Good morning. In Spectator, Stefan Bauer writes about the papist and historian, Onofrio Panvinio, who was critical of papal power:

Historians have long recognized that papal primacy is an idea which gradually developed through the Middle Ages. A pope who catapulted this idea into new heights was Gregory VII, who reigned from 1073 to 1085. Right after his election, Gregory broke with tradition by not asking for the approval of the German king Henry IV. A request for approval was customary and expected because the Holy Roman (German) Empire, along with the papacy, was the most important institution in Europe. Fanning the flames, Gregory also aimed to abolish royal control of bishops. All this led to his well-known, dramatic conflict with the Empire, during which Gregory excommunicated the German king twice.

Not surprisingly, Gregory was vilified by German Protestants of the Reformation period, who saw him as a diabolical monster; to the Protestants, Gregory was proof that the Church had become power-hungry and corrupt in the medieval period. Catholic theologians, on the other hand, argued that Gregory was a legitimate defender of the Church’s rights — and that the Church had never abandoned its original ideal of being a shining reflection of the truth. By the mid-16th century, it had become all but impossible to engage in measured, source-based research and to construct a balanced treatment of Church history.

It took another friar from Luther’s old order, the Augustinians, to break the deadlock: the Italian Catholic Onofrio Panvinio (1530–1568). Working in Rome under the protection of the Church’s wealthiest cardinal, Alessandro Farnese, Panvinio was one of the few full-time historians in Italy at the time. He traveled up and down the peninsula to track down sources on the history of the papacy, and came up with an original approach to his subject. Going back to earlier, medieval methods of history writing, he collected copies of original documents to inform his history. In addition, he applied the critical methods developed by Renaissance humanists to gauge the validity and age of these sources. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, he attempted to come to balanced historical judgments.

In other news: What does ESPN have on the docket after The Last Dance? Documentaries of Lance Armstrong and Bruce Lee.

Anthony Cummins reviews Lionel Shriver’s latest novel, The Motion of the Body Through Space, which takes aim at “generation snowflake”: “It’s potentially fertile ground, albeit tripwired with hazards, few of which she avoids.”

William Hay reviews How the Old World Ended. “The industrial revolution starting in the 1780s sparked an ongoing cycle of economic growth that transformed global living standards. Describing it as ‘the most fundamental reordering of human existence since the beginning of agriculture,’ Jonathan Scott looks beyond the origins of industrialization in How the Old World Ended to consider what made the way of life it displaced so vulnerable to disruption. The question points to a corner of the North Sea during the 7th century where a commercial revolution with developments in craft production and agriculture preceded the later industrial one. Scott argues that the Netherlands, England and English colonies in America drove a transformation producing ‘Anglo-Dutch-American early modernity.’ Substantively republican in governance and Calvinist or Calvinist tinged Protestant in religion, it prioritized intensively developing resources over passively extracting wealth as Spain did from its empire.”

The funeral director and poet Thomas Lynch writes about why we need time and space to mourn the dead: “Victorians allowed for extended periods of mourning, and their culture allowed for ‘proper respects’—the pause and tender patience granted the bereaved. The current emergency disallows all but the most needful duty to burn or bury the dead on a schedule advanced by a witless virus. Adding to our nation’s annual death rate by numbers we cannot accurately project or prevent, the coronavirus overwhelms not only our medical, financial, social, and religious infrastructures, but our mortuary ones as well. For many mourners, the postponed and bodiless obsequies will make the lonely deaths only more unmooring—like trying to understand love when the bride is absent from her nuptials; or initiation and new life, naming and claiming, when the baby is missing from the baptism.”

You may recall Chris Beha’s essay on Søren Kierkegaard from a few days ago. Beha focused on what Kierkegaard tells us today about living a good life devoted to God. In The Paris Review, Adam Kirsch reminds us how radical that devotion should be in Kierkegaard’s eyes: “He believed that the most important commitment we can make is to God, and his work grew increasingly concerned with religious faith. Eight months after Either/Or appeared, Kierkegaard published Fear and Trembling, probably his best-known book today, which begins with the proposition that a human being becomes great ‘in proportion to the greatness of that which he loved.’ There is no greater object of love than God, Kierkegaard writes, and the Bible’s most powerful example of what it means to love God is the story of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac, which he subjects to a powerful and dramatic analysis.”

Here are a couple of items from the higher education desk: The Cares Act could be an unexpected boon for small colleges: “For those small colleges, the department’s decision to use discretionary money to pump up their allocations to $500,000 could have significant consequences. For Avera Sacred Heart Hospital’s School of Radiologic Technology — a two-year institution in Yankton, S.D., with just 15 students — that sum approaches 2,000 percent of its reported annual revenue, according to an analysis by Miller.” In City Journal, Allison Schrager makes the provocative argument that, post-COVID—universities must “shift to a leaner, more productive business model. In the end, a hybrid system of online and in-person instruction will expand consumer choice and preserve the core functions of the university, while streamlining those features that have outlived their purpose.” I’m not so sure.

A defense of common sense: “Although I enjoyed Jordan Peterson’s runaway bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018), I thought it was needlessly long and complex. In Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World, Robert Curry offers a far simpler approach. It turns out there is just one rule for life and one antidote for chaos: common sense.”

Photos: Windbreak grid in Hokkaido

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