Question

How did religion unify medieval society

Answer 1



Bruce Hawkwood, none Literature, Anthropology, Science & Cinema and Acting, Self-Teaching

Answered Oct 21, 2018 · Author has 588answers and 91.6k answer views

Charitably, the Church was universal. Everyone deserved to hear the good news of salvation, and salvation was open to all who accepted the faith and were baptized. People were born to be wicked sinners, but the priests could absolve sins, and if people confessed on their death beds, they had a reasonable expectation of being saved at the Last Judgment. This hope of immortality was quite different from what pagan religions offered. In addition, unlike modern nationalists, the Church was open to all men (and I stress men). Eventually women exerted enough pressure to develop their own monastic orders, something unheard of in the ancient world. (Ancient temples had staffs of sacred prostitutes, but that’s another story.) The Church didn’t care what your ethnic origin was, except for Jews.

Which brings me to the evil side. As soon as the emperor Theodosius the Great declared Christianity the official religion of the Empire, Christians began tearing down pagan temples. Julian the Apostate tried to reverse this, but he had a short reign, and after him fanatic Christians went on rampages against Pagan temples and institutions. Edward Gibbon, in his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, goes into detail about this. In some places Christian penetration was peaceful. Britain was converted early, and Armenia was the first Christian kingdom. But with the Germanic tribes, it was more of an uphill struggle. The Gothic Bible stressed the heroic deeds of David and Solomon and Samson, as the crucifixion of Jesus was beneath the contempt of warriors. In other words, the Germans couldn’t relate to the pacifist Jesus, whose sacrifice on the cross made no sense to them. This means that Germanic Christianity was militant right from the beginning.

The persecution of pagans began in earnest with Charlemagne and continued long after. This is so true that it is not unfair to call Christianity the religion of persecution and bigotry. Christians pretend otherwise, but the history proves them wrong.