The Rise of the Mediaeval Church: And Its Influence on the Civilization of Western Europe from the First to the Thirteenth CenturyFlick, Alexander Clarence
History
The Rise of the Mediaeval Church: And Its Influence on the Civilization of Western Europe from the First to the Thirteenth Century
Flick, Alexander Clarence
Church history -- Middle Ages, 600-1500
Until Luther led the great reformatory schism in the sixteenth century,
all historians, crude and unscientific though much of their work was,
recognised the necessary union of political and ecclesiastical history.
The Venerable Bede began his celebrated history not with the coming of
Abbot Augustine and his monks, but with the landing of Cæsar and his
Roman cohorts. As modern civilisation crept over western Europe and
crossed the mighty deep to Columbia's shores, carrying with it the
revolutionising Teutonic conception of the national state with its new
duties and relationships, the tendency was to magnify the political and
social sides of history at the expense of the religious. The hatreds and
misunderstandings of the Reformation, though doing something to rectify
the "orthodox" history of the old Church, really put members of the old
organisation wholly on the defensive, and checked for centuries anything
like a genuinely sympathetic and scientific study of the old Church by
Protestant historians. With Neander, that sympathetic Christian of
Jewish descent, and the scholarly Gieseler, a new era opened. The
growing doctrine of the separation of Church and state accentuated the
breach between political and religious history. The early crude
conception of specialisation also separated sacred from profane
history, and turned the former over wholly to the theologian. Secular
historians took the position of Napoleon when invited to enter the Holy
City: "Jerusalem does not enter into the line of my operations."
At last the Church historian and the civic historian have joined hands,
and look each other in the face. They see that their aim is essentially
common: to know the truth about the past. This search for truth for its
own sake is purely modern--almost contemporaneous. Formerly, history was
written to justify or disprove some theory of political or
ecclesiastical polity, or to glorify some dynasty, sect, party, or hero,
or to vindicate some hypothesis or set of ideas. The historian was not a
searcher for truth, but a lawyer with a cause to plead. It is generally
realised now that the historian, whether he deals with the state, the
Church, society, education, or industry, is working an important part of
the field of general history. A knowledge of each one of these
institutions is necessary to supplement and explain any or all of the
others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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