Frankish West
We should recall again very briefly the far-reaching changes that
had taken place in the territories of the Western Roman Empire from the
end of the fourth to the sixth centuries AD. We usually call the influx
of barbarian tribes and nations into the empire and their settlement
there “the great migration of peoples.” Of a lower cultural level than
the native inhabitants they displaced, they brought about in 475 the
collapse of Roman rule.
Franks, Goths, Huns,
Burgundians, Vandals, and Lombards, they came to constitute the
predominant element in the population of Western Europe. And by the
late eighth/early ninth century, the military and political power of
Charles, king of the Franks, surnamed the Great (Carolus Magnus, or
Charlemagne, 742-814), enabled him to subject all the other tribes to
his rule and form a vast state stretching from the North Sea to the
Pyrenees and from the Atlantic to the Elbe.
The
barbarian hordes that dissolved the Roman “order of things” in the West
had hastened to adopt the Christian faith because conversion to
Christianity at that time was the path to civilization. The question
naturally arises: What can “conversion to Christianity” mean in the case
of large masses of people who could not possibly have understood what
until then had been the Greek expression of (or witness to) ecclesial
experience—the Greek philosophical wording of the conciliar
“definitions” and the teaching of the Fathers, the incomparable language
of Greek art?
At any rate, the Christianized
multiethnic kingdom of Charlemagne came to aspire to imperial status,
thanks to its geographical extent and military power, on the model of
the (unique until that time) Roman Empire. But it was taken for granted
by everyone that the empire was an international “order of things”: more
a common culture than a form of state. It was also taken for granted
that Christianity (the pax Christiana) was the only basis for a common
culture in the international world of that time. Consequently, there was
no real room or logical possibility for a second Christian empire so
long as the Christian Imperium Romanum remained on the historical stage
with its center in New Rome/Constantinople.
Charlemagne
saw clearly that his ambition to establish an empire presupposed a
cultural basis for political unity that was necessarily different from
that of the Roman oecumene. The new basis had to be founded on the
Christian faith. It therefore had to come up with a different version of
this faith on both the theoretical and the practical levels, a version
that was more correct and more genuine than that of the Greeks, clearly
differentiated and, above all, with a distinctive Western identity.
Only with such a new starting point for a civilized collective life
could a new Christian “order of things” be justified internationally with its center now in the Frankish West.
It would appear to be for these reasons that there arose at tha time a polemical literature condemning the “errors” of the Greeks— at least ten works dating from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries bear the title Contra Errores Graecorum. At the same time Augustine was retrieved from the historical margins to become the vital ideological discovery and weapon of the Franks.
Ideological Catholicity
Two
separate bodies emerged from Christendom’s schism in 1054. One defined itself
as the Roman Catholic Church, the other as the Orthodox Catholic Church. These
titles clearly revealed two different versions of catholicity: one Roman, the
other Orthodox. The pivotal difference between these two portions of the
Christian world (whether conscious or unconscious) was their understanding of
catholicity.
It should
be mentioned that until the time of the schism the term Catholic Church defined
the genuineness and authenticity of the ecclesial event in contradistinction
with heresy. Heresy (from the Greek verb
hairoumai, “I prefer,” “I choose”) indicated the result of an elected version
of the presuppositions of the ecclesial event, a choice that led to a
distinctively private approach ( idiazein), to a peculiar understanding and
experience of the gospel—peculiar and disjunctive with regard to the whole (the
katholou) of the ecclesial body. The criterion of the distinction between an
ecclesial community (parish or diocese) and a heretical group was not the
difference of “convictions,” or any codified formulations of experience. It was
catholicity. The ecclesial community realized and manifested the whole (the
katholou) of the ecclesial event, the totality of the gospel’s hope. And this
catholicity was attributed to it by all the other local churches through the
liturgical communion that was ensured by the conciliar system.
Even after
the schism the Greek East continued to maintain the understanding of
catholicity that had been held in common until that time. Of course, for the
conciliar system, which ensured the distinction of the Church from heresy, to
be able to function, the East depended on the effectiveness of the institutions
of the Empire of New Rome/Constantinople, institutions that maintained the
political and social cohesion of its Christian peoples. By contrast, the elder
Rome had to deal with a European West fragmented politically and socially into
a number of barbarian kingdoms, principalities, duchies, and counties where
each ruler claimed to decide for himself the correct faith of his subjects.
In these
circumstances it was almost impossible for the Church of Rome, the church
“presiding” in the West, to guarantee and preserve simply by its ecclesiastical
authority the catholicity (genuineness, wholeness, and authenticity) of the
local churches to be found there. It was thus led to the solution of itself
assuming the role of political leadership so as to be in a position to impose
orthodox thinking by employing means effective in the secular sphere. The Roman
Church succeeded in winning from the Frankish king Pepin the Short (715-68),
Charlemagne’s father, recognition as an autonomous state (in 754) with a
specific territorial sovereignty and with institutions and functions that
enabled it to intervene authoritatively in international relations.
This
evolution, a result rather of an inexorable historical necessity (but also of
the indisputable struggle for primacy of “jurisdiction” between the
patriarchates of Rome and New Rome), produced in the West a new version and
understanding of catholicity that was purely geographical and quantitative. Catholicity
now meant not the wholeness and fullness of a mode of existence, but the
international (or even global) character of objective marks of the ecclesial event,
such as faith as official “doctrine” and
conforming to a codified ethics.
Faith ceases
to be a struggle to attain trust, to attain relations of loving communion. It
ceases to be the fruit of self-transcendence. It is identified with convictions
possessed by the individual, with the individual’s intellectual assent to
“official” axiomatic declarations and principles. Faith is transformed into an
ideology, and its authenticity is confirmed now not by the dynamic of a shared
experiential verification (the conciliar function) but by an institution of infallible
authority: the episcopal cathedra or see (supposedly) of the Apostle Peter and
of each successive bishop of Rome. The same see also determines the regulative
principles of conduct, the morality of those who are believers in this
ideological sense, through a juridical system of codified canons and also by
means of a constant series of declarations on topical moral problems.
It is easy
to understand how and why the quantitative/geographical version of catholicity
was an effective solution to the problem of the unity of the Christian world in
the West and at the same time the matrix for the generation (for the first time
in human history) of the phenomenon we call
totalitarianism. Humanity had known various forms of absolutist rule,
tyranny, and arbitrary despotism. But it had not known a form of authority that
controlled not only public conduct but also the convictions of individuals,
their ideas and views, their private life. It had not known institutions such
as the Holy Inquisition that punished thoughtcrimes, nor the Index of Prohibited
Books, the systematic indoctrination of the masses established by the
Congregatio de Propaganda Fidei, the principle of infallible leadership
enshrined in the papal infallible
magisterium, the use of torture as a method of examination (authorized by a
bull of Innocent IV in 1252).
The Roman
version of catholicity became identical with the alienation of the ecclesial
event in a centrally controlled ideology and codified moralism: its radical
religionization. All the elements and marks of a natural religion are manifest
in the Roman Catholic tradition as institutionalized responses to humanity’s
biological, instinctive need for religion [Note: Yannaras in this book make a distinction of "religion" and the "ecclesial event". Religion being a kind of 'sickness' that must be cured through the true christianism - the "ecclesial event"]. They are manifest in an
intellectualist safeguarding of metaphysical certainties; in a moralistic
legalism, or fear of freedom; in submission to an “infallible” authority, or
fear of growing up; and in the idolization of “dogma,” or fear of risking ascetical
access to experiential knowledge.
As in any
religion, salvation was understood as an event centered on the individual and
proclaimed as such—a narcissistic, neurotic goal. Matter was depreciated, the
human body became a source of anguished guilt, and erotic love was identified
with the terror of a punishable
“impurity.” At the same time the Church’s service to humanity of freeing us
from slavery to the egocentrism of guilt was alienated into an authority “to
bind and to loose,” an all-powerful authority from the moment the full weight
of pangs of guilt that are so intolerable for humanity began to be felt. The expression
“plenitude of power” (plenitudo potestatis) literally means that the bishop of
Rome claimed (and for long periods succeeded in enforcing) that he alone
(thanks to the absolute power on earth granted to him by God) “invests” the
secular rulers, kings, and sovereigns with the insignia of their office, and
consequently that it was also he who deposed them when he judged their actions
not to conform to true piety. And if kings and sovereigns were directly or indirectly
subject to the pope, how much more completely were the laity subject to the
“Church,” that is, to the clergy.
Those who
exercised the authority “to bind and to loose,” the clergy as a whole, were
charged, moreover, with the authority that came from the obligatory
renunciation of sexuality: the priesthood was linked without exception to
celibacy. With full awareness of the powerful prerogatives and high merit that
went with their sexual privation, the clergy in the medieval West constituted a
distinct social class that enjoyed a standard of living incomparably higher than
that of the ordinary laity and often even higher than that of the nobility.
The Roman
version of catholicity succeeded in solving the problem of the unity of the particular
local churches in an impressively effective manner. But there is no doubt that
it radically changed the character of ecclesial unity, transforming it into an
ideologically disciplined uniformity and a homogenous legal moralism. (The Roman
Catholic totalitarian model of unity was reproduced some centuries later by
Marxism, in its imposition of a single and once again “infallible”
cathedra—Moscow—and an inflexible system of obedience of the “faithful” to the
party ideology and morality.61) By the criteria of the Church’s gospel, the
Roman version of catholicity was a dramatic historical failure, even if by the
criteria of secular efficiency it may be reckoned a success.
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