Frank Dialog

This is a continuation of a series, which (as a reminder) has the following planned outline:

First, dealing with Catholicism:

Catholicism from its very beginning was a spiritual religion that did not wish for worldly domination.

Evidence for this from Scripture
Evidence for this from the early Church Fathers

Catholicism has had a troubled relationship with Catholic rulers over the centuries, so that actions of Catholic rulers are often not fairly ascribable to the Catholic religion.
The specific history of the Age of Exploration is complicated, and not all actions of Eurpoean kingdoms of the time that are condemned nowadays necessarily deserve condemnation. Nor are all actions of Popes in that time period indicative of essential Catholicism (unfortunately).
Catholic theology of the time actually had the correct view on the relationship between religion and force.

Then, dealing with Islam:

Islam from its very beginning endorsed the spread of religion by force and the domination of the political sphere by the religious.

Evidence for this from the Quran.
Evidence for this from early authoritative supplements to the Quran.

Modern fundamentalist Islam draws inspiration and justification from these early principles and ideas.

1.1.2 Evidence from the early Church reinforces the premise that Christianity was a spiritual religion without worldly ambitions.

In Scriptural Theology

Typological understandings of salvation history continue to be extremely important; the Old Testament was read in this same typological fashion by theologians. Examples of this typological interpretation are too common to even summarize. To include just one, I'll point to a Persian Church Father, St. Aphrahat. His treatise on Faith is a revealing example of how the Christians went back through the Old Testament and saw their religion revealed in it, after the fact. Expanding on the thought of St. Paul, he goes through all of Jewish history and picks out how the characteristically Christian virtue of Faith was manifest in the primary figures of the Old Testament. Whereas the Jewish patriarchs had been founders of a physical kingdom in Jewish thought, they are re-thought as precursors to the Kingdom of God, the central element of which is an interior movement: personal faith.

In Religious Life

Catholicism was always a religion oriented towards high personal aspirations. Christ said, "be perfect as my heavenly Father is perfect," and the early Church took this to indicate a call to struggle to overcome the tendency to sin and to work for personal sanctity. In part, this personal sanctity consisted in the virtuous life, understood in much the same was as by the better contemporary pagans. However, the Christian ideal of sanctity always had a distinctively Christian characteristic in that it always revolved around the person and example of Christ. Three key elements of this are the Sacraments, veneration of the Saints, and the life of consecrated virginity.

Sacraments

In the Sacraments, the clearest examples of how the imitation of Christ was central in Christian religious life are Baptism and the Eucharist. Most primarily, baptism was seen as a washing away of the "old man" (Adam, and hence the original sin that came from him) and the "putting on" of Christ, the new Adam. The imagery of the sacrament itself was intended to recall also Christ's death and resurrection: you go down under the water to symbolize Christ's going down under the earth in the tomb, and you rise up out of it as Christ rose again from the dead.

In the Eucharist, the priest uses the words of Christ at the Last Supper (following His command to "do this in memory of me"), in order to transform the bread and wine into the Body of Christ, which is then fed to the Church as the sacrament of unity in order that it may become the *mystical* body of Christ (a good collection of quotes from various Church Fathers on this is here).

Although the celebration of the Sacraments has a social and external aspect, it was always clear that the end and purpose of the Sacraments was the interior life of the soul--the life of Christ that comes to the Christian believer through them.

Veneration of the Saints

Veneration of the saints is the oldest historically attested practice of Christianity, the first inscribed prayers to saints being older than any existing manuscript of the Scriptures (some examples described here). Although the practice of venerating saints would expand over time, originally it was almost exclusively about venerating the martyrs.

As Christianity has been compared with Islam on this point as well, it would be good to understand the specifically Christian notion of martyrdom. This is well exemplified in the very early (and short and readable) account of the martyrdom of St. Polycarp (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0102.htm). The main characteristics of Christian martyrdom that you can see here are:

It is considered the final and highest form of *preaching*. The martyr is a witness to the truth of the message that he proclaims. He proves how sincere and deep is his belief in his own message by suffering publicly for it.
It is considered an imitation of the example of the Apostles, who all went about preaching the Gospel and were all martyred (except for John) confessing Christ's name.
It is considered a participation in Christ's own life and sacrificial death: a sharing in the "cup of Christ". Just as Christ preached the Gospel and was sacrificed for it for the redemption of mankind, so the martyrs preach the Gospel and offer up their own bodies as co-sacrifices with Christ for the same sake. They are the "companions of Christ."

This idea of Christian martyrdom was the highest ideal of the Christian life, and it is nothing like the warrior-martyr that Islam puts forth. A Christian martyr is a lamb led to the slaughter, just like the Lamb of God, not a lion falling gloriously in combat.

It is quite simply impossible to reconcile this ideal of the Christian martyr as the fellow suffering servant with Christ with the imposition of the Christian faith by force.

The Life of Consecrated Virginity

Aside from martyrdom, the other early lived ideal of Christian life was the consecrated virgins. It is revealing of the ideals of early Christianity that the Christians they lionized were not the ones successful in the political or worldly sphere, but the ones who were either destroyed by the world or who separated themselves from it.

One interesting example of this is the early Egyptian monasteries, because it shows just how far the early Church took the spiritual understanding of the New Covenant. The Egyptian monks left the world in order to live in communities in the desert outside of Egypt, and in this they thought of themselves as the spiritual successors to the Jews who left Egypt with Moses and wandered in the desert for forty years before reaching the Holy Land. In Shenoute's White Monastery, this parallel was lived so specifically that they actually took many of their community laws straight from the book of Deuteronomy, thought to be the book that Moses wrote to the Jews during this period of exile in the desert. The difference was that while the Jews were in exile looking forward to entrance into the Holy Land, the Christians were looking forward only to the next life and the New Jerusalem in heaven. Egyptian monasticism is thus a sort of lived typology in itself.

The example of early monastacism shows that the Christian ideal was never the conquest of the world in the sense of causing earthly powers and principalities to submit to the Church *in this life*. The Second Coming of Christ was always expected, and it was Christ Himself who would cause the final definitive Kingdom to come. In the meantime, the Church on earth was principally fighting a battle with the world *as it existed as an influence on the sould of the Christian*. In other words, Chrisian conquest of the world happened by Christians freeing themselves of the tyranny of worldly influences on their own actions.

The Importance of These Elements

I want to stress that these elements in which I have identified a spiritual, non-worldly focus in Christianity were not merely incidental to early Christianity; they were central to it.

Indeed, from the point of view of archaeology alone, there is little evidence that early Christianity consisted of anything *but* these elements I have identified. We know from the extensive manuscript tradition that Scripture was always very important to Christians. There is even speculation that the book (as opposed to the scroll) was an invention of early Christians to make reading of Scripture at home more convenient (though this may be simply a coincidence of time).

Meanwhile, the importance of the Sacraments of the Eucharist and Baptism are evident from early Christian artwork that revolved around those two institutions. More than almost anything else, we have sanctuary art surrounding the altars at which the Eucharist was celebrated and baptistry art from the early baptistries. And the veneration of martyrs and prayers to saints form some of the very earliest physical evidence of Christianity that we have in the form of graffiti on tombs of the martyrs and their shrines.

While the emergence of the life of consecrated virginity was a bit later historically, the immense and immediate popularity of the Egyptian monasteries is hard to overstate. Pilgrims came to the monks in Egypt from all over the Catholic world in huge numbers (mini cities were built just to accommodate them), because the life they were leading was celebrated everywhere as the pinnacle of Christian piety and virtue.

Early Christian Writings on the Relationship between the Church and the World

That Christianity is a religion without worldly ambitions is shown by its early history in the world as well as its early theology; that is, some early Christians wrote specifically on this question. The fact is that Christianity lived for its first centuries without any State approval (quite the opposite on occasion), and it was basically fine with that. Early Christians, in fact, often had to answer accusations that they were not loyal to the State and were trying to overthrow it. One should remember that in those times, State and religion were not necessarily considered separate things. Romans considered it fairly uncontroversial to elevate the emperor to the status of a god and to demand sacrifice to him, as religious piety and devotion to the patria were considered intensely related by most.

Justin Martyr, one of the earliest Church fathers, gave a classic defence of Christianity drawing a distinction between belief in pagan gods and loyalty to the State, emphatically denying the first while maintaining that Christians were very loyal to the legitimate government of the Romans (following Christ's injunction to Peter to pay the Roman taxes), and that the kingdom that they sought was not of this world and hence not competitive with Roman Empire.

The fact that Justin is now known as "martyr" shows how successful his argumentation was with Rome, but the fact that his writings were saved and revered by Christians ever afterwards shows how successful they were among the early Church. Despite accusations, Christians were never working towards the overthrow of secular rulers.

As a sort of side note, I'd like to mention the early Church's relation to the pagan world of ideas: pagan literature and philosophy. On this there were mixed views among the Church fathers--some were very antipathetic towards all pagan culture, which they regarded as corrupt and even demonic. (And these people had a point, as the corruption of Roman culture in its decadence was in many cases extreme.) However, the consensus view of Christian teachers was conciliatory, expressed here by St. Basil, urging Christians to take what was good from pagan culture and discard what was evil.

Overall, the attitude of the Church to the secular world was coexistence. The world was created by God and ultimately governed by Him, but the existence of the Church in the world is special and different. The Church is the physical presence of an other-worldly reality within the world, interacting with it but not tied to it. The great Church Father St. Augustine wrote a book entirely about this, the City of God. This work is especially important here, because St. Augustine can be considered the bridge from the early Church to the medieval Church, so influential were his writings to become in the West. Key ideas in the City of God include:

Earthly kingdoms come and go as ordained by God's providence.
The Kingdom of God embraces all nations, and lives within them but is unified by a common spiritual life and a common goal, which is the life of paradise.
Not only is the Church, the Kingdom of God, dispersed throughout the world and intermixed with the Kingdom of Satan, the Kingdom of Satan is interspersed within the Church, as both the bad and the good are taken into the fold. The good and the bad will never be clearly delineated in this life, but only in the final judgement.

So Augustine clearly communicates a notion of the Church which cannot be identified with any merely temporal or political order.

Overall, I think this is a good survey of early Christianity supporting my thesis that it was, from the beginning, a spiritual religion. Next we will go on to look at how Christianity became more and more entwined with secular powers through history, having both good and bad effects.

In his recent exhortation on evangelization, the Holy Father stated:

Faced with disconcerting episodes of violent fundamentalism, our respect for true followers of Islam should lead us to avoid hateful generalisations, for authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.

I took exception to the second part of this sentence, as I believe violence is indeed recommended by authentic Islam and a proper reading of the Koran. A friend, however, challenged me by claiming that although violence may be part of Islam now, it was just as much a part of Catholicism earlier. In particular he pointed to the spread of Christianity by force during the 15th century and the Age of Exploration. From this he concluded that Fundamentalist Islam today is simply trying to impose its worldview onto an unbelieving world in just the same way that the Catholic Church tried to impose its worldview onto an unbelieving world by force six centuries ago. We can, then, hope that Islam will evolve into a peaceful religion eventually in the same way Catholicism did.

I don't believe that Islam and Christianity are in any way parallel in this regard, so I don't accept that argument in either its premise or conclusion. I'd like to show why here. This will be a multi-part series of posts, which I will structure as follows:

First, dealing with Catholicism:

Catholicism from its very beginning was a spiritual religion that did not wish for worldly domination.

Evidence for this from Scripture
Evidence for this from the early Church Fathers

Catholicism has had a troubled relationship with Catholic rulers over the centuries, so that actions of Catholic rulers are often not fairly ascribable to the Catholic religion.
The specific history of the Age of Exploration is complicated, and not all actions of Eurpoean kingdoms of the time that are condemned nowadays necessarily deserve condemnation. Nor are all actions of Popes in that time period indicative of essential Catholicism (unfortunately).
Catholic theology of the time actually had the correct view on the relationship between religion and force.

Then, dealing with Islam:

Islam from its very beginning endorsed the spread of religion by force and the domination of the political sphere by the religious.

Evidence for this from the Quran.
Evidence for this from early authoritative supplements to the Quran.

Modern fundamentalist Islam draws inspiration and justification from these early principles and ideas.

1. Catholicism and Political Domination

1.1 Evidence from Scripture

Christianity is a spiritual religion. This is true in a number of ways, but there is one very particular way I'd like to highlight now, which is that Christianity has at its foundation a spiritual interpretation of history, especially with regards to the Old Testament and Judaism. Christianity sees history as a story planned out by God, and the most important event of this story as a divine plot twist. It goes like this:

Throughout the Old Testament, God built up a relationship with the Jews, making them His chosen people and giving them the Holy Land, the Law and the Propets, the Kingdom of David and the Temple of Solomon. Because of the sinfulness of the People, the Land and the the Kingdom was taken away from the Jews, but with a promise that the exile would not be forever. Therefore at the time of Jesus, the major preoccupation of faithful Jews was the expulsion of the Romans and restoration of the Kingdom, and it was expected that this was to happen through the coming of a promised Messiah.

The Christian twist is that the Messiah comes, only to reveal that the Holy Land and the Kingdom of David were never the *real* point after all--that all the things that happened to the Chosen People was preparation for and symbolic of the New Covenant. The Kingdom of David was not going to be restored, but rather replaced by something incomparably higher and better: the Kingdom of Heaven. All the worldly expectations of the Jews at the time were turned on their heads and replaced by spiritual expectations, and all the history of the Old Testament was radically re-read in the light of Christ as a foreshadowing and prophecy for the new reality, which is the Church. So the Old and the New Testaments are read as paralleling each other, with the second including but also transcending the first.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of this doctrine of "transcending parallelism" (which is known traditionally in Catholic doctrine as "typology") to Christianity. It is everywhere in the New Testament. To pick a few examples:

The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus deliberately presenting Himself as a new Moses presenting a new, more perfect law than the ten commandments from a mountain top ("you have heard it said . . . but I say to you . . .")
Parables are given that emphasize the importance of the life to come over the present life (parable of the pearl of great price, the parable of Lazarus and Dives, the parable of the 5 five and 5 foolish virgins, the parable of the tares in the wheat, etc. etc.)
Twelve apostles with no wordly power or majesty are chosen to replace the twelve tribes of Israel and are sent out to spread the Kingdom of God with preaching rather than warfare.
Jesus is captured and suffers an apparent humiliating defeat at the hand of pagans and through the intermediate cause of sinful Jewish (thus paralleling the humiliating history of the Jews first in exile and then oppressed by pagans, a point that is often overlooked), only for it to turn out that His Crucifixion is actually His great triumph over evil and the very inauguration of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth (and note that he makes clear even during His passion, "My Kingdom is not of this world", thus making the theme explicit).
Moving beyond the Gospels, this transcending parallelism is everywhere in Paul. The pattern of "if it was this-and-such in the Old Covenant, so much the more will some-such-thing be true in the New" is constantly coming up in Paul's writings.
The idea that our citizenship is not of this world and that a Christian should therefore live a life higher and more exalted than an ordinary life is also constant in Paul.

Examples could be multiplied ad-infinitum--this really *is* an extremely important concept in Christianity.

This doctrine has a very important implications for the relationship between the Christian and the world. Whereas the Jews were seen as attached to a particular political structure they saw as divinely mandated (the Holy Land), the Christians were focused on the "New Jerusalem", a homeland that was in heaven, not in any earthly country. Consequently, when the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by Romans drew nigh, Christians were instructed to leave. Jersusalem was no longer the focus of religion: Christ was, and Christ could be worshipped anywhere.