"Thou shalt burn forever, and send forth smoke and stench."

            Assume in this assignment the identity of a humanist scholar from the Renaissance who is also a monk/nun currently residing in the city of Rotterdam, in the area of Europe today known as Amsterdam.  You spend your days writing, performing experiments, and pouring over recently discovered ancient Greek and Roman texts; in particular, you have discovered certain supposedly “lost” writings by the Roman physician Galen promulgating that blood circulated through the body in a closed system, and you have sought to take these ideas and conclusions to deeper levels.  You are in constant communication with other scholars of similar thinking throughout Europe.

            Besides being a scientist and historian, you have gained a reputation for being a humorous poet and author of a satirical novella about society and authority named In Praise of the Scepter and the Cross.  You were raised on a steady diet of Petrarch and Boccaccio and saw them as role models in your youth; more recently, you have been deeply affected by studying the new art and architecture in visits to Venice, Florence, and the Vatican City in Rome.

            You received a letter warning you to cease your studies and retain your scholarly curiosity within certain bounds.  Your assignment is to write a cogent and powerful defense not only of your own studies but those of the Renaissance humanists and the work of other artists in general.  Use the information in your notes, your textbook (especially pgs. 315-323 and pgs. 330-333), and (most importantly) what you remember from class discussions to prepare for this essay which will need be persuasive and tightly reasoned.  Reach back to what we have learned about the fall of Rome, rise of Christianity, St. Augustine and the City of Man vs. the City of God, feudalism, the differing interpretations of worship by Abbot Suger and Bernard of Clairvaux, the ascent of Italian city-states, as well as Renaissance humanism, individualism, and art.  Make sure you make liberal use of direct quotations to support your argument.  (Recommended  are:  Petrarch, Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Cardinal Bessarion, Jesus, the Bible, and Rabbis Akiba, Hillel and Maimonedes).  You will have 80 minutes to write this letter in class next Wednesday on June 7, 2000.  This assignment will be worth 200 points.

           Good luck!



6 June, in the year of our Lord 1511

            Dear Brother/Sister X,

            It has come to my attention that you have been performing studies on the human body and have sought to spread your ideas generally throughout Christian Europe.  It is said you have chanced upon the writings of a pagan who claimed the blood circulates through the body by its own motion, as pumped by a bodily organ, and is not moved principally by the will of God.  They say you are writing to others about your research, observations, and conclusions.  Many have brought to me their objections to your work and writings, as they have contradicted certain teachings of the Church and gone beyond the bound of that which is proper to man.  In your pride and vanity, you are putting your soul in danger and the stability of our Church at risk.  This cannot continue.  I write to admonish you, as befitting one Christian who worries for the eternal soul of another and esteems the edifice of the Holy Church eternal and triumphant.  Beware of the consequences of that which you do!

            Through the many dark, difficult centuries since the fall of the old Roman Empire the Church has been the rock upon which Europe has remained tethered: we and our order have survived invasions by the barbarians from the north and the infidels from the south, as well as the Viking war parties that have sailed down the rivers in search of plunder.  When men and women were poor, scared, and hungry, we helped organized them into functioning feudal communities that protected them and we also provided guidance and succor for their souls in our teachings.  Amid the agitations of the world, the Church remained unmoved; the waves could not shake her. While around her everything was in a horrible chaos, she offered to all the shipwrecked a tranquil port where they could find safety.  This we have done, and nobody else.  We kept the Word of God alive as the cities crumbled and the libraries burned to the ground; as the darkness of war and destruction reached to the corners of Europe, we attended to the precarious light of learning and nursed it in remote monasteries where we patiently and lovingly copied and illustrated parchments.  And through the efforts and leadership of the Church we have over many centuries re-captured in Europe part of the stability and order of the old Roman Empire; there is more wealth and peace today in our lands than any of us can ever remember there having been since Alaric and the Visigoths sacked Rome more than ten centuries ago.  This we have done, and nobody else.  “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” saith the Lord, and with His favor we are from being a tiny, despised sect in a vast empire come to bring forth the good news of eternal truth to the many: the Word is made manifest and reigns triumphant with the help and guidance of the Apostolic See in these kingdoms we have built in Europe: we are almost all of us Christians now whose souls travel through the veil of this world towards the bliss of everlasting life by belief in God, the performance of good works, and obedience to teachings and rules of the Church.  This that we have done is no small achievement.

            But let me return to your case generally, and in particular that occupation a righteous Christian scholar brings to the community.  The only true wealth a Christian enjoys is the observation of the Rule: prayer, work and study.  But of our work, the work of the Church, and in particular your work as a good Christian and a scholar -- indeed the substance of this work! -- is study, and the preservation of knowledge.  Preservation and not a search for truth, because the property of knowledge is a divine thing, in that it is complete in of as itself and has been defined since the beginning, in the perfection of the Word which reveals itself to itself.  Human history proceeds in a straight line from the creation in Genesis to the imminent return of Christ triumphant, who will appear seated on a cloud to judge the quick and the dead.  I am He who is, said the God of the Jews.  I am the way, the truth, and the life, said our Lord.  There you have it: knowledge is nothing but the awed comment on these two truths.  Everything else that has been said was uttered by the prophets and by the evangelists, by the fathers and doctors of the Church, to make these two sayings clearer.  And sometimes an appropriate comment came also from the pagans, who were ignorant of them, and their words have been taken into the Christian tradition.  But beyond that there is nothing further to see.  There is only to continue meditation, to gloss, preserve.  This is and only this should be the goal and occupation of the human mind.  There is nothing else.

            But you and certain others are reaching beyond what is fitting to man.  For some time now the serpent of pride has lay coiled in Europe; and you and the other “humanists” are that serpent’s poison which threatens all we have worked to build.  In your recent studies of history and ancient learning, you have moved beyond that which is proper to the righteous Christian community and its sacred mission to work for the salvation of souls.  Writing in the vulgar vernacular of the cities rather than in the scholarly Latin of the learned, you dare to write obscenities that mock the Church and make light of its works!  In the immodest paintings and sculptures of others which you have praised, and in your own mocking book and scurrilous poetry, you and these other “humanists” act as tempters and seducers.  You seek to highlight and make beautiful the ugly sinfulness of fallen humanity rather than bring the heavenly and the divine down to this unworthy earth.  Look at how a painting -- the work of a man, often the image of a human being -- is worshipped and deified by the ignorant and the vain in the streets today.  You would try to create graven images that approximate real life -- seeking to usurp the act of creation which is proper only to the Lord!  But the Lord commands us: “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.”  You also praise the construction of public buildings and their adornment with artifacts whose genius does only attest to overweening pride and vanity.  As in the Tower of Babel, you would seek to know beyond what God has deemed proper!  Sinners who would reach towards heaven!  Men who would be gods!  You would bring His wrath down upon all of us!  “And now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do.”  It is also written, “For the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” I apologize for my anger, but you have given me reason.  Anger is found in the divine character, as it is always found in any strong human character.  God seeks our salvation through the covenant He made with man.  His wrath comes upon us when the conditions under which He alone can work out that salvation are infringed, and His purpose of mercy is imperiled. 

            Sir, your lust for knowledge, as evidenced in your research of pagan texts and study of the human corpus and public opinions on books and art, and in the fame you think it brings you, is no different than another’s mortal sin in lusting after the flesh or yearning for earthly riches.  A lust for knowledge and learning is, after all, still a lust which leads one to wander from the light of righteous belief, obedience, and salvation towards the darkness of sin and death.  Be under no illusions: the earthly City of Man in the guise of the Roman Empire collapsed precisely because it was founded on the immaterial shadows of this transient world and not on the Truth of His Eternal Kingdom which lasts forever!  Power, glory, vanity, pride, lust, ambition -- for all of these sins God suffered the pagans to be vanquished by us Christians!  Now you would look back to these pagans and bring back their corrupt world of vice, vexation, and error!  A new age of darkness and misery will be the result, sooner or later.  You seek knowledge as others, more pure in heart, seek faith.  You are in error, having strayed from the path of righteousness.  To believe oneself, as children do, to be the center of all things is childish; but to presume to be able to comprehend by human reason the entirety of God and His creations is to be not only childish but dangerous.

The doctrine of a true Christian does not originate from the elaborate disquisitions of intellectuals, nor do they follow, as many in the past did, philosophical systems which are the fruit of human thinking.  A true Christian desires to know God and the soul.  Nothing more?  Nothing whatever.  "They are in the flesh, but do not live according to the flesh," says the Bible.  In the way we Christians are in the world, so the soul is in the body; as the soul lives in the body but is not of the body, so we live in the world but are not of the world.  What makes the heart of a righteous Christian heavy?  The fact that he is a pilgrim, and longs for his country, the Kingdom of God.  We dwell on earth, but are citizens of heaven.  We live amidst the natural sin and filth of this corrupted world, awaiting the perfection and incorruptibility of heaven.  Why then devote a life to writing books of childish verse and satires?  Why study the flesh and the stars, when they mean nothing?  Give up your school of Satan.  The Cherubim and Seraphim desired to raise themselves unto the level of God, and they were thrown down from heaven to burn forever in the fiery lakes of hell by Him.

            There are limits beyond which God does not smile but punishes.  The Lord punishes and continues to punish such pride that does not humble itself, and the Lord has no difficulty in finding, always and still, thanks to our fragility, the instruments of His vengeance.  You who seek to know God’s secrets in the body and substances of the earth!  You who are puffed up, and are not in the place God has accorded you!  Beware of what knowledge you might unearth, that you might awaken ravenous monsters over whom you have no control!  Break not the rightful bounds of knowledge God and the Church have erected and drink not from impure, dangerous springs: the ways and lures of the Evil One are many, and legion is the error committed by sinful, weak mankind in the name of truth and searching for the truth.  Presumptuous sinner that you are, make not so much study and care of this vile bit of dust and mud where you today and tomorrow live out your death but focus rather your energies and reflection on the eternal life which awaits you with your Heavenly Father.  This is the proper Christian ethic with which to live, work, and die, as all else is tumult and confusion; and you shall be judged, make no doubt about it -- all else is vanity and a vexation of spirit from which nothing good will emerge.  What gain you to earn fame and glory in this world, if you lose your soul in the next?  We the wise who are called upon to serve as the Lord’s earthly shepherds must in the eyes of the simple remain shining examples.  We must be beyond reproach, both in our theology and in our lives; we must be correct in belief as well as in action.

            The Church has not been ignorant of you and the others -- supported and sheltered for some time now by certain impious and prideful bankers and merchants and princes made rich and powerful for the moment by trade and commerce -- who have sought to undermine the stability of all that we have built up and sacrificed for over centuries.  When the existence of the Church is threatened, she is released from the commandments of morality. With unity as the end, the use of every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, prison, and death. For all order is for the sake of the community, and the individual must be sacrificed for the common good.  Look to what you do, and pray for guidance in what you shall do next.  Not only your soul but the stability of Christendom in danger.  Be not under any illusions: we shall not hesitate to uproot the unhealthy plant that threatens the entire garden.  Thou shalt burn forever, and send forth smoke and stench.

           Think well upon what I have said.

           In the Name of God our Father,

           Cardinal X

*  This letter is a pastiche of the ideas and words of Bishops Augustine, Ambrose, and Dietrich von Nieheim, Humberto Eco, anonymous early Christians, and various Biblical authors, etc.