Whither, Van Loon?
Wright, Cuthbert
WHITHER, VAN LOON ? By CUTHBERT WRIGHT ONE has a great desire to be fair to Mr. Van Loon. It is the same desire which prompts us to return good for good, Mr. Van Loon, in his capacity as writer...
...Van Loon's pretensions as a historian, or to expose the fitness of Protestantism as a religion for Christian men...
...When he comes to comparatively modern times, Mr...
...Van Loon observes that the philosopher's books "enjoyed great respect among scholars" in the wicked and bigoted middle-ages...
...Not content with affirming that Plato was held in great respect during the middle-ages, Mr...
...We are far from denying that all three were enemies, not very open or avowed either, of a certain spirit in the sixteenth-century Church, and Mr...
...One would love to be confirmed in this theory by so profound an historical authority as Mr...
...Pecksniff said of the Sirens, was wellnigh canonized, and was extremely revered even by the man in the street for having foretold the virgin birth of our Lord...
...When you point out to him and his school that Christ in the Gospels is constantly displayed as providing for a future, a future church, they reply that the Gospels are full of corruptions and emendations...
...Dropping all pretence at irony and the pedantic task of picking flaws in a man's thesis, we would only add that the final cause for all the confusions and illogicalities in such books as Tolerance, is that fundamental flaw of thinking—the illusion of progress...
...Van Loon advances blithely to a third and greater, and rewrites the story of Jesus Christ...
...The intelligent man will demand, on the contrary—"Progress toward what...
...Get that...
...It is a little vague: there are heretics and heretics...
...No one can be so pedantic as to blame a non-Catholic historian if he makes an occasional slip, such as calling Luther a "Dominican" or the assassin of Henry of Navarre a "monk...
...and, we may add without further ambiguity, that we are heartily in agreement with him...
...We have not written this notice, either to expose Mr...
...The Albigenses were less fortunate . . . But three centuries later, in a slightly modified form, their doctrines were to crop up again, and propagated by a Saxon priest, Martin Luther, they were to cause the reform which was to break the monopoly of the papal super-state...
...Sumner and several other obvious blessings of our immediate environment...
...Van Loon says—"We of the twentieth century, rightly or wrongly, believe in progress...
...Note that he has just reached the thirteenth, the Catholic century par excellence...
...j.oo...
...Van Loon, in his capacity as writer of popular history, having given us considerable pleasure...
...The Story of Mankind is a truly educational book...
...Whatever were the errors and cruelties of the mediaeval Catholic, he at least spared himself Mr...
...hence I am opposed to fresh air...
...Van Loon could have scored a big point for his nebulous cause had be observed just the opposite...
...Could it be that that famous "Gospel-light" was handed down by the old Manichees to Luther and Calvin, and then communicated by those saintly men to the New England Puritans and the Tennessee aboriginals and the devotees of the late Mr...
...Van Loon's conception of the perfect Christian, we are not surprised that he is so contemptuous of Christianity, but a little astonished that he blames the Pope for exterminating so unpleasant a sect...
...The errors of the mediaeval epoch were at least pardonable because the intention was at once logical and pure...
...Naturally, Mr...
...Erasmus and Company disliked pedantry and auto-da-fes...
...Speaking of Plato's Republic as an essay on intolerance, Mr...
...Van Loon could have said so without committing himself to a downright prevarication which could be corrected by any child...
...it is inept...
...Van Loon cheerfully, and the conclusion is that "it never apparently dawned on him that he might be the founder of a new religion...
...Other things being equal, it is a fairly correct description of their primitive state of mind...
...The heretic is the one true Christian...
...Having taken these liberties with the names of Plato and Virgil, Mr...
...It is absolutely incontestable...
...As Mr...
...Van Loon's particular traduction seemed like the crackling of thorns under pots...
...H. G. Wells...
...Did a heresy, manifested in earliest times as Manicheism, then as Albigensianism, finally appear—per saltum—as Protestantism...
...Now Mr...
...As in the case of all these modernizations and revised versions of what even atheists can fitly term Holy Writ, for the holy genius of art presided at its making, Mr...
...Van Loon, "the right to say courageously—4Do we really know?' " and for this ultimate blessing, he adds, he "would give all the collected sonnets of Petrarca and the assembled works of Raffaelo...
...Van Loon in mind...
...We are all glad to hear for the twentieth time that Christ is an isolated figure, memorable chiefly for the Sermon on the Mount and a few kindred maxims, having nothing whatever to do with the Christian Church, as afterward developed...
...Van Loon asserts, a little later, that Virgil was held in positive abomination during the same period...
...As he himself says touchingly—"I am profoundly grateful that the Geneva of the sixteenth century existed...
...The right never to know, the right to wander comfortably and happily in the dark...
...The truth is that Christians have very little to fear from Mr...
...But in his latest book, Tolerance,* much of which is to us profoundly exasperating, flashes of what we may call, without offense, the Van Loonatic style, are always bursting out in all their hilarious charm...
...Have we not said that we owe all our contemporary blessings to Luther's immortal gesture and to the Gospel-light that dawned in Boleyn's eyes...
...At all events, Mr...
...Van Loon wrote authentic history for children and adult children, and both classes of reader have cause to be grateful to him...
...Such a comparison is worse than irreverent...
...that nature was irredeemably evil...
...His version is a very old story...
...Van Loon's "only true Christians...
...Van Loon, naturally, does not admit all this in so many words, but he discloses something else extremely damaging about Protestantism, and does it in no uncertain terms...
...What is it that we do not owe, indeed, to Mr...
...Well, so much the worse for us, if we parade an ultimate agnosticism as shamelessly as does Mr...
...Obviously, the heretics in question are the Vaudois whom the Church let alone as long as they imitated Christ's poverty and only persecuted when they attacked His sacraments, and —the Albigensians...
...These are, after all, minor ineptitudes...
...It is one thing to speak of the Greeks as regarding life as a rough-house...
...The error of Mr...
...Old Manes begot Wyclif, and Wyclif begot Luther, and Luther begot Calvin, and Calvin begot Puritanism, and Puritanism produced prohibition and the Dayton trial and Mr...
...It is only toward the middle of his book that Mr...
...Van Loon has proved to be, and on page 140 of Tolerance one has his reward...
...Here the advantage of popularization seemed less obvious...
...Protestantism (it seems) was responsible for the glorious war of 1914-1918, and for several other wars to boot...
...It is quite another thing to compare Socrates to a "colyumist...
...The Story of Mankind was a capital book, in that its author, having the whole canvas of time and the world to fill in, filled it with broad, graceful strokes, with humor and good humor, with a sovereign lightness, instead of sweating and straining and forever falling foul of institutions and individuals like his ponderous contemporary, Mr...
...Van Loon and his school is, that disclaiming to know any difference between truth and untruth, between right and wrong, they venture to proclaim in big books, packed with a hundred additional errors of plain fact, that, never on any occasion, by any conceivable miracle, could the Church possibly have been right...
...We have long cherished the notion that this heresy of southern France, with its half conscious devil-worship and insane taboos, its teetotalism and liturgical indecency and hatred of sex, was the seed-ground of a later and, only apparently, different school of thought...
...As far as I understand that movement, [the Reformation] it was primarily a manifestation of a new spirit . . . which came to be known as nationalism, and which was, therefore, the sworn enemy of that foreign super-state into which all Europe had been forced in the last five centuries...
...that the race should die out...
...All is well then...
...Van Loon affirms it...
...It should not be confused with the mere blunder of historic fact...
...Toward the right to think," retorts Mr...
...Ah, that dreadful super-state...
...With The Story of the Bible one began to doubt...
...Far from being abominated in the middle-ages, Virgil, though "pagan, I regret to state," as Mr...
...Bryan...
...Besides, the sentiment is false in fact as well as false in logic, since none of the three evinced any particular sympathy for the Protestant cause...
...Whatever the sins of Socrates, he was a profoundly educated and civilized being who believed ^Tolerance, by Hendrik JVUlem Van Loon...
...The historical ineptitude belongs to another order of solecism...
...The creature to whom he is compared is usually an intellectually lazy fellow who, paid to translate editorial opinion into quotidian wit, pronounces pontifically on everything in heaven and on earth from the Pope to the Yankees...
...that the former should mortify and dishonor their flesh...
...You literally rub your eyes in reading howlers of that sort...
...In the meantime, the poor, old, bigoted, retrograde Catholic Church remained in the background of progress, refusing to aid and as often as possible attempting to suppress this ultimate fruition of light...
...There is another sort of ineptitude—the historical one...
...Van Loon, a very curious and interesting point...
...What particular brand has Mr...
...It was the Italian renaissance which rendered them fashionable to the great disgust of Pope Paul II, who persecuted several Platonic humanists at Rome...
...Van Loon's conception of progress...
...If this be Mr...
...I dislike cyclones...
...And now we reach, thanks to Mr...
...Van Loon in a fine flourishing of rhetoric lets his big cat out of the bag, producing the following astounding statement— "When I reach the thirteenth century . . . the heretic ceases to be a mere dissenter .. . and becomes, instead, the champion of those ideas for which a certain carpenter from Nazareth went to his death, and behold, he stands revealed as the only true Christian...
...Plato's books did not enjoy great respect in the middle-ages, for the excellent reason that they had been hardly so much as heard of...
...ergo, Erasmus and Company despised the sacraments and disbelieved in God...
...that there were the unco' good, the perfect—and also the others...
...It is so much more unprogressive to live at peace under the anti-Christ of Rome, than that Anglican England should war against Catholic Spain, and Lutheran Prussia on Catholic France, and that the smoke of their mutual hates and torments should go up forever and forever...
...So, if we wish to know what Mr...
...He was killed before he was able to organize his disciples into a special sect," says Mr...
...Van Loon's conception of progress, it is, like his conception of "the one true Christian," pitiable and damnable...
...Van Loon considers to be the one true Christian, we have only to study the latter interesting folk...
...Van Loon has some of the defects of his qualities...
...When you point out that the admired Sermon on the Mount is also in the corrupt and emendated Gospels, that the only authority we have that Christ ever lived at all is in the Gospels, they answer that the sermon is all right and belongs to the sublime sphere of morality, and that Gautama also preached on a mountain, as though one would expect Gautama to preach in a coal cellar...
...Van Loon throws off all restraint and allows his riotous fancy full play...
...The Albigensians believed, rather like our own Puritans, that there were two gods, good and evil...
...New York: Boni and Liveright...
...Speaking of the early Greek chieftains, he is able to write— "They were overgrown children who regarded life as one long, glorified rough-house, full of excitement and wrestling matches and running races and all the many things which we ourselves would dearly love to do if we were not forced to stick to the routine jobs which provide us with bread and bananas...
...If this be Mr...
...34 THE COMMONWEAL January 6, 1926 in seeing every problem four-square, in going to the bottom of things...
...Here the sense of fitness is at fault...
...We are told that Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne were all "open and avowed enemies of that institution which has taken upon itself the exclusive right of elevating ordinary human beings to certain celestial dignities...
...Van Loon, considered as a higher critic...
Vol. 3 • January 1926 • No. 9
