Chapter 5 — The Western Church
While reading the German legends can be a bit gloomy, the history of the Western Church is downright painful.
We recognize academically the difference between religion and spirituality. An essential element of human nature is an apprehension of things beyond the self, things which are higher and more powerful than humanity itself. The degree to which this apprehension may intrude into the consciousness, we call it spirituality. Religion is properly the organized human thinking, teaching and activities which seek to answer the pull of spirituality. The depth and breadth of that pull varies almost infinitely across humanity; so also does the question of what shape and place religion should hold in our existence. While theology is the rational inquiry into religious questions, mythology historically precedes reason and religion both. Religion invariably conforms to the mythology of the people involved, seldom consciously chosen.
German mythology offers no consistent or substantive view of the afterlife, with spiritual and corporeal existence inextricably intertwined. That is, such were their thoughts insofar as they thought much about it at all, since philosophy and theology simply didn’t exist among the tribal Germans. Once they encountered Christian teaching, the Germans overwhelmingly preferred heretical doctrines such as Arianism. In essence, Arius taught that Jesus was not co-eternal with the Father, but a distinctly lesser created being. While not directly linked to the Gnostic heresies, Arianism drew much from the broader philosophical assumptions that also gave us Gnosticism. The various theological controversies of the early church were problem enough, but they reflected something much more subtle and sinister.
Jesus was an ANE man preaching an ANE religion. It’s hard to imagine that anyone could not see the otherworldly focus of His Hebrew Mystical background. Yet before the last of Apostles died around 100 AD, we know that quite a few of those earliest churches were slipping away from that focus into a very worldly outlook. The trend continued until the church leadership in the time of Constantine couldn’t wait to receive his official declaration in favor of whatever organized Christianity had become at that time. Having drifted far from the tribal organization fundamental to anything Hebrew, churches had become increasingly Greek or Roman in their internal structure and rituals. Constantine first made them welcome in his councils; it was all too easy for church leaders to simply become part of the government. With that, the Christian religion became a slave of government policy.
Once Constantine abandoned the western half of his empire, the church hierarchy was the last vestige of Roman government still functioning. Survival as an organization took precedence of everything else, and external trappings become pretty much the entire identity of the Christian religion in the West. In the confusing mess of German tribes jockeying for power and preeminence in and around Rome, the church saved herself by compromising with whomever held political power over the migrating tribes. The Church was the sole source of social continuity for just about everyone, as the Church coaxed Germans into embracing as much of Roman Civilization as they could tolerate.
Thus, in their lust to maintain the same political privileges they held under Constantine, the Church leaders curried the favor of whomever was the secular ruler in the vicinity of Rome. At some point, the ascendant German ruler embraced Christianity as his official religion; the deeper question of much it changed the ruler is seldom examined. In relative terms, this official adoption spread rather quickly. As the Church began to reorganize within the new reality and gained a large degree of feudal power, she became the potential counterweight to any ruler. The final wedding was under Charlemagne who took the title Holy Roman Emperor.
Civilizing the rowdy German warriors was far more than simply manipulating them into a Christian confession. The Church was at pains to tame their wild mythology. Not so much the legends and tales, but the meaning of them. What we now call “chivalry” is almost entirely a construct of Church scholars putting a coat of polish, a Christian religious veneer on German tribal social customs. While there was a great deal more filler with notions of honor and civility, it retained the subtle matriarchal focus. That is, women were portrayed as inherently saintly and men had to constantly rise to their expectations. It’s not hard to see how veneration of Mary became so important, rather displacing, yet merging with, Oester as the Queen Goddess.
The question of religion at the point of a sword simply signals how religion is used. Were there no pretense that it really answered the questions of spiritual apprehension, it would have been consistent with prior human history. The Roman Church today is far nicer than she was at the height of her power in the Middle Ages. Rather early, she seized the question of spirituality, the otherworldly element of Christian faith, and locked it away in a dungeon. The Western Church had so deeply absorbed the Greco-Roman assumptions about reality that nearly every vestige of the Hebrew mystical outlook was forgotten. Over time, the mere mention of wanting to get to know genuine spirituality could get you tortured and killed.
In effect, the Church acted on the assumption that man’s intellect was not fallen. She virtually denied the existence of the spirit. All that God might think to do among humans was completely entrusted to the political organization of the Church hierarchy, with virtually no reference to the Spirit Realm. There was no Kingdom of Heaven in terms of what the phrase implied about a higher realm and spiritual apprehension; the visible church organization was all you were permitted to think of as the Kingdom of God. The phrasing “saving your soul” became the excuse for the most unspeakable terrorism. We note that Roman political philosophy was self-consciously dehumanizing, and the Roman Church absorbed this as an instinct. Where Church officials held genuine political authority, they were as a whole easily more brutal and hateful than most honestly pagan German lords.
Rather early in this process, all of Western Europe faced what they considered a serious threat of Islamic conquest. You can read about the victory of Charles Martel in the Battle of Tours in 732 AD. What isn’t so easily found is discussion of how the rather prolonged contact with Islamic Civilization actually intensified the fundamentally secular view of the West. The Muslims brought a far better organized mathematics, virtually inventing Algebra, along with advancements in medicine a range of other natural sciences. Fewer still will openly admit the Church absorbed a lot of this in their basic worldview. At the same time there was vast underground scholarship examining various Old World philosophy, giving birth to the earliest Western secret societies.
The Church maintained a choke hold on all scholarship, at least in theory. When Church leaders fully realized that these evil Muslim hordes controlled the ancient lands on which Jesus walked, they sensed a sinister threat to their control. If wandering scholars and soldiers could independently go and research some of the existing classical Greek, Roman and even some Hebrew documents and artifacts, they might counter the claims of the Church hierarchy regarding facts, and perhaps weakening her claim to moral authority over the question of what it meant to be Christian. This gave rise to the Crusades and the propaganda claim of freeing the Land of Christ from the filthy pagan Muslims.
Not only were the Crusades a strategic failure in the long run, those scholarly soldiers rediscovered a vast wealth of classical Greek and Roman art and literature. On the one hand, the Church also absorbed the classics in the guise of Thomism, the work of Thomas Aquinas consciously bringing theology under the sway of Aristotle. Meanwhile, the ferment of rediscovery and the weakening hand of the Church’s stranglehold on intellectual pursuit brought us the Renaissance.
We note in passing, again, official doctrine is less the issue than the broader impact of belief. When Dante wrote his Divine Comedy, it really didn’t matter what he intended. There is very real sense in which his allegory became a powerful influence on the Church. The behavior of Church hierarchy betrayed a sense that it was official doctrine. Even as the Reformers renounced the notion of Purgatory, for example, their net behavior and teaching still gives credence to the underlying assumptions about reality that pervades Dante’s work. Official doctrine expressed in the likes of Westminster Confession gives mere lip service to the otherworldly notions and confuses religion and spirituality.
Western feudalism carried the seeds of its own destruction. When rulers both secular and sacred found new ways to spend far more money, they found the old economics of land-based production wouldn’t pay the bills. Traders discovered they could making big profits, but only if they twisted the rulers’ arms. They did so by dangling money in front of them, purchasing charters and such. Little by little, the feudal choke hold gave way, not just on trade and self-government, but in scholarship and the arts. It was the birth of the social middle class and her pretensions to claiming the turf previously reserved for nobility. That genie could not be put back in the bottle, and the Renaissance was followed quickly by the Reformation.
Martin Luther’s 95 Theses were hardly original. The complaints were not new, having been voiced for quite some time by priests serving within the Vatican offices. His posting of them was in a manner and location that seldom elicited public notice. The Church was hardly so uniform as to suffer no debates between passionate and earnest men of good will. The whole thing could have been quietly resolved as had been done countless times before within the existing Church hierarchy. However, Luther’s questions fell into a critical turning point in European politics as a whole. The Church hierarchy felt compelled to crush all dissent, valid or otherwise. Further, his complaints were seized upon as propaganda by scandal mongers looking to make money by blowing it all out of proportion. Luther became a pivotal figure quite by accident. In many respects, Lutheran religion is not radically different from Roman. What matters more is the process that Luther as a political hot potato started.
The Reformation was, if anything, an even more cerebral kind of Christian religion. Ever more did human reason take the throne of faith. Reason became the justification for ripping political power from the hands of the Roman Church. The Reformers had their own political agenda. Without the need for political restraints of the old Church hierarchy, the Reformation leaders were free to indulge in what they considered pure reason for a purer religion. In essence, it was more of the same fundamental departure from the original teachings of Christ and the Apostles, but it was still a religion on the point of a sword. Eventually the question of spiritual apprehension reemerged as a separate issue, opening the question of what place religion should hold in human life.
Thus was born a very secular religion and secular government.
Recommended readings: Encyclopedic articles on Arianism and other Early Church controversies, Constantine and noting particularly how he paganized Christian religion, Mariolatry, Scholasticism, Thomism and Thomas Aquinas, and Charlemagne. Any brief reviews of the historical period in Europe covered by the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation would make a good refresher. If you are going to read any part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, annotated translations are highly recommended. The Westminster Confession of Faith also needs a bit of commentary. One of the best examinations of the very nature of feudalism can be found in Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society.
