Religion and the cities
A History of Europe by Henri PirenneUniversity Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Chapter III
The Growth of the Cities and its Consequences
3. Other Consequences
p237 ...The ability to read and write was indispensable to the merchant, and from the 12th century onwards there was no city of any importance without its school. At first the education provided was still entirely Latin... But this was only an intermediate stage... It was obvious that the bourgeois population could not long continue to employ, in its ordinary business affairs, a tongue that was not the language which it spoke. From the beginning of the 12th century the inevitable development took place: the vulgar tongue began to be employed by the urban scribes, and it is characteristic that this innovation made its first appearance in the country whose municipal life was most highly developed: namely, in Flanders. The first document of this kind in our possession is a charter of the corporation (echevinage) of Douai, dated 1204, which is written in the Picard dialect.... From the end of the 12th century an increasing number of... [qualified lay practitioners] entered into the employ of the princes or kings and applied their skill and experience in the service of the State. [Replacing ecclesiastics.] We may say that the first lay personnel in Europe since the disappearance of the Imperial Roman bureaucracy was furnished by the bourgeoisie.
p239 And even while the cities were thus so effectively secularizing the State, they were influencing its very constitution, and this influence constantly increased in the course of the centuries. Everywhere they began to play a greater and greater part in political life, whether, as in France, they helped the king to oppose the pretensions of the great feudal nobles, or whether, as in England, they united with the barons, in order to wrest the first national liberties from the Crown, or whether, as in Italy and Germany, they constituted themselves independent republics. The absence of the bourgeoisie in the Slav States shows what the West owed to it.
Neither the Church nor civil society could escape its influence. With the renaissance of urban life a period began for the Church in which piety and charity received fresh stimulus, but at the same time formidable problems presented themselves, and it was an age of bloody conflict. Nothing could have been more ardent or more deep-rooted than the religion of the bourgeoisie. Of this we need no other evidence than the associations of all kinds, which in every city devoted themselves to prayer, or to the care of the sick, the poor, the aged, and the widows and orphans. From the end of the 12th century the beguines and begards, who practiced asceticism in secular life, were beginning to spread from city to city. But for the bourgeoisie, the foundation of the new Orders -- the Franciscans (1208) and Dominicans (1215) -- whose spirit inspired the orthodox mysticism of the 13th century, would have been impossible. With these mendicant monks monasticism, for the first time, deserted the country for an urban environment. They lived on the alms of the bourgeoisie; they recruited their ranks from the bourgeoisie; and it was for the sake of the bourgeoisie that they exercised their apostolate, and the success of this was sufficiently proved by the multitude of brothers of the tertiary order, among both the merchants and the artisans, who were associated with the Franciscans.
p240 ...The laymen -- and this was still a novel phenomenon -- collaborated directly in the religious life, claiming their right to play their part in it beside the clergy. This represented a twofold peril to the Church. The first and the most dangerous of these was the threat to orthodoxy. The greater the interest of the bourgeois in the things of religion, the more liable they were to adopt the Manichaean doctrines which, in the 12th century, were spreading into Europe from the East; or to be impressed by the mystical dreams of the "Apostolics" or the "Brother of the Free Spirit." [Jansen and Augustine, again.] It is highly characteristic that the West was not troubled with heresy before the renaissance of the cities. The first and most formidable heresy known to Europe before the advent of Protestantism, that of the Cahars, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism] began to propagate itself in the 11th century, and was therefore precisely contemporaneous with the urban movement. And we must not forget that the sect of the Voudois (Waldenses) was founded by a merchant of Lyons. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldensians] Even after the terrible massacres of the Albigenses the urban populations continued, now in this part of Europe, now in that, to harbor their suspect sects, in which the aspirations of the proletariat tended to orientate mysticism toward confused visions of social transformation, and which dreamed of establishing, on the ruins of the Church and State, in some sort of communistic society, the rule of the just.
All this went entirely over my head when I first read this.
...With the rise of the cities the relations between the secular and the spiritual authority entered upon a new phase. Since the Carolingian epoch the conflicts between the two authorities had been due to the efforts of the kings to subjugate the Church and force it to serve their policy... the question was, which of the two was to be supreme in society. But neither... attempted to deprive its rival of its prerogatives or privileges...In the cities the case was very different... The cities openly attacked the tribunals of the Church, its financial exemptions, and the monopoly which it claimed to exercise in respect to education. From the end of the 12th century there were perpetual conflicts between the communal councils and the chapters and monasteries included within the urban precincts, or even between the councils and the bishop of the diocese. In vain did the Church blast them with her excommunication and interdict: they still persisted in their attitude... However religious and orthodox they might be, they claimed the right to prevent the Church from interfering in the domain of temporal interests. Their spirit was purely secular, and for this reason the urban spirit must be regarded as the prime and remote cause of the Renaissance.
p241 ...Never, until the end of the 17th century, was there such a profound social -- I do not say intellectual -- revolution [in Europe]. Hitherto men had been mainly restricted to the relations of producer and consumer. Now they were increasingly ruled by their political relations. The only circulation in Europe had been that of the Church toward Rome and the religious centers. Now this was accompanied by a lay circulation. Life began to flow toward the coasts, the great rivers, the natural highways. Civilization was purely continental but it was now becoming maritime.
p242 ...The Church continued to dominate the world of ideas, and the soil was still the foundation which supported the noblesse, and even the State. But the roots of the tree which had recently planted itself upon the wall would inevitably... by the mere fact of their growth, dislodge the stones. The cities had no desire to destroy what already existed, but only to make a place for themselves. And gradually this place became larger and larger, so that it presently created a new order of things... From the 7th to the 11th century the movement of history was everywhere analogous. But with the 11th century, what variety! The strength of the bourgeoisie differed from country to country, giving to each a national character of its own, a character previously unknown...
There is a sort of contradiction in the enthusiasm of the cities of the 13th century for the mendicant orders and their capitalistic activities. They were filled with enthusiasm for the ideals of poverty but they sought riches.
That sentence covers a great deal of human history. So Martin Luther was not at all the beginning of the spirit of Protestantism. The great Christian factions were starting to pestering the Church centuries before. At the same time the new commercial class was creating a secular niche for itself while breeding the religious fanaticism that would scare the coming age. Was this an indication of a split within the new urban communities? Or were the same people involved in both trends? I am amazed... and still can't believe this didn't stick with me from when I first read the book.
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