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S6 E2: Jennifer Smith, Cancellation in the Fifteenth Century
8 Plays1 year ago
Jennifer Smith is Associate Professor of English, Coordinator of Digital Humanities, and Associate Director of the Center for Faith and Learning at Pepperdine University. She is a noted medievalist, and also a 2022-2023 sabbatical fellow at the Benson Center. We discuss the life and legacy of the fifteenth-century English bishop Reginald Peacock, who was defrocked and exiled for heresy–i.e. canceled–for questioning the infallibility of the church and advocating the authority of reason.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Free Mind Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome back to the Free Mind podcast, where we explore topics in Western history, politics, philosophy, literature, and current events with a laser focus on seeking the truth and an adventurous disregard for ideological and academic fashions. I'm Matt Burgess, an assistant professor of environmental studies and faculty fellow of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Guest Introduction: Jennifer Smith
00:00:25
Speaker
My guest today is Jennifer Smith. Dr. Smith is associate professor of English, coordinator of digital humanities,
00:00:31
Speaker
and associate director of the Center for Faith and Learning at Pepperdine University. She's a noted medievalist and also a sabbatical fellow with the Benson Center.
Reginald Peacock's Heresy and Reason
00:00:40
Speaker
We discussed the life and legacy of the 15th century English bishop Reginald Peacock, who was defrocked and exiled for heresy, and today's speak canceled for questioning the infallibility of the church and advocating for the authority of reason. Jennifer Smith, welcome to the Free Mind podcast. Thank you. How are you today, Matt?
00:01:00
Speaker
Great. Good to see you again. Good to see you too. Okay.
Free Speech and Academic Freedom
00:01:03
Speaker
So on this podcast, we sometimes talk about free speech and academic freedom and censorship, et cetera, usually in the context of current or recent events.
00:01:15
Speaker
And this might give some of our listeners the impression that these are new issues, but they're not. And in fact, you've studied these issues in the context of a controversial 15th century Welsh scholar and bishop named Reginald Peacock.
The Book of Faith: Translation of Peacock's Work
00:01:28
Speaker
In 2020, you published The Book of Faith, a modern English translation, which is a translation of some of Peacock's most controversial claims at the time.
00:01:37
Speaker
claims for which he suffered a 15th century version of what people today call cancellation. And so that's why I wanted to talk to you about today. It's a nice synergy of the Benson Center's interests in Western civilization and Western history, but also in current political and social events.
Peacock's Life and Academic Journey
00:01:54
Speaker
So just to start, who was Reginald Peacock? And what made you decide to study his writings? Well, as you said, he was a Welsh Bishop. Well, initially he was from Wales, but in early life he moves to Oxford. So he moves to Oxford when he's probably between 16 and 18 years old around the year 1408 or 1409. And he has a good career at Oxford eventually
00:02:21
Speaker
gets appointed to a couple of different positions, first in Gloucester, then in London, and then gets an appointment at Bishop at St. Asifs, which is in Wales, and then after that at Chichester, which is a little bit south of London. And that's the position that he had when all of his troubles really came to a head. How did I get interested in Peacock?
Peacock's Writings and Heresy Charges
00:02:43
Speaker
Well,
00:02:44
Speaker
He's a really fascinating fellow. He wrote something like 50 books during his lifetime in both English and in Latin. He was the only sitting bishop before the Reformation to be convicted of heresy. When I say it was a scandal, it was
00:03:01
Speaker
a huge scandal when he ultimately recanted some of the beliefs, false misrepresentations, I might add, but when he finally did it, an account says that there were as many as 20,000 people who showed up to see him do this. Wow. Okay, so two follow up questions. First of all, in the context of the 15th century, what is heresy?
00:03:23
Speaker
Oh, well heresy, I think maybe a little etymology would be helpful for you. It means to believe other than the church. So heterodox means to hetero is other and docs is teaching. It's antonym is orthodox. So correct teaching. So at this time to be considered a heretic means that you hold and believe
00:03:49
Speaker
beliefs that are antithetical to the fundamental faith beliefs of the church. Great. That's a good summary for our listeners. And so what were his beliefs that were antithetical to the beliefs of the church that he articulated? Well, I will have to say what he was accused of and what he recanted and then explain how those were not exactly what he actually believed.
00:04:18
Speaker
He was accused of saying that you didn't need to believe in the descent of Christ into hell, which he technically does argue that it wasn't part of the Apostles Creed, at least the original Apostles Creed.
00:04:33
Speaker
which is not exactly the same thing as saying that you don't have to believe in the descent of Christ into hell. That's one of the things that he was asked to recant. One of the others is that a church council could earn matters of faith when gathered together as a council.
Conciliarism and Church Authority Debate
00:04:52
Speaker
This belief, by the way, is later overturned by the church itself. That is, at this period, there was something known as conciliarism, and conciliarism was the belief that the highest authority in the church was a gathered church council.
00:05:07
Speaker
So the two sides that are arguing about authority at this point is whether the gathered council has the highest authority or whether the pope has the highest authority. Now, the sort of historical background that you need to know to understand why this is such an important
00:05:24
Speaker
controversy is that before this period, so the end of the 14th, beginning of the 15th century, so he's already alive, he's a young man, there's something known as the Western schism, which is a period of time when there are multiple popes that are vying for authority. Now, ultimately, the church decides that ultimate authority resides with the pope, but most people in England are sympathetic to the conciliarist position. So what that means is that if Peacock is arguing,
00:05:54
Speaker
against that position that a church council can in fact earn matters of faith, then it stands to upset the hierarchy in all sorts of other ways as well. So he argued that the church council did not have the ultimate authority. Did he side with the Pope? Did he argue that the Pope did or did he argue that some third entity did?
Surviving Works of Peacock
00:06:17
Speaker
No, he would have argued that the Pope did. This is what I'm working from is actually the
00:06:22
Speaker
list of recantations. And so I said before that he wrote about 50 books, right? But most of them were burned. So we actually only have five surviving books of that 50 more or less. So we know some of the ideas based on what it is that survives and some of the other stuff we have to extrapolate. It's kind of fun because he likes to cite himself. And so that's actually some of the work that I'm doing right now.
00:06:48
Speaker
It's very interesting. So he was against conciliarism, which upset the established order of the time, at least locally. In what ways was he misrepresented, though, in terms of what he was accused of compared to what he actually said? I mean, well, there were some other things as well. So he says that it wasn't necessary to believe in the Holy Catholic Church.
00:07:10
Speaker
And this is actually not what he says. So he makes arguments about whether or not you have to believe in everything that the church says as a matter of faith, as opposed to believing the fact that the church exists. That is, that the entity of the church itself is an authoritative thing. So the technical term here
00:07:33
Speaker
is whether or not the apostolic succession from the time of the original 12 apostles is a legitimate and valid manifestation of the transfer of power from Jesus to the apostles, from the apostles to the following bishops, and then to the bishops who are currently in power in England in the 15th century. Okay. So what was his punishment?
00:07:57
Speaker
Well, there were a few different things that happened. Now, initially, it's complicated and it goes back and forth. When he's first called before the archbishop and the group of people, and I'm going to skip over some stuff, like he has to talk in his books and there's all sorts of different things. But initially, what it looks like happens is that he recanted errors as opposed to heresies.
00:08:23
Speaker
And then he was restored to his job and then nothing happened immediately. But then some of his accusers were unhappy with this turn of events and they pushed further and more extreme confessions. And so ultimately,
00:08:41
Speaker
He's asked to abjure twice, once privately but under oath in the arena of the archbishop and the other bishops that are gathered, and then once publicly at St. Paul's Cross. Now, at St. Paul's Cross, when he abjures there, they gather all of his books.
00:08:59
Speaker
I'm sure some survive probably because they were used in the trial, but the other books are gathered and they're all burned. There's another burning of his books in Oxford a couple of weeks later. And then at that point, because of this, he's actually supposed to be able to resume his work, although he doesn't immediately.
00:09:21
Speaker
He writes to Rome complaining that he hasn't been restored to his position. And Rome writes back and says, put him back in his job, he did all the things that you asked him to do. But in the meantime, some other people who are unhappy that he wasn't really removed from his position continue to complain about his influence on the English people, on the lay people.
00:09:48
Speaker
Eventually, what's happening at this point is the crown gets involved and they bribe him. They say, you step down from your sea and we'll provide you with a pension. You just go retire and get out of our hair. That's the
00:10:03
Speaker
initial recommendation. And Peacock ends up taking up the crown on this offer, but some of his enemies are not happy with that outcome as well. And so what they do is they write to
00:10:20
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Rome. And in the meantime, there's a new pope who doesn't know that the old pope had basically confirmed peacock's original status. And so they end up getting the authority of Rome involved, at which point
00:10:36
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Peacock is fully defrocked in all of the different ways, and then they have him imprisoned. So the technical term at this point is confinement, but they send him to a place in Cambridgeshire, which is in the Fens. I don't know if you know anything about the geography of England, but Thorny Abbey, and this is before the Fens were drained because eventually they're drained.
00:11:01
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but it's a place that is on what is functionally an island in the middle of a swamp for most of the year. So he sent to this abbey, some of those money from the, the monies from the king is sent to help support him. And he's confined in an anchoritic cell, which is a very small, you can think of it as a kind of prison, but most anchorites choose to go inside of them. That's a different sort of medieval practice. And they take away everything from him,
00:11:30
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with the exception of a Bible, a Psalter, a saint's life, a breviary. And explicitly, he's to have no writing tools. And we don't hear from him after that. So I would say life imprisonment until death was the final punishment after having all his books burned.
Interplay of Power: Crown, Church, and Universities
00:11:51
Speaker
So you talk about his accusers, and one of the things that is often talked about in the context of present-day cancellation and present-day quasi-heresy is the fact that there's this interesting interplay between what you might call mob justice, where the accusers are everyday citizens, say on Twitter,
00:12:16
Speaker
But then there's an interaction between everyday citizens and authorities, be that campus authorities or HR departments, et cetera. And so who were Peacock's accusers and to what extent did what you might call bottom up and top down sources of power interact to create his travails?
00:12:41
Speaker
I'd say you have to describe power in England this way in essentially three different facets, or maybe four depending on how you count. One would be the power of the crown. One would be the power of the ecclesiastical church.
00:13:00
Speaker
And then one would be the power of the universities. Those are your three main loci of power. And then, of course, there are the people who constitute the parishioners and the churches who are going and hearing the sermons, who are engaging in all these different ways.
00:13:20
Speaker
The first three that I named for you, the Crown, the Church, and the University, these three groups mingled with one another, and they often influenced one another. So for example, the Chancellor of England was usually also a Bishop of England. The Bishops in England would sit on the King's Great Council.
00:13:45
Speaker
when there are heretical matters, oftentimes doctors of the church, so the professors, your professors, right? You go to Oxford to get those people. The people who are the highest-ranked people are also coming from Oxford and Cambridge. So these three groups are oftentimes vying for power. Sometimes they're allying with each other, and sometimes they're against one another.
00:14:14
Speaker
The crown at this point is very much interested in representing itself as orthodox as possible as defenders of the faith. So the 15th century is the time when the Yorkists and the Lancastrians are fighting for power. So this is a period known as Lancastrian England, when essentially the Lancastrian kings have come in and seized power improperly.
00:14:41
Speaker
And so they're interested in doing everything possible to maintain a stable political relationship. So any kind of heresy, which is a challenge to authority, there is concern from the crown that it will somehow encourage the laity to rebel against the crown as well.
Peacock's Criticism of Ecclesiastical Norms
00:15:05
Speaker
And so you're dealing with political matters. You're dealing with,
00:15:09
Speaker
university matters as well. I mean, I would say that some of Peacock's accusers are a group of, you can think of them as London preachers. So the thing that he did initially to offend everyone that happened way before the trial, 10 years before he gave this speech, this sermon at St. Paul's cross in London.
00:15:33
Speaker
And the thing that you have to remember is St. Paul's is the place you go. It's outside of the church, so the cross is outside of the church. But you go there to reach people more broadly. That is, there aren't a lot of, it's bigger, it's outside, so you can talk to a lot of people at the same time.
00:15:51
Speaker
And he gives this sermon that is a defense of absenteeism. And absenteeism is the idea that a bishop isn't in their actual C, but instead residing somewhere else. Okay, so that's one thing that he argues for. And he also argues against the idea that bishops are necessarily required to preach.
00:16:18
Speaker
Both of these things are considered hugely offensive to a lot of clerics, including some of the clerics from Oxford, and then some of the later enemies that he has who are writing letters against him to the king. Because frankly, it makes clerics look bad, one, if they're in London and not, say, in Chichester or St. Asifs or whatever.
00:16:40
Speaker
But certainly Peacock was highly defensible in this. In that, I think I already mentioned that bishops also sat on the king's counsel. So Peacock was of the position that a bishop's primary responsibility to the crown was to influence the behavior of the king because in order for the king to make good decisions, he has to have good spiritual leaders. And you can't do that from your home bishopric.
00:17:09
Speaker
That was his position on absenteeism. Why was that offensive? It's offensive because it's this idea that you're not actually in the place for which you're appointed to be the pastor of your people. I suppose the way to think about it is the distinction between a governor and a senator. If you think that bishops are supposed to be a little bit more like governors,
00:17:33
Speaker
then they ought to be in their state, or in this case, in their diocese, overseeing the operations and being available to the people that they're responsible for, that they're caring for. If you see instead the bishop more like a senator, then he ought to be in the capital, influencing the decision-making of the political leaders at the time.
00:18:00
Speaker
So Peacock and, frankly, a lot of bishops in practice operated more like senators who lived in London, who sat on the great council, and who influenced the political decisions of the realm as opposed to someone who was necessarily in residence in their diocese.
00:18:19
Speaker
Now, the other thing that he was challenged for was whether or not the bishop necessarily needed to be giving sermons or preaching to the people. And people didn't like this as well. He was saying, like, well, no, actually, the responsibility of the bishop, a little bit like a professor, say, at a big research institution, is to write the books that helps to guide the lower clergy in order to do their work well.
00:18:48
Speaker
So the academic analogy is, I don't need to teach the discussion section. My job is to write the textbook that you guys are going to use. And by all accounts, he did that. He worked very hard to write theology in both English and Latin in a way that would help guide those who read it to do a good job of being pastors to the people.
00:19:15
Speaker
But it turns out there are a whole lot of clerics, unsurprisingly, who think that the primary responsibility of bishops is to preach, and that it's actually a dereliction of duty to do anything but.
00:19:29
Speaker
So he gives this sermon in 1447 that essentially makes a whole lot of enemies very quickly. And people don't like him for it. Regular people don't like him for it because it's like imagine yourself from the point of view of a lay person or in this case, it's like being a student and having a teacher who said, I don't want to be there for you, right? Like you can have your, it's an elitist position. So the average person
00:19:56
Speaker
probably doesn't like him very much, although we don't have a lot of evidence of that. But we also can imagine that this is embarrassing for the ecclesiastical hierarchy as well, because even if this is how things are done, it's not as if anyone wants to shine a light on it, that the bishops are actually in residence all the time. And if you know anything about the Reformation, you'll know that absenteeism is one of the
00:20:24
Speaker
practices that's called out as a form of corruption of the medieval church. But as you can see, it's actually an interpretable facet. If you think about people who give speeches today that quickly win enemies,
00:20:40
Speaker
At least in my experience, they broadly come in two categories.
Controversy of Writing in English
00:20:44
Speaker
There are the ones who are often related to their intellectualism, socially unaware enough that they don't realize that what they're saying is going to be controversial.
00:20:56
Speaker
And then there are the ones that do realize what they're gonna say is gonna be controversial but don't care for some principal reason or some intellectual reason or some. Sociopolitical reason whatever it may be do either of those categories describe regional peacock.
00:21:13
Speaker
Peacock was very much aware that what he was saying and doing was controversial. And we know this because repeatedly in the five surviving books that we do have, he defends himself against his detractors. He's accused of many things. One of the things is that, as I said before, he's writing in English.
00:21:36
Speaker
And writing in English at this point is a fairly controversial move when you're talking about theological matters and not simply devotional works. So there are other works of medieval, the 15th century that we're talking about, that are religious in nature.
00:21:55
Speaker
but that are not scholastic in nature. What I mean by that is these are works that make rational arguments for different aspects of the faith. The scholastic ones do.
00:22:08
Speaker
If I can make an analogy here, the belief was that this wasn't a safe thing to do for most lay people. That is, the general opinion was that to write such matters in English when many people aren't fully trained in theological disputation was irresponsible.
00:22:32
Speaker
because it could lead people to believe erroneous things about the faith and would thereby imperil their souls. I think when we often talk about the Middle Ages today, there's this idea that the medieval church limited access to material in the vernacular, so in English in this case.
00:22:55
Speaker
out of some sort of malevolent desire to maintain power. But that certainly wasn't the case. The primary concern was that material when spread among people who were not well trained could lead them to believe things about the faith that were untrue. Which would endanger them in the cosmic timescale.
00:23:17
Speaker
That's right, that would imperil their souls.
Peacock's Philosophy of Reasoned Obedience
00:23:20
Speaker
So Peacock, he walks a very fine line. His arguments primarily come down to this. He's trying to persuade laypeople that they should submit their obedience to the church as a matter of probable faith, that is, it's logical to yield these kinds of matters of expertise over to the experts.
00:23:46
Speaker
So he's willing to make the theological arguments up to the point of what we could call obedience, but not blind obedience, rather reasoned obedience. Yeah, the arguments are actually very similar to ones that we hear today about listening to the science, right? Like what that really means is we should trust our scientists.
00:24:06
Speaker
And so you need to know enough science in order to find certain scientific practices credible. So it's an argument that draws from expertise. The analogy that he gives in one of his books, in the Book of Faith, for example, is that if you go and you are on the water and you have to yield your life to a sailor,
00:24:31
Speaker
who is an expert in sailing, that you shouldn't, in fact, try to take on that responsibility for yourself because that's probably going to imperil your physical life, right? You're probably going to die if you try to do that.
00:24:44
Speaker
What you're saying reminds me a little bit of some of the debates around science and censorship in the context of things like the pandemic right wasn't there the argument that for example social media sites ought to be center censoring certain discussions in some cases by like stanford professors.
00:25:03
Speaker
who were epidemiologists of scientific evidence, because the fear was that the public would see partial information, say about a study that found a particular side effect, myocarditis in young men as a side effect of some of the vaccines, for example, that they might see this, and due to their lack of expertise, make an ill-informed decision that would be harmful
00:25:29
Speaker
In this case, not getting a vaccine. Is that a good analogy to kind of both how it worked, but also the good intentions that may have been behind what would otherwise look like censorship?
00:25:40
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, and the analogy is actually, it's excellent for a lot of reasons, but I would say that there's one difference that makes Peacock's argument or say the church's argument about matters of obedience at this time even more compelling, which is that if a person has yielded that they rationally understand that they haven't gone through the theological training that a doctor from Oxford say has in terms of these matters of faith,
00:26:10
Speaker
And then they're taught that by this person, and they believe it. Even if they are wrong in fact, they no longer are morally blameworthy. That is, from the point of view of salvation, they would not be held accountable for holding an erroneous belief if they got that erroneous belief from someone to whom they owe spiritual or religious authority.
00:26:39
Speaker
So his argument is that you should use your reason to understand why you ought to trust in the authority of the apostolic successors because you're saved if you happen to be wrong. Now it turns out that's not true with, you know, like if it happens that our scientists are somehow wrong, you could still, and being wrong in fact in the physical world doesn't work the same way.
00:27:07
Speaker
So I would say that that's an important distinction between the two. This interaction between faith and reason in his both his writings and in how people at the time interact with them are really interesting. And so I wonder, you know, you come from a school of Pepperdine that has a religious affiliation, obviously universities reason or, you know, the lifeblood of universities and scholarship.
00:27:34
Speaker
Are there any parallels or not between how faith and reason interact in your professional life in that context? Or is it totally different? I think it might help to define what faith means for peacock and for other medievalists. And it's not the same thing that I think we typically use that word to mean today. So faith for peacock was divided into two different parts.
00:28:04
Speaker
Certain faith and probable faith. And certain faith are the things that we have by revelation, say, the virgin birth or the transubstantiation of the Eucharist and Mass. These are things that we have
00:28:20
Speaker
as certain elements of the faith. Those things are the things that ought not to be challenged. They're the core. They're that orthodox true in the center. And then the probable faith, which is what we actually have access to in the material world, so in the world that we live in today, that actually constitutes the world of probable faith.
00:28:45
Speaker
and we all live in a world of probable faith, which means the daily exercise of reason. So for Peacock, what that meant was every believer has to actively work on that probable faith, even if what that means is submitting eventually, but only in a rational way, to authority.
00:29:08
Speaker
Now at Pepperdine, I would say that there is an acknowledgment of truth, that there is a truth. So there's not the kind of relativism that you might encounter in other universities or say theoretical ways of engaging with the world.
00:29:26
Speaker
So there is, once again, that sort of center pole that there is a truth. And then there's a very broad range of latitude for that questing after the truth. And sometimes we do it better and sometimes we do it worse. There's a lot of disagreement about how these things manifest.
00:29:47
Speaker
But it's a pretty plural environment to the extent that, at least at Pepperdine, we are not obligated to sign any statement of faith. That is, there's no sort of creedal statement that the school obligates, which is actually unusual for most faith-based institutions, but it's connected to Pepperdine's Churches of Christ heritage, which is a non-cretal heritage.
00:30:12
Speaker
And of course, some would argue that there have been and perhaps still are other kinds of pledges, credo pledges that are being done in different forms. That's maybe a topic for another podcast.
00:30:25
Speaker
public attestations to what you do and do not believe, yeah. So for example, it's definitely the case that that was the anti-communist loyalty oaths in the 50s were a thing and were struck down by the courts. And there's some modern concerns that there are similar things happening today. Back to Peacock, some of the ways that you describe his thinking about how basically we need to write in English so that common folk can understand the reasons for obedience.
00:30:55
Speaker
sound a little bit Protestant in flavor and a little bit liberal in flavor. Was there any extent to which his writings and teachings influenced the Protestant Reformation and or liberalism? It's hard to know entirely, although he is later held up as an early Protestant hero in say, John Fox's very influential book of martyrs. It really depends on who's writing about Peacock.
00:31:24
Speaker
and how it is that they characterize him. So if you have an author that tends to be more sympathetic with the medieval or Catholic Church, he tends to be represented as an innocent guy that was taken out by people for political reasons. If you have authors who are writing more from a sympathetic point of view in terms of the Protestant Reformation,
00:31:53
Speaker
then they actually want to present his conviction of heresy as legitimate because it seems to be a precursor to other Reformation ideas. I think one factual element that would help to clarify all this is that the major heresy in England
00:32:14
Speaker
In the late 14th and 15th century, when Peacock is alive and writing, that he is trying to challenge are the heresies of John Wycliffe, which are sometimes referred to as Lollard beliefs. John Wycliffe,
00:32:29
Speaker
He influences Jan Hus in Bohemia. Wycliffe is often called the Morning Star of the Protestant Reformation. And his ideas are the ones that are quite actually similar to Martin Luther's ideas at the beginning of the 16th century.
00:32:48
Speaker
So what Peacock does is he's trying to fight against law-lord belief, which has already been condemned. I mean, when Peacock's a young man, in fact, after the Council of Constance fully declares Wycliffe a heretic and his books a heretic, they dig up Wycliffe's body, they burn it, and they throw it into the river. And this is all during his lifetime, and obviously Peacock would have been well aware of this.
00:33:14
Speaker
So Peacock decides to make a stand using some of the law learned techniques that is writing in English. So you could think of it almost like in terms of the medium, fighting fire with fire,
00:33:31
Speaker
trying to use some of the strategies of the lawlords in terms of spreading the ideas, but instead presenting orthodox beliefs instead. So for a long time, Peacock was essentially one of the most vocal defenders of what you could think of as traditional medieval Episcopal authority. In fact, he is always siding on the side of the bishops.
00:34:00
Speaker
When he was at university, a set of rules gets instituted between 1409 and 1411, known as the Oxford Constitutions. And these are a set of rules that limit what you can debate on in the universities.
00:34:16
Speaker
You can imagine how this goes over in Oxford and Cambridge. I can imagine how that would go over in Oxford and Cambridge today. There are those very debates that are happening. In fact, recently, there was quite literally a debate of that sort that the Oxford Union ran asking whether there was too much orthodoxy. But obviously, this is a very different time in some ways. So how was it viewed at the time by the students at Oxford?
00:34:38
Speaker
Oh, the students, the faculty, they hated it. And in fact, the college that Peacock was at, Oriel College, they were some of the most vocal opponents to the institution of these constitutions.
00:34:50
Speaker
It's basically like saying this outside authority can come in and tell you what you can and cannot teach to your students. But Peacock is a defender and is his entire life of episcopal prerogative. So unlike his classmates, he supported the constitutions. He liked the idea.
00:35:11
Speaker
of the church coming in and regulating what was going on in the universities, because Wycliffe had been an Oxford man, and his ideas first had currency in Oxford. So from Peacock's point of view, you can think of him as a company man. For most of his life,
00:35:31
Speaker
He supports Episcopal prerogative, but only in later life, and frankly, not with the support of the bishops. These are other people who are really encouraging the charges against him. That's when he starts to have trouble. When people who are more affiliated with the university or with the crown don't like a very strong clerical sense of authority that Peacock has trouble.
00:35:59
Speaker
It's complicated, right? If he's a heretic, he's not like the other heretics of the 15th century. Right. A related question then, there's one way, just based on the way you've told the story so far, there's a way to imagine him being scared to end up like Wycliffe.
00:36:21
Speaker
and therefore, you know, perhaps a somewhat, you know, not necessarily fully sincere Episcopal defender. There's another way to look at it where he is sincere, you know, so much so for so long that it becomes his undoing. Obviously, there's no way to know exactly, but based on your expertise, which of those do you think describes him?
00:36:43
Speaker
Well, we are to trust the historical record, and I mean, some of it is more reliable than others. He's given a choice to either recant or be burned. And so he chooses shame and infamy over death. In 1401, so this is at the beginning of his life, there's something that's passed in England called De Heretico Comberendo. It's a set of laws that essentially allows
00:37:11
Speaker
the state to burn heretics. So the church is actually not the one that oversees the execution of someone who is convicted of heresy. And so there were enough burnings. There weren't a lot. I mean, just a few. But every 10 years or so, someone was burned on the continent or in England
00:37:36
Speaker
And so it was enough of a threat that he understood that if he did not recant his beliefs and or recant beliefs that were false representations of his beliefs, that would be the outcome. But I was also thinking about earlier in his life, right? So when he's at Oxford and he's towing, you know, he's being a company man, as you said.
00:37:58
Speaker
Just to what extent does the historical record suggest that that posture is sincere at that time, as opposed to motivated by fear of episodes like Wickliffe's? It would be backwards thinking, like sort of thinking about whether or not he's consistent. And I would say that he is consistent in all of his writings about Episcopal authority and submitting yourself to the church. And so I'm actually totally unsurprised that that's the position he took when he was at Oriole.
00:38:27
Speaker
Because even in his books, he says, you can always challenge what it is that the church has to say, but you have to be willing to defend it. And you have to be able to persuade the church herself of the beliefs that you have. And if you cannot do that, you must therefore submit to the beliefs of the church.
00:38:51
Speaker
So it's not saying you cannot dissent ever, but it's saying that when you do dissent, that you also then have an obligation to submit that dissent to examination. So his analogy is a metallurgical one. You want to test metals in the heat of prosecution. And in his case, what he means by that is the intellectual
00:39:19
Speaker
prosecution of rational discourse. Right, you're questioning ideas, but you're not ever questioning the church's authority.
00:39:27
Speaker
So on somewhat of a different tack, what, if anything, do you think are the most important lessons of Peacock's life today? And is there any way in which studying Peacock has affected your worldview or any other aspect of how you live your life today?
00:39:50
Speaker
or how you see the world or anything. You've clearly spent a lot of time and investment in understanding this, and it's a really fascinating story. Has that imprinted on your day-to-day life in any way?
Impact of Peacock on Teaching Philosophy
00:40:05
Speaker
When you teach Peacock to your students, are there any lessons that you hope that they'll take from his life that'll apply to their lives?
00:40:15
Speaker
I would say that I have great sympathy for Peacock. The word that I think of when I think of him first is earnest. He means what he says and he devoted his entire life to writing in a way that would persuade someone of belief that's not working by compulsion, but rather by reason and persuasion. I admire that.
00:40:42
Speaker
I hope that I operate in the same way in the classroom, that I'm not ever trying to force people to believe through authority alone, because I think that that's the initial impulse for some who are concerned about whether or not students will get the right answer.
00:41:03
Speaker
Right? Like that it's easier to just say, well, this is what the right answer is and not to provide people with the tools to come up with that on their own, even acknowledging that all of our intellectual capacities are flawed. So some people will get it wrong. And then I suppose humility, one doesn't know where one's life is going to go.
00:41:28
Speaker
I think Peacock was mostly right, but if you've heard hesitation in any of this description, it's that I don't think he was entirely right in either his theological beliefs or even in some of the ways that he seems to have conducted himself. Can you give an example of that, of something that either of those things that you disagree with?
00:41:50
Speaker
Yeah, so theologically, I would say that he's a kind of, do you know what scientism is? It's this belief that science alone can explain everything as opposed to thinking about things in a broader way. And also that kind of empirical evidence can't really be challenged. So it's treating science as if it were a religion. Peacock does something similar to reason.
00:42:17
Speaker
That is, to the extent that he admits that there are miraculous elements of faith, and I'm a person of faith myself, I think it's too narrow. He works almost exclusively from syllogisms, with very little engagement with the works of any of the church fathers, or even for that matter scripture. He's presumptuous.
00:42:43
Speaker
He challenges the use of the Ten Commandments, and he says this repeatedly, for being incomplete as a pedagogical program. So he offers something else that is, he calls it the Four Tables of God's Law, and it might be complete, but it's totally unlearnable. He says things like... It reminds me of... Commandments aren't good enough.
00:43:09
Speaker
It reminds me of the debate in education research right now about direct instruction versus, for example, so for math, should you teach kids math by just teaching them their times tables or should you do, there's these various things that have been tried in various places. One, I think that they have in Ontario is called discovery math, where it's like you have to make everything fun and kind of a discovery process. And there's, there can't be any part of math education that is rote.
00:43:36
Speaker
You know, I'm not an education scholar, but as far as I understand it, there's at least some evidence that suggests that the, that the direct instruction does work for, you know, you need, you need to teach problem solving kind of at the higher levels, but you also just needed kids need to learn their times tables. And maybe the best way to teach them their times tables is to just teach them their times tables, as opposed to creating some complicated puzzle for them to solve. Is that a good analogy or a clumsy one?
00:44:03
Speaker
I think he's basically of the point of view that you should just learn your times tables and nothing else, or rather that that somehow is sufficient. And I think that that is actually insufficient. Otherwise, you lose a real aspect of the real. That is, what we have through history
00:44:22
Speaker
is as much a part of the human story and the Christian story as what we can theorize. He was so deeply invested in a theoretical understanding alone that he missed the
00:44:37
Speaker
important and real historical moment that he was in, how to engage with people, right? And the extent to which the precedence of the framework that comes from Scripture is something that has worked for people.
00:44:56
Speaker
I mean, he challenges the Ten Commandments as a comprehensive pedagogical program. The other thing he challenges are the New Testament commandments to love God above all things and thy neighbor as thyself. He's like, oh yeah, yeah, that's good.
00:45:13
Speaker
that's the thing that you need to focus on. But actually, that's not two commandments, that's three. So then he works, reworks them, and then he divides them out into different ways. So he's always optimizing along a theoretically utopian framework that breaks down when you actually apply it to how people live in the world and what they have experienced.
00:45:40
Speaker
Certainly, I would say that that's an erroneous approach to faith. And how he went about doing things, my guess is that he was such a purist in his engagement with people as well that he was probably a little hard to get along with.
00:45:59
Speaker
It's true that he probably worked as hard or harder than anyone else. I mean, you don't write 50 books on accident, but hard work alone, and this is probably something that I need to remember myself, but hard work alone is not justification enough for doing something. That is, the ability to actually connect and persuade people
00:46:28
Speaker
depends more on an abstraction and hard work. It involves actually getting to know people and understanding where they come from and being able to articulate things in a way that doesn't cause offense. I think that that's an important facet in life as well, and he seems to have missed that.
00:46:50
Speaker
So you mentioned that you're a person of faith. Unlike in the 15th century today, that's a very underrepresented group in the academy compared to the general population, at least in the United States. It's one of the more underrepresented groups.
00:47:04
Speaker
So just as an open-ended question, what's your experience been like? Is your faith, in what ways is your faith important or not important to your experience in the academy and maybe how you were experienced, how others experience you and interact with you and engage with you?
00:47:24
Speaker
Well, I would say that first of all, I've been very lucky. I'm actually an adult convert to Catholicism. So I went to secular schools all the way through graduate school. I went to Berkeley as an undergraduate and I went to UCLA as a graduate student. And it was at UCLA where I actually, through my medieval readings, was drawn to the faith. There were other things involved as well, but certainly the work that I was doing as a medievalist preceded
00:47:53
Speaker
the spiritual journey that I eventually took.
00:47:56
Speaker
And then I was lucky in that my advisor at UCLA is a former Jesuit. And so he was very supportive. I met another graduate student there who ultimately became a Jesuit, but who was also my interlocutor for a year as I asked these questions that I wanted historical, as well as theological answers to some of the questions that I had. And so all of that was, I wanna say a lucky thing for me.
00:48:26
Speaker
I don't know if it's typical in the academy at large. I was never afraid to hide my faith belief when I was at UCLA and among friends, but I admit I was a little bit nervous when I went on the market, and I admit that I was nervous when I interviewed at Pepperdine, which is not a Catholic institution, and I was concerned about how it is that they would receive me.
00:48:50
Speaker
And it all went fine. It's all been very, very good. My hope is that whatever institution, whether it's public or private, religiously affiliated or not, that people can talk and engage fully in who they are without feeling that they have to censor themselves about what it is that they believe. So I will mention that I'm a person of faith if it's relevant to the conversation.
00:49:17
Speaker
But I also try, I would say, to take a page from Peacock here and not make statements that are not also justified by reason. That is, by the probable faith that we can have through the application of our natural reasons and the evidence that we have available to us.
00:49:38
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really nice tie back to Peacock and thanks for sharing that. One of the things you mentioned at the end there was that you think it's important, Greg has been paraphrasing inaccurately, that you think it's important as a matter of inclusion for people from different backgrounds.
00:49:57
Speaker
for people to be able to be open and honest about beliefs that may differ among each other. And so in that sense, do you see, you know, there are some people who frame principles like free expression as being antithetical or at intention with inclusion. And it almost sounds like you're saying that the opposite is true.
00:50:22
Speaker
that in fact it's essential to inclusion for people to be able to express what they believe and disagree constructively and be able to thrive and be comfortable in environments where not everybody shares their beliefs including deeply held beliefs. Am I characterizing that accurately or if not what am I missing?
00:50:42
Speaker
I do agree with that, and I'll bring it back to the earlier point that Peacock made. Belief, if it's beliefs that are worth holding ought to be tried under the faith of persecution. It needs to be tried by fire, intellectual fire in this case, but it needs to be tested. That's how you find out if your medals are true.
00:51:08
Speaker
When people don't have the ability, both secular and religious, to put their ideas forth, those ideas will never actually be tested.
00:51:21
Speaker
I would say that at the center of how I engage as a scholar and as a teacher is that notion that conversion is possible, not compulsion. So I believe that students can be taught, not just indoctrinated, that I am
00:51:41
Speaker
a different sort of person after my baptism than I was before, not because I was coerced into it, but because I chose it through the application of my reason, as well as benefited from the grace of the experiences that I've had in the world.
00:51:58
Speaker
And so there is an intellectual reason to do these things, not just in terms of honesty, but because I don't think you ever really give that up. It's not as if you convert once and then it's over. Every day we come to work and we evaluate our ideas as scholars. If you become complacent in that, then you miss out on
00:52:24
Speaker
the changes that happen in your field, the ways in which you might have been wrong in the past. And so all of those things to me are really important. So I think inclusivity is, it's not enough, Matt. That's not enough. That's not why we do it, not to be inclusive alone. It's because there's honor and respect and understanding that people are who they are, but only when they have the ability to engage with each other openly and honestly.
00:52:52
Speaker
Thank you. That's a really, really good answer. So this is a closing question. You know, I'm struck by the intellectual and historical and even spiritual richness of this conversation. And I think, although I'm not myself a humanist, I think it represents what people think of as the best of the, of the humanities.
00:53:13
Speaker
And yet, as I'm sure you're aware, in terms of things like enrollment and sometimes even in public discourse, the humanities are somewhat embattled these days, in the United States at least, in a way that they haven't been certainly in my lifetime. And yet there's obviously this intellectual and spiritual richness to them.
00:53:35
Speaker
And so what I would ask you is, what would you say to a high school student who you met, who was interested in exploring an English major, or maybe a high school student who isn't sure what they want to major in, but are open to trying out English or medievalism? What would be your advice to them or your parting wisdom to them?
00:53:56
Speaker
Well, I actually have such a student. I'm the mother of two daughters, but my oldest daughter is a freshman in high school. And we're just starting to look at different colleges and universities and that kind of thing. And she's interested in the humanities. She's interested in English and history and political theory and philosophy.
00:54:16
Speaker
I admit that on a practical level, I'm a little bit concerned about the state of the humanities as a field and its ability to translate at least quickly.
00:54:29
Speaker
into a professional career. I think there's enough evidence to show that in the long term, it does usually pay back. It does usually work out, but transitions are hard. But I would say that the most important thing that the humanities has to offer, and English in particular, is the ability to deal with paradox, the ability to consider the human experience
00:54:56
Speaker
and to understand meaning that is not always explicit. So Peacock, he would have benefited from some literature courses. He wanted to make everything neat, to always fit into a syllogism. And life isn't always syllogistic. It's narrative. It's paradoxical.
00:55:18
Speaker
And so what the humanities broadly can offer, especially the areas that deal with human story, are the tools that we need as people to deal with lived human experience and not simply ideas alone.
00:55:36
Speaker
That's a great message that I hope some of our listeners, especially those in high school, listen and reflect on. There's also perhaps a message in there for employers about what the value is of these degrees.
00:55:51
Speaker
that are applicable in lots of different workplaces that are topically diverse and on a day-to-day basis don't have a direct relation to the subject matter of the humanities, but apply these lessons. Or when employees apply these lessons, they do better. So that's a great note to end on. I just want to say thanks again, Jennifer Smith, for joining us in the Free Mind podcast, and we'll see you soon. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Matt.
00:56:18
Speaker
The Free Mind podcast is produced by the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder. You can email us feedback at freemind at colorado.edu or visit us online at colorado.edu slash center slash benson. You can also find us on social media.
00:56:38
Speaker
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