In his book, An
Historian’s Approach to Religion (1956), English historian Arnold Toynbee
expressed his admiration for the Medieval Western Christian way of living
because it maintained an unusual and delicate balance between freedom and
power. Certain Latin Christian leaders kept themselves closer to the freedom end of the
spectrum than was true of those before and after them. The best years of this
balance, according to Toynbee, began in 1073 with the papacy of Gregory 7th.
With Gregory, political rulers more or less
intellectually assented to Christian teachings and outwardly conformed to
Christian morals. Intellectual leaders did not publicly challenge the Latin Christian
worldview. For his part, Gregory did not interfere in strictly political
affairs and allowed intellectuals the freedom to explore non-Christian thinkers.
This gave Latin Christendom a unique “social diversity in unity” (169) lacking
in Greek Christendom.
Eventually this creative medieval balance broke down. This
breakdown led to the emergence, after 1648, of the Age of Exuberant Olympianity.
That, in turn, resulted in the formation of the catastrophic Global
Technological System under which all creation inescapably suffers today.
Toynbee identifies several causes that led to the tragic breakdown
of the creative medieval balance between freedom and power:
1. Pope Innocent 3rd
(r. 1198-1216) abandoned the freedom of Jesus in order to politically
destroy Frederick 2nd, King of Sicily and Holy Roman Emperor, and
the Hohenstaufen dynasty. Everyone knew that Innocent was engaging in
unadulterated power politics and that this was unbecoming the leader of the
Latin Christian Church. In other words, Innocent abandoned the freedom of Jesus
to use the power of Jupiter, god of politics, to gain wholly Olympian political
ends.
2. Babylonian
Captivity (1309-1376): during this period of time, the popes and their
bureaucracy left the city of Rome for Avignon where they lived as captives to
the policies of the rulers of France. Having lost their political power, these church leaders attempted to compensate by amassing great wealth at the expense
of ordinary churchgoers across Latin Christendom. Left unrewarded by Jupiter,
god of politics, these church leaders devoted themselves to Pluto, god of
money, and Bacchus, god of consumption, rather than repent of their lust for
power and return to Jesus.
3. Great Schism
(1378-1417). From 1378, two men claimed to be the one true pope; beginning in 1410,
three men did. Their underlying disputes were political rather than
theological. This lack of unity at the top weakened the unity of the whole.
Devotion to Jupiter—otherwise known as political partisanship—further weakened
the unity of minds and hearts possible only in the freedom of Jesus and the love which that makes possible.
4. Rejection of the
Conciliar Movement needed to repair the lost unity at the top and of the
whole. The Conciliar Movement grew out of the Council of Constance (1414-1418)
which had proven necessary to end the Great Schism. Leading bishops and
theologians across Latin Christendom wanted to continue the needed work of
reform along with—or in spite of—the pope. Successive popes, however, beginning
with the Council of Basel (1431-1449) and ending with that of Florence (1438-1445),
were able to force enough other Latin Christian leaders to affirm the supremacy
of the bishop of Rome over even a council of all other leading bishops of Latin
Christendom.
5. The Protestant
Reformation (1517-1648) was one direct consequence of the rejection of the Conciliar
Movement. To maintain their own supremacy, popes remained indifferent to the
increasingly pressing need for reform. In the 1500s, reformers took their
advocacy for reforms, and implementation of them, out of papal hands.
6. The Renaissance
of Olympian Culture (1345-1563). One traditional date given for the
beginning of the Renaissance is the year (1345) that Petrarch discovered a
previously unknown collection of letters by Cicero. We may regard the year
(1563) in which the Council of Trent concluded as marking the end of the
Renaissance—at least in Rome. There were no more Renaissance popes after that.
The Protestant Reformation was unintentionally sparked by
Martin Luther on October 31, 1517, when he publicly challenged the sale of
indulgences. Leo 10th, pope, second son of Lorenzo de’ Medici of
Florence, and patron of Renaissance artists, completely missed the significance
of this challenge. Had his mind and heart been more focused on Jesus than on
Jupiter and Bacchus, perhaps the Latin Christian Church, of which he was ruler,
might still have embraced the changes so necessary to its vitality.
7. Wars of
Religion (1522-1648). Latin Christian Church leaders, increasingly abandoning
Jesus for the gods of Olympianity, lurched from one disaster to the next from
1201 to 1522. Their increasingly blind devotion to the Olympian gods finally
ended in their exaltation of Mars, god of war, in what we may rightly call the
Latin Christian Civil War. The worst result: these church leaders disgraced the
name of Jesus Christ. By doing so, they ironically got Jesus, and devotion to
him, blamed for the enduring agonies of war when, in reality, it was their own
devotion to the Olympian gods, especially Mars, that caused the bloodbath. What a stunning victory for the
gods—from which we all still suffer.
Copyright © 2018
by Steven Farsaci.
All rights reserved. Fair use encouraged.
All rights reserved. Fair use encouraged.
