Star Trek as Imperialist Literature

I've watched and read and thought about Star Trek a lot more than is probably healthy, but here's something that only very recently occurred to me, at least in an explicit form.

Star Trek, of course, has its origins in the art and literature of Imperialism, in the first place from the naval and colonial literature of the British Empire ("a tall ship and a star to steer her by"), in the second place from Westerns and other literature of the Age of Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny, and in the third place from Cold War, Kennedy-era art about superpowers and proxy wars. Yet I hadn't noticed that even in in-universe terms, there are literally NO non-Imperialist powers, and virtually no non-Imperialist entities, in the Star Trek universe. That is, there are no governmental entities that are not aimed essentially at unlimited expansion, or could not expand without limit.

The majority of both the villains and the allies of the Star Trek universe are single-species Empires whose raison d'etre is unlimited colonization and conquest by this single species over vast swathes of space and other species: hence the Klingon Empire, the Romulan Empire, the Cardassian Union, etc. This much is obvious.

What is less so is that the Federation is also a specifically Imperialist state, only one based on equality and liberal democracy and the extension of these principles. As the various series make clear, the Federation is constantly engaged in expansion, through exploration, colonization, and the frequent induction of new member planets. "First contact" with other species is carried out with the intention of eventually making them part of the Federation; and in many episodes we see new planets in the process of being absorbed into the Federation, with Bajor in Deep Space Nine only the most prominent example. The Prime Directive and the general Federation refusal to engage in wars of conquest is, at least in theory, a limitation on this--but in practice, it hardly seems to prevent or even slow down Federation expansion. A number of wars in the Star Trek universe, for instance, seem to have originated in the encroachment of new Federation colonies on the borders of other powers.

The United Federation of Planets is, in design, a version of the United States of America (down to the "Federation Constitution" with its "Guarantees" a la the Bill of Rights and its strict egalitarian policies banning caste systems and other non-egalitarian social structures in member worlds)--but it is a vision of the USA during its period of Manifest Destiny, that is, as a constantly expanding Imperialist entity aimed at a constantly-expanding "frontier." There is no inherent limitation to this expansion at all (such as a Galactic UN or any kind of necessary tie to a particular territory or culture), and no larger whole that the Federation considers itself subject to; in the long run, there is no reason besides force of arms and diplomatic policy why it would not absorb the Klingons, the Romulans, and every one of its rivals. In fact, if there's an underlying progressive arc to be discerned in the history of the Star Trek universe, its telos would seem to be the entire Galaxy (and beyond) as part of the Federation.

In the long run, as all the Star Trek shows make clear, the Federation, with its egalitarian policies and purported policy of non-interference, is simply far more effective and successful at Imperialism than any of its rivals. The Klingons, after all, no matter how much territory they may conquer, are still all finally bound to their sacred homeworld of Qu'on'os and the particular traditions and culture and religion of their species--and all these things are, in the end, limitations to the indefinite extension of their political power. The Federation, though, has no such equivalents.

There are apparently independent planets in the Galaxy, to be sure, though they get relatively little attention. Most of them are clear targets of the Federation's expansion, future member worlds to be enticed with economic and cultural and military benefits. A few are "neutral worlds" that exist on the margins of larger powers and generally are portrayed as havens for crime and the like. But even most of the "independent nations" we see are also expansionist Empires of various sorts. DS9's Dominion is a multi-species Imperialist federation with unlimited expansion as its goal. The Ferengi are an example of economic Imperialism, their goal unlimited business expansion and exploitation of resources. The Orion Syndicate is an expansionist organized crime group founded by a single species but incorporating many and operating within the network of Imperialist powers that dominate the Galaxy. The Borg, of course, are the ultimate "absorbers" and "assimilators" of species and people. And so on and so forth.

The Star Trek Galaxy, then, is dominated by dueling Imperialist expansionist powers, and everyone else has to find their place in the margins. Independence is, seemingly, scarcely an option--in Deep Space Nine, Bajor really has little choice but to join up with the Federation, since independence (as many episodes make clear) would immediately lead to annexation by a far less attractive Imperialist power (the Cardassian Empire). The Federation would not (and did not before) protect an independent Bajor--the price of safety is assimilation. The formation of any larger institution or whole over and beyond the Federation and its rivals is never even contemplated.

This is a dynamic that, to its credit, Deep Space Nine seems to get, and plays with a lot. The best example is in the speech I've posted here (which is a slight spoiler), as well as in the various non-Federation characters we see.

The normal critique of the Federation you tend to see is that it is economically Communist or really deep down violent and repressive (a la DS9's Section 31) or even just human-dominated and speciesist (a la Star Trek VI). I don't think any of these things are necessarily true--the Federation as portrayed in the various series and movies is clearly very committed to its egalitarian principles and codes of individual rights and principles of tolerance and multi-species cooperation and its very liberal-contractual theory of non-interference. But is the Federation intrinsically and by definition Imperialist? Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. There's really no question.

Dependency

Whether we like it or not, we all affect each other, we all depend on one another, we all make claims on each other. By the very fact of our existence, we are in relation, one to another; and these relationships necessarily demand our attention, our energy, our love. Whether we like it or not, we all exist--and this fact has many profound and necessary consequences.

Individualism, in contrast, is an illusion that can only be maintained by homicide; whether this homicide is direct and deliberate or more indirect. If we uphold autonomy as the chief good, violence is the only possible means to that end. Still, no amount of violence can change reality. We have the power to harm or even destroy each other and ourselves; but we do not have the power to make it as though we never were.

Knowledge vs Relation

Thought that came to me tonight while driving in my car: the conflict between Neoplatonism & Christianity (and more broadly between Christianity & a lot of ancient philosophy) can be boiled down to the question of whether we attain union with God, ultimately, through knowledge or relation.

Expanded a little, the question is whether we attain union with God through the conscious operations of our natural intellect, or through a supernatural relation that transcends the intellect (i.e. the Incarnation).

I don't think I'll ever get over just how intelligent the Late Antique Neo-Platonist pagan religious-philosophical consensus was. A vast, hierarchical universe with innumerable powers, but the absolutely transcendent One as the source and summit of it all--a vast, hierarchical human society where people are constantly reincarnated in higher or lower positions based on their merit. At the bottom of the hierarchy, you worship daimons, lesser entities, through blood sacrifice, because they have power over your physical life and must be propitiated. A little higher up in the social ladder, you worship gods, slightly higher, more intelligent entities that exemplify beauty and courage and social virtues. At the very peak, philosophers learn about and contemplate the One directly, setting aside all creation, and achieve true union with him.

As a system, it's brilliant, an almost perfect, symphonic summing up of ancient pagan philosophy as a whole: philosophy subsumes pagan religion into itself, monotheism triumphs over polytheism, yet absolutely nothing is disturbed. To just about everyone, it makes sense. If you're an ordinary pagan, an illiterate peasant or an urban worker or slave, you can agree that yes, you worship capricious gods with sacrifice because they are very close to you and have power over you, over whether you are healthy or sick, whether your crops grow and you eat or they fail and you starve, whether your master frees you or crucifies you. Maybe there's a One God out there, but he has little to do with you and the physical and social world you know, and you're quite satisfied with that so long as things work out for you in the here and now. If you're a philosopher, sheltered from all this harsh world by your social status, you can feel very good about the fact that you alone, who dedicate your life to understanding the difficult arguments to prove the existence of the One transcending all things, to contemplating the nature and attributes of the One God, will attain union with him through these efforts. Everyone, too, gets what they immediately want. The peasant gets rituals to ensure his crops grow and protect him from evil spirits, the Emperor gets social rituals to ensure his citizens obey him, the philosopher gets true knowledge, virtue, and union with Being itself. And, of course, if you do a good job as a peasant, you might one day end up reincarnated as a philosopher, with a shot at the Big Time. Nothing is lost, everything is conserved, and absolutely everyone is made to be content with their lot in life.

Against this, Christianity's stubborn insistence that people of all social classes and levels of intellectual sophistication were immediately called to true and transcendent union with the One God couldn't help but seem both revolutionary and a little absurd. Why should an illiterate slave get the same union with the One as a philosopher? Why would he even want it, and how could he possibly get it even if he did? The slave understands nothing about what the philosopher means by the One; it is not something he knows about, and so not something he can even coherently desire, let alone attain. Christian philosophers certainly understood this problem--but, to a man, they only insisted on it even more the more it was challenged by their pagan colleagues. The slave would get the same thing as the philosopher--indeed, he would get something denied to the pagan philosopher altogether. No one had any business with daimons or lesser gods, since they were all directly and immediately called to union with the One God. The slave would desire God, he would live a life of supernatural virtue far beyond the efforts of philosophers, and attain to an eternal and supernatural union with the One surpassing all the philosophers' desires.

Their answer to how this was possible was, of course, the Incarnation: the coming of the Logos, of the Divine Reason itself, into the physical cosmos, his becoming a human being. God had not left the cosmos or human society as it was--he had come down into it and was now engaged in a death struggle with the rebellious daimons and lesser gods and Emperors who were trying to oppose his reign. Because of this state of affairs, all Christians possessed a relation to God that went far beyond simple natural knowledge. The slave might not understand precisely what the philosopher (even the Christian philosopher) meant by the One, but he stood in relation with that One nonetheless, and could confess the simple creed of Christ's Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection, be baptized in his name, and so be brought into a direct and intimate relation with him, incorporated as part of the body of God himself. By virtue of this, even if the Christian were entirely ignorant, even if he were an eight-day-old infant newly baptized without even the benefit of language, he had, really and truly, attained the highest end of philosophy: the real, actual possession of the Divine Logos.

Against this, philosophers quite naturally protested. Such "faith," the simple assent of the will to a series of nonsensical propositions about the life, death, and supposed divinity of a Galileean carpenter, and participation in a nonsensical set of rituals focusing on that life and death, were no substitute for careful, reasoned apprehension of the philosophical arguments and meditations on the Divine Nature. Christians were ignorant slaves and women who, in an outrageous display of sheer arrogance, dared to claim themselves superior to philosophers who spent their lives studying the divine and contemplating it. They were not true philosophers at all, but madmen, the very lowest of social malcontents.

This was a bitter controversy indeed in its heyday, and both sides certainly drew blood. It can, though, again, be boiled down very simply to the binary of relation or knowledge. For the Neo-Platonist, the natural intellect, working in its own laborious way, with plenty of time and intelligence and social status to work with, was the only possible way to get knowledge of God, and this knowledge was the only possible way to be united with him. For the Christian, all this laborious natural effort, in time and space, could hardly include the vast majority of humanity, naturally fell into all kinds of error, and even where perfectly accurate could not possibly attain its goal, actual union with God. Only a supernatural effort by God himself could establish an actual relation and true union between creature and creator--and once that was established, the operations of the natural, unaided intellect were hardly the only or even the most important thing in the picture. Faith included the intellect, certainly, it could not possibly oppose it (which is why many Christians eagerly did philosophy and laboriously worked through all those arguments anyway)--but it also went far beyond it. Christian faith was a real supernatural relation between human being and God, and that relation included illiterate Christians and infants just as much as Christian philosophers.

I could go on and on and on on this topic, which represents a rather fundamental break both in philosophy and world history, with massive implications for society and culture and art and everything else--I could expand on it with some analysis of the relation this controversy has, in my opinion, to the later controversies of the Protestant Reformation--but I think I will stop there and go to bed instead. Goodnight.

Time and the Self

I have a very good memory, and this is both a blessing and a curse. The line that separates my self in the present from my self in the past is generally very thin. When I am reminded of what I have been before, and most of all when I exist in a place that I have existed before--I experience with immediacy what I once experienced, I perceive in one and the same place my self doubled, tripled, multiplied. This is the strange, miraculous thing, though: that I am all these selves, or rather that there is only one self present, not two, or three, or a multitude. The multiplicity is in fact only an illusion, an error of perspective. This is what I am seeing, hearing, feeling, this is what I saw, heard, felt. I am, I was, here, then. I am here now. This certainly has its downsides, especially when it comes to those things that it is difficult to remember. Much of my life, in fact, I spent in a futile and dangerous effort to escape from what was already past. It is also, in itself, a rather dangerous and deceptive perspective on life. There is, in fact, a difference between what is past and what is present and what is to come. What is present is open to potentiality, open to our action and causation. If we live in the present, we can learn to live well--if we live only in the past, we cannot learn at all anything which we did not already learn then. Only from the perspective of the present can we accept and suffer the past, overcome it and learn from it. The past, then, is the teacher for the present--the present is the space in which learning and action takes place. They should not be confused. Then, too, there is the danger of deception, when we remember falsely, when we perceive falsely. We can be deceived in the present, true, but never so completely as in the past. In the present, we can accept, we can discern, go beyond, learn--in the past, all too often, we find ourselves fixed, trapped, within a single, narrow perspective. What we did not see then will never be seen. All too often, too, we distort the truth of the past through the perspective of the present. We try to see ourselves in the past, but only see ourselves in the present, seeing the past, trapped by it. We lose sight of reality, of one another, are isolated and imprisoned within ourselves. Then, too, we do not remember everything, and so everything we remember is incomplete, partial, pieces to a puzzle with too many missing pieces. It is impossible to perceive the full and complete truth of any time from within such a limited perspectives. Still, one of the great tasks of life is to gradually learn, in the present, with the help of the past, to broaden and to perfect and to unify. In remembering, memory can be purified and perfected--it can become, as memory, something far more true than it was as immediate perception. A key instance of this is repentance, which is in truth a kind of remembering. We remember something as mistaken, as wrong, as false, and by remembering it in this way we perfect it. In repenting, in altering one's mind the past action, the past self, is completed, corrected, perfected. Here, too, is where the relational aspect of the person comes into its own, as we learn to to exist together, to live together, not only in the present, but in the past as well. By remembering together, by existing together, our perspectives are broadened, our reality is increased and perfected and guaranteed. The self is only really stable, it only really exists, in any time, when it exists with and in relation to others. It is, then, one of the great tasks of the human person as person, in time and space, to transcend time and space in just this way: to enrich and perfect and unify the self, all our selves, together and apart, across time and beyond it. Here, though, is the danger, the crux of the whole matter: that this is a task that is, in essence, beyond the grasp of the human person. We can, really, only affect the present--we are so easily deceived--our perspective is so small--we have so little time in which to live, to act, to remember. We, both as individuals and as a community, are unable to be the means by which past and present are unified, by which the self in all times and places is brought together and perfected. We fall through time, and so we cannot transcend it. God, however, is present in all times and in all places simultaneously, and is himself entirely apart from time. Only God can truly touch the past and the present simultaneously, perceive everything clearly, and affect the self at all points in time. This is why only God can forgive sins: because only God can actually touch the self in both past and present simultaneously, can truly alter the past as it is, not merely as it is remembered. He is the real means, the only conceivable means, by which the human person can be truly unified, truly perfected, truly taken beyond time. If God is real, then, memory, human memory, becomes far less important. This is a lesson I have had to learn--that all our efforts to broaden and purify the past, to overcome it, are, in the end, entirely vain. I lose myself in the past--I am unable to escape it, let alone perfect it. In losing myself in the past, I lose all the opportunities and potentialities of the present. I am deceived, lost in perceptions that are false, the present distorted by the past, and the past by the present. Unity gives way to total fragmentation. I have lived this. Given God, though, there is little to fear. The presence of God in past and present unifies the self, guarantees it. We do not have to labor to remember, for we are remembered--we do not have to labor to see, for we are seen. The reality of the self, in each and every time, comes only through God. Thus, any reality of the self beyond time can only come from, can only be entirely in the power of, God, and not the self. To accept this, to accept this ultimate ignorance, this ultimate powerlessness, is one of the most difficult and important things in life. It is this lesson, primarily, which time teaches us--that we are nothing. All our reality comes from God, and without him we have neither past, nor present, nor future. If we can accept this, though, then we will receive all that we have labored to achieve: truth, reality, eternity. We will receive, in the fullest possible sense, a future: a plane of reality, of possibility, entirely beyond both what has been and what is. Our future within time, along with our present and our past, will be taken up into the future beyond time. This is eschatology; the knowledge of, the desire for, the perfect fulfillment of human existence that can only take place through the transcendence of time. So, for now, we live, as best we can, in the present, learning from the past as best we can. The self, all our selves, interconnected and unified, is kept by God, in all times and beyond time. Such is life.

The Immaculate Conception

Today is the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The dogma of the Immaculate Conception does not merely mean that Our Lady was conceived without sin; it means that from the first moment of her existence, she had within her, as the principle of her every movement and thought and sensation and action, the flame of divine love that found its perfect fulfillment in the Incarnation and Cross of Christ. She was conceived in the divine love, and never allowed herself to be separated from it, following it faithfully all the days of her life.

Free from the egotism of sin, Mary loved more, not less. Hence, her sinlessness does not separate her from us in the slightest; rather, it draws her infinitely closer to us in love, as the most faithful of friends, the most trustworthy of mothers. She was sinless for the sake of sinners, so that she might more perfectly love us in our wretchedness, and more fully share in the outpouring of God's love for us on the Cross.

Standing by the Cross of her son, she alone saw him, and the horror and darkness of sin which he bore, perfectly and truly; and of all his disciples she shared most deeply in the pain of every one of his humiliations and wounds, which he suffered for our sakes.

Therefore, let no one fear to draw near to Mary, let no one believe that his sins have separated him from the Immaculate. The one who was conceived and born and lived her whole life aflame with God's love for sinners will not abandon us in any sin. She who is our Mother will never fail to lead us to her Son, so that by his blood we may be made pure as she is pure, without stain as she is without stain, full of love as she is full of love. Flee to Mary, and you will never be without refuge in all the storms of life.

O Maria concepta sine peccato, ora pro nobis qui ad te confugimus.

Reactionary Narratives

The real trouble with most reactionary historical narratives is that they tacitly assume the same kind of inevitable historical processes as the progressive narratives they claim to oppose.

Within such narratives, both past and present events are interpreted according to a hermeneutic not merely of suspicion or fear, but inevitable defeat. The idea, though, that the cosmos and its processes are not just contingently, but inevitably and naturally, aimed at the extinction of all the things you consider good and the promotion of all the things you consider bad is not, in fact, particularly conducive to continuing belief in these principles.

Such narratives frequently produce a siege mentality that is in essence nihilistic, since it is grounded not in a sincere belief in the (necessarily universal) truth of particular principles, or even in the (necessarily limited) duty of opposition to the particular evils of a given society, but rather in a profound insecurity or even despair on both of these counts. Deprived of a clear rational and universal basis for action and identity, merely sectarian and factional dynamics all too easily assume the dominant position: the mere principle of opposition to supposedly dominant and inevitable trends becomes, in fact, the true driving force, and the true end aimed at, by such groups.

Once this point is reached, however, it is no longer possible to set clear limits on the means by which goals may be achieved or evils opposed: and without such limits, the means chosen very often end up sabotaging or even destroying the original goods pursued--if, indeed, the overall goal of increasing and intensifying opposition does not lead people to actively and perversely further the processes they hate, as a means to facilitating further opposition.

The irony by which reactionaries end up frequently embracing the very evils which they opposed, and sacrificing the very goods which they sought, is thus no coincidence at all, but a natural outworking of the terms of much of reactionary discourse.

Note that my point here is not that it is not valid to acknowledge the possibility that the dominant forces of a particular society, time, or place may happen to be working against particular goods or in support of particular evils. Nor am I saying that it is wrong or useless to oppose inevitable historical processes that I do not believe exist or to look to the past for models for society. Bad trends should of course be opposed, no matter how dominant or pervasive in a given time and place; and past societies are one very natural place to turn for guidance on the organization of society and life in the present and future.

The point I *am* making, though, is that ascribing inevitability and universality to historical processes that you oppose is incredibly foolish, dangerous, and destructive, as well as horribly self-defeating, counterproductive, and ultimately self-contradictory.

The Reformation Did Not Take Place

The Reformation Did Not Take Place

(With Apologies to Jean Baudrillard)

(Actually, This Should Really be Called 'The Reformation Did Take Place, Mostly, But Not Like You've Probably Heard,' But That's Not As Catchy)

Subtitle: I'm Really Sorry For How Long This Is

Second Subtitle: Really, I Am Sorry. Sorry.

[NB: This is not an academic essay. It's not even really an essay at all. It is, rather, something much more like a sketch of ideas and big-picture narratives for a potential essay, essays, book, or books to be written perhaps one day. I have, as a matter of a fact, read more, including scholarly work, about the Reformation than it might appear from this; but this is very deliberately not an essay with citations and references and sources or anything of the sort. It is, rather, a kind of intellectual synthesis of the things I've read and heard and thought on the topic, a sketch of a particular interpretation of history; or, better yet, the incoherent ramblings of a graduate student with a keyboard and far too much time on his hands. Do not take it as other than such.]

So what is the Reformation, anyway?

From the beginning of the year until now, news articles, television journalists, religious leaders, and Twitter accounts have all assured me that this year, 2017, is the 500th anniversary of the Reformation; this event is duly being celebrated or at least commemorated by many people throughout the world.

Yet the great difficulty in commemorating--or writing about--the Reformation is trying to figure out just what people are actually commemorating--and what I'm actually writing about.

Still, those commemorations, and this essay, do in fact exist, for some reason or other. So let's take that as our starting point; 500 years ago, something happened--something important enough that it is still remembered five hundred years later.

This much, at least, we all seem to agree on: five hundred years ago this year, a monk named Martin Luther nailed some theses onto a door--or maybe he didn't, maybe that story's actually apocryphal, but anyway, this guy named Martin Luther clearly did something important; thereafter, lots of things happened, and have continued to happen ever since: Luther's German translation of the New Testament, the Peasant's Revolt, John Calvin writing The Institutes of the Christian Religion, the Thirty Years War, the French Revolution, the Great Awakening, the Holocaust, the election of Donald Trump...

Which of these events are to be considered to be either part of or the result of "the Reformation" or Martin Luther's hammer, and how, differs a lot depending on just who you're reading, and when and where and why they're writing.

Still, if you want to write something about the Reformation, you have to come up with something. Stories, narratives, have their own rules; they need to have, among other things, characters, a plot you can follow, and generally some conscious themes as well. If you want to give a narrative of "the Reformation," you need to come up with all these things, somehow.

In some understandings, the Reformation seems to be taken, implicitly or explicitly, as nothing more than a historical period, covering, perhaps, the years from about 1500 until...1600, perhaps? 1800? Certainly, historical periods are very tricky things, constantly created and fought and refought and buried and resurrected and winced over by historians the world over--but they also have a neutrality to them, an objectivity, that can be quite comforting.

Still--if all we're talking about when we say "the Reformation" are the years between 1500 and 1600, we surely don't seem like it. After all--I don't know of too many people celebrating the beginning of Late Antiquity, or the Age of Exploration, these days. The Reformation--in whatever guise--is clearly something more than a particular set of years and whatever happened to take place during them: it is...shall we say, an event? An action?

Still, if the Reformation is an action, we're obliged to ask who did it; and if it is an event, we're going to need to figure out what happened. Certainly, Martin Luther nailing some pieces of paper to a door (if it actually happened) is both a single action, and a discrete historical event: this much is quite clear, which is perhaps why it is this event and action whose 500th anniversary is actually being celebrated this year. But when we say the Reformation, we do not merely mean this one action of Luther's--we do not merely mean all of Luther's actions. We are clearly talking about a whole set of different actions, carried out by innumerable different people and institutions over a very long period of time; actions that somehow add up to a single thing called "the Reformation."

There are, in fact, any number of ways to unify multiple events and actions into a single larger event or narrative--some perfectly reasonable, some not so much. In general, though, events are unified based on some kind of commonality: whether this is a common cause or effect or telos or time period or category. It is this which allows us, say, to talk about the Fall of the Roman Empire as a unified historical event--inasmuch, as say, the Sack of Rome, the deposition of Romulus Augustus by Theodoric, the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England, and many other events and actions all shared as a common cause the breakdown of Imperial government in Western Europe, led to similar effects in furthering that breakdown, took place at around the same time, and shared many other similarities in kind and interrelationships as well.

In general, then, I have no problem with the unification of historical events and actions into larger events, narratives, and periods; but I also believe there are clear rational standards for when and where and how this can reasonably be done.

This may seem rather academic, but it is nevertheless important if we are to make sense of the Reformation, both as it actually was and as it has been understood and narrated in the past.

For make no mistake: the very concept of "the Reformation" is, for everyone who uses that term, indelibly marked with the narratives of the past people and institutions and societies who have used that term. When we speak of "the Reformation"--whether we are atheists or Catholics or Zoroastrians or Evangelicals--we are using terms, and thinking of stories, that we have not originated, but received. The fact that we think of the Reformation as a single, unified event to be commemorated--the fact that we see it as beginning with Martin Luther nailing some theses to a door--the fact that we even remember it today, and see it as important--the fact that we call it "the Reformation." These are all legacies of narratives and histories past.

Each one of these narratives made sense on its own terms--that is to say, each one answered the basic questions I have posed above in at least minimally satisfactory way. It explained what the Reformation was, how far it extended, and what commonalities unified its various deeds and happenings into a coherent event. Each one of these narratives also succeeded at least minimally as a narrative: that is, it supplied characters, themes, a plot, and events enough to maintain at least some interest in those who heard or read about it.

Our culture no longer really has such a narrative about the Reformation--indeed, even many of those who belong to groups that once had coherent narratives about the Reformation no longer really buy into them anymore. So we are left, more and more, with confusion.

This essay does not exactly aim at clearing up this confusion--to a great extent, it aims to increase it. Nevertheless, I will, naturally, end up telling some stories, and creating some big narratives, related in some way to "the Reformation" as a cluster of events and actions and concepts; and in doing so, I will be operating on the basis of the questions I have laid out here. I will be aiming always, that is, to clearly lay out on the common ends, categories, causes, or other similarities on the basis of which I am unifying--or separating--historical events.

Again, if all that bores you: I am going to tell some stories.