Quranic Foundations And Structure Of Muslim Society
APPENDIX
CHRISTIAN CIVILISATION IN ITS AGE OF FAITH
Before closing this discussion, it is necessary to attend to the Jewish-Christian allegation, referred to in the present work on different occasions, that, as one Orientalist has worded it, “Islam is the bastard child of Judaism and Christianity”, and hence whatever is good in the value-system of the Islamic civilisation is in bondage to the Biblical civilisation. In that connection we may give here a brief review of the civilisation nurtured on an international level by Christianity, under the Biblical civilisational value-system, since its coming to power and until the Renaissance in western Europe brought about by the Islamic civilisation,—whereafter the West adopted a secularistic and free-thought approach. We shall present here its basic characteristic features, leaving out certain, vital facts for being dealt with in the next chapter under different headings; and our review, here again for avoiding all possibilities of doubt as to accuracy and authenticity, will be submitted in the words of a devout and eminent Christian historian of that civilisation, i.e., Will Durant. Projecting it as ‘Civilisation in the Age of Faith’, he says (The Age of Faith, pp. 44843):
“The foster mother of the new civilisation was the Church … There is an epic grandeur, sullied with superstition and cruelty, in the struggle of the new religion to capture, tame and inspire the minds … to forge a uniting empire of faith…
“… In paganism the family had been the social and religious unit; it was a loss that in medieval Christianity this unit became the individual.
“… the status of woman was hurt by the doctrine … that woman was the origin of sin and the instrument of Satan.
“The Church did not condemn slavery. Orthodox and heretic, Roman and barbarian alike assumed the institution to be natural and indestructible … slavery continued throughout the Middle Ages,[1] and died without benefit of clergy.
“Next to determination of faith, the greatest power of the Church lay in the administration of sacraments—ceremonies symbolising the conferment of divine grace … More Important was the sacrament of penance … According to the Gospel (Matthew, 16:19; 18:18), Christ had forgiven sins, and had endowed the apostles with a similar power to ‘bind and loose’. This power, said the Church, had descended by apostolic succession from the apostles to the early bishops, from Peter to the popes; and in the late twelfth century the ‘power of the keys’ was extended by bishops to the priests … Absolution in confession removed from sin the guilt that would have condemned the sinner to hell … The Church claimed the right to remit such punishments … The Church commissioned certain ecclesiastics, usually friars, as quaestiarii to raise funds by offering indulgences in return for gifts, repentance, and prayer. These solicitors … developed a competitive zeal … they exhibited real or false relics to stimulate contributions and they kept for themselves a due or undue part of their receipts.
“The official prayers of the Church were often addressed to God the Father; a few appealed to the Holy Ghost; but the prayers of the people were addressed mostly to Jesus, Mary, and the saints. The Almighty was feared … Jesus was closer, but He too was God, and one hardly ventured to speak to Him face to face … It seemed wiser to lay one’s prayer before a saint certified by canonization to be in heaven, and to beg his or her intercession with Christ … Every nation, city, abbey, church, craft, soul, and crisis of life had its patron Saint, as in pagan Rome it had a god … The Church arranged an ecclesiastical calendar in which every day celebrated a saint; but the year did not find room for the 25,000 saints that had been canonized by the tenth century. The calendar of saints was so familiar to the people that the almanac divided the agricultural year by their names … Many saints received canonization through the insistent worship of their memory by the people or the locality, sometimes against ecclesiastical resistance. Images of the saints were set up in churches and public squares, on buildings and received a spontaneous worship … With so many saints there had to be many relics— their bones, hair, clothing, and anything that they had used. Every altar was expected to cover one or more such sacred memorials … The churches of Constantinople, before 1204, were especially rich in relics; they had the lance that had pierced Christ and was still red with His blood, the rod that had scourged Him, many pieces of the True Cross enshrined in gold, the ‘sop of bread’ given to Judas at the Last Supper, some hairs of the Lord’s beard, the left arm of John the Baptist … In the sack of Constantinople many of these relics were stolen, some were bought, and they were peddled in the West from church to church to find the highest bidder. All relics were credited with supernatural powers, and a hundred thousand tales were told of their miracles. Men and women eagerly sought even the slightest relic, or relic of a relic, to wear as a magic talisman—a thread from a saint’s robe, some dust from a reliquary, a drop of oil from a sanctuary lamp in the shrine.
Monasteries vied and disputed with one another in gathering relics and exhibiting them to generous worshipers, for the possession of famous relics made the fortune of an abbey or a church. The ‘translation’ of the bones of Thomas á Becket to a new chapel in the cathedral of Canterbury (1220) drew from the attending worshipers a collection valued at $300,000 today. So profitable a business enlisted many practitioners; thousands of spurious relics were sold to churches and individuals; and monasteries were tempted to ‘discover’ new relics when in need of funds. The culmination of abuse was the dismemberment of dead saints so that several places might enjoy their patronage and power … The worship of God as Lord of Hosts and King of Kings inherited Semitic and Roman ways of approach, veneration, and address; the incense burnt before altar or clergy recalled the old burnt offerings; aspersion with holy water was an ancient form of exorcism; processions and lustrations continued immemorial rites; the vestments of the clergy and the papal title of pontifex maximus were legacies from pagan Rome. The Church found that rural converts still revered certain springs, wells, trees, and stones; she thought it wiser to bless these to Christian use than to break too sharply the customs of sentiment … So a dolmen at Plouaret was consecrated as the chapel of the Seven Saints, and the worship of the oak was sterilized by hanging images of Christian saints upon the trees. Pagan festivals dear to the people, or necessary as cathartic moratoriums on morality, reappeared as Christian feasts, and pagan vegetation rites were transformed into Christian liturgy. The people continued to light midsummer fires on St. John’s Eve, and the celebration of Christ’s resurrection took the pagan name of Eostre, the old Teutonic goddess of the spring. The Christian calendar of the saints replaced the Roman fasti; ancient divinities dear to the people were allowed to revive under the names of Christian saints; the Dea Victoria of the Basses-Alpes became St. Victoire, and Castor and Pollux were reborn as Sts. Cosmas and Damian … The finest triumph of this tolerant spirit of adaptation was the sublimation of the pagan mother-goddess cults in the worship of Mary. Here too the people took the initiative. In 431 Cyril, Archbishop of Alexandria, in a famous sermon at Ephesus, applied to Mary many of the terms fondly ascribed by the pagans of Ephesus to their ‘great goddess’ Artemis-Diana; and the Council of Ephesus in the year, over the protests of Nestorius, sanctioned for Mary the title ‘Mother of God’. Gradually the tenderest features of Astarte, Cybele, Artemis, Diana, and Isis were gathered together in the worship of Mary. In the sixth century the Church established the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin into heaven, and assigned it to August 13, the date of ancient festivals of Isis and Artemis. Mary became the patron saint of Constantinople and the imperial family; her picture was carried at the head of every great procession, and was (and is ) hung in every church and home in Greek Christendom. Probably it was the Crusades that brought from the East to the West a more intimate and colourful worship of the Virgin … Just as the sternness of Yahveh had necessitated Christ, so the justice of Christ needed Mary’s mercy to temper it. In effect the Mother—the oldest figure in religious worship—became … the third person of a new Trinity … knights vowed themselves to her service, and cities gave her their keys … The Church … made great festivals of the events in Mary’s life—the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Purification (Candlemas), the Assumption.
“… In Christian theory the whole human race had been tainted by the sin of Adam and Eve. Said Gratian’s Decretum (c. 1150), unofficially accepted by the Church as her teaching, ‘Every human being who is conceived by the coition of a man with a woman is born with original sin, subject to impiety and death, and therefore a child of wrath’; and only divine grace, and the atoning death of Christ, could save him from wickedness and damnation … The preaching of this doctrine … gave many medieval Christians a sense of inborn impurity, depravity, and guilt, which colored much of their literature before 1200.
“… by the age of sixteen the medieval youth had probably sampled a variety of sexual experiences. Pederasty … reappeared … In 1177 Henry, Abbot of Clairvaux, wrote of France that ‘ancient Sodom is springing up from her ashes’ … The Penitential—ecclesiastical manuals prescribing penances for sins—mention the usual enormities, including bestiality; an astonishing variety of beasts received such attentions … Cases of incest were numerous. Premarital and extramarital relations were apparently as widespread as at any time between antiquity and the twentieth century … Rape was common … Knights who served highborn dames or damoiselles for a kiss or a touch of the hand might console themselves with the lady’s maids; some ladies could not sleep with a good conscience until they had arranged this courtesy. The Knight of La Tour-Landry … if we were to believe him, some men of his class fornicated in church, nay, ‘on the altar’; and he tells of ‘two queens which in Lent, on Holy Thursday … took their foul delight and pleasance within the church during divine service’. William of Malmesbury described the Norman nobility as ‘given over to gluttony and lechery’, and exchanging concubines with one another lest fidelity should dull the edge of husbandry. Illegitimate children littered Christendom, and gave a plot to a thousand tales. The heroes of several medieval sagas were bastards—Cuchulain, Arthur, Gawain, Roland, William the Conqueror, and many a knight in Froissart’s Chronicles.
“Prostitution adjusted itself to the times. Some women in pilgrimage, according to Bishop Boniface, earned their passage by selling themselves in the towns on their route. Every army was followed with another army, as dangerous as the enemy. ‘The Crusaders’, reports Albert of Aix, ‘had in their ranks a crowd of women wearing the habit of men; they traveled together without distinction of sex, trusting to the chances of a frightful promiscuity’ … The university students, particularly at Paris, developed urgent or imitative needs, and filles established centres of accommodation … In Rome, according to Bishop Durand II of Mende (1311), there were brothels near the Vatican, and the pope’s marshals permitted them for a consideration. The Church showed a humane spirit toward prostitutes … A council at Rouen, in the eighth century, invited women who had secretly borne children to deposit them at the door of the church, which would undertake to provide for them; such orphans were brought up as serfs on ecclesiastical properties. A law of Charlemagne decreed that exposed children should be the slaves of those who rescued and reared them [2] … Penalties for adultery were severe; Saxon law, for example, condemned the unfaithful wife at least to lose her nose and ears, and empowered her husband to kill her. Adultery was common notwithstanding.
“… Feudal masters seduced female serfs at the cost of a modest fine; he who ‘covered’ a maid ‘without her thanks’—against her will—paid the court three shillings. The eleventh century, said Freeman, ‘was a profligate age’, and he marveled at the apparent marital fidelity of William the Conqueror, who could not say as much for his father. ‘Medieval society’, said the learned and judicious Thomas Wright, ‘was profoundly immoral and licentious’.[3]
“… In the Middle Ages … men, good and bad, lied to their children, mates, congregations, enemies, friends, governments, and God. Medieval man had a special fondness for forging documents. He forged apocryphal gospels … he forged decretals as weapons in ecclesiastical politics; loyal monks forged charters to win royal grants for their monasteries; Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury, according to the papal Curia, forged a charter to prove the antiquity of his see; schoolmasters forged charters to endow some colleges at Cambridge with a false antiquity; and ‘pious frauds’ corrupted texts and invented a thousand edifying miracles. Bribery was general in education, trade, war, religion, government, law. Schoolboys sent pies to their examiners; politicians paid for appointments to public office, and collected the necessary sums from their friends; witnesses could be bribed to swear to anything; litigants gave presents to jurors and judges … perjury was so frequent that trial by combat was sometimes resorted to in the hope that God would identify the greater liar. Despite a thousand guild and municipal statutes and penalties, medieval craftsmen often deceived purchasers with shoddy products, false measures, and crafty substitutes. Some bakers stole small portions of dough under their customers’ eyes by means of a trap door in the kneading board; cheap cloths were secretly put in the place of better cloths promised and paid for; inferior leather was ‘doctored’ to look like the best; stones were concealed in sacks of hay or wool sold by weight; the meat packers of Norwich were accused of buying measly pigs, and making from them sausages and puddings unfit for human bodies, Berthold of Regensburg (c.1220) described the different forms of cheating used in the various trades, and the tricks played upon country folk by merchants at the fairs.
“… Once at war, Christians were no gentler to the defeated, no more loyal to pledges and treaties, than the warriors of other faiths [4] and times. Cruelty and brutality were apparently more frequent in the Middle Ages than in any civilization before our own.
“… In all classes men and women were hearty and sensual; their festivals were feasts of drinking, gambling, dancing, and sexual relaxation: their jokes were of a candor hardly rivaled today; their speech was freer, their oaths vaster and more numerous. Hardly a man in France, says Joinville, could open his mouth without mentioning the Devil.
“… begging flourished … Mendicancy reached … a scope and pertinacity unequalled today except in the poorest areas of the Far East.
“Cleanliness, in the Middle Ages, was not next to godliness. Early Christianity had denounced the Roman baths … and its general disapproval of the body had put no premium on hygiene. The modern use of the handkerchief was unknown … One result of the Crusades was the introduction into Europe of public steam baths in the Moslem style.
“… In the thirteenth century the chamber pots of Paris were freely emptied from windows into the street … People eased themselves in courtyards, on stairways and balconies, even in the palace of the Louvre.
“… The commonest meat was pork. Pigs ate the refuse in the streets, and people ate the pigs.
“… Drunkenness was a favourite vice of the Middle Ages, in all classes and sexes. Taverns were numerous, ale was cheap. Beer was the regular drink of the poor, even at breakfast. Monasteries and hospitals north of the Alps were normally allowed a gallon of ale or beer per person per day … A customal of the abbey of St. Peter in the Black Forest includes some tender clauses: ‘When the peasants have unladen the wine, they shall be brought into the monastery, and shall have meat and drink in abundance. A great tub shall be set there and filled with wine … and each shall drink … and if they wax drunken and smite the cellarman or the cook, they shall pay no fine for this deed; and they shall drink so that two of them cannot beat the third to the wagon’.
“… Gambling was not always forbidden by law; Siena provided booths it in the public square.
“… The French and Germans in particular were fond of the dance … Dancing could become an epidemic: in 1237 a band of German children danced all the way from Erfurt to Arnstadt; many died en route; and some survivors suffered to the end of their lives from St. Vitus’ dance, or other nervous disorders.
“… Several persons, of any age or sex, might sleep in the same room. In England and France all classes slept nude.
“Does the general picture of medieval Europe support the belief that religion makes for morality? Our general impression suggests a wider gap between moral theory and practice in the Middle Ages than in other epochs of civilization. Medieval Christendom was apparently as rich as our own irreligious age in sensuality, violence, drunkenness, cruelty, coarseness, profanity, greed, robbery, dishonesty, and fraud. It seems to have outdone our time in the enslavement of individuals … It surpassed us in the subjection of women; it hardly equalled us in immodesty, fornication, and adultery, in the immensity and murderousness of war. Compared with the Roman Empire from Nerva to Aurelius, medieval Christendom was a moral setback. “… The intellectual virtues naturally declined in the Age of Faith; intellectual conscience (fairness with the facts) and the search for truth were replaced by zeal and admiration for sanctity, and a sometimes unscrupulous piety … The civic virtues suffered from concentration on the afterlife … Perhaps hypocrisy, so indispensable to civilization, increased in the Middle Ages as compared with the frank secularism of antiquity, or the unabashed corporate brutality of our time.” (All italics, present writer’s).
[1] And it continued in Christendom with greater virulence and unspeakable cruelty the thereafter also, as we shall notice in the next chapter.
[2] Mark the tone of Christian charity towards the orphans!
[3] Is the society in Christendom in any way less immoral and licentious today!
[4] On Will Durant’s own admission elsewhere in his book under reference, Islam stands excluded here from ‘other faiths’.
to be continued . . . . .
Quranic Foundation & Structure Of Muslim Society In The End Times
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