Dogmas Secular and Sacred

Walking the Labyrinth-February 12, 2010—Few things provide me more fun and fascination than perusing an antique Martyrology. Martyrologies are collections of the lives of the saints, written to preserve the stories of those whose feasts are celebrated on the calendar of the Church year. The oldest surviving collections go back to the fourth century. The writing is stylized, and follows predictable patterns, but there are those occasional delights that jump from the page straight to the heart. Today is one such for me. St Luden was a medieval pilgrim, the son of a minor Scottish nobleman, who lived at the end of the twelfth century. He resolved to travel to Jerusalem to pray for his family and friends at the Holy Places, setting out in 1198, when he was 24 years old. Two years later he arrived at Jerusalem; he visited the Holy Sepulchre, walked the Via Dolorosa, bathed in the Jordan River, and prayed at the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth. Along the way, the young man kept a diary of his travels, thoughts and prayers. After almost a year in the Holy Land, he left for Scotland during the summer of 1201. Luden never returned home. While traveling through the Alsace border of eastern France, he got sick outside the small village of Nordhouse. On February 12, 1202, he sat under a nearby tree and died. When villagers approached him he had a large pouch at his side; they carried him to the parish priest who opened the pouch and found Luden’s diary. It began “I am Luden, the son of Hildebod, a Lord of Scotland. I have become a pilgrim for the love of God.” His diary revealed a profound piety and the local people began to speak of Luden as a saint. A chapel was built in his honor on the site his body was discovered; it was enlarged to a church in 1492, when his remains were formally enshrined in a tomb. The Ludenkirche is still there today. No big miracles, no great accomplishments in Luden’s life, but piety put to practice, walking the path of a pilgrim. For me at least, clumsily walking my labyrinthine path, Luden isn’t a bad saint to remember. He died on his route (as each of us will), but he arrived at his Goal.

Some people are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Two such unfortunates, joined only by today’s date and a mutuality of distresses, are Zahir ad-Din Toghtekin and Lorenzo Cardinal Campeggio. Toghtekin (known as “Dodeghin” in the French chronicles of the Crusades) by some accounts began his life as a Turkish slave about 1060. He rose through the ranks of the military and in 1092 came to the attention of the emir of Damascus, who put him in charge of his army. Toghtekin, though, had set his sights higher than mere military rank. Over the next several years, through scheming, bribery and murder, he made himself Lord of Damascus, marrying his predecessor’s widow. Before the end of the year his troubles began. The Great Army of Godfrey de Boullion, the leader of the First Crusade, appeared, unexpectedly, before the walls of Antioch. Toghtekin, who hadn’t even known there was such a thing as a Crusade, sent some men to drive them off. When they didn’t return, Toghtekin led a force of 500 against the invaders only to discover Godfrey was at the head of an army of 40,000. This was the first in a whole series of Very Unwelcome Events. For the next 31 years of his life, Toghtekin fought a losing war against the Crusaders, and when he wasn’t fighting them, he had to put down rebellions by his own vassals. In 1103, the Crusaders took Homs, in 1106 they captured Tripoli, a few years later Tyre fell. His empire crumbled around him. After the loss of the great commercial center of Tiberias in 1113, he made peace with the “Franks,” signing a treaty with Baldwin I, the King of Jerusalem and allying with the Crusaders against his fellow Muslims. He repented within a year and joined an army to drive out the Crusaders, but it was resoundingly defeated. Toghtekin participated in three more campaigns against the Franks but lost each one. He died on February 12, 1128, the treasury of Damascus depleted and his name in disrepute across Islam. Sometimes, it’s just better to “bloom where you are planted.”

Lorenzo Campeggio was born in Milan on February 12, 1471. He came from a well-to-do family, not noble but prosperous. In 1500 he took his doctorate in canon and civil law from the University of Bologna and immediately married. After his wife died giving birth to their sixth child in 1509, Pope Julius II (who in my mind will always look and sound like Rex Harrison in “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” rather than the old bearded man of Raphael’s portrait) convinced him to take up the life ecclesiastical. He quickly rose through the hierarchy, sent as papal legate to the Emperor Maximilian I in 1510, created Bishop of Feltre in 1512, in 1513 appointed papal legate to Milan. Pope Leo X made him a cardinal in 1517 and Maximilian immediately named him Cardinal-Protector of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1518 he was made papal legate to England, where he clashed with Cardinal Wolsey, jealous of the much-titled new arrival. In January, 1523 he was named Cardinal-Protector of England and the next year Bishop of Salisbury. Late the same year, the pope made him Bishop of Bologna. With his many positions, endowments and benefices, Campeggio was one of the best-connected (not to say richest) men in Europe. “What goes up,” the adage says, “must come down.” In 1527, when troops allied to Emperor Charles V sacked Rome (it’s always smart to pay the people with guns) Campeggio was left in charge of the city as the pope fled. The cardinal saw his estates destroyed, his fortune seized by the mob, his family scattered. In the midst of the disaster, King Henry VIII decided he could wait no longer to marry Anne Boleyn, and ordered Campeggio to return to England and see to it. Ever the diplomat, Campeggio tried to delay a decision, hoping one or more of the parties would die—or at least—change their mind. He stalled for three years, until an angry Henry took matters into his own hands (to see how successfully it all came out, look up “General Synod, Church of England” in this week’s newspapers). Campeggio returned to Rome, his policies in shambles—Henry had kicked him out of England, revoked his titles and—in what would become a Henrician habit—confiscated his incomes. He found both pope and emperor in a forgiving mood. The emperor gave him a nice castle in Germany and the pope made him Bishop of Huerca in Spain, Candia in Cyprus (he never had to visit either one) and he was given the income of Majorca—his son having been named bishop of the island but still too young to act in the office. Campeggio died quietly at home during the summer of 1538, his fortune re-established by both church and state. Both his sons, two of his brothers and one of his nephews became bishops of wealthy dioceses, thanks to his influence. In spite of the pious priests and reverend clergy you may know, Religion Can Pay.

Lady Jane Grey, “the Nine Day’s Queen,” was beheaded at the age of 16 on February 12, 1554. She never quite understood why.

The Reverend Doctor Cotton Mather, American Puritan and apologist for the Salem Witch Trials, was born on February 12, 1663. As a boy he attended Boston Latin School—where Meg teaches today!—and, following family tradition, he, like his father and grandfather before, became a Puritan clergyman. He was a prolific author (he wrote more than 400 books and pamphlets in his 65 years), who, in addition to worrying about witches, experimented with the hybridization of plants and was one of the first Americans to have his family inoculated against smallpox. Though Cotton wrote some very long books (the only one really read anymore is his Wonders of the Invisible World, written in 1693, wherein he describes and defends the Salem Trials), most people of his day knew him from what were then known as “Execution-Sermons.” These were short pamphlets recounting in lurid detail the crimes of those people executed—usually for murder—in Puritan New England. They were best-sellers in their day and Cotton mastered the form. Mather re-published a collection of his favorite Execution-Sermons in 1699 under the title Pillars of Salt. In 2008, The Library of America reprinted the entirety of Pillars of Salt in its retrospective two centuries of American True Crime writing. Cotton Mather—the literary progenitor of Dashiell Hammett?

On February 12, 1797, Franz Joseph Haydn, court composer for the noble Esterhazy family, introduced what he hoped would become the National Hymn of Austria. He’d lived for five years in England and was impressed with the English “national song”—“God Save the King.” Wanting to produce something similar for Austria, he wrote a tune for the words Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser (“God Save Emperor Francis”) for the birthday of Francis II, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. It is sometimes called the Kaiserhymne (“Emperor's Hymn”), though the name of the tune in most English-speaking hymnals is “Austria.” The English hymn opens with the words “Glorious Things of thee are spoken, Zion, City of our God.” The tune was also used, long after Haydn’s death, by German poet Hoffmann von Fallersleben in his Das Lied der Deutschen (1841). The opening words are “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles" and despite its tinny use in Germany during the 1930’s, it remains the German National Anthem today.

On February 12, 1809, two births of immense consequence for the century took place. In Hodgenville, Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln, future President of the United States was born in a log cabin; the same day, in Shrewsbury, England, in the mansion of Richard Darwin, his wife Susanna gave birth to their fifth child, Charles. In 1859 that same Charles published On the Origin of Species. There isn’t a lot I can tell you about either of these men you don’t already know—but I bet you didn’t know this: last year, on the bi-centennial of their natal day, Google designed a special logo to run on all its web-pages, celebrating Darwin Day (of which more later). They received so many complaints about the perceived slight to the Great Emancipator the logo came down and, if you look at today’s Google logo, you’ll find no sign of either nativity. Incidentally, Newsweek Magazine ran a special cover (see the illustration up and to the right) and story that day about the two men, asking which was more influential (Lincoln won). Letters over the next few weeks, however, indicated that many readers—or at least, lookers—thought the story was about which of the two could “take down” the other in a wrestling match. Now there's a historical question. Unsurprisingly, Abe won that one, too.

On February 12, 1878, Frederick W. Thayer, captain of the Harvard University Baseball Club, patented the baseball catcher’s mask. Later, he became a dentist. I know those two things have to be related.

On February 12, 1915, Lorne Greene (that’s Ben Cartwright to you and me) was born in Ottowa, Ontario to Russian Jewish immigrants (in those days he was Lyon Hyman Green). While studying chemical engineering, he took a job at the university radio station and enjoyed it so much he left school for a job with the Canadian Broadcasting Company. He was nicknamed “The Voice of Canada” by the mid-1930’s, but in the early days of World War II, as he delivered the somber news day after day, Canadians took to calling him “The Voice of Doom.” The Bonanza television program turned him into an icon of the Old West (I remember going to rodeos in my youth and seeing “Ben” and “Hoss” and “Little Joe” taking a quick ride around the ring, waving them hats, their pistols a-blazin’, and then later appearing to sign autographs. Don’t know where any of those old signed pictures are nowadays). Later in life, after Bonanza was off the air, Lorne recorded ten albums between 1960 through 1966—including Bonanza Ponderosa Party Time and Welcome to the Ponderosa. They make painful listening today—as they must have then to the impartial listener. Still, True Believers gave ole Ben six weeks at the top of America’s music charts in 1964 with “Ringo.” It tells the story of a lawman of the Old West and an outlaw named Ringo (loosely based on Johnny Ringo). Sometime, somebody in Hollywood, needs to tell actors that just because they can make money acting in front of a camera, that doesn't necessarily mean they are qualified to sing behind a microphone. Nor, for that matter, does it make them intelligent commentators on American politics.

Today is the 43rd day of the year. 322 days are left in 2010 (are you used to writing “2010” yet?). The ancient Romans dated today as ante diem idus Februarius. For Coptic Christians today is Amshir 5, 1726, the Coptic Martyrology lists "saints Anba Bishay of the Akhmim Monastery, and Anba Abanub, known as the owner of the Golden Fan." I have no idea what the “golden fan” is or was, but I’m determined to find out. When I do, I’ll let you in on it. The Congress of the United States has declared February 12 “National Jello Day” (hm-that’s not so inappropriate, when you think about it), and a number of groups across the globe—though not the U S Congress—have named today “Darwin Day.” I don’t have a thing against Darwin’s theories qua theories, except that many adherents seem to believe those who would question their unquestionable certainties are dangerous throwbacks to a Neanderthal past. Scientific inquiry ends where federal dollars begin.

Lent is upon us, and soon. Monday is “Clean Monday” in the Orthodox Churches, the first day of their Lenten observances. This coming Wednesday is “Ash Wednesday,” when Lent begins for Western Christians. Between now and then lies Shrove Tuesday, commonly called (by those who don’t know about Tuesday Shriving) Mardi Gras—Fat Tuesday. I hope your Tuesday is fun—I’m having pancakes and sausages to eat, watching Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and having a nice cup o’ bourbon—and your Wednesday is holy—I’m off to confession, laying aside my beloved Cicero for forty days and forty nights and wrasslin’ through the Gospel of Mark in Greek (with a fat lexicon by my side). Happy fasting.


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Many thanks to Steve Mitchell, who suggested I change the format of the first part of Labyrinthus so as to make it easier to read. Breaking the single run-on paragraph up, he suggested, makes each topic easier—and the whole more pleasant—to read. This week’s emails tell me several of you agree. Just don’t think I change easily. It took Steve, Barry, Tanya and Beata seven years—the time it took Jacob to labor for Rachel—before I’d agree to use a computer at all!


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I’ll say, right off the bat, I’m a believer in dogma. For years I taught Dogmatic Theology: I taught it, believed it, and liked it. Still do.

Dogma, the noun, dogmatic, the adjective, dogmatically, the adverb are negative words in our current vocabulary. They connote close-mindedness, ignorance and a self-satisfied, self-contained view of the world. A dogmatic person, by this account, suffers from an inability to distinguish between established facts and personal opinions. I’ve known a lot of people who fit this mold. Some are Christians, some atheists, some Jews, some Muslims, some are scientists: any religion—or lack of it, any point of view—can be forced into the mold.

Dogma wasn’t originally a bad word. It comes to us from the ancient Greeks and at first it meant “things so obviously true everybody accepts them,” and so a dogmatic statement would be something like: “the sky is blue” or “justice is better than injustice.” This actually is where Socrates got his start, where philosophy, as we know it, began. Socrates didn’t necessarily deny the daily dogmas of Greek life, but he did ask questions about them. “If justice is better than injustice,” he might ask, “how is it better? What do we mean when we say ‘justice?’ ” In its earliest form, then, dogma simply meant “the truths we all accept.” It wasn’t a particularly religious word.

Over time, dogma came to mean those particular tenets which distinguished one school of philosophy from another. What did a follower of Plato believe as distinct from a disciple of Epicurus? Those distinctions came to be called dogmas, “distinguishing opinions.” If you look up “dogma” in most dictionaries, that’s how it defines the word. Dogmas are the characteristic beliefs of one group or another. We’ve refined the word a bit since, and some of us (me included) distinguish between “dogmas”—“essential beliefs”—and “doctrines”—those beliefs which flow from dogmas. That’s best left to another discussion in another place. We can say that dogmas are “core beliefs.”

The important word here is “belief.”

When I tell you I believe something, I mean more than “I guess this might be so.” I mean, “this is true.” All of us have had the unpleasant discovery of realizing something we believed to be so wasn’t so. Sometimes we shrug it off, sometimes it brings us to a personal crisis. We don’t stop “believing” things when that happens, because “believing” is an essential part of us. I go to bed believing I’ll wake up in the morning, though someday I won’t. I believe the merchant will take my cash as good for my purchases (though someday he may not!); I believe the waitress will understand my language when I give her my order, it’s safe to believe my hair color will still be gray next week. These basic beliefs, these daily dogmas, help us move through our lives with order and continuity.

But, in the tradition of our western culture, dogma does imply more. It has become a religious word.

In fact, dogma can describe something intensely personal and liberating. When a Jew recites the Sh’ma, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One,” when a Christian says the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son our Lord…” and when a Muslim intones the shahadah, “There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is His Prophet,” all are speaking dogmatically. Each is saying “this I believe.” We are grounding ourselves in the reality of God, in His presence and Grace. This is no mere intellectual assent. It is prayer at its most fundamental level. We will disagree about the contents of these dogmatic statements: neither Jew nor Christian will accept the Muslim’s claims about Mohammed and both Jew and Muslim will reject the Trinitarian faith enshrined in the Apostles’ Creed (some “who profess and call themselves Christians” reject it too). Dogma lies at the heart of any religious belief. Without dogma you can still have a religion, but it will be entirely self-centered and ultimately self-absorbed (“I’m not very religious but I’m a very spiritual person” is another way of saying “I decide what’s true or false, right or wrong, good or bad, for me.” Try that line on the sufferers of Buchenwald).

I’m not a scientist or a climatologist. I have no empirical data to tell me whether the claims made by those who make dire predictions about “global warming” are true or not (I suspect though, some people this week may have thoughts of their own as they shovel their driveways or contemplate their snow-shrouded patio furniture). It's worth noting that a growing number of news organizations are carrying stories about the doctoring or suppression of any evidence that calls those New Dogmas into question. There’s an old Latin phrase worth remembering: Cui Bono? “Who benefits?” Detectives consider “who benefits” when they look at a crime, as do judges and lawyers and sometimes even reporters. We have it in the back of our minds when something happens we don’t like. We may not say. “Hmm-‘cui bono?’ ” But we do think “what are they getting out of that?” Perhaps the old phrase can even be applied to scientists.

When I was young, I was taught the basics of Darwin’s theory of evolution. I accepted it. I had the good fortune to have pastors and teachers who saw no conflict between scientific and religious truth. Evolution, as I understand it, makes sense to me. God can create using whatever methodologies and tools He wants (St Augustine’s famous phrase, “God still creates, He still redeems, He still sanctifies!” doesn’t seem too out-of-place in this context). If Darwin is correct—or as I imagine is more likely—partially correct, good for him and good for us. If he’s completely wrong, and all things sprung into immediate and full existence as many “creationists” seem to insist, that’s great too. One way or another, we were called into being. However, Dogmatic Darwinians not only demand that I assent to Darwin’s evolutionary theory but require me further to renounce the superstitious shackles of religion (look at any one of the many “Darwin Day” sites on the internet). Darwin didn’t seem to think that necessarily followed, but in our day, scientific dogma carries a political clout the Inquisition might envy. Scientists who question the many conclusions of Global Warming—shown at least sometimes to be nothing more than speculations, as in the case of the Not-Quite-Dead-Yet Himalayan glaciers—are refused seating at conferences or tenure in universities—hmm—cui bono? Is it a victory for Science—or for scientists seeking for more global warming research dollars? I dunno, I’m not a scientist but a lot of this scrambling around of researchers lately looks like something other than a dispassionate interest in facts.

Dogma is not about scientific facts but religious belief. Every time somebody trots out the latest research on the Shroud of Turin, I—inwardly at least—roll my eyes. Whether it’s a clever medieval forgery or a genuine relic of Christ’s Resurrection makes no difference to my belief in what happened on the first Easter Day. Science will not make me pray more, sin less or love my neighbor as myself. That’s not its job. The Church 500 years ago learned to its chagrin that throwing Galileo in the calaboose didn’t affect the movement of the planets. Dogma tells us who we are; science tells us where we are (or, in Galileo’s elegant phrase, “The Bible tells us how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens go”). Both things are good and important. When one trespasses into the expertise of the other—nobody benefits.

One of the reasons so many “people of faith” question evolution, global warming or the latest scientific orthodoxy is that some scientists-or people who are called scientists—speak with an increasingly dogmatic tone. It’s not simply that evolution seems best to match the world as it appears, but if we understand it properly, we can-and should-jettison any notion of God as a stale leftover from our Dark Past. It’s okay to question the most intimate details about a life of faith—(I was particularly irritated when I read several years back that somebody somewhere had done research on whether or not prayer “worked” by having one set of sick people prayed for while leaving a controlled set “unprayed” for) but evidently many of today's "scientists" don't want the details of their research examined too closely. Some of them expect us to accept what they tell us on faith-the same faith they mock if it's attached to religion.

“Faith” St Paul said, “is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

We chaff at the dogmatic claims of scientists not because they are about science but precisely because they are not. When they speak dogmatically they are intruding in the courtyard of faith. And why? Because dogma is religious, and-to speak bluntly-they are propounding a new religion, even if they don’t know it. Their new dogma replaces the God Who speaks to the individual hearts of men and women with impersonal forces which we can harness and ultimately control. The ancient Greeks knew better. One of their words—even older than dogma—is hubris, "over-reaching pride."

I’m a believer in dogma, but it matters very much which dogmas you believe.