Calvinism and vice (WAS MDMD(3)--Just a thought)

[Doug Millison]

I garbled it a bit:

>unlearndall the eswhich the bona fide home as organized to instill.  (Until

should be

unlearned all the lessons which


At 11:41 AM 7/8/97, Doug Millison wrote:
>from The Embarrassment of Riches:  An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in
>the Golden Age, by Simon Schama, p. 467-468 (UC Berkeley Press paperback
>edition)
>
>"What both the Calvinist homilies and the misogynist satires document,
>however, is the Dutch male fixation -- part fantasy, part reality -- of
>lairs of vice lying in wait for the unsuspecting....the brothel was quite
>plainly an antihome, a counterhome, just as in this system of moral
>opposites the tavern was always thought of as a counterchurch. The
>procuresses were the antimothers:  their wrinkles those of evil rather than
>of piety, their prayers to Satan rather than to God. And the girls
>themselves made up a kind of antifamily lodged in an antihome where they
>unlearndall the eswhich the bona fide home as organized to instill.  (Until
>quite recently, the red-light establishments in Amsterdam struck tourists
>as quaintly cozy, travesties of the Dutch bourgeois household or the
>bric-a-brac bibelot shop, full of knickknackery, lace curtains, bibelots,
>and potted plants, with their own gaudy version of gezelligheid.) In the
>seventeenth-century moralists canon, the musicos and speelhuizen were
>schools of vice, just as home was the great school of virtue. On their
>premises, dirt, theft, squalor, deceit, drunkenness, immoderation, inverted
>humanism's domestic norms:  cleanliness, honesty, comfort, sobriety, and
>moderation....the world of virtue and vice lived in practice in a kind of
>symbiotic interdependence ....This benign disingenuousness was of a piece
>with other varieties of moral pluralism in which inconsistencies of
>principle were set aside (though not completely suppressed) for the sake of
>effective social management. To compare a whorehouse with a lottery, a
>doelen feast or the stock exchange (and there were some ministers of the
>church who did exactly that) is not to cast aspersions on the latter but to
>point up the many -- but connecting -- ways in which the Dutch managed to
>sustain a set of regulating ethics while living in the midst of an
>otherwise uncontrollable fleshly appetite-provoking world. For as the
>anonymous author of 't Amsterdamsch Hoerdom succinctly put it, "the world
>cannot be governed Bible in hand."
>
>-Doug
>
>At 9:45 AM 7/8/97, Doug Millison wrote:
>>Consider Amsterdam today. The Oude Kerk, dedicated to St. Nicholas, patron
>>saint of sailors, famed for its 16th century stained glass windows known as
>>Nieuwe Vrouwenkoor (depicting the life of the Virgin), with a late gothic
>>spire that rises in the center of the city's red-light district, photogenic
>>prostitutes on display in picturesque lace-curtain framed picture windows;
>>drugs cafes with multiple varieties of marijuana and hashish on the menu;
>>funseekers lurching in the canal maze of streets --  not so much a combat
>>zone where low-life criminals are left alone to prey on one another but
>>instead a safe, well-planned ghetto of cheap indulgence, a carnal
>>Disneyland, the stops clearly laid out on tour bus routes on the tourist
>>maps, with salvation close at hand in the Oude Kerk. All quite tame here in
>>the metropole, compared to Cape Town.
>>
>>-Doug
>>
>>At 9:19 AM 7/8/97, Steven Maas (CUTR) wrote:
>>>Dixon, or Pynchon, asks the question--". . .how can there be any room for
>>>excess in this gossip-ridden Town. . . ?"  and answers that it's ". . .as
>>>if Judgment be near as the towering Seas and nothing matter anymore,
>>>especially not good behavior, because there's no more time--the bets are
>>>in, ev'ry individual Fate decided, all cries taken by the great Winds, and
>>>'tis done."
>>>
>>>So I was wondering, is, or was, there in fact a strain of Dutch Calvinist
>>>thought that would lead the Cape Dutch to imagine that once Time was about
>>>to end it no longer mattered what one did, that one's fate was decided and
>>>would not change no matter what?  This seems to go well beyond the
>>>Elect/Preterite dichotomy, where even the Elect are expected to follow
>>>certain codes of conduct.
>>>
>>>        Steve Maas
>>>
>>>Meg submits for our consideration this excellent, though inexplicably
>>>lacking references to Librarians and NoCal dope dealers, excerpt from
>>>chapter 8, page 78 of M&D:
>>>
>>>>       "He [Dixon] feels like a predatory Animal,--as if this Town were
>>>> ancient to him, his Hunting-Ground, his Fell so mis-remember'd in nearly
>>>> all Details, save where lie the Bound'ries he does not plan to cross.
>>>> Tho' how can there be any room for excess in this gossip-ridden Town,
>>>> crowded up against the Mountains that wall it from the virid vast
>>>> leagues of Bushmen's Land beyond? as behind these carv'd doors and
>>>> Gothickal Gates, in the far Penumbrae of sperm tapers, in Loft and
>>>> _Voorhuis_, in entryways scour'd by Dusk and blown Sand, these Dutch
>>>> carry on as if Judgment be near as the towering Seas and nothing matter
>>>> anymore, especially not good behavior, because there's no more time--the
>>>> bets are in, ev'ry individual Fate decided, all cries taken by the great
>>>> Winds, and 'tis done. Temporally, as geographically, the End of the
>>>> World.  The unrelenting Vapor of debauchery here would not merely tempt
>>>> a Saint,--Heavens, 'twould tempt an Astronomer.  Yet 'tis difficult, if
>>>> not impossible, for these Astronomers to get down to a Chat upon the
>>>> Topick of Desire, given Dixon's inability to deny or divert the Gusts
>>>> that sweep him, and Mason's frequent failure, in his Melancholy, even to
>>>> recognize Desire, let alone to act upon it, tho' it run up calling Ahoy
>>>> Charlie. "How could you begin to understand?" Mason sighs. "You've no
>>>> concept of Temptation.  You came ashore here _looking_ for occasions to
>>>> transgress. Some of us have more Backbone, I suppose. . . ."
>>>>       "A bodily Part too often undistinguish'd," Dixon replies, "from a
>>>> Ram-Rod up the Arse."
>>
>>
>>D O U G  M I L L I S O N ||||||||||| millison at online-journalist.com
>>
>
>
>D O U G  M I L L I S O N ||||||||||| millison at online-journalist.com
>     Today in history (8 July 97):  951. Paris was founded.


D O U G  M I L L I S O N ||||||||||| millison at online-journalist.com
     Today in history (8 July 97):  951. Paris was founded.