An Idiot’s History of Western Europe—The Terrible Transition toward the Modern Worldview (1500 to 1700)

[This is the seventh installment of my mini-history—more to come]

In my previous post, I described how the expansion of the Ottoman Turks and the discovery of the New World shifted the center of political and economic gravity from Italy and the Mediterranean Sea to north of the Alps—the resurgence of the Holy Roman Empire under Charles V—and to the Atlantic coastal countries—Portugal, Spain, France, England and Holland extended their competition to the New World through trade and colonization.

Charles V of the Habsburgs inherited the Spanish throne in 1516 and was elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, thereby creating the largest political entity in Europe since the Roman Empire.  He united the German principalities and the Austrian, Bohemian and Hungarian kingdoms with Spain and its control of the Low Countries (now the Netherlands and Belgium) and parts of Italy as well as Spain’s New World colonies.  He ruled this vast collection of semi-autonomous states and dependencies until he resigned in 1556 in favor of his brother Ferdinand I as Holy Roman Emperor and his son Philip II as King of Spain.  Like his predecessors in Spain, Ferdinand and Isabela, Charles V was devoted to Roman Catholicism.  In fact, he regarded himself as the Church’s leader and protector in temporal matters, partner to the Pope as Vicar of Christ in an alliance of the separate realms of the temporal and the spiritual.  He embraced the crusading zeal for defense of Christendom along with imperial ambition to exploit the New World in service of imperial and Church objectives.  He also presided uneasily over the launch of the Protestant Reformation and the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation and the first Wars of Religion.

Lutheran Reformation

Martin Luther instigated the Protestant Reformation, starting in 1517 by circulating his “Ninety-Five Theses” objecting to the selling of indulgences by the Church (interpreted as offering tickets to personal salvation in order to raise revenue for the Church’s worldly projects).   He quickly gained a wide readership thanks to printing and the resonance his argument found with so many people disgusted by obvious Church corruption.  By itself this document was not considered heretical by the Church.  But the selling of indulgences symbolized so many other, more fundamental features of Roman Catholic belief and practice that Luther and his followers objected to, and Luther spelled out the details of these strong objections in three books published in 1520.  These could not be ignored.  Luther was excommunicated by the Pope in 1520 and a call for his arrest was put out by Charles V in 1521.  But the politics of the Holy Roman Empire were complicated; princes and their equivalent in the various states had wide latitude to subvert the will of the Emperor and often had scores to settle with him and his allies.  Luther might very well have been executed for heresy (not by the Church but by imperial authorities), like Jan Hus a century earlier, except that he was protected by Frederick of Saxony, who installed Luther at Wartburg Castle, where Luther churned out volumes of new challenges to the Old Religion as well as a German translation of the Bible that helped establish the modern German language.

From Wikipedia, I offer this short summary of Martin Luther’s religious views.  He taught that salvation is not earned by good deeds but is received only as a free gift of God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ as our redeemer from sin.  Luther’s theology challenged the authority of the Pope, claiming that the Bible is the only source of divinely revealed knowledge.  He also denied the legitimacy and authority of a closed caste of priests to mediate for us with God.  For Luther, all baptized Christians are a holy priesthood, able to interact directly with God.  These became the basic tenets of the Lutherans.

Luther’s revolt was religious not social in nature, yet his writing encouraged many of the German peasantry to rise up in a social revolt against the landlords of some states of the empire.  Luther was appalled by the evil actions of the peasants against their masters and called for their brutal suppression.  It was not for humans to change society, the product of God’s plan for the world.  This view was hardly original to Luther.  It was the general assumption on which social, economic and political organization rested.  It was a human’s task to discern God’s will through the evidence in Nature and Scripture.  Luther did not desire an overturning of the social order; he differed with the Roman Church on questions of whose interpretation of God’s will should be taken seriously.  Yet the social implications of Luther’s religious revolt were profound.  Many nobles and peasants alike harbored deep, simmering resentments against political, social and economic domination by remote authorities aligned with the Roman “confession.”  They wanted greater autonomy and more local authority to organize their lives, communities and states.  Luther gave them religious vocabulary and cogent arguments to support their taking action.  The Lutheran revolt spread rapidly.

English Reformation

At the same time as the rapid spread of Lutheranism in the Holy Roman Empire, King Henry VIII of England repudiated the authority of the Pope and in 1534 declared himself supreme head of the Church of England.  While it is well known that Henry wanted a divorce that the Pope would not grant, his move to separate from Rome played very well with the nobles who wanted to acquire land owned in perpetuity by numerous monastic houses, which Henry simply dissolved so that he could expropriate and sell the land.  Thus, this was a royal reformation that had very little to do with theology; Henry insisted that the Church of England maintain most of the features of Roman Catholicism.  However, his son Edward, who reigned 1547-53, brought the English church more into line with continental Reformation theology, including the publication of the Book of Common Prayer and the Act of Uniformity which abandoned the Catholic mass and allowed clerical marriage.  Edward was followed by Mary the Catholic and her bloody attempt to restore England’s allegiance to Rome and then Elizabeth I, a pragmatist who enforced an uneasy peace in which the Church of England regained some but not all of its Protestant features and Catholics were allowed to practice their faith in private—at least until she was declared a heretic by the Pope, plots against her were attributed to Catholics, and Philip II of Spain attempted unsuccessfully to invade England with his Spanish Armada in 1588.

Reaction in the German Lands

Whole states of the (especially northern) German lands of the Holy Roman Empire became Lutheran and formed the Schmalkaldic League to resist with military force the action by Charles V to bring them back under the banner of Roman Catholicism.  Charles V was forced by military stalemate to recognize in the Peace of Augsburg (1555) that Lutheranism could not be uprooted and therefore would have to be accommodated within the German lands.  The resolution of this war in the name of religion was that each prince would determine the religion that all citizens of his state would have to embrace (allowing those who could not do so to move their families and possessions unimpeded to a state that had embraced their preferred religion—a remarkable concession for the time).  The notion that all citizens of a state should share the same religion startles our modern sensibilities, but we must understand that since antiquity the fundamental concept of communal harmony, from villages to empires, was that its members share the same values, which meant the same religion, at least in public if not uniformly in private.  The fact that the Holy Roman Empire could tolerate both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism as official religions coexisting in neighboring states of the empire was quite revolutionary.  It also broke forever the historic unity of Christendom, a common, continental set of values, language and culture that recognized one source of Authority regarding what is true, right and good, the glue that united Europeans despite their often violent commercial and political competition.

Counter-Reformation

At first it seemed that Roman Catholicism was doomed to decline in the face of the vigorous revolt of the Protestant Reformation.  But urged on by Charles V, Pope Paul III convened the Council of Trent at which Church leaders carefully considered the objections raised by Luther and other Protestants.  Other than making some important reforms to stamp out corruption in the Church hierarchy, the Council finally and fatefully decided to stand its ground, thereby launching the Counter-Reformation.  I quote Professor Bartlett:

In the years of its deliberation, 1545-1563, the Council of Trent redefined and reinforced Catholic doctrine and hierarchy, largely rejecting Protestant demands.  The Latin Vulgate Bible was affirmed as the true source of scripture.  St. Thomas Aquinas, the 13^th century scholastic theologian, was adopted as the central thinker for the shaping of Catholic dogma.  The central authority of the pope was maintained, the seven sacraments were upheld, and the saints were still recognized.  The centrally managed Roman Inquisition was sustained to identify heresy; and in 1559, the Index of Prohibited Books was decreed to control heretical ideas.

The driving concern that spawned the Inquisition and the Index was the Church’s felt need to provide guidance for the confused laity who sought answers regarding what to believe and what not to believe.  As I described in a prior posting, the Church felt keenly its obligation to prevent its followers from being led astray from the will of God, as interpreted by the Pope and the hierarchy in Rome.  The same zeal for defense of the faith had led in 1540 to the founding of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) by Ignatius of Loyola and a small band of associates.  Like the Dominicans starting in the 1100s, the Jesuits’ reason for being was to engage opponents of the faith in reasoned argument based on the best knowledge of the day, and to win the argument convincingly but peacefully and with respect.  But also like the Dominicans in earlier centuries, the Jesuits often unwittingly (or not) provided intellectual cover for violent suppression of the enemies of the faith.  Again quoting Professor Bartlett:

[The Jesuits] provided the instrument by which that faith would be affirmed, taught and spread.  These priests were to live among the people, engaging in teaching, preaching and missionary activity.  The natives of the new world were to be converted to Roman Christianity and souls both protected and won back from the Protestants in Europe.

The spirit that brought about the Jesuits also brought about the religious wars of the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  The Jesuits and their superb schools, together with the Inquisition and the Index, represented a different kind of religious war: a war of the spirit and of will between Protestants and Catholics.  Europe had been divided by religion, and the ultimate consequence of this was a century of unspeakable suffering.

Let us remember, however, that the consequent wars were fought in the name of religion but actually in service of temporal politics.  Religious vocabulary and concepts were still regarded as the sole means of justifying human action, even to achieve distinctly secular ends.

Calvinism

By breaking the unity of recognized spiritual and moral Authority, Lutheranism opened the door for a wide variety of independent religious reform movements, often in protest against both Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism.  The most influential of these was started in 1536 by John Calvin as he turned Geneva into a theocracy in which all behavior and even thought was to be controlled by the city leadership, who thus became the ultimate authority representing God’s will.  Despite the totalitarian austerity imposed by Calvin in Geneva, his simple, clear message was welcomed by Europeans deeply confused by the Reformation.  This new religion spread quickly to France, the Low Countries (Holland) and Scotland thanks to Calvin’s The Institutes of the Christian Religion as a guide for setting up independent Calvinist cells, as well as thanks to the printing presses and the University of Geneva that provided the intellectual support for Calvinist missionary work throughout Europe.  Just as Germany was fairly evenly split between Lutheran and Catholic, France became split roughly half and half between Catholics and Calvinists (Huguenots), leading to a French civil war in the name of religion that finally ended in 1598 when King Henri IV achieved religious reconciliation and provided toleration and full civil rights to Huguenots in his brilliant Edict of Nantes (only to be revoked by Louis XIV in 1685, leading to mass emigration of Huguenots to the New World, South Africa and other parts of Europe).

Thirty Years’ War

In the Low Countries, the Catholic King Philip II of Spain (also monarch of the Low Countries) sought to suppress Calvinism through military force, thereby sparking the Dutch Revolt, which started around 1568.  This revolt festered into the 1600s and became part of a continent-wide conflagration—the Thirty Years’ War, 1618-48, which ended with the near total destruction of Europe and the Treaty of Westphalia.  The Thirty Years’ War started with an intensely overzealous effort to impose Catholicism on Bohemia, the home of the earliest proto-Protestant movement, the Hussites.  It soon engulfed the German and Austrian lands of the Holy Roman Empire and then drew in the Lutheran kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden, and then Catholic France (but on the side of the Protestants, because of fears of the encirclement by the Catholic Holy Roman Empire and Spain!).  All the while, Spain was financing the war in Germany and engaging the Dutch rebels, and the English were fighting their own civil war (as well as wars in Scotland and Ireland)—all in the name of opposing religious identities.  The brutality on all sides, characteristic of civil wars, was as Professor Bartlett wrote “unspeakable.”  In central Europe, which suffered the most, the combatants literally soldiered on despite the eventual bankruptcy of their respective sponsors, causing the armies to live off the land, which means taking what they wanted from the populous and killing those who objected too strenuously.  Europe’s economy collapsed.  Millions were killed or starved to death.  A census of Bohemia after the war found that several thousand villages had been abandoned!  Europe had never seen such widespread and profound devastation.

Old Social Mold Irrevocably Smashed

In its exhaustion, Europe understood that a new political and social arrangement had to be found.  The will to change society could no longer belong solely to God (or God’s interpreters).  Human leaders would have to take matters into their own hands and use reason and experience to the best of their ability.  Much as the Protestants and Catholics now hated each other, they had to tolerate each other’s existence, even in the same states.  Individuals had to be allowed to follow their own consciences in their choice of religious affiliation.  It would no longer be legitimate to use minor theological differences as an excuse to hate those whom we are predisposed to hate anyway for reasons of ethnicity, culture or class.  The passions generated were just too fearsome, the costs far too great.  No longer could sovereignty of states be subsumed to transnational religious confessions.  What was best for the nation or local community had to take precedence over religious affiliation.  In fact, the concept of the secular sovereign nation state led by a sovereign leader started to emerge in theory (Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes in 1651) and in practice (Louis XIII of France under the guidance of the Machiavellian Cardinal Richelieu, who put the interests of France above those of his Roman Catholic Church).  Not that these changes were fully realized immediately after the Thirty Years’ War or even in the next few centuries, but the old social mold had been irrevocably smashed.  The process of putting together a new order merely advanced a step or two forward in the unprecedented international congress of nations and states involved in the war, convened in two German cities of Westphalia.

After the Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years’ War, “He who comes in the name of the Lord” would be subject to sharp questions and deep suspicion.  By what authority does he represent the Lord?  Whose notion of the Lord does he represent?  And coming in the Lord’s name might mean good or evil intentions depending on our difference or similarity of ethnic, class or political affiliation.  The notion of ultimate Authority had been irrevocably shattered into many, competing authorities, leaving Europeans confused and at odds.  A few started to wonder out loud whether the Lord even exists.  Perhaps we have nothing but our human values to guide us; perhaps we can look only to ourselves or our community or national leaders for guidance regarding what is true, right and good.  In the 1600s and 1700s, the Enlightenment, fueled by the Scientific Revolution, would provide intellectual voice to those looking for a new notion of authority to guide them.

Copyright 2012 by Chris Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Chris Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)

An Idiot’s History of Western Europe—The Wheels Come Off in the Late Middle Ages (1300 to 1500)

[This is the sixth installment of my mini-history—more to come]

In 1348, a Genoese ship arrived from the Black Sea carrying rats infected with the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague.  The resulting Black Death killed about one third of the population of Western Europe by 1350, more in the cities and towns.  No one, not even the learned Church, could provide any relief or explanation.  Even worse, the Plague returned at unpredictable intervals (but with less impact) over many centuries thereafter.  Recent findings indicate this medieval disease organism was no more virulent than its modern-day form found in many species of rodent around the world.  It seems the crowded, unsanitary conditions of medieval urban life, coupled with poor nutrition from expanding population and decreasing agricultural output as the Medieval Warm Period gave way to the Little Ice Age in Europe, made Europeans exceptionally susceptible to the disease.  Today we can hardly imagine the psycho-social, cultural and economic impact of such an unprecedented and pervasive calamity as the Black Death (nothing comparable had been seen since the Plague of Justinian in the 600s and 700s), especially in 1348-9 when it struck so quickly and violently.  It is equally difficult for us to conceive of how a society could recover from the Black Death.  Ironically, Western Europe recovered quite quickly and became more prosperous and innovative than ever before.  In fact, the Black Death saved Europe from an economic collapse that struck in 1343.

Black Death Recapitalizes Europe

The population and economic growth in the High Middle Ages, resulting from agricultural innovation, good weather, and related growth of trade and towns and the economic stimulation of the Crusades, was particularly felt in the Italian Peninsula.  Leading families of the mercantile cities, especially Genoa, Florence and Venice, became enormously wealthy.  Control of trade between Western Europe and the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Levant (eastern Mediterranean shore) allowed these families to accumulate capital and invest it in new business ventures proposed by adventurous young men with no wealth of their own but the courage to risk life and reputation in pursuit of wealth and recognition.  Some families, most notably the Bardi and the Peruzzi of Florence, set themselves up as bankers to Europe, even the monarchs of England and France as they waged the Hundred Years’ War (1337 to 1453) for control of France.  The vital role of these two banks for lubricating the economy of Western Europe (and the associated risks of supporting both sides of a princely conflict) was dramatically demonstrated when Edward III of England in 1343 repudiated his enormous loans from the Bardi and Peruzzi.  The Italians were kicked out of England, their property was confiscated, and their banks collapsed, taking the whole economy of Europe down with them, since so many tradesmen and artisans had placed their small and large savings with the banks or depended on them for working capital loans.  The European economy was decapitalized overnight.

Then it was recapitalized almost as quickly by the Black Death.  How could this be?  First, the survivors of the Plague were in more demand for their labor and skills.  Wages rose and so did opportunities for social mobility in the towns.  Second, Professor Bartlett cites the “inheritance effect.”  The survivors in wealthy families inherited from family members killed by the Plague.  Surplus capital accumulated in fewer hands.  This stimulated new investment and consequent economic growth.  It also gave rise to new confidence of the mercantile families, who had the leisure and the wealth not only to pursue creature comforts but also develop their own distinctive cultural identity, setting the stage for the Italian Renaissance.

Italian Renaissance and Humanism

According to Professor Bartlett,

“The Renaissance began in Italy in the 14^th century and then spread somewhat unevenly over the rest of Northern Europe in the late 15^th and 16^th centuries.  The most perfect actualization of this new culture arose in Florence.”

With the Ordinances of Justice in 1293, Florence became a merchant-controlled republic.  Its governing merchant class sought “a cultural model for their self-definition,” which had to be found outside the definitions and structures of the feudal system.  They saw themselves reflected in the Roman Republic of antiquity, where

“the state was an instrument to help us here on Earth.  Salvation was left to faith, as the secular and divine were separated in function.  Social mobility and competition were valued, as was personal responsibility.  These were the fundamental ideas that collectively came to be known as humanism.”

“Florentines perceived themselves as different from the men of the Middle Ages, which [their] historians described as barbarous and Gothic.  Celebrated by Florentine writers like Petrarch and Boccaccio, the place of human values became supreme, and the Middle Ages came to define that chasm between classical antiquity and the beginning of the Italian Renaissance.  Humanist values and practices spread broadly across the Italian Peninsula, as learned laymen were produced by humanist schools and sought employment in republics, monarchies, and papal Rome.  Humanism proved a remarkably flexible and effective tool, setting the standards for style, scholarship, and communication, as well as art and architecture throughout Italy.”

Having heard the term “humanism” throughout my (partially) educated life, I thought this worldview had emerged in the Renaissance as a truly new way of looking at the world, so I was surprised to discover from Professor Bartlett that Renaissance humanism was in fact the “revival of antiquity and its application to contemporary issues.”  My confusion is understandable given the very broad use of the term these days, even as a softer label for atheism.  The Renaissance humanism actually arose as a reactionary “back to the good old days” denial of the Church-centered medieval culture.  On one hand, Florentines and other wealthy, educated laymen had become aware of the sophistication of Roman and Greek culture through recently re-discovered writings.  On the other hand, nearly a millennium had passed without direct exposure to the truly barbaric aspects of ancient Greek and Roman life.  So the ancient world could take on the aura of a lost golden age of civilization that preceded the “dark ages” (Petrarch’s term) from which the nouveau riche Italian republicans sought to free themselves. As described in my previous post, there was already underway in the prior century a reform movement led by the mendicant orders and especially St. Francis and St. Thomas Aquinas to revitalize the Church-centered medieval culture and make it more human-centered.  But this movement didn’t fully serve the purposes of the Italian merchant class.  For them there had to be a clear distinction between the Church-centered culture that supported the feudal system and a superior new culture of those who were, almost by definition, outside the feudal system.  St. Thomas Aquinas had already done the heavy intellectual lifting to legitimize Aristotle (and by association, pagan antiquity) in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church.  Without challenging the Church’s authority on theological and spiritual issues, the Renaissance drew from the ideas and examples of antiquity to create a self-consciously alternative culture for the here-and-now material world.  This very practical new culture served the townspeople and kings of Western Europe very well indeed.

Humanism was technically the study of the humanities—the literature and art—of ancient Greece and Rome.  In practical terms, however, humanism inspired not only emulation of classical literature and art during the Renaissance but also a form of secular education that emphasized the importance of precise use of language, the formal Latin language of Cicero, to influence others through elegant rhetoric.  These and other secular skills, such as arithmetic and bookkeeping, made the graduates of humanist schools quite valuable employees in the administrations of city-states, kingdoms and even Papal Rome.  This humanist education became a requirement for career advancement and achievement of social position for the sons of the Third Estate and eventually all who would be regarded with respect.  Such education became a new “caste mark” (as Professor Bartlett calls it) of the educated, upwardly mobile, competitive achiever—the Renaissance Man on the street.

Humanism’s Setback of Scientific Development

It is ironic that the fashion-driven preference for the formal Latin of Cicero (which had never been spoken on the streets of Rome) more or less killed Latin as a living language that could evolve with the times.   Equally ironic is the setback that humanism gave to the development of natural philosophy (science).  In setting up the Greek and Roman writers as their reference point for what is true and right and good, the humanists dismissed the work of Thomas Aquinas and his followers in the early universities, known collectively as the Scholastics, in favor of a return to unsophisticated acceptance of Aristotle as the final authority on nature and how it works.  In his excellent book, The Genesis of Science, James Hannam shares new insights on medieval science derived from recent historical research.   Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics, notably Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, Richard of Wallingford, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham and the Merton Calculators of Oxford University (including Thomas Bradwardine, Richard Swineshead and William Heytesbury), and on the Continent, John Buridan, Nicole Oresme and others built on and challenged each other’s work and in the process distilled and further developed the great value of Aristotle’s rational method while correcting many of his obvious errors.  They succeeded in building on and up from Aristotle’s pioneering work in natural philosophy.  It seems that Aristotle seldom bothered to actually test his ideas about how the natural world works by just observing nature in action, even the simplest mechanics of projectiles and falling objects.  The Scholastics made great strides by committing themselves to observe the natural world and try to explain its behavior through reason aiding by their pioneering though still rudimentary mathematics.

The Black Death took the lives of some of the Scholastics and no doubt left the confidence of others deeply shaken.  But worse was the derisive dismissal of the Scholastics by the humanists.  History is written by the victors, it is said, and in the cultural triumph of humanism and the Renaissance, Scholastics were not just ignored as though they never existed, they were derided as fools caught up in meaningless theological speculation.  If the Scholastics ever wondered how many angels danced on the head of a pin, writes James Hannam, they surely were just teasing each other, but the joke was turned against them.  The extent of anti-intellectual character assassination is reflected by the origin of the word “dunce” from the name of Duns Scotus.  Aristotle, along with the other Classics, was enshrined in the curricula of universities for centuries after, perpetuating his laughable errors along with his materialism and commitment to logical reasoning from a priori (i.e., unquestionable) premises as the sole source of knowledge.  Even worse for the Scholastics, they were blamed in later centuries (notably by Francis Bacon) for this over-commitment to the truth of Aristotle and his tedious, hyper-rationalist method.  I will return in a later post to the Scientific Revolution and its origins in medieval philosophy.

Christian Humanism

As humanist education and values spread to the schools of Europe north of the Alps, humanism took on a more Christian identity.  In Italy there had been a tradition of secular schooling (the abacus schools that prepared young men for careers in their fathers’ mercantile businesses), so it was possible for humanism to be taught to youth without much reference or challenge to Christian theology and practice.  Humanism and the Church could coexist without much interference in Italy.  In northern Europe, on the other hand, education was provided by the Church (such as the cathedral schools of France, Germany and Britain).  There was no tradition of secular education.  Since humanism was in effect a lens through which to study literature and art, and since the texts to be studied in northern Europe were not the Classics of Rome and Greece but the Bible and writings of the early Church Fathers, humanist education led to new ways of interpreting the Christian religion – the Christian humanism exemplified by the writings of Desiderius Erasmus of Holland and Thomas More of England (who were close friends).  These and other Christian humanists raised awkward questions about the dissonance of the Judeo-Christian idea (and its elaboration in Christian theology) and the actual operation of the Roman Catholic Church in practice.  Moreover, their books were widely read and very popular, thanks to the spread of literacy and education in Western Europe and even more the invention of the printing press with moveable metal type by Johann Gutenberg, marked by his first Bible in 1455.

Crisis in the Church

Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church was doing just about everything possible to undermine its own legitimacy and authority.  In the Late Middle Ages, Rome was an unpleasant and dangerous little city, to the point that popes feared for their own lives, due in part to their involvement in temporal struggles for power in the Italian Peninsula and beyond.  In 1309, Pope Clement V, who was French, moved the papal court to a safer, more comfortable location in Avignon in what is now France.  Critics derided the following decades and seven French popes residing in splendor in Avignon as the Babylonian Captivity, not to be confused with the Babylonian Captivity of the Jewish people of the Old Testament.  Whether true or not, England and its allies believed the papacy was favoring the French crown and its allies and therefore supported Rome as the rightful residence for a pope, preferably not a Frenchman.  Then in 1378, two popes were elected, one in Avignon, the other in Rome, and this was followed by a series of rival claimants to the papacy and deep confusion in Western Catholicism about just who held the ultimate position of authority as Vicar of Christ on earth.  This episode of Church history was known as the Western Schism; in contrast to the Great Schism of 1054 that officially separated Western and Eastern Christianity, the Western Schism had no theological implications.  It was simply a question of where and who was the locus of ultimate authority on theological and moral questions when they arise.  But both schisms had the effect of undermining the notion that the authority of God could be represented on earth by just one entity or one person.

The Western Schism was resolved in 1417 by the Council of Constance, which elected Martin V as the one and only legitimate pope and sent him to reside in Rome.  However, the cultural impact of the Western Schism was not so easily resolved.  Corruption continued to be blight on Roman Catholicism as the pope and the Church hierarchy competed for political power and sought greater revenue, including the selling of indulgences later made famous by Martin Luther.  To quote Professor Bartlett:

“As a consequence many pious people began to look outside the Church for spiritual comfort.  There was a huge increase in lay religious movements, more or less orthodox, that promised a close communion with God on a personal level, thus bypassing the institutional structure of the Church that had become so questionable.”

This trend was strengthened by the rise of Christian humanism and its rapid spread through humanist education and the printing of books.

In my prior posting on the High Middle Ages, I mentioned the heresies that challenged the role of the Church and its priests as necessary intermediaries between the individual Christian and God.  The first major heresy of this type was led by Jan Hus of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic).  Hus foreshadowed the Reformation with his sweeping theological challenges to the prerogatives of the Church, but his followers were motivated as much by the local politics of Czech vs. German in Bohemia, a state within the Holy Roman Empire.  This empire was founded by Charlemagne but it quickly disintegrated and reconstituted as a German-dominated federation of principalities and kingdoms covering what is now mainly Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Italy.  Usually the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor were vying with each other for political control, particularly in Italy.  But in the case of Hus and his followers, the Hussites, the Holy Roman Emperor and the Church found common cause in putting an end to these heretics.  However, the treacherous execution of Jan Hus and a few others at the Council of Constance in 1415 ignited a decade-long Hussite Rebellion in Bohemia that was finally crushed by the Emperor’s forces.  This incident illustrates the explosive blend of religious and ethnic grievances against both the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church.

Turkish Threat to European Civilization

We moderns think of the past couple of centuries as a time of amazing change.  And they were, of course, but surely it is hard even for us to imagine the turmoil created by all these events starting in the 1300s and flowing into the 1400s.  But there were soon even more unprecedented and deeply disruptive developments.  While the events in Western Europe were unfolding, the Ottoman Turks were sweeping across the Islamic Middle East, Egypt and the Anatolian Peninsula, winning victory after victory against the Byzantine Empire until Constantinople itself finally fell in 1453.  The shock of this news in Western Europe of the impossible-to-believe loss of the last vestige of Roman rule in the East, the fortress city of Constantine, was quickly compounded by the Turkish conquests in Eastern Europe, including Serbia, Greece and Bosnia.  The Turks appeared to be super-human, unstoppable warriors.  The Black Sea and the Mediterranean became Turkish lakes, halting the Mediterranean trade that had enriched Italy, thereby dooming the Italian Peninsula to centuries of decline.

After a pausing for a few decades, the Ottomans under Suleyman the Magnificent surged deeper into central Europe, annihilating a massive Christian army led by King Louis of Hungary in 1526 and then laying siege to Vienna in 1529.  The siege was lifted only because the Ottoman army had over-extended its supply lines from Constantinople and could not withstand the winter.  The Ottomans would lay siege to Vienna again in 1683, but that siege was broken by intervention by Polish-Lithuanian forces combined with those of the Holy Roman Empire, and this marked the beginning of the decline of the Ottoman Empire.  But the Europeans of the 1400s and 1500s were gripped by reasonable fear that Christendom would soon be overwhelmed by Islam, destroying life as they knew it.  They were even more troubled by a deep sense that God was using the Turks to punish them. What had they done wrong?  Perhaps the transgressions so widely displayed even by the Church itself.  What could they do to recover God’s favor?

The effects on society and politics were profound, especially in Spain, where a new Christian militancy arose with the reign of Ferdinand and Isabela, who joined two of the main political units of the Iberian Peninsula.  Reflecting the fear and loathing throughout Christendom, the Spaniards were hungry to reassert the dignity and honor of the Christian identity and push back against the Muslims, seeking any kind of victory over the seemingly invincible Turks.  For centuries, Spain had been the principal point of mutually tolerant contact between the cultural and religious traditions of Western Christendom and Islam, as well as Judaism.  The Iberian Peninsula had been the gateway to Europe for the Greek, Roman, Jewish and Islamic learning that sparked the resurgence of European culture.  But that tolerance was overwhelmed by a new crusading zeal to restore the ascendancy of Christendom, driven by fear of Islamic expansionism and political jealousy of the favored position of Jewish converts to Christianity.  The result was military conquest of all Moorish Muslim areas of the southern Iberian Peninsula, the mass expulsion of Muslims and Jews, and the Spanish Inquisition (an appalling perversion of long-standing practice of the Church to inquire fairly into reports of heresy) that focused on rooting out the Jewish converts.  That the Moors of Spain had almost nothing in common with the Ottoman Turks except their religion meant little to the Spanish Christians.  Any victory over Islam would do to relieve the simmering panic that had gripped Christian Europe.

Sailing Around the Turks and Discovery of the New World

At the same time, the Portuguese were circumnavigating the African continent and discovering a long way around the Turkish blockade of the Mediterranean and overland trade with the Orient.  Denied both these routes, the Spanish crown was receptive to Christopher Columbus’s proposal to explore the possibility of a third route to the Orient, by sailing straight west across the Atlantic Ocean.  No serious thinker of the time actually thought the earth was flat (it was known to be a sphere since the ancient Greeks).  Rather the question was how big the earth was, and therefore whether the distance across the Atlantic was too great to allow a ship and its crew to make the journey before
exhausting their provisions of water and food.  Columbus had calculated the distance to be about half the real distance to Asia (which the Alexandrian Greeks had calculated already with fair accuracy) and used this erroneous calculation to convince Queen Isabela to sponsor his expedition.  While Columbus was convinced that he did in fact reach the East Indies in 1492, those who followed him soon understood that they had discovered a New World.

This remarkable discovery was a shock to more than the unsuspecting inhabitants of the New World.  It posed a peculiar challenge to Christendom; this strange land and its human and other inhabitants were not mentioned in the Bible.  What were they?  To imagine the psychological impact, think how we moderns would react to discovery of extraterrestrials?  As David Brog describes in In Defense of Faith, it took some time for the Dominicans who accompanied the Conquistadors to convince Europe that the Amerindians were in fact human beings, children of God and therefore brothers and sisters of all those races named in the Bible and known to Europe – and should be treated as such rather than enslaved or killed.  Remarkably the Spanish Crown, and not so remarkably the Pope, accepted this argument early on and banned mistreatment of the New World people.  But the Conquistadors were cut from vicious cloth and determined to get what they wanted regardless of the cost to others.  And even the Spanish crown was unable to reach across the Atlantic to force these cruel men to follow the dictates of Christianity.  For Europeans in general, the New World was yet another surprise that upended their worldview and forced reconsideration of all they had taken for granted for millennia.

In this context of cultural, political and economic upheaval, Western Europe entered a violent transition, during the 1500s and 1600s and beyond, from the medieval worldview to the modern one.

Copyright 2012 by Chris Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Chris Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)

An Idiot’s History of Western Europe—Big Changes in the High Middle Ages (1000 to 1300)

[This is the fifth installment of my mini-history—more to come]

The moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church was nearly unquestioned in the affairs of medieval Western Europe for most of Late Antiquity (A.D. 300 to 650) and throughout the Early Middle Ages (650 to 1000).  Contrary to conventional wisdom of the past few centuries, historians now regard the Catholic Christian intellectual and moral tradition as the foundation for Modern notions of rational inquiry, human rights, and civilized living.  But this tradition was compromised daily in temporal medieval practice.  No doubt the Church’s temporal and spiritual efforts to tame the knights and protect the weak against their arbitrary violence somehow fostered emergence of the Christian knight’s code of chivalry (from the same root as “cheval” for horse) by the advent of the High Middle Ages (1000 to 1300).  But contradictions were baked into the Church’s collaborative roles within the Romano-barbarian feudal system, as discussed in my previous post on “fallen institutions.”  Moreover, as times changed, any challenge to the feudal system became by association a challenge to the authority of the Church as well.  The High Middle Ages, and even more the Late Middle Ages (1300 to 1500), brought huge changes that challenged the feudal system and the Church itself, drastically transforming both but failing to destroy either.  Again I depend on Professor Bartlett’s course for most of what follows.

The Rise of Islam and the Crusades

Chronologically, the first major external challenge was the rise of Islam in the Early Middle Ages.  Islamic armies swept out of Arabia and overwhelmed the Christian Middle East and North Africa, then invaded Spain and moved north into southern France before being stopped by Christian (mainly Frankish) forces led by Charles Martel, most famously in the Battle of Poitiers (Tours) in 732.  Charles Martel then continued to defeat the Islamic forces and drove them south of the Pyrenees Mountains, never to return north into France.  What followed was a long period of Christian-Muslim standoff through the Early Middle Ages.  But ongoing Muslim control of the Holy Land rankled the Church until Christian nobles and peasants alike responded with unexpected enthusiasm to the call of Pope Urban II to go to the assistance of the Byzantine emperor to repel the invading Turks from Anatolia and retake Jerusalem for Christianity.  Thus was launched the First Crusade (1096-99), which succeeded in recapturing the Holy Land (though only for about a century).  This and the following eight crusades to the Holy Land were as much peoples’ movements as military campaigns.  They were often ill-disciplined and violent, with disastrous results for the Jewish and Christian communities through which these rag-tag swarms made their way like locusts through Europe and Anatolia toward the Holy Land.

Re-Emergence of Trade, Money Economy and Towns

We are familiar with the controversies over the Crusades, but generally not with how the Crusades stimulated the economic transformation of Europe.  In the one or two centuries before the Millennium, Western European populations began to grow again, due to improvements in agricultural productivity, especially the iron plowshare and moldboard, the horse collar that allowed horses rather than oxen to pull the plows, and the three-field rotation system.  With more food available, towns and even small cities could form and grow as trade centers with increasing specialization of labor.  However, the basically subsistence-oriented feudal system had made no provision for towns and cities—a rich merchant or craftsman had no more status than a peasant farmer; both were members of the Third Estate and could never aspire to the social status of even the poorest knight.  Moreover, the feudal system was based on the manorial subsistence economy that operated without money or enforceable commercial contracts, which are essential to facilitate long-distance trade.

The First Crusade sent thousands of knights and their retainers by sea to the Holy Land through the Italian city-states on the sea (Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Amalfi) that controlled Mediterranean Sea trading routes.  Small cities had managed to survive the Early Middle Ages on the Italian peninsula and were in prime position to take advantage of economic opportunity offered by the Crusaders.  Florentine families were already developing banking services to enable the cloth, linen and woolen trade between northern Italy and Flanders via the trade fairs of Champagne. Venetians were already dominating Mediterranean trade between Western Europe and the Byzantine Empire.  Many Italians and others along the several routes to the Holy Land became wealthy as they provided the goods and services needed by the pilgrim Crusaders.  The First Crusade jump started the nascent economic engine of Western Europe, stimulating revival of coinage (notably the Florentine florin and the Venetian ducat) and use of Roman law (with innovation of contract law, including the legal concept of the corporation owned by shareholders, which was developed from monastic life) and other commercial infrastructure vital for an economic boom that benefitted mainly the new towns and older cities.

Undermining the Feudal System

To quote Professor Bartlett again:

“The rise of urban life, long distance trade, and a money economy were the factors that first challenged and then corroded the rural, subsistence, localized feudal world.  The development of trade and a money economy permitted people living in towns to develop wealth and power to the point that they could ultimately join in the undoing of feudal fragmentation by assisting a central authority—like the king—in establishing power and weakening the resistance of the fractious nobility.”

“The increasing demand for luxury goods among the feudal nobility damaged their economic power and introduced a cash economy that undermined the manorial system.  Inflation affected everyone.  Grain prices rose faster than wages throughout the late medieval period.  Mutual obligations, personal loyalty, customary regulations, cooperative agriculture all began to be undermined by the introduction of money into the system.”

Thus the rising power of townspeople created a new center of gravity in medieval Europe, in tension with the centralized authority of the Church and the decentralized authorities of local feudal lords, over which kings had little real control.  On the margins of the long-standing feudal system, the king and the townspeople generally found alliance against the feudal lords to be in their mutual interest, and the Church often found itself in the middle.

Dissonance of Church Behavior and the Judeo-Christian Idea

For almost a millennium, the Roman Catholic Church had provided coherence to Western Europe with a common religious worldview guided by one institutional hierarchy with one language of learning and continental communication.  This cultural dominance was abetted by extreme fragmentation of political and ethnic loyalties.  As the growth of trade and towns made movement around the continent easier and safer, ideas and the people who held them could also move more easily from one region to another, giving Western Europe a sense of cultural coherence that it hasn’t enjoyed in more recent centuries, when nation states and ethnic identities have divided Europeans profoundly.  One by-product of this cultural unity was a growing awareness and resentment of the dissonance between the “fallen” behavior of the Church and the great Judeo-Christian idea, as David Brog calls it in his In Defense of Faith: The Judeo-Christian Idea and the Struggle for Humanity – the belief in the sanctity and equality of all humans at the core of both Judaism and Christianity.  As often as the Church stood up for its great idea in the face of cruel expediency, it allowed its officials to cling to hierarchic social privilege and material luxury, to engage in political adventurism, and even to cruelly suppress ideological and political opponents.  All this undermined the Church’s spiritual as well as social authority and invited “heresy.”

Heresies

Let me reflect a moment on the meaning of heresy for the medieval Church.  We moderns find the medieval worldview extremely difficult to understand, the sense that all life is bound up with God, that nothing has meaning except in its relationship to God’s will, which is basically that each of us should strive toward eventual union with God in an eternal life beyond this material world.  The medieval mind regarded the Church’s highest calling as guiding and supporting the individual soul’s journey to God.  Anything or anybody who derailed that journey was committing mortal sin that destroys the soul.  Misleading a great many minds constituted a mortal threat to whole societies of souls.  It was the Church’s solemn responsibility in the material world to prevent such misguiding influences, or heresy, from destroying souls.  The Church could tolerate a good deal of quiet disagreement with the teachings of the Church, but it could not tolerate aggressive spreading of heretical teaching to unsuspecting minds and souls.

It seems that most of the early heresies against Church teachings involved a reaction to the seemingly inexplicable corruption and evil doings of the real world, including within the Church itself.  Surely there could not be one benevolent God at work – there had to be a dualism between the God of love and another god of evil, often posed as a god of the spirit and a god of the here-and-now.  This heresy often devolved into denial of the reality or value of material life in favor of a purely spiritual world.  In effect, God could not have created the material world, much less have manifested as a material person – Jesus.  The practical implications were anarchic denial of social institutions, such as marriage and procreation and even the value of the human person as a material being.  Apart from how this thinking could distract the soul from its journey, the Church had to be deeply concerned about the social disintegration such heresy could cause.  The danger in such concern, however, was that the Church could perceive any threat to its dominant position in society as a threat to social order—generating a reactionary response.  (In later centuries, heresy often took the form of objecting to the Church’s claim to be the sole legitimate intermediary between an individual and his or her God, but more on that later.)

The Mendicant Orders

In contrast to the heretical movements, there arose in the late 1100s and early 1200s religiously orthodox but highly unconventional movements to reinvigorate the life of the Church in service of the Judeo-Christian idea.  These were the “mendicant orders” – the main ones being the Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, Servites and Augustinians – who walked a fine line between challenging the institutional Church and adhering to its teachings.  Inspired by Francis of Assisi and his follower Anthony of Padua, they passed up the comfort of the parish and monastery to take to the streets and rural roads as “friars,” preaching the Gospel and serving the poor.  The label “mendicant” comes from their begging or depending on the charity of ordinary people, in imitation of the life of Jesus and his disciples.  They sought to provide a model of God active in the world, much in contrast to the dualist heresies.  Despite the embarrassment of being upstaged by these ragged, roving preachers to the people, the Church recognized their orthodoxy and wisely blessed and adopted the main mendicant orders as part of the life of the Church, alongside its parishes and monasteries.  Not coincidentally, the friars were particularly welcomed in the emerging towns.

Saint Francis of Assisi

G.K. Chesterton claimed in his biographies of Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas that these two men in particular set European civilization on positive new paths we take for granted today.  Saint Francis of Assisi was the son of a wealthy merchant of the Umbrian hill town Assisi.  Francis was fascinated by the French troubadours, the minstrels who entertained the medieval towns with their epic ballads of unrequited love of knights for the lady of the local lord.  After a humiliating failure to achieve valor and honor in war, Francis experienced a profound conversion to true devotion to Christ.  He was a small, intense, often flamboyant man who turned his life into a religious form of performance art, starting with a dramatic gesture in the public square of Assisi.  He handed his clothes to his wealthy father in front of the local bishop and walked naked into the surrounding hills, singing of his love of God and all God’s creation.  This was a profound repudiation of the existing social order but through a personal demonstration of a different way to live.  Francis was an extreme romantic, a self-described Troubadour of God.  He was an ecstatic yet anchored firmly in reason and the real world.  He attracted companions by his profoundly sincere interest in and acceptance of every person he encountered as he wandered the Umbrian countryside.  Even highwaymen who would normally rob and kill would fall under his spell.  He was an original, unique in every sense.  Some thought Francis was Christ himself, come again, but Francis would hear none of that.

In one of his many grand gestures, perhaps the grandest of all, Francis decided to end the Crusades by simply persuading the Saracen Muslims to become Christians.  So he made his way to Egypt where the Crusaders were laying siege to Damietta.  According to Wikipedia, Francis took advantage of a cease-fire to cross the military lines and enter the encampment of the Saracens, where he was received by none other than the Sultan of Egypt (nephew of the great Saladin).  His conversion effort failed, but his safe return to Italy (and subsequent Saracen tolerance of the Franciscans as custodians of Christian sites in the Holy Land) testified that the Saracens realized they were in the presence of a truly holy man, a true Christian, not a Crusader.

G. K. Chesterton believed that St. Francis revived the Europeans’ emotional connection to their religion and introduced new patterns of thought that underpin humanitarianism and the arts as we know them today (he is considered the first Italian poet, writing in the local Umbrian dialect such verse as the Canticle to the Sun).  In his devotion to God and his imitation of Jesus, Francis embraced humanity and nature as God’s creation, to be revered as part of God, not to be dismissed, transcended or destroyed.

Saint Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas was the son of a prominent Italian family near Naples with blood relation to the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II.  He was a very large and placid man with a profound intellect.  As a youth, Thomas was clearly predisposed to religious life, but he rejected his family’s design that he should become prominent in the local Benedictine abbey.  Despite the family’s excessive effort to prevent him, he joined the new order of mendicant Dominicans and took to the streets and roads to beg and preach for his living.  He was of the generation that followed Francis of Assisi or Dominic Guzman, the founder of the Dominican order.  St. Dominic was a Spaniard who decided that the way to counter the Cathar heresy in southern France was to use reason and disputation to persuade the Cathars to abandon their obstinacy.  The attempt failed, and ultimately the Cathars were wiped out in a “crusade” that ultimately was about northern France dominating southern France.  But Dominic had established an order of friars that educated local populations in the true meaning of Christianity.  Thomas Aquinas took this charge to the next level under the initial tutelage of the Dominican Alfred the Great in Cologne, Germany.  Together they later established themselves at the new University of Paris.  The gentle giant, called by fellow students the Dumb Ox because of his shy silence, turned out to be the greatest intellect of his time and, according to G. K. Chesterton, the greatest philosopher of all time.

St. Alfred was a proto-scientist, a natural philosopher among his many other disciplines.  He observed and described the natural phenomena of the real world in an effort to understand God better by understanding God’s creation.  Alfred’s method was inspired by Aristotle’s effort to comprehensively describe how the natural world works.  Most of Aristotle’s writing, along with most of ancient Greek learning, had been long lost to medieval Western Europe but was regained from Arab and Byzantine sources (many discovered during and after the First Crusade) and a frenzy of translation from Greek and Arabic into Latin in the 1100s.  In contrast to Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, for whom the ethereal world of ideal “forms” was the true reality (while our material here-and-now world is merely an imperfect, even distorted reflection of these ideal forms), Aristotle insisted that the material world was the only reality.  He was a materialist.  Some historians of philosophy contend that Plato and Aristotle, teacher and student, represent the two main opposing arguments of all philosophy, from antiquity to this day.  Their opposition was captured subtly but dramatically in the fresco painting by Raphael, School of Athens (c. 1510), in which the world’s greatest philosophers are depicted together in one scene, at the center of which are Plato, pointing to the heavens, and Aristotle, pointing to the ground.  We moderns continue to be torn between the two ancient Greek thinkers—in simplest terms, between idealism and realism.

At first, despite enormous medieval respect for his rational system, Aristotle was regarded with great suspicion by many intellectual leaders of the Roman Church.  First, Aristotle was a pagan materialist.  Moreover, his ideas and commentary on those ideas by the Arab scholar Averroes caused a flood of new thinking in the cathedral schools (originally established by Charlemagne) and the new universities in Paris and Oxford.  This flood heightened the Church’s concern about heresy.  Plato had been revived and massaged long ago by the Neo-Platonists of the first few centuries of the Christian era, and their interpretations of Plato’s thought had been reconciled to Judeo-Christian thinking by St. Augustine in the 400s.  Through the enormous influence of Augustine, Plato’s emphasis on the spiritual world had held Christianity in thrall for centuries.  So Aristotle’s materialism was a true challenge to Christian thinking; Alfred was “pushing the envelope” just by emulating Aristotle’s rational method of natural philosophy.  At the same time, the Dominicans found Aristotle’s reputation and ideas useful for rational argument against less rational heretical ideas.  Into this scene came Thomas Aquinas.

St. Thomas did for Aristotle what St. Augustine had done for Plato—he reconciled Aristotle’s work and thinking to the orthodox Christian thinking of the day.  Building on Alfred the Great’s attention to the working of the real world as a reflection of God’s mind and on Aristotle’s use of logic to deduce reality from first principles, Thomas constructed a coherent explanation of the Christian worldview that was eminently rational.  It was derived from the “first principles” given by Judeo-Christian scripture and grounded in what Aristotle and Alfred contended were the real facts on the ground.  Thomas’s Summa Theologiae might be regarded as a rigorously reasoned update of Augustine’s reconciliation of the Two Books of nature and scripture (and much more!).  For Thomas, this grand explanation had to be anchored in the reality of the world we live in.  With this insistence on reason and reality, St. Thomas Aquinas set out on the path to modern natural philosophy, now known as “science.”  Chesterton wrote it far more eloquently:

“… Thomas was a very great man who reconciled religion with reason, who expanded it toward experimental science, who insisted that the senses were the windows of the soul and that the reason had a divine right to feed upon facts, and that it was the business of the Faith to digest the strong meat of the toughest and most practical of pagan philosophies.” (pp. 13-14).

Moreover, he used his brilliant mind and powers of disputation to win over the Church to embrace Aristotle and his “science,” just as Thomas had earlier defended the mendicant orders as a boon rather than threat to the advance of orthodox Christianity.  The impact of St. Thomas Aquinas on Christian thinking going forward was and continues to be enormous.

Renaissance of Emotion and Reason in Christianity

In essence, St. Francis of Assisi revived the emotional life of Christianity, and St. Thomas Aquinas revived the rational life of Christianity.  To quote Chesterton again, “These saints were, in the most exact sense of the term, Humanists; because they were insisting on the immense importance of the human being in the theological scheme of things” (p. 16).  Together they fomented a true renaissance of Western European civilization.  Ironically, this was not the Renaissance of historians.

Copyright 2012 by Chris Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Chris Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)

An Idiot’s History of Western Europe—“Fallen Institutions” of the Middle Ages

[This is the fourth installment of my mini-history—more to come]

I’ve been searching for years for a book or a course that would guide me through the intellectual history of Western Europe from the time of Charlemagne (A.D. 800) to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment (1600-1800).  How did events and people in this time manage to unseat Christianity from its monopoly of moral authority in medieval Western Europe on questions of what is True and Right and Good (see my January 2011 post on “Science and Religion—Where is the Source of Authority?”).  In my just-previous post (April 2011), I shared my discovery that there was so much about the Medieval Mind, thoroughly imbued with the Christian worldview, that fostered development of the Modern Mind.  Yet the Modern Mind is deeply conflicted about Christianity as the Source of Authority, or even a source of authority, and wants to search for other authorities, any other for some of us.  What happened to cause this reaction, even rejection?  Most of us have taken for granted what popular authors of the past three centuries have glibly told us about religion, especially Christianity, as a reflection of ignorant bias, a cause of war and suffering, and an impediment to science and progress.  Satisfying as this dismissal may be for many, it has the unfortunate burden of being historically incorrect on all three counts of the indictment.  Therefore this glib dismissal itself must be a reflection of some ignorant bias.  Where did this bias come from?

I finally found a comprehensive course that filled the historical gap for me:  “The Development of European Civilization,” taught by Prof. Kenneth R. Bartlett of the University of Toronto as one of The Great Courses of The Teaching Company ( http://www.thegreatcourses.com), published in 2011.  Unless otherwise noted, my main source for the facts and interpretations I offer here and in the next four posts is this course by Professor Bartlett.  I am embarrassed to admit that millions of university students have taken a similar “European Civ” course as freshmen or sophomores to fulfill their core course requirements.  I did not.  I went to Cornell University, specifically because in the 1960s this was one of the first of the big-name universities to de-emphasize “liberal arts education” in favor of allowing eager students like me to focus almost immediately on a specialty—biological sciences in my case.  As I’ve puzzled over the difficult questions of life beyond my initial profession, I’ve keenly felt this deficit in my basic education and had to do remedial work (such as the reading for this Idiot’s History).  Often I’ve learned from my son’s coursework within a more traditional core curriculum (I’ll offer an example in a moment).

Fallen Institutions

I take the title of this post from a conversation with a friend, Dr. Robb Davis, an accomplished scientist, practitioner of international development and a deeply thoughtful Christian.  His conversation point is captured in this passage of an article Robb wrote for The Ellul Forum (p. 7 of the Fall 2010 issue):

“Included in this broader understanding [from the writings of St. Paul] is the idea that institutions and systems which God has created for good act as dehumanizing forces; essentially trading their true role in maintaining the conditions for human flourishing for other ends, including their own survival.  In this way they reveal their ‘fallenness.’” (© International Jacques Ellul Society. www.ellul.org).

This point would have been understood easily by the Medieval Mind, because of the immense influence of St. Augustine’s writings, in particular on the concept of Original Sin.  Human institutions may be divinely conceived and constructed from divine inspiration, but they are nonetheless built, staffed and run by humans, who suffer the burden of Original Sin, which arose with the Fall of Adam and Eve from God’s Grace in the Garden of Eden.

This concept has enormous explanatory power for Christians trying to make sense of the ways of the world.  It generates a testable prediction, that a human being is not born good, only to be corrupted by interaction with family and society (which is a popular view in the Modern Mind), rather a child is born with free will, which has a tendency to self-absorbed evil in the absence of self-discipline that comes from education by adults who have mastered this self-discipline.  The Medieval Mind took this notion for granted, attributing this self-discipline to Christian education benefiting from God’s Grace through the work of the Holy Spirit.  It was no big stretch to extend the concept of “fallenness” from human individuals to human institutions—divinely inspired, perhaps specifically mandated by God, but subject to the entropy of human “fallenness,” constantly corroding all it touches and so requiring regular correction, just as a house needs an occasional new coat of paint and other forms of routine maintenance to keep it from rotting away and falling down.  The falling of institutions, even divinely-inspired ones, has been seen over and over as “trading their true role … for other ends, including their own survival.”  And so it must have been that dominance for a thousand years took their toll on Christianity and the Christian-soaked institutions of the Middle Ages.

The Three Estates of the Feudal System

Let’s look at those Christian-soaked institutions of Western Europe in the Middle Ages, in light of the course by Prof. Bartlett (who shows no pro- or anti-Christian bias in his presentation of history, as far as I can tell).  He starts with the disintegration of the Roman imperial system of laws, administration, roads and ports, and coinage to facilitate trade, in the fearsome chaos of successive barbarian invasions from the north and the east. All that was left was a diminished population with a shrinking economy shattered into hundreds of isolated pieces and a memory of the imperial system of which only the still-relatively-new state religion, the Roman version of Christianity, remained just barely standing.  As I explained in an earlier (March 2011) post, Thomas Cahill, in Mysteries of the Middle Ages (p.39), described the local bishop as often the only Roman official who stayed at his post and was “capable of implementing a body of law and custom that could reestablish social peace and guide the new barbarian ruler (and the mixed population of Romans and barbarians that he now ruled) toward a rational political settlement.” Roman popes and their bishops and priests had to make deals for the Western Church to survive; circumstances required that they be practical and flexible. This was not a time to be overly zealous about fine points of theology.  Romans long had a deeply practical streak, even in their theology, preferring to focus on the literally down-to-earth implications of the Incarnation of God as a human being like themselves.  If God could accommodate human beings through the Incarnation, surely the Roman Church could accommodate the barbarians in all their loathsomeness.  Moreover, the Church had no choice.

From the chaos, this awkward accommodation of Christian officials and barbarian overlords built the “feudal system” with its three “estates”—the landed nobility, the Church, and everyone else who did the hard work.  The feudal system had its origins partly in the Roman custom of patronage, in which prominent men drew prestige from literally being followed through the streets by less prominent men who sought prestige by association and a share of the favors the Man could provide to loyal followers.  Even more, the feudal system drew from the similar Germanic custom of comitatus, in which a heroic warrior was surrounded by other proven warriors who gained honor and favor through their valorous military service to their hero-chief as well as first pick of the spoils of victory in battle.  Prof. Bartlett offers the colorful analogy of these Germanic warrior alliances to modern biker gangs—in the absence of any effective state apparatus, they could do pretty much what they wanted, with no constraints other than their own code of ethics—public power in private hands.  However, to enjoy the spoils of their victory, these strong men (kings) and their henchmen (nobles) had to prepare for defense against the next wave of barbarians as well as the miscreants of their own tribe.  And they had to eat!  Without money to pay for the military service of the nobles, the king had to offer them control of food-producing land and the people who would work it for them.  So, with the collaboration of the Church (presumed to be essential for gaining the cooperation of the Third Estate), these biker gangs settled on the land and developed the feudal system and the “manorial economy.”

Knights and Monks

The stirrup, one of the many prosaic inventions of the Middle Ages, made it possible to fight on horseback, protected by heavy armor and able to use high-impact lances and other heavy weapons.  The warriors became knights, the fearsome medieval equivalent of modern military tanks.  The care and feeding of a knight and his horse “takes a village” and enough good land to feed and clothe both the knight’s family and the villagers and their priest, who all benefited from the knight’s protection from outsiders—this was the “manor” over which the knight ruled as he chose to rule, constrained only by the web of customary practice and mutual obligation that governed nobility and villagers alike with the blessing and help of the Christian authorities.   The king provided the land and people to support the knight and in return had the right to call upon his knights to gather in defense of the kingdom or to attack other kingdoms.  Otherwise, the knight was the lord of his own manor, with little support or interference from other knights.  The manor was a self-contained and self-supported economic and social unit.  All administration, economy and social life itself was supremely local and, in the best of times, mostly isolated from the rest of the world.  Trade among these local units was hampered not only by marauding bandits and lack of roads and bridges but also by lack of money—literally no currency with widely recognized value.

Some of these local units were abbeys—spiritual communities of monks (monasteries) or nuns (convents), most organized according to the Rule of St. Benedict.  Their number exploded in the period 550-700.  This seems strange in the chaos of the time, when we might assume that mere survival would trump the luxury of supporting whole communities of Christian contemplatives removed from the world.  The monastic movement was effectively autonomous of Church control but benefited from Church endorsement and grants of land by a king or other noble.  The phenomenal growth no doubt reflects the pervasive esteem for Christianity as well as the need to protect its traditions and learning from the barbarian onslaught and for many, of course, the opportunity to take refuge from the danger and hard work experienced by most people of the time.  An abbey was the fortified great house of a manor, supported in the same way as for a knight, by a village and land worked by the villagers for the benefit of the abbey’s residents.  Often the monks and nuns themselves worked very hard, too, along with the villagers, to support the manorial economy and protect life and property from marauders.  Moreover, the abbeys were responsible for much of the remarkable inventiveness of the Middle Ages and the preservation and advancement of learning and arts.

While recognizing that Wikipedia accounts need to be treated with caution, I find they often provide succinct descriptions as good or better than I can offer (for now, at least).  I will occasionally quote from Wikipedia to summarize what I have found in other sources that confirm the facts offered, such as this one (just as Wikipedia welcomes correction and amplification, so do I—please comment):

“The Benedictine monasteries went on to make considerable contributions not only to the monastic and the spiritual life of the West, but also to economics, education, and government, so that the years from 550 to 1150 may be called the ‘Benedictine centuries’.” 

Meritocracy Corroding into Aristocracy

This feudal system lasted so long because it met the needs of people bereft of the protection and administration of a larger government.  It was most developed in France, England and Germany but similar forms were widespread throughout the former Roman Empire.  It worked especially well when it was still a meritocracy, with the bravest, most capable warriors becoming knights and the most spiritually committed Christians becoming priests, monks and nuns, thereby justifying the privileges and honor yielded to them by the Third Estate in exchange for their protection and assistance in the temporal and spiritual worlds.

Over the centuries, however, meritocracy corroded into aristocracy.  A knight’s investment in the years of training and equipment needed to prepare his successor was most efficiently focused on the knight’s own sons.  And to maintain the minimal size necessary for a manor to support a knight and his family and horse and so on, the “law of primogeniture” arose to forbid the knight from dividing his manor among his sons.  From these practical constraints arose the cultural assumption that succession was the eldest son’s birthright, sometimes in spite of rather than because of the son’s competence.  Surplus sons were destined to join the Church, as the only respectable alternative profession for the sons of nobility.  While members of the Third Estate could become priests and advance up the ranks of the Church, most commonly the privileged status of the nobility adhered to the sons who joined the Church, so that privileged positions of status within the Church, especially the bishops and abbots, were mostly given to those born of noble families.  Given that the boys typically did not freely choose to join the Church, they were not dependably pious or even of good moral character.  For both knights and leaders of the Church, moral leadership and self-sacrifice for the common good, even administrative competence, too often melted away, leaving only the seeking and protection of privilege and luxury.  These baked-in contradictions of the feudal system would play out over many, many centuries, even well beyond the Middle Ages.

The principal contradiction was between the ideal of the Christian life (loving and serving God and each other as God’s children, each an invaluable part of the mystical body of Christ) and the Roman and barbarian reality (violence met with violence and might making the right to enforce a rigid hierarchy of status, rights and privileges).  Being the state religion at the time of imperial disintegration and the only widespread and remotely effective guardian of moral and civic order afterward, the Roman Catholic Church had both the opportunity and the self-imposed duty to concern itself with the temporal as well as spiritual lives of its parishioners, Roman citizens and barbarians alike.  In retrospect, it is easy for us to foresee the danger in religious leaders (promoters of the ideal life) taking responsibility for the messy job of creating and maintaining civic order.  But only some of the religious could exercise the monastic option to attempt withdrawal from the real world.  The rest, from the Pope to the parish priests, had to find a way to work with and even support the emerging social and political order, no matter how far it was from the Christian ideal.  The danger, of course, is guilt by association.  If you undertake to fix it, you often end up owning it.  After centuries, the Church was thoroughly entangled with the feudal system.

Beowulf and the Unpleasant Compromise

The tension and danger in the process of Christianizing the barbarians is illustrated by the earliest of Old English literature, the epic poem Beowulf, the date and author unknown but believed to be as early as the 700s (but maybe as late as 1000).  My son, Jeremy Dunford, wrote a “final paper” for Loyola Marymount University’s History 100, in which he interpreted Beowulf as emblematic of the tension in the Middle Ages that finally produced an unpleasant compromise.  In addition to the history course on European civilization, Jeremy drew from his Jesuit high school freshman English course that focused on the study of Beowulf.  At Jeremy’s age, I would not have been caught dead reading Beowulf, nor did he choose to read it!  But he clearly gained a much deeper understanding of both European history and Christianity from this forced exposure, as well as benefiting in some way from reading one of the Great Books of our civilization.  I learned so much from his essay that I thought it worthwhile to share it (posted just before this piece).

The relevant point in Jeremy’s essay is that the poet employs all the classic elements of a Norse epic to introduce his pagan audience to the Christian worldview and way of life.   Beowulf is the proud hero that the Germanic newcomers to England could admire and understand, a man who flaunts his raw power and unmatched wit, whose valor and accomplishments were admired above all else.  Having established his credibility as a true hero in pagan eyes, Beowulf gradually morphs into a Christian in what he says and does, embodying Christian virtues.  In death, Beowulf becomes a Christ-like figure, saving his people from the clutches of evil and fulfilling his duty to promote the common good of humanity.  Jeremy’s interpretation is that the poet engaged in a very modern type of message packaging—telling the Christian story to pagan Germanics in the language of their own culture and in terms they could understand and embrace.  However, the flash of insight (from either Jeremy or his teachers or both) is that “While millions of pagans were converted when Christianity mixed with paganism, the influence was not a one-way street.”  The Church’s accommodation with the barbarians created the feudal system, but it proved to be a Faustian bargain.

Quoting from Professor Bartlett:

“Thus, by the end of the 11^th century, Western Europe was fragmented into small units, ruled by a professional warrior class, who obeyed no laws but their own principles of feudal practice and custom, known as chivalry.  Although the Church knew that it could not change these professional killing machines into men of peace, it also knew that their power and aggression could be turned against the enemies of Christendom.  It was not an accident, then, that the Crusades erupted at just the time when these principles of chivalry were beginning.”

I’ll let Jeremy finish this post:

“Certain pagan values such as militancy and material prosperity were adopted into a new sense of piety that proved to be the driving spirit of the Crusades.  Nothing in Jesus’ or Augustine’s Christianity would have allowed for such brutal massacre or such worldly desires, yet in 1099, as described by William of Tyre, the crusaders butchered the inhabitants of Jerusalem, showing no mercy and leaving no survivors. Concealed by the veil of “God’s will,” crusaders’ passion overtook their Biblical foundations. After killing all and sundry, the pillagers selfishly claimed any possessions that they wanted, completely discarding the principles of moderation and sacrifice. These were not starving peasants, but wealthy lords who were claiming more for themselves. Without the promise of land, they probably would never have left to fight in the first place. Their greed vanquished any remaining ounce of true Christian character.  Moreover, immediately after killing and raping the people of Jerusalem and stealing all of their possessions, the crusaders knelt to pray. Clearly they were under the impression that they were working for God, assuming that, because they had been sent by Pope Urban, this was the will of the Church. Since the Church defined what “Christianity” meant at any given time, Christianity itself was now a religion of self-interested rich men looking to get richer by any means possible while hiding under the mask of doing God’s will. This could not be farther towards the opposite end of the spectrum from those to whom Christianity originally appealed – the poor, oppressed, and downtrodden.”

“Historians agree that the ‘Dark Ages’ for European culture ended around the turn of the millennium. The darkest days for Christianity, on the other hand, lasted much longer. By the time of the Crusades, the Christianity of Jesus and Augustine had been so greatly influenced by pagan materialism that greed replaced piety, acquisitive militancy replaced mercy, and corrupt misconceptions of God’s will replaced the testament of the disciples.  Francis of Assisi recognized this overwhelming materialism at the forefront of Christianity and dedicated his life toward reestablishing the spirit of sacrifice on which it was founded, marking a decisive turning point in the Church’s history and setting it on course to restore its former virtuous glory.”

Not that the medieval Church approved of all that the Christian knights did or that it took no effective action to moderate their behavior, but the society that gave rise to the Crusades was formed in large part by the Roman Catholic Church.  The Crusades were only one of the new developments in the High Middle Ages that ultimately undermined the moral authority of the Church as well as the feudal system.  In my next post, I will delve into specifics of what happened and how figures like St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas sparked a true renaissance that might have saved Christianity from its later fate.

Copyright 2012 by Chris Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Chris Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)

An Idiot’s History of Western Europe—Beowulf and the Christian Compromise

[In support of my next post in the Idiot’s History series, I am posting the full text of a paper my son, Jeremy Dunford, wrote for a history course at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles.]

Stemming from the roots of Judaism, Christianity developed in the wake of Jesus of Nazareth. Throughout the first millennium following his death, the new religion cyclically spread and morphed to fit the time period and people who became enveloped by the ever-growing phenomenon. As pagan traditions were integrated into monotheistic Christianity, the core foundations of the religion managed to remain steadfast until end of the Dark Ages. Around this time, grand transformations in how the Europeans interpreted and lived out the teachings of the Church began to occur. By comparing the historical texts that connect Christ to the Christendom of the High Middle Ages, we can clearly discern that the shifts that occurred were fundamentally in line with classic Christian tradition to a point, but by the time of the Crusades had completely obliterated the philosophies of Christ and Augustine. Pagan ideals that emphasized physical wealth eventually overcame the righteous nature that had defined followers of Christ since the time of the Pax Romana. The centrality of Christian piety remained a constant across the earlier centuries, but between the Dark Ages and High Middle Ages its definition drastically changed from one of selfless sacrifice to one of zealous materialism.

The strong Jewish ancestry of Christianity is shown in the Old Testament. In Exodus, the Hebrews name themselves as God’s “chosen people,” the first recipients of His law and constituents in the Covenant. Essentially, the Covenant says that God will bless His people so long as they obey His law, made explicit in the Ten Commandments. The concept of sin, introduced in Genesis and later expanded upon by Saint Augustine, is defined as the usage of man’s free will to violate God’s laws and breach the Covenant. Original Sin, the origin of evil illustrated in Genesis by the eating of an apple from the tree of knowledge, can be simply described as man acting selfishly to fulfill his own desires rather than living life in the name of God. As the first to present the concept of ethics, the Hebrews symbolized the shift from this-worldliness to the supernatural that would be developed in the Christianity that followed.

Thousands of years after prophets first began to preach of a Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth expounded Old Testament philosophies and taught what would become the apex of Christian doctrine. According to the Gospel of Mark, the greatest commandment of all is to, “…love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  Central to the early Christian worldview were the notions of selflessness and living as a vassal for God’s grace. The Beatitudes, outlined by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount, were meant to curb the worldly, egocentric vices of pride, revenge, and greed. Jesus’ teachings especially appealed to the poor, meek, downtrodden, and persecuted who felt left out by Rome’s grand successes.

As Lactantius describes, Greed is the source of evil and is the principal cause for the degeneration of society. Thus, as Jesus commanded, generosity towards the needy is the basis for achieving social justice and bringing order to the earth. Concern for the common good was of primary moral importance, and it was on this point that Saint Augustine based his most famous work, City of God. Augustine’s central premise is that when human beings turn away from God to follow their own appetites (in effect succumbing to original sin), they fall into evil and cannot possibly find true happiness (happiness here is equated to an afterlife in heaven). He says that, “When a man lives ‘according to man’ and not ‘according to God’ he is like the devil,” and that while human nature inherently involves the capacity for sin, we can overcome our natural immoral desires to work for God and attain eternal salvation. As opposed to the City of Man, there exists in the City of God, “a piety which worships the true God…and all of the citizens are personally immortal with an immortality…which even human beings can come to share.”  Happiness, he says, cannot come from man alone but only through God in the afterlife; to sin is to live according to oneself and thus lose God. Pagans claimed that happiness was achievable in this world, but Augustine argued that the only perfect world is heaven with God. He asserts that it is in swallowing our pride (the foundation on which sin is built) and complying with the laws of God that we might be saved by Jesus Christ and gain entrance to this City of God.

Once Constantine reunited the Empire, made Christianity legal in 313, and officially established Christian dogma with the Nicene Creed in 325, the spirit of Christendom spread like wildfire. A vivid example of how Christendom was achieved in the Dark Ages is the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf. When Rome abandoned the Britons, they were a newly Christian society that was now vulnerable to powerful pagan Germanic tribes. As Bede describes, Christian monks slowly assimilated the newcomers to their religion through slow integration. While Beowulf includes certain values such as pride, material wealth, and desire for fame and glory, its message has a clear Christian tone of selfless piety. The writer’s expression of the story is plainly steeped in a deeply pagan tradition (empathizing with his readers), yet he focuses on distinctly Christian ethics, signaling his attempt to quicken the expansion of Christianity to the Viking commoners.

In essence, the opening passage depicting an all-powerful, omnipresent force to whom all creation owes its existence, perfectly in line with the Christian image of God that was developed in the Roman Empire, serves to offer insight into the audience for whom this poem was intended – the common people who could be hearing the Creation story for the first time and whom the writer hoped would come to understand Christianity, if not fully convert. God’s counter-character, Grendel, is directly juxtaposed to the, “Almighty Judge of good deeds and bad, the Lord God, Head of Heavens and High King of the World” (180). Grendel evidently defies the pagan ideals of prideful boasts and cunning, strategic battle while also challenging Augustine’s Christian view that man should act solely for the purpose of serving God rather than fulfilling his own worldly appetites. The beast is simply living to literally fulfill his own appetites by eating men, thus embodying the exact animalistic evil identified by Augustine in City of God. The author of the poem thus drives home the Christian message of the immorality of living for one’s selfish desires, using exaggerated images of the savage slaughter of the Danes that would be considered evil by pagans and Christians alike.

On the other hand, the Great Hero demonstrates virtues that were idealized by the Anglo-Saxons. We find aspects of both pagan and Christian traditions portrayed in the writer’s characterization of Beowulf as proud to the point of arrogance, yet at the same time willing to trust in God and submit to a greater destiny that will ultimately decide his fate. For example, when introducing himself to Hrothgar, Beowulf says that, “every elder and experienced councilman among my people supported my resolve to come here to you…because all knew of my awesome strength” (415). The Germanics needed a proud hero to relate to, a man who flaunts his raw power and unmatched wit. They came from a lawless barbarian culture in which, as Tacitus described, valor and accomplishments were admired above all else. For the Anglo-Saxons to support Beowulf as their champion, the author needed to show his experience, credibility, and merit. Because prideful boasts, while not at all a Christian idea, were valued highly by the pagans, they were a necessary inclusion to the story for the audience to accept the concept of piety which the poet would later introduce.

In what some might call a conceited display of pure egotism, Beowulf renounces his weaponry so as to even the playing field when the time comes to grapple with the monster. In essence, he is welcoming the challenge from evil, firmly asserting his confidence not only in his own abilities, but in his God as well. With this act, Beowulf expresses his utmost assurance that he is fighting for the right cause, and that, no matter what unfavorable circumstances might confront him, he cannot lose with God on his side. He proclaims that, “Whichever one death fells must deem it a just judgment by God…Fate goes ever as fate must” (440-455), and later, “May the Divine Lord in His wisdom grant the glory of victory to whichever He sees fit” (685). In one sense, fate is primarily a pagan attribute, as Christians believe that man was given the power to voluntarily disobey God’s will (deemed “sin”). Beowulf feels that all of his strength is God-given and every battle he wins is ultimately the result of God’s judgment. To a degree, he sees the outcome of each campaign as somewhat pre-determined, consequently deeming the specific details of his own actions insignificant. This might lead us to believe that the Anglo-Saxons followed in the footsteps of the ancient Sumerians (as portrayed in the Epic of Gilgamesh) who viewed fate as the dominating force in the universe and entirely disregarded free will.

Yet, as the poem continues, a distinctively Christian tone emerges and eventually consumes the pagan theory of fate. In living as though he is enmeshed within the greater framework of fate, Beowulf seems to exhibit signs of belief in the Christian idea that there are multiple parts to one Almighty God. He is constantly claiming that, while God’s will always wins in the end, God is working through him to achieve that end. It is almost as if the hero is indicating faith in a sort of “Holy Spirit” force that drives man to carry out the will of God. In most pagan traditions, the gods were directly involved in bringing their decrees to reality, but in Beowulf fate is realized through man. The author thus ties the two together:  it is not fate versus free will, but fate with free will. For Christendom to be achieved, the Anglo-Saxons must understand free will in terms that can be reconciled with their pre-existing beliefs. Beowulf’s expression of both signifies that God works indirectly through man to bring forth an ultimate fate; God cannot paint the image of fate Himself, so He needs man as His brush. After this combination cosmology had been accepted, the English could be fully converted to the ethical morality of pure free will that devout Christians believed to be truth.

In addition, Beowulf’s main goal in life appears to be achieving fame and glory on this earth, undoubtedly pagan objectives. While acknowledging that, physically, “all of us…must make our way to a destination already ordained where the body…sleeps on its deathbed” (1003), he seeks eternal life through legends and tales of his epic accomplishments. Beowulf is showered in gifts honoring his triumphs, which he graciously accepts. These rewards are earthly, and it seems as though Beowulf does not recognize the Christian concept that one’s true recompense comes through everlasting life with God in Heaven. Again, as Bede’s process of slow assimilation suggests, the idea of an afterlife may have been completely unfamiliar to the pagan barbarians. Christian missionaries had to relate to the worldly views of the Anglo Saxons before introducing such a wildly outlandish proposal.

Much later in the poem, Beowulf displays a very Christian selflessness. Upon his deathbed, he announces, “To the everlasting Lord of All, to the King of Glory, I give thanks that I behold this treasure…that I have been allowed to leave my people so well endowed on the day I die” (2794).  At this point, he could potentially be considered a Christ-like figure. In death, both leave their respective people free from the clutches of evil and rejoice in the fact that they have fulfilled their duty by truly contributing to the common good of humanity. The author thus attempts to create a Christ figure for the English since they could not yet read the Bible. It was in writing down a relatable story in their own language (Old English) that they could spread the new ideas amongst themselves without having to hear monks read alien Bible stories in Latin. The result would be exactly what the missionaries had hoped for – Germanic peoples being introduced to Christianity in the language of their own culture and terms they could understand.

For most of the poem, contrasting pagan and Christian concepts appear to balance each other in emphasis. But in his final speech to Wiglaf, Beowulf makes it clear that even more than any personal reward of power, wealth, or fame, he wants to depart from this world knowing that he used all of his God-given talents to help mankind thrive. Most pagan societies would place utmost importance on personal achievement, but Beowulf embraces the unmistakably Christian philosophy of caring for others before oneself. Contrary to pagan beliefs, Beowulf is revealed to have lived as if his own true happiness came from devoting his life to making others happy. Instead of scoffing at this concept, the pagan audience is open to it because it is placed within framework of God’s will. The author has thus accomplished his goal, successfully presenting Christianity through a pagan lens and slowly leading his audience from admiration of pride to ultimate acceptance of Augustine’s Christian piety as heroic. The pagan aspects of the story served as a permeable buffer between the writer’s pagan audience and his own Christianity.

As the Dark Ages progressed into the High Middle Ages, Christianity drastically altered in both practice and principle. While millions of pagans were converted when Christianity mixed with paganism, the influence was not a one-way street. Certain pagan values such as militancy and material prosperity were adopted into a new sense of piety that proved to be the driving spirit of the Crusades.  Nothing in Jesus’ or Augustine’s Christianity would have allowed for such brutal massacre or such worldly desires, yet in 1099, as described by William of Tyre, the crusaders butchered the inhabitants of Jerusalem, showing no mercy and leaving no survivors. Concealed in the veil of “God’s will,” crusaders’ passion overtook their Biblical foundations. After killing all and sundry, the pillagers selfishly claimed any possessions that they wanted, completely discarding the principles of moderation and sacrifice. These were not starving peasants, but wealthy lords who were claiming more for themselves. Without the promise of land, they probably would never have left to fight in the first place. Their greed vanquished any remaining ounce of true Christian character. Moreover, immediately after killing and raping the people of Jerusalem and stealing all of their possessions, the crusaders knelt to pray. Clearly they were under the impression that they were working for God, assuming that, because they had been sent by Pope Urban, this was the will of the Church. Since the Church defined what “Christianity” meant at any given time, Christianity itself was now a religion of self-interested rich men looking to get richer by any means possible while hiding under the mask of doing God’s will. This could not be farther towards the opposite end of the spectrum from those to whom Christianity originally appealed – the poor, oppressed, and downtrodden.

Historians agree that the “Dark Ages” for European culture ended around the turn of the millennium. The darkest days for Christianity, on the other hand, lasted much longer. By the time of the Crusades, the Christianity of Jesus and Augustine had been so greatly influenced by pagan materialism that greed replaced piety, acquisitive militancy replaced mercy, and corrupt misconceptions of God’s will replaced the testament of the disciples. Francis of Assisi recognized this overwhelming materialism at the forefront of Christianity and dedicated his life toward reestablishing the spirit of sacrifice on which it was founded, marking a decisive turning point in the Church’s history and setting it on course to restore its former virtuous glory.

Copyright 2010 by Jeremy Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Jeremy Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)

An Idiot’s History of Western Europe—“Dark Ages” and the Medieval Mind

[This is the third installment of my mini-history—more to come]

In How the Irish Saved Civilization, Cahill tries to tell us what was lost as the barbarian hordes overwhelmed Roman civilization by describing the life, works and thought patterns of Augustine of Hippo, “the last great man of Roman antiquity” (p. 65) and the only theologian of the ancient Western (Latin) Church “worth speaking of” (p. 63).  Augustine reconciled early Christianity with Plato and his Latin interpreters, the Neo-Platonists.  His classical education, brilliant mind and commitment to seeking the Truth led Augustine to create a Christian theology based on Reason applied to inspired scripture and existing knowledge of the real world.  Though much of the classical literature that formed Augustine’s mind was effectively lost to Western Europe, his books and sermons continued to form and guide the Medieval Mind of the Catholic bishops who tended the barely glowing embers of Classical philosophy, Christian morality, and Roman law and order through the Dark Ages.  While the mass of medieval humanity lived in illiterate fear and fantasy, the few educated Church leaders had faith in the power of reason and the possibility of progress—thanks almost entirely to Augustine’s synthesis of Jewish Christianity and Greek philosophy and the enormous influence of his powerful writing and personality. 

Reason and Progress

Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason has richly expanded the perspective on medieval Europe that I’ve gained from Thomas Cahill’s books.  Stark’s subtitle sums his thesis – How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success.  Stark maintains that Christianity, particularly Western or Latin Christianity, has had all along certain features that other religions did not and that provided a fertile seedbed for the development of Western Europe’s world-dominating culture and economy. He comes at his subject from an economic conservative’s viewpoint, but Cahill is clearly a social-justice liberal and finds in the Mysteries of the Middle Ages precursors of Euro-American feminism, science, and art in the medieval cults of Catholic Europe.  Both historians are using their deep knowledge of the Middle Ages to overturn the popular notion that Christianity has always been an indomitable foe of human reason and progress.  In fact, Western Christianity became the Authority that arched all authority for so many centuries because it fostered reason and progress.  In doing so, however, it also sowed the seeds of its own destruction as the ultimate authority, but that comes later. 

Here are key distinctive features cited by Stark, with which Cahill would likely concur:

Celebration of Reason – “as the means to gain greater insight into divine intentions” (p. 7), because God is a rational being.  Augustine “held that reason is indispensable to faith.” (p. 7).

Belief in Progress – the “application of reason can yield an increasingly accurate understanding of God’s will” (p. 9).  Because its creator is a rational being, the universe “necessarily has a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting increased human comprehension” (p. 12).

Focus on the Individual – given the doctrine of free will and emphasis on personal salvation, the Christian focus is on the individual self, with “the opportunity to choose, and the responsibility to choose well” (p. 25).

Theoretical Equality of Rights – all selves are equal in the eyes of God.  “If we are unique beings, all to be judged by our actions freely taken, what is the duty of Christians with regard to one another’s freedom to act?” (p. 26).  Christian theology undermines the legitimacy of slavery and other differentiation of fundamental rights of different types of human being. 

Better Off than in Roman Times

Stark explicitly asserts that the average medieval person was better off in almost all ways than his or her counterpart in the glory days of the Roman Empire, and Cahill obliquely agrees.  However, neither Stark nor Cahill is asking us to believe that medieval life was comfortable or civilized—to the contrary, life was distressingly nasty, brutish, and short (to paraphrase Thomas Hobbes).  Nor do they expect us to believe that medieval leaders, despite the overarching Authority of the Church, lived up to the ideals of Christian morality.  In fact, the leaders, even of the Church, very often were irrational, hostile to the dignity of the individual person, and determined to thwart progress—to put it mildly!  But there was a difference from the post-Modern world we live in—the culture did not cynically accept the real and laugh at the ideal.  Humans were not expected to be perfect, in fact quite the opposite, so it was no great surprise when evil stalked the land.  But humans were expected to aspire toward the holy ideal, to seek divine grace in that aspiration and to experience the love and mercy of Christ when they fell short.  Forgiveness was ever available, if sincerely sought, but it was never “okay” to be “only human.”   

Because of these distinctive features of Christianity, says Stark, “rapid intellectual and material progress began as soon as Europeans escaped from the stultifying grip of Roman repression and mistaken Greek idealism” (p. 32).  This startling contention seems to hold up as Stark presents detailed evidence that “the so-called Dark Ages saw an extraordinary outburst of innovation in both technology and culture.  Some of this involved original inventions, some of it came from Asia.  But what was most remarkable about the Dark Ages was the way in which the full capacities of new technologies were rapidly recognized and widely adopted, as would be expected of a culture dominated by faith in progress—recall Augustine’s celebrations of ‘exuberant invention.’  Nor was innovation limited to technology; there was remarkable progress in areas of high culture—such as literature, art, and music—as well.  Moreover, new technologies inspired new organizational and administrative forms, culminating in the birth of capitalism within the great monastic estates.  This, in turn, prompted a complete theological reappraisal of the moral implications of commerce—the leading theologians rejected prior doctrinal objections to profits and interest, thereby legitimating the primary elements of capitalism” (p. 37).  

The Medieval Mind

Stark’s assertions of cause (Latin Christianity) and effect (innovation and progress) may be conjecture from coincidence, but the facts seem to support Stark’s and Cahill’s separate theses that the Medieval Mind, dominated though it was by ancient Roman Catholic Christianity, was already moving rapidly in the direction of the Modern Mind, even before the year 1200.  In fact, medieval theology offered carefully reasoned justifications for this movement. 

Thomas Cahill claims that Augustine of Hippo “was among the last of classically educated men” (How the Irish Saved Civilization, p. 42), but in his Confessions published in 401, Augustine also became “the first human being to say ‘I’—and to mean what we mean today” (p. 39).  His self-revelation was totally unprecedented in classical literature; “with Augustine human consciousness takes a quantum leap forward—and becomes self-consciousness … as modern as … a character in Camus or Beckett.  He is the father not only of autobiography but of the modern novel.  He is also a distinguished forebear of the modern science of psychology” (p. 41).  Heady claims!  You’ll have to read Cahill for yourself to understand and accept his logic, but no one disputes the profound legacy and impact of St. Augustine on Western Christianity.  Given his foreshadowing of the Modern Mind at work, along with his influence on medieval and early modern Western Christianity, it should not be a great surprise that the Medieval Christian Mind bore the seeds that developed into the Modern Mind. 

Eight centuries later, at the University of Paris, there was finally a man whose intellectual stature and huge influence on Latin Christianity, and therefore the future of Western Europe, would match and even surpass that of St. Augustine—he was Thomas Aquinas.

Copyright 2011 by Chris Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Chris Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)

An Idiot’s History of Western Europe—From Rome’s Fall to Charlemagne

As the Roman Empire established itself, the mostly Germanic hunter-gatherer tribes beyond the Rhine and Danube rivers, the northern and eastern borders of the Empire, were settling into an agricultural way of life.  The inevitable population explosion that follows the agricultural revolution drove the Germanic tribes into desperate movement to the south.  For centuries, their immigration was slowed by far-superior Roman forces to a flow that was absorbed by the existing societies of the Empire, much like current immigration across the southern border of the United States.  However, during the time of Constantine and the following century, the pressure of barbarian numbers and aggression increased dramatically even as the Roman ability to contain them declined.  The decline was due to much more than the diversion of military forces to the East (with the Emperor’s move to the Greek city, Byzantium, later called Constantinople and the center of Eastern Christianity).  Thomas Cahill describes with convincing insight, in How the Irish Saved Civilization, the probable causes of the centuries-long disintegration of Roman administration and society from within.  I commend that book to you, but I won’t go further here.

The breaking point came in the terrible winter of 406-407 when the Rhine froze solid enough to allow thousands of Germanic men, women and children to storm across the ice to overwhelm Roman forces.  They were followed by hundreds of thousands.  In 410, for the first time in eight centuries of security, Rome was sacked – by Alaric and his Visigoths – leaving the citizens of Rome with nothing but their lives. 

 Byzantium and the Eastern Empire were spared this tragedy for many more centuries by fortunate geography that enabled more effective protection against invasion.  Meanwhile, successive waves of barbarian tribes swept across Western Europe, breaking the Western Roman Empire into innumerable barbarian kingdoms with little more in common than a memory of Roman administration – and the ongoing Christian Church.  Thomas Cahill, in Mysteries of the Middle Ages (p.39), described the local bishop as often the only Roman official who stayed at his post and was “capable of implementing a body of law and custom that could reestablish social peace and guide the new barbarian ruler (and the mixed population of Romans and barbarians that he now ruled) toward a rational political settlement.” 

The fundamental differences between the Greek and Roman cultures showed in their interpretations of Christianity.  The Greeks preferred abstract, even mystical contemplation of the meaning of the Trinitarian God, who is determined to raise humanity up from our hopelessly corrupted existence.  The Romans were impatient with the Greeks’ other-worldly distinctions; they preferred to focus on the literally down-to-earth implications of the Incarnation of God as a human being like themselves.  These Greco-Roman differences were amplified by the times they were thrust into.  Roman Popes and their bishops and priests had to make deals for the Western Church to survive; circumstances required that they be practical and flexible.  This was not a time to be overly zealous about fine points of theology.  However, coming to terms with barbarian chiefdoms was given theological cover by the Roman Christian understanding that, as Thomas Cahill put it (Mysteries, p.49), the face of God is “compassionate beyond all imagining, willing to live, suffer, and die for each of us, so compassionate that it excludes no one, not even the most stupid, the most craven, the most outrageous, the most corrupt.” “No one is negligible.”  Even these reeking, ignorant barbarians were children of God, just like the Romans.  They became part of the Church’s pastoral responsibility.

This is no small point.  It embarrassed the whole class structure of Roman society that, in the divine perspective, women and men, slaves and freemen, barbarians and cultural sophisticates are equally bestowed with the inherent dignity of the human person.  All of us are in the same divine boat, no matter the human proclivity to treat each other as though only some of us are the elect of God.  This theological understanding was reinforced by practical accommodation to the chaotic time.  The epitome of this practical humanitarianism was Gregory the Great, who was Pope just before and after 600.  He welcomed the barbarians to Christianity.  Going against the Roman impulse to regiment everything, Gregory directed his bishops and priests in the far reaches of the crumbling Western Empire to avoid trying to entirely remake the newcomers.  Instead, Gregory urged his Church to be open to allowing the new Christians the comfort of their traditional customs and celebrations, as long as they were not antithetical to Christianity.  “Just baptize them a bit” (in Cahill’s words—Mysteries, p.59). The result was a Universal Church composed of richly diverse local manifestations. 

This accommodation with the barbarian kingdoms established Western Christian clergy as having a unifying realm of authority separate from and, in theory, above the political authority of the many temporal rulers – a higher, universal and more stable spiritual authority to which temporal authority must ultimately yield.  This distinction of church and state authority sowed the seeds of challenge to absolute authority, starting with the Emperor in Constantinople as the temporal authority (and later a challenge to papal claim to absolute authority in the spiritual realm, but that would come later). 

By Gregory’s time, the barbarian chaos had destroyed the books and centers of learning, along with the luxury of formal education.  Literacy was reduced to the confines of monasteries and bishops’ palaces, which reinforced the prestige and authority of the Church.  But even there science and philosophy had been mostly lost; many priests were illiterate themselves and had to commit scriptural passages and liturgical rites to memory, as in traditional oral cultures.  Only the Eastern Empire and isolated Ireland were able to preserve the written works of Classical wisdom.  Irish monks reproduced and gradually reintroduced these works to Western Europe (the saving of civilization, as Cahill called it), before Ireland itself was finally overwhelmed by the predatory Vikings from the north.

In 800, Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope, signifying a brief political consolidation of the barbarian kingdoms of the Western Empire and also marking a mini-renaissance of culture in Western Europe as the Irish monks did their work of re-evangelization.  However, from the death in 430 of Augustine (as barbarians stormed the gates of his city, Hippo, in North Africa) to the chartering in 1200 of the University of Paris, Western Europe seems to have disappeared from the history of human intellect.  The Medieval Mind, a Roman Catholic Christian mind, developed and dominated during these nearly eight centuries.  Our Modern Mind can hardly comprehend the Medieval Mind, in great part thanks to the anti-Catholic Protestant historians, notably Edward S. Gibbon, who have defined these centuries for us as the Dark Ages, in which nothing good could possibly have happened.  However, as Thomas Cahill points out (Mysteries, p. 189-91), it is simply illogical to pretend that the Modern Mind that emerged through the process of Renaissance, Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment could have arisen from an eight-century vacuum.

Next installment of An Idiot’s History of Western Europe: “Dark Ages” and the Medieval Mind.  Look for it around April 1st.

Copyright 2011 by Chris Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Chris Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)

An Idiot’s History of Western Europe—From Jesus to Constantine

The Christian story is fundamentally about the God of the Jews manifesting as a human being named Jesus, a Son of Man and the Son of God, and the teachings and miracles of Jesus and then his death and resurrection and ascension into heaven, with a promise to return at the end of time itself. This story took place in a peripheral province of the Roman Empire. At that time the Emperor’s authority to rule was supported by the notion of the Emperor as a god or that he was chosen or at least favored by the Latin gods, from whom the Emperor drew his moral authority. The Christians would not acknowledge the reality, much less authority of these Latin gods. Christianity spread rapidly through the Roman Empire and became a challenge to the Emperor’s authority, so Christians were intermittently and often viciously persecuted. Nonetheless, the Christian numbers continued to grow rapidly through conversion, even at the highest levels of Roman society itself.

It is perhaps ironic, though certainly logical, that the early Christian Church organized itself along the familiar, hierarchical lines of Rome’s political structure and its most successful institution, the army. The Bishop of Rome (later called the Pope) has moral authority as the Vicar of Christ on earth, the latest in a continuous line of Apostolic Succession going back to Jesus and his appointment of Peter as the Rock upon which the Church would be built. Peter was the first Bishop of Rome. Bishops draw their authority from their ordination by the Pope, and priests from their ordination by the Bishops, each priest representing Christ’s presence in the local community of Christians.

In 313, the Emperor Constantine, the son of a Christian woman, issued the Edict of Milan announcing toleration of Christianity in the empire. More important, Constantine himself became a Christian (at least in name), making it suddenly fashionable for upwardly mobile Romans to become Christian as well. While Constantine recognized the separate authority of the Bishop of Rome and supported the Church’s independent hierarchical structure, he effectively established Christianity as the state religion. The fateful implications soon became clear. In 316, Constantine himself acted as judge in the Church’s dispute with Donatist heretics in North Africa and then led an army against the heretics, the first instance of Christian against Christian persecution. The Church had temporal as well as spiritual power, drawing its moral authority through the Apostolic Succession from Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Constantine called the First Council of Nicaea (in what is now Turkey) in 325. This was hardly the only but perhaps the most successful attempt to standardize Christian belief (the Nicaean Creed continues to be the foundational statement of belief for most Christians). A crazy quilt of variation in Christian belief had developed over the previous three centuries in the far corners and shadows of the empire, but as long as Christianity was more or less underground, the priority of the Church Fathers was survival of the faith rather than the finer points of theology and belief. Once legitimized throughout the empire and enjoying benefits of the Mediterranean-wide Roman communication network, the Church leaders, including Constantine, turned their attention to forging “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.” Naturally, they sought the same level of uniformity and discipline that the political empire aspired to achieve – standardization and regimentation were hallmarks of the Roman formula for successful institution-building. The task at Nicaea was to decide what was acceptable variation of belief and what was dangerously misleading to uninformed minds, and therefore beyond the pale.

This was the era in which the canon of scriptures – the Christian Bible – was determined. There were many “gospels” and “books” with checkered authenticity circulating as accounts of the life and sayings of Jesus Christ and the Apostles and others who had direct knowledge of the Son of God. Some were deemed more authentic than others, having been based on eyewitness accounts only one or two generations removed. The ones written later tended also to be more fanciful or mystical. The Church Fathers had the task of sorting out what was useful to propagation of the faith and what was harmful to harmony and discipline among an empire-full of diverse Christians. In particular, a controversy arose between the mainstream of leaders and the Gnostics, the Knowing Ones, who claimed elite access to secret knowledge passed down by Jesus to a select few – the rest of the followers presumed to be unable or unworthy to comprehend such esoteric teachings. Elaine Pagels, in The Gnostic Gospels, has done more than anyone to reintroduce to the modern reading public the Gnostic scriptures unearthed in Egypt in the early 1950s. She astutely observed that the elitist message of the Gnostic Gospels was antithetical to the forging of an institutional Church that could appeal to, guide and serve the needs of the general Christian community. This, she hypothesized, is why these “apocryphal” texts were excluded from the Christian Canon and later banned from circulation and destroyed (except for some copies buried in earthen ware by Gnostics in Egypt).

Following his establishment of Christianity as the state religion of the Empire, Constantine moved his residence and retinue to Byzantium, a Greek city on the shore of the Bosporus. Thereafter, Byzantium became the imperial capital, later renamed Constantinople until 1453 when it finally fell to the Turks and became Istanbul. As Thomas Cahill puts it in his Mysteries of the Middle Ages, the Emperor left the old capital to the Pope and his brother bishops, taking a good portion of the army with him. This left a power vacuum in Rome and the Italian peninsula that the Pope was more or less forced to fill.

The Romans had conquered and absorbed into Roman culture and administration huge numbers of “barbarians,” most notably the Gauls and Britons, in what is now France, Spain and England. The empire also dominated other “civilizations” around the Mediterranean Sea, including the Greeks, who continued confident of their cultural superiority to the pretentious Romans and their barbarian allies to the north and west. With the Emperor’s residence in Constantinople and the Pope enthroned in Rome, there emerged two empires, Western and Eastern. Both were Christian, but one was predominantly Latin in culture and the historic locus of religious or spiritual authority, the other was distinctly Greek and the center of political power. Thus was created a geographical and cultural distance between the seat of political power and the seat of religious authority. The implications of this divide would be profound.

Next installment of An Idiot’s History of Western Europe: From Rome’s Fall to Charlemagne.  Look for it around March 1st.

Copyright 2011 by Chris Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Chris Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)

Science and Religion – Where is the Source of Authority?

In previous posts, I offered this hypothesis: Personal and social factors influenced Charles’s attitude toward God and religion at least as much as his observations of nature and Man and his theory of evolution by natural selection. 

And more generally about the “social factors” influencing Charles’s thinking: There are other forces at work in driving the Science-Religion Debate besides science and religion.

At this point in the development of my book about Charles and Emma Darwin on the question of God (working title: Walking Fish), I want to do a series of posts on social, political and intellectual history of Western Europe to identify and describe these “other forces at work.”  I aim to make this a short but deep dive into the evolution of Western European thinking about God and Nature.  For those schooled in this academic discipline, I hope you will be entertained by my gross generalizations, and I ask your forbearance and correction (Comment, please!).  For other readers less steeped in intellectual history and philosophy, I hope to make the topic interesting in itself but also show how essential this ground work is for the project when I return to the early and mid-19^th century and Charles and Emma themselves.

Here is the overriding question:

Who Gets to Say What is True and Right and Good?

Who, where or what is the source of Authority?  The term authority has so many meanings and connotations, evoking all sorts of emotional response.  Here I don’t mean authority in the sense of who has the Power, the control over others in the social structure or in the marketplace or on the frontier with other societies – that is the authority that derives from possessing greater strength or weaponry.  If you maintain that Might Makes Right, you are often right in specific situations and for periods of time.  However, to endure, this political authority must be legitimized by a higher authority, a source of knowledge about what is True from which flow ideas about what is Right Conduct that leads to what this authority asserts to be Good.  This is the Moral Authority which ultimately has to underpin any lasting political authority.

Let me explain with a couple of examples.

Consider the coach of an athletic team, like my son’s baseball team.  This man is in charge.  My son and I fear displeasing him, because he has the power to decide whether or not my kid gets to play a particular position, or at all, in the next game.  But to remain coach for the whole season, and especially year after year, this man has to demonstrate to the great majority of kids and parents certain qualities of character and knowledge of the game and ability to motivate kids.  We give this man permission to have the power he has because he earns at least minimal respect for his knowledge of what is True about the game, for his Right Conduct with the kids and on the field, and his ability to lead the team to what we collectively agree is Good (fair play, winning games, skills development and having good, clean fun).  His political authority depends, in the long run, on his moral authority.  Note: this moral authority is collectively defined and supported by all involved – without defining from scratch what is true and right and good.  Our notion of what is “moral” is culturally defined and passed (with modification) from one generation to the next.

Now consider the Constitution of the United States of America.  The American citizenry give permission to the federal, state and local governments to have the power they have because the moral authority of the Constitution legitimizes this government structure.  If you doubt this, consider the passionate conflicts that are resolved by U.S Supreme Court decisions simply by reference to what is “constitutional.”  There are winners and losers in these Supreme Court decisions, and the losers often vow to fight on for their cause.  Nonetheless, the losers respect the power of the Supreme Court decision, and the necessity to fight on within the bounds defined by the Constitution-mandated government.  Why?  Because of the citizenry’s collective respect for the moral authority of the Constitution, which derives from the ideals of the 18^th Century Enlightenment, particularly as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers.  Even in the 21^st Century, there is collective agreement among the citizens of the United States that ideals of the Enlightenment, such as the right of the individual person to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, define what is True and Right and Good in governing the United States of America.  

God or Me or Some Other Person 

We have to go further back in history to find the source of moral authority for the Enlightenment ideals.  In simplest, starkest terms, the answer to “Who gets to say what is True and Right and Good?” is either God or Me or Some Other Person.  Only a few who choose “Me” as their answer are audaciously self-confident; the vast majority is simply intellectually lazy.  They don’t really care about sources; they simply “know” what is true and right and good – enough said.  But a truly thoughtful person has to admit that her or his development of moral beliefs is based on more than personal experience. 

Think about it—how often do you accept something as true or right simply because it comes from a source you trust and admire, to whom you look up to?  Most of the time, right?  You are “taking their word for it.”  There is no shame in this.  It is how we humans efficiently gain knowledge without having to experience everything ourselves or do all our own original thinking. We depend on our sources having done the hard work of unearthing and examining facts (including experience) and making sense of them through logical analysis leading to rational conclusions.  Who are these sources?  They are parents, friends, teachers, coaches, authors, scientists, religious leaders, politicians (sic), journalists, news anchors, op-ed writers, books, movies, etc.  More implicitly, you trust and admire your source because you believe this person has looked at reality through the same lens or worldview that you would look through, if only you had the necessary skills, experience or data, and time.  Your source has saved you the trouble of working hard (even taking risks) and thinking deeply for yourself.  You can also have “anti”-sources—if information comes from them, it must not be true or right.  It works both ways, does it not?

We all have been strongly influenced by the moral beliefs of other people, often from the writings of long-dead other people. So, where did these “other people” get their moral beliefs? 

The intellectual history of Western Europe traces the source of moral authority to the God of Christianity. If this is self-evident to you, you can skip the rest of this series of blog posts.  But for those who do not accept this assertion at face value, the burden of proof is on me!  For starters, it is irrelevant whether or not you believe in this particular god.  This is not about your worldview or mine.  It is about the worldview in which Charles and Emma Darwin grew to intellectual maturity and to which today’s scientists are the intellectual heirs.  It is a long, man-made road from the original Christian story to the intellectual life of 19^th-century England. 

Bear with me in the next few posts!  This is important.  I promise to be as brief as possible.

Copyright 2011 by Chris Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Chris Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)