(continued in the early stage)
Early stage: ↓
13, Black Death shakes the authority of the church
During the outbreak of the Black Death, people who were in panic eagerly explore the cause of the plague. How did the Black Death happen? How to treat it or stop it from spreading?
The church, which is in absolute authority, gives the answer to "God's condemnation" based on the belief system of "original sin-atonement-judgment". They believe that the Black Death is a punishment God has brought for the sins of the world. In order to calm God's wrath, people must constantly repent and suppress their desires. Some believers even clear their sins through harsh self-fighting in order to obtain God's forgiveness.
However, the Black Death ruthlessly negated the church's interpretation, and despite constant prayers, thousands of people were taken away, including morally noble priests and nuns.
So, people asked this question: What kind of behavior does
cause God’s anger?
Why do good people and bad people die indistinguishable from each other?
If adults are at the cost of their crimes, why do innocent children also bear the punishment of death? What is especially true is that why are priests who are messengers of God not spared?
All these, the church cannot give a reasonable explanation.
The most ironic thing is that Archbishop Williams Eddington, who claimed to be "the condemnation of God", also caught a disease soon and became one of the earliest victims in England.
Due to the extremely terrible contagious nature of the Black Death, the mortality rate of priests is very high. Faced with the threat of death, although some priests with good character can persist in their duties, many priests chose to escape in the last battle. With the large number of culprits dying, the vacancies of high-level church personnel have been caused. To fill this vacancy quickly, the church had to lower the standards and hire priests who were less educated, fragile in dedication and less training than their predecessors.
Church
Results, many priests were unable to strictly perform their rescue duties during the Black Death epidemic, and took the opportunity to fill their pockets and accept a large amount of donations, thus making a fortune. These actions aroused people's hatred of priests and to a certain extent weakened the church's sense of sacredness in people's minds.
Church
Because clergy did not rescue the people from the danger of the plague, coupled with the subsequent corruption, some historians believe that the Black Death indirectly promoted the Protestant Reformation. Although the Reformation was initiated by the complex interaction of multiple factors, before Martin Luther published his "Hyper 95 Propositions ", it was impossible to deny the unique role played by the plague in significantly weakening the power and authority of the Christian Church.
RDF Church attempts to use religion to fight the Black Death
"Ninety-Five Outlines" published by Martin Luther
Mystic always appears when society encounters crisis. Because the existing social mechanism or explanation cannot cope with disasters, in order to fill this belief gap, the people will naturally look for their own explanations. As the performance of the church during the Black Death proved that it failed to provide a socially satisfying response, the people turned to using mysticism as a communication tool. The guarantee of redemption is obtained through direct communication with God.
Decades after the Black Death, while the prestige of the church declined, religious enthusiasm in secular society showed a significant increase. A large number of church chapels were established in England, and a trend of building churches emerged in Europe. Among them, the most famous is the cathedral located in , Milan, .
Milan Cathedral
1350 to 1375, France and Italy established a large number of rural churches.It is obvious that although the people are disappointed with the church, their recognition of Christianity itself, their piety to the cause of disaster caused by human sin, their fear of disaster prompted them to bypass the intermediary of the church through their own understanding and establish a direct communication channel with God in a mystical way.
After the Black Death, knowledgeable scholars joined the path of direct communication with God. Oxford University The famous theologian Wycliff translated " Bible " into English, which provided great help to ordinary people to directly understand God through the church. Although his views were criticized by the church, the priests of the Lollard sect who followed him had achieved certain success in the secular world.
Some keen thinkers began to oppose the asceticism of Christian theology, advocated liberating individuality and enjoying life, hoping to establish a new and more human moral principle and life ideal. The poet , known as the "father of humanism ", declared: "I don't want to become God... I am a mortal, I only ask for the happiness of mortals.
"Father of humanism" poet Petrac
A unprecedented catastrophe of life brought heart-wrenching reflection and awakening to Europe. It not only brought a population crisis due to the sharp decline in population, but also liberated human thoughts from religious confinement. The church's ideological autocracy and political hegemony began to extinguish, and the thoughts of humanism were fully opened.
philosopher thinker Thomas Hobbs (Thomas Hobbe was influenced by liberal thoughts. In his eyes, God has basically nothing to do with the world since the creation of the world. Since the ultimate goal does not exist, it is naturally wrong to think that mortals must tend to be virtue and perfection. This shakes the medieval asceticism rooted in the theory of goodness, and everyone began to advocate freedom and equality.
European Enlightenment philosopher thinker Thomas Hobbe)
objectively destroyed the old social system, attacked the church's domination over Europe, and greatly weakened the feudal and church power. This also caused some advanced European intellectuals to break free from the ideological control of the church. For example, Dante created " Divine Comedy " to satirize the rule of the church, and Peter Lack in "December", which not only reflected the reality of the plague in Europe at that time, but also showed the people-oriented theme. Later, these ideological reforms and evolutions into the Renaissance movement and the Reformation movement, promoting the development of modernization in Europe.
Dante created "Divine Comedy"
In the face of the plague, theology ended, medicine came on stage, it was the progress of mankind and the sublimation of the soul.
At that time, people realized that they could not continue like this, and they had to rely on themselves. They invented medical models that have been used to this day, such as isolation, herd immunity , etc. The famous doctor Shiriac took the lead in breaking the tradition and dissecting the Black Death Death. This was the beginning of anatomy , epidemiology and surgery. Many medical disciplines have thus embarked on the path of vigorous development. This can also prove that although the Black Death is a catastrophe of European society, it is also the end of this old era.
(to be continued)
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