Divine Justice

I have rarely enjoyed an article more from
any source. Thankyou for an entertaining and educational piece.

What was the old advertising slogan? You don’t have to be Jewish to eat Levy’s Rye Bread. Here’s a corollary. You don’t have
to be a converso to think like one. Or maybe we’re all conversos in our own way.

Isn’t it Barrabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. Who’s Barnabas?

But a wonderfully thoughtful and provocative article.

Interesting article. Just wondering if you were aware that a nineteenth-century version of the story–Don Juan Tenorio, by Spanish poet and playwright José Zorrilla–is traditionally performed throughout Spain on (or around) November 1 (All Saints’ Day).

Two things:

1. It strikes me that the statue who drags Giovanni to hell is a variation on the golem of medieval Jewish legend.

2. I think you incorrectly characterize Don Juan as “devout.” To his contemporaries, his theology would have sounded a lot more like Protestant extremism than like orthodoxy. I imagine that — whatever his intent — Tirso would have been read by his contemporaries (and the Inquisition) as showing the logical real-world outworking of Protestant theology. There is a reason Protestants have historically condemned Catholicism’s “Jewish” emphasis on right behavior, and its willingness to use civil coercion to force such behavior.

I am not sure this article has any coherent point to make, other than to showcase the writer’s hostility to Christianity and especially to the European peoples. Goldman is ignorant of Christian theology, and the caricature presented here is on the same level as a Christian claiming that Judaism allows people to be evil by affording them loopholes: legalistic casuistry. See Merchant of Venice….

What’s the point of this article anyway? That law-based theologies like Old Testament Judaism, Talmudic Judaism, or Islam, are any better at punishing evil-doers than traditional Christianity was, or even than modern liberalism is? That they are less “sociopathic”? Are Islamic or Jewish societies so much more just than European Christian or modern liberal society? Where is the evidence for this? Do we know from experience that Jews, even Orthodox Jews, are more moral and just than traditional Christians? Is medieval Jewish Spain superior to medieval Venice or to modern Denmark in humanity, lawfulness, and justice? To address a claim Goldman explicitly makes, I ask, how are European leaders of the 16th-19th centuries any more “sociopathic” than the leaders of colonial America or modern or ancient Israel, or than legalistic Muslim or Jewish Spain?

The article really makes no sense because evil exists in all societies, it will never be “gotten rid of”; but Christian society was and is actually pretty good at punishing evil, and pretty law-abiding compared to others. As is the modern liberal state. This article is just a vehicle for anti-European and anti-Christian hostility. This writer often expresses his racial hatred of Europeans in these veiled ways.

Can you imagine if a Christian mag had published a similar criticism of Jewish theology by the way? Goldman knows very well that a traditional Christian would be excoriated if he tried to publish a Christian criticism of Judaism in, say First Things, where he is given space to write. This is nothing but vulgar shamelessness.

I saw the Metropolitan Opera production via HD on Oct. 29. This essay gives me something new to think about in reflecting on the opera.

To be clear: I am reporting Tirso’s (and by implication Da Ponte’s) views and noting their consistency with a classical Jewish critique of Catholic soteriology; I am not making theological assertions of my own. As for Ferdinand’s objection: I first read the quotation that I used from Joseph Dov Soloveitchik in First Things, in a review we published of his book “From There You Shall Seek.” Exactly this critique appeared in FT, while I was an editor there. In addition: the Calvinist critique runs parallel to the Jewish critique. The issue to be addressed is whether I misrepresented Tirso de Molina, de Rojas, da Ponte and others.

Conversos also tend to take a rather dark view of things; I am thinking not just of de Rojas and Tirso, but also of Heinrich Heine (in particular “Atta Troll”).

I also wanted to point out to Ferdinand that First Things linked to the essay:
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/11/01/first-links-11-01-11/

And I might add, in response to Ferdinand, that the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648 really was a hideous episode in human history, in which two-fifths of the people of central Europe died, while the population of Castile declined by about a quarter and the Spanish Empire was ruined. So, yes: the density of sociopaths in power at the time Tirso wrote El Burlador really was something out of the ordinary.
I certainly make no claim that Jews in general are better people than Christians. But what separates Jews and Christians is a view of the best way to adhere to God’s will. After two thousand years of being told that Halakha is outmoded and superseded, it is reasonable for us to point out that questions can be raised about the efficacy of the alternative.

Even were it inarguably true that Tirso’s intent was to write an anti-Christian play that at bottom was a “Jewish practical joke of cosmic malevolence,” no such intent played any part in the minds of either da Ponte or Mozart in the creation of _Don Giovanni_. They in fact went to curious lengths to keep the opera free of any Christian theological references whatsoever, and, needless to say, there’s not so much as a hint of anything Jewish. I make the former clear in a piece I wrote in 2005 titled “Giovanni And The Stone Guest” which piece can be read at the following URL:

http://www.soundsandfury.com/soundsandfury/2005/07/giovanni_and_th.html

That objection being lodged and notwithstanding, I found your piece an interesting and educational read and am glad to have had the opportunity to read it.

–
ACD

Ethan C., the founding of the United States of America was a Christian response to the failure of European civilization–a direct an immediate one, for the Pilgrim Fathers sailed for America in 1620 in the 2nd year of the 30 Years War, anticipating a Spanish invasion of the Netherlands (I tell the story in my new book “How Civilizations Die”). America is a Christian nation, but one founded by Christians drawn to Jewish principles rather than (as in the case of the Spanish) hostile to them. Evidently you missed my point about Calvin’s corrective. The Catholic Church today is the Church of Henri de Lubac and Joseph Ratzinger, not Torquemada; but such men came too late for Europe. For additional background see my essay on the Spanish Inquisition:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FF22Aa01.html

Sure, David, but my general point is that just because Don Juan is a tragicomic critique of a certain Christian heresy, that doesn’t mean that it’s a Jewish critique that goes to the heart of Christianity — not even medieval European Christianity.

I’m a Reformed-ish Protestant myself, but you don’t have to be Calvinist to think Don Juan’s idea of forgiveness is way off. Like I said, Dante was saying the exact same thing in Italy 400 years earlier.

But even if you’re right about Da Ponte’s hidden message, the obvious rejoinder is to ask how well the Law worked for the Hebrews in keeping down the sociopaths.

A cursory reading of the RC Cathechism will convince you:

a) That there is plenty of rules and commandments, and that in fact, in no way God’s mercy detracts from his justice.

b) That somebody who refuses to repent because he thinks he can do it later is NOT justified, and that an insincere confession does not bring any absolution.

You should also reflects about Jesus’s comments that “those who love me are those who keep my commandments” and “I did not come to take one iota out of the law and the prophets” and that we must be “perfect.”

The list could go on and on…

Mr. Lancelotti, you miss the paradox: Juan refuses to make an insincere confession, but fully intends to make a sincere confession at some future date. And there is nothing to prevent him from doing so. Tirso’s Juan is not a heretic, much less an atheist; he sincerely plans to repent sincerely, but sometime later. In Tirso’s “El Condenado por Desconfiado,” a pious hermit is damned because he does not believe that repentance is available at any moment (while a bandit is saved who repents at the last moment). This should make clear that in Tirso’s framework, Juan’s belief in repentance is itself a kind of justification! (See Henry Sullivan’s book “Tirso de Molina and the drama of the Counterreformation”). My editors wanted to keep the essay to readable length, but I reviewed the academic literature on the subject before drawing my conclusions.
And yes, theological paradox does not have to be Jewish, as Ethan C. observes (Bunuel’s “Voi Lactee” is full of such jokes and there is nothing Jewish about it, for example). The special circumstances of Tirso, though, persuade me beyond a reasonable doubt that a Jewish motivation is present.

Mr. Goldman:

I noticed the formal paradox but, in all honesty, I could not understand how you can think that his later confession could ever count as “sincere.”

You seem to ascribe to Christianity as a whole a somewhat “Calvinist” (in the sense of “juridical”) soteriology. Catholics believe that there is such a thing as “spiritual health” which can be irremediably damaged by our choices and cannot be repaired by playing formal tricks such as conjuring up a dubious “sincere” confession.

Like other commenters, the essay gave me the impression that you are not only expressing a conjecture about Tirso, but that by and large you share in his diagnosis about the historical trajectory of Christianity. Is that the case?

Mr. Lancellotti,
America is a Christian nation, indeed the only industrial nation which still can be called Christian; and American (or at least Anglo-Saxon) Christian denominations are spreading very quickly through the world. Pentacostalism is the world’s fastest-growing denomination. The Christianity of Richelieu and Olivares is dead in Europe; the Christianity of the American founders which was historically Calvinist (from the Puritans to Lincoln, at least) remains a success. I am quite optimistic about Christianity. And I am also a great admirer of Benedict XVI about whom I have written extensively, and of the Ressourcement movement in general (although Hans Urs v. Balthasar would not like my take on Mozart!). Vatican II corrected many flaws in the Church, not least of which was the relationship with the Jews; another is the abandonment of earthly power. So I am optimistic about the Catholic Church as well, in the same way that Benedict is (the RCC will survive as a smaller entity).

Mr. Goldman:

thank you for the clarification. I am certainly not interested in defending the “Christianity of Richelieu and Olivares,” if it ever existed. I am also not sure that the source of the problems of early modern Christianity was “dependence on conscience.” If anything it was the opposite: a moralistic and legalistic reduction of the Christian experience, shaped by the nominalistic theology of the late Middle Ages. I suppose your thesis could be reformulated as saying that Tirso’s Don Juan is a precursor of Hazard’s “crisis of the European conscience.” Whether the Jewish element plays a role, though, remains speculative.

Goldman, would First Things ever have a traditional Catholic writer publish a criticism of Jewish theology along the lines of your criticism of Christian theology here? For example, a reading of The Merchant of Venice that is parallel to your reading of Don Giovanni? We both know what the answer to that is.

The truth is that, as I said in my first post, the criticism of Christian theology presented here is a caricature, and intellectually equivalent to the traditional Christian charge that Judaism is hypocritical because it allows evil men to find justification for their behavior through legalistic casuistry, i.e., finding loopholes, and thereby going around the spirit of the law. I think that is a surer recipe for encouraging sociopathy than the Christian teachings of mercy, absolution, etc.;

You keep on harping on the evils of Richelieu but I ask you if his evils are not matched by the evils of other statesmen of various other religions, including legalistic Islam. Because if this is the case, your broader argument is quite meaningless. Maybe you are saying this was Tirso’s argument, and his perception of the Europe of his time. It is possible, then, that Tirso was a man of narrow intellectual horizons, and not well read in history or theology, and that his views may easily be dismissed. Obviously you don’t think that’s the case though, so you’d have to make his case for him.

Perhaps Jewish-Christian hostility in Spain had something to do with the role Jews had in Muslim Spain? I don’t know…just a guess. Maybe it was not a theological issue but a matter of political hostility. Is your own hostility to modern Swedes and WASPs really theological?

Anyway I read some of your other articles and the general meaning is always the same, you seem to be motivated by feelings of revenge and racial animus against the European peoples, but that’s a longer discussion. I wouldn’t have bothered to say anything here if it weren’t that I’ve seen you do this before.

“I agree with Franz Rosenzweig that Christianity succeeds to the extent that it explicitly and consciously recognizes its Jewish foundation. A Christianity that persecutes the Jews must die, for it cannot be true to itself. That is to say, Christianity always must “Judaize” to some extent to succeed. The Calvinists did so explicitly, the American founders extravagantly. Now there is a Pope who reads the Gospels as Hebrew documents, as he made clear in his two-volume book “Jesus of Nazareth.” That is quite a change from the Spain of 1630.”

The foundation of Christianity is arguably the Old Testament, although I would argue that the ethical core of Christianity is quite opposed to the Old Testament, and comes from elsewhere. Even if one concedes that the foundation of Christianity is the Old Testament, this does not mean that its roots are “Jewish” in the sense you mean or that it must have a good relationship with modern Jews. Modern Jews follow Talmud, not the Old Testament, and rabbinical Judaism is not the faith of the Old Testament. Traditional Christians have always believed themselves to be the true Israel, and modern “Jews” to be impostors. See Jesus’ criticism of the Pharisees. The Vatican today can’t maintain its traditional position for political reasons, but this is a sign of its weakness, not its return to any genuine roots. The idea that modern Christianity comes out of Talmudic teachings is historically spurious but you keep bringing it up because you know PC people won’t challenge you.

Your concern isn’t Christianity anyway. That’s a proxy for your racial animus against Europeans.

Ferdinand,
You show your true colors by calling modern Jews “imposters” and denouncing the Vatican for abandoning its traditional position. If I am an imposter, why bandy words with me? And since you call me an imposter, this is my last communication with you. You may not be aware (as anyone who has read a bit about the Reformation does) that Luther, Calvin and the reformers knew the Talmud, and often cited rabbinic interpretations of the next. If you read Eric Nelson’s recent book “The Hebrew Republic,” you will note that John Milton quoted the Talmud in interpreting the Bible to reject monarchy.
And where did I display a “racial animus” towards Europeans? Some of my best friends are Europeans.

“here I would agree with Mr Goldman, because the core of Christianity is not “ethical.” It is the revelation of God in the person of a Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, who claimed to be fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel. There is no way around that. Many years ago Pope Pius XI famously said that “we are all spiritual semites” and this remains true whatever we may think of the theological status of that fraction of the Jewish people who rejected Jesus’s claims.”

Lancellotti, modern Jews follow Talmud, not OT. See Matthew 15:6 and Mark 7:13 for what Jesus says RE the rabbis’ (Pharisees’) view of law. My point was similar to yours, traditional Christians have always believed themselves to be the true Israel, BUT they have never for once thought that the rabbinic Jews in their midst were rightful descendants of the OT or “elder brothers” or this other kind of historical nonsense that is peddled now for political reasons. “Judeo-Christianity” is a historical fabrication of the 20th century. And Goldman is using this doctrine as a means of slandering Europeans and those of European descent as cruel, sociopathic “pagans” (his code word in his other articles), who do not deserve to have their own nations, as you see him admit in a veiled way from his joke above in the reply to me.

In fine, he is driven by feelings of revenge and of envy over the achievements of European culture and his entire body of articles on these matters is an attempt to convince himself, and others, that Europe’s achievements are really because it was trying to be Jewish, not only by following the OT, but by trying to emulate actual rabbinic Jews. Tirso, Mendelssohn, etc., and other middling characters thus become the fountains of culture in his mind. The center of European civilization, you see, must have been somewhere outside of Minsk where Goldman’s ancestors lived selling vodka to peasants. Newton consulted rabbis who swung chickens over their heads before proceeding with his inquiries, etc., etc.

Revenge and envy? I, who have published both learned and popular articles on the great achievements of Christian musical culture? e.g.,
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/10/sacred-music-sacred-time
Ignoramuses like Ferdinand, who do not know the first thing about Europe’s cultural heritage, rage about the Jews. No wonder Europe is in trouble.

You hate and fear Europeans, while admiring their past achievements. So you try to separate the latter from the former. What you are talking about is European musical culture, not “Christian” musical culture. Nestorian Christians weren’t composing that stuff; Mizrahi Jews didn’t have a “Mendelssohn”; he existed because he lived among civilized Europeans, not vice versa. Centuries of Christianity among various non-European peoples of the world somehow hasn’t raised their IQ and it didn’t make them discover the laws of physics, compose symphonies, become da Vinci, discover continents, go to the moon. Europeans were doing this stuff because it’s who they are for reasons that have nothing to do with Jews or with the OT. You need to come to terms with the fact that the cultural and scientific achievements you respect are the work of European races, not of Jews, and not of Christianity. You are engaged in an absurd project to “prove” that it was really second-rate writers like Tirso that were behind European cultural achievements. This is driven by envy and nothing more.

By the way I am of Jewish blood myself, though I have renounced this false religion and also the parochial tribalism that you embrace–and not for Christianity, an Oriental superstition. I’m not raging against the Jews, I’m tired of your racial hostility and envy against Europeans, including white Americans. They’re so nice and brainwashed now that they won’t defend themselves against this slander, so I’ll do it for them. Look to Yemeni Jews to see what we’d be..

What’s going on here is simple, it’s mainly Ostjude Americans from rude beginnings who came into some money and now want to give themselves a noble pedigree to go with it. “We was kings once,” etc. For some, it’s pretending that golem stories and the whole fetid shtetl world is something to be proud of. For you, it’s the rather more ridiculous pretense that Schumann had to consult the rabbi of Bialystok (or “Tirso”) before composing a symphony.

Simply a thank you for a most interesting article, and set of exchanges which followed. What jolly good fun to consider such perspectives and possiblities through the lenses of decent scholarship. Our world needs more of this. Was not Mozart fortunate to have had this libretto? Was not da Ponte fortunate to have had Mozart? Are we not fortunate to have them both so many generations later? We need the stories, and we need their retelling in so many ways. Without the Western canon of arts and literature, the world would be a far more impoverished planet.

Your quote from another article, “Music cannot represent eternity—no human artifice can—but it can direct the mind’s ear to the border line at which eternity breaks into temporality” needs be learned by many musicians. Persevere and prosper, sir.

“And where did I display a “racial animus” towards Europeans? Some of my best friends are Europeans.”
–David P. Goldman

OK everyone…do you understand why Goldman/”Spengler” is making this little joke? He thought it would be just between me and him, but it’s not hard to figure out.

When Goldman uses “pagan” in his articles he means racial Europeans. His conception of Judaism is entirely racial, but he thinks that whites aren’t entitled to similar national or tribal loyalties. “Christianity” and the Noahide crap he peddles are meant to replace that.

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 Actually, Spengler very much believes that indigenous Europeans have a right to nation states. You’ve never read him.