Religion and the cities
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University 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.
Pessimism
Continuing Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel
p33 Pessimism... is a philosophy of conduct rather than a theory of the world; it considers the march towards deliverance as narrowly conditioned, on the one hand, by the experimental knowledge that we have acquired from obstacles which oppose themselves to the satisfaction of our imaginations (or, if we like, by the feeling of social determinism), and, on the other, by a profound conviction of our natural weakness. These two aspects of pessimism should never be separated, although, as a rule, scarcely any attention is paid to their close connection.
...
2. The pessimist regards social conditions as forming a system bound together by an iron law which cannot be evaded, so that the system is given, as it were, in one block, and cannot disappear except in a catastrophe which involves the whole. If this theory is admitted, it then becomes absurd to make certain wicked men responsible for the evils from which society suffers; the pessimist is not subject to the sanguinary follies of the optimist, infatuated by the unexpected obstacles that his projects meet with; he does not dream of bringing about the happiness of future generations by slaughtering existing egoists.
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p35 In primitive Christianity we find a fully developed and completely armed pessimism: man is condemned to slavery from his birth -- Satan is the prince of the world -- the Christian... awaits the glorious second coming of Christ...
Sixteenth-century Calvinism presents a spectacle which is perhaps even more instructive; but we must be careful not to confuse it... with contemporary Protestantism; these two doctrines are the antipodes of each other... [how is contemporary Protestantism a single doctrine?] Pessimism, which formed no part of the current of ideas which characterized the Renaissance, [Footnote: "At this epoch commenced the struggle between the Pagan love of life and the Christian hatred of this world and avoidance of it" (Hartmann...)] has never been so strongly affirmed as it was by the Reformers. The dogmas of sin and predestination which correspond to the two first aspects of pessimism, the wretchedness of the human species, and social determinism, were pushed to their most extreme consequences. Deliverance was conceived under a very different form to that which had been given it by primitive Christianity; Protestants organized themselves into a military force wherever possible; they made expeditions into Catholic countries, expelled the priests, introduced the reformed cult, and promulgated laws of proscription against papists. They no longer borrowed from the apocalypses the idea of a great final catastrophe, of which the brothers-in-arms who had for so long defended themselves against the attacks of Satan would only be spectators; the Protestants, nourished on the reading of the Old Testament, wished to imitate the exploits of the conquerors of the Holy Land; they took the offensive, and wished to establish the kingdom of God by force. In each locality they conquered the Calvinists brought about a real catastrophic revolution, which changed everything from top to bottom.
Where's Ivan K. when you need him? So, I'm in heaven with this topic, but where and when is he talking about? Aside from the Puritans in England, I thought most of the violence of this period started with the Catholics attempting to reassert orthodoxy. As in France. Perhaps the Swiss Protestant cantons? The Dutch? I'm going to have to hit Wiki. (Not obvious to me. Though I hadn't really been aware before that most of the European Colonists of Mid-Atlantic America and New England were Calvinist dissenters of one denomination or another including the Dutch, the Huguenots, and the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of the Appalachians -- like Thomas Sutpen.)
But to just stick with the Puritans, I'm eager to see how these pessimistic paragons of the Reformation turn into the bedrock of the Bourgeoisie of his time.
Calvinism was finally conquered by the Renaissance; it was full of theological prejudices derived from medieval traditions, and there came a time when it feared to be thought too far behind the times; it wished to be on the level of modern culture, and it finished by becoming simply a lax Christianity. [Footnote: If socialism comes to grief it will evidently be in the same way, because it will have been alarmed at its own barbarity.] To-day very few people suspect what the reformers of the sixteenth-century meant by "free examination," the Protestants of to-day apply the same method to the Bible that philologists apply to any profane text; Calvin's exegesis has been replaced by the criticisms of the humanists.
Wendell Berry has made a point very similar to this about texts being considered as if they don't matter. I also don't know what he means by "free examination" and a quick Google search doesn't discover anything. Perhaps there's a problem with the translation?
There follows quite a bit about Pascal with a comment about how Calvinist he was.
p39 The people who believe in natural right are not always implacable enemies of civil struggles, and certainly not of tumultuous rioting; that has been sufficiently shown in the course of the Dreyfus question. When the force of the State was in the hands of their adversaries, they acknowledged, naturally enough, that it was being employed to violate justice, and they then proved that one might with a good conscience "step out of the region of legality in order to enter that of justice" (to borrow a phrase of the Bonapartists); when they could not overthrow the government, they tried at least to imitate it... all the revolutionary disturbances of the nineteenth century have ended in reinforcing the power of the State.
Proletarian violence entirely changes the aspect of all the conflicts in which it intervenes, since it disowns the force organized by the middle class, and claims to suppress the State which serves as its central nucleus. Under such conditions, it is no longer possible to argue about the primordial rights of man. That is why our parliamentary socialists, who spring from the middle classes and who know nothing outside the ideology of the State, are so bewildered when they are confronted with working-class violence. They cannot apply to it the commonplaces which generally serve them when they speak about force, and they look with terror on movements which may result in the ruin of the institutions by which they live. If revolutionary syndicalism triumphs, there will be no more brilliant speeches on immanent Justice, and the parliamentary regime, so dear to the intellectuals, will be finished with -- it is the abomination of desolation! We must not be astonished, then, that they speak about violence with so much anger.
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Foucault must have loved Sorel. Though one wonders if Sorel would have changed his views had he lived to see the 1930s-60s.
Sorel has something to say about Joseph de Maistre which sent me to Wiki... shit, someone else I have to read. And Ernest Renan. And Henri Bergson.
p52 ...For a long time people have been struck by the fact that religious convictions are unaffected by criticism, and from this they have concluded that everything which claims to be beyond science must be a religion. It has been observed also that Christianity tends at the present day to be less a system of dogmas than a Christian life, i.e. a moral reform penetrating to the roots of one's being; consequently, a new analogy has been discovered between religion and the revolutionary Socialism which aims at the apprenticeship, preparation, and even reconstruction of the individual, -- a gigantic task. But Bergson has taught us that it is not only religion which occupies the profounder region of our mental life; revolutionary myths have their place there equally with religion...
Renan was very surprised to discover that Socialists are beyond discouragement. "After each abortive experiment they recommence their work: the solution is not yet found, but it will be. The idea that no solution exists never occurs to them, and in this lies their strength." ... by the side of the Utopias there have always been myths capable of urging on the workers to revolt. For a long time these myths were founded on the legends of the Revolution, and they preserved all their value as long as these legends remained unshaken. To-day the confidence of the Socialists is greater than ever since the myth of the general strike dominates all the truly working-class movement. No failure proves anything against Socialism since the latter has become a work of preparation (for revolution)...
p53 The works of my friends have been treated with great contempt by the Socialists who mix in politics, but at the same time with much sympathy by people who do not concern themselves with parliamentary affairs. We cannot be suspected of seeking to carry on a kind of intellectual industry, and we protest every time people profess to confuse us with the intellectuals, who do, as a matter of fact, make the exploitation of thought their profession. The old stagers of democracy cannot understand why people should take so much trouble unless they secretly aim at the leadership of the working classes. However, we could not act in any other way. [I'm puzzled by this, too.]
... we... have invented nothing at all, [in the way of Utopias] and even assert that nothing can be invented; we have limited ourselves to defining the historical bearing of the notion of a general strike. We have tried to show that a new culture might spring from the struggle of the revolutionary trades unions against the employers and the State; our greatest claim to originality consists in our having maintained that the proletariat can emancipate itself without being compelled to seek the guidance of the middle classes which concerns itself professionally with matters of the intellect. We have thus been led to regard as essential in contemporary phenomena what was before regarded as accessory, and what is indeed really educative for a revolutionary proletariat that is serving its apprenticeship in struggle. It would be impossible for us to exercise any direct influence on such a work of formation.
We may play a useful part if we limit ourselves to attacking middle-class thought in such a way as to put the proletariat on its guard against an invasion of ideas and customs from the hostile class...
How is this not arrogant paternalism? And how are these ideas not from the "hostile class"?
Where does this blind faith in the proletariat come from? Why are they assumed to me so morally different from the nobility and the middle classes? And how is this faith in the dictatorship of the proletariat not another Utopian ideal? It reminds me of the Noble Savage. And since Sorel wants to go back to Christianity and Calvinism, isn't he really asserting that the proletariat is somehow immune from the consequences of "The Fall of Man?" By that standard he is even denying them their humanity.
p54 ... I have said that art is an anticipation of the kind of work that ought to be carried on in a highly productive state of society... this observation has been very much misunderstood by some of my critics, who have been under the impression that I wished to propose as the socialist solution -- an aesthetic education of the proletariat under the tutelage of modern artists. This would have been a singular paradox on my part, for the art that we possess to-day is a residue left to us by an aristocratic society, a residue which has, moreover, been corrupted by the middle class... so little did I think of asking the École des Beau-Arts to provide a teaching suitable to the proletariat, that I based the morale of the producers not on an aesthetic education transmitted by the middle class, but on the feelings developed by the struggles of the workers against their masters.
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