Personal Jesus

I can't find the first paper on the laptop, so I'll check the desktop later. Here's paper #2, equally loved and graded by my professor. I don't know how well my copy-pasting from MS Word is going to format, though.

Misreadings in Exclusion and Acceptance

I look through our readings of the past weeks and I can see why Matthew Arnold can so readily be seen, accurately or not, as more than a tad bit elitist. I agree that his discussion of the newspaper article about Ms. Wragg ultimately proves itself a sympathetic text, but there’s a sense of patronization in his tone that also makes him an easy target for those elitist barbs he keeps snagging upon. What I wondered more, however, was how exactly did Thomas Aquinas get let off the hook for what, with a little research, proves itself elitist in the Summa Theologica.

What catches my ire towards Aquinas is that, with even the most rudimentary knowledge of the cultural anthropology of Europe in the Dark and Middle Ages, and of the history of the Bible in translation, anyone reading Aquinas as someone truly lauding poetic forms in the Bible for their ability to make the Bible comprehensible to the masses should realize that he was likely full of the proverbial crap.

To get a truly informed reading of Aquinas’ articles, you should first look at the important pre-Reformation historical contexts that held sway over Biblical studies of the time. During the years of 600AD through 1,400AD the Catholic Church, the only organized and recognized church of that time, forbade the scripture to be available in any language other than Latin. As priests were the only people widely educated in Latin during that era, it allowed for the Catholic Church the power to rule without question, to deceive the people, to extort money from the masses all because the lack of Latin proficiency in the masses made it nigh impossible to question Biblical teachings as they were taught them by the priests. Anyone found in possession of a non-Latin Bible during the Dark Ages could, and regularly would, be executed. It wasn’t until the advent of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in 1436 (completed in 1440) that it was even possible to realistically make a non-Latin translation available to the masses, which would be crucial to the success of the Reformation; and it wouldn’t be until Martin Luther sparked the Protestant Reformation in 1517 that people would press forward more ardently with translating the Bible out of Latin. As he was canonized a saint in 1323, more than a hundred years before the printing press and nearly two hundred before the Reformation, it would be difficult to accuse Aquinas of being anything other than a good Catholic.

When all of this is put forward, where exactly does it leave Aquinas? When he writes “that spiritual truths be expounded by means of figures taken from corporeal things, in order that thereby even the simple who are unable by themselves to grasp intellectual things may be able to understand it” (p. 244), who exactly are the “simple” people who are benefiting from the metaphors he defends in the Bible. If the Bible was taught only in Latin and those who spoke Latin were primarily limited to the priests and the highly educated, it would be fair to say Aquinas’ “simple” people would be easily likened to the C-average Harvard Graduates, the George W. Bushes of his world and not the common man.

Further readings in Aquinas’ article seem more supportive, then, of the Catholic Church’s usage of Latin to keep truths from the masses. Passages such as “hiding the truth in figures is useful for the exercise of thoughtful minds [read: the clergy and the educated], and as defense against the ridicule of the impious” and “because thereby divine truths are the better hidden from the unworthy” (p. 244), when taken into historical context, does not read as a defense of poetic form in the Bible for its ability to illuminate scripture to the masses, but rather as a defense of poetic form in the Bible for its ability to illuminate scripture to the educate and to veil the truth of scripture from the masses.

I marvel at how a person so revered and characteristic of the Catholic Church of his time, one known now for being too esoteric and corrupt, a person as obedient to the Church as he was can get away with what seems clearly to favor an educated, pious few over the simple masses while another critic, one who perhaps had a bit of a patronization problem, who seems generally sincere in his calls for equality in education and representation can be so widely reviled.