Today: some background about the West, as we start to look at the cultural differences between Islam and the West.
Aslan is arguing that Islam is going through a “reformation.” As background, I want to talk a bit about our reformation.
Pax Romana
Rome never fought an offensive war, if you believe Roman history. They claim all their wars were defensive, or at the very least a preemptive defense against a rising threat. Their power was at a peak, as for 200 years they enforced a Roman peace (Pax Romana) on the empire from London to beyond Jerusalem and Damascus. Their power and wealth was immense, and Rome itself grew to over a million people, with a rising middle class as wealth created business people, administrators, teachers, and others.
Christianity: Christianity rose at the time of Pax Romana. St. Peter, one of the apostles of Jesus, was sent to Rome in 64 CE to try to gain recognition. He was crucified upside down on (according to legend) Vatican hill. In the 4th Century Emperor Constantine would build a church there, and later it would become the site of St. Peter’s. Despite the stories of persecution, most Christians lead rather normal life styles as the religion became more and more popular, especially with women, who had a higher status than in traditional Roman society.
Why Christianity? Paul, a Jew who was a Roman citizen made a fateful decision. Christianity was one of many sects of Judaism competing for dominance of the Jewish faith. But Paul determined that new Christians did not have to become Jews (did not have to be circumcised or follow Jewish laws to become part of the covenant God had with Israel), arguing that due to Jesus, people were ‘justified by faith.’ This led Jews to reject this version in favor, ultimately, of rabbinical Judaism. But the openness to other people of the new religion (after all, having to be circumcised to join a religion was a big barrier to gaining large numbers of male converts) helped it expand and ultimately become a world religion. Later Islam would also join this tradition, as Muhammad would accept Jewish and Christian teachings, arguing that Jesus (Isa) was only a great prophet rather than the son of God (since a monotheistic god couldn’t have a son, according to Muhammad). In any event, Christianity became popular and persecution actually was rare after the early years.
By the rule of Constantine in the early 4th century, the golden age of Rome was ending. German tribes had been resistant to conquest, and were expanding, as were the Huns and other tribes from the East. Constantine made some major choices. One was to convert to Christianity – later Christianity would become the religion of the Empire. Second, he moved the capital of the Empire to the safer East to what would be named Constantinople (now Istanbul). That would set up a split between the western (Roman Catholic) and eastern (Christian Orthodox) churches. He did this in part to strengthen the Empire by enlisting Christians in defense of the Empire. It worked; Augustine, for instance, developed Just War theory in part because Christian pacifism was hard to reconcile when the choice was to defend the now Christian Roman Empire, or to give way to the pagan barbarian hordes. But Rome was by the 5th century constantly attacked. The Romans allowed the Germans to settle in Roman lands, and soon they were encroaching on Rome. The population by the end was down to 20,000. Soon the buildings and monuments would be plundered for scrap, and knowledge of how all that was built would be lost. The end of the western empire was officially 476 CE when the last emperor abdicated, but for all intents and purposes, it was done before then. The eastern empire would survive in Constantinople until 1453 so in some shape the government started in Rome in 753, which went from Etruscan kings to a Republic to an Empire to an Empire based in Constantinople lasted over 2100 years.
In the ruins of an empire… The Church
Although the view of the dark ages was one where the Roman Catholic church used its authority to control politics and people, preventing the growth of science and reason, that is an unfair and wrong impression. The church actually saved the remnants of civilization and learning in its monasteries and cathedrals, which themselves were often an oasis from the chaos of the “real world.” Moreover, there were attempts to rejuvenate European culture. Charles the Great (Charlemagne) reconstructed the empire briefly, being crowned by the Pope. This led to a power conflict which would persist for centuries. Although Charlemagne’s effort to revive the empire failed after his death, a decentralized patchwork of territories ruled with archaic rules and traditions emerged known as the Holy Roman Empire. The Emperor exercised only minimal authority, and even that was contested by the Pope, who claimed to be the premier authority in both the political and spiritual realms.
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274): The writings of Aristotle had become known in the West before Thomas, and ironically, he was used by the church to counter those who were making a secular argument against religion using Aristotle. He incorporates Aristotle’s thoughts with church teachings, and develops would be the dominate form of inquiry before Galileo’s time. By the 15th century, Aristotelian scholasticism becomes the intellectual focus of the church. It emphasizes the validity of prior knowledge (the authority of the classics, and the presumption that past knowledge, having stood the test of time, is superior) and understanding the primary traits of things, their essences. It was not scientific, nor progressive (indeed, the emphasis on the authority of prior teachings makes it inherently conservative).
Aquinas as a product of something new in Europe. In 1060 the first modern University opened in Bologna Italy, and soon in Paris, Oxford and other centers universities sprang up. This was designed to train professionals, but really was the opening act in what would, in time, bring the renaissance and ultimately modernism to the West. Aquinas was a Dominican, from the Kingdom of Sicily. He got his degrees at the University of Naples, then the University of Paris. He wrote massive amounts in his 49 year life (he died March 7, 1274), and taught in Paris and Naples.
He learned Aristotle from the works of Averroes (Ibn-Rushd), Avicenna (Ibn-Sin) and other Muslim philosophers who had discovered and were not only spreading knowledge of Aristotle but expanding and creatively developing his philosophy.
Aquinas accepted the idea of logic from Aristotle. Our modern notions of logic come from Aristotle, often called the ‘inventor of logic.’ Like Aristotle he said we know the world through our senses, and we can explore and learn about the world, but we learn spirituality through our soul. Moreover he used Aristotelian logic to develop proofs on the existence of God, and his thought was teleological, concerned with the end or purpose of any being or any of its actions. Unlike Augustine, who saw the state as a ‘punitive consequence’ of original sin (more like Plato), Aquinas saw humans as political animals, and the state was necessary. He also had a vision of a kind aristocratic democracy very early on. Many who put the advent of democracy with the Greeks are only partially correct; Aquinas brings it to the western tradition in his own way, close to, but not exactly with Aristotle.
In law, he also made strides: The eternal law of God is first, then the natural law inherent in human nature; divine positive law for human conduct, and human custom. Laws humans make cannot be true laws if they deny natural law (note: Martin Luther King Jr. uses this to defend his breaking of laws in fighting for desegregation).
There was a battle in the Catholic church over the teachings of Aristotle. Many wanted to label Aquinas a heretic, and his teachings banned. The battle was won both due to the intellectual strength of his arguments, but also to the political power of the Dominicans. Although Thomist thought would evolve, overall the entry of Aristotle into the Christian tradition altered the theology and set the stage for further developments.
Neo-platonist spiritualism of the Augustinian sense was, at some level, contrary to progress. For Augustine, the material world was suspect; at best it was a symbol of God’s love, there to teach us and help us turn inward to God. But as with Plato’s notion of the contemplative philosophical life as the ideal, Aristotle’s emphasis on naturalism and pragmatism/realism would, through Aquinas, invigorate a drive for knowledge and progress. This marked the high middle ages, and started a transition which, in the next three hundred years, would bring about the renaissance, with its rediscovery of classics and start of new quests for science and knowledge, the reformation, and ultimately starting around 1600, modernism.
The west, however, remains this mesh of spirituality and logic, faith and reason. I think, whether we are religious or secular, more traditional or ultra scientific and modern, can see some of our own minds in the thought and directions begun by Aquinas and Augustine.
Aquinas died in 1247. And, though he’d opened the door to rationalism, for the next three centuries the church would adopt Aristotelian scholasticism as its primary focus. This essentially treated Aristotle like a great teacher; rather than using Aristotle’s logic to investigate the world, Aristotle was made an authority whom one did not question. In short, knowledge from the past was held to be true because it had withstood the test of time; if that knowledge had been wrong, surely we’d have realized it by now. So you did not think critically, you accepted past knowledge as authoritative.
While this bought the church a few centuries, implicit in Aristotelian thought was questioning reality; but it would take the printing press and a challenge to the church’s authority to bring that out.
Luther and the reformation (1517)
Luther: German monk, who changed Europe, altered Christianity, and set the stage for the future political and in many ways intellectual developments in the West – though that wasn’t his intent at all!
Young Luther worried about grace: The teaching at that time is that grace leads to faith, but how do you get grace? The answer, according to Augustine, whose ideas shaped early Christian theology (and still are profoundly important for Catholics and protestants) is to do “all that lies within us” to receive grace. We must love god as much as we can, and then god, noticing that, will give the gift of Grace. Only then would you be saved. But Luther was worried. Augustine had distinguished between slavish obedience to avoid punishment vs. filial obedience which comes with true contrition. But Luther wondered if he was truly contrite? Was it presumptuous to believe he had received grade? A vicious circle, which Luther said terrified him, gave him a terrified conscience, a sense of failure. Am I really in love with God, or am I trying to be because I want paradise? He was confessing multiple times a day, in a constant state of terror.
As he goes through this torture, he is aware of an indulgence seller named Tetzel working in the area. Indulgences were promises of remission from sin and thus time off from purgatory for a price. Luther realized that the average people thought they were buying their way to heaven, or buying the right to sin – they not only weren’t doing all they could to have faith, they simply were trying to get to heaven. How horrible! These people will be damned, this is hurting their souls rather than helping!
Luther was not only a monk, but also a university professor, in Wittenberg Germany, teaching Old Testament. He decided he wanted to debate this amongst the academic community at the Wittenberg university, so he nailed to the door (which acted as the university bulletin board), 95 theses, in Latin, making complaints against the theology of the church. But to his surprise (and against his will) these were translated to German and spread throughout Germany. This shows the technological power of the printing press, which created an information revolution that changed the world. (One wonders: will our internet/computer information revolution lead to just as profound a set of changes in our world).
At first this was not meant as defiance; he was originally respectful of the Pope, it was not an effort to create a new church. Yet that’s what happened. A firestorm is released, with many siding with Luther on indulgences, and others siding with the Church. Luther’s break with Catholic theology, however, only got more pronounced over time.
Law and Gospel. Law is meant to terrify us to recognize our inherent inability to merit salvation. Thus we turn to the Gospel. There he argues that the gospel makes a promise: have faith and you are saved. Paul’s justification through faith and faith alone. Believe it and you have it because god says you have it. To doubt it would be to call god a liar.
Moreover, this was a personal justification between you and God through the Gospel. So the Catholic church’s rites, ability to excommunicate, and claim to speak with the authority of God was seen by Luther as doing the “devil’s work,” since it undermined faith. Rather than saying ‘this is between you and the Lord,’ the Pope is seen as claiming that the church guards access to salvation. Luther labeled him an ‘anti-Christ,’ for this reason, and of course by that point the two could not be reconciled. The Pope was trying to take from Luther the Gospel – his personal promise and relationship with god – and say he can control that.
The result would be nearly a century and a half of warfare and violence, as thanks to the printing press the bible (and other things) would be printed in local languages, literacy would spread, ideas would spread, and the hold of the church over information would disintegrate. Gunpowder was allowing more powerful weapons, and political leaders started to demand real power, no longer subservient to the church. The church was fighting to hold on to its authority, but it was doomed to lose.
1618-48: The Thirty Years War. It engulfed all of Europe, though mostly northern Europe. The Church in 1648 would yield, and the protestants would gain real power, and the modern sovereign state would be born. Even though places like France would remain Catholic, political power would no longer rest with the church. The era of church dominance would be over.
Today:
What do you know about the Muslim faith?
What are the main differences between Islam and Christianity?