The void in the political realm in the Roman empire was filled by the Christian Church. Religion and culture are supposed to grow from the same roots. People of the North were barbarians until Christianity united them. The Church came to the barbarians with a higher and more sophisticated society. Christians are known for their missionary work. The conversion of the Roman Empire lead to the rising of a new culture. The higher culture of the ancient world ignores the existence of their new faith even after Christianity had become the designated religion of the Empire. In other regions, pagan ideas began to sprout. The areas in the West that received the most persecutions and barbaric attacks had the most spiritual growth. The Church did not suffer too badly. The barbarians were in control of the military and political functions, but everything else - moral authority, learning, and culture - belonged to the Church at that time. When the Empire fell, the Church's resources were not injured; if anything, they had been strengthened. After the barbarians began to convert to Christianity, they brought ideas of the higher culture into the Church and therefore causing the Church to lose some of its Roman traditions and it became very dehumanized.
In the age of Gregory of Tours, the world had strayed far away from Christianity. The rulers were vicious and corrupt. They were unjust and had no notion of what the law should be. In such a world, religion only remains because the people are held in admiration of the supernatural and the spiritual. The vengeance and wrath of God was the one thing to hold the lawless in fear. Within the Dark Ages, the saints' were supernatural powers who watched over the people. The worship of the saints was a huge influence on this time period.
In the early centuries of the Middle Ages, we wee two sides of the world. On one side, we see a dark and dismal time filled with violence and destruction. But on the other side, we can see power and mystery - any evil or wrongdoing will be remedied - and plenty of hope. Without the accumulating of some traits of the barbaric people, it would have been impossible to have accepted any of the saint-worship. The barbarians didn't believe in any of the Christianity, unless they had it clearly demonstrated in their life.
"The Western Church did not come to the barbarians with a civilizing mission or any conscious hopes of social progress, but with a tremendous message of divine judgment and divine salvation."
"What is there to please us in this world? Everywhere we see sorrow and lamentation. The cities and towns are destroyed, the fields are laid waste and the land returns to solitude. No peasant is left to till the fields, there are few inhabitants left in the cities, and yet even these scanty remnants of humanity are still subject to ceaseless sufferings....Some are led away captive, others are mutilated and still more slain before our eyes. What is there then to please us in this world? If we still love such a world as this, it is plain that we love not pleasure but misery," St. Gregory.
The religion that they had at that time had a unique characteristic: it was collective as opposed to individualist, objective as opposed to subjective, and realist as opposed to idealist. The Church continued to be a refuge for those seeking aid and relief.
Both Augustine and Ambrose brought whole new meanings into the Church concerning the musical sphere. No matter how bad the world became, the liturgy of the Church remained stable and remained Christo centric. There were many things within the Church that was viewed as mysteries, such as the idea of salvation. "Thus in the West, after the fall of the Empire, the Church possessed in the liturgy a rich tradition of Christian culture as an order of worship, a structure of thought and a principle of life." Christianity was preserved through the liturgy. As darkness swept over Western Europe, the one thing that kept the traditions and ideas of a Christian life was the monasteries.
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