Sunday, January 18, 2009

The council of the zealots

Walter Scott, Old Mortality: Reading Notes, Part Four

Henry's moderation and neutrality: he finds nothing to admire either in the oppressed religious zealots with their "gloomy fanaticism" and the "envenomed rancor of their political hatred" or in their military oppressors "the misrule, license, and brutality of the soldiery, the executions on the scaffold, the slaughters in the open field."

If the Bible in Lewis' "The Monk" is a compendium of all that is sinful, in "Old Mortality" it is a justification for extreme, ruthless, and ecstatic violence. For Balfour and Mause, the Bible demands the exercise of violence.

Henry cites to Balfour (Burley) his own respect for scripture as a guide to behavior but protests the Dissenters "wrest[ing] of certain passages out of their context" in order to justify killing.

Motive for Balfour's attempt to lure Henry into the insurgent camp is revealed in aside to the fanatical preacher Macbriar: that they must temporarily abide "Laodiceans and Erastians" in order to mass sufficient numbers against the Government.

Scott makes clear the personal ambition that underlies Balfour's militant religiosity.

Erastianism = "subjection of the church of God to the regulations on an earthly government."

In reading papers of the deceased Bothwell, Henry sees a once honorable man driven by failed love and adversity into depravity and coarseness. In the same documents, Balfour sees the myriad forms of Satan's influence.

Council of the insurgents a raucous event, theological rather than political or military. "The smoke . . . formed over the heads of the assembled council a clouded canopy as opaque as their physical theology."

(Turgenev will also use "smoke," in novel of that name, as a metaphor for the unsubstantiality of Revolutionary ideology).

Heated dispute between moderate (Poundtext) and radical (Kettledrumle) clerics broken-up by Balfour; the silenced divines "continued to eye each other like two dogs who, having been separated by their masters while fighting, have retreated, each beneath the chair of its owner . . . each indicating by occasional growls, by the erected bristles of the back and ears, that their discord is unappeased."

Theological debate reignited by ravings of bloodthirsty, apocalyptic madman Habakkuk Mucklewrath: "slay, slay -- smite -- slay utterly -- let not your eye have pity! slay utterly, old and young"

Henry agrees to serve with insurgents, with goal of "softening the horrors of Civil War" and opposing atrocities.



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