April 21, 2022
I’ve been reading The Bright Ages, a book that seeks to demolish the still common idea that the Middle Ages were "dark.â€
One of the things that struck me was the consensus among clergy and laymen and women on what was called "The Peace of God.†Meetings were called during which people of all classes as well as the departed saints and martyrs were assumed to attend. The idea was that in times of confusion and conflict, an attempt to understand God’s plan for the world should be attempted. The gap between the temporal and the supernatural was to be filled.
"People believed generally in divine intervention as a real force in their world,†and the determination was "to make this world as much like the next as possible.â€
It struck me that the Church’s loss of belief in God’s sovereignty over temporal matters and the failure of belief in the interface of Heaven and Earth has been catastrophic. The erosion of the idea of the sovereignty of God has been evidenced by the separation of the supernatural from the world’s affairs. "…religion became something internal; all else, all actions were politics.â€
Matters became even more exacerbated by the separation of disciplines in universities, as Cardinal Henry Newman pointed out in his "Idea of a University.†The idea of Christian theology as a separate discipline and the establishment of seminaries as opposed to the Christian universities once characteristic of the Middle Ages (think University of Paris) and of America until relatively recently (think Harvard, Yale and Princeton) has meant the establishment of a narrow Christian subculture heavily influenced by and competing more and more unsuccessfully with other disciplines such as science.
As theology become a discipline that excised the affairs of the world, politics took its place, with political ideologies taking the place of theology.
In turn, the loss of the idea of God’s absolute sovereignty except within an individual’s heart led to strong emphasis on personal pietism; on the emergence of the idea of an infallible "inner light.†That idea in turn became secularized and has found its extreme form exhibited in the trans movement and in such ideologies as CRT and other critical theories.
Still thinking. I recommend the book.
Tim adds:
Very astute observations Fay! I think you have found the truth here.
The Middle Ages get a bum rap. The Renaissance people turned against them hard because they wanted to promote neo-classicism, and saw the classical period as so much better than the era they were coming out of. The Enlightenment saw the Middle Ages as corrupt and decadent, enemies of reason. The Reformation hated them because they were triumphantly Catholic.
So, with all those enemies, and those enemies gaining the upper hand in terms of propaganda via the printing press, the Middle Ages came to be seen as barbarism, violence, ignorance, and utterly worthless.
But they weren't. The University was born then. All manner of innovations were invented - eyeglasses, telescopes, the compass, sails capable of moving ships into the wind, fireplace chimneys (before the Middle Ages fires were open on the floor and a hole was in the roof to let the smoke out), and a host of other things. Politically it was a time of ferment, too, with concepts like the Magna Carta.
The Medieval period suffered from enormous problems early on which ended the classical world. There were multiple invasions, and many were ongoing (like the Vikings, or the Mongols or Islam). Supply chains broke down. Also, there was a volcanic eruption in the 536 led to a dust cloud blotting out the sun for well over a year - a year of total darkness in Ireland and partial darkness many other places. (Ireland's civilization collapsed completely). Temperatures plummeted. Crops failed around Europe. It must have seemed like doomsday.
So Europe was trying to come out of that, and recover from the multiple invasions, and fight off Islamic aggression as well.
They did remarkably well despite all that. That was because the Church kept people's minds centered on the important things.
Even the trial of Galileo is misunderstood, as is the roll of the Inquisition. Galileo was tried not because he was a seeker after truth in an ignorant, superstitious world but because he was a jackass. He wrote his "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" about Copernicanism (which the current Pope was kindly disposed towards) and he had his character Simplicio - the fool - who mirrored exactly the Pope's position on Copernicanism. The Pope was both his boss (he worked for the Church) and his sovereign (he was a citizen of the Papal states) and anywhere else he would have lost his head. He received a light house arrest. Bear in mind he was repeatedly warned to teach Copernicanism as a theory, not as settled science. Like Michael Mann he insisted on saying the debate was over when ti was not (his system did not eliminate epicycles any more than did the old Ptolemaic system.)
As for the Inquisition, it was mostly an investigative body and often actually helped accused by taking over when they were about to be executed or lynched, then quietly releasing them. Thomas Madden of St. Louis University wrote a book on the subject.
But all of that was spun to the benefit of the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, and now to the benefit of the Progressive revolution.
Fay I think your point here really makes a strong case. The embrace of Reason and Science over Faith has led to a situation where religion no longer matters in the world to people. And the glittering world we have created here on Earth leads many to reject eternal truths because they are enthralled by the wealth we hold now. People reject the eternal for the temporary, the Creator for the Creature, because they can see, touch, taste, smell and hear the fruits of our material wealth. They think that is enough, but it isn't and it leads to terrible discontent. All the riots we saw in the last few years are a testament to the unquenchable thirst for something more than a lot of toys.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
10:28 AM
| Comments (3)
| Add Comment
Post contains 1037 words, total size 7 kb.
Posted by: Dana Mathewson at April 22, 2022 10:25 PM (GIKgf)
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at April 23, 2022 10:22 AM (bnhE/)
Posted by: Fake Watches at August 14, 2023 03:03 AM (OAWTR)
37 queries taking 0.9905 seconds, 161 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
