Re: God and Religion
Echoes said:
In a traditional Christian/Catholic view, the Temporal Power & the Spiritual power ought to be distinct. I have never used the term separation, though. In the Catholic Middle-Ages and Renaissance, they definitely were distinct. The Church could raise tax as much as the states could: the tithe. This tithe ensured the Church's independence from the states. Needless to say, the people were much less heavily taxed then than now (both secular tax and tithe combined). And with this tax the Church raised schools, hospitals, charity institutes, observatories, etc. This way, the Church established itself as a true COUNTER-POWER to the secular powers.
This is anti-historical drivel. The moment Christianity made its pact with the Imperial administration to institute a Christian regime the Church and temporal affairs went hand in hand. Steeped in crime, however, as correctly percieved by Julian (361-63), called the Apostate because he abandoned the faith altogether, it had not lived up to what it preached. While it is true that after the introduction of Christianity as state religion at Rome in the fourth century, the functions of
princeps and
pontifex, which had been united in the person of the emperor, once more were separated as during the Republic, even so the deal was done. The Church embraced the state. Once Rome became
Urbs ecclesiae in fact it initiated open hostility toward Constantinople, the
Urbs regiae. The supreme state and church would thus eventually be integrated within the papal 'presidency' of the High Middle Ages and Renaissance, which ended in the fatal catastrophe of Luther's revolt (and the Sack of Rome).
In fact as Galassias wrote to emperor Anastasius about the two powers, that of priests and that of kings, it was to ensure him that kings must submit to the decisions of priests. During the Middle Ages, however, when the holy wish proved too difficult to enforce, a powerful secret weapon was introduced. This was the forged Donation of Constantine of circa 800, by which the religious authorities attempted to establish, once and for all, their superiority over the secular powers. It stated that Emperor Constantine had ceded
secular power to Pope Sylvester as a reward for curing him of leprosy. The need for forgery (as later Lorenzo Valla's brilliant
Declamatio irrefutably demonstrated) points to the vulnerabilty of the papacy
operating in secular matters in a chaotic Italy and Europe. On the other hand, it exemplifies a new papal profile, which has been termed papal-presidentialism. This profile eventually led to the foundation of the Papal States, and led to the bitter investiture struggle which divided Italy in the High Middle ages, the traces of which could be felt down to the Sack of Rome in 1527. Furthermore, the importance of the 'Donation' for both papal profile and policy is made clear by the famous cycle in the
Cappella di San Silvestro, illustrating the Donation of Constantine. It was commissioned by Stefono Conti,
vicarius Urbis under Innocent IV, cardinal-priest of Santa Maria in Trastevere, in 1246. At the time Frederick II,
stupor mundi according to admirers, Antichrist according to the curia, had invaded the Papal States and approached the Aurelian walls in his conflict with Innocent IV. The pope had consequently fled to the protection of the French King, Saint Louis, where, safe and subsidised in Lyon, he convoked a general council to depose Frederick. His deputy in Rome, Conti, took up residence in the fortified Quattro Coronati, which was safer than the vulnerable Lateran.
The frescoes in the chapel date from the period of negotiations between agents of Frederick and the curia, and clearly refer to the positions of the opponents as envisaged by the papal party. The imperial legates were thus confronted by a forceful illustration of the status of the absent pope, where images imprint on the viewer the 'aetion' of papal supremacy.
The distinction is however not a separation and from a truly Catholic viewpoint the Spiritual power should always get the upper hand since only the spirit and a good morality can regulate the secular conflict of interests. Matter against matter, it's always the law of the strongest. That is what we have had since the advent of capitalism caused by the French Revolution.
By a good morality you must mean the Church and papacy in the age of Adelpapstum, the Albigensian Crusade, or the burning of the heretic-philosopher Giordano Bruno?
The French Revolution did not separate the Church from the State but it brought the local Church under state control. That's a huge lot different. They got rid of a counter-power. That's the first step towards totalitarianism. It's the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 12 1790! easy date to remember, it's my birthday!). The priests had to swear an oath to the new regime. Obviously many rejected it, more particularly in the Vendée. That's why the Republic caused one of the first genocide in history. By 1796, a new Republican regime made priests swear a new oath of "hatred to the monarchy". The religious persecution that ensued was just ruthless and barbaric. In the meantime, the French had invaded Belgium and for Belgian priests, this was something new. More particularly around Antwerp priests were contumacious. Some 500 of them were deported to the Isle of Ré and Rochefort and a few dozens to Guyanese penal camps in Sinnamary or Conamama, the most damnest places on earth. For those who've seen the film Papillon, it gives an idea of what the Guyanese camps were.
Henry VIII of England did exactly what the French Revolutionaries did. He was the temporal head of state but succeeded in getting its grip on the Spiritual power. That is what brought materialism and individualism to England, long before the rest of Europe. Think of the tragedy of the Commons, the advent of the Enclosure, denounced by saint Thomas More.
Substitute for God a divinized humanity and you have the myth that lies behind radical secular politics form the Jacobins forward. Unlike the ancient Greek and Roman humanists like Epicurious and his disciple Lucretius, who rejected the religions of their times and who sought tranquility through withdrawing from this world, the goal of Enlightenment philosphers was to change it. Paradoxically they adopted a Christian framework. The world-transforming hopes of modern humanism with its promise that salvation is open to all, thus derives from Christianity. Where the reformers of the Catholic Enlightenment had tried to extirpate the excesses of popular religion, the nineteenth-century church went with the grain, promoting a 'cleaned-up' form of popular religion where they were in charge. In France this proved widely but not universally successful. The same was true in Spain. The great wave of modem Marian apparitions perfectly illustrates this partial success story. The church controlled the cults surrounding a few selected sites, although even here there were unsatisfactory seers and other problems. But there have been many hundreds of alleged apparitions since the French Revolution, triggered by war or postwar uncertainty, political persecution, economic distress or social and familial dislocation.
The point of this is that the Church turned back to superstition, in the face of modernity. Like the emergence of famous stigmatists, such as the Belgian Louise Lateau and Theresa Neumann of Konnersreuth (Bavaria), these dramatic cases electrified popular sentiment in ways that often proved uncontrollable and difficult to square with recognized cults and devotions. While some Marian sites (Lourdes, Fátima, Medjugorje) have since become big business, which of course have triggered a reversal in terms in the policy. The rectionary Pius IX then lead the Church in a concentrated, though futile, effort against pluralism, democracy and positivism.
As for the Russian schismatist, you've got to Watch the beautiful film Tsar if you want to have an idea of the struggle between a Spiritual Metropolitan Philip and the Temporal ruler Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible.
Putin and His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow are fixing that.
Christianism and Islam are universal. Judaism clearly isn't. The Judeans betrayed the universal divine promise into a tribal/racial mascot. That's the reason for all the horrors of the Old Testament. That is why Jesus came to denounce them.
And your point is? You parroting David Duke again?
As for Bush being a theocrat, don't make me laugh, please. I'm getting stomach-ache. Is your source also the BBC like some posters above (Savile's broadcaster, if I may remind you). Bush was only concerned with bringing "democracy" and "human rights" to Iraq. Under the signifier "Christianity" he strictly brought "Human right". Paul Gottfried sumed that up nicely.
America believes that all people are entitled to hope and
human rights, to the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity.
People everywhere prefer freedom to slavery, prosperity to squalor, self-government to the rule of terror and torture.
America is a friend to the people of Iraq. Our demands are directed only at the regime that enslaves them and threatens us. When these demands are met, the first and greatest benefit will come to Iraqi men, women and children. The oppression of Kurds, Assyrians, Turkomen, Shia, Sunnis and others will be lifted, the long captivity of Iraq will end, and an era of new hope will begin.
Iraq is a land rich in culture and resources and talent. Freed from the weight of oppression,
Iraq's people will be able to share in the progress and prosperity of our time.
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB80/new/doc%2012/President%20Bush%20Outlines%20Iraqi%20Threat.htm
In referrence to the 9-11 attacks and the subsequent US bombings of Afganistan and Iraq, the missing element here is the pivotal politcal role of millennialist religion. The attacks activated beliefs widely current in sections of the American population, which the Bush administration was able to mobilze in support of its agenda. This was not simply cynical manipulation, for there seems little doubt that Bush shared these beliefs. The wordview of the Christian right embodies a view of history that is framed in eschatological concepts, according to which American power can be used to rid the world of evil. No doubt the Bush administration committed many avoidable mistakes; but its central folly had been to impliment a faith-based foreign policy and to frame the US's historical role in theological terms.
The Belgian governments in the colonial period were either Christian Democrats (secularists) or left-wing socialist (atheists). The first Belgian monarch was a Freemason from a lodge close to the Grand Orient which promotes atheism and materialism. He's the one who educated the butcher of the Congo. The main architects of the Congo Free State were Albert Thys, a Freemason and Henry Morton Stanley, a liberal Unionist who approved of the persecution of Catholic in Ireland. Catholics have nothing to do with the colonization of the Congo. They just fought against the Zanzibar slave trade, they fought against all the damage done by alcohol in the Congo and as I said in my post that probably nobody but Maarten read, they emancipated the Hutus from Tutsi tyranny, making them realised that everybody's equal before God.
Colonization was a left-wing undertaking, by liberals and by atheists. The main architect of the French colonial empire was left-winger Jules Ferry. The guy who said that the secular school system was meant to "take God out of the heart of the people" and he's also the guy who claimed that "Superior races have a right towards the inferior races" (!!!). I don't know if you realise what that means. In Britain, the main architect of the Empire is Alfred Milner, he and his boys were predominantly liberal Unionists (see Caroll Quigley's "The Anglo-American Establishment").
It's about time the political Left be held to account for their Colonial past. As long as present-day Leftists don't admit that, they won't be credible.
This was already addressed by another poster.