The Christian Social Legacy

As with all cultures, Western or Christian culture is a unique blend of various contributing sub-cultures, ones however which combined around the idea of the importance of the sovereignty of the individual. This is partly a Jewish idea, partly a Greek idea, and partly a Roman idea, into which Jesus came to sum up the idea of the sovereign individual. Each of these sub-cultures helped to develop that key idea. And so it would profit us greatly in coming to an understanding of the deeper character of our Western civilization if we took a closer look at each of these contributing sub-cultures. And it is most logical to start with the earliest, and in a way the most determinative, of these ancient sources: Judaism.

The Jewish contribution to Western culture. Anciently, Israel (of which the Jews were the southern-most of the 12 tribes) at one point went at life pretty much like all the other nations of the day. Their capital city, Jerusalem, possessed not only royal palaces but also a Temple, where – under the leadership of the Levitical priests – they performed animal sacrifices in worshiping their god Yahweh.

But in becoming a rich and successful people, the Israelites soon fell away from their devotion to Yahweh, who then abandoned them to the folly of their own political planning and operating. They became reckless in their messing with the growing powers of the Egyptian Empire to the south of them and the Assyrian Empire to the East of them. If they had been wise, they would have stayed out of the growing struggles between these two neighboring empires, for this was not God's plan for them. And they had prophets who warned them of the dangers of such foolish involvement in the larger political battles going on at the time. Eventually Israel got itself in trouble with Assyria, and the cruel Assyrians marched ten of the twelve tribes of Israel off to captivity, where they scattered the Israelites among the peoples of their empire, and soon much of the Israelite identity simply dissolved, never to recover again.

However, the Southern Israelite kingdom, basically made up of the tribe of Judah (thus the Jews) had more wisely stayed out of these political doings, and Assyria left them alone. But such wisdom did not pass on (as so often happens) to a new generation of Jews, who got mixed up in the struggles between Egypt and the newly rising power of Babylon, which had just succeeded in overthrowing Assyrian power. Finally now it was the Jews turn – at least their leading citizens – to be carted off to Babylon.

But by the grace of God, the Babylonians let the Jews at least remain together as a community in captivity. Thus the Jewish identity was not lost. But still, as a people's religion defined the very nature of their societies back then (and still today) they were in a bit of a quandary. The Babylonians would not let them build in Babylon a temple to their god Yahweh (the one in Jerusalem in fact had just been torn down by the Babylonians), and thus it seemed at first that there would be no way for those relocated to Babylon to hold onto to their unique social identity.

But they did have one very precious item that they could cling to, which would serve to keep them mindful of their existence as a distinct people: their own tribal narrative – a history of their tribal ancestors and their relations with their god Yahweh, a story which reached all the way back to what they understood as the very beginning of humankind itself. There in Babylon incredible religious scholarship would develop under the guidance – not of the (unemployed) temple priests, but instead by religious teachers or rabbis, who collected this far-reaching narrative and turned it into a piece of holy writing, something that the members of the Jewish community could study, meditate on, and be guided by socially. And they could do so wherever they found themselves, even there in Babylon. All they needed was some kind of community center, the synagogue, where they could gather locally on a regular basis (at least weekly on the Sabbath) and hear a teaching – usually some form of commentary on their holy Scriptures – presented by their teachers (rabbis) and elders.

And it was all very democratic, in the way that all young men were expected to demonstrate – as a rite of passage into manhood – the ability to perform this kind of rabbinical Biblical study and teaching. In a way it was an early version of the "priesthood of all believers"!

This also gave the Jews the idea that they served the interests of God in the broader realm of humankind, for they were led now to understand that God was not just a Jewish God, but was the God of all people, Babylonians, Egyptians, and everyone else. And as a special covenant-people of God's own choosing, they had the larger responsibility of bringing their awareness of God's role in life to all the people, non-Jews as well as Jews. Thus they became quite active in Babylonian affairs, as a "people of God," a "Light to the Nations."

Eventually the Persians conquered the Babylonians, and allowed the Jews then to return to their lands in Israel. But most chose to remain behind in Babylon and continue their special lives there (Babylon and then Persia would continue to serve as a key center of Jewish scholarship and religious activity). Those that did return to Jerusalem naturally rebuilt their Temple. However, they did not let go of the Jewish spiritual practices developed during their Babylonian captivity, but instead kept Jewish life active around the local synagogues, under the leadership of the rabbinical scholars. And that would continue all the way down to the time of the Roman Empire, and the arrival of Jesus. In fact, it still continues to this day, wherever the Jews find themselves in this world of ours!

Greek (more specifically, Athenian) "Democracy." "Democracy" is a term used today by Americans to describe what it is that they understand America to be in its very essence – unfortunately not always with the clearest understanding of what is involved with such a concept or social identifier. But it is a powerful idea nonetheless, made somewhat dangerous at times because, unlike the Founders of the American Republic over two hundred years ago who understood the possibilities and dangers both of the idea of democracy, to Americans today it has become something like a religion in itself.

Most Americans know that the idea of democracy was a political legacy given Western Civilization by the ancient Greeks (500s-300s BC). Actually it was practiced widely around the ancient world, and not just in Greece – developed out of the need of tribal peoples, generally everywhere, to consult with clan or household elders whenever an important decision affecting the tribe had to be made: when to hunt, when to go to war, when to make a physical move. It was necessary to get every clan, every household of the tribe on board with the decision – for unity of purpose was essential to the survival of the tribe. Thus democratic consultations would continue until some kind of general agreement was possible prior to taking action with respect to the event in question.

Thus it was that the very ancient or early city-state Athens was quite reliant on the democratic process of holding meetings to discuss common matters – and have an affirmative vote from the participants in order to move things forward.

But when the population of Athens began to grow, participation of all Athenian citizens in such decisions became problematic. There simply were too many people involved to conduct such business in an orderly fashion. Consequently, small groups of people – especially ones that could claim a longer line of Athenian ancestry – would tend to take control, turning themselves into something of a ruling class. And the xenoi (foreigners) not born of Athenian ancestry, who were even more numerous than the Athenian citizenry, had no place at all in this process, not to mention the slaves, who outnumbered even the xenoi.

Unsurprisingly, as class distinctions developed, so did class conflicts. Several efforts were made to improve the democratic process (a toughening of political requirements under Draco (thus the term "Draconian," something very brutal as social measures typically go), countered a generation later by Solon – who attempted a fairer distribution of responsibilities and rewards. However, this did not make a huge difference in the Athenian political lineup. Finally, in reaction to Peisistratus' tyrannical rule (a "tyrant" was actually originally a strong-handed defender of the rights of the poor) and the rising danger of mounting Persian power to the East, the popular politician Cleisthenes was led to reform the constitution by simply re-classifying the Athenians into ten residential or neighborhood "tribes" and having these tribal districts represented at the Assembly by citizens chosen by lot. Fair enough! And thus it was that Athens affirmed itself as a "representative" democracy.

For a time this reform, plus the mounting danger of an aggressive Persia taking control in the eastern Greek lands of Ionia, brought unity to the Athenian population, bringing even the Greek city-states to amazing unity under Athenian leadership. It even forced Athens' chief political rival in Greece, Sparta, to cooperate with Athens militarily. And this unity finally allowed the Greeks to defeat the Persians at Marathon (490 BC) and Salamis (480 BC).

From this point on (the mid-400s BC) Athens took on the position as Greece's leading city-state, particularly when other city-states agreed to send funding to Athens to support the unified Greek defenses of the new Delian League against a resurgent Persia.

And this marked the "Golden Age" of Athens, under the capable political leadership of Pericles (excellent orator, statesman and general) during the period from the mid-400s BC to his death in 429 BC, a time in which Athens was also producing the historical insights of Herodotus (to about 424 BC), the creative works of the dramatists Euripides and Sophocles (to 406 and 405 BC respectively) and the outstanding philosophy of Socrates (to his death in 399 BC).

But moral problems within Athens itself had begun to mount during that same period. Peace had brought not democratic nobility of spirit, but a new greediness, stoked by the political self-interests of a series of leading Assembly speakers, clever Sophists or "wise ones," able to convince – through the most clever use of "reason" – the representatives of the people to do the most unwise, most self-destructive things, merely because it played to the interests of one or another of these "demagogues."

For instance, the demagogues led the Assembly to the decision to use the money sent by the other city-states to Athens for Greek mutual defense instead to simply beautify Athens itself (new buildings, improved streets, grand statuary, etc.), despite the protests raised by its Greek allies. Ultimately these other city-states would look to Sparta to champion their cause against an increasingly greedy Athens, and ugly war resulted.

How stupidly selfish Athenian democracy had become. And the Athenian representatives would also foolishly ostracize (expelling for ten years) Athens' very best military leaders – actions inspired by jealous Assembly speakers. What was this democratic body thinking? All of this helped lead to Athens' ultimate defeat in a series of Peloponnesian Wars (the second half of the 400s BC).

Thankfully Sparta ignored the demands of its city-state allies (Thebes, Corinth and others) to enslave the defeated Athenian population, but resolved instead simply to tear down Athens' city walls, leaving the city defenseless militarily from that point on (404 BC). This was the beginning of the end of Athenian greatness.

But the foolishness of Athens' democratic Assembly did not end there. In 399 BC, the wisest philosopher of the ancient world, Socrates, was voted the death penalty by the democratic Assembly – because he annoyed Assembly speakers by calling into question the wisdom of their words and behavior.

In sum, democracy Athenian-style had led that society down a very self-destructive road.

Socrates' pupil Plato tried to find a better approach to political wisdom by developing in a key philosophical work, Politeia (commonly known by its Latin name, Republic) his own idea of what a well-run society should look like. But the success of such a venture depended entirely on the wisdom of the leading politician, not the wisdom of the people (which Plato doubted was obtainable anyway).

This would be the beginning of the tendency of intellectuals to design from their desks beautiful societies, or "utopias" (a Greek word meaning literally "nowhere"!) – built entirely on their own powers of rational planning, and not on the basis of actual human experience (which tends to be not very pretty much of the time).

But Plato would have the rare opportunity as an intellectual to discover how well his ideas actually worked, when he was invited by the young tyrant of Syracuse, Dion, to put his philosophy to work there. The end result when Plato faced political reality was total disaster for Syracuse (20 years of chaos under the social breakdown that his experiment ultimately produced) and Plato's own arrest, imprisonment and sale into slavery, which he was finally purchased out of by a sympathetic fellow philosopher.

Plato's own student, Aristotle, was more cautious in his approach to political design, actually studying historically various patterns of social governance. In his famous works, Politics, he stated that on the basis of his research, the measure of good or bad in a society and its government appeared to depend not on the constitutional form of government itself – whether a government was made up of one (as in a monarchy) or a few (as in an aristocracy) or the many (as in a democracy) – that is, not by how many ruled, but by how morally they ruled. A rule of one could be good – or bad – depending on the moral quality of the ruler. A rule of the many could be good – or bad – as for instance a rule by an enlightened citizenry would be considered good, whereas rule by a frenzied mob would most definitely be viewed as some perverse form of popular tyranny. Thus to Aristotle, "good" or "bad" depended not on how many ruled but how well the society was ruled by its own high moral standards. Failure to hold to its foundational standards would soon enough bring any society to ruin.

As we shall see further on in this narrative, the Founding Fathers of the American Constitution (1787) were college men, back when college or university education meant principally a study of the humanities (philosophy, theology, history, law, and the social sciences). Thus they were very aware of both the political history of ancient Greece, and the philosophy of the Greeks, especially Plato and Aristotle. We shall see more of how this influenced deeply their decision as to how to build a new Federal system uniting the thirteen newly independent American states. Full democracy was not their goal. Democracy was included as part of the dynamic. But they attempted to put it under the considerable restraint of a constitutional "checks and balances" system. More about that later.

Alexandrian Greece. While we are on the subject of ancient Greece, it is important to bring into the narrative the role that a single individual, Alexander of Macedon, would play in the development of the ancient world. He was the son of Philip II of Macedon, the latter a strong warrior who many of the Greeks had looked to in order to bring Greece out of the disorder ongoing in that land since the days of the Peloponnesian Wars. Philip, anticipating a permanent (or dynastic) call to Greek governance, prepared to have at his side a son, Alexander, well informed in the ways of the people Philip intended to rule. So he sent Alexander off to study under the very wise Aristotle. But Philip was killed in 336 BC, and his 20-year-old son suddenly found himself at the head of his father's project.

Most amazingly, Alexander proved to be as much a leader as his father. He was able finally to assemble the Greeks into some kind of united community, to take on the powerful Persians directly – in Persian territory itself this time. There would be no more just sitting passively waiting to fend off another Persian assault, as had been the pattern previously. Alexander intended to go at the Persians in their own world.

He first captured the lands bordering the Eastern Mediterranean, including even Egypt. He then swung his army eastward and crushed the Persians' own efforts at self-defense in 331 BC.

But Alexander had a roll going, and kept on conquering, deeper into central Asia, and even down into the Indus River valley. But his soldiers were at this point exhausted and wanted to go home, or at least back to Babylon, the former Persian capital, but now theirs as well. Thus he turned around (however, losing half his men trying to get across the Baluchi Desert). But back in Babylon, Alexander was himself soon to die (323 BC), probably his death resulting simply from sheer exhaustion.

Alexander thus left a huge Greek legacy for his successors to deal with (they ultimately split Alexander's huge empire into a number of smaller empires). And it left a lasting Greek cultural imprint on the entire region, not only in the Eastern Mediterranean but even into the Mesopotamian lands (principally today's Iraq) and large sections of central Asia.

The importance to Americans of this Alexandrian legacy is that Greek culture was so dominant in the times of Jesus and the first century church that all of Christianity's foundational writings were done in Greek, not the local Semitic language (Hebrew and Aramaic) of the lands where Christianity was birthed, or even the Latin of the then-dominant Roman Empire.

The Roman Republic. Actually, America long-identified itself as a republic – not as a democracy. There is a difference. A republic refers simply to the idea of the actual ownership of a society – not the particular method by which it goes about the business of being governed. The word "Republic" comes from the ancient Latin res publica or "thing of the people." A Republic belongs to no particular ruling dynasty (such as the kings or emperors), no ruling class, no particular tribe, sect or socio-economic group within a society. It belongs to all the people of that society.

And for such an understanding, we Americans are deeply indebted to the Romans, for it is from them that the concept originated. Under the Romans, their government or "republic" was originally designed to be a government not of human wills, whether the will of one person or even the many. The Roman Republic was intended to be a government of laws, a permanent body of rules that would describe the order that all Romans were to live and thrive under – an unshakeable legal order that would continue forward in a precisely-defined way regardless of whatever personalities played their assigned parts in this order. A Republic was intended to be a system of fundamental or unchanging constitutional laws – not a system governed by the whims of human ambition and personal political interest, no matter how "rational" these whims might claim to be. And these laws were supposedly eternally valid, because they found themselves detailed on 12 bronze tablets (450 BC) posted in the Roman Forum (central market and religious center) for all to see. And all Romans knew these laws well.

This was the key to Rome's early success in its expansion across Italy, and then across the Mediterranean world (and Europe north of the Alps as well). Unlike tribes and nations that have a very hard time bringing conquered peoples into their social order as fellow members (choosing instead to enslave them or butcher them on the spot), the Romans offered participation of those they recently conquered in their society as full members, provided they were willing to come under Roman law and live accordingly as Roman citizens. That was not only fair, it was powerfully effective in developing Rome's wide-spread multi-ethnic republic.

And it created a powerfully effective socio-economic order. Given their legalistic mindset, Romans almost instinctively organized the world around them physically and materially as they conquered it, building roads (still standing today in many places) to provide rapid communication, troop movement and ultimately commerce connecting the Roman center to its outlying territories. Wherever they conquered they planted military camps (naturally on a perfectly uniform grid pattern!), which became the heart of new commercial towns which quickly grew up around these garrisons. They cleared the seas of pirates and kept marauding tribal raiders from central and east Europe closed out beyond a well-defended line running from the Rhine River in Germany to the Danube in the Balkan Peninsula. Consequently, the Mediterranean world that Rome had "conquered" experienced an unprecedented peace and prosperity, one that made Rome the very model of civilization itself to millions of people.

The Empire replaces the Republic. But again, such politics – even Republican politics – is not a perfect thing. It involves people. And people can be very messy to work with.

Over time, but particularly during the wars with the Carthaginians (the three Punic Wars from the mid-200 BC to the mid-100s BC), the Roman Senate had become the center of all Roman power. It was a club of old Roman families (the "patricians") joined by a select group of "commoners" (the "plebeians") of recently acquired wealth, which closed its ranks against the rest of the Roman common or plebeian citizenry. In short, the Senate had turned itself into a ruling oligarchy. Meanwhile rising taxes necessitated by ongoing war, and competition from the growing amount of slave labor acquired in these wars, were bringing the more middle-class Roman plebeians to ruin. And yet real Roman power, especially the power of the Roman military, was built on the loyal services of these commoners as citizen-soldiers. Something drastic needed to be done to save Rome from collapse or revolution.

Thus as was the case for Athens, efforts were undertaken by leading Roman citizens to reform the system, opening up bitter debate as to exactly how that was to work. "Reform" invites new forms of reasoning into the older legal order, reasoning which can go most any way, or at least in the way of the most powerful of the social groupings within society. In short, the ancient Roman Constitution proved to be not quite as permanent or unchanging as a body of laws.

Social problems thus merely increased as various identity groups wielded reason against each other as Rome sought to upgrade the now-changing constitution. Tragically, identity politics was overwhelming the constitutional republic.

The Gracchi brothers, Tiberius and Gaius, as Tribunes (Rome's political officers representing the interests of the commoner plebeians), attempted reforms in favor of the plebeians (133-121 BC), which were blocked by a jealous Senate. The brothers were either clubbed to death by a mob or forced into suicide in advance of a mob, stirred to action by the Senate.

This brought forward the military leader Marius (108-100 BC) who tried to use his power to clean out the corruption in both the military and the massively expanding Roman bureaucracy. But in the end, he was unable to stop the Roman fall into deeper "Social War." This in turn led General Sulla to march his troops into Rome (a highly illegal act), designed to undercut the plebeian reform party and strengthen the position of the Senate. Thus Rome came under the first of its military dictators (82-79 BC) or "emperors" (from the Latin imperator or military commander).

But the chaos only deepened, especially with Spartacus's slave uprising (73-71 BC). At this point, the Senate looked completely to the Roman military to save Roman society. This resulted in the selection of three generals – Crassus, Caesar and Pompey – to bring Rome back under control. But instead, it simply put Rome through the process of a growing political competition among these three military giants. One last effort was made – by Cicero – to bring Rome back under constitutional rule. But getting nowhere, Cicero retired from politics, the last significant spokesman for Roman Republicanism. Finally, with Caesar coming out on top in the competition among the generals – by marching his troops on Rome in 49 BC – Rome now found itself under full military rule. The Republic had just begun its conversion from Republic to Empire (imperator-ruled).

And it would be Caesar's adopted-son (actually nephew) Octavian "Augustus" Caesar who would complete the conversion, as he tightened up Roman "Republican" society just as a general would tighten the ranks of his army. His absolute hold over Roman society did finally bring about much-needed social order. But it also ended forever the role of the Roman commoners in determining the shape and behavior of their society. Rome was now ruled "from the top down" by a rigidly organized Roman military imperium. The "Republic" now existed in name only.

For a while this looked as if it had been exactly the right development needed by a mighty Rome. And this "for a while" was set in place by indeed a number of very capable Roman emperors – Octavian Caesar, Tiberius, Vespasian, Domitian, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and finally Marcus Aurelius – who governed the Empire during most of the first two centuries of the Christian era.

But from the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 onward, Rome (or its military legions that actually did the selection of Rome's imperial leadership) seemed unable to come up with talented leadership. To a great extent this was caused by the deep infighting that went on among the legions as one or another legion would promote its own general as Rome's new emperor. The situation got so bad that in a 50-year period (running from 235 to 285), constant overthrow or assassinations of emperors (25 in total!) going on within the higher ranks of the military caused Rome to tumble into deep moral corruption and social chaos. And thus did Rome begin its fall from greatness – to the status of its Republic being no more than a fond memory, actually a tragic memory.

CHRISTIANITY ... ITS ORIGINS

The critical importance of America's own Christian roots. But, of all the different social legacies that went into shaping American society – Jewish, Greek, Roman and, Christianity – it has been the last of this list, Christianity, that served ultimately as the foundational element of American society.

It was Christianity and its accompanying social order that birthed and then developed English America politically, economically, socially, etc. – serving as America's moral-spiritual foundations on which a new American society was built, even many generations before the establishment of the American Federal Republic in 1787.

Jesus – the pathway to the Fathership of God. Jesus the Christ or "Anointed One," as founder of this Christian religion that was so foundational to American birth and development, was something of a Jewish teacher or rabbi – except that he did his teaching out in the open fields as well as in the local synagogues. He preached a call to come to God personally – like coming to your own Father (and thus he spoke of God as "Abba" or "Daddy" in the language of the day) – so familiar in expression that it shocked proper Jews who thought he was not showing respect to Almighty God. He preached not only to proper Jews (who anyway thought that they did not need his advice) but also to the rejects of Jewish society – and even to non-Jews or Gentiles.

In fact that broadness of his spiritual reach was the very heart of his ministry, the demonstration that God as Father was not interested in the various ways that we humans divide the surrounding world into various identity groups, ones to be loved and supported and those to be despised and forcefully rejected. And Jesus's wide-ranging realm of love included not only tax collectors and women of questionable repute (major sinners in the Jewish social scheme), but also foreigners such as a Roman centurion and the despised Samaritans, and even lepers. And he also had a high regard for the importance of children, a group of small beings who had not yet earned the right of high regard or social respect in the thinking of the time (and maybe still even today). Furthermore, he drew into his closest circle of friends people of no greater status than that of fishermen.

In short, Jesus was no practitioner of identity politics. Quite the opposite. His ministry was a clear demonstration of the fact that our Heavenly Father made no such human distinctions in his love of humankind. That was man's own particular failing: to judge others on the basis of where these others stood in the comparative realm of identity politics.

Jesus demonstrates the power of such faith. And just as shocking, Jesus performed signs and wonders or miracles, calming the storms, performing deep physical healings even of lepers, raising individuals from death (even as in the case of his friend Lazarus from the grave itself) – all undertaken to drive home his point about the importance of getting into a right relationship with God as Father. With God as personal Father, even the laws of the physical universe must submit to strong human faith.

Of course people of reason (they existed back then no less than they do in today's "scientific" culture) were disbelieving and even hostile to such demonstrations of Jesus's authority, which he assured others was also – through the simple power of faith in God as Father – within their reach as well.

The cross of Jesus Christ. Ultimately the Jewish political authorities had enough of Jesus's threat to their well-structured universe ¹ by way of his miracles and most unusual street ministry, and had him arrested and turned over to the occupying Roman governor of the day, falsely accusing Jesus of encouraging rebellion even against Rome itself – something to get him to be put away by the cruel Roman device of hanging criminals on a wooden cross until they died a slow and agonizing death. And so it came to Jesus.

But then hundreds of his followers were most certain that he returned (briefly, for 40 days or so) from the grave and again taught them his gospel (good news) message before being taken up to Heaven to join the Father at God's right hand – and by doing so, releasing the Holy Spirit to come among the people (on the day of Pentecost) in order to continue the work themselves that Jesus had started.

It is ironic that the Roman device, the cross – that was intended to force the most humiliating death as possible on a criminal – would become itself the very symbol of Christianity. This is because Jesus's death on the cross was understood by his followers to be an act of cosmic significance: the blood sacrifice or sin-offering required by the power of Heaven as the price for entry into eternity. But Jesus himself was without sin, and so the sins he was paying for in his self-sacrifice on the cross were not his own. Instead the sins being paid for by the cross were in fact the sins of the entire range of humanity.

But how could one man's sacrifice be sufficient to pay for the sins of all humankind? Actually, Jesus was ultimately understood to be not just a mere man – but was fully divine – and thus able, as God himself, to offer himself in sacrifice for the sins of the world. A very loving God had, in essence, offered himself through his Son as the payment for the sins of all mankind – at least for those, anyway, that were willing to put themselves under such divine grace and receive, at the foot of Christ's cross, God's full forgiveness. Furthermore, in doing so, they also received a new, powerful life from the hand of God – without being in any way specially deserving of such favor. In this new life they would live by and through the power of God's own Holy Spirit, to help them take on the challenges of life – including even the challenges presented by their own moral frailties. And they would continue to be fully empowered to meet the particular challenges presented to them individually – and jointly (as members of a Christian society) – until they were to draw their last breath, and at that point, when their work on earth was done, join their Heavenly Father in eternal paradise.

Trinitarianism. This idea of a loving Heavenly Father, sacrificing on the cross his own divine Son for the sins of the world, and then empowering those who accepted for themselves this act of divine forgiveness with the gift of God's own Holy Spirit – all of this came together as a key belief system known as Trinitarianism: a single God in three "persons" – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Unitarianism. However, receiving the salvation that God himself lovingly offered by way of Christ's cross turned out not to be such an easy concept to get over to many people – because it is a more natural instinct of man to want to earn his own moral credits himself – as a matter of moral pride. Setting aside that pride and receiving the undeserved saving grace of God himself just was more than most normal egos could handle.

Those that could not or would not rise above the idea of earning moral merits through one’s own good works argued that Trinitarianism sounded like merely another version of Dionysian Greek religion or philosophy. Indeed, members of the Roman world who lived in the predominantly Greek cultural areas of the Empire were more able to understand and embrace Trinitarianism. But those of the Semitic world of Syria, Palestine and Arabia, for instance, refused to embrace Trinitarianism because it did not conform well to their cultural understanding of moral behavior and social obligation. But this would also include many German tribes north of the Roman borders, who did come to accept Christianity, but also only of the Unitarian variety

Ultimately, as Unitarian Christians, they understood Jesus as a fully human creature – not another form of God while on earth. To Unitarians, Jesus was a human without sin to be sure, which made him a perfect moral example worthy of complete devotion by others – one indeed so perfect in behavior that at his death he was raised in heaven to sit at the right hand of God as God's favored Son. And as far as the notion of an assisting Holy Spirit – Unitarianism found no place in its understanding to include such a concept. That was way too Greek for a Semitic or Germanic mind to grasp.

Trinitarianism versus Unitarianism would remain an ideological tension that would reach through the long history of Christianity and its impact on the larger world – even down to today.

The Early Church. Those who early took up the "Way" of Jesus the Christ during the first couple of centuries of the Christian community did so in a rather typical Jewish way – gathering together regularly at least weekly on the "Lord's Day" (Sunday), although largely in secret because it was very dangerous to be a Christian at that time. Here they would recall the sayings of Jesus, pray together, and just in general fellowship as mutual followers of Christ.

Efforts were soon made to bring together for study various narratives about Jesus' life and ministry (the gospels) – plus letters circulated among the various churches written by key Christian leaders advising them on the Christian life, many of these letters written by the Jewish convert, Paul (formerly Saul). Thus was formed the foundations of the Christian New Testament, the second part of the Christian Bible, following the longer Jewish or Old Testament portion of the Bible. Such writing served not only as the central document that described Christian life in the years of Christ and immediately thereafter – but also as a social model instructive for Christians at all times and for all generations.

Intense Roman persecution. During those first few centuries, Christianity was not well accepted, either in its Jewish homeland or in the broader context of the Roman Empire. It was subject to waves of intense Roman persecution – not because of its rather un-Roman religious beliefs (Rome was actually very tolerant of an amazing wide variety of religious beliefs held by their citizens), but because the Christian religion refused to also acknowledge the divinity of the Emperor (emperor worship). This was too drastic a departure from Rome's imperial policies. Thus the Christians were hunted down ruthlessly, and then put to death for their refusal to worship the Emperor. This involved even gruesome public displays of Christian slaughter by wild animals or gladiators, or anything designed to entertain the Roman spectators.

But ironically, Christian martyrdom merely became an even more-powerful social force spreading within the Empire – because of the very quiet bravery of Christian martyrs undergoing such cruel Roman death. Romans grew increasingly impressed with Christianity's ability to give its followers such incredible personal moral and spiritual strength, even in the face of a most terrible death. Christian morality stood out glowingly in high contrast to the obvious moral collapse going on within a darkening Roman Secular/Materialistic imperialist culture.²

¹Today we would term their well-structured universe as one that was "scientifically ordered." Jesus seemed not to be limited in his thinking and behavior by such "science."

²The Roman government's offering of "bread and circuses" to the masses to keep them supportive of a decadent imperial order was a classic case of a ruling elite failing to understand what it is that makes for a vibrant society, one defended willingly even to the point of death by its members. Cheap material rewards offered by a ruling class will never rescue a society whose moral order is failing.

Jesus Christ – Pantocrator ("Ruler of All")

CHRISTIANITY BECOMES "ROMANIZED"

Then Christianity's fortunes – and its very character – changed dramatically when the Roman Emperor Constantine decided in the early 300s not only to accept Christianity for himself, but also to make it the new moral-spiritual foundation of the decaying Roman Empire.

At the time, Christianity was having a huge impact on the Roman Empire, so much so that the Emperor prior to Constantine, Diocletian, had conducted one of the cruelest efforts to eliminate Christianity (thereby supposedly bringing Rome back to good order), but had succeeded no more than the emperors before him. Then when he died, four imperators competed for the position as grand ruler of the Roman Empire.

One of them, Constantine, in 312 received a vision in the night before a crucial battle with a competitor (the latter was equipped with a much larger legion supporting him), a vision that told Constantine to place the chi-rho (Greek symbols representing Christ) on their shields, indicating that they were doing battle for Christ as well as Constantine. And indeed, the victory of Constantine the next day was so impressive that it confirmed for him the critical importance of Christianity, although his familiarity with the religion was rather shallow at the time.

In any case, it would be another ten years before his sole claim to emperorship would be completed. But nonetheless, in conjunction with an imperial ally, Licinius, Constantine the next year (313) issued the Edict of Milan, ending all further persecution of Christianity.

Indeed Constantine even took for himself the title pontifex maximus, making himself also the religious head of the Roman Empire, and as such began to reorganize the Christian religion, Roman style. He called conferences with the bishops or Christian leaders to clear up the clutter of three centuries of unsupervised religious development, by clarifying the doctrines (or "creeds" or "confessions"), deciding which of the considerable body of Christian writings were to be officially authorized as "canonical," and by developing a huge, bureaucratic ecclesiastical (church) structure to supervise the life of this religious community, whose religion had now officially become the moral-spiritual underpinning of Constantine's Empire.

Indeed, before that same century (the 300s) was finished, subsequent Christian emperors would see that anything that did not fit into a precise or legalistic definition of Christianity would be rejected, and ultimately, Roman style, even be suppressed. So it was indeed that Christianity, under imperial sponsorship, now itself became the persecutor of any religious deviants within the newly Christian Roman Empire.
And thus it was that the Christian faith, which had started out as the source of strength offered the common Roman citizen in an increasingly depersonalized Roman Republic run by military authorities no longer personally accountable to the Roman citizenry, was subsequently stripped of its democratic roots, and itself became part of the highly authoritarian Roman imperial realm.

However, at the same time, the masses rather naturally still held close to their hearts certain aspects of traditional pagan Roman religion – as well as a deep reverence for the Earth Mother cults that had been brought in earlier from the East along with Christianity. With the authorities having now outlawed the religious practices in which the little people once looked for assistance to the patron gods of old, pagan deities that once presided over family matters, business matters, travel issues, romance issues, etc., the little people found that by appealing instead to famous Christian saints, reputed to possess the same supportive powers as the former pagan gods, they could satisfy their spiritual-religious hunger. They thus now prayed to the saints rather than to the old pagan deities for their blessings. There was nothing Biblical about any of this (this idea did not originate from Jesus's own teachings, nor those of his original disciples). Yet the Christian authorities let such worship of the saints stand, because it seemed to satisfy everyone and seemed somehow to qualify even as proper Christian practice.
Likewise, Jesus seemed to slip away from the grasp of the little people as he became the friend of emperors, Jesus's primary role now being to certify the rule of imperial candidates by Jesus's own personal endorsement from Heaven. That is, Jesus was now Christus Rex (Christ the King), the friend of the emperors, and too lofty to be approached as personal friend and savior by mere commoners.

His place in the hearts of the little people now was taken by Jesus's mother, Mary. She was accessible, she was the one that you could go to in order to reach the powers of Heaven. Of course, Mary-worship quickly and easily replaced Earth-Mother worship, Mary being able to offer a Christian alternative in terms of the same feminine warmth and hope as the older Earth-Mother (Aphrodite, Isis, Demeter, Astarte, etc.) cults had formerly offered the little people. Eventually Mary as Theotokos (Mother of God) basically replaced Jesus as the focal point of common Christian worship. Under Roman sponsorship, churches, cathedrals and other centers of Christian worship were dedicated to her honor, rather than Jesus's. Of course, Mary was mentioned in the Christian Bible, but never in this central role, one that Biblically belonged only to Jesus.³

The Madonna (Mary) and Child – with Worshipers and Angels

Also, Biblical writings themselves began gradually to fade as the fundamental authority defining the Christian faith. That place was being taken by the church authorities, the bishops and archbishops who presided over the Christian faith, Roman style, whose sacred pronouncements now became the final authority on matters of Christian belief and behavior. An episcopal ⁴ bureaucracy whose authority flowed from the religious power-centers of Constantinople, Alexandria (Egypt), Antioch (Syria) and old Rome (Italy) now directed completely the Christian faith, and its leading role in the Roman Christian political, economic and social world.

Religious works vs. divine grace. This Romanization of Christianity would also have a tendency to move Christianity slowly over the centuries towards Unitarianism – as salvation or access to heaven depended less and less on God's grace and the individual's repentance and transformation in being confronted by that grace – and more and more on the powers of the official Roman Church to offer salvation to the Christian faithful. The Church now required regular periodic confessions to a priest (followed up by certain works performed by the penitent sinner as specified by that priest), allowing the person to be qualified to receive the holy sacraments or blessings of the priest in order to help cleanse the sinner of his or her sins. Thus it was that works slowly took the place of Divine grace in the way the Church instructed the faithful concerning the requirements for salvation, and the reward of eternal life.

But Rome declines in the West anyway. Not only did Constantine reshape Roman culture by adopting Christianity as Rome's new moral spiritual foundation, he also moved the political center of the Empire east, from its original base in Italy to a new position at the point where the Black Sea empties into the Aegean Sea (Eastern Mediterranean) – anciently the city of Constantinople (named after him), today's Istanbul, Turkey. He did so to move his operations closer to where the political (or more particularly, military) action was – against the Persians to the East and against the Germanic tribesmen to the North (the Balkan Peninsula) pressing the Empire from both directions. But this move of the Imperial capital east from Latin-speaking Rome to Greek-speaking Constantinople left the old Italian city of Rome forlorn – pathetically so.

With respect to the Persians, there was little the Romans could do. The powers of both Rome and Persia were so evenly balanced that the wars between these two powers simply played back and forth, brutally.

But with respect to the Germans, the solution was simple: move the Germans westward, into Western Europe where Roman authority had recently downgraded the importance of that part of the Empire. Even some of the Germanic tribes (such as the Franks) were invited to relocate themselves within the boundaries of the old Empire, in the hope that they might serve as something of a buffer against other Germanic tribes hungryly eyeing a decaying Roman imperium in the West.

On top of that, Germanic troops (mostly Goths) were being recruited for service in the Roman legions, to a point by the late 300s they made up most of the Roman army. How a heavily German-staffed Roman army was expected to enthusiastically fend off fellow German intruders was a problem with no very good solution.

Then, by the beginning of the 400s, pressures on the Germanic Goths coming from the Asiatic Huns in the East, plus a violent reaction of the Romans to the growing numbers of Goths in their midst, produced an explosive encounter between the Goths and the Romans ... which did not go well for the Romans.

The Goths attacked the Roman Empire, even in 410 sacking and burning extensively the old capital at Rome (which by that time was no longer serving even as the Western Roman capital). That was the signal for other Germanic tribes (principally the Franks, Burgundians, Visigoths, Vandals, and Saxons) to move into Roman territory in the West (today's France, Spain, Northern Africa, and Southwestern England). Tragically, the Romans seemed unable to offer effective resistance. By the mid-400s, the Roman Empire in the West was no more.
It is important to remember that these Germans came not to destroy Rome but to capture the elegance of the once-famous Rome. But there was very little elegance left to capture at this point. Roman civilization had simply broken down in the West.

Now travel on the Roman roads became dangerous, leading to a decline of commerce and trade. Consequently, urban life decayed and eventually disappeared in most areas of Western Europe. Survival now depended on the ability of the new tribal societies simply to support themselves locally from the bounty of the small farms that became the sole foundation of the Western European economy. Materially an economic, then social, Dark Age fell upon the West.

³It is hardly surprising that the founder of Islam, Mohammed, in his travels (c. 600 A.D.) to the Christian world north of his Arabia, would get the idea that Mary constituted the third member of the Christian Trinity (God the Father, Mary the Mother and Jesus the Son!), he heard so much about the central place of Mary in the Christian faith. Interestingly, although he would reject the notion of the Christian Trinity, he would accept the idea of Mary's very special place in the life of the faithful.

⁴"Episcopal": a system of bishops (Greek: episcopos) controlling and directing the life of the Christian community, from the top down. Thus village priests were under the authority of the regional bishop, who in turn was under the authority of the archbishop, who in turn was under the authority of the Pope (the Bishop of Rome), who then answered to God alone.

The Visigothic chief Alaric Entering a Defeated Rome – 410

BUT CHRISTIANITY SURVIVES
THE ROMAN DECLINE IN THE WEST

Nonetheless a series of talented Christian Bishops of Rome, who remained behind in the ancient capital city, continued to command considerable respect within the Western Christian community – and slowly came to be recognized as the head of the Christian Church in the Latin West – eventually gaining the title "Pope," meaning something like Father – but Father (Papa) above all other priestly Fathers! Especially notable among these popes were Leo I (pope, 440-461) and Gregory I (pope, 590-604), who managed to preserve and strengthen what little remained of Roman or Latin moral-cultural order in the West.

Indeed, the church of Rome not only survived the Germanic impact but converted some of the most important tribes to Trinitarian Christianity⁵ and restored the city of Rome to a position of some degree of religious cultural importance – at least within the West itself.

And there was the British monk, Patrick, who brought Trinitarian Christianity to neighboring Druid Ireland in the early to mid-400s. In Patrick's 30-year mission to the Irish, he established over 300 churches and he baptized over 120 thousand Irishmen. In turn the converted Irish would soon themselves become Christian missionaries to the Germanic and other Celtic tribes to the East of them, most notably: Columba (mid-to-late 500s) to Scotland; Columban (late-500s) to the Burgundians, the Alemanni and Celtic Gauls on the European continent; and Aidan (mid-600s) to the Angles, Mercians and East Saxons of Britain.

And there were other such missionaries, monks and priests who acquitted themselves quite honorably along vital moral-cultural lines, especially once the monastic movement had been disciplined by Benedict (early 500s), whose monastic rule was widely honored throughout the West. These monks were sent out among the Germanic tribes to convert them not only to the Christian religion but also to the Roman Catholic political-religious order that accompanied that religion. In many cases the effort by monks pointed only to the first part of the program: the saving of souls. But the popes had more of the second part of the deal in mind.
Ultimately tribes had to decide where they belonged in the Christian program, on their own as autonomous Christian tribes, or as components of the larger Western Christian or Roman Catholic community. Thus, for instance, in 664, a religious council or "synod" gathered at Whitby (north central England), where the majority of the delegates voted to end the self-supporting religious life in England introduced by the Irish monks who had originally brought Christianity to the kingdom The Synod decided instead to bring the Northumbrian tribe or kingdom within the religious realm (and its particular Latin rites) overseen by the Pope at Rome.

In effect this decision conveyed the idea that the Pope was the ultimate authority, both religious and political, within Western Christendom. Of course tribal kings tended to ignore in practice the moral-legal distinctions of this relationship. But the popes, especially the more active political popes, were very aware of this special entitlement they possessed.

⁵Some of these tribes, particularly the Goths, were already Christian, though Unitarian or "Arian" thanks to the missionary effort of Ulfilas and the leadership of the Gothic chieftain Fritigern in the 300s; Rome was "Trinitarian" and thus looked on these tribesmen as not yet fully Christian, and thus in the need of conversion.

THE CHRISTIAN "MIDDLE AGES"

Charlemagne, and The Shift from Tribal
to Feudal (or Dynastic) Society
Then in the late 700s, Europe underwent a dramatic transformation as Charles, King of the Franks, better known to us today as Charles the Great or Charlemagne, came into the European political picture. Charlemagne not only inherited the title of King of the Franks from his father, Pepin the Short (himself son of the powerful Frankish leader, Charles Martel),⁶ but also succeeded in conquering all the neighboring German tribes in north and central Europe, and even (at the invitation of the Pope in Rome) defeated the powerful tribe of Lombards in Italy. Thus on Christmas day in the year 800, the pope, in recognition of this great military achievement, crowned Charlemagne as emperor, a title not used since the fall of Rome some 350 years earlier.

With this achievement, Charlemagne not only broke the power of the individual German tribes – at least on the European continent ⁷ – but had the Church recognize officially his right to rule much of Europe as his personal property or fief.

The Principle of Subinfeudation

However, this fief (Latin: feudom) was a vast piece of territory to rule. Unlike the former Roman Empire, Charlemagne had no well-developed bureaucracy of trained government officials placed around his Empire to rule on his behalf. So, Charlemagne instituted the policy of awarding large sections (fiefdoms or feudatories) of his personal empire to various barons (princes and dukes, etc.) to govern on his behalf, that is, in his name. Charlemagne still held the full title to the land since all of this was now considered his (like private property), his to lease out to others as he saw fit. His tenants or vassals (the princes and barons) in turn owed Charlemagne loyal service in maintaining the peace of the land and providing him troops in case of war. They did not pay taxes because no one, not even the barons, had much by way of money. The obligation of personal service to Charlemagne as their lord was what was required of them.
But even for the barons, the territory they were responsible for was still too big for any one person to govern. So they in turn sub-leased portions of their own lease to lesser land-lords (marquesses and counts, etc.), under the same type of obligation that they owed the emperor: land tenure (land-holding, not land-owning) for various services in return. Thus, although the barons were vassals to the emperor, they were themselves lords to their own set of vassals lower on the feudal scale.
Finally the system reached down to the masses of peasant farmers and their families (actually about 95 percent of the population!), who were allotted land in return for labor service (working their lord's fields and maintaining his flocks) and the requirement that a portion of their harvest or produce be turned over to the local lord and his court of knights and ladies. The peasants themselves owned almost nothing (except maybe their most humble clothing), usually not even the houses they lived in. No money was involved, just the right of a certain amount of landholding and the obligation of certain services in return.
This in short was the feudal system
In theory the emperor was free to extend or take back land rights to whomever he chose, for however long he chose to do so. But over time it became a lot easier for a lord to allow a vassal to pass his land rights on to his sons (or his eldest son only – under the rule of primogeniture that was widely practiced in Europe). After a number of generations, a family would begin to consider this land theirs to have and to hold as they chose. This created difficulties between the lords (such as the European kings) and their vassals (their barons) that were never fully worked out satisfactorily. Some clever dukes were able (through conquest, although most often through marriage) to accumulate sections of land here and there, sometimes at great distances, even under different lords. The Dukes of Normandy, for instance, ended up holding more land of their own than the French kings they were supposedly under (but the Dukes of Normandy were also kings – in England – by their own right).
It could get to be very confusing.
But the principle always remained the same: land, land, land. Social status depended entirely on the amount of land a baron was able to hold. And land tended to stay within the realm of one's family. And thus inheritance (not hard work or industrial cleverness) ruled the status system. A person was born into his or her status, and was carefully married off in accordance with the dictates of that same status system. What possibilities life might bring a person were determined entirely by that person's birth. And so it was. And so long it was that few ever thought that things could be otherwise.

⁶Charles Martel (the "Hammer") had made his own great place in history by being able to stop the spread of Islam into Europe by defeating Muslim forces at the Battle of Tours (732) in central France. He went on to establish the Carolingian dynasty ruling France, which Charlemagne was soon to head up.

⁷The Saxons and Celts of the British Isles excepted, as they continued to lay outside Charlemagne's conquered territory. Likewise, most of Spain also fell outside Charlemagne’s realm because it remained under Arab-Berber Muslim control, and would do so in part for the next 700 years.

Equestrian bronze statuette of Charlemagne (900s)
From the Treasury of the Metz Cathedral (France)
Paris, Musee du Louvre

Viking blood added to the mixture. But about the time Charlemagne was bringing Western Europe under this feudal system, attacks were happening along the edges of his vast Empire – and across the way even in the British Isles. Northmen (Normans) or Vikings coming from the Scandinavian North were beginning to conduct horrible raids on Christian Western Europe – stopping cold the cultural advance that had almost got up and running with Charlemagne's social-political revolution. These Viking raids effectively plunged Christian Europe back into the Dark Ages.

However, around the start of the second Christian millennium (ca. 1000 AD) the barbaric attacks of the Vikings or Normans slowed up considerably, giving Europe something of a degree of peace, the first in a long time. Part of this was due to the settling of the Normans within the communities they had once raided ruthlessly – the Vikings or Normans adopting both the local languages and the Christian religion of the people they had overrun – now becoming as dukes or even kings, protectors of those same communities – such as French Normandy, the English Danelaw, eventually England itself (1066), and even places as distant from the North as the Mediterranean island of Sicily.

The Crusades – and encounter with Islam's great wealth (1100s and 1200s). But even with their settling in, the Normans lost none of that energy – though this energy was now tamed and converted to the powerful service of Christian or Western society.

And in 1095 this energy would be called on by the Christian Pope to rescue the Holy Lands from the Muslim Turkish "infidel" who had made Christian pilgrimage to the Holy sites of the East very difficult, if not even impossible. The Normans – but also the Germanic kings and noblemen (as well as multitudes of commoners) – boldly answered the call to go crusading ("to take up the cross") in the Holy Lands of the Mediterranean East.

The Crusades which followed over the next two centuries (1100s and 1200s) in turn inspired two major developments in Christian culture or civilization at the time. First, it involved the outpouring of a renewed religious spirit eager to spread the Christian faith to the Muslim lands of the East. This spirit could be found high and low in Christian society – although the European feudal nobility of kings and princes quickly took the lead in the enterprise.

But secondly, the Crusades brought the rather materially primitive Europeans into direct contact with the East's fabulous wealth, such wealth as Western Europe had not seen since the fall of Rome many centuries earlier. Not surprisingly, the Crusaders themselves wanted to participate in that world of wealth. Some of the Crusader noblemen even settled themselves amidst the wealth of Islam, establishing Norman kingdoms in the recently conquered lands of the Middle East – sort of "going native" – not exactly abandoning their Christian faith, but wanting very much to combine their Christian world with this higher level of Muslim material wealth. But this new hunger for material wealth would include also those crusaders who returned to their kingdoms and principalities in Europe after having fulfilled their pledges to crusade for Christ in the East.

The Franciscans and Dominicans. In the early 1200s a spiritual "awakening" was to come to a young, very wealthy and very brash Francis of Assisi, through both a series of personal hardships and a mystical call to give his life over to serving the poor, as Christ himself exemplified. In fairly short order a much-transformed Francis attracted a large number of other young Italians to such service, forming something of a monastic community, which the Pope then forced him to bring under Roman or papal supervision (lest he be declared a heretic). Out of this the huge Franciscan movement developed, one that would eventually take multitudes of Franciscan monks to all corners of the world, and one that finds Franciscans even today serving the poor both in urban ghettos and rural villages everywhere.

At about the same time (also the early 1200s) another individual, the Spanish priest, Dominic de Guzman, began to train Christian teachers in order to rebuild proper faith in the Church and its Christian ministry. Here too his new monastic movement (with considerable papal support) spread rapidly around Europe, as vast numbers of Dominican monks or "Friars" were sent out to teach and enforce Christian orthodoxy.

The rise of urban Europe. Contact with the Muslim East (the crusades of the 1100s and 1200s) also birthed a new system of wealth founded not on landholding but on the ability to accumulate mobile wealth (goods, money, bank credit, etc.). Such wealth, like the feudal system, could be acquired and passed on to future generations of the family. But mostly it came as a challenge to each generation to grow its own wealth in industry and trade – something that feudal landholding could not do. Land, of course, could be exchanged with, or seized from, another. But the overall supply of land itself could not be increased any. However, the money economy had no limits placed on its ability to expand.
Feudal lords naturally looked down on the lower-status industrial-financial achievers as mere wannabees, not really worthy of serious social consideration. In short, feudal lords were snobs. But monied wealth had its own way of having an impact, even socially and politically. Kings, who always had troubles with their much-too-independent-minded barons, found that working with these industrial entrepreneurs from the rising urban middle class (neither barons, nor peasants but socially in the "middle") worked to their great advantage.
Kings were willing to license industrial groups (grant them charters as corporations or companies) in return for a tax portion of their monetary earnings or profits, taxes which allowed kings to hire their own soldiers and purchase their own arms, rather than be forced to rely on the not very dependable military services of their barons or lesser lords. Also, with the development of overseas interests on the part of kings and princes, a navy of fighting ships had to be constructed at considerable financial cost, something that only the moneyed classes could fund – but also derive considerable benefit from as much-needed protection in their trading – something also that the landed aristocrats of the countryside had nothing to contribute to or gain from.
Taking advantage of this newly awakened consumer or materialist spirit brought on by the crusades were a number of port-cities located strategically along the sea routes that made for easy access to the wealth of the East. Prominent in this regard within the key Mediterranean region were a number of city-states of Italy, not at all feudal domains but instead types of urban republics – the most important being Venice (which actually went on to develop a vast commercial empire linking Europe and the East) – but including importantly also Genoa (another shipping center) and Florence (a banking center situated in the center of the flow of moneyed wealth East and West). But coastal cities of the Atlantic – such as Portugal's Lisbon, Flanders' Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent and England's London (not on the coast but accessible to the high seas by way of the Thames River) – and the cities of the Hansa League of northern Germany, such as L beck, Hamburg and Danzig and the Rhine region such as Cologne also got involved – and also grew quite wealthy from this new East-West trade.

The rise of Portugal and Spain. Meanwhile, the feudal dynasties themselves did not want to be left out of this scramble for wealth and power that was clearly benefiting these rising city-states of Italy, Flanders and other coastal regions. Thus the Portuguese kings of the House of Aviz in the mid and later 1400s sent explorers from coastal Lisbon to look for a direct passage to the wealth of the East by going around Africa – thereby avoiding the expensive Italian and Muslim middlemen of the cross-Mediterranean route.⁸

Not to be outdone by the Portuguese, the Spanish monarchy of Ferdinand and Isabella at the end of the 1400s commissioned the Genoese sailor Christopher Columbus to locate a supposedly more direct route to the wealth of Asia by heading west directly across the Atlantic – presuming that Asia was only a short distance to the West. What a surprise Columbus had when he ran into islands just offshore of a vast landmass whose existence Europeans were completely unaware of. This discovery would ultimately inspire Spanish adventurers to head to this new land (given the name "America") – when rumors of vast quantities of gold were soon verified with the discovery – and plunder – of both Mexico and Peru (early 1500s).

At this point the Spanish Habsburg dynasty (actually originally Dutch) loomed far above all other European dynasties (the Valois of France and the Tudors of England, for example) in wealth and thus also power. Habsburg Spain would in fact continue to dominate Europe totally during the 1500s – thanks to this huge flow to Spain of plundered American wealth in gold and silver.
England and France. For England and France, the Hundred Years' War raging between the mid-1300s to the mid-1400s also served to strengthen the hands of the French and English kings, by simply bleeding off the feudal aristocracy in endless slaughter. In France those wars left the feudal lords so devastated that in 1439 the king was able to put literally the entire military establishment and an entire national tax program into his own hands. In England the chaos continued an additional three decades (until 1485) in an ongoing dynastic struggle (the War of the Roses) between the two royal houses of York (White Rose) and Lancaster (Red Rose) serving to weaken even further the remnants of the old feudal order. In that last year, a distant Lancastrian cousin of the House of Tudor was able to grab power, marry a York princess, and finally, as King Henry VII, bring an exhausted England under his firm grip. At Henry's death in 1509 his son Henry VIII took the throne and continued to strengthen the monarchy, this time at the cost of the medieval Church – whose lands he confiscated in order to award the Church's vast wealth to his own political supporters. Thus in the early-to-mid-1500s, royal absolutism also came to England.

⁸Actually, before even reaching the lands of the East (India principally), the Portuguese had become quite wealthy in acquiring African gold and slaves.

Quentin Metsys – The Money Changer and His Wife (1514)
Musee du Louvre, Paris

THE BREAKUP OF CHRISTENDOM

Renaissance Europe. By the early 1500s, something else was stirring in the hearts of the Europeans – some of them anyway. The personal empowerment in wealth and the opportunity to explore life more deeply during the European Renaissance served to challenge inquiring minds to examine more closely the way European life itself was structured.

Indeed, all of this new flow of wealth and power was producing a vast cultural awakening, later termed the "Renaissance" (French for "rebirth"). God and Christ were becoming upstaged in popular interest by simply the life of man himself, and his new-found ability to bring his world seemingly under human mastery. Thus "Humanism" increasingly became the cultural motif of Renaissance Europe.

A classic example of such Humanism was found in the works of the political analyst, Niccol Machiavelli. In his early 1500s study, The Prince, Machiavelli insightfully described the way for a dictator to bring unity to a conflicted society, through everything from brute force to simple political deception. Humanists would later denounce Machiavelli for his less than elegant depiction of the human spirit. But they would also find it impossible to prove him wrong. In any case, none of this had anything to do with traditional Christianity and its role in European society.

Deep corruption in the Church. At the same time, traditional Christianity was suffering deeply under the greed and political corruption of the Church, even papal authority itself ... also caught up in this quest for wealth and power. Classic cases were the very corrupt Pope Alexander VI and his Borgia family which directed the church during the period 1492-1503, in political opposition to the powerful della Rovere family (Pope Julius II, 1503-1513) and the Medici family (Pope Leo X, 1513-1521).

Tragically, the Church had itself become caught up in the world of constant, sometimes even brutal, politics – and very little spirituality.

A Christian "Awakening"

The Christian social identity of Europeans had long been the foremost of all the particular identities that a person might hold, back in pre-modern Europe – even more important than English, or French, or Spanish. National identities and national politics, especially on the European continent, were only in their very early stages of development. The people who governed European society married across national or linguistic lines and ruled lands whose inhabitants spoke a variety of languages. Most Latin-speaking European kings and princes viewed themselves not as national defenders but simply as rulers of multi-ethnic lands, personally called to keep the peace and preserve the Christian faith in their assigned lands, wherever those lands might be.
It is important to note that of all their responsibilities, the greatest was still considered their divine call as defenders of the faith. But it was also in this area of defending the faith that considerable tension had been brewing in Europe by the early 1500s. Many Christians felt that the Church had long departed from its original spiritual mission and was more interested in securing wealth and power for itself than in guiding and guarding the souls of its people.⁹ Demands that the Church reform itself had largely fallen on deaf ears among the Church's ruling elite.¹⁰
Compounding this theological tension was a deep social-cultural clash between the older feudal order based largely in the extensive rural countryside of Europe and the rising urban, commercial middle class. And it had to do with not only the rise of moneyed wealth and power in competition with landed and titled wealth and power, but it also arose over the matter of the high degree of literacy typical of this rising middle class.
Widespread Literacy in Newly-Rising Urban Europe

Literacy was rare across the European countryside. Peasants did not know how to read. Aristocratic males were normally fairly well-trained in Latin and therefore literate. But they constituted only a small portion of the cultural world of the European countryside. However, the very rigors of urban commerce and industry necessitated a high degree of literacy in the fast-rising cities, members of this rising urban middle class needing to track financial transactions and engage in correspondence that flowed with their trade.
And accompanying the rapid growth of literacy in Europe's fast rising cities came the ability of members of the middle class personally to open the sacred Scriptures of the Christian faith to their own reading. With the advent of the printing press at about the same time that urban culture was gaining power, the Bible became increasingly available as a book that could easily be afforded by any urban middle-class family, even though Bible-reading by mere commoners had long been condemned by the Church because supposedly the meaning of Scripture could be understood only by those trained as priests.
With a new and closer look in Scripture and how Christian life appeared at its origins in the first century A.D. and how the Christian life fifteen centuries later stood socially, economically and politically, there appeared to be a huge disconnect. In short, what the new class of readers of Holy Scripture discovered in that reading was how far materially, morally and spiritually the contemporary European Church seemed to have wandered from the design or character of the original Christian community or Church as described in the Bible. To the thinking of many of this rising middle class, something therefore needed to be done to bring the Christian world back closer to its roots. Clearly their Christian world needed deep reform.

⁹The Roman popes at this point were clearly more interested in consolidating their political-military grip over central Italy than in playing the role of spiritual mentor to the huge Christian world of Europe.

¹⁰Earlier reformers had not done well in their effort to bring needed reform to the Church. In 1415 The Englishman John Wycliffe was officially condemned as a heretic (forty years after his death in 1384) for having dared to translate the Latin Bible into the English spoken by the common Englishman. 1415 was also the same year that the Czech reformer Jan Hus was burned at the stake as a heretic for his effort to bring the Church back to Biblical standards.

THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION

But surprisingly, it was not in the cities but rather in the rural hinterland of central Germany that a successful challenge to the authority of the traditional Roman Church first took place. There a very vocal German monk and Biblical scholar, Martin Luther, was so bold in 1517 as to challenge Catholic authorities to justify Church practices on some ninety-five points, earning him the hatred of the Roman Papacy – and the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (who also happened to be king of superpower Spain) whose most sacred job was to defend traditional Christianity from just such religious rebels as Luther.

Luther was upset in seeing how the official Church had moved Christianity slowly over the centuries towards Unitarianism. Under the dominion of the powerful Church, salvation or access to heaven had come to depend less and less on God's grace and the individual's repentance and transformation in being confronted by that grace, which the Bible clearly described as the only path to salvation. Instead, over time the idea of salvation had come to depend on the powers of the hierarchical Roman Church, a community of priests and high priests (bishops) offering ceremonial cleansing by the administration of the holy sacraments, through required confessions which brought priestly forgiveness of human sin (provided that certain cleansing rituals were undertaken as per the instructions of the priest), and finally even payments to the Church in the form of indulgences – which would speed a departed soul through the process of Purgatory (the stage after death in which individuals had to purge or work out the penalties for their sins before they could enter fully into heavenly paradise). In short, the Church was becoming the grace-dispensing institution, not the personal faith of the believer. Salvation had thus become a matter of works (required by the priestly Church) rather than divine grace freely given by God. Luther was loud in how all of this was wrong, very wrong – at least according to Biblical standards.

But such challenges were considered simply as attacks on the Holy Mother Church, and the reaction of the Christian Establishment (the Medici Roman Pope Leo X and the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles V) was that Luther had to recant ... or disappear (as critics before him had). But ready to defend Luther were some of the princes of Germany, who smarted at the way the Roman Church laid such a greedy hand on the wealth of Germany to finance its various projects, especially the building of the pope's exquisite Vatican Cathedral in Rome. Certainly, as much for political reasons as for religious reasons, they swung their support behind Luther, giving him protection from both the pope and the emperor.

Furthermore, Luther shook the foundations of the Roman Church with his claims that God intended the role of priesthood to be the self-responsibility of all Christian believers (the "priesthood of all believers") and not just the select few members of the priestly class serving the official Church.

However, when thousands of German peasants, under the leadership of Thomas Müntzer, moved to extend that idea of the sovereignty of the Christian believer to all aspects of Christian life – including their own civil governance - Luther balked. The idea of political self-government was too radical for Luther,¹¹ who sided with the German princes, who moved decisively to put down savagely a huge revolt (1524-1525) of the German peasants (supposedly some 100,000 to 300,000 peasants were killed, although no one is quite sure of the exact number).

Theologically, Luther was a radical reformer. But when it came to challenging the feudal political order, Luther came out strongly in opposition. Consequently, the feudal order would remain intact in Germany all the way up into the 20th century, despite much of the country's Protestant character.

Calvin's Reforms Modeled in Urban Geneva, Switzerland

A far deeper and more threatening movement for Church reform now shifted to the rising urban society of Europe. And this would be led by the French reformer, John Calvin – who experienced a personal conversion that changed him from a secular-minded jurist (legal scholar) to a true Christian evangelical. This rather quickly got him in trouble in France and in 1534 he fled to Berne, Switzerland, where he began to study and write (first in Latin in 1536 and eventually in French in 1541)¹² a commentary on the Christian faith, Institutes of the Christian Religion. He ultimately ended up in the Swiss city-state of Geneva, invited there by the town fathers to put his ideas of Christian reform into practice in their city. And this he did, turning Geneva into a model Christian city dedicated to honoring God with Christian life and practices conducted in accordance only with Biblical standards, and not the traditional pronouncements of the Roman or Catholic Church.
And in the process, going well beyond Luther's theological reforms, he undertook Christian reform in political or social (or civil) matters as well. In Calvin's eyes, civil and religious life were completely interconnected. One could not be properly spiritually reformed without being socially-politically reformed as well. The witness or outward evidence of an inner salvation – or being one of the elected or covenanted of God - would be clearly demonstrated in the quite obvious way the Christian actually lived in the world: humbly, lovingly, and actively supportive of the greater good of mankind. Calvin noted that a person's works were not themselves required for salvation, yet true salvation nonetheless would inevitably produce good works in witness or testimony of such a Godly salvation. This is what God rightly expected of his Covenant People.
This Genevan or Calvinist project of erecting a purified Christian society, attempting to live by Biblical standards as a Godly witness before the larger world, excited a huge number of this rising class of industrious European urban commoners. They were eager to become part of a society in which individuals presented themselves personally before God on the basis of their personal faith alone, not on the basis of the teachings of an ancient religious institution, and certainly not on the basis of the intervention of a class of professional priests. Furthermore, they tended by nature to be a hardworking lot (at a time in which feudal aristocrats looked down on such manual labor) and were pleased to find Christian dignity in their work. Therefore, this rising urban middle class, being an independent, free-thinking and hard-working lot, was quite ready to practice diligently the priesthood of all believers, one that Luther talked about, but one that Calvin actually put into full social practice.
Thus Christians from all around Europe flocked to Geneva to study Calvin's reforms, and to participate in the publication there of the Bible in more of the local European languages. Their personal Bibles provided the common people of Europe the platform on which they could then carry out their part in the priesthood of all believers.
They came to Geneva from France (the Huguenots), from the Netherlands (the founders of the Dutch Reformed Church), from Germany (the German Reformed Church), Scotland (the Presbyterians), England ¹³ (future Puritans and Separatists), Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, and even Italy and Spain (the political heart of Catholicism.)
The Catholic Counter-Reformation

Finally, a Catholic Church Council was held at the city of Trent where, from 1545 to 1563, efforts were made to answer the Protestant challenge, in particular by tightening up church discipline, both theologically and politically. Besides trying to reinvigorate Catholic spiritualism, the decision was made to hunt down Protestant heretics and force their reconversion, or, alternatively, their exile – or even death – with the Spanish Inquisition (which had already gone after Spanish Jews and Muslims) leading the way.

Also the Society of Jesus, a priestly order of "Jesuits" founded by Ignatius of Loyola just prior to the opening of the Council of Trent, would play a huge role in putting some intellectual discipline behind the old Catholic order, with each Jesuit sworn to a life of simplicity, study, and total loyalty (military style) to the direction of the Roman Pope and to him alone – overriding the demand of the kings and princes to be the dominant authorities in their own realms.

The Rising Wars of Religion

But with the rise of this spiritual-intellectual awakening, the Christian Church itself became deeply divided between Catholics, who supported the feudal Church and society such as had long existed, and the Protestants, who demanded reform of both the Church and society along more Biblical - even Genevan - lines. And the division became deeper and more contentious with time, Christians fighting Christians over this matter of the Church and its ways, an issue so central to the very identity of all Europeans that the fighting soon became extremely brutal.
For instance, Habsburg Spain under Philip II (ruled 1556-1598) unleashed its armies on the Protestant Dutch lands of the northern reaches of the Habsburg Empire (1560s), arresting and executing the leaders of Calvinist Dutch Flanders (modern Belgium) along with thousands of other Flemish Calvinists - ultimately forcing the region back into the Catholic camp. But the armies of the Spanish Habsburgs found themselves unable to break the resistance further north among the Holland Dutch, who consequently remained in the strongly Protestant (Calvinist) camp.
Also, the autocratic French Queen Catherine de Médicis in 1572 invited the nobility of France to a wedding in Paris on St. Bartholomew's Day, and had the Calvinist Huguenots among them (about half the nobility at this point) slaughtered. This in turn led further to the killing of tens of thousands of other Huguenots in other French cities as well, all in the name of protecting the True Faith (Catholicism). Thus it was that the spread of the Protestant Reformation was brought to a halt in France.
Feelings separating the Catholics and Protestants thus became very bitter – and the use of power by one group to suppress the other was intense, even murderous. By 1618 the European continent found itself plunged into a savage war (depopulating huge sections of central Europe) which went on for thirty years (thus the "Thirty Years' War"). Finally sheer exhaustion over this matter of religious identity led the wearied dynasties to conclude in 1648 the Treaty of Westphalia. With this treaty the various dynasties agreed to acknowledge that some parts of the continent would probably always be Catholic and others Protestant. There was no point in continuing to fight over this matter. It was time to move on.
The Human Enlightenment – or Age of Reason

And not surprisingly, and quite ironically, all this ferocious religious zeal was to open the way for the rise of the Human Enlightenment or "Age of Reason," as a civilized or "reasonable" alternative to the murderous Christian theological disputes that had destroyed Europe. Scholars and thinkers since the time of Ren Descartes (early 1600s) had been exploring the idea that all of nature actually operated rather mechanically in accordance with the laws of nature (Natural Law) that were discoverable simply through disciplined study and analysis. The question of God or Catholicism versus Protestantism played no part whatsoever in this new approach to the search for the fundamental Truths of Life. All that was needed was the mature application of Human Reason to the study of the various processes directing every feature in every category of life. The mechanics of life involved in the production of goods, the similar mechanics in the behavior of plants and animals, even in the behavior of men and society, could and should be investigated simply through the process of applying Human Reason – in order to bring life's great Truths to light.
Thus was born the new realm of modern science, although at the time it was called "natural philosophy." Actually, these natural philosophers had begun the process of coming at life with an entirely new worldview, a new religion that needed no reference to the role of God (except maybe as the originator of all of life's natural mechanics) or, for that matter, of any part of the Christian religion. And so it was that towards the end of the 1600s, the Age of the Western Enlightenment – or Age of Reason – was born ... and soon in full growth.
That's what obsessive, eventually murderous, religiosity could bring mankind to. But this also should have naturally raised the question: would this new religion of the exalting of Human Reason not also itself eventually go down this same road, given mankind's love to pursue religious Reason to the point of murderous obsession? It was, after all, obsessive Theological Reasoning – not Jesus or his teachings – that had actually been the cause of Christian theology's murderous disputes.
Only time would reveal the answer to that question.

¹¹In his Wider die Mordischen und Reubischen Rotten der Bawren [Against the Robbing Murderous Hordes of Peasants] (1525) he advises the German princes to take necessary action against the peasants: "Let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly and publicly, . . . a poisonous, devilish rebel, like one must kill a rabid dog."

¹²This work underwent numerous editions, increasing in coverage with each new issue, from a single volume of six chapters in 1536 ultimately by 1559 to four volumes of 80 chapters, indicative of his own development as a scholar-teacher.

¹³Under the brief rule (1547–1553) of Henry VIII's young but sickly son, Edward, the Protestant cause took great strides forward in England. But when he died, his half-sister Mary took the throne, an ardent Catholic, who was determined to stamp out this new Protestant intrusion into her realm. It was during the violent reign of Mary (1553–1558) that English Protestants fled England, and headed to Protestant Switzerland, coming under Calvin's strong influence.

THE IMPACT IN ENGLAND OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION

English King Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I

English King James I and his son Charles I

In England the split between traditional Roman Catholics and Protestant Reformers was less murderous - though intense nonetheless. English King Henry VIII had split from the Catholic Church during all the commotion of the early years of the Protestant revolt (the first half of the 1500s), but his move was strictly political and not religious. He detested Luther, but had pursued pretty much the same goal as the German princes in wanting to free himself from the grip of the Roman Church and the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles,¹⁴ the very conservative "defender of the (Catholic) faith." Nonetheless during Henry's reign, the Protestant cause began to take root in England, notably, of course, within the urban commercial class, especially strong in London.

Elizabeth ... and the "Puritans." Henry's daughter, Elizabeth, who came to rule England during the last half of the 1500s, conducted something of a delicate balancing act so as to retain the loyalties of both English Catholics and English Protestants. She had no desire to split her realm into warring factions. Things nonetheless were harder for the Catholics than Protestants in Elizabethan England, principally because her contemporary in Spain, the very Catholic Habsburg King Philip II, was determined to conquer England and force it back into Roman Catholicism.

Thus he sent his huge naval fleet (the "Mighty Armada") against England in 1688 ... only to have winds, skilled English seamanship – and God himself – turn this into a Spanish grand disaster. Nonetheless, despite this huge Spanish humiliation, this action had the result of making English Catholics highly suspect as being possibly pro-Spanish. It also advanced the cause of English nationalism – which was becoming increasingly Protestant in nature.

But Elizabeth's middle-of-the-road policy did not please the Protestant purists (deeply inspired by Calvin's reforms) who felt that if England did not permit worship in the purest, most first-century or Biblical way of early Christianity, then the reform movement in England was merely a sham. Purity of faith was not something about which they were willing to compromise. And thus this group of Biblical purists collectively came to be known in England as the "Puritans."

James I. In the early 1600s a new ruling line took over England (Elizabeth never married and thus had no heir of her own to whom she could pass on her throne) when her cousin and Scottish King James Stuart was brought to the English throne. He was raised as a Protestant and was pleased to authorize the publication of a new English translation of the Bible, the well-known King James Version (although the Puritans were quite content with their English-language Geneva Bible). But he was not willing to go much further in the direction of Protestant reform than that. He, as Henry VIII and Elizabeth before him, was head of the Church of England, personally appointed its archbishops and bishops as well as presided over its theological discussions, and was most unwilling to revise this episcopal or top-down or structure of his English church. He detested the Puritans, but basically tolerated them - as long as they did not get too radical in their demands for reform.

Charles I and the English Civil War. When James died in 1625, his place was taken by his son, Charles I. But Charles had distinct Catholic sympathies – and tensions thus grew between his supporters and the rising group of English Puritans. Many Puritans – by the thousands – chose to simply leave the growing field of conflict in England and head to America (New England principally, but also the islands of the Caribbean) to build a society there according to their Puritan ideals. But those Puritans that remained behind ultimately fell into full rebellion against Charles, producing a very bloody Civil War which pitted their own Puritan "New Model Army" (created in 1645 by the heavily Puritan Parliament) against the king's royal army. Ultimately, in 1649, Charles was defeated and executed, the remaining members of the Stuart family and their Tory supporters fled to continental Europe, and the Puritans took full control of England for the next decade (1649-1660), and governed the country, now operating as a Puritan Republic or Commonwealth.¹⁵

England's Puritan Commonwealth ... and the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy. But England's Puritan Commonwealth, under the strict rule of Oliver Cromwell and his powerful Puritan army, did not find its way into the hearts of the majority of the English. Thus also failing to find a potentially popular leader after Cromwell died in 1658 (his son was proving to be a big disappointment), the decision was finally made by Parliament in 1660 to call the Stuarts from exile – and turn the crown over to Charles I's son, Charles II. Thus the Stuart monarchy was restored in England (the "Restoration").

But the years of parliamentary rule during the Commonwealth had changed considerably the rules of English politics – so much so that the King and his Tory supporters had to proceed carefully in the presence of the strongly Whig Members of Parliament. The party of Whigs, although no longer Puritans by spiritual inclination, were nonetheless certainly Puritan offspring in terms of their quite post-feudal attitudes about government.¹⁶

Charles II however was careful to watch his step in dealing with the Whigs – and managed to conduct a fairly successful reign as English (and Scottish) King. But his brother James II, who took over at Charles' death in 1685 – was not so wise. He got caught up in the trendy fashion set by French King Louis XIV, who not only reigned over the most glamorous court in all of Europe, but also set the example of what truly autocratic rule should look like. Trying to imitate that dictatorial style of government in England would ultimately force James II's expulsion from his throne in 1689. Subsequently the Protestant Dutch governor, William of Orange, and his wife (and James' Protestant daughter!), Mary Stuart, were called on by Parliament to take the English throne as joint sovereigns.

The "Glorious Revolution," and the "Human Enlightenment." But Parliament's success in establishing its own dominance in English affairs was not merely a political matter. It also had a tremendous intellectual, moral and spiritual impact on English society and culture. Just as the European continent turned away from divisive religious matters after the mid-1600s, so a similar development occurred in England at the end of the 1600s.

Replacing the old religious idea of God controlling all events in life, a new, quite Secular, worldview (ultimately religion) was coming into place, one which instead saw life as operating under rather fixed mechanical laws of "natural" cause and effect. Things just happened the way they did because they were designed by their very nature to operate that way. Thus "natural philosophers" began the study the "nature of things" (or "natural law") in all realms of life, from the physical universe around them to the natural workings of man's society, even the workings of the human mind itself. Consequently, the later 1600s became a time of intense social inquiry – in the quest of an improved natural design of society, one supposedly that would work better than the ones around them that had simply evolved over time through a brutal process of social struggle.

God did not factor into this rising intellectual world except perhaps as its ancient originator. But God no longer was involved – nor needed to be called on – in helping Europe's enlightened natural philosophers engineer and direct what was expected to be a quickly improving world – a world soon to be brought under human mastery in this new "Age of Reason."

Although people still attended church (at least one or the other of its major ceremonies, such as Christmas and Easter, but also weddings and funerals) and still considered themselves Christian, the reality was that Christendom was dead. Western culture by the end of the 1600s had stepped into the natural world of mechanically-operating materialism or Secularism – and its social-moral counterpart, Humanism. Leading the way were a number of famous natural philosophers, but most notably in England at the time, the physicist Isaac Newton and the social/psychological philosopher John Locke. These men would have a huge impact on their times, as significant as the impact that Luther and Calvin had on the previous century.

¹⁴Charles was the Holy Roman Emperor who tried to stop Luther; Charles ruled both Spain as Charles I and the Holy Roman Empire as Charles V. His was a very long rule (1516–1558) – as was also his son Philip II's reign (until 1598). Philip, however, received only the kingship of Spain, the Holy Roman Emperorship going to Charles's brother, Ferdinand. Thus the House of Habsburg from that point on (mid–1500s) constituted two separate branches, one in Spain and one in Germany/Austria (the Holy Roman Empire).

¹⁵Actually, the American Puritans kept their distance from the Puritan developments occurring back in England during the mid-1600s.

¹⁶These labels "Whigs" and "Tories" were terms of contempt that one party assigned to the other: Tories, the name for Irish Catholic bandits, assigned to those who stood with their Stuart king and his pro-Catholic sympathies, and Whigs, the name first for Scottish horse thieves and then later for Scottish Presbyterian rebels, eventually assigned to those pressing for a law which would exclude a Catholic from the English or British throne!
Eventually those terms would also be used to describe the groups in America in the 1770s who either supported, as "Patriots," full independence from England (Whigs) or those "Loyalist" colonials who thought it criminal to rebel against their English king (Tories).

Go on to the next section: The First Years of European Colonization of America

Miles H. Hodges

1. AMERICA'S COLONIAL FOUNDATIONS

THE CHRISTIAN SOCIAL LEGACY

The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work America - The Covenant Nation © 2021, Volume One, pages 18-39 ... and also from my work America's Story - A Spiritual Journey © 2021, pages 12-46.

WESTERN CULTURE AND THE WORLD

The Visigothic chief Alaric Entering a Defeated Rome – 410

Quentin Metsys – The Money Changer and His Wife (1514)
Musee du Louvre, Paris

Calvin's Reforms Modeled in Urban Geneva, Switzerland

1. AMERICA'S COLONIAL FOUNDATIONS THE CHRISTIAN SOCIAL LEGACY

The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work America - The Covenant Nation © 2021, Volume One, pages 18-39 ... and also from my work America's Story - A Spiritual Journey © 2021, pages 12-46.

WESTERN CULTURE AND THE WORLD

The Visigothic chief Alaric Entering a Defeated Rome – 410

Quentin Metsys – The Money Changer and His Wife (1514)Musee du Louvre, Paris

Calvin's Reforms Modeled in Urban Geneva, Switzerland

1. AMERICA'S COLONIAL FOUNDATIONS

THE CHRISTIAN SOCIAL LEGACY

Quentin Metsys – The Money Changer and His Wife (1514)
Musee du Louvre, Paris