Those times are these times: Reflections on the Feast of the Holy Innocents

According to the Gospel of Matthew, in the immediate aftermath of Jesus’ birth, King Herod was visited by wise men, who had followed a star to find the newborn king of the Jews, the Messiah. After ascertaining that he was in the vicinity of Bethlehem, Herod dispatched these wise men to find Jesus. When they found him, they gave him their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, then returned to their own country having been warned in a dream that Herod would betray them.

Then, when Herod, who feared Jesus as a threat to his power, realized their deception, “he was infuriated and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years or under.” In the interim, Matthew’s account tells us, Joseph had been warned by an angel to flee to Egypt, thus escaping Herod’s scheme.

Today is the feast of the Holy Innocents, commemorating the victims of Herod’s attempt to murder the newborn Jesus before he could grow up and challenge Herod’s authority. It's been celebrated since the fifth century, and in some places involved into a feast of social inversion, much as Christmas became in the English-speaking world, to the point that even today there are places where it serves as a kind of April Fool's Day, with pranksters tormenting "Innocents."

I'm not religious, but the Feast of the Holy Innocents matters to me for several reasons. First and most immediately relevant is that if I am a historian at all, it's because reading about an event that took place on this date in 1022 stoked the fires of scholarship. It is an event that resonates in the current moment, not just for the ties invoked between the flight of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus into Egypt and the current immigration debate, but because it is a step along the path to becoming the sort of society we are.

“In those times," the Limousin monk Adémar of Chabannes wrote some five years after the event, "then among the canons of the Church of the Holy Cross at Orléans, who appeared to be more religious than others, were shown to be Manichaeans. Whom King Robert [r. 987-1031], when they would not be reverted to the faith, ordered defrocked, removed from the church, and thrown to the flames."

The clergy in question (their number and beliefs vary according to the five or six accounts) were wrong believers, heretics, obstinate in their heterodoxy, and were executed for it. At most, they seemed part of an illuminist group with some secret knowledge, or gnosis, as their core tenet. More likely they were would-be reformers, whose views provided a preview of the coming reform movements.

Big deal, right? If there's a stock image of the Middle Ages, burning heretics is part of it.  But here's the thing, in 1022 no heretic had been executed in the West for over 600 years. This was a new thing and a big deal. The last heretic to be executed in the West had been Priscillian of Avila, executed in Trier, Germany around 385, not for heresy, but for sorcery (maleficium). Under Roman law this was a capital offense and the punishment was...burning.

The Orleannais heretics were, then, executed as witches would be on the Continent for centuries to come (in the English-speaking world, such as Salem, the punishment was hanging). Indeed, this was justified in some of the accounts by reference to diabolical orgies and a magic powder made from the ashes of babies born of them. These seem to be later inventions. The further away, in time and distance, one gets from the event, the more lurid the descriptions, even from a supposed infiltrator who helped reveal the heretics. Before Adémar wrote his version of events, a version which incudes the witchcraft libel, there were two others, written probably by eyewitnesses to the trial, and neither mentions magical aspects.

But here's the thing: the problem of heresy was less important than the problem of politics. When we think of the King of France, we think of someone like Louis XIV, whose dominion extended beyond the territory we think of as France. Robert the Pious was nominally king of pretty much that same era, but his practical authority didn't extend much past the Île-de-France. Orléans was a place Robert was trying to extend his power, competing with the Count of Blois, Odo, whose animus was both political and personal, since Robert had divorced Odo's stepmother for a more politically advantageous match. At this point they were competing to see who would install the bishop of Orléans.

According to one account, supposedly based on the account of a participant who happens to be the hero of the story, the heretics were unmasked by a knight named Aréfast, who was a favorite of Robert's. Surprise, surprise, though, the heretics (or were they? that's a barrel with no bottom) were clerics close to the king. In Aréfast’s telling, one of the heresiarchs is the queen's confessor. She is so angry in the story that she puts his eye out with a staff! Whatever the case, the events were definitely not a good look for the king in this ongoing struggle, explaining his decisive action.

The heretics themselves were sacrificed on the altar of Robert's political ambition. From this point, burning becomes the standard execution method for heretics, and fodder for a million bad "when the Church ruled it was called the Dark Ages" takes. No time for that right now, though.

In the following few decades we hear more accounts of heretics being unmasked and executed. Then, in the 1050s, they stop as the Church enters the so-called "Gregorian reform," which suggests all sorts of interesting things (had I finished my PhD, this is the sandbox 'd have been playing in). Then around 1100 the accounts resume and by the end of the twelfth century the Cathars were around (or maybe not) and on and on.

R.I. Moore pegs this as the time Europe became a "Persecuting Society," when ruling elites used persecution as a tool against potential rivals, creating out-groups (heretics, Jews, lepers, witches, prostitutes, etc) and subjecting them to various types of segregation and degradation. Glimpses of the future are possible.

It's hard NOT to see the decree of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 that Jews identify themselves by some kind of special dress, in some places a patch shaped like the Eucharistic wafer, as a forerunner of the Star of David patch forced on Jewish people in the Third Reich, as well as of the atrocities that followed. The categorizing impulse plays out in limpieza de sangre rules concerning Jewish and Muslim ancestry during the Reconquista, which provides a theoretical basis for the creation of race as we think of it and so on.

All of this is in the future, mind you, but the .impulse is there and if we think of those long-term effects as ripples spreading across a pond, then maybe the events at Orléans are the pebble. Or maybe not.

Still, for me, it's impossible not to think of them right now. I thought of them all throughout the 2016 campaign, and the persecutory rhetoric and incitements to violence Donald Trump hurled at Mexicans or at Syrian refugees, or at Muslims in general. I could go on. And, of course, in the treatment of the innocents. Jakelin Caal Makin and the and the 8-year-old Guatemalan boy who died in our custody (abolish ICE, y'all...it's a descendant of the Inquisition) are innocents sacrificed on the altar of Trump's ambition. As are the thousands separated from their parents and imprisoned at camps in states along the border. I'm not the first to make the Herod connection in this regard.

In this Christmas season, the comparison is frequently drawn to the family of Jesus fleeing for their lives in Egypt and to the unnamed thousands fleeing violence and poverty in Latin America. Often these get caught up in pedantry over who was and was not subject to Rome during the time of Herod, but these arguments deliberately obscure more than they illuminate.

I guess the other takeaway is that this fight is never over for those of us who prize pluralism and diversity. This is at least a thousand-year-old struggle. It's seen peaks and valleys, the battleground has shifted, but the battle is the same. There are people who will sacrifice the innocent for their own power and aggrandizement, as we see in the current contest over the wall Trump wants built along the Mexican border and the accompanying government shutdown. The lesson of the Gospel, regardless of whether you are a believer, is that power can be overcome. It can be overcome today, as well, but only if we choose not to surrender to it.

The heretics of Orléans were offered the choice to renounce their beliefs. According to the account of Aréfast, two among them did. The rest willingly chose the flames. I'm not advocating for self-immolation, only that we look to their example. Perhaps on that feast day of the Holy Innocents, they saw themselves in that story, with Robert playing the part of Herod. In choosing the flames, they chose to continue the battle for their truth. 

If nothing else, their resolution in the face of overwhelming repression calls us to do better as we face the oppression of our own times, and as we seek to act on behalf of others who need our help, so that no innocent need die to serve another’s purposes.

"Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall:" Lessons from Berlin

Struggling to find my way to Museum Island, I crossed an invisible boundary several times before I noticed the marker, a subtle groove a less than a foot across and about an inch deep in the brickwork at Potsdammer Platz, and a plaque with the simple but freighted engraving:

Across Pottsdammer Street, I could see sections of the wall, concrete barriers little more than twelve feet tall that had stood marking the barrier between the freedom of West Berlin and the oppression of East Berlin, a barrier which, when I was a high-schooler, seemed permanent and near-impermeable, but which collapsed the year after I graduated.

Germans, ordinary people, took down the wall, but left its mark on the landscape as a reminder. In one direction lay the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Brandenburg Gate. In the other you could follow the path of the Wall, as bricks embedded in the sidewalk or the roadway, to the kitsch of Checkpoint Charlie, along the way seeing the surreal spectacle of cars parked half in West Berlin, half in East, or places where a building stood astride the Wall's footprint and the bricks dead-ended, only to resume on the other side. 

 

There’s been a lot of talk about walls lately. Most, of course, surrounds President Trump’s much-longed-for barrier along the border with Mexico. I thought about that wall when I was in Berlin just as I’m thinking about the Berlin Wall now, and about the ultimate futility of walls.

A Mexican wall, we are told, will protect us against the hordes of illegal immigrants who come and sap the economic vitality of the country. It is not my plan to argue that, except to say that I find compelling the evidence that they are net contributors to American society and that, even if they weren't there is a clear moral case for allowing them to stay, especially those coming from countries facing turmoil caused, in large part, by American activities.

Some, when pressed, will bring up the old adage, "Good fences make good neighbors," as if the fact that it is a truism means that it's true. Robert Frost addressed this in his poem "Mending Wall," when he wrote,

              "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

              What I was walling in or walling out,

              And to whom I was like to give offense.

              Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

              That wants it down."

In Berlin, the answer was simple" the Soviet-controlled government of the German Democratic Republic was walling in eastern Germans who wanted to emigrate in search of some dreamt-of liberty and opportunity. Along the southern border of the United States, supporters of the wall want to keep out immigrants who seek the refuge of America for the same reasons. In both cases the answer of whom the builders are like to give offense is the same: each wall represents an offense to the world, to everyone who values liberty and opportunity.

Of course there are differences. Most importantly, the Berlin Wall effectively made East Berlin into a prison, something I don't think is intended by the Mexican Wall. To those walled in, or out, though, the difference may seem purely academic.

But there's also an important similarity, and it comes down to the reason we build walls. Or fences. We build them to demarcate our property, and to defend them from incursion.

Qin Shi Huang, the third-century B.C.E. Chinese emperor who directed the construction of the first Great Wall, ordered defenses against the growing might of the Xiongnu confederation to the north. This was a present threat; within a decade of Qin Shi Huang's death, the Xiongnu almost overthrew the first Han emperor. Of course this raises the question of how effective walls are against invaders. We might also consider France's Maginot Line in this vein. Walls are imposing, but a determined foe can always find a way to circumvent them.

During the second century of the Common Era the Roman emperor Hadrian, and his successor Antoninus Pius had walls built across Great Britain in northern England and Scotland, respectively. Each of these walls was less about defense--the Picts to the north were hardly the existential threat to the Romans that the Xiongnu were to the Chinese--than about displaying imperial power, and its limits, by marking those limits.

However, both of these walls can be construed as being built against an actual enemy. Berlin's wall wasn't built against an enemy, at least not an external one; no one truly threatened to invade the east through Berlin. No one now is threatening to invade the United States, despite the strident warnings of a massive migrant caravan that flared up just before the election and mysteriously vanished just as it ended.

No. The intent of each wall, the actual historical wall and the proposed future wall, is the same: to prevent people from going to a place where they believe they can build a better life for themselves and their families. Supporters can harumph about policy and illegal versus legal immigration, as though the legal is a marker of the moral (the GDR was within its legal rights to keep East Germans within its boundaries) and as though those legal constraints are fixed constants of the universe. 

Laws, though, are made by actual human beings, and they can be unmade as well, or changed for better or worse, just as the laws that prohibited the movement of Germans between the two parts of their country were made and then unmade.

What cannot be made or unmade, though, is the desire of people to move to where their lives will be better, and the will to do so whatever the risk. Indeed, this desire and this will represent everything patriots claim makes America great.

A wall athwart that is a wall doomed to fail. Whatever it is that doesn't love a wall will see to that.