The Idea……

History tells you what happened, right? How can it have or be, an idea?

Like a good historian, R.G. Collingwood gives a history of what history was thought to be from the first known historian in western civilization, Herodotus, to his own time, the late 1930s.

Is history just one damn thing after another? No matter who said this, one might call this the atheist version. Atheists believe there is no order or reason to existence. The universe began as an accident with no meaning other than it just happened and everything since then has followed from this accident. Thus this saying looks at the events of human life and society in a similar manner.

Collingwood disagrees. R.G. Collingwood stands out among historians, not in his particular corpus of writings on history itself, but in his eclectic approach to study. He was not an historian bound to a table in an archive somewhere, thinking and writing amongst cobwebs and curious spiders in these cellars. He was also an archaeologist, digging and studying the remnants of the Roman Empire in Britain and he was a philosopher. History requires textual evidence and today combines that with material remains. Collingwood may have been the first to do this and then to sit and think.

[The quote investigated: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/09/16/history/ ]

western civilization (s) ?

This is an old textbook used in a long forgotten course I either took, or was a Teaching Assistant for, probably 30 years ago at McMaster University in Hamilton Ontario. It has 1098 pages of text, followed by several unnumbered pages entitled: Rulers of Principal European States since 700 A.D. After this are 29 pages of an index headed by a pronunciation guide.

Usually on Bookstory I randomly choose a book off my shelf. But in the past little while I have been cogitating on the nature of western civilization (when dealing with an entire civilization or civilizations, one should cogitate, not merely think). As I was scanning in the book sleeve, I noticed for the first time the plural use, ‘civilizations’. What got me thinking about this topic most recently was an article I read concerning a member of an indigenous band located in the United States. Their traditional territories occupied land on both sides of the Canada/U.S. border, but no members had lived in Canada for many decades. He decided to hunt in Canada, then go to the local authorities and turn himself in, specifically to initiate a legal judgement. The trials went on, finally reaching the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled he had a right to hunt in traditional lands, even though no member of his band lived in Canada. This got me to cogitating on the idea of borders and countries and nations and nation states. Then I segued to thinking about the West.

What plural civilizations called western have their been? This book says the first ‘western’ civilization began about 3200 BC with the rise of cities that required full time warrior-rulers, administrators and priests. This mirrors generally what I was taught in Grade 11 History in my Canadian High School: civilization began for the West in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece. Then came Rome and then Christianity, then the Middle Ages, then Early Modern, then the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Curious that they don’t provide a section on the United States, but include it at the end of the section on the consequences of the French and Industrial revolutions. Apparently the ‘West’ = western Europe. They don’t explain why they use the plural. I can guess as there are very few points of comparison between Babylonia and the European Union.

Curious indeed.

art and artist

This is the dust jacket of a ‘must own’ book for Canadian historians. Well, historians who live in Canada? Or just historians who study the history of that part of North America north of the lower 48 U.S. states? It is a 1997 2nd edition of what is labelled a magisterial overview of indigenous peoples in Canada from before contact to after contact, up to the late 1990s. I have always thought that James Axtell’s book title ‘Natives and Newcomers‘ was one of the better book titles on this general topic.

These days, of course, European expansion is vilified and not much studied except to detail the ill effects. A number of new forms of linguistic denigration have emerged in very recent times: colonization, settler society etc. Olive Patricia Dickason avoided this by writing a solidly researched history. I might add that Prof. Dickason had a hard scrabble personal history and Métis ancestry through her mother. This article tells her story.

But what drew me to this book is the artwork on the dust jacket. It is by Daphne Odjig. Dickason notes that she herself was drawn to indigenous art and I can understand that – she cited ‘racial memory’. I can make no such claim. I like the vibrant colours and especially the soft curves of people, mountains, drums – I can hardly make out what is in the painting but I do not care.We live in a culture that adopted straight lines and linear thinking beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries. I have trained my brain to think in a linear fashion but live most vibrantly in a culture of wild curves and sprouting tree branches and grass blades.

Shades of blue

and wisdom of birds

mountains dancing in the distance

smiling faces and questions asked

rolling rocks on an earth that moves

surely this is heaven itself

the joy of wisdom unassailed

no straight lines live here

no beginnings and endings

just life a joyous panoply

a life told

What can you tell about a person by looking at a random shelf of books, or in this case a part shelf? I have many books, many of which I have not read. I used to buy books, usually used, that caught my eye. The purchases very quickly got ahead of my time to read. I’ve read six of those showing here. They are: Tudor & Stuart Britain, 1471-1714 (from a university course); The Streets of London (well, it is the sort of book you dip into here and there or use to look up a street you came across reading something else); Concession Street in Context (a local history of businesses on this neighbourhood street – I am so grateful I can walk to shop, rather than drive); Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles and Tales (from a very interesting history of Russia course I took one summer. This was my first inkling that there were very few jobs for historians. The fellow who taught us in Hamilton, had just taught the same course the term before at the U of Toronto, and was rushing off to Edmonton a week after finishing with us, to teach it again, there); A Tour through the whole island of Great Britain (an 18th century tour); The Diary of Thomas Turner (another 18th century study).

Some of these as noted, were books I read while doing my undergraduate degree at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. I had an excellent prof for 18th century English history – though he was required to stray into the 19th century in teaching also. Dr. Paul Fritz loved 18th century England. He had been a PhD student of Sir John Plumb at Cambridge. I recall a fascinating class where he talked about architecture in the 18th century – both great houses and landscape architecture. Since then, I have always included architecture in my history of religion courses. As an M.A. student at McMaster, he had us come to his apartment in downtown Hamilton, Ontario, for a relaxed seminar one week. The building was a fairly typical 1960s/70s apartment tower on the edge of an older, but still genteel part of town on the southern fringes of downtown. A typically ugly bare elevator car and a typical hallway leading to his apartment door. Oh, but when we stepped through that doorway inside! It was an experience very much like one of those mystical stories where you step through a portal into an alternate universe.

We found ourselves in an 18th century gentleman’s sitting room by the simple act of crossing a threshold. Dr. Fritz had collected heavy, oaken furniture, the walls had oil paintings – in particular one of Sir Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister of… well of anywhere, but England in particular. He had a top of the line TV, but it was hidden inside an old looking wooden cabinet – a computer sat on an enormous oaken desk – the only openly modern device visible. I am afraid I was more interested in the decor and design and the artifacts than the subject of the seminar. Perhaps that is why most of the books on this shelf date from the two undergraduate courses and one graduate level seminar I took from this interesting man and superb teacher.

Did any of this say anything about me, I wonder?

Favs

A Facebook friend posted an article about books one owns but has not read. The thesis of the article was that just having books around you alters your character and outlook in a good way.

This got me to thinking about the many books I own that I, too, have not read. Some, however, I have read more than once. I wonder if that counts somehow?  And who is counting? This then lead to thinking I would do a multiple book post of my favourite books. I thought idly for a few minutes, then decided I had to think more deeply and…. then decided that idly thinking was probably a better marker of my fav books as they would like cream, rise to the top.

Here are my idle choices:  The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien; The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris; The Geometry of Love by Margaret Visser.  All three, as i will now explain fit into my mini-thread of books on religion.

I went into my library to grab the three and take cover pictures of each (I think I have already done a Bookstory post on Margaret Visser’s book, but I took a new shot anyway). While there I saw other books that I enjoyed, learned from, found useful – particularly Leonard Cohen’s Selected Poems 1956-1968.  But these three are the top three. They burrowed into my heart and my mind where they live happily and where they stir me in many ways. Not necessarily happiness as that is over-rated, but they move my spirit.

They have an essentially religious nature, or if you are one of those who are spiritual but not religious, an essentially spiritual nature. The Cloister Walk is about the experiences of a Presbyterian poet (yes, they do exist) who spent holiday time at Saint John’s Benedictine Abbey in Collegeville Minnesota, despite being a practicing member of her own church congregation.  The front cover has a blurb from the Boston Globe. The first sentence encapsulates this book completely:  ‘This is a strange and beautiful book’. I would add it is a prose work that could only be written by a poet. The Geometry of Love has a prolix title that you need to meditate on to see its appropriateness. Margaret Visser delves (and that is an apt word too) into one of the most ancient, yet less well known churches in Rome. The church is Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura and is so old that you must descend stairs to reach the level that was the ground level when the church was built. She applies a lover’s gaze at every aspect of the building’s architecture and its connection to Agnes, a young girl martyred as a Christian around about the year 304.  The Lord of the Rings may seem surprising to readers of this blog. Most these days likely know only the movies, which like Hollywood since the beginnings of that place, changed the inner soul of the book. J.R.R. Tolkien was a devout Catholic and this spirit of the inner nature of Catholic Christianity infuses The Lord of the Rings. Not in specifics – there is no obvious and crude connection with the Christian story. What the book does have at its centre is a profound belief in the relationship between the immanent and the transcendent.

This trinity of books is religious essentially. Or spiritual, if you will.

2020

For this year, Anno Domini 2020 I chose a screenshot of the way the Bible appears in this cyber era. This is an evangelical Protestant site where one can find many Bible translations and also a search box. I noticed that the default translation is the King James version. In the post on the 60s I noted that this translation was the translation for the English-speaking world, even to influencing Catholic Bibles from the 18th century into the present day.

If you click on the translation tab you will find 219 translations. The greatest number are in English, some 60 versions,  but Chinese translations are very common too. These perhaps reflect the long history of missionary work in China.  I don’t know how these statistics compare to other religions, but the numbers printed, distributed and translated into many languages and often several translations into one language is surely remarkable.

I think the early division of Christianity into east and west and also into fragments especially in the east in early days and later the fissiparous Protestant churches has meant there has never been a single official Bible from which all translations flow.  The Bible is actually a compilation of books written at different times and places and wedded together into one volume. I suppose one could see Christianity as a living coloured mosaic that has been added to and altered at different times. Or as something like white light which is in actuality all the colours of the visible spectrum merged. It may look like one but is many, joined.

Post Scriptum:  I was determined to work the word fissiparous into one of these blog posts!

And I made it before midnight eastern time and thus before the end of the 12th day of Christmas.

the 60s

In this blog post I decided to combine two 1960s style Bibles here:  one is a peculiar sort of Bible and very Protestant; the other is a standard text Bible, but deliberately Catholic.

First the 1960 Gideon New Testament, with Psalms and Proverbs. The Gideons are a group I did not know much about until I began this blog post. The Bible shown above was given to me in Grade 5 in 1960. As I recall (dimly), two men wearing brown suits came into the class, were welcomed by our teacher and spent a few minutes preaching casually, then handed out free copies as above. The Gideons (taking their name from an Old Testament figure) were formed in 1899 by two travelling salesmen in Wisconsin. According to that reliable source, Wikipedia, this group today gives away on average two Bibles per second and has distributed roughly 2 billion since they began this practice in 1908. To be a Gideon you must be male, over 21 and in a sales or professional occupation – and, most importantly a member in good standing of an evangelical Protestant church.

This idea of religion in a public school system comes up in my teaching when students here in Ontario, Canada begin to note that only Catholics have publicly funded religious schools. I can then tell them that the ‘public’ schools in Ontario were at one time ‘Protestant’  schools and publicly funded. I have personal memories of daily Bible readings, saying the Lord’s Prayer (the ‘Our Father’ to Catholics) as part of opening excercises, a general assent to Christianity from teachers, and occasional visits in class time from a local Protestant minister. And of course, the receipt of free Bibles from the Gideons.

George Grant has a good essay on the degree to which these public/Protestant schools actually assented to Christianity in the early 60s. The essay can be found in a collection of his essays, Technology and Empire (1969). The particular essay, Religion and the State, was first published in Queen’s Quarterly in 1963. The 1969 reprint has a new introduction by Grant where he critically analyzes his own earlier thinking. In general he states that the true religion of public schools was consumerism and that only lip service was paid to Protestant Christianity.  Judging by my own 1960 experience, I am not sure his assessment was entirely accurate, unless of course I was personally more attuned to faith and the message received from curriculum and teachers and Gideons than most. This inclusion of a basic, Protestant Christianity in schools was a product of the attitudes and mind of Egerton Ryerson in the 19th century. Ryerson, like Sir John A. MacDonald, has been cast from the firmament of national worship because of their ideas on indigenous education, as has the place of religion in these formerly Protestant schools.

I have also alway been curious why these gift Bibles only include the Psalms and Proverbs from the Old Testament. I have no answer, just the question.

The second Bible pictured above was published in 1966 using a 1946 updated translation originally from 1611. This is a Catholic Bible and the interesting point here is that it is not based on the first Catholic Bible English translation, but the King James Anglican version that became ‘the’ Bible for English-speaking Protestants and is still so for many today. The original Douay-Rheims Bible has a complex publication history which I won’t go into here as that would require a long article on its own. But, in the 18th century another entirely different Catholic English translation was produced in England that was based on the King James Anglican translation. It was translated so as to ensure it matched the last Latin Bible and did not conflict with Catholic theology. This 1966 Bible is in that tradition which also has a complex publication history. Like the family Bibles I described earlier in this series of blog posts, it contains explanatory notes, especially for the Old Testament indicating it is meant to be used as a study Bible. This too is new for Catholicism. The existence of English translations was part of the Catholic Reformation that followed the Protestant – sometimes called the Counter Reformation as it was seen at one time as a reaction to the Protestant reform. To some degree it was, but reform had been bubbling under the surface before Martin Luther. But what is new here for Catholics is Bible study and a Study Bible.

Both these Bibles show a Christian world in the 1960s that saw Bibles as sources of intellectual study – a type of science of the Bible, or Godly science. Given the state of Christianity in the contemporary world I think it obvious that this attempt to study the Bible as one would study Biology or Physics did not achieve positive results. I am currently struggling with Charles Taylor’s philosophical works on ‘secularism’ and his ideas such as ‘authenticity’ and ‘individuation’ as factors in the change if not the decline in Christian belief in the western world. More on this in the final installment of this series.

1954

At this point, I leap into the mid 20th century. This Bible is the same size as the 1899 Bible and the original owner, my elder brother the same age, nine, as my grandfather when he received his Bible in 1899. There are differences, however. This Bible, as was common in the United Church of Canada, was given to students free at a certain age in Sunday School. It is cloth bound, not leather and has no special identifier on the cover. It has maps at the back, but in black and white and only three: ‘The Ancient World’ (actually the eastern Mediterranean sometime prior to the arrival of the Roman Empire in the east); ‘Palestine’, with three inset maps of Palestine at the time of the Tribes of Israel; at the time of the Kingdoms of Judah & Israel and ancient Jerusalem; thirdly, ‘The Mediterranean World in the First Century’ – listing some of the Roman provinces and showing as far west as Italy. The book is published by the American Bible Society and is less obviously directed towards historical study than the 1899 Bible.

Sunday School classes in the United Church of Canada were heavily weighted towards teaching basic Christianity utilizing the Bible, reinforced by hymns for children such as Jesus Bids Us Shine.

My memory of my elder brother (who died of cancer 16 years ago) was of a natural cynic about Christianity. He claimed to me when a teenager that he had read through the Bible and was unimpressed. When my family lived in Toronto and he was a teenager, my parents made him attend their United Church congregation there, rather than senior Sunday School. I recall one time when I attended too,  instead of going to Sunday School, he gave me lessons on how to avoid boredom. He brought along paper and a pencil and sat drawing pictures or doodling through the service. He told me I should do the same if I were ever required to undergo this experience in the future.

In later life he became an aficionado of various exotic spiritualities. After his death, when my sister and I travelled to the family home where his life ended, I found a book shelf filled with volumes on Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto and New Age material, but no Bibles. I think he was a bit ahead of his time in terms of the decline of active (or even passive) Christian belief in Canada. A harbinger, if you will.

It is interesting though, that he kept this Bible, even if not on his main bookshelf.

Insurance?

1899

This is the first of this series that is not a ‘family Bible’, but a 6 X 4 inch personal Bible. As such it has no section between the Old and New Testaments for family rites of passage. As you can see it has an inscription:  a gift from my mother’s grandparents to her father when he was a boy at Christmas in 1899. His grandfather came initially from Liverpool, first to Jamaica, then to Canada. His father moved from Kingston, Ontario to Oswego NY, then to Rochester NY.

The Bible bears the imprint of Oxford University Press, American branch and was printed in the U.S. His parents had his name printed in gold lettering on the front cover. Considering it is roughly 121 years old, the book is in remarkably good condition. The cover is leather with some fraying as can be seen above, but the pages are pristine as are the colour maps at the back. Maps are important in these 19th century Bibles as they were used for study: of scripture and its meaning and with maps to place the events mentioned in the text. The first map shows Egypt and the Sinai tracing the journeys of the Israelites on their way to ‘the promised land’. Next is a map of ‘Canaan’ with tribal names added. Then comes a map of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. Following are maps of Palestine in the Roman era and time of Jesus; Jerusalem and environs; and the eastern Mediterranean showing the travels of St. Paul.  History figured large in the thought world of the 19th century. This centrality of history, based to a degree on Christianity, lasted into the 1960s at least, in schools. At some point after that History, except national history, was no longer a required subject. This makes one wonder if we, in the West, are now a people without history, without a foundation, drifting about  where the winds of social change and fad drive us. I wonder too if the decline in Christianity in the West is one cause of the removal of required History courses from High School curricula. If the goal of worship is the nation state and not the divine, then History declines in importance.

I found most interesting the fact that a Bible was considered to be a good Christmas gift in 1899 for a nine year old boy (my grandfather was born in 1890). This was not a notably religious family. They were members of the Church of England in England and Canada and the American equivalent, the Episcopal church in Rochester, NY.  Apparently later in life my grandfather became a Baptist, which according to the research of the sociologist Reginald Bibby is unuusal. For Canada anyway, he tracked denominational change and found concentric circles: Anglicans might become Catholic; Catholics Anglican; Methodists might become Anglican or Baptist; Anglicans might become Methodists, but almost never go as far afield as the Baptist church.  People, when they changed denomination stayed within the loosely familiar, that is – unless this occurred through marriage. Even here though, as religion is intrinsic to culture (anthropologically defined), marriage was within degrees of cultural familiarity.

I don’t know enough about my grandfather to know how deeply he felt his faith, except that he did begin attending a Baptist church as an adult. But I do know he liked his booze – usually cheap rotgut – and this is not an aspect of Baptist behaviour, though it is acceptable for Episcopalians. Again, religion is more than about theology; it is a way of life.

1873

This is another Harding published Bible, belonging to my father’s mother. It has some interesting aspects as compared to the first two of my trio of 19th century Bibles. Firstly, for the economic historian, the price and place of purchase are given:  $15.00 in Oswego, NY.  I found a handy inflation calculator that tells me that $15 US is in 2020 equivalent to $338.43.  This is $439.40 in Canadian dollars today, January 2, 2020. The most expensive modern Bible I could find in roughly the same size and bound in genuine calfskin leather,  retails for $119.99 US. Here are the particulars of this modern version from the publisher’s site (Thomas Nelson Bibles – a division of HarperCollins (see the 1864 Bible post):

• 9780785220718
• Release DateDec 18, 2018
• Weight 4.210
• Height 11.11 in
• Width 6.11 in
• Pages 2240
• Price $119.99  (155.79 Canadian)
• Bible Translation New King James Version
• Features Ribbon Marker, Thumb Index
• Language English

The 1873 Aseltine Bible weighs 9.4 pounds and measures 11 inches by 9 inches.

So, the 1873 Bible (purchased in 1874) is more expensive than the most expensive printed Bible today. This is one case where inflation worked in reverse.

The 1873 Bible has improved on the 1860 by the same publisher. It has ‘glossing’ (marginal notes – the kind teachers used to punish you for scribbling in the margins of books, but which has a long and honorable history). It has an extensive note index, but no colour, unlike the 1864 Collins Bible.

What interests me here more, however, is the cross border factor. The Aseltine or sometimes written Asselstine family were (and perhaps still are) a large family scattered around the Kingston, Ontario region. If you ever visit Upper Canada Village along the St. Lawrence river east of Kingston, one of the displays is the Asselstine Woolen Mill.  The link here doesn’t say where the building was moved from, but I know it was moved from Odessa, Ontario, a village just north of Kingston.

This family were of Dutch origin, living in the Hudson Valley region of New York.  The Canadian branch were Loyalists who fled to Upper Canada after the American Revolution. They set up one of their businesses in Odessa, Ontario. The purchaser of this Bible, William Henry Aseltine moved back and forth across the border. This was common in those days. Even in my day, so to speak, all you needed was a birth certificate to prove you were Canadian to cross into the U.S. Oswego NY was the closest town on the US side for Canadians in eastern Ontario.

Anti-semitism is a side note of the history shown in this Aseltine family Bible – William Henry Aseltine had a son named Charles who became a bank manager in New York City for the Chase National Bank.  Here is a bit of banking history for you. The Chase National Bank was formed in 1877 and through a number of characteristic capitalistic mergers and purchases is today JPMorgan Chase and Company, but operates publicly as the Chase Bank. Why did I zip off in this direction?  Well!  When my ancestor Charles Asselstine began to climb the corporate ladder in NYC, he was told his name sounded too Jewish. So, he changed the family name to Aseltine from Asselstine. Further research by me a few years back revealed that in the 16th century, the Asselstines in the Netherlands were in fact Jewish and converted to Reformed Christianity and later moved to the Dutch New Amsterdam colony. The Brits took New Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed the colony New York.  This unearthed bit of family history made real the dry facts of what I label in my courses ‘the other’ and its very real consequences for real people.

What else can I draw out of this material object for the understanding of religion and life in the 19th century?  The Bible is leather bound and has a metal clasp to hold it closed. It is published and printed in Philadelphia. A middle class man (and what is interesting here is that the book was purchased by a man, not a woman) thought it important enough to spend a large amount of money on it.

Inside on the ‘Marriages’ page between the Old and New Testaments, William Henry takes the first entries and reveals another fact of 19th century life. He was married twice. Today that would normally mean a divorce and remarriage. But in the 19th century, that meant a first wife who died as the result of child birth. The Charles who changed his name was my grandmother’s half brother from the first marriage. Men had to be married for a number of reasons in the 19th century, as did women for other reasons. Modern understandings of marriage and family see the traditional role of women as one of oppression, but in an era where family was central and science and technology weak,  a wife was a necessity to run all the many tasks of a household allowing the husband to concentrate on work. A husband was necessary as pregnancy made work difficult if not impossible.   Why did men work outside the household and women in? There is a whole literature on this, but here is the condensed version:  work mostly meant physical labour for most people and men biologically have greater muscle mass and aggression, and to repeat the evidence from this Bible, women often died in child birth. This set a gender role for men and women whether they worked at labour or in offices. These roles had an economic basis therefore, that was reinforced by religion.

The feminist movement did not change this in any real sense until the invention of the birth control pill in the 1960s. It is no accident that Christian churches began to accommodate divorce, as did the law, also in the 1960s. The earlier beginnings of home technology – vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and the slow decline of death caused by child birth due to the growth of medical science preceded the ‘pill’, but women gaining control over reproduction was the essential agent of social change. The existence of the centre pages with places for family milestones (marriages, births, deaths) indicates the also central role of religion in family life.  I could not find any reference to these pages being included in modern ‘family’ Bibles. I’m not immediately sure what to make of this lack.

It is on the basis of material evidence combined with documentary evidence that we can, as R.G. Collingwood noted, rethink the thoughts of the past and in this case begin to understand the integration of religion and society.