became popular again under John Paul II. Therefore, to reject patriotism as a vice, as MacIntyre advocates, is not in fact to embrace a virtue, but to embrace the loyalty to a foreign power that typically wishes to influence or subvert sovereign states. Without the break from Trithemius and therefore from Thomism, cryptography would never have developed and thus someone else, an invading power, would have developed it instead of Britain. Without the cryptographic work of MI5, British Communism may have continued to have more credibility and many would have continued to deny that it was a serious problem for the state. Without this basic technique for defending the state, our university culture especially in the humanities would not be what it is in terms of diversity, and certainly Christian theology and ethics would not be taught therein. Theology and Religion would only be taught at the sociological level.

It is highly relevant that Pope Benedict XVI has embraced MacIntyre's theory, and that he has been behind the reassertion of the Papal opinion that protestants and other Christians only belong to 'communities' not churches, as they apparently do not have 'the valid episcopate' or the correct sacramental theology.48 Although commentators have tried to soften the blow by arguing that Orthodox churches are considered valid, the real subtext is obvious—the repudiation of Papal authority as theologically valid. Considered in a historical light, his attitude towards church-state relations is ironic. In 2006 he wrote the following:

The Church may not exalt itself to become a state, nor may it seek to work as an organ of power in the state or beyond the state boundaries…'The Church remains outside the state… [but] must exert herself with all her vigour so that in it there may shine forth the moral truth that it offers to the state and that ought to become evident to the citizens of the state.49

If MacIntyre's story of the decline of western ethics is to be taught to students, we should also teach them clearly that that story parallels very close the story of the decline of Papal power and the rise of modern cryptography. It won't do to stay at the safe level of changes in metaphysics. The Papacy has for most of its history had a state of its own. Its land was donated to it in the first millennium. From about the 8th century—the time of the forgery of the Donation of Constantine to invent the granting of lands to the Papacy by Constantine in the 4th century—to the modern period, the Papacy had an army and behaved just like a monarchical and later princely state, i.e. a secular institution wielding temporal power.50 Rome was occupied by Italian nationalist soldiers in 1870, weakly resisted by papal soldiers. The papal state was annexed by the new kingdom of Italy, and Rome became its capital in 1871.51 The question of Rome was a problem for the Papacy until 1929, when the Lateran Treaties founded the state of Vatican City to guarantee papal independence for the Pope's pastoral ministry.52 (The Papacy probably had an eye for the difficulty Orthodox patriarchs had vis-à-vis the Byzantine emperors. Nearly a third (36 out of 122) of Orthodox patriarchs had been deposed by Byzantine emperors between 379 and 1451. They had no state of their own.) The Lateran Treaty of 1929 guaranteed the Holy See's sovereignty in the international sphere, confirmed Catholicism to be the official religion of the Italian state, and made Rome the capital of Italy. The treaty also allowed the Church free exercise of spiritual authority, state protection of Christian marriage and religious communities, and the position and payment of clergy. The Holy See was financially compensated for the loss of the Papal states. The Lateran Treaties were revised in 1984, such that religious pluralism was established as legitimate, and renewed the 1929 stipulation for the Italian state to contribute financially towards the payment of priests and to the maintenance of ecclesiastical institutions. This means that the Roman Catholic Church seems to be the 'established' church of modern Italy. So does the Roman Catholic Church fulfil Benedict XVI's criteria for church-state relations? The Papacy which heads the church has a special state of its own to protect it that is not the Italian state—an extra concession compared to, say, the Church of England or the Church of Scotland. It is literally an organ of power within Vatican City State, and was certainly so in the Papal States. It works as an organ of power beyond state boundaries in subtle ways, by having observer status at the United Nations, and through its many societies. It has a Diplomatic Corps, founded in the 15th century when it was at the vanguard of the development of the modern princely state.

This then is the institutional ecclesiological backdrop to MacIntyre's story about the decline of ethics. It is also the backdrop to Benedict XVI's story about the decline and fragmenting of knowledge. As this is relevant to the short history of cryptography outlined above, it is worth summarising briefly. Tracy Rowland argues that Benedict sees Catholic theology as a 'double helix' of Christian and Hellenistic components.53 (It's significant that she doesn't speak in terms of Jewish and Hellenistic components, which would be the correct way to see things.) Benedict claims there are three moments of severance from this 'double helix': Giordano Bruno's reversal to a divine cosmos, Galileo's supposed equation of knowledge of geometry with knowledge of God, and Martin Luther's alleged wish to purge Christian thought of its Greek inheritance. It is significant that Bruno is at the top of this list, as he was chronologically not the earliest of these figures. He was burnt at the stake by the Church in 1600 for practicing black magic and advocating a return to ancient Egyptian sun-worship.54 Most people would consider it bizarre, not to say deliberately insulting, to put Galileo and Luther alongside him. It looks suspiciously like a way of demonising Protestantism. A further problem is that Galileo cannot be characterised the way Benedict characterises him, for the dispute concerning his work was rooted in Biblical interpretation.55 As for Luther, he expressed a fondness for alchemy as a model of Christian doctrine, in particular the general resurrection.56 This is a far cry from repudiating the Hellenistic heritage, for alchemy is Hellenistic in origin. Anybody who accepts it is implicitly accepting an awful lot of Hellenistic metaphysics as at least worthy of serious attention. So did Benedict put Bruno the magician, Galileo the natural scientist, and Luther the protestant reformer in the same boat? The latter two belong together as drawing on the Augustinian tradition in reading the Bible. The former does not belong with them, being a pagan. All three challenged the authority of the Papacy regarding the production and dissemination of exoteric and esoteric knowledge. Institutionally, currents of thinking derived from these three thinkers understood as types, among others, fed into early Freemasonry. There is a long history of Catholic suspicion of it as heretical and even a counterfeit religion.57

Freemasonry originated in Scotland as a Trinitarian and esotericist response to elements of the Calvinist Reformation.58 It soon absorbed elements of Rosicrucianism, which came from Germany, and which falsely claimed descent from Luther's theology on the basis that the rose and the cross were his emblems. Historians and controversialists of Freemasonry have long debated whether the Constitutions of English Freemasonry, written by the Scottish Presbyterian Rev. James Anderson, were inclined towards Deism, and therefore whether this is the basis on which the Catholic Church was opposed to it. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that this is wrongheaded.59 British Freemasonry always sought to link itself to the political and ecclesiastical establishments, to defend religious toleration and scientific freedom, and oppose sedition. Anderson's Constitutions of 1723 welcomed Protestant Nonconformists but not Unitarians or Catholics or atheists, in the light of Jacobite campaigning against the Act of Settlement of 1701. His revised Constitutions of 1738, approved by the Grand Lodge of England on 25 January 1738, introduced the Noachide Laws and appeared more latitudinarian. Pope Clement XII issued a papal bull condemning and excommunicating Freemasons and all who supported them on 28th April 1738. He did not distinguish between British and continental Freemasonry, thus revealing that it was the scope of ecclesial authority that was at the heart of the condemnation. As the 18th century progressed, British Freemasons would return to the 1723 Constitutions and draw closer to the Church of England, as well as condemning Deism in 1756 in order to reassure Catholic sympathisers. This trend was supported by Edmund Burke, champion of Catholic emancipation turned hostile to Unitarians. It was in the wake of the French Revolution that British Freemasons would strengthen their loyalty to the monarchy and the British constitution. Revanger points out that the existence of 39 General Regulations in the Constitutions of the United Grand Lodge of England (1813) curiously mirrors the 39 Articles of the Church of England. All of this suggests that Catholic anti-Freemasonry and Catholic anti-protestantism are two sides of the same coin, of opposition to the Reformation as it was played out in the English-speaking world. The opposition to Italian and French Freemasonry, openly Deist and later atheist and revolutionary, was always genuine but also an excuse for this. MacIntyre's exoteric Marxism-turned-Thomism is in sharp contrast to the Freemasonic esotericism that has long lurked within the mainline protestant churches and modern western states. In British politics this conflict can be perceived between the Labour and Conservative parties going right back to the founding of MI5 and the advent of universal suffrage. Labour always suspected MI5 of spying on its members, and always suspected that Freemasonry was rife among the socially conservative. Indeed, along with Anglicanism, it had spread throughout the British Empire. The Conservatives by contrast were not averse to accusing Labour of harbouring secret Communists bent on doing Moscow's foreign policy within the United Kingdom. In other countries, Freemasonry has been patriotic but revolutionary and anti-Catholic, so it has gravitated more towards liberal than conservative politics. Pope Benedict XVI appears to be continuing in the long Catholic tradition of repudiating Protestantism via attacking esotericism. For this argument to work, Martin Luther has to be grouped alongside Giordano Bruno and then written off as anti-metaphysical, and the differences between Martin Luther and John Calvin just have to be ignored. MacIntyre plays a similar game when he assimilates Luther to Macchiavelli regarding the secular autonomy of the state.60 There is a slippery slope argument at work, as well as a taint-by-association argument.

The Roman Catholic Church gradually lost control over the esoteric disciplines that were closely related to theology, science and statecraft. The story of the 'decline' of western ethics (and with it of western metaphysics and theology, which runs parallel) is bound up with this at the intellectual, not only the contingent institutional level. It is also the story of the rise of religious toleration and the recognition of diversity. In the medieval era, the Church was the transnational polity that interfered in the workings of states and whose reigning discourse governed cryptography and the arts of war, claiming right to universal assent and obedience. In the 20th century it was Soviet Communism that attempted to fulfil this function. Neither body was tolerant either in theory or in practice of religious or intellectual diversity. The fact that both supported state universities should not blind us to this fact. In theological terms, MacIntyre's turn to Thomas Aquinas in ethics, including on the morality of truthtelling and lying, sits somewhat uneasily with Benedict's general preference for Augustine. MacIntyre defends Aquinas by making the following claim:

Twentieth-century political society, unlike its thirteenth-century counterpart, characteristically lacks…the existence in its midst of any influential body of protagonists of an absolute prohibition upon lying, let alone the presentation of that prohibition as part of a body of thought claiming to merit both its intellectual and its moral allegiance. 61

Yet as Paul Griffiths has argued, Aquinas' approach to lying was purely ethical, viewing it as an offence against justice.62 MacIntyre only reads Aquinas in relation to modern ethicists. For Augustine lying was wrong because it was 'a rupture of the divine image'. Aquinas' position is closer to the Greek Patristic tradition. I would argue that this is no accident given that the Greek tradition stretching back to Clement of Alexandria was more hospitable to esotericism and had a closer relationship to the Byzantine Empire, more analogous to Aquinas' relation to the Papacy and its power than to Augustine's critical distance from the Roman Empire. It accords with Aquinas having written dissertations on esoteric themes, versus Augustine's repudiation of such thinking.

Conclusion

The end result of neglecting the history of how the exoteric and esoteric dimensions of theology were separated is that esotericism has come to be seen by many Christians as a style of discourse that is distinct from and mainly opposed to Christian theology. Partly this may have been the influence of Calvinism in some countries, as it was generally opposed to things esoteric, possibly associating them with magic and superstition.63 Apophaticism has become fashionable among theologians in recent years, yet most have not made the connection with the esoteric disciplines, i.e. the way in which an apophatic theology has served to conceal artistic and scientific knowledge from lay people.64 Some theologians have turned to apophaticism as an apologetic device to woo students and to ward off what they regard as Biblical literalism. 65 In practice this often translates into ignoring positive exegesis altogether. Thus the reality is that the modern fad for apophatic theology could be seen as quasi- or pseudo-esoteric, in that unlike its ancestor it is not a double-edged sword both pointing to the ineffable God and the secret things supposedly only known to Him (and of course to His priests!). In being locked in this practice, modern theological apophaticism is blind to its complicity with its historical ancestor's role in keeping knowledge away from lay people, whilst at times functioning to ward students off from close reading of the Biblical texts. In this respect, it may even form part of an academic mode of surveillance against the continued rediscovery of and debate concerning the Biblical texts.66

Both cryptography and surveillance are related to state intelligence: the former as hiding it in impersonal form and the latter as gathering of intelligence. The police states of Communist Eastern Europe relied a lot on personal surveillance. In late modernity surveillance and cryptography have come to be closely linked as both have become computerised. The history of the former Communist states shows that it is not technology that is the biggest problem for religious and scholarly liberty, it is state ideology insofar as the majority of the population chooses to assent to it. David Lyon's theory is that the rise of surveillance is linked to the phenomenon of 'disappearing bodies'—we can do things at a distance.67 Digital and computerised surveillance arrived quite a bit of time after the social fragmentation that was initiated in the 1960s, so it cannot be held responsible for every ill, any more than 'global capitalism' can be. There is a tendency for some intellectuals to construct conspiracy theories around the two, whilst ignoring the reality of the role of law, public policy and the manufacture of public opinion in secularising and de-Christianising western countries. Unless this reality is grasped, we will not be capable of grasping the depth of the problems involved in being asked to manage the effects of a public ideology of diversity in university classrooms and supervisions. If there is a culture of 'disappearing bodies', this is reflected in some pedagogical arguments for using e-learning methods, with individualised distance learning at the extreme end. Parallel to this development in time, but not in nature, has been an increasing disappearance of primary Biblical texts in theological teaching. There is no causal relationship between the two. However, if the culture of learning elects to choose only distance-learning methods, it is preserving reading primary Biblical texts as a solitary act at the expense of communal reading. Thus the very rationale of reading and hearing primary Biblical texts is undermined. It is impossible to debate Biblical exegesis if you only read the Bible by yourself. The idea of a reading community, like that of a reading public, cannot survive if teaching becomes merely a method of surveillance of students via computer. Not only that, but the many foreign students who now form a large proportion of our degrees—the majority in many postgraduate courses—find British university culture alienating, atomised and depersonalised. There has been a renewal of scholarly interest in theological exegesis of the Bible, but it has not translated into major programs on the history of theological exegesis spanning the past two millennia. There is one sure way to capture the interests of the diversity of students in theology and ethics, and also to tackle the sundering of the exoteric and esoteric branches of theology, and that is to teach the history of the interrelationship of the two branches, and how this feeds into the history of the theological exegesis of the Bible, as this is the central text that all Christian traditions share, and which has shaped western culture and ethics even when repudiated. Attention to them should help foster a deeper engagement with the theological diversity within Christian theology, exegesis and ethics in the classroom.

Endnotes

  1. http://www.prs.heacademy.ac.uk/about_us/the_centre/index.html.
  2. Aldrich, Richard J., GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain's Most Secret Intelligence Agency (London: Harper Press, 2010) pp. 532-550. Aldrich concludes by agreeing with Sir Ken Macdonald, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, who blames western populations' use of communication technologies for the rise of state surveillance, as the state has harvested information from private companies catering to private individuals' perceived needs.
  3. Faivre, Antoine, 'Esotericism' in Jones, Lindsay, The Encyclopaedia of Religion, vol. 4. 2nd ed. (Farmington, Michigan: Thomson Gale, 2005) pp. 2842-2845.
  4. Hägg, Henny Fiskå, Clement of Alexandria and the Beginnings of Christian Apophaticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Itter, Andrew C., Esoteric Teachings in the Stromateis of Clement of Alexandria (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
  5. Boccacini, Gabriele, Beyond the Essene Hypothesis: the Parting of the Ways between Qumran and Enochic Judaism (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998).
  6. Droge, Arthur J., Homer or Moses? Early Christian Interpretations of the History of Culture (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1989). Assmann, Jan, Moses the Egyptian (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997).
  7. Bok, Sissela, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) pp. 171-190.
  8. Al-Kadi, Ibrahim A., 'The Origins of Cryptology: The Arab Contributions', Cryptologia 16/2, (April 1992) pp. 97-126.
  9. Kahn, David, The Codebreakers (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1974).
  10. Kahn, David, 'On the Origin of Polyalphabetic Substitution', Isis 71/1, (Mar. 1980) pp. 122-127.
  11. Bobbitt, Philip, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (London: Penguin, 2002) pp. 75-94.
  12. Aquinas writes on alchemy in Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II. II.72.2. Marie-Louise Von Franz argues that Aquinas wrote the Aurora Consurgens in Von Franz, Marie-Louise (ed.), Aurora Consurgens: A Document attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy (Toronto: Inner City Books, 2000) pp. 405-434.
  13. On what follows on Trithemius I am indebted to Braun, Noel L., Trithemius and Magical Theology: A Chapter in the Controversy over Occult Studies in Early Modern Europe (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999).
  14. Reeds, Jim, 'Solved: the Ciphers in Book III of Trithemius' Steganographia', Cryptologia, October 1998.
  15. Braun, (ibid.) pp. 15ff.
  16. Stroumsa, Guy G., Hidden Wisdom: Esoteric Traditions and the Roots of Christian Mysticism (Leiden: Brill, 1996) pp. 132-146. Augustine, City of God VIII, 19-23; X, 8-12. Beatrice, Pier Franco, 'Hermetic Tradition' in Fitzgerald, Allan D., OSA, Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 429-431. Digeser, Elizabeth DePalma, The Making of a Christian Empire: Lactantius and Rome (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2000).
  17. Braun, op. cit., pp. 179-180.
  18. Braun, op. cit., p. 180.
  19. Braun, op. cit., p. 231.
  20. Braun, op. cit., p. 236.
  21. Braun, op. cit., 230ff. Shapiro, Barbara J., John Wilkins 1614-1672: An Intellectual Biography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969).
  22. Boehme, Jakob, Six Theosophic Points and Other Writings, trans. John Rolleston Earle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), p. 54.
  23. On Charles Babbage's work in cryptography and computing, see Franksen, Ole Immanuel, Mr. Babbage's Secret (London: Prentice-Hall, 1985). See Standage, Tom, The Victorian Internet (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1998) on the development of the electric telegraph. On the most important decipherment of WWI, see Tuchman, Barbara W., The Zimmerman Telegram (New York: Ballantine, 1994). On the Enigma, see Hinsley, F. H. and Stripp, Alan, The Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Alan Turing's four last postcards to his friend Robin are entitled 'Messages from the Unseen World', and appear to describe a vision of the truths of physics given within a kabbalistic metaphysic, as they start with the sentence, 'The Universe is the interior of the light cone of creation'. Cited in Hodges, Andrew, Alan Turing: The Enigma (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 513.
  24. Electricity was seen as the alchemical quintessence by some 18th century theologians. Benz, Ernst, The Theology of Electricity: On the Encounter and Explanation of Theology and Science in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1989).
  25. The inventor of 'Pretty Good Privacy' writes about it in Zimmerman, Philip R., The Official PGP User's Guide (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). On the impact of cryptography on civil liberties and law enforcement, see Koops, Bert-Jaap, The Crypto Controversy (Boston, MA: Kluwer, 1998).
  26. Steiner, George,'The Retreat of the Word' in Steiner, George, Language and Silence (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), pp. 30-54.
  27. MacIntyre, Alasdair, A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the 20th Century. 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1998). MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1985). MacIntyre, Alasdair, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (London: Duckworth, 1990).
  28. D'Costa, Gavin, Theology in the Public Square: Church, Academy and Nation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
  29. MacIntyre, Alasdair, Secularization and Moral Change: The Riddell Memorial Lectures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).
  30. The gendering of the sociology of religion has teased out the depth and complexity of contemporary religious change much further than conventional secularisation theory could do. See Marler, Penny Long, 'Religious Change in the West: Watch the Women' in Aune, Kristin, Sharma, Sonya and Vincent, Giselle, Women and Religion in the West: Challenging Secularization (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 23-56. My argument about paganisation and the emancipation of esotericism as supplementing a turn to atheism could be read as critically supplementing in the longue durée the main thesis of a 'spiritual revolution' involving sacralization alongside secularisation found in Heelas, Paul and Woodhead, Linda, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). They discuss the difficulty of assessing the evidence for a 'subjective turn' in Britain and the USA on pp. 49-76. Where I differ from Heelas and Woodhead is in emphasising that esotericism has always been present in western Christianity, and been gradually detached from official expressions of Christianity, what Hegel would call 'objective religion'.
  31. British theological critiques of MacIntyre have shied away from addressing the Reformation and thus appear rather abstract. Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, 326-376. Bretherton, Luke, Hospitality as Holiness: Christian Witness Amid Moral Diversity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 61-91. By contrast the American reformed theologian Richard Mouw has demonstrated clearly that MacIntyre's repudiation of the Reformers on theological anthropology and ethics is misplaced. Mouw, Richard, The God Who Commands: A Study in Divine Command Ethics (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).
  32. MacIntyre, Alasdair, Marxism and Christianity, 2nd ed. (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1995), pp. 1-18.
  33. Tomasoni, Francesco, Modernity and the Final Aim of History: The Debate over Judaism from Kant to the Young Hegelians (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Press, 2003).
  34. Magee, Glenn Alexander, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
  35. Maccoby, Hyam, Antisemitism and Modernity: Innovation and Continuity (London: Routledge, 206) p. 68.
  36. MacIntyre, Alasdair, 'Notes From the Moral Wilderness' (1958), reproduced in Knight, Kelvin, The MacIntyre Reader (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1998) pp. 31-49.
  37. Polanyi, Michael, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998).
  38. MacIntyre, Alasdair, 'Is Patriotism a Virtue?' in Beiner, Ronald , Theorizing Citizenship (New York: SUNY Press, 1995) pp. 209-228.
  39. Blackledge, P. and Davidson, N., Alasdair MacIntyre's Engagement with Marxism: Selected Writings 1953-1974 (Leiden: Brill, 2008).
  40. West, Nigel, MASK: MI5's Penetration of the Communist Party of Great Britain (London: Routledge, 2005).
  41. West, (ibid.) p. 2.
  42. Beckett, Francis, Enemy Within: the Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party (London: John Murray, 1995), pp. 108ff.
  43. Beckett, (ibid.) pp. 121-123.
  44. Andrews, Geoff, Endgames and New Times (Lawrence and Wishart, 2004), pp. 74 & 90.
  45. Andrew, Christopher, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Penguin, 2010), pp. 402-403.
  46. McNar, Mike, 'Sects and 'New Left' Disillusionment', Weekly Worker, 13 April 2010.
  47. Coulombe, Charles A., The Pope's Legion: The Multinational Fighting Force that Defended the Vatican (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
  48. As Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, Benedict wrote the encyclical Dominus Iesus, August 6, 2000, for the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith, asserting this position. http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/ rc_ con_cfaith_doc_20000806_dominus-iesus_en.html.
  49. Benedict XVI, Values in a Time of Upheaval (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), pp. 69-71.
  50. Fried, Johannes and Brandes, Wolfram, The Donation of Constantine and Constitutum Constantini: The Misinterpretation of a Fiction and its Original Meaning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007). Chambers, David, Popes, Cardinals and War: The Military Church in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006).
  51. Gatz, Erwin, 'Papal States' in Steiner, Bruno and Parker, Michael G., Dictionary of Popes and the Papacy (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2001), pp. 227-231.
  52. Benz, Hartmut, 'Lateran Treaties' in Steiner, Bruno and Parker, Michael G., Dictionary of Popes and the Papacy, pp. 210-211.
  53. Rowland, Tracey, Ratzinger's Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) pp. 108-110.
  54. Yates, Frances, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge, 1999).
  55. Carroll, W. E., 'Galileo and the Interpretation of the Bible', Science and Education 8/2, (March 1999) pp. 151-187.
  56. Luther, Martin, The Table Talk of Martin Luther. (Trans. William Hazlitt) (London: G. Bell, 1902) p. 326.
  57. This kind of argument is made by Anglican priest turned Roman Catholic Walton Hannah in Darkness Visible: A Christian Appraisal of Freemasonry (1952) 2nd ed. (London: Chulmleigh Augustine, 1984). Hannah tends to focus on oaths and rituals, without attending a great deal to scholarly debates on their origins, or engaging in theological debate on the relationship of esotericism to Christian theology.
  58. Stevenson, David, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's century 1590-1710 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
  59. Révanger, Cécile, 'Franc-Maçonnerie et Religion en Grand Bretagne: vers une religion de l'Etat', in Porset, Charles & Révanger, Cécile, Franc-Maçonnerie et Religion dans l'Europe des Lumières (Paris: H. Champion, 1988) pp. 29-41.
  60. MacIntyre, Alasdair, A Short History of Ethics, (ibid.) pp. 121-128.
  61. MacIntyre, Alasdair, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, cited in Knight, Kelvin, The MacIntyre Reader (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998) pp. 155-156.
  62. On what follows see Griffiths, Paul J., Lying: An Augustinian Theology of Duplicity (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2004) pp. 171-184.
  63. Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Penguin, 2001). Cameron, Euan, Superstition, Reason and Religion: 1250-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). It is worth recalling that both Luther and Calvin were heavily indebted to interpretations of Augustine. Calvin and the Reformed churches seem to have inherited Augustine's hostility to esotericism.
  64. See for example the anthology of western apophatic texts collected in Franke, William, On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourse in Philosophy, Religion, Literature and the Arts (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 2007). On alchemy as conceived and concealed theologically by doctrines of election and priesthood in East and West, see Karpenko, Vladimir, 'Alchemy as Donum Dei', Hyle: International Journal for the Philosophy of Chemistry 4, (1998) pp. 3-8.
  65. John Webster perceptively links Rowan Williams' redefinition of apophasis in terms of 'the indeterminable and unsystematic character of knowledge of God' with his 'curious insistence on polyphony, conflict, and incoherence within the [Biblical] canon.'Webster, John, 'Rowan Williams on Scripture', in Bockhmuehl, Markus and Torrance, Alan J., Scripture's Doctrine and Theology's Bible: How the New Testament Shapes Christian Dogmatics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2008) pp. 108-109, 121. Andrew Moody offers a sharp critique of Williams' reliance on apophasis in dogmatics, but as with many writers on the apophatic/kataphatic distinction, he fails to see the elitism at the core of ecclesiastical handling of apophasis which means that the apophatic theologian is forever warding off kataphatic expressions as supposedly too reminiscent of 'simple piety'. This kind of mentality is traceable to Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Andrew Moody, 'The Hidden Center: Trinity and Incarnation in the Negative (and Positive) Theology of Rowan Williams', in Russell, Matheson, On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2009) pp. 25-46.
  66. As with theological criticism of MacIntyre, so with introducing historic debates in theological exegesis to students and congregations—the work is done in the United States more than in Britain. See Thompson, John L., Reading the Bible With the Dead: What You Can Learn From the History of Exegesis That You Can't Learn From Exegesis Alone (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2007).
  67. Lyon, David, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (Buckinghamshire: Open University, 2001).

Return to vol. 10 no. 1 index page

This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.

-
The British Association for the Study of Religions
The Religious Studies Project