Hey I congatulate you on having the guts for reading such trash. I did it too!
In here I include for you and for anyone my notes on a great book. It explore the development of Church and beliefs. It is important to learn the Bible but it is also important to know the historical and social context in which it evolved. I hope you like it. Also You are right Sex is only 10%. The longer you stay together the less sex you have. That is called the Coolidge Effect describes a phenomenon – seen in nearly every species in which it has been tested – whereby males show continuously high sexual performance given the introduction of new receptive females. The sex difference that the effect refers to is explained by Bateman's principle which is the theory that females almost always invest more energy into producing offspring than males, and therefore in most species females are a limiting resource over which the other sex will compete.Which is one of the reasons for Polygamy!
The Rise of Western Christendom
Second Edition
Peter Brown
Introduction
This myth [Christianity] began to be formed around the end of the fourth century. It has been wielded with great effect by ecclesiastical reformers from the age of Augustine to John Cassian up to beyond the Reformation… In the third and fourth centuries, we know a lot about writings of an undoubtedly sophisticated elite and surprisingly little about the day-to-day practice of the average Christian. To mistake the views of the Fathers of the Church for the texture of Christianity as a whole in the Roman world is like taking the grandiose and elegant façade of a surviving Roman building for the sum total of life in a Roman city… It makes us forget the levels of poverty, malnutrition, and disease, which characterized the Roman world as a whole… In the same way, we should not be misled by the writings of the Fathers of the Church into mistaking their elevated views to a rougher texture of life as really lived by Christians.
The drawing up of the Penitentials did not represent the corruption of a more “enlightened” Christianity. Rather, it marked a startling victory of men of the pen who turned a widespread, almost nonverbal, sense of the distinction between the sacred and the profane, and between the pure and the impure (shared alike by barbarians and be Mediterranean Christians) into a finely calibrated system to be used for the guidance of the soul.
Chapter 1 “The Laws of countries”: Prologue and Overview
Bardaisan (154-222 CE) was a Christian nobleman in Persia that said, “Wherever they lived, human beings were free to choose their own way of life.” “In whatever place they find themselves, the local laws cannot force them to give up the law of the Messiah.”
The Barbarians were all foreigners, usually nomads. To the north in Free Germany, the barbarians were farmers with no structured government and no written language. All their knowledge was transmitted orally. For the Romans, the Barbarians were lower than a slave was. Galen of Ephesus wrote, “I expect no more to have Germans among my readers, than I would expect to be read by bears and wolves.”
Chapter 2 Christianity and Empire
The Roman Empire was a “Commonwealth of Cities,” Rome with a population of almost 1,000,000, Antioch and Alexandria 300,000 and many cities with a population of 100,000 plus inhabitants. Frontier towns like London, Paris, and Cologne were impressive in contrast to the under-populated, rural landscapes in which they stood. They had populations of up to 20,0000, and most towns had a population of around 5,000 inhabitants. Yet, these towns were seen as privilege oases of Roman civilization. Each town had an ordo, a legally constituted council, which consisted of the 30 to 100 richest families in the region.
These urban oligarchies formed the upper classes of the Roman Empire’s aristocracy never amounted more than three percent. Yet, they own a quarter of all the land of the empire and 40% of all the liquid wealth of the empire. The imperial Roman Empire never messed up with the towns and only collected the taxes, which were 10% of the agrarian surplus.
Imperial Government was centered in the Metropolis, a mother city in the area, which emerged as the permanent capital of each region.
Diocletian’s empire was still an overwhelmingly polytheist society that believed in many invisible gods that demanded worship, reverence, and gratitude. Great emphasis was placed in traditional Roman circles, on religio, the apposite worship of each god. Hence, a religion was the worship of many gods, a hallmark of polytheism in the Roman Empire.
Symmachus, Prefect of Rome in 384 CE, one of the last great polytheists said,
“Everyone has his own customs, his own religious practices; the divine Mind has assigned to different cities different religions to be their guardians… To this line of thought must be added the argument from “benefits conferred”, for herein rest the most emphatic proof of existence of the gods. Man’s reason moves entirely in the dark; his knowledge of divine presences can be drawn from no better source than from the recollection and the evidence of good fortune already received from them. If the long passage of time lends validity to religious observances, we ought to keep faith with so many centuries, we ought to follow our forefathers who followed their forefathers and were blessed in so doing.”
The religio that these high gods received depended, to a large extent, on the self-image of their worshippers. The religiones were necessary for the maintenance of the Roman Empire. Diocletian said in 302 CE,
“The ancient religion ought not to be censured by a new one. For it is the height of criminality to reverse that which the ancestors had defined, once and for all, things which hold and preserve there recognized place and course.”
In 325, CE Constantine summoned all the Christian Bishops at Nicaea. He even included Bishops from Persia. Constantine wished for uniformity. Even the date for Easter was agreed upon. This concern for universal uniformity, devoted to the worship of one god only, was the opposite of the colorful variety of religiones.
In 325 Christianity with a 10% of the population, challenging the Empire with its own codex and the empire was not going to fight it. Therefore, Constantine and his Roman Empire took over and used Christianity as a manner to impose order.
Christianity preached salvation through the conquest of sin. Salvation meant, first and foremost, salvation from idolatry and from the power of demons. “The unity of God and the refutation of the idols.” Christians ascribed to all gods without exception the unreliable qualities of the lowest gods. The lower gods had usually been spoken of by polytheists as daimones, as invisible, intermediary beings. To Christians all gods were demons, in the sense with which we still use the word demon. They were touchy and evil. The demons were faceless invisible powers, past masters of the art of illusion.
Christians commonly used the practice of exorcism. In addition, Christian saw martyrs as men and women possessed by the power of Christ. They had a mighty god inside them, and, by their heroic death, they trumped the power of the ancient gods of the city.
In the Early Church, SIN was largely a novel and helpful concept!
Universal suffering came from Buddhism. Sin came from Judaism as the single human condition.
In the course of the third century, the handling of sin came to be taken over by the bishop. The bishop was presented as the searching mercy of god personified: “first of all judge strictly and, afterwards, receive…command the sinner to come in…examine him…and appoint him days of fasting.”
Money and goods given “for the remission of sin” ensured that wealth gained in “the world” (through craftsmanship, trade, and landowning) flowed, without inhibition, into the Church. The “goods of this world” were “redeemed” by being spent on the religious community.
Chapter 3 Tempora Christiana: Christian Times
In 404, a group of pagan notables in the small North African town of Boseth entered a Christian basilica to listen a sermon by a famous visiting bishop, Augustine of Hippo. What they heard was an exhortation to wake up, to listen to the strepitus munndi, the roar of the Roman world, like unanimous chanting of a great crowd in the circus, as it acclaimed the victory of Christianity.
By patronizing the Church, Constantine had wished to gain the support of the God of the Christians. Whether he wanted to foster renew religious violence (this time, by Christian against pagans) is another matter. But, the Christian bishops thought otherwise. For them it was now or never. They considered that they had won the right to finish off struggle with the gods.
Cultivated polytheists, urban notables, and even members of the Roman Senate in 416 told Orosuis, a Spanish Priest, that theirs was a religion of countryflok, of pagani, of men of the pagus, of paysans, paesanos- that is, a religion worthy only of illiterate peasants.
It was the Theodisian Code held their attention and esteem. It was the official voice of the Roman Empire at its greatest, that is, when it was the Roman Empire as God had always intended it to be- a Christian empire. The Code ended with a book On Religion. In the Theodisian Code, extracts from the laws issued from the reign of Constantine to that of Theodosius II were arranged in chronological order. They communicated a rising sense of governmental certainty. There was to be little place, in the new Roman order, for heresy, schism, or Judaism, and no place at all for “the error of stupid paganism.”
Following the Roman tradition of lavish endowments of the cults deemed most useful to the empire, Constantine became a Christian donor of overpowering generosity.
Bishops and the clergy received immunities from taxes and from compulsory services.
For Pelagius, God’s grace consisted rather in God’s decision to create human nature in such a way that human beings could follow his commands through the exercise of their free will. Human beings never lost their original, good nature. Everyone was free to choose the good. Augustine’s point of view was, “Human beings could not simply make themselves good, when they please, by their own free will. They depended ultimately on god’s grace for constant inspiration and support.” By rallying to Augustine, Latin Christian of the 5th century made plain that they needed heroes, not self-improvers. Prosper of Aquitaine said, “The church could not be built upon mere free will: “the fickle will that is not ruled by the changeless will of God.”[A clear statement that they wanted to acquire power over people and not to grant goodness toward the people.]
In Augustine’s writing against the Pelagians, we can glimpse the catholic laity of his own, and of many subsequent centuries. There was room in the Church for those,
“Who indulge their sexual appetites, although within decorous bonds of marriage, and not only for the sake of offspring, but even, because they enjoy it. Who put up with injuries with less than complete patience … that may even burn, at times, for revenge… Who hold to what they posse?. Who give alms, but not very lavishly? Who do not take other people’s property, but defend their own: but do it in the bishop’s court, rather than before a worldly judge… But who, through all this, see themselves as small and god as glorious.”
[Was Augustine accepting adulteress, pederasts, and sexual deviants inside the church? Was Augustine taking the seven capital sins as acceptable behavior inside the Church?]
[Augustine’s view in the City of God was], Human beings could not glory. But an institution could do so. What was truly glorious on earth, for all the imperfections of its individual members, was the Catholic Church. For without Catholic baptism, Augustine was convinced, it seemed impossible (to human minds, at least) that God would grant forgiveness of the original sin, which had made all human beings equal because equally estranged from God. For this reason, the Church had to be truly universal. It was the only resting place, on earth, in which a sorely wounded humanity could hope to recover its lost health.
[Human beings are a creation of God’s glory. The Catholic Church is a creation of men. Therefore, by definition and by logic, it cannot be truly glorious. Augustine’s beliefs were pure circular logic and non-sequiturs.]
Chapter IV Virtutes sanctorum… strages gentium: “Deeds of Saints… Slaughter of Nations”
After 476 when the Roman Empire finally collapses with the resignation of the last Emperor Romulus Augustulus what emerged, instead, all over Western Europe was the world of the Romans without a Roman Empire. These were the local aristocracies, who now struggled to maintain their power through collaboration, for the first time, with non-roman warlords.
The end of Roman peace and the loss of the wide horizons associated with the Christian Empire were troubling enough to Christians.
Part II
Divergent Legacies 500-600 CE
Chapter VI Reverentia, rusticas: Caesarius of Arles to Gregory of Tours
It was not enough to have placed a single, exclusive God at the head of the mundus. Nor was it enough, even to brought that God down to the lowest level of the universe, to move as a human being among other human beings in the person of Jesus Christ, in a manner which Christian theologicians of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries struggled so hard and for so long to express. Christianity had to make sense to populations who had always thought of themselves as embedded in the natural world, and who had always expected to be able to impinge upon that world, so as to elicit its generosity and to ward off its perils, by means of rites which reached back, in most parts of Europe, to prehistoric times.
Pagan worship had been officially forbidden since the end of the 4th century. Nonetheless, shrines remained active in many remote regions all over the West. As late as the 690s, in parts of Spain, votive offerings were still being made to idols.
What every preacher must learn were, as it were, the right chess-moves with which to check the eternal chess Grand Master, the devil. These chess-moves did not vary from place to place or from time to time. They are always available in the form of standard admonitions to withstand particular temptations and to avoid particular practices.
In Caesarius’ [Bishop of Arles 502-542, copied and adapted all the sermons of Augustine. Therefore, the hatred toward sex continued.] opinion, one did not even have to be a pagan or a peasant to be a rusticus (a boorish peasant who being devoid of reason and un-amendable to culture was driven by brute passion alone.). Sophisticated urbanites were warned by him that failure to abide by the strict sexual codes upheld by their bishop, betrayed rusticitas, lack of decorum. In bed, anyone could behave like a rusticus. To make love on Sundays, or when one’s wife was menstruating, was to act no better than a peasant; and the results, he pointed out appealing to a grim medical tradition, were children such as would befit indecorous tumbling-deformed children, lepers, epileptics. [This is an excellent example of the level of ignorance that the so-called Fathers of the church had. They were ignorant!] The pruning of rusticitas of every kind among baptized Christians, and not the eradication of paganism itself outside the Church was the principal object of the bishop’s pastoral care.
For Caesarius time was detached from nature. Time no longer registered the organic throb of the natural world, as this was shown in the changing of the seasons. Instead, Christian time registered the great acts of God in history. [Christian time is a loop-sided continuum that does not have any evolution at all.]
Reverentia, created habits from the heart. It assumed that the saints were still active and present on Earth, and that the good and bad fortune depended on the manner in which they were treated by their worshippers. [The saints replaced the local gods of the pagan world.]
Chapter VII Bishops, City, and Desert: East of Rome
The average bishop in the East Roman Empire was a careworn and humdrum person. He was a glorified town counselor. He owed his position to the manner in which he stood between his city and an imposing imperial administration. By 500 CE the Christian bishop and the clergy had been encouraged by the emperors to take over many duties which had once been performed, in classical times, by the town councils. The imperial governments used the clergy as its local watchdogs. Bishops were commanded to use “sacerdotal freedom” to report to the emperor governors guilty of graft or incompetence. Bishops validated the weights and measures used in the marketplace, and ensured that the city’s walls were maintained. It was they, who represented the emperor in the cities.
It is the duty of bishops [wrote the patriarch of Antioch to a subordinate] to cut short and retrain the unregulated movements of the mob…and to set themselves to maintain good order in the cities and to keep watch over the peaceful manners of those who are fed by their hand.
Tyché, Lady Luck!
Chapter VIII Regimen animarum: Gregory the Great
War between the Roman East Empire and the Persian Empire, the Lombard invasion to Italy. Emperor Justinian declares Rome “Sancta Republica” a Holy Commonwealth.
Gregory the Great, an aristocrat, becomes Prefect of Rome in 573. In 575, he returns to his father’s house in the Clivus Scauri on the Caelian Hill and turn it into a monastery. It was a center of fierce asceticism, and heavy learning. Gregory ruined his health by austerities: from them onwards his energies were sapped by constant illness. In 579CE, he was made deacon by the Roman Church and sent to Constantinople as papal representative.
From the works of Augustine, Gregory decided that all human life was an exile. Humans had been cast out from Paradise, yet the desire for Paradise still pulled at them. [He did not have any proof about it. Human life in exile, from where? Paradise? Another thought or belief that shows us the level of ignorance of the Fathers of the Church.] Yet, God was always close at hand. Gregory was sure that he could see God’s hand in every detail of the material world.
In 590CE, Gregory became Pope and he saw his life as a Pope in terms of a single phrase from the book of Job: “Behold, the giants groan beneath the waters.” In 591, Gregory wrote a book titled “Regula Pastoralis” Rule of Pastors, This book is a masterpiece on “Ars atrium regimen animarum”: The art to end all arts in the governing of souls.
• Power was here to stay; Christianity touched every level of life.
• Pointed out and regulated the rules on conduct of married persons up to the point of when and where they should have intercourse.
• It enumerated 39 different types of spiritual condition-and their opposites- and recommended how each should be addressed. The book says, “Penetrate the soul of his subjects to open a door into the heart by the shrewdest questioning.”
• It also said, “God does not reject the powerful, for He Himself is powerful (Job 36:5)”
• It could be viewed as a handbook, a guide to conduct for the ideal bishop, abbot, or clergyman. As such, it placed the souls of entire congregations in the hands of a spiritual elite.
• “Obedientian sin mora”, Obedience without hesitation was the maxim of Regula Pastoralis
• Regula Pastoralis proved to be the book for all occasions, the control of the soul. The book guided all kings and clergy of Latin Europe.
Note: My personal position is that with Gregory the Great, castrated the human free will, the freedom of mankind was usurped by Church, and mankind became slaves of the Catholic Church. Gregory the Great created the basis for the Dark ages.
Part III The End of ancient Christianity A.D. 600-750
Chapter IX Powerhouses of Prayers Monasticism in Western Europe
By the time of Benedict, alms “for the poor” often meant, not alms for the local beggars, but contributions to the “poor” monks of the local monastery. Most monasteries would scarcely have enough food for three month if there was only the daily bread of the region to eat, which requires more work on the soil than in any other part of the country.
The practice of oblation is to give a girl of age of six to a convent or a boy age 10 to a monastery as an offering to God. Children, like any product of nature were the gift of God quite as much as was any good harvest. Why, then, should children not be offered to God much as the “fruits of the earth” were offered? [Isn’t these a form of human sacrifice, a holocaust?] More cynically, of course, parents frequently used monasteries and convents as depositaries for unwanted children-and especially for girls, who required dowries if they were to be married.
Monasteries were School of the lord’s service, a place were people learned to be Christians. It was an elementary school for people to learn under the cane of the Schoolmaster. In this school of morals, people were to subject their behavior to meticulous supervision, accompanied, when necessary, by instant punishment- blows from the straps included.
Seen from the outside, monasteries looked like slave households. Places of intense discipline, carved out against the grain of normal social relations.
The nuns were prize relics of antiquity; their virginity gave the towns the power of the sacred alongside the profane world. Their bodies were intact; they have not suffered the penetration of intercourse or the disruption of childbirth. They carried an intact soul revealed through an intact body. Nuns were the Vestal Virgins on the new Christian city.
Chapter X The Making of a sapiens: Religion and culture in Continental Europe and in Ireland
Latin became known as the rustic Roman tongue. Education had always been a preserve of the upper classes of the Roman world. This education was provided in the cities, and especially in the major cities. Those in search of classical education found themselves traveling around an archipelago of cities where education was to be found. In the fifth and sixth centuries, the cities of the West could no longer support the expense of maintaining their schools. Also, in many kingdoms men knew that they served their king better, and received more generous rewards, if they opted at an early age for military careers rather than spend their time, at the feet of a schoolmaster, learning classic Latin. [The students became soldiers!]
The ecclesiastical culture of the late sixth and seventh century West was dominated by a “culture of wisdom” overwhelmingly directed to moral issues, which was analogous, in many ways, to the strenuous concern for moral improvements which had dominated philosophical thought in the Hellenistic and roman periods. [Therefore, knowledge was transferred to the monasteries and to the church.] In this environment was that Gregory the Great wrote his Regula Pastoralis that appointed the rectores, rulers of soul in a spiritual empire, whose actions had an immediate effect also in the secular world.
The sapientes, “men of wisdom” dominated the world of Latin texts. As Christianity progressed in the British Isles, these “men of wisdom “were called to regulate large Christian communities. In order to regulate these communities the sapientes devised an unusual system of penance and atonement for sin, called by scholars by somewhat clumsy name of the system of “tariffed penance.” Each particular sin had to be confessed to a spiritual guide, who was usually a bishop, a priest, or a monastic director. A precise calibrated penance, in the form of a fixed period of prayer, fasting, and similar self-mortification, was assigned to each sin. Once this penance had been performed, the sinner could be considered absolved in the eyes of God. [Absolved from a sin determined by me and castigated by men, then absolved from God? Wow]
The duty of a spiritual guide was to draw on his wisdom to search out to apply the correct “medicine for sin,” appropriate to each failing. Confession and penance were not imposed on all believers, as they came to be imposed in the Catholic Church from the year 1215 onwards.
The Penitentials consist of a list of sins and their appropriate penances. A single Penitential can range from explosive cases of perjury and bloodshed to the most intimate details of sexual behavior. Fornication by a bishop is mentioned alongside intercourse with animals, masturbation, intercourse with one’s wife “from behind, in the manner of dogs,” and sexual play by small children. Entire scenarios of temptation are described, and the appropriate penance for each act is laid down. They represented an attempt to mold society according to the ideals found in the Old Testament. In the holiness code of the Book of Leviticus, the wise men of the British Isles found an all-embracing code of behavior, based on the avoidance of various forms of pollution.
[In the Celtic world, to insult or injure a person and his kin-group, or to fail to meet agreed obligations to them, was to “leave shit on the face.” To avenge oneself of such an insult was “wash clean the face.” To offer compensation to offended neighbors was to “wash their face”-to acknowledges and restores their damage honor.]
The Penitentials frequently incorporated local law directly in their own rulings, nothing if not practical, their authors knew that no other way would peace be established in a community made up. [The Penitentials became the Law of the Land.]
Chapter XI Medicamenta paenitentiae: Columbanus
Columbanus transformed the Penitentials into “Medicamenta Penitentiae” medicines of penance to Gaul. No uniform system existed in Latin Christianity for the imposition of penance and the forgiveness of sin. For the average believer, the tradition established by Augustine in his controversy with Pelagius proved more significant. Augustine denied that any Christian could ever be without sin, even after baptism. Gregory the Great added a final tone to Augustinian tradition of perpetual penance.
The widespread “penitential” mentality also led to greater preoccupation with death and the afterlife. Gregory the Great and Columbanus believed that, once sin was gone, the soul could move, with triumphant ease, into the other world. The landscape of the other world included a well-known Heaven and a Hell whose horror was only hinted at. It also included a new intermediate region characterized by agonizing delay, “The Purgatory.”
By the year 700 CE Western Christianity had a highly individualized notion of the soul and a lively concern for its fate in the afterlife; a linking of the Mass to a notion of the deliverance of the soul, which opened the way to medieval doctrine of Purgatory; a widespread emphasis on confession as a remedy for sin.
Chapter XII Christianity in Asia and the rise of Islam
Constantinople was 13 days of travel east of Antioch to the city of Nisibis in the Persian Empire. Then 80 days of travel to the great cities oasis of Merv and Samarkand and another 150 days to reach Hsian-fu, the western capital of China. Christianity spread through the Silk Road. There were Christian communities in Persia, in the Coromandel Coast, and Ceylon. This is taken from the writing of a merchant from Antioch Indicopleustes –Cosmas the India-Sailor. Cosmas believed that the earth was flat, that there were no races of Antipodes, or unknown races at the other side of the world. For him Christianity was the dominant religion in the world and the Roman Empire would last for ever because it was a Kingdom of God, as in Daniel 7:14, “The God of Heaven shall set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed…” [Is this another failed prophesy?] For Cosmas the Roman Empire was,
“The Empire of theRroman thus participates in the dignity of the kingdom of Christ, seeing that it transcends as far as can be… any other power and will remain unconquered until the end of time.”
After 550CE, there were embassies from Persia and from Po-tzu in China.
The East Roman Empire was Christian, while the Persian Empire was Zoroastrian. Between 540CE and 630CE, they were at war for 70 years out of 90. The warfare between them was highly professional and murderous in its impact. There were clashes of armies of 50,000 soldiers or more. There sieges to ancient cities, capture, and the deportation of entire populations like in Antioch in 540 and Apamea in 573. This warfare led to the exhaustion of both empires. It contributed to the bankruptcy of both empires while the population remained wealthy and self-confident.
The plague that occurred in 542-3CE was the first destabilizing factor, then the war. Both events leveled the cities with the country and between 533 and 635CE Christianity spread through commerce and caravans of the Silk Road. The Romans spoke Latin and Greek, the Persians spoke Farsi and the Mesopotamians (the land being fought for) spoke Syriac. They had all the Greek Classics translated in their language and had a very rich culture not caring for the war at all. Syrians used the Indian number system, which was adopted by the Arabs and then by mankind, thus Arabic numerals. To the South of Mesopotamia is the Arabian Desert wasteland and the tribesmen who spoke Arabic.
From Armenia came the “Church of the East” a Monophysite church using the Old Testament models of the People of Israel. They were called the Nestorian Church, the Christians of Persia, and Nestorian Christians. [All this division came after the Council of Chalcedon.] Between 470 and 496CE, there was a bishop in Nisibis, Barsuma that accused the Church of the West of deliberately splitting the Christians of the East from the West for tactical purposes. The Syrian Christians descended from Iranians and were Iranian Christians either by intermarriage or by conversion. Pehlevi (middle Persian) joined Syriac as the other language of the Church of the East. These Christians from the East Church spread from Mesopotamia to China.
Between 610 and 620CE, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria fell to the Persian Empire [Zoroastrians]. In 627CE, Emperor Heraclius recovered Antioch and Jerusalem and deported all the Persians. While this events were happening the Arabs were being neglected by both empires. In the eyes of the Christians, Arabs were,
“There are many people between the Tigris and the Euphrates who lived in tents and were barbarous and murderous. They had many superstitions and were the most ignorant people on earth.”
The Arab’s thought were,
Put on your traveling clothes, gird yourself with your sword, and when you sit down to eat, take big mouthfuls…eat much and appear hungry… for these pleases the King of Persia … for he thinks that there is no good in an Arab unless he is a hungry eater, especially when he sees something which is not his accustomed food, If he then asks, “Will you master your Arabs for me? Say, Yes.”
The Arabian Peninsula became an echo chamber of the Roman and Persian empires. A place for the Christian and Zoroastrian philosophies collide and co-exist in a fusion of beliefs.
Muhammad of Mecca 570-632CE lived at the same time of Columbanus and Gregory the Great. The Arabian Peninsula was had an absence of a state and safety depended on the membership of a clan. Therefore, the Tribe was everything! The “international trade” which matter more in the Arabia of Mohammad, was a trade in religious ideas, carried with remarkable conductivity from north to south. Some tribes adopted Judaism other tribes adopted Christianity. Religious differences created a constant inter-tribal battle for religion.
In 610CE, Muhammad of Mecca began to have the visions of the One God, “the lord of the Worlds” (Allah in Arabic). The same God that spoke to Moses and Jesus and to many thousands of humbler prophets now spoke to Mohammad. His words were vividly memorized by his followers and passed through skilled reciters throughout the Arab World. These words were not written down until after 660CE, and he died in 632CE. When written out, they came to form the single book known as Qur’ân, and the Syriac quryana, exquisite recitation of the Word of God, comes from the same root qr’, to read, to cry aloud. Both accorded the fullest measure of authority to a religious message when it was carried, directly, by the human voice.
What Mohammad recited was, rather, a direct rendering of the eloquence of God as he spoke to the human race. This God had never ceased, throughout the ages to “call out” to all nations, through his many prophets. Now this voice repeated itself, in Arabic, in a final and majestically definitive summation. It was this aspect of the Qur’ân that offended the Jews and the Christians alike. For the message of Allah claimed to undo the past. His message declared that neglect and partisan strife had caused Jews and Christians to slip away from, even distort, the message, which they had once received from their prophets, Moses and Jesus. Christians were told, in no uncertain terms, that they have erred. They were warned by God that the Christological controversies, which had absorbed their energies for so many centuries, were based on a gigantic misunderstanding. Jesus had not been God and never claimed to be treated as if he was God:
“And behold [at the Last Judgment] God will say: “O Jesus, son of Mary! Didst thou say unto men: worship me and my mother as gods in derogation of God?” He will say: “Glory to Thee. Never could I have said what I had no right to say.” Qur’ân v: 119
The Arabs were to return to the original purity of an uncorrupted past. They realize that they were descendants of Abraham, the father of Ishmael. The Ka’ba of Mecca had been the spot where Abraham himself had sacrificed to the one, true God. All who heard this message should surrender themselves to the will of God. For this was what all religious persons had done since the beginning of time. The name adopted by the new religion, “Islâm,” and the word used to describe its adherents, “Muslims” came from the same Arabic root, slm-to surrender, to trust in one God. It summed up an entire view of history. It was a history where, in what truly mattered for human beings-that is, their relationship to God- nothing had ever changed. Islâm and Muslims had always existed. In all ages, trust in God and the rejection of all other worship had invariably distinguished true monotheists from ignorant polytheists. God had fostered this monotheism by sending the prophets to the Jews and Christians. Those who accepted the message of Moses and Jesus were Muslims without knowing it.
The word jihad, usually translated as “holy war,” originally meant little more than to “strive” to keep one’s end up in a world, which took test of martial courage for granted.
In 622CE, Mohammad made his hijra-an emigration of a leader and his armed band to find a new place to settle. He moved to Medina, and in 630CE, he returned to Mecca and eliminated all idolatry from the holy place. He died in 632Ce, leaving his companions who were blunt men in a society inured to war. They were convinced as the emperors Justinian and Heraclius had been that god blessed the armies of those who trusted in him. They intended to use their armies to inherit the earth. As an Armenian writer reported it:
“They sent an embassy to [Heraclius] the emperor of the Greeks saying: “God has given this land as an inheritance to our father Abraham and to his posterity after him. We are the children of Abraham. You have held our country long enough. Give it up peacefully, and we will not invade your country. If not, we will retake with interest what you have withheld from us.”
Heraclius the emperor said,
This people are like an evening, between daylight and nightfall, neither sunlit nor dark… so is this people neither illuminated by the light of Christ nor is it plunged into the darkness of idolatry.
Chapter XIII “The Changing of the Kingdoms”: Christians under Islam
“Up to our times the frontiers of the Roman empire stretched as far as Ireland and Britain…to Persia and the East. The statues of the emperor in bronze and marble appeared everywhere. By command of God, all nations obeyed the Romans. Now we see that the Roman world is brought low.”
In 636CE, the East Roman Army was crushed on steep eastern slopes of the Golan, at the battle of Yarmuk. In 637, at Qâdisiyya (northern Iraq) the Persian Army suffered a similar fate. In 642, Egypt and the last Persian king fell. In 698, Carthage fell, and in 698, the Visigothic kingdom of Spain collapse in the year 711. At the same time, the Arab army was raiding northern India and making contact with the western outpost of the Chinese empire. For the first time in human history, the populations of the archipelago of settled regions that stretched from Morocco to Andalusia to Central Asia and the Punjab found themselves part of a single political system.
Christian contemporaries of this revolution could do justice to so immense a change only by invoking the vision of the succession of great empires in the Book of Daniel.
This fourth, arising from the south, is the kingdom of the sons of Ishmael [the Arabs]…The fourth beast, the fourth kingdom, shall arise, which shall be greater than all other kingdoms, and it will consume the whole earth. Daniel 7:23
The new kingdom of the Arabs had replaced Rome. It was the final, gigantic flare-up of human grandeur, pride, and violence before the return of Christ to earth and the Last Judgment. Christians in the seventh century thought that they were living the End of Time.
In his Hadiths Muhammad said,
Persia is [only a matter of] one or two thrust and no Persia will be after that. But the Rûm [the East Romans] …are people of sea and rock…Alas, they are your enemies to the end of time.
Islâm has started as a foreigner [to all lands] and may again become a foreigner, folding back [on Mecca and Medina] like a snake folding back into its hole.
The Arab Armies were recruited from tribesmen. Their first loyalty was to their own tribes and not to Islâm. The Arab leadership was constantly occupied by feuds and inter-tribal wars [civil wars]. In Mesopotamia of 687CE, John bar Penkáye wrote in Syriac,
God summoned against us a Barbarian Kingdom -a people that are not open to persuasion (Isaiah 65:2) …whose comfort lies in meaningless bloodshed, whose pleasure is to dominate all nations, whose wish is to take captives and make deportations.
He became king, controlling the to kingdoms, the Persians and the Byzantines. Justice flourished in his time and there was a great peace in the regions under his control. He allowed everyone to live, as they wanted.
After 699 Arabic became the sole official language of the empire’s bureaucracy. In 693, a new coinage system replaced the East Roman coinage. By the year 700, all public spaces began to look distinctively Muslim and Arabic. The inscription of the Dome of the Rock on top of the deserted site of the former Jewish Temple at Jerusalem says,
Oh People of the book [that is, Christians, defined by their possession of holy scriptures] do not go beyond the bounds of your religion… Jesus, the son of Mary, was [only] God’s Messenger… It is not for God to take a son… The true religion with God is Islâm. (Qur’ân iv: 171 and iii 19)
For the Muslims, the foundation of their own, Islamic Empire proved that Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians had been wrong and that they themselves were right.
Through the practice of concubinage and polygamy, the descendants of slave-women came to grow up in a totally Arab and Muslim environment. Many of the greatest Arabic poets, grammarians, lawyers, and theologians of the Muslim world were descendants of a generation of slaves. Protected in this way by a sort of religious apartheid, the Christians of the Near East settled down to live with their new masters, in a state of perpetual ambivalence. Their position within the Islamic State was far better than the status of non-Christians, Jews, and pagans in the Christian empire.
Mansûr bar Sarjûn , is known as John of Damascus or John Damascene is a founding father of medieval Orthodox tradition. He showed that it was possible for an Arab to be many things in the seventh century. There were Arab Christians that were preached in Arabic. Al-Akhtal, an Arab Christian, emerged as one of the greatest poet of the Ummayad court. In Damascus, the Chalcedonians became known as “Melkites”- as “the Emperor’s People” and were striped of all the power that the Roman Church had. There was no longer a state orthodoxy imposed on the people. Jews and Christians were treated with even handed indifference, the Islamic Empire merely declared a permanent open season for religious disputes between Jews, Christians, Chalcedonians, and Monophisites. No group could use the state power to silence the other.
Anasthasius of Sinai was a learned Chalcedonian that knew the Muslims at close hand. He knew that they believed that a man predestined to die fighting in the holy war would bear on his face unmistakable signs of his impending martyrdom. He also knew that some Christians had become Muslim and that many other treated Islâm as no more than an innocuous variant of their own religion. Anasthasius believed that Islâm was a demonic religion. By contrast, the Syrian and Egyptian Monophysite of the Jacobite Church were no great lovers of the Arab, but they arrived at less dramatic conclusions. God had nodded his assent to the Arab conquest. They were a punishment on the east Roman emperors for having persecuted the true- that is, the monophysite- Church. The Monophysite called the Council of Chalcedon, “The Great Prevarication,” and to the persecutions which the East Roman Emperors in the fifth and sixth centuries.
For the Christians of the former Persian Empire, Muslim rulers were a marked improvement on the erratic patronage of a pagan King of Kings. The eastern Christians welcomed the establishment of a strong, frankly monotheist empire.
By 800CE, it was the allure of an entire profane cultured, expressed in Arabic, and not in Islâm itself, which caused the Christians of the Islamic Empire to forget their own rich heritage.
The East Roman empire regarded Islâm as a purely ethnic religion. Muslims were “Saracens,” “Ishmaelites,” or “Hagarenes”- that is descendants of Ishmael, Abraham’s bastard son by his servant Hagar. Islâm, for them, was no more than “a new, deceptive heresy.” It was not even a very interesting heresy. They saw it as an incompetently plagiarized form of Christianity, thought up by Muhammad to give a cloak of religious respectability to the ravages of his bloodthirsty nation.
Chapter XIV Christianities of the North: Ireland
In the course of the sixth century, Christianity emerged as the dominant religion because it was adopted by the royal and noble families who controlled the Irish society. Each túath (commonly called, for the sake of convenience, a tribe) was tightly interrelated group, which often claimed common ancestry. Each occupied a tiny ecological niche. The aristocrats were called errid, “men of the chariot,” from the memories of archaic warfare, which had long vanished. The commoners were called aithech, “base clients.” From top to bottom, the Irish society was one held in balance by an intricate web of mutual obligations created by gifts.
Columba, known as “Colum Cille,” Saint Columba, “dove of the Church” was the first leading Christian to come from a royal family. Was the first Irish warrior to become a monk. His descendant Adomnáin, created the Law of Innocents. This law protected women and cleric from the inter-tribal violence.
Chapter XV Christianities of the north: The Saxons of Britain
Nothing important
Chapter XVI micro-Christendom
Nothing important
Part IV New Christendoms 750-1000CE
Chapter XVII The Crisis of the Image: The Byzantine Iconoclast Controversy
By 700CE, the former world empire of East Rome, known to the Muslims as Rûm, had become a sadly diminished state. It had lost its eastern provinces and three quarters of its former revenues. For two centuries on end, until 840CE, it faced near-annual attack from the Islamic Empire- a state ten times larger than itself, with a budget 15 times greater, capable of mustering armies that outnumber the Rûmi by five to one.
Between 717 and 843CE, western Asia Minor, the coastlines of Greece and the Balkans and, at the furthest edge of the Ionian Sea, Sicily and Calabria were firmly incorporated into a new political system the Byzantine Empire, which replaced the East Roman Empire. The Byzantine Empire was defined by their religion quite as sharply as was the empire of the Muslims. Theirs was the empire of “the baptized people.” They have lost all sense of the classical past.
The Byzantine Church was increasingly cut off from Latin Christianity and from the Christian communities in the Middle East. It became more compact as its horizons narrowed. The text of the Fathers were excerpted and arranged in encyclopedic and anthologies. The organization of the overwhelming richness of the past into trenchant collection of citations and the resolution of theological problems through manuals of Questions and Answers was a necessary pursuit in Byzantium as in Seville. That orthodox belief should be reflected in uniform traditions of worship observed was characterized, not by renewed theological controversy, but by heated debates over concrete Christian religious practices.
The beleaguered Christians of the Byzantine Empire believed that, if they looked to God for help, then they had to be sure that the manner of their worship was acceptable to him. The survival of the empire was at stake.
As the pagans, the iconoclasts have made their God present by adoring figures, images, and objects of their God, his mother, and saints. A group said that God had expressly forbidden the worship of images made by human hands. They believed that it was idolatry. In 787CE, the Second Council of Nicaea put an end to idolatry. Nevertheless, in 815CE images were back!
The images were important, because the need to establish a relationship with invisible human protectors had driven the early cult of images. The need of Byzantine believers to feel that Christ and the saints were close to hand in all their daily emergencies- in sickness, in the swearing of oaths, at the baptism of their children, in childbirth and infertility, at moments of success and of danger. These had given to the inconophiles, ”low profile” tenacity in their defense of images, which ultimately, wore down the high-minded reform of public worship introduced by the iconoclasts.
In the Council of Frankfurt of 794CE, summoned by Charlemagne, declared that the decrees of the Greek Council of Nicaea in favor of the worship of images were to be “completely rejected and scorned.” [This event marks the beginning of the separation of the Catholic Roman Apostolic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church.]
Chapter XVIII The Closing of the Frontier: Frisia and Germany
Nothing important
Chapter XIX “To Rule the Christian People”: Charlemagne
Nothing important
Chapter XX In geār dagum, “In days of Yore”: Northern Christendom and its Past
The conversion of Denmark, Sweden, and nothing important.
Tlaloc said:
Thank you Dragonfly, Tretullian has been a sacred cow in some of my discussions (off this board).
I didn't like him from what I heard of him in history, but one day I actually ponied up and read his works... HE OUTRIGHT SAYS THAT ITS EVIL TO TOUCH A WOMAN! He says, seriously, that sex and marriage are only just a little better than going to hell! I thought his stuff on spectacles was dubious but this was outright nausiating.
He did some impressive things, but I cannot give him my respect after reading the things that came out of his mindset. Augustine was bad enough when he said just go with the status quo, T is... AAARRGH! :evil:
Ok, rant done, sorry...
It's not just about sex once you compartmentalize sex as being something other than the way to make kids or something other than close companionship or something other than enjoying each other. If you think of sex in the modern terms where it has nothing to do with kids ect... then no. If sex is the first part of parenting (it makes the kids) a great way to enjoy each other, and a great way to care about each other and be close, then it kind of is about sex. It is true and fair to say the relationship is 10% enjoying each other\ being close in a sexual way and 90% doing those things in other ways.
:lol:
