Collective Remembering, Forgetting, and Forgiving

I have for many years been fascinated with, and written numerous articles about, the questions of remembering and forgetting among Christians, especially between and among Orthodox and Catholic Christians. Too much of what still divides us is bad history badly "remembered." The remembering has very little to do with the past, and much to do with present politics, as Adam Phillips (also explored extensively on here) has so helpfully and rightly reminded us: "memories always have a future in mind."

The on-going problem is how we can overcome these dodgy so-called memories and find true healing. Some have suggested we need to engage in deliberate forgetting, an idea I explored in detail here, by discussing David Rieff's useful little book.

Since it remains an on-going problem, I remain on-goingly interested in books exploring these questions. Oxford University Press recently sent me some such books in exchange for reviewing manuscripts for them. Among the books I asked for were J.K. Olick et al, eds., The Collective Memory Reader (OUP, 2011), 528pp.

As you might imagine, it features very short (most are c. 3-4pp.) excerpts from a huge range of people, some well known--Freud, Burke, Marx, Durkheim, Benjamin, Blondel, Foucault, Ricoeur--alongside many others who were knew to me. The editors argue in their introduction that the study of collective memory really goes back to Maurice Halbwachs, whom I had not read previously, and who was first translated by the anthropologist Mary Douglas, whom I have read to great profit (see, inter alia, her Natural Symbols as well as Purity and Danger).

One of the other authors excerpted in this collection is Roger Bastide, whose The African Religions of Brazil argues that we need to be careful about assuming that we either remember or forget (for whatever motives) in anything like a straightforward manner. Instead, both the remembering and forgetting can be subject to individualized and idiosyncratic mutations that may or may not bleed into the supposedly collective memory.

The other book OUP sent me is Jeffrey Blustein's Forgiveness and Remembrance: Remembering Wrongdoing in Personal and Public Life (OUP, 2014). Blustein is a philosopher who teaches bioethics at the City University of New York.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

Forgiveness and Remembrance examines the complex moral psychology of forgiving, remembering, and forgetting in personal and political contexts. It challenges a number of entrenched ideas that pervade standard philosophical approaches to interpersonal forgiveness and offers an original account of its moral psychology and the emotions involved in it. The volume also uses this account to illuminate the relationship of forgiveness to political reconciliation and restorative political practices in post-conflict societies.

Memory is another central concern that flows from this, since forgiveness is tied to memory and to emotions associated with the memory of injury and injustice. In its political function, memory of wrongdoing -- and of its victims -- is embodied in processes of memorialization, such as the creation of monuments, commemorative ceremonies, and museums. The book casts light on the underexplored relationship of memorialization to transitional justice and politically consequential interpersonal forgiveness. It examines the symbolism and the symbolic moral significance of memorialization as a political practice, reflects on its relationship to forgiveness, and, finally, argues that there are moral responsibilities associated with memorialization that belong to international actors as well as to states.

I'm only a little ways into the book, and hope to report more later. But for the time being, I wanted to draw it to your attention as one of the most philosophically rigorous and carefully argued books I have yet found in this whole complex of topics. Other works, including Rieff's, have only glanced at some of the serious challenges we face if we talk about learning to forget and forgive. Blustein faces these challenges head-on, and his book is much the richer for it, as I hope to show in a future note about it.

Transgenerational Trauma: The Armenian Genocide Considered

To my mind one of the most important and far-reaching insights Freud first helped us to understand, and many analysts--as well as other psychologists, sociologists, historians, and churchmen--have deepened in the years after Freud (and in particular after the Holocaust) is the long-lasting nature of major trauma, and the very real ways in which something of those traumatic memories will shape later generations who did not experience the trauma directly.

In this instance, Eastern Christians have first-hand experience, starting in 1915 (though, of course, actually much earlier, given a centuries-long trail of blood and tears among Armenian Christians, subject to periodic mass slaughters under the Ottomans) with the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides. The first of these was the largest, and has attracted a good deal of attention in the last two decades. Now that a century and more has passed, and all survivors are dead, the memories and effects of the genocide are not, as a new book reminds us: Anthonie Holslag, The Transgenerational Consequences of the Armenian Genocide: Near the Foot of Mount Ararat (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 291pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

This book brings together the Armenian Genocide process and its transgenerational outcome, which are often juxtaposed in existing scholarship, to ask how the Armenian Genocide is conceptualized and placed within diasporic communities. Taking a dual approach to answer this question, Anthonie Holslag studies the cultural expression of violence during the genocidal process itself, and in the aftermath for the victims. By using this approach, this book allows us to see comparatively how genocide in diasporic communities in the Netherlands, London and the US is encapsulated in an historic narrative. It paints a picture of the complexity of genocidal violence itself, but also in its transgenerational and non-spatial consequences, raising new questions of how violence can be perpetuated or interlocked with the discourse and narratives of the victims, and how the violence can be relived.

The Quest for a Usable Past

We are living in a time when questions of memory, memorialization, and forgetting are perhaps more prevalent and more controverted than ever. I have for several years been examining these questions, and continue to do so in a variety of venues and with regard to a number of incidents and periods in particular, as readers of this blog will know.

This month will see another volume join the discussion: Claudia Florentina-Dobre and Cristian Emilian Ghita, eds., The Quest for a Suitable Past: Myths and Memory in Central and Eastern Europe (Central European University Press, 2017), 164pp.

About this book, the publisher tells us:

The past may be approached from a variety of directions. A myth reunites people around certain values and projects and pushes them in one direction or another. The present volume brings together a range of case studies of myth making and myth breaking in east Europe from the nineteenth century to the present day. In particular, it focuses on the complex process through which memories are transformed into myths. This problematic interplay between memory and myth-making is analyzed in conjunction with the role of myths in the political and social life of the region. The essays include cases of forging myths about national pre-history, about the endorsement of nation building by means of historiography, and above all, about communist and post-communist mythologies. The studies shed new light on the creation of local and national identities, as well as the legitimization of ideologies through myth-making. Together, the contributions show that myths were often instrumental in the vast projects of social and political mobilization during a period which has witnessed, among others, two world wars and the harsh oppression of the communist regimes.

"Take, O Lord, and Receive All My Memory...."

Thus begins the famous prayer of the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola, in his famous Spiritual Exercises. This particular line comes in for especial attention in Matthew Ashley's short, suggestive lecture which I have read with great interest: Take Lord and Receive All My Memory: Toward an Anamnestic Mysticism.

What does that mean in itself? What would--does--the Lord do with our memory in such cases? Has He a hidey-hole where He keeps it for safekeeping in case we want it back? Would He cast it into oblivion where neither we nor--perhaps--even He could retrieve it, so "far as the East is from the West...does He remove our transgressions from us" (Ps. 103:12)?

What does it mean with reference to, say, controverted and divisive Christian events such as the Council of Chalcedon or the Fourth Crusade? What would the Lord do with our memories in such cases? Is it possible, in the search for Christian unity, that we might need to ask the Lord to obliterate our memories of division?

Readers will know that these and related questions continue to occupy my thinking, as I have often noted on here over the past year especially.

Several new or forthcoming works will continue to put these questions before us, including Orthodox and Catholic Christians in Eastern Europe, as in this new study by Uilleam Blacker, Memory, Forgetting and the Legacy of Post-1945 Displacement in Russia and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2017), 240pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

After the Second World War, millions of people across Eastern Europe, displaced as a result of wartime destruction, deportations and redrawing of state boundaries, found themselves living in cities that were filled with the traces of the foreign cultures of the former inhabitants. In the immediate post-war period these traces were not acknowledged, the new inhabitants going along with official policies of oblivion, the national narratives of new post-war regimes, and the memorialising of the victors. In time, however, and increasingly over recent decades, the former "other pasts" have been embraced and taken on board as part of local cultural memory. This book explores this interesting and increasingly important phenomenon. It examines official ideologies, popular memory, literature, film, memorialisation and tourism to show how other pasts are being incorporated into local cultural memory. It relates these developments to cultural theory; and argues that the relationship between urban space, cultural memory and identity in Eastern Europe is increasingly becoming a question not only of cultural politics, but also of consumption and choice, alongside a tendency towards the cosmopolitanisation of memory.

Another new study will force the uncomfortable question of what is to be gained by forgetting, rather than remembering, such horrors at the Holocaust--a question also asked by David Rieff in his book, which I discussed on here extensively: Alejandro Baer and Natan Sznaider, Memory and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust Era: The Ethics of Never Again (Routledge, 2016), 182pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

To forget after Auschwitz is considered barbaric. Baer and Sznaider question this assumption not only in regard to the Holocaust but to other political crimes as well. The duties of memory surrounding the Holocaust have spread around the globe and interacted with other narratives of victimization that demand equal treatment. Are there crimes that must be forgotten and others that should be remembered?

In this book the authors examine the effects of a globalized Holocaust culture on the ways in which individuals and groups understand the moral and political significance of their respective histories of extreme political violence. Do such transnational memories facilitate or hamper the task of coming to terms with and overcoming divisive pasts? Taking Argentina, Spain and a number of sites in post-communist Europe as test cases, this book illustrates the transformation from a nationally oriented ethics to a trans-national one. The authors look at media, scholarly discourse, NGOs dealing with human rights and memory, museums and memorial sites, and examine how a new generation of memory activists revisits the past to construct a new future. Baer and Sznaider follow these attempts to manoeuvre between the duties of remembrance and the benefits of forgetting. This, the authors argue, is the "ethics of Never Again."

Remembering the Crusades

I just received in the mail a new and fascinating collection edited by Megan Cassidy-Welch, Remembering the Crusades and Crusading (Routledge, 2016), 266pp. I am greatly looking forward to reading this, coming as it does in a period of increased thought on the uses and abuses of historical memory of the Crusades, as noted in many posts on here over the past 18 months.

This book, the publisher tells us,

examines the diverse contexts in which crusading was memorialised and commemorated in the medieval world and beyond. The collection not only shows how the crusades were commemorated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but also considers the longer-term remembrance of the crusades into the modern era.

This collection is divided into three sections, the first of which deals with the textual, material and visual sources used to remember. Each contributor introduces a particular body of source material and presents case studies using those sources in their own research. The second section contains four chapters examining specific communities active in commemorating the crusades, including religious communities, family groups and royal courts. Finally, the third section examines the cultural memory of crusading in the Byzantine, Iberian and Baltic regions beyond the early years, as well as the trajectory of crusading memory in the Muslim Middle East.

Remembering the Crusades and Crusading draws together and extends the current debates in the history of the crusades and the history of memory and in so doing offers a fresh synthesis of material in both fields. It will be essential reading for students of the crusades and memory.

Routledge also gives us the table of contents: 

Introduction
1. Remembering in the time of the crusades
Megan Cassidy-Welch

Sources of memory
2. Preaching and crusade memory
Jessalynn Bird
3. The liturgical memory of 15 July 1099: between history, memory and eschatology
M. Cecilia Gaposchkin
4. Crusades, Memory and Visual Culture: Representations of the Miracle of Intervention of Saints in Battle
Elizabeth Lapina
5. Remembrance of Things Past: Memory and Material Objects in the Time of the Crusades, 1095-1291
Anne E. Lester
6. Historical writing
Darius von Güttner-Sporzyński
7. "Perpetuel Memorye": Remembering History in the Crusading Romance
Lee Manion

Communities of memory
8. Monastic memories of the early crusading movement
Katherine Allen Smith
9. Royal memory
James Naus and Vincent Ryan
10. Jewish Memory and the Crusades: The Hebrew Crusade Chronicles and Protection from Christian violence
Rebecca Rist
11. Family memory and the crusades
Nicholas Paul and Jochen Schenk

Cultural memory
12. ‘A blow sent by God’: Changing Byzantine memories of the Crusades
Jonathan Harris
13. Living and remembering the crusades and the Reconquista: Iberia, 11th-13th Centuries
Ana Rodriguez
14. The Muslim Memory of the Crusades
Alex Mallett
15. Appropriating history: Remembering the crusades in Latvia and Estonia
Carsten Selch Jensen

The Virtues of Forgetting

As part of a long-term project of thinking about the ecclesiological, ecumenical, and ultimately soteriological implications of forgetting, which I have described in various posts you may view here, I picked up Viktor Mayer-Schönberger's book Delete: the Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. It is a sobering assessment of the problems of a digital era in which people (e.g., Andrew Feldmar) could run into all sorts of problems from employers and governments (inter alia) relying on digitized "memories" of events in our past that, without context, may look (in the eyes of densely stupid bureaucrats, inter alia) sufficiently disqualifying to entering countries or companies alike.

Mayer-Schönberger documents the rise of long-term collective memory through the invention of language, and then books, especially after the invention of the printing press. But nothing has prepared us for the digital revolution in which the sheer quantity of information we can retain is utterly overwhelming, and becoming more so each year as the expense and effort in such retention becomes technically cheaper and easier.

He rightly issues a caution against putting too much faith in digital sources to do the remembering for us if we assume that such sources are incorrupt and will remain incorruptible. Even in an earlier, technically primitive era, it was still possible for the Trotskys of this world and others who had fallen into disfavor with the current regime to be 'erased' from pictures, articles, and entire editions of, say, the Soviet Encyclopedia. And as everyone knows today, it is possible to be constantly editing and deleting things from, e.g., Wikipedia. So digital "memory" can be just as malleable as human memory, though on a far wider and therefore much more dangerous scale.

In the end, the author proposes a number of suggestions, before focusing on in-built expiration dates for most on-line information--Amazon's "suggestions" of additional things we might like to buy, e.g., or cookies from retailers and search engines stored on our browsers. Endless forgetting is not the boon some may glibly assume, and contains real dangers. Mayer-Schönberger rightly reminds us of the virtues to be found in forgetting.

David Rieff on the Duty to Forget (II)

As I noted previously, among its several virtues, David Rieff's new and important book, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, forces us to overcome any romantic or idealistic claims that enforced historical remembrance of certain, especially traumatic, events, in itself makes the world a better place.

The notion of collective memory comes in for unrelenting criticism from Rieff, and in my view this is wholly justified. He disputes flatly the idea that there is such a thing as collective memory as genuine memory of actual events which the collective itself experienced directly. (This is a problem I have long wondered about in all the papal calls for the "healing of memories," especially among and between Christians. How can the "memories" of, say, the entire Greek Orthodox Church be healed apart from healing each person one at a time if, that is, they have such "memories" in the first place--rather than having "acquired" them as part of their national identity kits?) This is indeed Rieff's point also: collective "memory" is an instrumentalist notion packaged into national identities and political ideologies; as such it is tendentious, narcissistic, unambiguous, unequivocal, and one-dimensional. It privileges power over truth; it does not scruple over historical accuracy, or acknowledge any ambiguity. This is what makes collective memory so useful to politicians and convincing in the hands of nationalist ideologues, and precisely what makes it so dangerous also.

Instead of an almost unquestioning insistence on remembrance, whose utility is assumed but almost never demonstrated, Rieff spends considerable time arguing that certain memories for a time may be useful in trying to prod people to repentance and reconciliation, but these cases will likely be short-lived and can only be determined on a case-by-base basis. There is, then, no room for blanket insistence on wide-spread collective remembrance by everyone forever.

Equally Rieff is not a one-sided polemicist in the other direction, insisting on blanket and widespread forgetting. He recognizes that remembering may have its place, and may be of limited use to some people.

Its utility, however, is in fact likely to be highly limited, and time-bound. Wide-spread insistence on collective remembrance has little if any demonstrable track record in making the world a better place. Collective remembrance in and of itself gives us no clues, no tools, no guidelines, as to how to prevent a future recurrence of, say, a genocide or other traumatic or violent event.

What might work better, then? Here Rieff turns to both forgiveness and especially forgetting. According to Rieff, both have considerable virtues and both have advantages that collective remembrance does not.

Forgetting, says Rieff:

• is more mature
• is more likely to bring peace
• is no more likely to ensure repetition of a traumatic, violence event than enforced remembrance is to prevent it

We insist (and legally so in some cases--e.g., France's Gayssot Act and later legislation mandating memory and criminalizing denial of, e.g., the Holocaust) on a "duty to remember," notes Rieff before asking: Why not a duty to forget? Would that not be socially useful also?

Related to a duty to forget is the question of forgiveness. Rieff does not give this as much attention, and in our final installment we will look at this in more detail before teasing out some of the implications of all this for both Christian and Muslim "memories" of such as, e.g, the Fourth Crusade.

Continues. 

Is Christianity Constitutionally Incapable of Forgetting?

I have noted on here several times previously my ongoing interest in the practices of remembering and forgetting, especially among Eastern Christians and Muslims with references to things like the Crusades, and the divisions between Orthodox and Catholics. I have found several recent books of use in thinking through some of these issues. None of these authors entertains any explicitly theological or "religious" interests or questions--apart from some mention of the Holocaust of course--but their works are nonetheless useful to those of us who try to grapple with theological problems such as long-standing "memories" of division and hurt at the hands of fellow Christians, or Muslims, or others.
As I continue to make my way through such books as Manuel Cruz's On the Difficulty of Living Together: Memory, Politics, and History as well as David Rieff's In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (and several others I have mentioned previously) there emerges a central and properly theological question hinted at in my title: is Christianity capable, is it morally permitted, to forget when its central act, when the "source and summit of the Christian life" is precisely the act of grateful remembrance, of eucharistic anamnesis, of thankful memorialization? Given such powerful weight attached to "remembrance," have many of us derived therefrom some inchoate sense that forgetting is a morally reprehensible act?

I will explore more of the implications of both books once I have finished them. For those who are interested in such questions as remembering and forgetting, especially publicly and culturally, both Rieff and Cruz have written short but powerful essays very much worth your time, and I commend them to you.

On Learning to Forget

As I noted last summer, I have become more and more fascinated not just with the uses and abuses of memory--in the context of, e.g., the "Crusades," which have become an all-purpose stick with which certain Orthodox Christians and certain Muslims try to beat the Catholic Church--but also with the question of forgetting. Our last century has, for justifiable reasons, been concerned to say "Never again!" by saying "Never forget!" And that is noble, commendable, important if we wish to guard against a repeat of, say, the Holocaust, Armenian Genocide, or Holodomor.

But sometimes it seems the only way forward is by not remembering. That is, the way forward is precisely through forgetting. The problem here, of course, is that most of us have been conditioned to think of forgetting as a morally reprobated activity, as a deplorable oversight, as a sin of omission--forgetting the dog in the car on a hot day, say, or failing to remember the dental appointment that morning at 9, or not remembering to buy a card for my spouse's birthday.

But as we ought to have learned by now from Freud, not all forms of remembering are healthful and helpful; and not all forms of forgetting are evidence of unhealthy repression or unconscious frustration. Certain forms of remembering are necessary, while certain others are not. Certain remembrances can help with healing with others can hinder it. This is as true for individuals as it is for Christians and their churches. Indeed, on this latter score, I think there are certain things that Christians can and must come to forget if we are ever to live together again as one body.

I've been thinking about these things for a while now, and continue to work on them for a lecture I'm to give in 2017. These thoughts have also been recently addressed in this fascinating article, which in turn put me in mind of Bradford Vivian's welcome and important book, Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again

The author of the article, David Rieff, has a book coming out in May: In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (Yale UP, 2016), 160pp.

About this book we are told:

The conventional wisdom about historical memory is summed up in George Santayana’s celebrated phrase, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Today, the consensus that it is moral to remember, immoral to forget, is nearly absolute. And yet is this right?

David Rieff, an independent writer who has reported on bloody conflicts in Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia, insists that things are not so simple. He poses hard questions about whether remembrance ever truly has, or indeed ever could, “inoculate” the present against repeating the crimes of the past. He argues that rubbing raw historical wounds—whether self-inflicted or imposed by outside forces—neither remedies injustice nor confers reconciliation. If he is right, then historical memory is not a moral imperative but rather a moral option—sometimes called for, sometimes not. Collective remembrance can be toxic. Sometimes, Rieff concludes, it may be more moral to forget.

Ranging widely across some of the defining conflicts of modern times—the Irish Troubles and the Easter Uprising of 1916, the white settlement of Australia, the American Civil War, the Balkan wars, the Holocaust, and 9/11—Rieff presents a pellucid examination of the uses and abuses of historical memory. His contentious, brilliant, and elegant essay is an indispensable work of moral philosophy.

Notes on Julia Kristeva, Psychoanalysis, Eastern Christianity, and Today's European Refugee Crisis

More than twenty years ago now when I was studying psychology and thinking of training as a psychoanalyst, I came across the name of Julia Kristeva, but never read much beyond a few sentences in some textbook or other purporting to describe briefly who she was and what she was on about.

More recently, however, I have had a chance to dive into her works more deeply as part of some on-going research I'm doing on the uses and abuses of memory in Catholic, Orthodox, and Islamic contexts and inter-relations. So consider this a brief note for those who may be interested in learning more about Kristeva.

Kristeva's book In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith shows some familiarity with the Christian East as Kristeva recounts part of her early adolescence in which she tried to see if she could will herself to faith, which she found strangely attractive after spending some time contemplating a Byzantine icon of the Mother of God. (Her interest in Byzantium, perhaps motivated by or connected to her birth in Bulgaria, has generated Murder in Byzantium: A Novel, which I have not read yet.) She describes herself as not successful in trying to have faith, but it didn't leave her bitter or hostile but instead genuinely open to learning what she can about both the particular teachings of Christianity, as well as to the whole phenomenon of faith.

The rest of In the Beginning Was Love is a rather anemic and staccato series of reflections on faith, including two chapters that move systematically through each line of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. She shows herself far more open to the idea of faith, and far less convinced that it simply fulfills some kind of infantile neurosis--a position usually attributed to Freud, though I would also note here that I found a copy of Sigmund Freud: Psychoanalysis and Faith, Dialogues with the Reverand Oskar Pfister in a wonderful used bookstore in Indianapolis over Christmas, and I have been very impressed with the correspondence, most of which is from Freud's side as many of Pfister's letters have been lost. Freud's tone is consistently extremely gracious and kind, and he here evidences a sincere openness to trying to see faith as something more than a wish fulfillment or neurosis. He is unfailingly polite and modest, and recognizes the hermeneutic limits of psychoanalysis when it comes to metaphysical and theological questions. In fact, I detect in this book something approximating an inchoate desire on the part of Freud to have faith as Pfister has it. (How much faith Pfister himself had remains open to debate. He seems nothing if not an early proponent of what the contemporary sociologist Christian Smith has memorably called moralistic therapeutic deism, which perhaps explain's Freud's attraction to him and subsequent friendship with him.)

Kristeva's other book, which I have just begun, will be of obvious interest to Eastern Christians and our perpetual problem of ethno-nationalism or phyletism: Nations Without Nationalism (Columbia University Press, 1993).

It is striking to me, reading this book in 2016 with the on-going European refugee crisis, just how much relevance it still has after it was first published in French in 1990, and translated into English three years later. She asks such questions as "Will France be able to welcome without too many clashes the flow from the other side of the Mediterranean?" Little did she know a quarter-century ago how that flow would become a flood today into Germany, France, and elsewhere.

She notes, in 1990, the increasing mania then of "discovering one's origins" and then using the founding mythologies of my group or nation as a source not only of personal identity, but also of a collective ideology with which to exclude if not destroy others who are not pure laine, who become objects of hatred that may well be little more than a projection of my internal self-loathing.

Like In the Beginning Was Love, Nations Without Nationalism is clearly an essai in that form which French writers use so well but many others find frustrating: not as a finished product tightly wrapped up, but as a somewhat discursive and almost playful place in which the author seeks essayer disparate ideas. Thus after only a few brusque paragraphs contemplating French immigration and struggles, she moves on to consider how America has historically handled questions of immigration and identity; how the United Kingdom did; and how the ancient Greeks did. She then returns to France, noting that "Nowhere is one more a foreigner than in France." Looking towards the year 2000, she predicts that "the matter of Arabian immigration in France" will remain the most pressing problem--a prescient argument indeed seen from today's perspective!

Then, curiously, she suddenly lurches to considering the life and work of St. Paul, noting how his writings challenged the ancient ideas of nation and kinship, giving Christians and the world a new definition: "there is neither Jew nor Greek for all are one in Christ Jesus." Though Christians, as she recognizes, have often failed to live up to this vision of a universal community transcending all our particularities, nonetheless we must "bow, in passing, to Paul's psychological and political sensitivity."

Returning again to France, she sounds what seems an appropriate call for France--and perforce the rest of Europe--to assume a greater confidence in its own ways of life, and a greater willingness to defend those ways of life in the face of Arab-Muslim immigration and the latter's very different cultural mores. How little that call seems to have been heeded in the intervening quarter-century! In this regard she wants a return to what she sees as the ideals of the Revolution: the creation of a pact among sovereign individuals freed from other attachments, including the hateful shackles of nationalistic identity in which I am at war with all those who are not part of my family, clan, and nation. She seems to suggest that such a pact, such an ideal from the Revolution, has commendable Christian origins--though, of course, many Christians, pre-eminently Catholics in France and Western Europe--saw the revolution as nothing more or other than "demonic," as Joseph de Maistre unsparingly put it.

After a brief foray into ancient Jewish laws about foreigners, she then considers--as many others have, perhaps especially Paschalis Kitromilides, not least in his essay "The Legacy of the French Revolution: Orthodoxy and Nationalism" in The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 5, Eastern Christianity--the pivotal role played by the French revolution in developing theories of nationalism and the "sovereignty" of the nation-state, theories which have, as I've demonstrated elsewhere, proved to be so pivotal in the rise of not just the modern nation-states of, e.g., Greece, Romania, and Russia, but the concomitant rise in their Orthodox national churches as well.

If time allows, I hope also to read Kristeva's Hannah Arendt. Arendt's famous studies of the banality of evil, and of The Origins of Totalitarianism retain important explanatory power for Eastern Christians--especially in Russia--still struggling to find ways of dealing with the communist past. 

Imagining Byzantium

I have for some time been ever more fascinated with the uses and abuses of the past, with questions of memory and forgetting, particularly in the context of East-West relations. We seem to be living in a time where such questions are coming more and more to the fore, as I have noted on here several times. A new book continues the exploration of these historiographical and hermeneutical questions: Elena Boeck, Imagining the Byzantine Past: The Perception of History in the Illustrated Manuscripts of Skylitzes and Manasses (Cambridge UP, 2015), 300pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Two lavish, illustrated histories confronted and contested the Byzantine model of empire. The Madrid Skylitzes was created at the court of Roger II of Sicily in the mid-twelfth century. The Vatican Manasses was produced for Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria in the mid-fourteenth century. Through close analysis of how each chronicle was methodically manipulated, this study argues that Byzantine history was selectively re-imagined to suit the interests of outsiders. The Madrid Skylitzes foregrounds regicides, rebellions, and palace intrigue in order to subvert the divinely ordained image of order that Byzantine rulers preferred to project. The Vatican Manasses presents Byzantium as a platform for the accession of Ivan Alexander to the throne of the Third Rome, the last and final world-empire. Imagining the Byzantine Past demonstrates how distinct visions of empire generated diverging versions of Byzantium's past in the aftermath of the Crusades.

"Do This in Memory of Me"

As I noted on here a few weeks ago, my attention has lately been riveted on the question of memory and forgetting, especially in the context of Christian disputes and traumas such as the Fourth Crusade. More than a decade ago now I published several articles on the concept of the "healing of memories" that the late Pope John Paul II talked about so often in the context of Christian relations, especially between East and West.

But I did not then attend to the issue of how those memories were formed in the first place, or how we come to forget things, or to other broader questions raised by the category of memory, which is of course such a central part of the central ritual of Christianity: the Eucharist. What does it mean to say "Do this in memory of me?" How are we to translate the Greek ἀνάμνησιν or the Latin commemorationem in Luke 19:22? Christians have not, of course, always agreed on these terms, nor do we today.

Even if we did agree on the liturgical meaning of these terms, it would leave other important questions unresolved. In my days as a psychology major, the then-recent research of people like Elizabeth Loftus was emerging to demonstrate just how fungible and unreliable memory can be. Her research on what even so-called eye-witnesses thought they remembered was and remains startling and disconcerting. Memory, it seems, is an enormously complex phenomenon and ever so much more than a mere "photograph" in our mind of a past event. I look forward to continuing to explore these questions in the coming years.

Oxford University Press sent me an e-mail this week alerting me to a book to be published at month's end that treats some of these questions: Dmitri Nikulin, ed., Memory: A History (Oxford UP, 2015),416pp.

About this book we are told:

In recent decades, memory has become one of the major concepts and a dominant topic in philosophy, sociology, politics, history, science, cultural studies, literary theory, and the discussions of trauma and the Holocaust. In contemporary debates, the concept of memory is often used rather broadly and thus not always unambiguously. For this reason, the clarification of the range of the historical meaning of the concept of memory is a very important and urgent task. This volume shows how the concept of memory has been used and appropriated in different historical circumstances and how it has changed throughout the history of philosophy. In ancient philosophy, memory was considered a repository of sensible and mental impressions and was complemented by recollection-the process of recovering the content of past thoughts and perceptions. Such an understanding of memory led to the development both of mnemotechnics and the attempts to locate memory within the structure of cognitive faculties. In contemporary philosophical and historical debates, memory frequently substitutes for reason by becoming a predominant capacity to which one refers when one wants to explain not only the personal identity but also a historical, political, or social phenomenon. In contemporary interpretation, it is memory, and not reason, that acts in and through human actions and history, which is a critical reaction to the overly rationalized and simplified concept of reason in the Enlightenment. Moreover, in modernity memory has taken on one of the most distinctive features of reason: it is thought of as capable not only of recollecting past events and meanings, but also itself. In this respect, the volume can be also taken as a reflective philosophical attempt by memory to recall itself, its functioning and transformations throughout its own history.

We are also given the table of contents:

Introduction. Memory in Recollection of Itself. Dmitri Nikulin

Ch.1. Memory in Ancient Philosophy. Dmitri Nikulin

Reflection: Roman Art and the Visual Memory of Greece. Francesco de Angelis
Ch.2. Memory in Medieval Philosophy. Jörn Müller
Reflection: Visual Memory and a Drawing by Villard de Honnecourt. Ludovico Geymonat
Ch. 3. Memory in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period. Stephen Clucas
Reflection: Memory and Forgetfulness in Daoism. Xia Chen
Ch. 4. Forms of Memory in Classical German Philosophy. Angelica Nuzzo
Reflection: Memory and Story-Telling in Proust. Mieke Bal
Ch. 5. Memory in Continental Philosophy: Metaphor, Concept, Thinking. Nicolas de Warren
Reflection: Freud and Memory. Eli Zaretsky
Ch. 6. Trauma, Memory, Holocaust. Michael Rothberg

Reflection: Memory: An Adaptive Constructive Process. Daniel Schacter

Ch. 7. Memory in Analytic Philosophy. Sven Bernecker

Reflection: The Recognitional Structure of Collective Memory. Axel Honneth

Ch. 8. Memory and Culture. Jan Assmann