Treason against God

...Above all, the historian cannot limit his definition of competence to those who happen to have written in only one of the current languages of scholarship...

...The real purpose of this book is theological and philosophical, or historico-philosophical...

...To be sure, no historian can possess a full philological command of all the documents he uses, particularly in a book with as broad a chronological scope as this one...

...Following only a long-forgotten work of 1914 rather than Nicola Badaloni and Luigi Firpo-or even Paul Oskar Kristel-ler and Frances Yates, who write in English-on Giordano Bruno has led him to conclude that Bruno is still regarded as "the foremost of the philosophers of the Italian renaissance" (p...

...Otherwise he will expose himself to errors of fact, as Levy does five times on just two successive pages (109 and 110):" The capture of the Eternal City in 467" (1...

...Nineham, Oscar Cullmann, "Father Gerard Sloyan," and "the controversial Catholic theologian Hans Kung" all say the same thing...

...Whenever he doubts his own competence, he has the right, even the duty, to borrow from those who are competent...

...the Holy Roman Empire...

...Since he is professor not just of law, but of the humanities, and since he teaches at one of the few institutions of learning still brave enough to resist demands for specialization and professionalism, he is obviously in a very good position to carry out this resolution...

...152...

...But when faced with varying degrees of competence, he must follow the judgment of those who are considered the current authorities in the field...

...by light years'' or that a certain "interpretation of the Trinity...

...And merely extracting passages from, rather than reading, the great number of works he cites in the footnotes has led him to believe" that such diverse authors as William Wilson, Rodolf Bultmann, D.E...

...Overlooking Delio Cantimori and his several continuers has led Levy to attribute to George Williams a thesis Williams nowhere proposes: that Socinianism was a revival of Arianism...

...These rules do not permit the use of colons in the place of relative clauses...

...But this is really not a work of history at all, the title notwithstanding...

...And they permit the use of metaphors only for the purpose of rendering non-metaphorical statements clearer or more vivid...

...It elucidates no current political or constitutional problem, since, Levy admits, the blasphemy laws still on the books of a few American states are neither enforced nor enforceable...

...and] endowed [it with] this provision in Justinian's code" (3...

...He portrays Luther (but not Calvin, who is excoriated in the seven pages on the Servetus affair) as "progressive" at least in relation to "the Inquisition," and he reduces "the Continent" to the role of providing "precedents" to what he then ascribes, in more than half the book, to late sixteenth and seventeenth century England...

...For another thing, historiography is firmly grounded in philology...

...Byzantium, the eastern half of the [Roman] Empire, where [in the fifth century] the Greek Orthodox Church dominated" (i.e., was dominant) (2...

...Charlemagne . . . founded...

...He cannot assume, for example, that the best guide to the Gospel of Mark is a book published in 1925...

...the body: corrupt matter"), emotion-charged adjectives in the place of explicit statements ("hideous blasphemy"), or adverbs in the place of theses for which the historian can be held responsible ("impartially, if promiscuously, Luther condemned...

...They forbid the use of transitive verbs as if they were intransitive ("the controversy reduced to quibbles...

...He has now resolved to carry out a life-long ambition to put his many monographic studies into a broader historical perspective...

...In order to prove that impiety and sacrilege were the same as blasphemy in fifth-century Athens, the historian must argue from the language used by fifth-century Athenians, not from English translations of Plato or Plutarch...

...Levy seeks first of all to reestablish the true Christianity professed by a real historical Jesus in accordance with his own "Arian and Unitarian beliefs" and to ecraser all the many infantes that have disfigured it ever since-from "Paul" (the fabricator of the letters attributed to Paul) and Augustine to Luther, the reviver of Augustinian attitudes toward blasphemy, from the Anglicans and the Quakers, who persecuted "Arians" in their day, to Martin Marty and Jaroslav Pelikan, who objected to Levy's "digs" at traditional orthodoxies...

...reverberated across the centuries" is to say nothing...

...He cannot depend solely upon a 1913 commentary on the Old Testament and ignore seventy years of subsequent scholarship...

...61 and 356)-he cannot then use them as historical sources in support of his own account of what did happen...

...How well Levy succeeds in realizing these goals is a question that cannot be answered until the promised sequel is published-a sequel that will cover England after 1700, even though English law still has "no equivalent of the First Amendment," and then the U.S., where, it seems, the 2,500-year quest of Western man for freedom of thought and expression has at last been fulfilled...

...In order to prove that Socrates was really tried for blasphemy when Meletos's accusation actually reads: "Theous hous he polis nomlsdei ou nomlsdonta, hetera de daimonia kaina'," and in order to prove that Al-cibiades was the innocent victim of "priests and priestesses" rather than, as Thucydides says, of his political enemies, he must read all, not just parts of, the texts he cites in translation...

...If he decides that certain documents are apocryphal-in this case the Gospels, which present "grossly distorted views" and depict "what did not happen as having happened" (pp...

...Eric Cochrane LEONARD W. LEVY is a well known authority on American constitutional law whose Origins of the Fifth Amendment was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in history...

...For one thing, historiography happens to be bound by grammatical, syntactical, and stylistic rules with which he is apparently not very familiar...

...To say, as Levy does, that Tertul-lian "advanced the cause...

...Unfortunately, the task has turned out to be more difficult than Levy imagined...

...Levy seeks secondly to reestablish the long-discredited "whig" view of history...

...It does not elucidate any historical problem either, since he constantly, even deliberately, confuses blasphemy with heresy, and since he evaluates both according to the standards not of the societies that expressed them, but of modern American society, which cares little about either...