Pynchon & "the law" (1)

[Terrance]

David Morris wrote:
> 
> >From: Terrance PS Terry Reilly's essay in the Oak Review fits into our
> >current grgr episodes.
> 
> Jeeze Louise!
> Always the tease...
> 
> Must we ask for more, sir?

Terry Reilly's essay is very dense. It might have been cut
down to fit the Law Journal's requirements or else it is
like so much that anyone can do with GR? It's a wonderful
essay and an excellent companion piece to the Spencer essay.
Two very different looks at Pynchon's history/satire
complementing each other. Reilly focuses on a "cohesive,
coherent narrative" (the pig hero episode) and Spencer's
essay is a brilliant postmodern application of Baudrillard,
Virilio, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, others, (No mere
name dropping) that dovetails into the Spencer essay and the
McCarron Catch 22 essay and provides some of the best stuff
around on TRP.  

If you are not a Law Journal reader, don't fret, these
essays are not much to do with the play things of lawyers,
though they will set your tops a spin. 

Some Notes on Reilly's essay, Nashe, satire,  and some
connections to religious intolerance in germany and the USA.

  ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA


 Anabaptist 

 also called Rebaptizer, member of radical, or left-wing,
movement of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. Its 
most distinctive tenet was adult Baptism. In the first
generation of the movement, converts submitted to a second 
Baptism, which was a crime punishable by death under the
legal codes of the time. The Anabaptists, of course,
 denied that they were rebaptizers, for they repudiated
their own infant Baptism as a blasphemous formality. They 
considered the public confession of sin and faith, sealed by
adult Baptism, as the only proper Baptism. Following  the
Swiss Reformer Huldrych Zwingli, they held that infants were
not punishable for sin until an awareness of
 good and evil emerged within them, and that then they could
exercise their own free will, repent, and accept  Baptism.

 The Anabaptists also believed that the church, which to
them was the community of the redeemed, should be  separated
from the state, which for them existed only for the
punishment of sinners. Most Anabaptists opposed  the use of
the sword by Christians in the maintenance of social order
and in the conduct of a just war. They also
 refused to swear civil oaths. For their beliefs thousands
of Anabaptists were put to death.

 The Anabaptists did not aim to reform the medieval church.
They were determined instead to restore the  institutions
and the spirit of the primitive church and were quite
confident that they were living at the end of all  ages.
They readily recognized in their leaders divinely summoned
prophets and apostles, and all converts stood
 ready to give a full account of their faith before the
magistrates. They often identified their suffering with that
of  the martyrs of the first three Christian centuries.

 The Anabaptist movement originated in Zürich among a group
of young intellectuals who rebelled against  Zwingli's
apparent subservience to the magistrates and his reluctance
to proceed swiftly with a complete reform of  the church.
One of their leaders was Konrad Grebel, a highly educated
Humanist from a patrician family. The first
 adult baptisms took place at Zollikon, outside Zürich, at
the beginning of 1525, and soon a mass movement was in 
progress. Some of the more distinctive convictions of the
Swiss movement were set forth in the seven articles of  the
Schleitheim Confession (1527), prepared under the leadership
of Michael Sattler.

 The vehemence and intransigence of the Anabaptist leaders
and the revolutionary implications of their teaching led  to
their expulsion from one city after another. This simply
increased the momentum of an essentially missionary 
movement. Soon civil magistrates took sterner measures, and
most of the early Anabaptist leaders died in prison or were
executed.

 Thomas Müntzer was among those (sometimes called
"spirituals") who emphasized that the Anabaptists were 
living at the end of all ages. He was executed after leading
Thuringian peasants in the revolt of 1525. His disciple 
Hans Hut (died in prison in Augsburg in 1527) was the
principal radical Reformer in southern Germany.

 Balthasar Hubmaier (executed in Vienna in 1528) was a
leader in Nicholsburg, Moravia. Also in Moravia, where  the
ruling lords desired colonists and where many Anabaptists
settled, a type of Anabaptism developed that  stressed the
community of goods modelled on the primitive church in
Jerusalem. Under the leadership of Jakob  Hutter the growing
communistic colonies assumed his name. Hutterite groups
survived and are now primarily
 located in the western United States and Canada.

 Melchior Hofmann was the Anabaptist apostle in the
Netherlands, where he developed a very large following. He 
taught that the world would soon end and that the new age
would begin in Strasbourg, where he was imprisoned in  1533
and died c. 1543.

 Some of Hofmann's followers came under the influence of the
Dutchman Jan Mathijs (died 1534) and of John of  Leiden (Jan
Beuckelson; died 1535). The two leaders and many refugees
settled in 1534 in Münster, Westphalia,  where they gained
control of the city, established a communistic theocracy,
and practiced polygamy. The city was
 captured in 1535 by an army raised by German princes, and
the Anabaptist leaders were tortured and killed.

 Modern historians have come to see the episode at Münster
as an aberration of the Anabaptist movement. In the  years
following the episode, however, classical Protestants and
Catholics increased the persecution of Anabaptists
throughout Europe without discrimination between the
belligerent minority and the pacifist majority. The pacifist
 Anabaptists in the Netherlands and north Germany rallied
under the leadership of the former priest Menno Simons and
his lieutenant, Dirk Philips. Their followers survived and
were eventually accepted as the Mennonite  religious group. 

More to come....