267. Taborites

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Bohemia in a passion

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War

Book Eight
The European Crisis
(1300-1450)

The Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism, and the Hundred Years War

Chapter I
General Characteristics of the Period

2. The Religious Movement

Continued

p413 [Huss burned at the stake at the Council of Constance 1414] ... Hitherto the followers of Huss had confined themselves... to professing the ideas of Wycliffe. A certain number of them remained faithful to these ideas: these were the Utraquists, so called because they communicated "in the two elements." [Both bread and wine. ] But the mass of the people, under the spur of religious passion, suddenly pushed the doctrine to its extreme consequences. Since the Bible proclaimed the Word of God, it must be obeyed in everything not only in such matters as regarded the soul, but also in all that related to the body. Hence the ecclesiastical organization, no less than the civil organization, ought simply to disappear. The Kingdom of God must be established in this world, by reconstituting the whole of humanity in accordance with the Holy Scriptures. Such was the enthusiastic dream of a young people, [the Czechs] a people full of illusions, and history shows no pendant to their behavior save that of the Russian Bolsheviks of 1917. They set to work immediately, under the conviction that the Czech nation was the Chosen of the Lord. The Catholic clergy was dispersed, its property confiscated, and the churches and monasteries were destroyed. A partiarchal [patriarchal?] constitution, on the lines of the Old Testament, was given to the people, and on the site of the castle of Kozihradek... the Holy City of Tabor was built, from which the New Hebrews received their name of Taborites... The revolution was thus in full control of the country... from all parts of the world exalted mystics, members of the associations of Bogards, or the proletariat of the industrial cities, hastened toward this country in which the Kingdom of God had been proclaimed, and their communistic aspirations, or their paradisiacal visions, gave rise to some singular sects amidst the Biblical rigorism of the Taborites. The sect of the Adamites, founded by a Belgian weaver, affords the curious example of the exaltation of their adepts. The disciples of the new Adam, who settled on an island in the river Nezarka, professed to live there, in a state of the completest communism, the life of the Garden of Eden, Like the first of our race, they wore no clothes, and their morals were as primitive as their costume. They soon caused such a scandal that John Ziska, in 1421, had them massacred.

p415 The faith of the Hussites was too ardent to allow them to neglect the duty of propagating it...The adjacent Slav regions, Poland, Moravia and Silesia, where the language of its apostles was readily understood, and where the masses of the people were living wretchedly under the oppression of the nobles, immediately provided it with thousands of adepts. It even made some progress among the poorer inhabitants in the German regions of Austria. And its prestige appeared more dazzling than ever in the light of its triumphs. The victories of John Ziska and Procopius over the German chivalry sent against them by the Pope and Sigismond [King of Germany] inevitably reminded the faithful of the victories of David or of Gideon over the Amalekites.
...

p416 The religious and social radicalism of the Taborites ended by provoking a definitive rupture between them and the Utraquists. Almost  the whole of the nobility had gone over to the side of the Utraquists, and at Lipan, on March 30th, 1434, they won a bloody victory for their cause. Bohemia, exhausted by the war, asked for nothing more than peace... The difficulties were evaded rather than solved. All the efforts, all the enthusiasm, all the bloodshed, profited, in the end, only the Czech nobles, who divided the property of the convents among themselves... They thereby acquired such power that little danger was to be feared henceforth from the discouraged sectators among the people...
...

Of the [reform] work of the Council [of "Basle"] nothing survived. The Church had preserved its monarchical form; after so much effort, so many hopes, everything was as it had been in the beginning.

p417 ...The Papacy remained supreme within the Church. But the Church was no longer what it had been in the Middle Ages. It no longer extended its authority over the temporal as over the spiritual domain. To a certain extent it turned inward upon itself, and... decided to specialize in its religious role. Following the Emperor, the Pope in his turn disappeared from the stage of the world as a universal power. From the middle of the 15th century there were to be no more Antipopes. However, after the deposition of the King of Bohemia, George Podiebrad, by Paul II, the quarrels of the kings would no longer be submitted to Papal arbitration.

I'm still trying to get my mind around the idea that it was the urban bourgeoisie driving the economic transformation of Europe from the 11th?? century and now I have to get used to the idea that, while it was the Third Estate starting to taking control of the political power in the 14th century, it was the petite bourgeoisie (recruiting spear carriers from the proletariat) who were behind the mystical religious tendency that led to centuries of mindless violence and sectarianism. It is always disquieting to see what "the people" get up to when left to their own devices. 

I've always read the European Religious Wars as someone raised a Lutheran. I wonder how this will look as I approach it again not having a dog in the fight. Almaric may have been on to something after all when he (maybe) said "Kill them all and let God sort them out." (And I see that this quote comes from the beginning of the Albigensian Crusade. So the Crusaders, like the loyal Imperial Japanese soldiers of the Pacific War, might even have appreciated the privilege of dying for the cause.)

I think football (what we Americans call soccer) may be a good analogy for the religious wars of all denominations. And I have in mind the way football looks to an American who would prefer the fate of Sisyphus to having to actually sit through an entire soccer match. (Cricket might be even better as the rules appear to have been drafted by mad men.) I don't know the teams or the players and don't care who wins. Everyone but the goalies seem to get a good workout, but why am I watching them run about the field? 

To be fair, I've written extensively about baseball and basketball, which are also pretty inane -- though at least things happen frequently. But, with the possible exception of hockey players, nobody thinks these games are worth dying for. And yet it seems that there is no religion crazy enough for people not to feel that it is worth dying for. Is it because you can't see the thing you worship? Is it that the religious idea is our greatest invention and so we will fight to the death for our particular version of that general idea? 

And here's a spoiler, my Regieren blog will probably be returning this summer as I finally get around to blogging The Magic Mountain itself. (I've referred to it so often my book club has decided to give it a try.) I'm having trouble, reading this, imagining Naphta as the spokesman for the Catholic orthodoxy that is falling apart in the centuries we are now looking at. (Maybe Ivan Karamazov's Grand Inquisitor would be a better option.) It almost seems like the Church is protecting the people from religion. So is it the new level of oppression or just the brush with strange ideas that has opened Pandora's Box? I imagine most of the followers of Huss and Wycliffe and even our old friends the Albigensians were mostly illiterate. So there must be a small number of educated people who are preaching to the masses. Both Wycliffe and Huss would have been educated by the Church through the universities of the time. 

I ran into a couple interesting quotes about Wycliffe in Wiki, "Thomas Bradwardine was the archbishop of Canterbury, and his book On the Cause of God against the Pelagians, a bold recovery of the Pauline-Augustine doctrine of grace, would greatly shape young Wycliffe's views,^[8] as did the Black Death which reached England in the summer of 1348.^[9] From his frequent references to it in later life, it appears to have made a deep and abiding impression upon him. According to Robert Vaughn, the effect was to give Wycliffe "Very gloomy views in regard to the condition and prospects of the human race."^[10]" And then, "Wycliffe completed his arts degree at Merton College as a junior fellow in 1356.^[11] That same year he produced a small treatise, The Last Age of the Church. In the light of the virulence of the plague that had subsided only seven years previously, Wycliffe's studies led him to the opinion that the close of the 14th century would mark the end of the world. While other writers viewed the plague as God's judgment on a sinful people, Wycliffe saw it as an indictment of an unworthy clergy. The mortality rate among the clergy had been particularly high, and those who replaced them were, in his opinion, uneducated or generally disreputable.^[9]"

This would suggest that it was not anything to do with the cities, but people trying to make sense of the Black Death that was driving the religious feeling. Now this makes more sense to me. Though the logic is absurd. 

The Church trades in the life after death, a perfect business model as dissatisfied customers can't really complain. But after the Black Death, people were bargaining for their lives in This World, and this was a competition that science would eventually win, but not for a long time. And even now there are plenty of people happy to believe any well presented magic solution.   

266. John Wycliffe & the Beguines

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Proto-Protestants

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War


Book Eight
The European Crisis
(1300-1450)

The Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism, and the Hundred Years War

Chapter I
General Characteristics of the Period

2. The Religious Movement

p398 ...it is evident that about the middle of the 13th century the Church had attained the maximum of its power. It had ceased to grow, and presently began to decline... Without intention, without being really conscious of what they were doing, men were gradually turning away from the influence of the Church. [Toward their economic concerns.] And the Church was not aware of this desertion... The Defensor Pacis of Marsilius of Padua... expounded ideas of which we may note the first traces in the entourage of Frederick II and Philip the Fair. But only now were they fully developed, and they amazed the world by their boldness. For Marsilius the pretensions of the papacy were merely an intolerable usurpation, as incompatible with the interpretation of Holy Scriptures and the usages of the primitive Church as they were disastrous to the peace of the world. The Pope was merely a bishop like any other... All interference in the temporal domain, all jurisdiction over laymen should be refused him. And expatiating on this question, Marsilius defined the Church: the community of all those who believe in Jesus Christ. Before Wycliffe and before Huss, he declared that the layman belonged to the Church no less than the priest, and he categorically insisted that the "clerks" should be subject to the secular power in all temporal relations. Of course, we must not exaggerate the influence of these declarations... They had, as yet, only the importance of a symptom, and in religious as in social questions, contemporaries do not usually notice the symptoms which precede a crisis.

p399 ...In its profoundest and most spontaneous features the piety of the 14th century was essentially mystical. In its efforts to attain to God the Church no longer sufficed it. Without hesitation, it took flight towards Him; it sought to contemplate Him face to face in the intimacy of consciousness, without the intermediary of the priest. Moreover -- and this is a peculiarly characteristic innovation -- it no longer expressed itself in the tongue of the Church. Nearly all the mystics -- Eckhardt (1327), Tauler (1365), Ruysbroek (1381) -- wrote in the language of the people, thus for the first time giving religious thought a secular form, and so undermining the prestige of the clergy, who had hitherto enjoyed the sole monopoly of religious ideas... Mysticism took alarm at the fact that a conventual [relating or belonging to a convent] rule necessarily imposes constraint upon spiritual liberty. It preferred solitary contemplation, as a voluntary practice, or such congregations as were exempt from perpetual vows, like the beguinages, or the community of the Brothers of the Common Life, founded by Goert Groot (1384). Here piety could still expand beyond the boundaries which the Church had created to confine it. For neither the Beguines nor the Begards nor the Brothers of the Common Life were religious orders. They did not consider that the secular life was incompatible with devotion, or that it was necessary to flee the world in order to enter relations with God...

p401 This spread of mysticism in the lay community was doubly perilous for the church. To begin with, it represented a danger to orthodoxy... The danger was all the greater inasmuch as these naive zealots were without theological training, since most of them came from the ranks of the people or the petite bourgeoisie... During the Black Death of 1347-1348 bands of penitents, urged onward by a sort of ecstatic delirium, went from city to city, exciting the people, like Oriental fakirs, by their singing, their dancing, or their public flagellations. In Italy, France and Germany obscure sects appeared which seemed to have preserved something of the doctrines and the dreams of the Albigenses; they were known as "Spirituals, Apostolics, Friends of God." All these mystics -- and this was the second danger to the Church -- aspired to lead the world back to evangelical poverty. This question of poverty troubled the whole of the 14th century. Among the workers in the manufacturing cities, and the English rebels in 1384, it gave rise to communistic aspirations, which the secular power proceeded to stifle. But even more widespread, and even more difficult to contend with, was the criticism of the religious authorities, beginning with the highest of all, the papacy...
...

p403 Wycliffe was the first to tread the path which was to lead to the Reformation. He had nothing in common with the heretics who had troubled the Church before his time, and whose doctrines had their essential foundation, like that of the Albigenses, in the dualism of flesh and spirit. Wycliffe... did not rebel against Christian dogma nor against Christian morality, but simply against the Church, and even more... against the Papacy. The only head of the Church, he taught, was Christ. His word, recorded in the Bible, sufficed for the salvation of those who had faith... As for the Pope, far from being the representative of Christ on the earth, he was actually the Antichrist. Before the people could practice the true religion it must go back to the Bible, with which it was no longer familiar... He even went so far... as to deny the Transubstantiation of Christ in the Communion. The Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, might vainly accuse him of heresy... but the Parliament was so obviously favorable to Wycliffe that no one dared to persecute him, and in 1384 he died peacefully in his own parish of Lutterworth... It was only after the advent of Henry of Lancaster (Henry IV), that the king, desiring to obtain the support of the Pope for his new dynasty, turned against Wycliffism, or, to use the term employed by the adversaries of the reformers, against the sect of the Lollards. At the beginning of his reign -- 1399 -- he introduced the first law which ever condemned heretics to be burned at the stake in England, and which forbade the translation of the Bible into the national tongue... These violent measures hampered the movement without suppressing it. Until Protestantism made its appearance, the disciples of Wycliffe never ceased to influence the religious thought of England and to prepare it for the great transformation of the 16th century... Transplanted into Bohemia by John Huss, this doctrine... was to shake the very foundations of the Church and of Germany.

p405 ...[At this time] the Papacy... flung itself into the famous crisis which is known as the Great  Schism, and which for forty years was to rend Western Christendom in twain (1373-1417)...
...

255. Europe goes Crusading and all we get is Istanbul

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The final result of the Pope's Crusades

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War

Sorry for the delay. It's been a little crazy around here.

Book Seven
The Hegemony of the Papacy and of France in the Thirteenth Century

Chapter I
The Papacy and the Church


2. The Papal Policy

p298 It is often said that the 13th century was a theocracy. But we must define the term. If by theocracy we mean a state of affairs in which the Church enjoys an incomparable prestige and in which no one can escape from its moral ascendancy, the 13th century was undoubtedly a theocracy. But it was not a theocracy if theocracy consists in confiding to the Church itself the guidance and government of political interests. [Footnote: Theoretically the Popes aimed at theocracy, although they never actually achieved it, but it was acknowledged that they possessed... a rudimentary power of supreme arbitration, which... often excited opposition, though not quite open conflict.]

p299 [About the Fourth Crusade] ...Innocent III... still inspired by Christian idealism, made preparations for a new expedition [after the Third Crusade achieved nothing] with the intention of attacking Egypt... This time... the kings had had their fill of crusading... The princes of the Low Countries, Champagne, and Blois, set out on the Crusade; but the Venetians, the owners of the fleet, who had not been paid in full for their services (these expeditions were becoming more costly, and the nobles were ruined), persuaded the Crusaders to attack Zara, a Christian city which incommoded their trade in the Adriatic. The Pope excommunicated them, but in vain... The Pope was opposed... [to the plan to attack Constantinople] However, his opposition was ignored... On May 16th [1203, after seizing Constantinople] Baldwin, who had the largest number of soldiers, was elected Emperor and crowned by a Papal legate. Innocent III had suddenly reversed his policy. His confidential agent, the Venetian Tomaso Morosini, was created Patriarch of Constantinople. However, it was not really the Church that profited by this expedition, but mainly Venice, who founded a magnificent colonial empire in the ancient Byzantine provinces.

p301 ...in history nothing is improvised, and here once more we can see how untrue it is that little causes lead to great results. Here the events were on a small scale, and so were their results. The Westerners could enter Constantinople by assault, but they could not keep it... In 1261 Michael Palaeologus, with the help of the Genoese, who were jealous of the Venetians, recaptured Constantinople and restored the Empire. Of the union of the Greek and Roman Churches not a trace was left... The Empire was weaker than it had been [since it was unable to reclaim the lost islands from Venice], less capable of resisting the Turks. This was the practical result of the Crusade!

p303 ...Europe had no need of Syria and Jerusalem. She took them in a fit of enthusiasm and had not the strength to retain them. Their retention would have involved a permanent crusade, and the transformation of all Europe into a military order. This was impossible. Moreover, the agricultural civilization which had made the levy en masse possible was gradually disappearing, so that each successive Crusade was recruited with greater difficulty. The urban populations, and the rural populations who maintained them, could no longer be uprooted. The knights were ruining themselves, and they had to be paid... In the Christian sense of the word, in the sense understood and intended by the Popes, the Crusade had failed, and with it, the pontifical policy. It was shattered against the realities of a Europe whose conditions of political and social life had evolved while the papacy had remained faithful to its ideals... Taking it all in all, the universal policy had been as unsuccessful in the spiritual sphere, with the Popes, as with the Emperors in the temporal sphere.

And yet, the resulting rise of the cities and of the bourgeoisie also lead in time to the global spread of the Roman Church (and the Protestant faiths) in the baggage of colonialism and empire.

History really is just "Good luck. Bad luck. Who knows?" writ large.

254. Dogma and heresy

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Rise and rot of Papal power

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War

Book Seven
The Hegemony of the Papacy and of France in the Thirteenth Century

Chapter I
The Papacy and the Church

1. The Situation of the Papacy in the 13th Century

p291 ...Neither the humiliation of Henry IV at Canossa, nor that of Frederick Barbarossa at Venice, nor that of Otto IV at Bouvines, was the humiliation of the civil power before priestly arrogance. In reality, the conflict was not a conflict between State and Church: it was an intestine struggle within the Church itself. What the Emperors wanted was to compel the Popes to recognize them as governing the universal Church... Their pretensions thus imperiled, in every country, that temporal independence of which, by the strangest of confusions, they had been regarded as the defenders. The cause of the Pope was the cause of the nation, and with the liberty of the Church was bound the liberty of the European States; to such an extent that the victory of Philip Augustus at Bouvines was the triumph of both causes.

p292 ...the collapse of Otto IV did not mean the end of the Empire... Yet we may say that from the beginning of the 13th century the historic role of the Empire was finished. It ceased to exist as a universal power, as a European authority... they [the later Emperors] were actually merely the sovereigns, or to speak more exactly, the suzerains, of the medley of principalities and municipal republics constituted by the Germany of the late Middle Ages and the modern epoch, and which from the 14th century onwards was known as the "Holy Roman Empire of the German nations."

After the fall of the Empire only one universal power was left in Europe: that of the Pope...The whole government of the Church depended on the Pope... All the bishops now swore fealty to the Pope; no religious order could be founded without his authorization... The canon law, whose most ancient monument, the Decree of Gratianus, was proclaimed in Rome in 1150, was rapidly enlarged under those great jurists, Innocent III and Innocent IV. By the end of the 13th century it was complete... [Discussion of the various taxes throughout Europe that funded the Pope] It was these taxes that constituted the treasury of the Holy See, and enabled it to play the universal role which was allotted to it: to subsidize the Crusades, to maintain the missions, and to add to its spiritual influence the purely worldly influence of gold... On the other hand, it must be noted that this financial power, which was nourished and maintained by the Catholic hierarchy in every part of Europe, was made possible only by the economic progress due to the revival of trade... when the circulation of money was an accomplished fact, when it was replacing, more and more completely, the system of revenues in kind, the fiscal system of the pontiff was free to develop within the extreme limits of the pontifical authority... they [pontifical taxes] are the consequence of the economic transformation which was at the same time beginning to render possible a regular system of taxation in the various States. And it is interesting to see how the Pope took advantage... of the capitalist organization which was beginning to evolve in the great Italian communes. The men whom he entrusted with the collection and transmission of his revenues were merchants, the bankers of Siena, and afterwards those of Florence. The Popes, even earlier than the lay sovereigns, were in intimate relations with the financiers, and the fact that the latter had to collect their revenues in all parts of Europe, convert them by exchange into Italian or international money, and place them at the Pope's disposal, without the necessity of transporting them, at the cost of great expense and danger, across mountains, contributed in no small degree to the origin of the first banking operations and the first letters of credit, the most remote ancestors of our bills of exchange... Like ecclesiastical law, theology was essentially an achievement of the 13th century. The scholastic philosophy of the previous centuries finds its climax in the Summa of St Thomas (1274), in which Christian morality and the Christian dogmas are expounded in accordance with the Aristotelian method. 

p294 ...men no longer sought to attain salvation through mysticism, through immediate contact with God. Everywhere the Church interposed... What men were now seeking to achieve was the government of their souls by the Church, itself governed by the Vicar of Jesus Christ. And these souls were accepted in the bodies which they animated; which is to say, that society was accepted; heroism was not required of it, nor were men expected to desert the world. They had only to obey the Church, and allow it to lead them to salvation. Every human being, every profession was subject to the Church, and therefore to the Roman pontiff... All those who had received baptism belonged to the Church, and had to bow to its teachings, under penalty of penitence, or excommunication, or, in case of need, of taking part in a Crusade. Here was a majestic unity, a complete doctrine, which imposed itself upon a world of believers, all of whom accepted it...

p296 At the moment when the Church... had arrived at this summit of power... a new adversary rose up against it: heresy. Since the Arian heresy, which the Goths had brought from the East in the 4th century, the Latin Catholic world, for many centuries, had unanimously professed the same faith, and acknowledged the same dogmas, presenting a notable contrast... to the religious disputes which, down to the 10th century, had never ceased to trouble the Greek Church... In the West... there was no philosophical tradition, no learning outside the ranks of the clergy; there was no contacts with civilizations professing different religions, no social conditions liable to direct men's minds toward dangerous innovations. How could faith have been disputed, in a society living in isolation... and in which the Church, the only literate body in the midst of universal ignorance, knew no other literature than the Latin -- that is, a completely orthodox literature? The 1th century, which saw the rise of the revival of commerce, the development of navigation, and the rise of the first cities, was also to see the first symptoms of restlessness appear in religious life. ...the Manichaean doctrines were trickling in from the East -- into Lombardy, and from Lombardy into France and Rhenish Germany. Few at first, their adepts became more numerous in the course of the 12th century, and... were concentrated more especially in the County of Toulouse and the region of Albi, whence their name of Albigenses. Even more mystical and ascetic than their orthodox contemporaries, they went so far as to reject in the name of the Spirit, the sole principle of life and truth, not only society, but the Church itself, corrupted as it was by wealth and power. In order to attain to Christ, whose only disciples they declared themselves to be, a man must divest himself of the whole terrestrial nature, arriving at a state of perfect purity. Hence their name of Cathars... [the "pure ones"] as greatly dreaded and abhorred in the 12th century as the name of Anabaptists was in the 16th, and from which is derived the word that denotes the heretic in the Germanic languages (Ketzer, Ketter). Like the Anabaptists, moreover, these visionaries menaced both the social and the religious order. They preached both the community of goods and the annihilation of the Church... Between 1208 and 1235 they were hunted down and exterminated in every part of Languedoc... [a Crusade preached by Innocent III] Until the appearance of Wycliffe nearly all the heretical sects -- Apostolics, Brothers of the Free Spirit, Begards, etc. -- the Waldenses alone excepted -- seem to have had some fundamental relation with the Cathar mysticism... The radicalism of their aspirations could never be realized in practice, and everywhere it excited the hostility of the social authorities. It was among the proletariat of the cities that they recruited most of their adherents; and this explains both the naivety of their communistic dreams and -- except for certain moments of crisis -- their somewhat restricted diffusion. Save in a few of the great industrial cities, the proletarian workers constituted only a very small minority of the bourgeoisie. The great majority of the bourgeois consisted of small employers, master craftsmen, etc.; in short, that middle class which is as hostile to capitalism as it is to communism.

p297 ...from the end of the 12th century the Church employed every means of persecuting and opposing heresy. It tolerated the Jews because they were outside the Church; but it could not tolerate heretics... If they refused to adjure their doctrines it cut them off from its communion; then, having passed its capital sentence on the soul, it delivered them to the secular power, which undertook to destroy the body... Before the 12th century we find... in the upper ranks of the clergy, the expression of doubts as to the legitimacy of inflicting the sentence of death on heretics. But no such doubts recurred after Innocent III had ascended the Papal throne... Orthodoxy, having become a body of doctrine which was imposed on all men and on all their activities, could no longer tolerate dissidence, and every individual opinion, every deviation from the norm, became a crime. The Order of the Dominicans, founded in 1216, devoted itself especially to the examination and persecution of heretics. Side by side with the ancient episcopal Inquisition there now appeared the pontifical Inquisition created by Gregory IX in 1233, a kind of universal police whose function it was to watch over the safety of dogma. ...anyone who placed himself outside the Church was regarded as a criminal. Did not the kings hold their power from God, and were they not the protectors of the Church? 

248. Cluniac reform of the Church

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The Church in crisis

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War

Book Four
The War of Investitures and the Crusades

Chapter I
The Church

A lot here about the fall of the Papacy as it became the plaything of Italian noble families. But in other ways the Church was doing well,

p167 ...The influence of the abbeys was increased by the fact that many of the rural churches belonged to them, or were dependent upon them; and the monks officiated in them. The contemporary ideal of sanctity was the monastic ideal; the renunciation of worldly joys in order to save one's soul; the withdrawal from social activities, and even from all other virtues than those of renunciation, humility, and chastity. And it was to this ideal that the Church owed its renaissance: not to the bishops, whether they were semi-feudal as in France, or faithful to the Carolingian tradition, as in Germany. Their learning made no impression on this uncultivated public. The people wanted saints and workers of miracles.

p168 The feudal nobles, even more than the people, regarded the bishops as their enemies. They pillaged the monasteries, but they respected them...

We can judge of their feelings by the encouragement which they accorded to asceticism whenever this made itself conspicuous... Cluny... [see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluny and also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluniac_Reforms] founded in 910 by Duke Guillaume d'Auvergne... played a part whose importance might be compared with that of the Jesuits in the 16th century...The point at issue was the orientation of religious thought and feeling. I think we may say that the reform of Cluny monasticism set its stamp upon Western Christianity for centuries to come... For them [the Clunians] the world was the antechamber to Eternity. Everything had to be sacrificed to supra-terrestrial ends. The Salvation of the soul was everything, and it could be effected only by the Church; and the Church, in order to fulfill it's mission, must be absolutely innocent of temporal interests. Here there was no question of the alliance of Church and State, but only of the complete subordination, in the spiritual domain, of man and society to the Church, the intermediary between man and God... The priest belonged to the Church and the Church alone. He could have no seigneur, just as he could have no family. The marriage of priests, tolerated in practice, was an abomination which must disappear... In the domain of piety it [the tendency of Cluny] made for asceticism: in the political domain, for the complete liberty of the Church, and the breaking of ties that bound it to civil society...

p169 ...From the middle of the 10th century the reform spread through the whole of France, and into Italy, Flanders, and Lotharingia -- whence, at the beginning of the 11th century, it overflowed into Germany...

p170 The Church was regarded as a purely superhuman institution. Men lived in an atmosphere of wonder; miracles were matters of everyday experience. Every epidemic gave rise to miracles... The "peace of God" which interrupted the private wars on the occasion of the great annual feasts was one of the results of the extraordinary influence which the Church exerted over men's thoughts and feelings. But the riots which broke out in the 11th century to mark the popular disapproval of married priests were also the direct result of this influence...

p171 The power of the movement has left its traces to this day. It was then that the first great churches were built... The 11th century was an extraordinary period of church-building... 

...A serf could not enter the nobility, but he could enter the Church. He had only to go to school and learn Latin... 

In short, it was in the 10th and 11th centuries that the Church finally conquered the privileged situation that it retained until the end of the ancien regime...

p172 ...the Church, being the necessary medium of salvation, on concerning itself exclusively with the eschatological motives, obtained an ascendancy over men's souls which it had never before enjoyed... Lastly, its prestige brought it enormous wealth, in land, in alms, in privileges.

The whole movement evolved outside Rome and apart form the papacy. But it was bound to reach Rome...

Free Kool-aid

This is probably the best (or worst) time to insert this bit of fiction I've been sitting on.

(Cult representative at table on Market Street with large jug and paper cups.)

"Drink our Kool-aid! Free Kool-aid! Have faith in our Kool-aid!"

(Large, wordy, sign behind table.) 

"We are still hashing out the details of what our God is all about, but be assured our religion will be a doozy. What we can tell you is that if you drink our Kool-aid you won't go to Hell -- Hell is exactly like an endless morning commute to a job you hate, where you are stuck in looping detours while all the people you hate the most pass you (honking and waving) in a nearly empty HOV lane."

241. Church and State

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A new Empire

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War


Book Two
The Carolingian Epoch


Chapter III
The Restoration of the Empire in the West


2. The Empire

p86 ...the power of Charlemagne [Pirenne says Charles gave himself the name "Great," but it is my understanding (from Gibbon?) that it was Church history that added "Great" to the names of individuals who benefited the Church] extended to all countries and all peoples that recognized in the Pope of Rome the Vicar of Christ and the head of the Church. Outside this area was the barbaric world of paganism, the hostile world of Islam, and the old Byzantine Empire: Christian, indeed, but marked by a highly capricious orthodoxy, which was centering itself more and more upon the Patriarch of Constantinople, and ignoring the Pope... Is it surprising that under these circumstances the idea presented itself to the Papacy of profiting by so favorable a conjunction to reconstitute the Roman Empire?  -- but a Roman Empire whose head, crowned by the Pope in the name of God, would owe his power only to the Church, and would exist only to aid the Church in its mission: an Empire which, not being of secular origin, would owe nothing to men, and would not; properly speaking, be a State, but would be conterminous with the community of the faithful, whose temporal organization it would be, directed and inspired by the spiritual authority of the successor of St. Peter... The authority of the Pope and that of the Emperor, while remaining distinct one from the other, would nevertheless be as closely associated as the soul with the flesh in the body. What St. Augustine had desired would be accomplished. The terrestrial State would be but the preparation for the journey to the Celestial City...

p88 ...the Pope alone could dispose of the Imperial crown.
...

...in order that the spiritual and the temporal power should not encroach upon each other... it was necessary that they should be associated, and that they should... keep step in a spirit of intimate and absolute confidence. But charged, as they were, the one with the government of men's souls, and the other with the government of their bodies, who was to indicate the exact limits of their competence?... if the Imperial idea brought the State into the Church, it also brought the Church into the State. And what would happen when the successor of St. Peter felt it incumbent upon him to intervene in the civil government, to correct or guide it?

p89 ...Charles extended his solicitude to the material needs of the clergy... He showered donations upon sees and monasteries... and he made the tithe compulsory throughout the Empire... The so-called Carolingian Renaissance was as the poles removed from the Renaissance properly so-called. There was nothing in common between the two, apart from a renewal of intellectual activity. The true Renaissance, purely secular, steeped itself in the ideas of the classical authors. The Carolingian Renaissance, exclusively ecclesiastical and Christian, regarded the classic authors merely as models of style...

p90 ...The intimate alliance of Church and State was yet another reason why Latin should become the language of the lay administration... without the use of Latin administration by the written word would have been impossible. The Requirements of the State necessitated the use of Latin; it became, and it was destined to remain for centuries, the language of politics and of business, and also the language of science.
...

p92 Charles... abandoned the coining of gold, which had become too rare in the West to keep mints at work. Henceforth only silver monies were minted; and the ratio which he fixed between them continued in use all over Europe until the adoption of the metric system, and is still current in the British Empire... 

Chapter IV
Economic and Social Organization

1. The Disappearance of the Cities and of Commerce

p94 ...In the Roman Empire the cities constituted... the very basis of the State... The country was merely the territory attached to the city; it had no independent existence; it produced only for the city and was ruled by the city. Wherever the Roman State was established it founded cities and set them up as administrative centers... the same word, civitas, was employed to denote the city and the province. And this state of affairs continued until the end of the Byzantine Empire.
...

p95 ...until the middle of the 7th century the Western ports of the Mediterranean were still assiduously frequented by Syrian and Jewish merchants. In the time of Gregory of Tours a Jewish colony of some importance existed at Clermont-Ferrand. The papyrus employed in the Merovingian chancellery was imported from Sicily... But these relations with the Byzantine world came to an end once the preponderance of Islam made it impracticable for Christian traders to risk themselves beyond the waters of Greece and Southern Italy... And just as the Mediterranean was in the power of the Musulmans, so the North Sea was traversed only by the ships of the Scandinavians. [Finally!]... Its [the Carolingian Empire's] only ports -- Quentovic, at the mouth of the Canche, [where Etaples is now, south of Boulogne-sur-Mer] and Duurstede -- still maintained a certain degree of commercial activity until the 9th century, when they were devastated by the Normans, after which they lapsed into complete decadence. From the 8th century onwards Europe existed for three hundred years without any intercourse with the countries overseas.

p96 ...apart from a few local industries, such as the weaving of cloth, which still survived in Flanders, there was an almost total failure of industrial activity, and money no longer circulated.

...Rome seemed lost within the vast circuit which the wall of Aurelian described about what was left of the city. In 848 Pope Leo, to guard against a sudden attack, caused the inhabited portions on the left bank of the Tiber to be enclosed (the "Leonine city" [includes the Vatican]), and turned the tomb of the Emperor Hadrian into a fortress.

p97 In Gaul... the kings... lived all the year round on their domains, passing from one to the other as they emptied the barns and granaries... the administration, on losing its urban character, became nomadic instead of sedentary.

Ruined and depopulated though they were, the cities had not lost all their significance... they remained the centers of the religious organization. ...in the heart of a purely agricultural society, something of the municipal character of the ancient State was preserved by the Church. It was owing to the Church that the cities did not disappear altogether...

238. The Papacy converts the Anglo-Saxons

Link to Table of Contents

Gregory the Great

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War


Book Two
The Carolingian Epoch

Chapter I
The Church

2. The Monks and the Papacy

I really hoped to skip this section, alas! I do need to summarize the contents. This section covers the rise of the Papacy under Gregory the Great (590-604) who, apparently, 

p62...was concerned... with drawing the moral consequences from the dogmas, with organizing the Christian life in respect of its aim -- in respect of "last things" which were summed up in the terrifying dilemma of Heaven and Hell. His vision... was fixed upon the Beyond, and the pictures which he drew of the life to come were enormously effective in helping to give medieval religiosity that gloomy and agonized cast, that preoccupation with terror, that obsession with eternal torments, which found their immortal expression in the "Divine Comedy." The Church being the instrument of eternal salvation, its power over men's souls must be augmented in order that they might be saved from the abyss. And here, in Gregory, as in other great mystics -- in St. Bernard, for example, and Loyola -- that practical genius revealed itself, which, in order to attain the supraterrestrial end that it had proposed to itself, excelled in organizing the affairs of the pressing world which it held in disdain... [His letters] show him at work restoring the patrimony of St. Peter -- that is, the enormous domains of the Roman Church -- scattered all over Italy and the coast of Illyria and Sicily... In a few years the task... was completed. The Papacy found itself in possession of a regular income and abundant resources. It had become the first financial power of its time.

p63 ...He perceived very clearly what an ascendancy the Papacy would acquire from those monasteries which were scattered all over Europe by constituting itself their protector...

p64 It was... to the monks directed and organized by him that Gregory confided the great achievement of his pontificate, the evangelization of the Anglo-Saxons... [596-655]
...

p65 The conversion of England marks a decisive stage in the history of the Papacy. The direct foundation of the Pope, the Anglo-Saxon Church, was subject from the beginning to the immediate control and direction of Rome. It was in no sense a national Church; it was apostolic in the full meaning of the term. And the trans-Rhenian Church which it proceeded to organize was given the same character. It is easy to understand what additional strength and glory the prestige and authority of the Papacy won thereby. While in Rome itself the Popes were still regarded by the Emperor of Byzantium and Exarchs of Ravenna as Patriarchs of the Empire, and were still obliged to apply to them for the ratification of their election, the new Christians of the North revered in the Popes the Vicars of Christ, the representatives of God on earth. Thus the Papacy had made a position for itself which was henceforth incompatible with the state of subordination to the Emperor in which it had hitherto existed. Sooner or later it would break the traditional tie between itself and the Emperor, which... was merely a burden, a humiliation and an embarrassment...

In the Byzantine milieu, torn by theological passion, a new heresy had just emerged: Iconoclasm. The Emperor Leo III not only proposed it (726), but attempted to force it on Rome. This was too much: the Pope refused to submit himself to the will of a master who expected to find him as complaisant as the Patriarchs of Constantinople or Antioch... [Gregory II (715-731) needs a protector] There was only one such man and he himself was seeking an ally capable of legitimately conveying the crown to him: the Mayor of the palace of the Merovingian kings.

It's interesting to look forward almost a thousand years to the great division of the Church, which seems to have been on the lines just described. Protestantism was strongest in the areas that were originally most loyal to the Papacy. Coincidence? A thousand years is a very long time, after all. Or did this history make the Church in those areas particularly susceptible to the later failings in Rome.

And how did the Protestant view of the final things differ from the Catholic view? Was this anti-Creation attitude stronger than in Latin Europe? Did the people change in these areas colonized by the Papacy or did the Church change and the people restored the focus of Gregory? I have no idea. And Pirenne may not have gotten far enough into this history (before he was set free by the end of the Great War) to cover this... so I may be in for the long haul.

Pirenne's tone, while covering Christianity, is as inoffensive (to me) as Gibbon's, though he lacks the witty footnotes. Perhaps they would have come with a second draft. I would love to know if Pirenne had read Dostoevsky. It seems he would have, he might even have read him in Russian while learning the language during the war. It isn't necessary, of course. He could simply be covering the same ground Ivan covered in the early meeting with Father Zosima because these are obvious Christian -- and Russian Orthodox vs Roman -- topics. And how could you cover Medieval Europe without covering this Church history. 

Care in the Community, again

Today at Walgreen's there was a woman who took her purchases to the pharmacy counter rather than the checkout counter because, it was pretty obvious, she didn't understand how the store worked. Why a person of limited intelligence or of a damaged sensibility would seek out the out-of-the-way pharmacy instead of the up-front-and-center checkout counter, is an interesting question too. But my first thought was of the cruelty of dumping this woman on the streets to fend for herself.

237. Fall of Rome to Carolingian Age

Link to Table of Contents

A History of Europe

by Henri Pirenne 
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War



Book One
The End of the Roman World in the West

Chapter I
The Barbarian Kingdoms in the Roman Empire
2. The New States

p35 ... The court [of the Frankish king after the fall of Rome in the West] was composed of various dignitaries whose titles show that they were once borne by slaves, as was the case with all dignitaries of Germanic origin: the marshal (the horse-slave), the seneschal (the senior slave)... But these servants, these household officers, shared in their master's fortunes, and naturally enough, since what was royal was public, they became his ministers.... 

It wouldn't surprise me if Napoleon was aware of this and even reminded his marshals about the origin of their title from time to time. 


Chapter III
The Musulman Invasion
2. The Consequences of the Invasion

p50 ...For centuries Europe had gravetated about the Mediterranean. It was by means of the Mediterranean that civilization had extended itself; by means of the Mediterranean the various parts of the civilized world had communicated one with another. On all its shores social life was the same in its fundamental characteristics; religion was the same; manners and customs and ideas were the same, or very nearly so. The Germanic invasion had not changed the situation in any essential respect. In spite of all that had happened, we may say that in the middle of the 7th century Europe still constituted, as in the time of the Roman Empire, a Mediterranean unity. 

This is a little confusing as in the previous chapter Pirenne demonstrated that the Eastern Roman Empire of Justinian -- which had just reclaimed Italy, Africa, and Spain -- was in reality the Roman Empire.


Now, under the sudden impact of Islam, this unity was abruptly shattered. The greater part of this familiar sea -- which the Romans had called "our sea," mare nostrum -- became alien and hostile. The intercourse between the West and the East... was interrupted... The community in which they had lived so long was destroyed for centuries to come...
...

p51 the Byzantine Empire, henceforth confined between the coast of Illyria and the Upper Euphrates, devoted the bulk of its forces to withstanding the pressure of Islam. In its long history, down to the day when it finally succumbed, in the middle of the 15th century... it was to know some moments of splendour... But this history, most of the time was alien to that of Western Europe. Venice alone kept in touch with Byzantium, and found, in her role of intermediary between East and West, the beginning of her future greatness...

As for the West, its separation from Byzantium confronted it with a completely novel situation. This separation seemed to exclude it from civilization, since from the beginning of the ages all the forms of civilized life and all social progress had come to it from the East... For the Christianity of the West, when its traditional lines of communication were cut, became a world apart, able to count only on itself, and in respect of its further development it was turned to the still barbarous regions beyond the Rhine and the shores of the North Sea, European society, continuously expanding, crossed the ancient frontiers of the Roman Empire. A new Europe was created with the rise of the Frankish Empire, in which was elaborated the Western civilization which was one day to become that of the whole world.

Pirenne doesn't specifically mention piracy and the coastal raiding of the Saracens in the south and the Vikings in the north, but this had a substantial effect on "civilization" and trade along the coasts. Cities either fortified or moved inland to safer locations. He does, a little later, describe how the Venetian, Pisan, and Genoan navies eventually restored some degree of order to the Eastern Mediterranean so that trade could resume.

Book Two
The Carolingian Epoch
Chapter I
The Church


p55 During the vicissitudes of the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries, when Europe was torn by the conflicts of the Germans, the Empire, and Islam, what became of the Catholic Church, the great force of the near future? It contented itself with continuing to exist, or rather to vegetate. Its influence upon the course of events was negligible; its moral influence over society was imperceptible. And yet, amidst the ruins of the Empire, it remained intact. It had saved its organization, its hierarchy, its incalculable wealth in land. And it had no enemies. The Germans no less than the Romans were its dutiful children...

...it [the Church] had become barbarized. The Latin literature of Christendom, which was still so vigorous in the 4th century, the century of Saint Augustine, had nothing to show in the 5th century... After this the life of the mind became dormant... the world had to wait for Gregory the Great before the study of theology and religious and moral philosophy was revived, though in quite a new spirit... Introduced into Ireland in the 4th century, Christianity had rapidly spread through the country. In this remote isle, which had no communication with the Continent, it created for itself an original organization, in which the great monastic colonies were the centers of a most ardent religious life. In these centers there were large number of ascetics and proselytes, who, from the 6th century onwards, began to leave their native country, some to seek, in distant lands, inaccessible solitudes, and others, souls to be converted. When the Norsemen discovered Iceland in the 9th century they were astonished to find that the only inhabitants of its misty shores were monks who had come from Ireland. They were Irishmen, too, who devoted themselves with such enthusiasm to the conversion of Northern Gaul and Germany... One must have read the portraits which Gregory of Tours has traced of some of his colleagues to form any idea of the state of their knowledge and their morals. Many of them could hardly read... The honest Gregory is indignant... And what an example he furnishes in his own person... of the decadence of the Church! The Latin which he writes -- as he is aware -- is a barbarous idiom, taking strange liberties with grammar, syntax and the vocabulary; and his morality -- but this, unhappily, he does not realize -- is capable of very irregular indulgences and very surprising judgements. [I read him in translation, so I don't know about his Latin but can confirm the rest.] And after his time things were even worse...

p57 ...decadent though it was, the Church was the great civilizing force of the period... It was through the Church that the Roman tradition was perpetuated; it was the Church that prevented Europe from relapsing into barbarism... [In that last paragraph Pirenne used "barbarous" properly to refer to language and the degeneracy of language. But here he seems to be using "barbarism" in the more common sense of crude and savage. Or maybe this is the fault of the translator?] the Church remained intact, in spite of its temporary decadence; the clergy were protected by the mighty edifice that sheltered them, and by the discipline imposed upon them. Ignorant, negligent, and immoral though some of the bishops may have been, they could not absolve themselves from the essential duties of their functions... Writing, without which no civilization is possible, appertained so exclusively to the Church from the end of the Merovingian period that even to this day the word that describes the ecclesiastic also describes the scribe: clerc in French, clerk in English, klerk in Flemish and Old German, diaca in Old Russian. During the 8th century intellectual culture was confined to a sacerdotal class... Not only were the clergy venerated because of their religious character; not only did they posses, in the eyes of laymen, the prestige which knowledge enjoys in an ignorant community, but they were also an indispensable auxiliary to civil society. The State could not dispense with their services. In the Carolingian period, when the last traces of lay education had disappeared, it was from the clergy that the State was obliged to borrow its staff of scribes, the heads of its chancellery, and all those agents or counsellors in whom a certain degree of intellectual culture was essential. The State became clericalized, because it could not to otherwise, under penalty of relapsing into barbarism... [now "barbarism" seems to mean illiterate] this was not because their character as apostles of Christ made them peculiarly fit to serve it. The servants of Him who has said that His kingdom is not of this world had not learned from Him the conduct of secular affairs. If they had the requisite knowledge it was because they had acquired it from Rome... In short, it was not because it was Christian, but because it was Roman that the Church acquired and maintained for centuries its control over society... The inevitable collaboration between Church and State, which was presently established, bore within it the germ of formidable conflict, which no one could have foreseen in the beginning.

p59 On entering the service of the State, the Church did not submit itself to its employer. Whatever the concessions which it may have made, at certain moments... it still remained, with regard to the State, an independent power. It claimed and enjoyed, in Western Europe, a liberty which it did not enjoy in the Roman or the Byzantine Empire. This was... because the Church was from the first in an economic situation which enabled it to live and develop itself on its own resources... The immense fortune in real estate which lay at its disposal it owed to Constantine and his successors, who transferred to it the wealth of the pagan temples. They not only made the Church the greatest landed proprietor in the world; they also made it a privileged proprietor, by exempting its members from the poll-tax and its property from the land tax...

Whenever I think about the history of Europe I, unlike Pirenne, apparently, think about the great Houses. Starting with the ultimate noble House, the Habsburgs, I find that their lineage is traced back to the Etichonids in Alsace and Burgundy -- the area around Dijon is mentioned in Wiki as a possible point of origin around the 7th century. Curiously, they are described as being, "of Frankish, Burgundian or Visigothic origin" -- which is awfully vague. 

I can't find even that much about the House of Hohenzollern or of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The House Bourbon (and House Capet) seem to be Frankish, as you would expect.