Medievalism as “Source”

Just by way of clarification, I wanted to illustrate what I was thinking when I said that “Roman Catholicism is the source of damage in our culture today”. I did not intend to say that it was the Roman Catholic religion that is causing all of the problems.

My intention was to talk about the “history of ideas”, and in that sense, in the illustration nearby, you can see that in the flow and history of ideas, especially in talking about western Europe, that there was a very long time when Roman Catholicism was the only game in town.

On 4 September 476, one hundred years after the Goths crossed the Danube, the last Roman emperor in the west, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed, and it was the descendants of those Gothic refugees who provided the military core of one of the main successor states to the Empire: the Visigothic kingdom. … (Heather, Peter. The Fall of the Roman Empire (p. xi). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.)

The papacy after that point held to a “two-swords” theory of power and authority. In 494 AD, not long after the city of Rome was sacked, “Pope Gelasius” wrote to the then-emperor Anastasius “on the superiority of the spiritual over temporal power”:

There are two powers, august Emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled, namely, the sacred authority of the priests and the royal power. Of these that of the priests is the more weighty, since they have to render an account for even the kings of men in the divine judgment.

You are also aware, dear son, that while you are permitted honorably to rule over human kind, yet in things divine you bow your head humbly before the leaders of the clergy and await from their hands the means of your salvation.

In the reception and proper disposition of the heavenly mysteries you recognize that you should be subordinate rather than superior to the religious order, and that in these matters you depend on their judgment rather than wish to force them to follow your will.

This pronouncement set the tone for political order in western Europe for the next 1000 years.
And so, when I say that Roman Catholicism was THE source for all of our cultural and political difficulties today, it is this event that I had in mind.

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Just to give you a brief outline of the political history of Europe from that point, the pope, “Pope Leo”, crowned Charlemagne as emperor of the Holy Roman empire in 800 AD. By 1054, the eastern and western churches officially split (after much bickering prior), effectively severing the western from the eastern empire as well. The “high middle ages” represent almost a total “reconstruction” of the old Roman empire. Peter Heather cites a letter of Peter Damian, who was one of the Cardinals in the inner circle of the Roman hierarchy in the eleventh century:

Now the Roman Church, the see of the apostles, should imitate the ancient court of the Romans. Just as of old the earthly Senate strove to subdue the whole multitude of the peoples to the Roman Empire, so now the ministers of the apostolic see, the spiritual senators of the Church Universal, should make it their sole business by their laws to subdue the human race to God, the true emperor. (Heather, Peter. The Restoration of Rome (p. 388). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.)

This was a period of period of great accomplishment. Local church and monastic “schools” came together over time, eventually leading to the founding of the great universities of Bologna, Paris, and Oxford. New religious orders such as the Dominicans (teachers) and Franciscans (“friars minor”) formed and also developed “schools of thought”. Writers such as Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and others worked greatly to synthesize what was known of Christian doctrine.

That period also offered many troubles. Thomas Aquinas wrote a long work, “Error of the Greeks”, which gave reasons that the eastern churches should submit to the papacy – it had to be retracted later, because its arguments were found to be heavily reliant on forged documents that were rampant during the prior centuries.

The “great schism” also developed during that time, when political infighting led to a time when there were two and even three “popes” in place. English kings realized that their land-owning allies would not necessarily fight every war without having some say-so, leading to the development of a bi-cameral parliament.

William of Ockham dared to write about “papal tyranny”. Marsellius of Padua wrote a treatise that led to the idea that government involvement of the citizenry that would provide for the best political systems.

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During that 1000 year period, however, there was really only the one source of political power, and its “source” was the papacy. All political and religious thought was either an affirmation of or rejection of the thinking and institutions that were in place at the time.

With this kind of history in mind, it is hard for me to imagine that I “overreact” to Roman Catholicism, by the way. There is such a thing as specialization. Nobody ever said that Stephen Hawking (for example) spent too much of his life studying physics.

It seems to me that most people don’t pay enough attention to it, and in that way, they are missing a lot. The damage is not a surface kind of damage. It lies deeper, in the underlying thinking of things.

That kind of phenomenon is still in place today, although to a much lesser degree. It is the kind of thing I have in mind as I write this.

So, back to First Things. THEY SAY: “Culture is the root of politics, and religion is the root of culture.” For a 1000 year period of time, the papacy was at the root of religion AND politics. Perhaps there is some of that they would want you to stop thinking about. At the time of the Reformation, John Calvin was absolutely right to say that the papacy was the institution through which “satan has polluted every good thing that God has appointed for our salvation.” I did not think it would be controversial on a Reformed blog to repeat such a thing.

The historical papacy has polluted much else, too, and the effects are still with us today, either in the form of affirmations of, or rejections of, papal thinking and teaching.

I say all of this as background for some of the things I hope to discuss going forward. Perhaps I should have outlined it better before I got started. As I said in an earlier comment, I do appreciate your feedback and even your objections. If I’m going to be writing about this topic moving forward (as I hope to do), it is true that “iron sharpens iron”, and you all are helping me to better focus my thoughts.