Part 28 (2/2)
Where ecclesiastical organization is highly developed and has become controlling in the life of a people, it may be one of the most powerful forces in social life. Such, for example, might be said of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages:
A life in the Church, for the Church, through the Church; a life which she blessed in ma.s.s at morning and sent to peaceful rest by the vesper hymn; a life which she supported by the constantly recurring stimulus of the sacraments, relieving it by confession, purifying it by penance, admonis.h.i.+ng it by the presentation of visible objects for contemplation and wors.h.i.+p--this was the life which they of the Middle Ages conceived as the rightful life of Man; it was the actual life of many, the ideal of all.[1]
[Footnote 1: Bryce: _Holy Roman Empire_, p. 423.]
Churches may also come to acquire political functions.
The history of the Church is for many centuries the leading factor in the political history of Europe, nor is it only in Christendom that political inst.i.tutions have been inextricably a.s.sociated with religion.
Religious inst.i.tutions may, as pointed out in the case of primitive tribes, acquire educational functions. The initiation ceremonies in Australian tribes have a markedly religious character. In the higher and more modern religions educational functions still persist. The Catholic Church has been regarded as the educator of Europe. Charlemagne's endowment and encouragement of education was largely made effectual through the Church. The grammarians and didactic writers, the poets, the encyclopaedists, the teachers whom Charlemagne endowed and gathered about him, the heads of the schools which he founded, were all churchmen. Until very recently in the history of Europe the universities and education in general were nearly all under the domination of the Church. The secularization of primary education in England took place only late in the nineteenth century, and it is not yet a generation since the battle over the secularization of education was waged in France. All religious sects maintain on a smaller or larger scale educational functions.
Parochial and convent schools and denominational colleges are contemporary examples.
THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF INSt.i.tUTIONALIZED RELIGION. The consequences of inst.i.tutionalized religion in social development have been very marked. The mere a.s.sociation of large groups in a common faith and a common religious interest has been a considerable factor in their integration. There is to be noted in the first place the common emotional sympathies aroused by the partic.i.p.ation of great numbers in identical rites and ceremonies. Any widespread social habit becomes weighted with emotional values for its members. Particularly is this true of religious habits, the mystery and magnificence a.s.sociated with which deeply intensify their emotional influence. Again religious habits are given a unanimous and high social approval, especially where the prohibitions and commands enforced by religion are conceived intimately to affect the welfare of the tribe. The prophets reiterated to the people of Israel that their calamities were the result of their having ceased to follow in the ways of the Lord. The possession of a common religious history and tradition may also give a people a deepened sense of group solidarity. The national development of the ancient Hebrews was undoubtedly promoted by their sense of being the chosen people, of possessing exclusively the law of Jehovah.
Again religious sanction is given to codes of belief, modes of conduct, and to inst.i.tutions, thus at once strengthening them and making change difficult. It is not merely customs that are obeyed and disobeyed, but the sacred commands. A premium is put upon the regular and traditional because of the divine sanction a.s.sociated with them. To violate a prohibition, even a slight one, becomes thus the most terrible sacrilege. Customs that, like the hygienic rules of the Mosaic code, may have started as genuine social utilities are maintained because they have become fixed in the religious traditions as enjoined by the Lord. In consequence there may be a Pharisaical insistence on the performance of the letter of the law, long after its practical utility or spiritual significance is forgotten. It is this persistence in the literal fulfillments of religious commands at the expense of the spirit, that the Hebrew prophets so vehemently condemned. Thus proclaims Isaiah:
To what purpose is the mult.i.tude of your sacrifices unto me? Saith the Lord: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts....
Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me....
Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them....
Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil;
Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.[1]
[Footnote 1: Isaiah I: 11-17.]]
Inst.i.tutions and modes of life, even when they are not, strictly speaking, part of the religious tradition proper, are given tremendous sanction and confirmation when they become embodied in the religious tradition. The inst.i.tution of the family, for example, through the strong religious sanctions and values implied in the marriage ceremony and relations.h.i.+p (especially the marriage sacrament of the Catholic Church), comes to be strongly fortified and entrenched. Change in the form of an inst.i.tution so hallowed by religion is something more than change; it is sacrilege. Governments and dynasties, again, when they have a religious sanction, when the King rules by ”divine right,” acquire a strong additional source of persistence and power. The imperial character of the j.a.panese government to-day, for example, is said to be greatly enhanced in prestige by the widespread popular belief that the Emperor is lineally descended from divinity.
Sometimes religious sanctions have inspired and promoted zeal for social enterprise. The Crusades stand out as cla.s.sic instances, but in the name of religion men have done more than build cathedrals and go on pilgrimages. In the Middle Ages, bridges and roads were constructed, alms were given, pictures were painted, books illuminated, encyclopaedias made, education conducted, all under the auspices and inspiration of the Church. The mediaeval universities started as church schools. In our own day, the expansion of the churches in the direction of welfare work and social reform, the use of the church as a community center, are examples of this development. Men have found justification by good works as well as faith.
INTOLERANCE AND INQUISITION. The influence of religious tradition over the minds of its followers has had, among many n.o.ble and beautiful consequences, the dark fruits of intolerance, persecution, inquisition, and torture. Part of the bitter narrow-mindedness which has characterized the history of ecclesiastical inst.i.tutions is not to be attributed specifically to religion. It is rather to be explained by the general uneasiness which the gregarious human creature feels at any deviation from the accustomed. In addition men have felt frequently that any divergence from the divinely ordained would bring destruction upon the whole group. In the Christian tradition there was an additional reason for intolerance: the heretic was willfully losing his own soul, and it was only humane to compel him to come ”into the fold, to rescue him from the pains he would otherwise suffer in h.e.l.l.”
The profound conviction that those who did not believe in its doctrines would be d.a.m.ned eternally, and that G.o.d punishes theological error as if it were the most heinous of crimes, led naturally to persecution. It was a duty to impose on men the only true doctrine, seeing that their own eternal interests were at stake, and to hinder errors from spreading. Heretics were more than ordinary criminals, and the pains that man could inflict on them were as nothing to the tortures awaiting them in h.e.l.l.[1]
[Footnote 1: Bury: _History of Freedom of Thought_, pp. 52-53.]
In fevered zeal for the Faith began that long hunting and punishment of heresy, which has done so much to darken the history of religion in Western Europe. There were, as in the Albigensian Crusade, wholesale burnings and hangings of men, women, and children.[1] Heresy was hunted out in secret retreats.
”It was the foulest of crimes; to prevail against it was to prevail against the legions of h.e.l.l.” The culmination of intolerance was, of course, the Inquisition. One need not pause to recall its espionage system, its search for the spreaders of false doctrine, its use of any and every witness against the suspect, its granting of indulgences to any one who should bear witness against him, its ”relaxing of the criminal to the secular arm,” which unfailingly punished him with death. It must be pointed out that in the instance of the Inquisition, just as in the case of all religious persecution, the motives were most frequently of the n.o.blest. ”In the Middle Ages and after, men of kindly temper and the purest zeal were absolutely devoid of mercy when heresy was suspected.” Nor are intolerance and persecution to be laid exclusively at the door of any one religion. In Protestant countries, in England and Scotland, the persecution and torture of alleged witches is one of the most painful instances of the cruelties into which men can be led by loyalty to their religious convictions. And Mohammedanism vividly taught men how a faith might be spread by fire and sword.
[Footnote 1: _Ibid._, pp. 56-57.]
QUIETISM AND CONSOLATION--OTHER-WORLDLINESS. Many religions, including Christianity, have emphasized ”other-worldliness.”
This has most frequently taken the form of emphasis on the life to come. This world has been conceived, as it were, as a prelude to eternity. In the Christian world scheme, as most clearly expounded and universally accepted during the Middle Ages, man's chief imperative business was salvation. All else was trivial in comparison with that incomparable eternal bliss which would be the reward of the virtuous, and that unending agony which would be the penalty for the d.a.m.ned. ”Salvation was the master Christian motive.
The Gospel of Christ was a gospel of salvation unto eternal life. It presented itself in the self-sacrifice of divine love, not without warnings touching its rejection.”[1]
[Footnote 1: H. O. Taylor: _Medioeval Mind_, vol. I, p. 61.]
<script>