Did Christianity 'build' the West?
Idle musings
What is the West? Well, the West is certainly paintings with perspective, put on your 3D glasses folks:
Who painted this wonderful picture? It is “the divine Sanzio” Raphael. Here is what we know of his life:
He is said to have had many affairs, but a permanent fixture in his life in Rome was “La Fornarina”, Margherita Luti, the daughter of a baker (fornaro) named Francesco Luti from Siena who lived at Via del Governo Vecchio.
Well, at least Sanzio was straight, what about the old gentleman in the painting? This is Julius II. He is famous for two things:
In addition to an active military policy, the new pope personally led troops into battle on at least two occasions, the first to expel Giovanni Bentivoglio from Bologna (17 August 1506 – 23 March 1507), which was achieved successfully with the assistance of the Duchy of Urbino.
A man of war.
Also:
Criticism was furthermore made of the sinister influence exerted by his advisor, Francesco Alidosi, whom Julius had made a cardinal in 1505. However, it is likely that the closeness was down to the fact that he simply knew how to handle him well.[130] This sexual reputation survived Julius, and the accusation continued to be made without reservation by Protestant opponents in their polemics against “papism” and Catholic decadence. The French writer Philippe de Mornay (1549–1623) accused all Italians of being sodomites, but added specifically: “This horror is ascribed to good Julius.”
Now I’m sure there are a thousand well-placed, well-formulated, cunning objections to what it is already clear I am insinuating here. Nonetheless, I ask you all to stick with the article for a bit. When we look back on the past from modernity we carry two big assumptions, one is the legacy of the Reformation, the other the legacy of 20th century state-building:
People ‘believed’ in metaphysical things like Gods, or ideologies, in the sense of being unknowable postulates consented to by faith, this ‘belief’ informed their actions.
‘Society’ existed as an object for the action of ‘the State’ with universal applicability.
For most of history, 1 was untrue. It was certainly the intention of many founders of religions to get people to adopt the attitude of 1 but this wasn’t how average person behaved. You see this a lot with online devotees of ‘paganism.’ A 7th century Norse fisherman did not consider himself a ‘pagan’, he wouldn’t necessarily have even been familiar with what we’re told is ‘the pagan creation myth’; he would have possibly known Odin and Freyja and Loki as characters in stories which explained certain things but more likely there was a purely local ancestor or spirit and he sacrificed to this being; unless he was a warrior, Odin could’ve simultaneously been real and also of no real concern to him. The mountains here exist because all the trolls were dancing when the sun came up and turned them all to stone. That’s paganism.
Religion means a set of rules people live by and originally pertained to monastic communities. For most of history “religion” meant practices: rites and sacrifices in other words. This is why polytheistic societies, like the Ancient Romans and Greeks, did not know religious intolerance. If you look at the modern Middle East, religion often just means ‘ethnicity’; do you think, say, a Yazidi actually believes the earth was created by angels and guarded by a peacock-angel? Of course not. Yazidis eat funny rice. Yazidis drive on the left side of the road. When Europeans arrived in the middle east they were not called ‘the Christians’ but ‘the Franks.’ Christianity, as intellectual faith of saints and churchmen, set itself against this conception of religion but this did not mean it was alien to average Christian in Europe before the Reformation.
This brings us onto point number 2 because it is essential to understanding how Christian our ancestors really were. When I read some things written by Calvin Tomlinrobinson, I get impression they have simply taken the Liberal view of past societies and added a yes-chad next to it. They believe that, in France c. 1210, if you clicked on the country’s flag in a video game it would say ‘religion: Christianity’ and if you weren’t a Christian you were arrested by the police. For this is what contemporary believers in theocracy mean when they say they want a Christian country, they want faith tests for public servants, moral doctrine to inform legislation on topics like abortion and for Christian heritage to be protected. It means the enforcement of Christian morals and not simply Christian metaphysics. This is not what happened in Medieval Europe because Medieval Europe was ruled by aristocrats: men on horses with private armies, you cannot arrest aristocrats; you can, and this happened to outright heretics, get other aristocrats to attack them. There was the Church, which was extremely rich and powerful and vied for supremacy with these aristocrats but it was not omnipotent, it knew just how much it could bend the crooked timber of humanity.