As a result of the "Affair of the Placards," six Protestants were burned at the stake in front of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on January 21, 1535. And while it’s fashionable to mock those WWJD bracelets as cloyingly sentimental, there are worse questions you could ask yourself. Especially if you’re, you know, a Christian cleric or would-be governmental defender of the faith.

When I say this grisly execution happened "as a result of" the Affair of the Placards, it might be more precise to say it happened afterward and on the ostensible basis of it. The Affair itself was the scandalous posting of a series of aggressive protestant posters in Paris and other French cities denouncing the Catholic mass. They were intended to be offensive, and it worked. But the total number of people killed during their production and display was zero. Not even the King of France.

Here I say "not even" because one of the placards was actually put on his bedroom door in Ambois. It was not merely an affront but a pointed demonstration that had they chosen to they could have gone in and killed him. But they did not, nor did they try to. So he responded with a big public show of affirming his Catholic faith, reversed his earlier policy of trying to protect French Protestants from their more aggressive Catholic countrymen.

Bear in mind that France was dangerously riven by religious sentiment at this point, and a very great distance indeed from any real conception of separation of Church and State. Indeed they still have issues with it, being militantly secular. (I know it has been said that atheism is a religion in the same sense that not collecting stamps is a hobby. But I disagree. Atheism offers equally firm answers to the same full range of metaphysical questions, and to enforce it through the state is not religious neutrality.) So I have to ask two key questions.

First, did either side gain anything by being deliberately obnoxious? I grant the Protestant grievance at being silenced on theological questions and living in perpetual fear of extreme mob violence. (In the wake of the Placards a number of leading Protestants pre-emptively fled France including John Calvin.) But to have posted reasonable comments on the advantages of free discussion of religion would have been a better move, surely, than to put up something highly likely to provoke Catholics into measures that further inflamed feelings in ways that reduced the likelihood of their acting with genuine charity.

As for the Catholics, to respond with extra-legal violence and state murder could not have been better calculated to reinforce their non-co-religionists’ worst suspicions about their motives and the need to arm against them. So everybody lost, and France spiraled into religious wars, intolerance and intellectual stagnation.

Among those who lost most, surely, are the self-proclaimedly Catholic king and the clergy who said there’s probably nothing Jesus would like better, nothing he’d be more likely to do if he were here, than to destroy some fellow human beings as horribly, painfully and messily as possible right at our best church. Oh yeah. I’m sure that’s in the Sermon on the Mount somewhere.

"I never said it was always wrong to enter fairyland. I only said it was always dangerous." Father Brown in G.K. Chesterton "The Sins of Prince Sardine"

"Take away the supernatural and what remains is the unnatural." G.K. Chesterton in Heretics

"Life is a fight and not a conversation." G.K. Chesterton quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 13 # 8 (7-8/10) p. 45.

So I’m trying hard to be fair here. Which requires me to note that on January 13 of 1435, before European colonization really got going, Pope Eugene IV issued a papal bull called Sicut Dudum which said you couldn’t enslave Canary Islanders who had converted to Christianity or were about to.

Sixtus IV was obliged to repeat this warning in "Regimini Gregis", threatening the excommunication of seafarers who enslaved Christians. But as I’m sure you know, it didn’t stick. There was an initial argument that enslaving Africans was OK because they weren’t Christian, but when slaves began announcing their conversion and requesting their freedom it is sadly predictable that they didn’t get it. (Incidentally the Canary Islands have a long and interesting history including, despite being off West Africa, being settled by people who appear to have been more Arab than sub-Saharan African.)

In some cases slave conversions may have been a dodge to get freedom. And it’s not obvious how you would enforce the rule if, after being liberated, they turned around and said actually I don’t find your religion convincing on sober reflection. But it doesn’t really matter in the simpleminded sense that it’s just plain wrong to enslave anybody of any race. A point that was in fact made by the local bishop, Fernando Calvetos, prompting Eugene’s bull.

It’s amazing the feebleness of the reasoning, in retrospect, for enslaving people. The original impetus behind Sicut Dudum was that as the Canaries were disputed between Portugal and Castille people said we might as well, you know, just rush over there in the absence of effective authority and stuff the inhabitants into sacks or something. Even though many of those inhabitants had already converted to Christianity before the shackles descended.

It’s also amazing how readily people acquiesced in what amounted to a rebirth of slavery in the Christian or at least Roman Catholic world after it had all but vanished in the Middle Ages. Including in many cases the Church itself. So it is important to note that there were at least some moves in the other direction, however inadequate, including Sicut Dudum itself, which imposed the penalty of excommunication for anyone who did not free any enslaved Canary Islander. As well as the arguably more significant point that it did not apply more widely, then or later.

On January 12 of 1916, as the First World War was the process of tearing European civilization apart physically and morally, Oswald Boelcke and Max Immelmann became the first airmen to receive the most prestigious Imperial German military award, the Pour le Mérite, for eight victories each over Allied fliers. It might seem to acknowledge only the growing prominence of a new way for men to kill one another. But to me it embodies a certain poignancy about the world in the process of vanishing into the much and mire of the Western front.

As you doubtless noticed with at least some curiosity, in the middle of a ferocious German effort to conquer France, the award in question has a French name. In fact the Pour le Mérite was by then nearly two centuries hold, having been inaugurated by Frederick II of Prussia in 1740. (It was also, for much of its history, also a civilian award though after 1842 in a separate class.) And he chose a French name not only because France was then a more dominant nation culturally as well as militarily than it later became, but also because divisions of nationality were regarded as less important and indeed less divisive in those days.

Europe, for all its brutal wars, tyrannical governments and various stupidities, still saw itself as a unified civilization, specifically as "Christendom," one bound together by common ideals and habits however short they often fell in practice, and one in which common languages served to unite them, Latin in the Middle Ages and French to a large degree since.

Both Boelcke and Immelmann deserved the award. The former was a brilliant pilot and tactician who trained the "Red Baron," Manfred von Richthofen, who idealized his mentor long after surpassing him in kills. And the latter invented an aerial combat maneuver still known as the "Immelmann turn" and in fact the Pour le Mérite came to be known informally as the "Blue Max in his honor. I salute their prowess while wishing they had fought in a better cause.

Tragically the war in which they won this award left little room for such sentiments as the world grew crueler, harsher and less decent. The Great War took a terrible toll in lives, including Immelmann’s own just months later, on June 18, 1916 and then Boelcke’s on October 28; after being grounded for a month to spare the German public the loss of two such heroes in short order, he resumed his duties and died in a midair mid-combat collision with a fellow German plane. And it took at least as terrible a toll in ideals of the sort that once made it possible for the Kaiser to give a military award with a French name. The last such award was made on September 2, 1918.

Perhaps this verdict is too bleak. The civil version was revived in 1923 in a mixture of French and German, the Pour le mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste. And after the dreadful Nazi period, it was again re-established in 1952 and is still awarded, not just as a medal but as an order with actual members.

January 8 was not a good day for the Papacy, Portugal or Africa. At least not if you mean January 8 of 1454. For on that date Nicholas V confirmed that Portugal owned all of Africa south of Cape Bojador and could enslave the inhabitants.

OK, perhaps "confirmed" isn’t quite the right word, since Portugal did not actually own that part of the world and nobody has the right to enslave anyone. And while you might expect an assertion to the contrary from some cackling old reprobate hunched over his ill-gotten gains, there’s this general idea out there that the Pope’s job when it comes to worldly matters is to be so unworldly that, in upholding high ideals, he sometimes gives advice that is almost wilfully useless. That trap at least Nicholas avoided.

Instead he issued this bull from concern that without it, other European nations would start horning in on Portugal’s "right" to grab large tracts of land because its inhabitants were not Christian, and demonstrate the virtues of the true faith by brutally mistreating them and denying their humanity. I can think of better plans.

I bring this up because I entirely reject ludicrous PC versions of history in which only Europeans were bad, basically the white serpents invading various gardens of Eden around the world. The inhabitants of Africa before the coming of European domination were up to the usual human tricks, sometimes in remarkably horrible ways. As were the inhabitants of the Americas. And I believe that on balance, the spreading particularly of the ideals and practices of the Anglosphere has brought great benefit to mankind. But it will not do, in rejecting one fairy tale, to substitute another.

At times, European conduct was so loathsome as to invite despair at humanity’s fallen condition. Especially when the worst practices were endorsed by those entrusted with recalling us to our moral senses when we went wrong. And so it is also important to note here that opposition to slavery and mistreatment of colonized people generally arose soonest and most strongly among professed Christians including Catholic clergy in the Spanish empire.

Still, we should pause on January 8 and reflect on the casual manner in which the papacy put its seal of approval on all that was worst about European colonization.

"I see well enough now that I hoped for the impossible – for the laying of what is the most obstinate ghost of man’s creation, of the uneasy doubt arising like a mist, secret and gnawing like a worm, and more chilling than the certitude of death – the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct." The narrator, Marlowe, in Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim