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What was the
cultural landscape in the medieval West? The path to the Renaissance was
paved less by the top-down activism of a minority, more by accretive
cultural shifts near the wider bottom. Faith is what differentiates
cultures, or human responses, across time and place. The faith implicit
in a cultural worldview is shaped by subjective factors: climate,
geography, natural resources, religious and material history, random
events, etc. Faith, whatever its form and object, religious or secular,
is ultimately what makes peoples tick; it is the basis of
both individual and collective identity. Cultural values, choices, and
aspirations are all derived from its interior discourse.
In medieval
times, religion was such a dominant component of faith that many of the
ultimate explanations are to be found in its dynamics. With this in
mind,
let's survey the temper of religious life in medieval Christendom. |
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It is early in the second millennium CE. Europe is a
conglomeration of warring kingdoms, changing shape with personalities,
dynastic succession is the norm. The Angles, Saxons, and Franks are basically an aggressive lot with no
semblance of a secular culture. Local languages and related identities are slowly emerging. Society is feudalistic; the
economy rests on subsistence agriculture, stagnant for centuries without
perceptible change. Man's idea of himself is reflected in Catholic art:
submissive and weak, man occupies his preordained place in the world,
seeped in a morality centered on sin and guilt. Painting and sculpture
have an unreal quality—meek expressions, flat faces; a benign,
guilt-ridden, awestruck-at-the-heavens kind of portrayal. Education is
religious and monopolized by monasteries—secular education is scarce.
Representative religious music includes the Gregorian chants. Literature
espouses chivalrous values, fantastic tales of valor, honor and
patriotism.
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In 1054 CE, the Roman and the Eastern Churches split on
doctrinal and political grounds with reciprocal excommunications.♣
Both now claim to be the sole true Church of Christ. The Roman Church, since
the fall of Rome to the Visigoths, has acquired enormous temporal authority;
the Pope is effectively the chief civic leader in many lands. The coronation
of Charlemagne as the Holy Roman Emperor establishes a precedent whereby
imperial authority depends on the sanction of the Pope. Armed with the power
to excommunicate, the Pope could, and did on at least one occasion,
undermine imperial power by absolving the emperor's vassals from their
allegiance to him.♣ The chief
concern of medieval western political thought remains the proper relation
between the church and state, settling most often in the middle ground
between the extremes of theocracy and Erastianism (the church as a
department of state). |
By the early second millennium, the Western masses are swept by an intense
religious enthusiasm. Theirs is a passion filled faith, preoccupied with literalist dogma and
rituals, largely devoid of the non-denominational spirituality that seeks
worldly detachment; its rational metaphysics, or secular philosophical
thought, is scarce. Even in Christianity's early days, the
spiritual-mystical Gnostic tradition was declared heretical and by the end
of the first century CE the canonizing process and scripture were formalized
in a form that still exists today. It was built entirely upon the gospels of
holy men who trailed Jesus by decades, and were responding to radically
different social tensions and political realities. On its tolerance for
other beliefs, here is an excerpt from the Encyclopedia Britannica 1998. |
Christianity, from its beginning, tended toward an
intolerance that was rooted in its religious self-consciousness.
Christianity understands itself as revelation of the divine truth that
became human in Jesus himself. 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life;
no one comes to the Father, but by me' (John 14:6). To be a Christian is
to 'follow the truth' (3 John); the Christian proclamation is 'the way of
truth' (2 Peter 2:2). Those who do not acknowledge the truth are enemies
'of the cross of Christ' (Philippians 3:18) who have 'exchanged the truth
about God for a lie' (Romans 1:25) and made themselves the advocates and
confederates of the 'adversary, the devil,' who 'prowls around like a
roaring lion' (1 Peter 5:8). Thus, one cannot make a deal with the devil
and his party—and in this lies the basis for
intolerance in Christianity.
Christianity consistently practiced an intolerant attitude
in its approach to Judaism and paganism as well as heresy in its own ranks
... Early Christianity aimed at the elimination of paganism—the destruction of its institutions,
temples, tradition, and the order of life based upon it ... it left only
the ruins of paganism still remaining. Christian missions of later
centuries constantly aimed at the destruction of indigenous religions,
including their cultic places and traditions (as in missions to the
Anglo-Saxons, Germans, and Slavs). This objective was not realized in
mission areas in which Christian political powers did not succeed in
conquests—e.g., China and Japan; but in Indian Goa, for example, the
temples and customs of all indigenous religions were eliminated by the
Portuguese conquerors.
The attitude of intolerance was further reinforced when
Islam confronted Christianity ... Islam understood itself as the
conclusion and fulfillment of the Old and New Testament revelation; from
the Christian view, however, Islam was understood eschatologically—i.e., as the religion of the 'false
prophets,' or as the religion of the Antichrist.♣ The aggression of Christianity against Islam—on the Iberian Peninsula, in Palestine,
and in the entire eastern Mediterranean during the Crusades—was carried out under this fundamental
attitude of intolerance. Intolerance of indigenous religions was also
manifested in Roman Catholic missions in the New World; these missions
transferred the methods of the struggle against Islam to the treatment of
the Native Americans throughout the Western Hemisphere and destroyed their
cults and cultic places. Against Protestants, the Counter-Reformation
displayed the same kind of intolerance ...
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During the
period 1095-1212, the Catholic Church and the leading European monarchs
devoted considerable energy to the Crusades. Notably, the Popes
themselves called for a holy war against the Muslims. It drew wide
support and participation. ♣
In 1095, Pope Urban II called for a Christian army to
help the Byzantine monarch ... and to recapture the Holy Sepulcher.
Armies were raised by knights ... Smaller, generally ill-organized
bands were collected by sundry lesser warriors, adventurers, and
zealots ... On July 15, 1099, Jerusalem fell to the crusaders, and its
Muslim and Jewish inhabitants were slaughtered ... During the second
Crusade, armies led by Emperor Conrad III of Germany and King Louis
VII of France joined forces in Jerusalem in the spring of 1148 and
with 50,000 men struck north at Damascus ... [it] ended in humiliating
failure. [The Turkish Mamluks led by Saladin regained control.]
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Shocked by the fall of Jerusalem, Pope Gregory VIII called
for the Third Crusade. The largest crusader army yet assembled set out ...
In 1191 Richard I, the Lion-Heart of England, conquered the Byzantine
province of Cyprus and then joined Phillip II Augustus of France in the
siege of Acre ... its inhabitants were slaughtered. After failing to reach
Jerusalem, in 1192 Richard I negotiated a five-year peace treaty with
Saladin that permitted European pilgrims access to holy shrines.
The Fourth Crusade, called in 1198 by Pope Innocent III to
strike against Egypt, took a bizarre course. The crusader army was unable
to pay for ships and outfitting obtained from Venice and so agreed to
assist the Venetians in capturing the city of Zara ... then moving against
Constantinople ... on April 13, 1204, the crusaders sacked the city ...
and established the Latin Empire of Constantinople, which was to last 60
years ... destroying any hope of alliance between the Byzantine and Latin
churches. It also mortally wounded the Byzantine Empire.
A wave of revived crusading fervor in Europe produced the
pathetic Children's Crusade of 1212, in which thousands of children were
lost or sold into slavery. Three years later Pope Innocent III called for
another strike at the Muslim world. The Fifth Crusade, manned chiefly by
French and German crusaders, captured Damietta, near the Nile, in 1219.
Floods stopped a march on Cairo, and the crusade ended indecisively with
an eight-year truce.
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Disputation
over dogma between the two flavors of Christianity obscured deep-seated
cultural differences rooted in a more distant past: while Byzantium
developed a predominantly mystical theology, mysticism kept a low
profile in the West until the twelfth century. Then it did gather
momentum but remained confined to monasteries and to small segments of
the population, for e.g., the Augustinian monastery of St
Victor in Paris. Its leading exponents include St Bonaventura, sometime
Master of the Franciscans, 'Meister' John Eckhart of Strasbourg, and the
Fleming Jan van Ruysbroek, 'the ecstatic teacher'. In fact, 'some of the
most profound [late medieval] expressions of Christ-mysticism are
found in the women mystics, such as Catherine of Siena and Julian of
Norwich.' According to a leading modern scholar of monotheistic
religions, Karen Armstrong, |
In the West, Christians were slower to develop a
mystical tradition. They had fallen behind the monotheists in the
Byzantine and Islamic empires and were perhaps not ready for this new
development ... the path to God [remained] beset with guilt, tears and
exhaustion ... clearly the West continued to find God a strain.♣
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Protestant thinkers like Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann have
also denied mysticism an integral role in Catholic belief, claiming
that 'mystical union was a Greek [Orthodox] import incompatible with saving
faith in the Gospel word.' The monastic-mystic orders were to remain on the
fringe in the West, much like the faylasufs in the tradition of
al-Farabi and Averroės in medieval Islam. Not surprisingly, they were also
among those who first spoke for tolerance in Christianity. The Western
Christian masses, however, exhibited no appetite for mysticism, and this is
a crucial difference. Instead, popular religion acquired another face. In
the words of a leading modern historian of Europe, Norman Davies, ♣ |
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'The
systematic practice of witchcraft seems to have been a product of the
late medieval period. What is more, by openly entering into combat with
witchcraft, the Church inadvertently fostered the climate of hysteria on
which the alleged witches and sorcerers thrived. The crucial Bull
Summis Desiderantes, which launched the Church's official
counter-offensive, was issued by pope Innocent VIII as late as 1484. The
standard handbook for witch-hunters, the Malleus Maleficarum [The
Witch Hammer], was published in 1486 by the Dominicans. If previously
there had been reticence about witches' doings, now there could be none.
Henceforth all Christendom knew that the legions of the Devil were led
by evil women who anointed themselves with grease from the flesh of
unbaptised children, who rode stark naked on flying broomsticks or on
the backs of rams and goats, and who attended their nocturnal Sabbaths
to work their spells and copulate with demons. Women were classified as
weak, inferior beings, who could not resist temptation. Once the Church
gave public credence to such things, the potency of witchcraft was
greatly increased ... the frontiers between fact and delusion, between
character and hallucination, were hopelessly blurred ... After that, for
300 years and more, witchcraft and witch-hunting were endemic to most
parts of Europe.' |
'The Malleus codified the folklore and beliefs of the
Alpine peasants and was dedicated to the implementation of Exodus 22:18:
"You shall not permit a sorceress to live." ... Torture is sanctioned as a
means of securing confessions. Lay and secular authorities are called upon
to assist the inquisitors in the task of exterminating those whom Satan has
enlisted in his cause ... [It] went through 28 editions ... [from 1486 to
1600] and was accepted by Catholics and Protestants alike as an authority on
Satanism and as a guide to Christian defense.'♣ It targeted the weak and the minorities: Jews, old women, midwives, Gypsies,
poets. 'Witchcraft was not the only crime of which one could be accused ...
By questioning any part of Catholic belief, one could be branded a heretic
... The Malleus ... offers us an intriguing glimpse into the Medieval
mind ... a taste of what it might have been like to have lived in those
times.'
§
When egregious disparities
appear between preaching and practice in the Roman Church, made evident by
the luxury, dissipation, and the scandalous lifestyles of the clergy, the
anguished response from pious followers is not to seek defensive refuge
within the soul—this tradition is little developed in
Europe—instead, their response is directed
externally. A group of fervent Christians break off from the Church, fueling
a wider sense of disquiet and scandal. They return to the fundamentals, and
rely on their own interpretation of scripture. These are very devout people
indeed, and interpret every statement in the New Testament literally. It is
not the Greek spirit of reason or inquiry informing their protest—the Greeks and their works have not
yet dawned upon them—a handful of theologians, taking the
cue from Islamic philosophers, have only taken the first steps. These
include Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham
in the 13th and 14th centuries. On the leader of the Reformation, Karen
Armstrong says, |
Martin Luther was a firm believer in witchcraft and saw
the Christian life as a battle against Satan. The Reformation can be
seen as an attempt to address this anxiety even though most of the
Reformers did not promote any new conception of God. The term
[Reformation] suggests a more deliberate and unified movement than
actually occurred ... [they] were all trying to articulate a new
religious awareness that was strongly felt ... there seems to have
been a religious enthusiasm in Europe which led people to criticize
abuses that they had previously taken for granted. The actual ideas of
the Reformers all sprang from medieval, Catholic theologies.
♣
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With the Church's worldly power threatened, the ecumenical
council of Trent (1545-63) summarily rejected the core Protestant idea—justification by faith alone rather than
by faith and rituals—and reasserted itself as the sole
interpreter of both faith and rituals through its episcopacy of bishops. The
schism thus formalized, the early Protestants were severely persecuted by
the Dominicans and the Franciscans under sanction from the Pope (even as
late as 1870, at the first Vatican council, the office of the Pope was
pronounced infallible). Only in late modern times did a much battered
Catholicism grow mellower. Better not to speculate on what Socrates would have thought
of the medieval West. Its mental life appears to be anything but conducive
to the spirit of Classical Greece. How then did so many Western Christians
end up embracing it?
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