Nothing Has Changed Since 1000
everyone wants to combine secular and religious power
We wise moderns all know that there’s been nothing like the Commies of the 20th century and their kissing cousins the Woke Faithful. And don’t get me started on Literally Hitler.
But Bjorn Merker in Perishing Promise tells us that the Catholic Church had the whole thing down pat starting at the turn of the First Millennium.
He tells the story through the growth of the Latin Church. See, after the Fall of Rome the Church knew if was “in danger of sharing its fate.” The whole point of Augustine’s City of God therefore was to dissociate the City of God from the Earthly City of the deceased and fallen Roman Empire. So the Church pushed into northern Europe and went to work on Christianizing the Germanic tribes.
But, of course, the Christianizing of the Germanic pagans didn’t just involve religious conversion.
In the process Christian doctrines, values and institutions were impressed upon societies undergoing the far-reaching changes attendant on the transition from an essentially preliterate tribal culture to a literate civilization.
The point is that the conversion was both religious and political.
This fusion of tribal and ecclesiastical power… [was] characterized by an absence of a principled distinction between worldly and spiritual authority and power[.]
And it didn’t hurt that the Church “engaged in large-scale land clearance effort, introduced efficient management techniques, and improved agricultural methods.”
But what happened after the conversion was complete — even extending to Iceland? Perfectly simple. It was time for “activism.”
Professing Christians could easily be shown to violate their own ideal in practice,, handing activists the lever of shame in pursuing their goals.
Sound familiar doesn’t it.
[T]hat lever and logic is a constant fixture of activist movements, whether religious or secular, [as we shall see.]
And they even had a Peace Movement, the “Peace of God.”
In due course came Pope Gregory VII, born Hildebrand of Soana, and he declared in Dictatus Papae in 1075 that the pope had the power to depose emperors. Yes, so Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV had to take the Road to Canossa.
Then the Church invented the Crusade.
The nature and scope of papal aspirations were reflected… in the Holy War or Crusade, directed against external enemies, and the Inquisition directed against internal dissent (heresy).
The point to understand is that the Crusades were not just fought against the Muslims, but also against Byzantium, Jews, and “non-Latin Christians such as the Copts.”
Internally, within the boundaries of papal authority, there was what we now call totalitarianism. If you were not a baptized Christian you were excluded from society.
Thus, the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) prohibited Jews from owning land and from all civil and military functions.
And woe to those outside the gates.
[T]he heretics, even if innocent of any other crime, were considered fit to be killed, and were in fact killed.
You can see what Bjorn Merker is setting up here. He is telling the history of the last millennium as though it were the first draft of our own totalitarian age, where religious and political leaders are ever tending towards enforcing a one true faith under one great leader.
As we say now: it’s in the jeans.
More to come.