You’ve got to love it when Moslem protesters in Egypt mouth the same cant about our history that the average Catholic or university student does. From this morning’s Wall Street Journal:
“People have lost faith in him. Anyone who takes such immature decisions can do anything to us, like establish a religious state similar to the dark ages in Europe,” said one protester in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
A half-dozen years ago, Harry Crocker stood this sort of thinking on its head in an aptly named essay “Monasteries and Madrassas: Five Myths About Christianity, Islam, and the Middle Ages”:
Myth Four: Medieval politics were despotic.Similarly, medieval politics were neither crude and ignorant, nor totalitarian and despotic. Far from it; the Middle Ages — from the start — practiced separation (and conflict) between church and state. It was the Reformation, the desire of the state to absorb the Church, that combined church and state with the creation of state churches. Medieval politics supported a wide dispersion of power, which is what feudalism was, and why England’s nobles — led by the Catholic archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton — were able to hold King John accountable with the Magna Carta. Medieval man believed in the great hierarchy of society, where every man and woman had rights and responsibilities and was individually responsible before God.
Medieval man was never threatened by totalitarianism. A totalitarian state was not even possible until the Reformation abolished the Church as a check on state power. Before that, feudalism preserved an extreme form of federalism, where even city-states (like Italy’s merchant republics) flourished. In the Middle Ages, not only could a merchant launch his own business, but twelve-year-old enthusiasts could launch their own Crusade (the Children’s Crusade), and a failed crusader like St. Francis could launch his own religious movement. The Middle Ages might be torn by war, conquests, political rivalries, knightly jostlings, and wars against the Albigensian heretics or the Muslim infidels. But politically, the Middle Ages were, if anything, a time when the dispersal of secular power was closer to anarchy than despotism, and the Church was generally on the side of political — if not religious — libertarianism in order to protect itself from ambitious monarchs and princes.
24 November 2012 at 10:19 am
The Ottoman empire did extend west of the Bosphorus. But, somehow, I doubt this is what he is referring to.
I’ve noticed a habit of people from one culture portraying people from another culture in a negative light, with an almost blindness to their own troubled past that is many times worse. The English obsession with the Spanish inquisition is an example.
24 November 2012 at 12:15 pm
[...] Those terrible Middle Ages. [...]
24 November 2012 at 2:44 pm
I would love a repeat of “those terrible Middle Ages.” We desperately need them!
24 November 2012 at 3:41 pm
[...] Those Terrible Middle Ages – Rich, Over the Rhine and Into the Tiber [...]
25 November 2012 at 1:01 pm
The Middle Ages, great in some ways, unfortunately saw Pope Innocent IV in 1252 make burning heretics ( previously an empire only law ) mandatory on secular rulers under pain of excommunication (see below).
True, a heretic then could also be an insurgent but then the ruling should have been: burn heretics only if they are insurgents. It became so accepted that Pope Leo X in 1520 ( Exsurge Domine, art.33) condemned Luther’s opposing the practice as “against the Catholic Faith”. Now we all agree with Luther on this one point and entrust our car brakes and our heart transplants
to people we used to burn.
Here is newadvent’s ” Inquisition” essay on that fateful decision of Innocent IV:
“ In this way Gregory IX may be regarded as having had no share either directly or indirectly in the death of condemned heretics. Not so the succeeding popes. In the Bull “Ad exstirpanda” (1252) Innocent IV says:
‘When those adjudged guilty of heresy have been given up to the civil power by the bishop or his representative, or the Inquisition, the podestà or chief magistrate of the city shall take them at once, and shall, within five days at the most, execute the laws made against them.’
Moreover, he directs that this Bull and the corresponding regulations of Frederick II be entered in every city among the municipal statutes under pain of excommunication, which was also visited on those who failed to execute both the papal and the imperial decrees. Nor could any doubt remain as to what civil regulations were meant, for the passages which ordered the burning of impenitent heretics were inserted in the papal decretals from the imperial constitutions “Commissis nobis” and “Inconsutibilem tunicam”. The aforesaid Bull “Ad exstirpanda” remained thenceforth a fundamental document of the Inquisition, renewed or reinforced by several popes, Alexander IV (1254-61), Clement IV (1265-68), Nicholas IV (1288-02), Boniface VIII (1294-1303), and others. The civil authorities, therefore, were enjoined by the popes, under pain of excommunication to execute the legal sentences that condemned impenitent heretics to the stake.”
25 November 2012 at 1:14 pm
I’d ask my readers to ignore Mr. Bannon, a combox gadfly banned from many Catholic blog due to his lengthy anti-papal tangents.
27 November 2012 at 4:44 pm
When loved ones have to go from the Thanksgiving table to clerk at mobbed box stores that very night, it reminds me of those ‘terrible’ middle ages when serfs in France averaged over 50 holidays (holy-days) a year and also Sundays as well. Over 100 days off.