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History 104A, December 5: Like It or Not, We are All Protestant! PART II

Once again the clock ticks down and I can soon say another

semester, another group of students gone bye-bye. In case I forget to

mention it, I'll see some of you in about 20 years and you'll be fat

and bald and that's just on the women.

Q Are you talking about the girls?

THE PROFESSOR: In 20 years I'm fat and bald already.

A I thought you were like 300 years old. You're not even going to

be alive in 20 years.

THE PROFESSOR: What do you mean? If I were a nice guy, I would

say F you; but I can't do things like that since I'm a professor.

Thanks loads. Why can't I be alive at 320? I made it to 300. That's

why I like her. She hassles me.

Q Is that in the notes again?

THE PROFESSOR: Well, the nice part is, if they fire me, I've got

my retirement so it's no problem. If they read my notes which I

post -- some day I'll edit and get that stuff out.

In any case, the exam is Monday and at an hour that's unGodly for

me, 9:30 to 11:30 in this room. And yes, I did remember suddenly,

even after a weekend of craziness with some kids -- chess tournament

that I didn't run, but it was both days in Stockton. This morning I

looked at the book, found a picture, came up with a question, and here

it is. The question is for the take home -- describe the impact of

western European expansion from 1450 to 1550 on the peoples they

encountered. Please spend as much time and space on the positive as

well as the negative impact of these encounters. It was a difficult

one because I didn't put aside any special assignment, readings

optional. This will at least cover the two chapters. That's all

actually we really have for this exam. The studying should be a bit

easier. And it will deal with at least part of the lectures as well

today and Wednesday where we have the last group meeting on Wednesday,

if I remember. And the other news perhaps is that we have really

become an important city here in Fremont Newark. They are opening a

second WalMart.

A No. It's already opened.

THE PROFESSOR: No, no, a second one. They're going to build it

on the old Costco in Newark, so both Fremont and Newark will have a

WalMart.

A It's only like 10 minutes away from the new one.

THE PROFESSOR: Three miles. They are absolutely convinced that

we are such consumers in the community, and then it will be great

because all us gray haired people can wear blue vests and greet you as

you walk in the door, so it helps with the unemployment problem like

they do in France, like we talked about the other day.

Which leads us into my own way, the Protestant reformation and

that whole sense of what we were talking about the impact of

Protestantism on the culture of the United States, as I alluded to,

ending up with that whole sense of an anal retentive personality and

that tremendous influence the bathrooms have in our lives. I didn't

get into perhaps the Protestant work ethic on the level -- well, I'm

not sure how much I do want to get into on it. Certainly there is an

element of Protestantism. As I said, Wax Weber and his study

indicated that Protestantism lead to capitalism because it lead to

investment, not showing off the wealth, rather than -- this was an old

term from the book years ago, conspicuous consumption, using your

money to show off your wealth and therefore really not doing anything

with it and therefore ending it and then you're at wealth in part. If

I forget to identify, this is to some extent what happened with Spain

during the age of exploration. They had all this gold and silver

coming into a country known as bullion or species. And with that gold

and silver they felt powerful and wealthy for probably almost 100

years, but they did nothing with it. It was shown off in the luxury

of the nation and of the ruling classes. And when they needed

products, manufactured quote/unquote, they purchased them from Holland

or from England. And so most of the wealth, most of the gold and

silver if not almost all of it, went off to other places to be able to

invest and produce, and Spain was left in poverty almost, once the

gold and silver from the colonies expired or at least the British, the

Dutch went in and took over certain areas where the Spanish could have

gotten more gold and more silver. So again, conspicuous consumption

was something frowned upon.

The Puritans, basically with their black and white outfits

symbolize simplicity. They symbolized hard work. They symbolized

morality. They symbolized moderation, the Puritan ethic. I think --

did I mention that we get the feeling that there was no wine, women,

and song allowed to the Puritan. Yes, they were uptight, but there

was moderation. You were allowed one glass of wine a day. You were

allowed one cigarette a day or one pipe of tobacco. And you were

allowed one woman a day. And that was the extent of -- that was it.

Anything more than that was considered conspicuous consumption. And

that investment went into the production of society. And we pointed

out, a stitch in time saves nine. Part of that work ethic that

transpired to produce, to a large extent, the wealth and success

candidly of the United States and of course in part has us exploiting

other people for the sake of our wealth. There's no doubt that that,

of course, was part of the early process of early colonization. We

have a book written in about 1836 or so around the same time Harvard

was produced that basically said that the Indians need to be hunted

down -- we're talking about the indigenous people -- and eliminated

with dogs, et cetera, because they do not work the God given land;

they do not produce. They simply live on it. And since they were

agents of the devil, they had to be purified. The true agents and the

first agents of the devil were the Jews, and while the Jews should be

eliminated, says the Massachusetts Bay colony, there are no Jews here,

so we must eliminate the indigenous people. That sense of being

trustworthy, loyal, helpful, worthy, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean,

and reverent because it proved you're among the saved, you were not

among the dammed led to perhaps one of the most famous authors in

American history. I don't know why this happens. It just went out of

the head. I'm talking too fast. In 1850s on he wrote many books

dealing with -- 300 years that's my age. That's what it does.

Horatio Alger -- any of you heard of Horatio Alger? They wrote over

100 novels all about the basic same theme. How, as Jews, he's lost in

the dessert and he comes across some guy who gives him a quarter. How

many know who Howard Hughes was? Yeah, you shouldn't take these

classes because it makes you feel sort of weird. Howard Hughes was

known as one of the richest men in the world and very eccentric. He

lived in his later years as a hermit. He was married to a number of

Hollywood movie stars including one of the more famous sex symbols, a

woman named Jane Russel, who I'm sure none of you have heard of, and

was famous or using some of that money to produce the "spruce goose",

this massive wooden airplane that was out in Long Beach for a long

time that flew for about 40 feet and never flew again. He was also a

famous pilot and of course is a subject of what film?

A The Aviator.

THE PROFESSOR: Thank you. So some of you have some familiarity

with his background and eccentricity. He always seemed to look like a

bum in later years with long fingernails and disheveled. The story

goes -- I can't remember how many years back before he died -- because

this guy helped him in whatever reason when he was stranded out there

on the street, he left all his money to this guy in a will. And that

was challenged by, I think it was the Mormon church, because they

tended to believe that money should have been going to them under the

original will. Does anybody remember any of that or am I maybe a

little off on that, but I don't think so.

The concept -- trustworthy, loyal, helpful, kind, obedient,

thrifty, brave, and reverent -- the theme, if you help other people,

if you're moral, if you're ethical, God is going to reward you at some

point during this life as well as the next life because it identified

that you are among the saints. And people envied what became, at the

end of the 19th century, known as the 400. They were seen as very

staunch, very strict, very moral individuals. We're talking about

people like Andrew Carnegie. We're talking about Standard Oil and of

course the Rockefeller family. I talked about the halfway doctrine,

that people were born in families of saints versus the families of

sinners, and therefore, by the end of the 19th century as it was

throughout much of the American history. In church you not only sang

songs to Christ, to God, you sang songs on behalf of work because you

worked hard. The working hard made some sense. Because if you were

uptight, you would not have these evil thoughts running through your

mind such as sex. You might have them, but you are too tired to

engage in immorality because you worked 24 hours a day. Well, with

lack of sleep, and so it helped purify your mind, keeping you distant

from people and keeping you away from sin. And certainly those kinds

of philosophies hung on in our society very heavily through to the

1960s.

Q Is that why the seven dwarfs in Snow White whistled while they

worked?

THE PROFESSOR: I never thought about it. It makes a lot of

sense. In the late 1960s we began to talk about the beginnings of a

leisure ethic, that the American society would be going into leisure

rather than heavy work because we didn't have enough work. It may

well have been an important element of it. I didn't think about it.

The night in shining armor comes through, but he's saving her because

she's moral, ethical, good. A lot of that comes out of northern

Europe and the European society. That's interesting.

In any case, with the counter revolution of the 60s, the hippies,

the yippees, part of their whole basis of looking unkept and acts of

even what the Jesus freaks that came through, copying the hippy but

not acting in a political sense because they were returning to the

spirited community of the early Christianity who was in a sense a

reaction to that quote/unquote uptight America with the anti-Puritan

theme, let it all hang out. We don't need to be kept in and bound by

that American Puritan sense. So yeah, there is a cultural impact that

can come from a certain religious philosophy as it interjects itself

into a society. And as I say, it doesn't matter dramatically whether

you're a Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Hindu, whatever you grow up in

some extent in that society and you pick up on the values that have

been transmitted for centuries in the history of the country. And as

I say, it has produced a productive economic system. And yes, there

are problems and there are problems with it, but that's, you know,

that's what the future will hold is another story. Yeah, I did want

to at least emphasize that element of Puritanism that comes from the

reformation and more directly from John Calvin and the sense of

predestination, that you were born a saint or a sinner rather than

perhaps the Lutheran free will or the Catholic salivation through the

sacraments, doing good works and good deeds. So let's return to "here

I stand", 1521, where Luther stands firm and as we identify, we get

the push in northern Europe for a Lutheran society and immediately we

find a war breaking out between the defender of the faith, the holy

Roman emperor, Charles the fifth, supporting the Pope against the

heretic, Martin Luther himself, and it is what we refer to as the

counter reformation.

I should note that during this period, once you opened the door

to reform and once reformists groups can survive, you're going to find

even more left revolutionary action. And so other groups come on the

scenes who were even too radical for even Martin Luther. Among those

are the Ana Baptists who preach such things as divorce and free sex.

Again, some things that simply are not acceptable. And then there are

the groups that go forth and begin to burn the Catholic churches and

breaking into property and attack the princes. And Luther actually

tells the princes who have supported him -- and this is where in part

he differs from Hus who, as I indicated, you saw in the video or DVD,

lost the support of his prince because he went too far pulling out the

tithing, the indulgences that the prince was getting from him. Martin

Luther sticks with the princes and tells the princes to hunt these

princes who are rebelling in his name down with dogs, that they are

not his people. And so to aid the princes again, not just against

Catholic, he begins perhaps a tradition in Germany tremendous amount

of anti Semitic writing. The Jews are blamed for the evils of the

world and for the monopoly of wealth. Again, they were the money

lenders because they were the only ones under the Catholic church

allowed to lend money. And so we get that feeling to, in Shakespeare,

of Shylock who demands the pound of flesh. And while the Jews are not

expelled directly from Germany, there is a closing down of the German

society for the Jews that had entered there in 1492.

Some of you are aware that when Ferdinand or Fernando and Isabel,

king and queen of Spain united the two sections of Spain that were

Christian, Castile and Argon, that controlled this part making a one

nation in their marriage in 1469 and the beginning of the Spanish

inquisition where everybody who was anti Catholic would be burned at

the stake, any heretics would be destroyed because one way to unify a

nation is to purify it in the sake of religion. And princes have used

religion to control nations for centuries if not even today. The fact

is that Spain, in 1492, destroyed the last Muslim stronghold in

southern Spain at Granada. Just as a sideline, I have a friend whose

kids are in my chess team who sadly don't go to the school anymore

because he put them into a Muslim school with the name Granada, so I

guess there's still some memory to it amongst the Muslims as the last

stronghold in Spain. At that point, the Jews and the Muslims were

expelled or given the option of conversion to Catholicism. By the

way, the Spanish inquisition could not try non-Catholics. Jews and

Muslims were not tried by the inquisition because they were not

Catholics. But those that had converted, what came known as the

conversos, were put on trial if they were found to have been violating

Catholic doctrine. And among of course the Jews and Muslims who

converted, many of them maintained their faith secretly. One of the

weird practices of converso Jews who maintained Judaism in Spain was a

ritual circumcision. Instead of circumcising the normal site for

circumcision based on the covenant between Abraham and God, they began

to circumcise their shoulders so they would not be -- I know -- make a

cut. It was a ritual circumcision so that they would maintain their

Jewish practices in secret. And many of them went off to other areas

with the Spanish and began picking up on some of those in South

America and Mexico some of their older traditions.

In fact, just as a sideline taking us into the age of

exploration, which of course is the same period of time basically

we're talking about, it is in 1492 that Columbus sails the blue. And

part of the reason that he was able to set forth was because of the

reconquest of Spain by Christians and expulsion of Jews and Muslims.

He actually had been denied the money and support by Isabel and was

leaving Spain -- he had already tried to Portugal and had gone England

and had been denied his requests. I'll talk at more about this later

maybe. And he was called back and told that he was able to raise

funds now and he would receive the title of viceroy of the seas in the

areas where he got. He would be given control over those lands in

return for the money being sent to Spain and the recognition and

control by recognition of the queen and king of Spain. Translation,

Isabel did not sell her jewels to fund the expedition. He gave him

his blessing. Most of which came from the pinzons which were from a

very long line of converted Jews. And many of the individuals that

came aboard his ship, in fact the vast majority, were of converted

Jewish families that were still living in Spain. In fact, the

individual who was given credit for finding land in the Bahamas,

apparently or whatever it was but they think it may have been the

Bahamas, first sighting it from the crows nest up on top of the mast,

later went to South America where apparently he brought his family and

continued or went back to practicing Judaism there. So the question

arose, why was Columbus so tied to the Jewish community including the

queen's confessor, Torquemada?

A Torquemada.

THE PROFESSOR: How do you spell it; do you know?

A No. It's in The History of the World though.

THE PROFESSOR: I'm guessing. Torquemada was also from a long

line of converted Jews. When I say that we're talking 100 years, in

1395 there had also been an influx of Jews and Muslims from Spain as

in the northern part. Most of the Jews at that point went to Germany

and north Italy. Some began a flux into the Muslims areas where we

were actually welcome. The Muslims, even after the creation of

Palestine -- I'm sorry -- of Israel, had large communities of Jews who

were openly practicing as long as they paid their tax. There was not

that anti-Semitism that began with the reestablishment of Israel and

of course to Turkey as well, and some perhaps as far as Persia,

although there was a very large Jewish community coming into Persia

2,000 years ago at the time of Christ. And many of the Persian Jews

celebrate that period and that community is interesting because many

of them are involved in selling Persian rugs. What happened was that

from 1395, many of them converted to Catholicism as well. One of the

largest communities of Jews besides Holland and Amsterdam existed in

Genoa. Columbus is from Genoa. It was believed by a major Spanish

historian that Columbus was of converted Jewish background, and that's

why he took the phony name Christ the colonizer or Christopher Colon.

And how does he identify it? Columbus from Italy went off to Portugal

and then to the Canary islands which was under Portuguese control,

where he married a lived for a multiple of years, married to a

daughter of a governor of the Canary islands. And when Portugal

turned him down, telling him that he knew this world was round and

that he was off in miscalculations by 3,000 miles, the Portuguese not

wanting to admit that they may have traveled into that area and

certainly in the Cape Verde islands, bodies were floating up that were

strange. It could have different difference kinds of driftwood and

people perhaps there was some contact and trade. He went to Spain,

England and then to Spain, where he began to try and convince, as I

said, Isabel to aid and perhaps fund an expedition. There he wrote

many things. And apparently, according to the historian, the Spanish

historian whose name slips my mind right now, he made mistakes in his

writings that were in Italian, the writings in Portuguese, yet there

were few mistakes in his Spanish. His writings in Spanish apparently

were as accurate grammatically as the native speaker. And the feeling

is that he spoke Spanish better than he did Italian and better than he

did Portuguese because his parents and grandparents had continued to

use the Spanish from their native Spain after being expelled in 1395

as their native language. Now anybody would want to claim as Spain

was trying to do, that Columbus was originally Spanish, why they would

want to claim this individual who cited the prime directive by

interfering with in the cultures, who knows. The Italians love to

claim him. The Spanish love the claim him as their own.

Back to in a sense and then we'll pick up there. As I say, these

all tie together, the counter revolution. Basically what occurred now

was a greater consolidation of the Catholic faith now that it was

seriously be challenged a number of new orders religious orders

appeared amongst perhaps the most powerful. And most famous of these

orders that I think you know the name of most of them were the

Jesuits. The Jesuits were an order designed to bring people not only

back to the church, but organized as if it were a military force, as a

group similar to the knights templar in a crusade, to bring people to

the Catholic church. They became and to the Pope as an order to bring

people directly back to the respect for the Pope. The Jesuits began

the movement the preaching the action, not just in Spain and Portugal

and in Italy, but in other parts of the world. And perhaps one of the

more influenced areas that they were in was in Japan. They began an

organization for education. And as many of you know, some of the top

universities in the United States are Jesuit based upon their concern

for education. I believe Santa Clara is, the University of San

Francisco is part of that Jesuit faction. They started out,

interestingly, right wing going back to the Pope. Today the Jesuits

are more considered reformists and left wing and are often in conflict

with the more ultra conservative Catholic followers.

A Because I'm a Catholic, originally the church we go to is St.

Claires and it's Jesuit. And they're considered more the odd group of

priests.

THE PROFESSOR: The odd group?

A Yeah.

THE PROFESSOR: I guess that's one way of putting it.

A The ones I knew were actually quite funny to be around.

THE PROFESSOR: Well, they're intellectuals. They have to be

funny.

A They're quite smart.

THE PROFESSOR: Well, they're well trained and definitely

scholars.

The Jesuits become a very financial solid to the extent that they

became hated by those, the things of the Catholic nations because they

began to take control of the wealth. And they were very much involved

in colonization of the Americas as well. In 1755, many years later,

an earthquake broke out in Portugal. The Jesuits blamed it on

people's anti-Catholic anti-Pope stance, blamed it on their

immorality, and the prime minister of Portugal. The aid to the king,

a man named Pombal banned the Jesuits from South America and in

Portugal, condemned them in 1757. However, the reason underlying it

was that the Jesuits along the Portuguese control of the Amazon had

taken control of all basically what are we calling plantations that

were in the area. And his brother was trying to get in there

financially and could not because of Jesuit control. The Jesuits had

what we know as the seven missions in Paraguay and Uruguay and those

areas where they really took control of the indigenous people, and

some say used them as slaves. And they said, no, they were just

working in the eyes of God. And with that there was an attempt to get

rid of the Jesuits from those areas. So that the Jesuits were soon to

be banned and outlawed in both Portugal, Spain, Italy and other

countries. They later came back, and of course restore their strength

as an order, but that's a little sideline to perhaps the history of

the Jesuits.

In any case, the counter reformation broke out, battles between

Catholics and Protestants. And in 1545 the Pope called together a

council to deal with the threat of the heretics. It was called the

council of Trent. And that council actually met to deal with some of

these issues until 1563. And there they went forth to try and

reconcile, bring together Catholics and Protestants. It failed. And

of course part of the reason for the failure was that real politics

that meant power to the individual princes in Germany and elsewhere

and in northern Europe. But what might be called reform was

undertaken. Once again, the church outlawed nepotism and simony.

God, I don't know how much time it is church, outlawed it from the

19th century onward. Nepotism means bringing your own family into the

church, giving them the bishops, making them bishops or cardinals.

Simony was a practice of buying church offices; by giving money to the

church, you came a priest or a bishop and you were given territory.

And of course these were one of the elements of the church that was

condemned by Luther and others. The attempts were made to include

clerical immorality including not sanctioned marriages between clergy

certainly, clergy who had mistresses, I guess, that's the term we

would use.

There's an interesting little paragraph in the conquest of Mexico

written by Bernal Diaz who was there with Cortes about how one day the

priests were attempting to get the Indians would give up their

multiple wives. And one of the Indians said to one of the priests,

Why do we have to give up our wives; what about your wives? You've

got three of them. And the priest apparently said they're not my

wives. The these are my housekeepers. And then the Indian looked at

them according to Bernal Diaz, how come they bury your children? So

that sense of immorality that some saw within the church brought about

these demands and the prosecution of immorality again, we're going

through some so much that right now. It is not church doctrine, but

we have seen a different sense of immorality among priests small

numbers perhaps compared to the number of priests but certainly enough

jokes for Jay Leno and David Letterman dealing with pedophilic priests

with young boys or young girls, and of course large numbers of

lawsuits and financial settlements in the last few years as well.

The church with the help of the Jesuits encouraged from this

counsel of Trent education, education in Catholicism. And I they

created officially a papal inquisition as part of this reform

movement. As an arm of the counter reformation, not just in Spain

where it was to be developed later, but here -- I mean earlier -- but

here in the church directly to get rid of any heretics that were to be

found. And any religious fanatics were to be arrested imprisoned and

executed. As I identified, the church generally, in fact, never

really did the executions. They were turned over to the arm of the

church which of course was the secular, worldly governments. All of

this we actually had a change in the freedom of Europe. If anything,

the freedom of religion in Europe that had existed, at least the

ability of people to question areas of the church, to post

disagreements, were closed down. In Protestant Europe people were

eliminated for being Catholics and often executed as witches.

Thousands of people were killed for their religious faiths or

differences, Catholic against Protestant, Protestant against Catholic

and against Protestants. That sense of a unity of Europe was also

destroyed. That sense that we could now have one European Catholic

society, we now broke down into a society where the faiths were

determined according to the prince.

In 1555 we began the peace settlement. And out of that peace

settlement itself came the treaty of Augsburg, came the belief or the

agreement that the princes of the nations of northern Europe could

identify their religion as Catholic or Lutheran. So now you had the

prince determining the religion. And at that point, Charles the fifth

retired to a monastery in 1556 and was followed in his power and

control by his son Philip the second of Spain. And we'll perhaps talk

a little more about Philip later. In a sense, a short range outcome

of course was the violence and cruelty that broke out in Europe due to

the reformation. As I indicated, a sharp decline in the freedom of

thought, the loss of rational ideas, toleration was eliminated,

moderation destroyed, and the humanists of the renaissance in northern

Europe was displaced by extremists. There was tremendous

redistribution of property from the clergy to the -- and the word for

common people is laity, to the commoners, to capitalists, because much

of the land previously was under Catholic control and wealth that was

now described in the Protestant areas. And there was some

distribution in the Catholic areas for those who were perhaps seen as

Protestants. There was in a sense perhaps some might call it a

positive.

There was a tremendous increase in religious enthusiasm. The

state had emerged, but now there was a rebirth of religion in Europe

and Europe in a sense was Christianized but no longer unified as a

Catholic world but yet Christian. Long-range, there was a continued,

as I said, fragmentation in Europe now. A fragmentation continued in

Germany until the 1870s. A fragmentation of various nations that

still continues although somewhat moderated by the European union that

has accomplished. And there was now a challenge by other religions

even to Lutherism. And it forced the Lutherans into a strong alliance

with the state. And there was no sense, by the end of the 16th

century, of church/state separation as we begin to see finally

occurring with the American revolution. As I pointed out, Rome became

far more religious, far more rigid, for more reactionary and far more

dogmatic. The Pope now, what he said, had to go. And so that sense

that had developed perhaps in Europe from the end of the Roman empire

was there was a single faith, a single unit was, in a sense, destroyed

forever. Now we had a fragmentation of thought and territory. Okay.

We'll pick up on and continue with the age of exploration on

Wednesday.

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