Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors

Is Rick Perry the next Ferdinand II? I mean, Ferdinand was taken up, in at least his later years, with a messianic vision of himself as the "Bat" who would defeat the antichrist, drive the Moors out of Grenanda, and then free Jerusalem from the Muslims, heralding the second coming. Rick Perry, as I understand it, wants to recapture the "seven mountains" of culture, including the government, also in preparation for the second coming.

So what becomes of heretics like me? Ferdinand's response was to reinvigorate the inquisition (its roots run back really to Theodosius I, and it had been used sporadically until the Albigensian crusade, but Reston makes a case that the "old" inquisition had been sporadic and occasional whereas the "new" Spanish inquisition was systematic and habitual) and use it to spread terror, enforcing thought control. Under the instigation and direction of Torquemada, who became the first Grand Inquisitor (is it he in Ivan's parable?), Ferdinand saw the inquisition as unifying the Spanish kingdom, bringing the recalcitrant and sometimes rebellious nobility under his control, and increasing the revenue available to fight his war against the Moors through confiscation of property. How many "heretics" were burned in Torquemada's auto de fes? How many people turned in their neighbors under torture or the threat of torture? How many of them confessed to acts they never committed? Do Rick and his brethren have that in mind for me?

It's hard to say how much Ferdinand's zeal was driven by his belief or how much of it was a cynical politician's use of religion to bring about his political ends (hmmm…so just how is that different from Perry?) While Reston does suggest that Ferdinand came to believe his ordained role as the trigger man for the apocalypse, he also notes that Machiavelli used Ferdinand as his model of the Prince in creating the "first modern political state." After joining the kingdoms of Aragon and Castille and then defeating the Portugese, Ferdinand and Isabella brought about centralized authority and taxation with the help of a national police force manned by a religious brotherhood, the Hermandad: "the effect was to centralize power and spread fear throughout the land."

And what are the best tools at hand for a politician to accomplish the building of a unified state? A common enemy and a convenient scapegoat will generally do the trick. The common enemy was the Kingdom of Grenada, the last stronghold of Al Andalus in Europe. The "Reconquista" had been a major goal of almost every king in Europe since Charles the Hammer finally stopped the Islamic invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 732. And the inquisition played on popular bigotry by targeting mainly the Conversos--Jews who had forcibly converted to Christianity in earlier pogroms--for being insincere in their conversions or for having lapsed back into Jewish practices. That Ferdinand could latch onto the Converso's property to help fund his wars was a real bonus.

This led to the "other 1492," the expulsion of Jews from Spain. But what counted now wasn't religion but blood, "limpieza de sangre," purity of blood. Which, of course, is a total farce. The people of Spain were a mixed blood lot from the earliest of times: paleolithic hunter gatherers with a mixture of Anatolian pastoral and agricultural peoples, overlain with major migrations/invasions from Celts, Phoenicians, Carthagenians, Romans, Alans, Suebi, Vandals, Visigoths, Arabs and Berbers--to cite only the most obvious and numerous--except for the Jews, of course, who migrated here early and interbred with most of the different people. Reston points out that Ferdinand, Isabella, and Torquemada all had Converso heredity in their own backgrounds, as did the majority of the Spanish nobility.

Persecution of the Jews had gone back to at least Hellenic times, with Greeks and Jews killing each other in the streets of Alexandria, and Jews were slaughtered by the thousands during the Crusades. Spain experienced a major outbreak of antisemetic zealotry in 1391, leading to forced mass conversions of Jews to Christianity (a widespread practice in Spain since Visigothic rule), but with the centralized authority of the state joined with the revitalization of the Inquisition, wholesale skepticism and eventual denial of converso sincerity held public opinion, especially with incitement from the pulpit. All Jews were forced to convert or to leave Spain in 1492. Those who converted and remained behind then made up the overwhelming majority of the cases tried by the Inquisition panels.

But that's just one strand running through the book. The defeat of Grenada, with its own cast of characters, including the last emir, Boabdil the Unfortunate, who was clearly unsuited for the task of ruling Grenada or fighting the Spanish, and who essentially sold out his people and his kingdom for a comfortable retirement. Add in Columbus, who comes strutting on the stage with his grandiloquent plans of finding a shorter route to the palace of the Great Khan, but unable to find anyone to take him seriously until after the Moors are defeated, eventually limps off disgraced and disillusioned, but not until whole tribes began to go extinct. The book covers a true "hinge of history" when Ferdinand and Isabella take their small feudal kingdoms and turn them into the Spanish empire.

Reston tells this story by drawing on multiple personalities, including not only Ferdinand and Isabella, Torquemada and Columbus, and also Boabdil the Unfortunte, but so many others, including King Joao II of Portugal, Enrique the Impotent--Isabella's brother, Muley Hassan--who contended with Boabdil, his nephew, for control of Grennda, Abraham Senior and Don Abravano--Jews who worked as advisors to the court of Ferdinand and Isabella but nonetheless suffered the fate of their fellow Jews, and Rodrigo Borgia--who later became Pope Alexander VI, infamous in his own right but even more famous as the father of Cesare and Lucretia Borgia. It really is quite a formidable cast of characters, and I find so little to admire in any of them.

Perhaps that is a major weakness of this book, then, that in trying to tell a good story, Reston overplays his details and maybe plays a bit loose with the facts. He certainly bends the tale in a modern, secular direction. He has often been accused of the novelization of history--sometimes an almost breathless "in media res" approach to history, surmising what his characters thought and how they reacted to one another--you can almost sense the animal magnetism of Isabella for Columbus or feel the scornful rage of Torquemada for Ferdinand and Isabella when he thought the expulsion ediict was being compromised. I guess the most egregious example, though, is Boabdil's mother, Ayxs, whose contempt Reston imagines as driving Boabdil into a disastrous battle with Ferdinand, and then who heaped further scorn on him for being such a wimp, or something to that effect.

But the bottom line is, Reston tells a good story. I quite enjoyed the read and got a better understanding of the time and the events. I came to the book wanting a better idea of what drove Spinoza's thinking, as Rebecca Goldstein makes it clear that his Converso background gave him the questions and the concerns culminating in the Ethics and the Tractatus. This book didn't really give me any insight in that direction, but it has lead me onto further inquiry into the history of antisemitism. For the truth is, I just don't get it. You can draw a straight line from Ferdinand (and Isabella, though Reston doesn't really impute any kind of cynicism on her part) and the Spanish Kingdom to Hitler and Nazi Germany, and I continually draw a blank on how such atrocities can happen. All I can hope is that we're not on the cusp of some new catastrophe.

Author: Reston, James

Date Published: 2005

Length: 384

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Horseman, Pass By

This was McMurtry's first novel, and it feels like it. While it is a good story, it certainly doesn't rate with Last Picture Show or even Leaving Cheyenne. It does have the west Texas bleakness built into it, but it's not the book that you might expect from the buildup surrounding Hud. I first read it years ago and enjoyed more than this time, so it may also have something to do with the narrator. Just a bit too hang-dog, I guess.

Jimmy told me years ago that his uncle Jack and a number of his cronies reminded him of Hud, the same wild ass, amoral characters that seemed to populate West Texas. I guess that mom's cousin Vernon could go in that same mold: good lucking guys driven around by their dicks and general lack of scruples. But Hud wasn't nearly as unscrupulous as I remembered him from my first reading. Even his shooting of Homer makes sense in terms of relieving suffering. And then he's the one that makes Lonnie seem respectable at the church during the funeral.

The book is really about Homer and the way of life that is dying with him, the old cowboy who has worked the ranch for so long. He finally breaks under the pressure of the last catastrophe, in a life filled with catastrophes, and one that was brought on by his buying cattle on the cheap from Mexico. There is something to be said about Hud's negative judgement of Homer. It's just that we see Homer through Lonnie's worshipful eyes. And maybe it's really Lonnie's voice that I don't enjoy so much. McMurtry uses the first person narrator so seldom, and maybe there's a good reason for it.

Author: McMurtry, Larry

Date Published: 1961

Length: 7 hr 34 min

Narrator: McCue, Kevin

Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

Betraying Spinoza means trying to tie him down to a particular time, place, personality, circumstance, and that's just what Rebecca Goldstein accomplishes in this book. She brings her sensitivities both as a philosopher and as a novelist to bear on Spinoza in such a way that vivifies him and his thought by placing him in the matrix of the times and the community that he inhabited. She also makes it clear that Spinoza would object strenuously to such particularizing as trivial. The circumstances of his life were irrelevant to the real task of understanding reality.

The central experience of his life was his excommunication by the Jewish community in Amsterdam. I was disturbed by the decree the first time that I read it years ago in Will Durant's history of philosophy, and wondered at its severity. Goldstein makes it clear that the preoccupations of this community, just a generation removed from the persecution and expulsion first by the Spanish ("the other 1492") and then by  the Portugese, not only triggered Spinoza's excommunication but also drove his thinking to finding a way out of the problems of suffering and identity that dominated La Naçao, the former Marranos living in Holland. "It was the community itself that had made the problem of personal identity of such crushing exigency for Spinoza that a way simply had to be found out of it, even though the way would set him at irreconcilable odds with that community."

Forced to live as Christians under Spanish and Portugese rule, most Marranos had to practice Judaism as secretly as possible, risking torture and death if found out. Goldstein suggests that Theresa of Avila (coming from a family of Conversos, or Jewish converts to Christianity) also came out of this environment where spirituality was strictly a matter of private observance. Having lost the knowledge of many or most of Judaism's essential practices and beliefs over the years, a fierce debate broke out over what constituted Jewish identify. Can the Marranos still in Portugal, for example, still be considered Jewish even though they were forced to practice Christianity? Much of the debate was fueled by a strong steak of kabbalism among the Sephardic Jews and the problems of suffering and identity become questions of cosmic redemption.

But Spinoza, in a classic case of reframing, saw his excommunication as an opportunity to pursue the problems of meaning and intelligibility without fear of offending the community. "The first and foremost rule is to remember that we have no control over anything other than the progress of our own understanding. And the second rule is to care only about that over which we have control." He couldn't offend them because he was now completely and totally cut off from the community. Amsterdam Jews were even forbidden to speak his name, much less acknowledge his presence. That didn't keep him from offending the rest of Europe, however, as the "atheist jew" pursued the meaning of life, the universe, and everything without any reference to an external creator God.

The first thing to understand about Spinoza's thought is that the "world is…intelligible, through and through." Goldstein calls this the presumption of reason: "All facts have explanations. For every fact, there is a reason why it is true." "The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things." That's not to say that we know it all, for we're trying to understand an infinite universe with a finite mind. But logic can reveal the fabric of reality because "logic alone is the fabric of reality." Interestingly enough, Goldstein, who comes out of the empiricist school  that would find such ideas nonsensical, seems to accept this premise as she considers the alternatives, citing David Hume that the rejection of the presumption of reason leads to the mind being just a series of mental events with no necessary connection to reality.

Spinoza begins with a few basic premises and proceeds to discover reality by using deductive logic. "By that which is self caused (causa-sui), I mean that of which the essence involves existence." (Is this the formula that Sartre stood on end when he said that existentialism means that existence precedes essence?) Only Substance is self caused, and so Substance = Nature [as in Laws of Nature] = God. All that is. What is, is, and that's all there is. There is nothing external or outside this. There is no God different from nature. There is no spirit different from matter. There is no soul different from body. Every separate thing in the universe, then, is a "logical entailment" or mode of the Substance. But as Goldstein makes clear, this is more than just an exercise in metaphysics. Bento's message is one of salvation using reason and logical proofs. "Salvation is achieved by bringing the vision of the causa-sui -- the vast and infinite system of logical entailments of which each of us is but one entailment--into one's very own conception of oneself." "Spinoza turns the Cartesian methodology…to illuminate the mysteries of the kabbalists:…the beginning of all things, the Ein Sof's [That Without End] relationship to creation and to our knowledge, the mysteries of evil and suffering."

Here Goldstein leads into a discussion of "conatus" which is any thing's identity with itself. It's that which makes me me, or you you. The logical and automatic consequence of the "conatus" is that everything seeks, as far as possible, to further it's own well being. "Our very essence, our conatus, will lead us, if only we think it through, to a vision of reality that, since it is the truth, is in our interests to attain." This leads to "dispassionate knowledge of oneself…the most self-expansive of all experiences, the most liberating, the boundaries of one's self stretching to incorporate the infinite system of explanations that constitute the very world." Goldstein calls this ecstatic rationalism, but Spinoza calls it "amor dei intellectis," the intellectual love of God. (This was certainly not a God that would love us back, but Spinoza's love of God does not depend on God loving us.) Taking this point of view then takes us outside the contingent situations of time and place and personality and circumstances. "To the extent that we are rational, we, all of us, partake in the same identity." To be caught up in the contingent, then, weakens us, leading to suffering, pain and evil.  (Isn't this essentially what Gautama said in the fifth century BC, that avidya [ignorance] leaks to dukkha [suffering]?) But is it possible to live and thrive with such an objective, dispassionate point of view?

Spinoza says that pursuit of anything else will not lead to that which all men seek: continuous, supreme, unending happiness. It is only through reality itself that we will reach the highest possible state of emotional well-being. "When we are able to grasp its infinite sweep, to sense the infinite context embracing each finite modification, then there is supreme, continuous, and unending happiness." Is this what we want? Goldstein questions this outlook: "I would argue that the highest level of imagination also amounts to a sort of love. I would further argue that the imaginative acts by which we try to grasp the substance of others, that specific singularity of them that resists universalizing into the collective, rational impersonal are a necessary component of the moral life." And so she brings us around to a view of Spinoza that is both personal and particular, and while it may not lead us to supreme happiness, it certainly deepened my understanding of the man and his thought and has led me to grapple with the issues of being human from yet another perspective. Can there be anything more moral in a book?

Author: Goldstein, Rebecca

Date Published: 2006

Length: 304 pp

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