Church and State as Seen in the Formation of ChristendomAllies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Religion
Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom
Allies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Church and state; Church history -- Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600; Religion and state
"When we speak of the slave as anciently included in the Family, we
intend to assert nothing as to the motives of those who brought him into
it or kept him there; we merely imply that the tie which bound him to his
master was regarded as one of the same general character with that which
united every other member of the group to its chieftain. This consequence
is, in fact, carried in the general assertion already made, that the
primitive ideas of mankind were unequal to comprehending any basis of the
connection _inter se_ of individuals apart from the relations of Family"
(p. 164).
"The point which before all others has to be apprehended in the
constitution of primitive societies, is that the individual creates for
himself few or no rights and few or no duties. The rules which he obeys
are derived first from the station into which he is born, and next from
the imperative commands addressed to him by the chief of the household of
which he forms part" (p. 311).
Then as to the union of government with religion:—"A stage occurs in the
history of all the families of mankind, the stage at which a rule of law
is not yet discriminated from a rule of religion. The members of such a
society consider that the transgression of a religious ordinance should
be punished by civil penalties, and that the violation of a civil duty
exposes the delinquent to divine correction" (p. 23). At the time of the
Code of the Twelve Tables, "Roman society had barely emerged from that
intellectual condition in which civil obligation and religious duty are
inevitably confounded" (p. 18).
For, in fact, originally, "Law is the parent's word" (p. 125), and "the
civil Laws of States first make their appearance as the Themistes of a
patriarchal sovereign" (p. 166); that is, "as separate, isolated
judgments, which, consistently with the belief in their emanation from
above, cannot be supposed to be connected by any thread of principle" (p.
5). Moreover, as to the origin of Property:—"It is more than likely that
joint-ownership, and not separate ownership, is the really archaic
institution, and that the forms of property which will afford us
instruction will be those which are associated with the rights of
families and the groups of kindred" (p. 259), as shown in the Indian
village-community, the Russian and Slavonic village. And "we have the
strongest reasons for thinking that property once belonged not to
individuals, nor even to isolated families, but to larger societies
composed on the patriarchal model" (p. 268). Thus the author conjectures
"that private property, in the shape in which we know it, was chiefly
formed by the gradual disentanglement of the separate rights of
individuals from the blended rights of a community" (p. 269).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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