Bryan Ekers Sociopolitical impact of Christianity on Pagan Europe

Great Debates
1

One of the common arguments leveled against Christianity is that it is an intolerant system used to subject people to a false being and dictatorial being.

I will take the position that:

Christianity took root in Europe where vanquishing one’s foes in bloody conquest was the surest method for acquiring immortality.

So in the notion of a savior, a single human sacrifice to end all other human sacrifices, was borne the idea that one could live eternally without spilling the blood of one’s enemies, that self-sacrifice was the key to immortality, and not the sacrifice of others.

This was a superior method to Roman, ‘Glory’, that Christian, ‘Grace’, was a preferrable condition.

People point to the diminishment of arts and sciences in the ‘Dark Ages’, though recent research suggests that this belief is more hype than actuality. However, regardless of it’s specific veracity, the heights of Graeco-Roman accomplishment were limited mainly to the Patrician class with a small nod to the power of the Plebes as represented by the ‘Mob’ of Rome.

Christianity was universal in that it allowed for an adherence to a social order that went beyond the affiliation with a particular tribe and welcomed members from any and all tribes. Roman multiculturalism suited this well, and it took root first within the slave class in Roman society and grew into the class of freemen Plebeians until it became an integral part of the social order and was ultimately adopted, providing for a commonality of the ‘in-group’ that went beyond the boundaries of class, language and lineage.

That regardless of the veracity of the core beliefs, this was a social good, as it ultimately led to the greater acceptance of multiple cultures in the modern world, and has resulted in a net reduction of conquest, even if it did nothing to eliminate the savage brutality inherent in the human condition. While much violence was carried out in the name of the religion, the greater and more vicious violence throughout history has been carried out by the competing tribal nationalisms that existed within Christendom.

So from a sociological point of view, the notion that self-sacrifice is the key to immortality rather than glory on the battlefield, led to a more compassionate society.

2

I am not at all ignoring cultural fault lines where Christianity lashed out and subjected non-Christian peoples.

3

Interesting concept. You skipped over many key steps, however.

If we’re going to look at this from a sociological standpoint, it took root within the slave classes of Roman society as easily as it did for a few reasons. First there was the brisk trade along the Eastern Empire route that made the spread of the religion possible. Second people were told they could keep their rituals because hey, Christianity had those rituals too* they just went by different names. This led to all sorts of interesting splinter factions. At one point IIRC there were over 20 different types of “Christianity,” many of them in direct conflict with each other over tenets. It wasn’t a unified movement. Let us remember that Paul began his ministry in Damascus and moved through Turkey and Greece before going on to Rome where there was already at least one Christian church and following.

*even when it didn’t

4

Syntropy I was going to wait for Bryan Ekers to respond but as this is technical point and not a discussion of the overall idea I’ll respond.

The syncretism of the ritual was a necessary component to its claim of universality.

5

A few small points.

By the time of the expansive growth of Christianity, there was no longer any distinction of note between the so-called ‘patricians’ and the ‘plebes’. The distinction was rather between the emperor and his household and his appointed representatives, the army, the general mass of the citizen of the empire, the freedmen, and the slaves. Most of the ‘patrician’ lineages had in fact died out by the fourth century and indeed much earlier.

In each of these clasess we have evidence of some Christians from relatively early on. It is incorrect to attribute the rapid growth of Christianity to its popularity amongst freedmen and slaves alone.

Many early Christian texts (‘apocryphal’ acts and gospels, for example) depict a much more mixed ‘social world’ of Christianity than in generally assumed. There does appear to have been a strong emphasis on ‘widows and orphans’ care and the like. But there were also senators and tradespeople attracted to the movement who had their own money and power base of a sort (and there is some evidence of Christians in the army from quite early).

The really dramatic expansion of Christianity did not occur, however, until after Constantine made it the favoured religion of the empire.

6

Since my name’s in the title (and I’m not entirely sure why), I guess I should reply at least once. At the very least, I should point out that if I invoke Christianity in a general discussion about religion, it’s not because of any particular anti-Christian bias but rather that it’s the non-Jewish religion with which I am most familiar, having lived all my life in Quebec and thus been extensively inundated with its symbols and rituals, as I expect have been most North Americans and Europeans, which comprise the majority of the population of this board, and thus is the faith most likely to be familiar to them as well.
As for the specifics of the OP, I’m not prepared to credit Christianity for making the world more civilized (and there’s some question as to whether or not it actually is). Rather it was a combination of literacy and the spread of scientific ideas, rather than the spread of religion. At best, Christianity coincided with the Enlightenment/Renaissance/Industrial Age and now some followers are trying to claim credit. To be fair, whatever religion was predominant when these discoveries and advancements were made would probably do the same.

Well, it’s only in recent decades that it was practical to travel halfway around the world to engage in wholesale slaughter of people with radically different beliefs than your own (European colonists in the Americas had smallpox on their side). For the most part, you went to war with people who were relatively close by, and thus more likely to have views related to your own, because it was easier to benefit from conquered lands that bordered your own and to get the loot home. Again, not specifically a Christian thing.

7

Hey, Tamerlane tried!

8

I think a good comparison would be Central and South America. When Christianity was rather forcefully introduced there it did not bring about the kind of advancements that were seen in Europe when Christianity experienced its largest growth.

I’ve always thought it interesting that Central and South America have stayed very Catholic without any real schism to speak of.

9

You don’t remember cutting that naming rights deal for all of mswas’s posts?

10

I don’t buy this notion that all the advancements which made modern civilization possible from the 17th century onward happened in Christian civilization by random luck and Christianity just took the credit. There are specific reasons why certain advancements occurred in Christian Europe and not other civilizations, and those reasons are related to Christianity.

  1. Secrecy vs. openness.

We take it for granted that researchers and scholars are supposed to publish their works so that others can have a look and their knowledge will be preserved. There is nothing universal about this approach. In feudal Japan, for example, there’s evidence of some substantial achievements in math and science. The problem was that each individual jealousy guarded his own discoveries (for cultural reasons). Once he died, his discoveries died with him, and there was no net progress from one generation to the next.

The same may have been true in Europe in the Middle Ages, but starting in the Renaissance times with the development of the university system, Europe had a system which encouraged everyone to openly publish, teach, and debate what they knew. And the universities arose from religious origins, were supported by the church, and were often organized by religious groups. Many of the big names in early scientific research specifically said that they were doing their research for the glory of God. (And lest anyone try claiming that the church attempted to suppress Galileo’s research, not so.)

  1. Education.

In modern societies, the goal of the education system is to educate everybody. In ancient societies, the goal was to educate only the proper people. In ancient Greece and Rome there was agreement that too much education was a dangerous thing, and that each individual’s education should match their station in life. It was the Scholastic movement, of which Aquinas was the most famous member, that first advanced the notion of education for all as a good in itself. A few centuries later it was the Puritans who first made free, public education available for everybody. Their justification was explicitly Christian.

  1. Gender bias.

This, of course, will be a major sticking point for some. Even in the Middle Ages, women had more freedoms and responsibilities than in other civilizations. Women appearing in public and being in the same building as men was never illegal. It was never considered a good idea for a women to commit suicide when her husband died. Women’s bodies were not mutilated by foot-binding or other such practices. The social status of women in Europe was always more advanced than elsewhere. Women started earning college degrees in the 1700’s, for instance.

All this happened because Christianity’s teachings about gender differed from other religions. The importance of the Virgin Mary and the treatment of women by Jesus is the underlying reason.

11

Or maybe it’s because Medieval Christian civilization derived in part from Roman civilization, where women, while almost always under the patria potestas of some man or other, still enjoyed much more freedom and higher status than women did in Classical Greece or Jesus’ Judaea.

12

P.J. O’Rourke (in Holidays in Hell) has a relevant observation, though someday I’d like to read the work he’s citing:

As a wild guess, I figure the parenting nations of South and Central America (Spain and Portugal, mostly) never broke from the Roman Catholic church, while the parenting nations of Canada and the U.S. (England, Germany, Holland) in various ways did, with the exception of Quebec and Louisiana (colonized by France, later conquered or absorbed by English-speaking neighbors) and some isolated pockets (the Ukrainian settlements in Saskatchewan, for example) which remain strongly Catholic, though the church’s influence has waned significantly in recent decades.

13

Your various arguments don’t encourage me to give credit to Christianity - it demonstrates to me that scientific advancement requires that the state religion not interfere with scientists. Sure, they can fund the research, but any wealthy group could have done that, and arguably the Age of Enlightenment really got rolling when reason firmly replaced religion as a motivation for research.

There’s simply nothing specific to Christianity that I can see as relevant, here. If the dominant religion in Europe had been, for example, Foo-ism, with completely different dogma but the same attitude of giving money to proto-scientists and not burning too many of them as heretics, I don’t see why the results should be different, even if Foo-ism had no concept of Virgin Birth, Saviour on Earth, Three-Gods-in-One, etc. A number of things you say happened “because” of Christianity either happened in spite of it, or would have happened anyway. What is the single most important tenet of Christianity? I’ll guess it’s the existence of God in the form of man, walking the Earth as the messiah, Jesus. Of what relevance is this concept to the Laws of Motion, the Laws of Thermodynamics, atomic theory, the fundamental forces of the universe, relativity, etc.? If you want to claim that none of these (or fewer of them) would have been discovered and promulgated had Christianity never existed, then we’ll have to agree to disagree.
As a side note, I like to think that had Judaism been as aggressively proselytizing as Christianity, it would have been the dominant religion of Europe, and Europe would have been better off as a result.

14

Bryan Ekers If you are not certain why this thread has your name in the title that shows that you didn’t even read what I wrote in the thread about Islam. Oh well, what was that you said about not knowing your motivations? Yeah, I know them. If you won’t even read what I write then how can we even talk about anything? In this I am talking about not reading posts you responded to.

I said I wanted to talk about sociopolitical ramifications of religion.

And the idea that Christianity coincided with the Enlightenment is laughable nonsense. It BIRTHED them. Secular Humanism is a direct descendant of Christian morals with Greek Pagan logic. It is the child of Athens and Jerusalem. It’s not even worth discussing an alternate theory to that. Christianity in Europe predated the englightenment by a millenium.

15

It is just as silly to say that all good things happened in spite of Christianity as it is to say they happened because of it.

16

Your conclusion is faulty. I have read and continue to visit the Islam thread, I’m just not sure why my name is in the title of this thread when the original post doesn’t contain any quotes from me or links to any of my posts and, in fact, only mentions my name once; in the title itself. You could have left my name off the title and it wouldn’t have made any difference.

And that’s good, or at least potentially more interesting and useful than debating the existence of God (for which I personally see no evidence or need).

Wait, “laughable nonsense”, “not even worth discussing”, “just as silly” (in the follow-up post)… These don’t strike me at efforts at discussion, just efforts at dismissal. I’ll still give it a shot, though:

Are Christian morals (which you claim as essential to the Enlightenment) exclusive to Christianity? Could such morals have existed without Christianity? What elements of Christianity could have been discarded and yet yielded the same result? Had China, for example, not become insular in the 15th century, could it have colonized the Americas and subsequently become the globally dominant culture (Jared Diamond suggests it easily could have)? Could another religion with very little in common with Christianity except aggressive proselytizing and willingness to assimilate pagan ritual have spread across Europe? If not, why not? If there had never been the concept of a virgin birthing the Messiah, could humans still have discovered the laws of physics?

Sure, Christianity was around for 1000+ years before the Enlightenment. I find it significant, however, that it was only after the Church began diminishing in power that reason and literacy began to spread in a big way, and only after monarchies (themselves closely akin to religious structures) began diminishing in power that progress could really be made. Whatever purpose religion may have served in the genesis of science, it’s long expired and it’s certainly time for it to move off center stage.

17

Repeatedly insisting that “any wealthy group could have done that” is a dodge. There were wealthy people and groups all over the world in every civilization that ever existed. (Okay I haven’t checked every single one but I assume it’s true.) So why did the scientific revolution occur in Christian civilization and not in any other civilization. To repeatedly suggest that it was random, and that it could have occurred anywhere, does not match the facts. I’ve laid down three specific contributions, unique to Christian civilization, that were vital to progress in science, technology, society, politics, and the arts. Do you have any specific objections to my reasoning? If so, I’d love to hear them.

But again, why didn’t it happen anywhere besides Europe? Do you suppose that every nation, city-state, or tribe in history has a certain number of scientists milling around, and that progress would automatically take off as soon as they were unleashed from social controls? Well it just isn’t so. The vast majority of peoples on earth never had any science. No conception of it whatsoever. It only came into existence in its full form in Europe, and in lesser forms in Arabia and the eastern civilizations.

Christianity was vital to the three phenomenon I listed and to many others.

  1. Secrecy vs. openness. Christianity views all of its followers as the Body of Christ, a people united towards a common goal of building a better society. Hence the desire to share discoveries for the common use, rather than hoarding them for personal glory.

  2. Education. It’s easy to understand why so many ancient societies wanted to keep education properly contained and limited. In a society based on strict differentiation of people into superior and inferior groups, education must always be restricted to the upper levels. Let the lower levels learn too much and they’ll get uppity. We can find examples of this phenomenon in Ancient Greece, in India with the caste system, and elsewhere.

The Christian view of all human beings lowered social barriers. With the need for absolute, cast-in-stone divisions between social classes lowered, widespread education was no longer a threat to the social order.

  1. Gender issues. I’ve already explained the relationship of this to Christian beliefs.

Of very high relevance. In addition to providing the unique social framework that was necessary for science, Christianity also provided the unique philosophical framework.

  1. The rational universe. Among the most fundamental tenets of Christian doctrine is that God created a universe that operated in a rational and consistent way. This contrasted sharply with other religions. The Ancient Babylonians, for instance, saw the cosmos as essentially chaotic and undesigned. According to the Buddha, physical reality is illusory and the true reality underneath is in ceaseless flux.

With metaphysical views like that, there’s no point in doing physical science. The Babylonians kept excellent (by ancient standards) astronomical records. They knew exactly how many times a giant dragon had swallowed the sun or moon. But they didn’t turn it into a coherent study of astronomy. What’s the point? The dragon will swallow the sun or moon when it wishes to do so.

  1. The knowable universe. Christians believe that humanity can understand and learn about the universe. Not everybody did.
18

I’d be interested to see some corroborating evidence of this. While Athens heavily influenced Rome, it isn’t as if that empire existed in a bubble until the invasion of Jerusalem. Rome had extensive trade routes and recruited foreign soldiers from conquered nations. The influx of new ideas from other areas of Europe/Africa/Asia/the Middle East was constant. It seems short sighted to assert that Christianity and Christianity alone was what brought about the European Enlightenment. It would be like claiming Britain and the Puritans are directly responsible for the internet because they got here first and they believed in god.

19

You do understand that ‘Athens and Jerusalem’ are common metaphors to describe the debate between logic and faith right?

20

It did. Or do you mean “why didn’t it happen anywhere at the same time that it happened in Europe?” ?

What? What? No. The T’ang and Sung Dynasties in China are most famously noted as periods of “Chinese Renaissance” but there are others as well. Eastern philosophy flourished during both. Have you never heard of Buddhism? Sun Tzu? The Tao te Ch’ing? Traditional Chinese medicine goes back 5,000 years. Texts proving they were using advanced mathematics date back to the Han Dynasty in 246 BC. India and Japan went through similar periods of enlightenment. It is preposterous to assert that ONLY in Europe was there ever a full fledged renaissance with so much evidence to the contrary.