BOOK Review: The Church at the Turning Points of History
From the opening pages of Genesis, the Bible expounds sacred history with a backdrop anchored in both time and place: the Bible's assertions culminating in Our Lord and His Church are historical assertions. In Genesis 2, the four rivers of the Garden of Eden are specifically identified. The reader learns that the first river is Phison; that, the river "compasseth all the land of Hevilath." One learns, further, that "the gold of that land is very good: there is found bdellium, and the onyx stone."1 Notwithstanding Joseph Campbell's contention that Christianity is but one of numerous versions of a single universal "myth," the Catholic religion insists that it is the religion of one God who has unfolded His plan in time. During the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, the Egyptians worshipped "Ra, the sun god, whom the Theban pharaohs joined with their favorite god Amon to make one god, Amon-Ra."2 Contrast that notion of god as a product of human art with the Bible's pithy statement: "Jesus therefore was born in Bethlehem of Juda, in the days of King Herod...."3 The Bible consistently presents historical details of God's, not man's, design.
Accordingly, a Catholic who wishes to deepen his understanding of the Faith will certainly profit from a closer study of the Church in history. Contemporary society, of course, puts numerous obstacles to block such learning. The Bible, if it is studied at all in the schools, is treated as literature, not history. The history that is offered instead is a hodge-podge survey of miscellaneous civilizations called global history: today's students, offered a sampling of all civilizations, are fortunate if they learn the history of any of them. To be sure, when the history of the Church is actually studied, its actions are always treated in darker hues. Scratch the surface of any university graduate'™s understanding of history and you will learn that the Crusades were bloodthirsty and the Inquisition intolerant. Individual Catholic students who know better confront additional obstacles. Many histories suffer from one of two defects: they are either so general as to be vague, or so specific as to lose the attention of all but the specialist. Where are histories that can fill genuine Catholic need?
In this writer's opinion, Godfrey Kurth's The Church at the Turning Points of History is one such work. The book, originally delivered as lectures in 1898 and first published in 1916, richly covers the tapestry of Church and society–from the ancient pagan world through the French Revolution and its aftermath–in less than 100 pages. Where necessary, Professor Kurth goes into considerable detail; when a more general view is better, he proceeds in that direction. In short, he was a Catholic historian who was a master of the craft: his work under review is as appropriate for a beginning (adolescent or adult) student of history as for an individual well-versed in the subject who desires a solid review.
As an example, Professor Kurth's second lecture, entitled "The Mission of the Church," amply proves that novice history students will not find his work unduly daunting. In that lecture, the professor explains the first key challenge which the Church, afire with the proselytizing zeal of Pentecost, had to confront: "the chief danger that the Church encountered in the first years lay in her ignorance of the attitude to be assumed concerning the Ancient Law and Israel" (27). Our Lord, in Kurth's clear exposition, did not make it easy for His first missionaries: "had He not said further that He had come first for the wandering sheep of the flock of Israel..." (Ibid.). Were Gentiles in fact entitled to join the New Israel? If so: "Was not Israel the guardian of the Law, of that Law which Christ said he had come to fulfil (sic) and not destroy?" (Ibid.). Did that really mean that Gentile men who wished to convert had to be circumcised? The beginning 21st-century student, because of Professor Kurth's careful buildup, readily understands the core issue and quite reasonably wonders how the Church in fact settled the matter.
Professor Kurth then reveals the drama of the Holy Ghost's step-by-step resolution of the issue. He first of all allots time to the inspired encounter of the Church's first Pope, Peter, and the Roman centurion, Cornelius. Cornelius's subsequent conversion was only that of a single person, however. Kurth then shifts the view to the mass conversion of Gentiles at Antioch, making that city the first to be called Christian. The argument between those who wanted Gentile converts to adopt the entirety of the Mosaic laws versus those who did not could no longer be postponed. History drily records that the argument was settled in favor of the latter position at the Council of Jerusalem. Professor Kurth brings to life the major personalities at that epochal event, both the St. Paul of customary historical narration as well as St. James the Lesser, whose contribution is too often neglected. The novice in conclusion learns about an important chapter in Church history from a master instructor who never condescends.
Veteran students on the other hand will profit from every one of Professor Kurth's seven lectures. This 30-year veteran of teaching history certainly profited. For instance, I had known–and taught–the cracking apart of the Roman Empire in the 300s and its subsequent collapse in 476. Until reading Kurth, however, I had not sufficiently appreciated the wrench to Church sensibility that the destruction of that great Empire entailed. In 312 Emperor Constantine's Edict of Milan mandated that Christianity be tolerated and, in 392, Emperor Theodosius declared Christianity to be the Empire's official religion. A fourth-century Church gratefully received these blessings from a civilization that was then over 1100 years old. Why shouldn't the Church regard that age-old Empire as eternal? When it ended, why did not the Church collapse with it?
Kurth brilliantly poses and answers such questions in his succinct account of this momentous historical catastrophe. The professor reminds the reader that Rome's history stretched as far back as 753 B.C., the era of the legendary (not imaginary) Romulus and Remus. He directs the reader to the Old Testament prophet Daniel: "For what was that fourth and last empire foretold by Daniel–and compared to iron to symbolize its indestructible duration–but the Roman Empire?" (38). Accordingly, when Alaric sacked Rome in 410, Churchmen went through a profound identity crisis. Not a few Christians of that era refused to distinguish between the Roman state and the Roman church, as Professor Kurth ably illustrates through the example of Roman Britain.
I had previously viewed Britain as Catholic since (roughly) 600, when Pope Gregory the Great dispatched Augustine on the latter's remarkable proselytizing effort. Actually, as one learns from Kurth, Britain had been Catholic since the second-century pontificate of St. Eleutherius. Unfortunately, when Roman military protection began to collapse in the fourth and fifth centuries, too many Catholic Britons refused to distinguish between Catholic civilization and Roman government. Laymen fought–while priests refused to convert–the Angles and Saxons who invaded the island. I had known that matters fared differently on the continent: Roman Churchmen there had baptized Clovis and anointed him King of the Franks, thus inaugurating a thousand-year tradition. Until reading Kurth, however, I had not sufficiently understood that the Catholic Britain of the fourth and fifth centuries represented a profound temptation, then and now. I wonder, for instance, how well many of America's Catholic intellectuals and politicians would fare with a collapse of our government or a successful invasion from abroad.
If Kurth stimulates the older student of history while he simultaneously instructs the beginner, he displays an art of composition that will impress students at every level. He has the remarkable talent to distinguish between the need to be general versus the need to be specific. His fourth lecture–"The Church and Feudalism"–is a superb instance of the former. In that lecture, the professor faces the huge challenge of covering 800 years of history, from 500 to 1300. How does one do justice to a politics that combines a Charlemagne with feudal vassals, an economics that ranged from manorialism to Italian towns and guilds, and a religion that produced numerous Benedictine orders, not to mention the later itinerant Franciscans and the Dominican instructors at the University of Paris? Kurth's splendid device is a single institution, lay investiture, through which–as a hub of a wheel–he can radiate numerous spokes.
Lay investiture was the unacceptable medieval practice of laymen, usually kings and nobles, awarding higher ecclesiastical offices. Professor Kurth brilliantly establishes the hierarchy of corruption which then ensued. First of all, from 967 to 1073, the Holy Roman Emperor actually chose the popes. The Church compromised at its highest level, the lower offices of bishop and priest in turn lost their independence. When a local bishop died, the chapter forwarded his ring and crosier to the king; unfortunately, by the time those objects had arrived, the court had already become "the steeple-chase of candidates for the episcopacy" (47). Naturally, the successful bishop had bribery expenses to settle, which meant that he, too, sold off the priesthoods at his disposal. The Church stank of simony at every level.
Professor Kurth superbly explains the wide-ranging ramifications of lay investiture as well as the courage of the Church's ultimate response. Concerning the former, he makes clear the average layman's disgust: "When luxury and venality had their seats in the sanctuary and talked from the pulpits, what could be the feelings of the hearers?" (50). The laity understandably, if regrettably, listened to the siren song of Albigensianism, the most formidable of the medieval heresies. Albigensianism is usually treated as the offshoot of southern French culture: Kurth challenges that notion, suggesting that the student "have no illusion on the subject: it was everywhere" (51). Consequently, the Church had to respond–often courageously–at many levels. Many students know of the martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas à Becket at the hands of English King Henry II; a few are acquainted with the stalwart resistance of Pope St. Gregory VII to the aggressions of Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV. Very few, I venture to say, will be familiar with the combination of tact and bravery Gregory's predecessors, pontiffs such as Leo IX, displayed in wresting control of papal selection itself from the grasping hands of the Holy Roman Emperors. Conventional history merely notes that the College of Cardinals, begun in 1059, started selecting popes shortly thereafter. Kurth's pages give light and inspiration to that mere date.
Through Professor Kurth's focus upon lay investiture, one better understands the entire Middle Ages. Charlemagne's successors inaugurated the simony of lay investiture; Albigensianism, heresy that it was, was an understandable reaction; and courageous churchmen such as Popes Leo IX and Gregory VII inspired a Francis of Assisi and a Thomas Aquinas to combat the heresy successfully. No wonder that the 13th century was probably the most glorious in the history of the Church, when She "presided at the birth of communes and universities, she covered with her prestige Gothic art and scholasticism, she saw saints ascend the thrones of France and Castile" (59).
It takes intellect of a high order to make lay investiture the bridge between Albigensianism and Gothic architecture, in the process compressing 800 years of history within fifteen pages.
Professor Kurth equally knows when he must devote considerable detail to a brief historical time period. The outstanding example among his lectures is his fifth, entitled "The Church and Neo-Caesarism," in which Kurth spends a surprising number of pages on the conflict between Pope Boniface VIII and French King Philip IV. Ten pages, over ten per cent of the Professor's lecture material, would at first sight appear to be too much coverage to devote to a single episode. Gradually, however, one appreciates the Professor's decision to allot so much time to just two individuals. He begins with the concept of Neo-Caesarism itself. Neo-Caesarism quite simply is the government's steady encroachment on more and more areas of private life until private life itself, culminating in a person's very prayer, is suffocated. Americans today live increasingly in a Neo-Caesarist world: in 1900, neighborhood children could spontaneously build Halloween bonfires; today, local governments forbid such entertainments. At the state level, a century ago a conscientious Catholic could refuse to rent his house to an unwed couple; currently, even "conservative" states are prepared to weigh in on behalf of the couple's "privacy" rights. More ominously still, the pre-Vatican II university whose funding from predominantly Catholic sources protected its capacity to teach the Faith now accepts both federal funding and federal tutelage.
Professor Kurth helps the reader see that Neo-Caesarism, absent in the earlier Middle Ages, received its insidious inauguration in the conflict between King Philip IV and Pope Boniface VIII. A typical medieval monarch, the Professor documents, had relatively little control:
Even the exalted Holy Roman Emperor could control only so much in a world of free cities, independent nobles, and untrammeled Church. Enter the conflict of Philip IV ("the Fair") and Pope Boniface VIII. Each stage of that late 13th-century confrontation, usually resulting in Philip's triumphs, reverberates in modern church-state relations. The conflict began, in 1297, when the pope tried to mediate a conflict between France and England. In doing so, Boniface mildly asserted the prerogatives of a medieval papacy strengthened by its victory over lay investiture: in 1215, for instance, Pope Innocent III had actually deposed England's King John I. Philip, much like the modern politician, would have none of that: "he accepted the mediation of the Pope, in the capacity as a private person...but in no way in the capacity of a recognized authority" (70). Would not our Holy Father today, whether opining for peace in Sudan or the Middle East, be perfectly acceptable to a Philip IV? Later, tensions escalated between the French king and the Pope over the issue of clerical immunity from direct royal taxation: the riches of the Church, "[i]n accordance with the doctrine of the time...belonged to the poor and could not be taxed" (73). While Philip subsequently backed off on this issue, later governments have implemented his policy, and the modern Church, unfortunately, has acquiesced. Few American Catholics can afford to tithe their church but they tithe–and then some–through mandatory taxation for welfare programs of dubious value to the poor. Eventually, Boniface in 1302 felt compelled to issue the papal bull Unam Sanctam in which he unhesitatingly reminded Philip of the prerogatives belonging to the Vicar of Christ. Philip's response was to gather a group of local Italian thugs to assault the pope, leading to Boniface's death from shock a few weeks later. Philip then moved the papacy to Avignon, France, in 1305, inaugurating that humiliating period of French control called the second "Babylonian Captivity" (1305-78).
While the papacy has long since returned to Rome, Professor Kurth–through his copious detail on a single episode–has enabled the student to better understand the ominous beginnings of Neo-Caesarism. Today, no pope would dare assert the doctrine of Unam Sanctam, and in fact that bull has become a staple of textbook presentation about a presumptuous papacy. In reality, the receding of papal guidance has created a social and spiritual vacuum into which a usurping Neo-Caesarist government has increasingly intruded. Professor Kurth furnishes a later historical example in the rule of ostensibly Catholic Louis XIV (1660-1715), the French "Sun King." In reality, Louis, using the doctrine of Gallicanism4, increasingly shackled the Church. He became one of the absolutist monarchs who so populate the 17th and 18th centuries. As Kurth succinctly states: "
The ensuing French Revolution, as Alexis de Tocqueville has pointed out5, merely took over and further consolidated the modern leviathan state. Today, the super-state extends and strengthens its grip over all of us while the modern Church has yet to face the issue as forthrightly as Boniface VIII did 700 years ago. Ultimately, Professor Kurth's editorial decision to devote over ten per cent of his text to just one pope and one monarch is necessary to introduce the reader to one of today's weightiest issues.
Notwithstanding his prodigious talent, not even Professor Kurth can do adequate justice to all the issues in such a short work. I found three key omissions: Protestantism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Neo-Caesarist possibilities of modern democracy. Kurth underestimates the impact and influence of Protestantism. I only noticed two references in the seven lectures, neither to Martin Luther. In both references, Protestantism is treated as at most an effect, and at best a secondary influence. I think Professor Kurth errs in understating the seminal influence of a Martin Luther in particular. At the historic (1521) imperial Diet of Worms, Luther, refusing to buckle to Church authority as explained by the Church representative Johann Eck, famously declared: "...
I believe the historian Will Durant, echoing the judgment of 19th-century historian Thomas Carlyle–"...the greatest moment in the modern history of man"7–has accurately stated the extent of Luther's influence (not, to be sure, the quality of that influence). Luther sprang subjective individualism on the world with lasting consequences. Religious indifferentism, rooted in the notion that our religious views are purely subjective opinions, is inseparable from Luther's rejection of any authority other than his own judgment. Nor has Luther's influence been confined to the theological. As I write, a woman's "right to choose"–the standard euphemism for the state-sanctioned right to kill unborn children–continues to pass muster with a Supreme Court comprised of five "Catholic" justices.
Professor Kurth also fails to do justice to the Scientific Revolution, both its historical origins as well as contemporary influence. Every civilization has pursued science; only modern civilization–beginning with the West–has become increasingly captive to the false philosophy of scientism. Scientism is the (ultimately) religious belief that unhindered science will eventually explain everything and solve all problems. As just one illustration of the extent of its influence today, consider the omnipresence of the psychiatric establishment. A troubled Catholic American in 2008 is more likely to visit a medical doctor than go to confession. His son or daughter is as likely to ingest a prescribed pill to combat "depression" than to think that the ultimate source of the problem is spiritual. Indeed, key concepts–such as "soul"–that would form part of a religious examination into a troubled interior life are almost utterly drained of meaning.
The historical roots of such scientific usurpation reside in episodes such as Galileo in the 17th century and Darwin in the 19th. Conventional history is monolithic in its presentation of these matters. Even as fair-minded a historian as R. R. Palmer weights his conclusions against the Church and for modern(ist) science in his discussion of Galileo. The Church, he concludes, could not cope with the heliocentric discoveries of Galileo: he "was condemned and forced to an ostensible recantation by his church."8 How many times has that propaganda been driven into Catholics? Similarly, conventional history records its sympathies for "science" in the 19th-century battle over Darwinism. In 1859, Darwin first popularized the idea of natural selection and followed that work, in 1871, with the less-known work The Descent of Man. In that writing, Darwin "theorized that humans and apes might have descended from a common ancestor." While "many religious leaders believed Darwin's theories contradicted the Biblical account of creation," the modern textbook blandly finishes: "Darwin's theories transformed people's understanding about living things and their origin."9 In today's world, all "intelligent" people accept that non-intelligence created everything.
A resurgent Catholic history will have to confront these one-sided presentations of history. Surprisingly, Professor Kurth rarely discusses the Scientific Revolution in his lectures, three times by my count. When he does, he is far too lenient toward modern science's propagandists. In his (sixth) lecture about the Renaissance, he notes in passing that "the vast conquests of the natural sciences, dating from the 16th century" (81) paved the way for the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. He says nothing about Galileo or Darwin, not to mention their deleterious influence on the prestige of the Church.
Perhaps Professor Kurth's greatest failing is a blind spot toward the Neo-Caesarist potential of the modern democracies. When he discusses the phenomenon of Neo-Caesarism, Kurth comes perilously close to restricting such totalitarianism to the "divine right" monarchies of the 17th through 19th centuries. Kurth is certainly correct when he concludes:
I agree with Kurth that the medieval king's limited control of his society accorded with Catholic teaching while a Louis XIV's ambition to dominate all of 17th-century France, the Church included, was not. However, modern democracy, with its roots in "social contract" philosophers such as the Puritan John Locke, is hardly exempt from the Neo-Caesarist temptation. One is not sure that Kurth was so persuaded. When discussing the abuse of lay investiture, he contrasts that medieval practice with "the great evangelical principle of the distinction of powers, which is the cornerstone of modern civilization" (48). In 1898, when he made that statement, the "Catholic" France of the Third Republic followed more closely the religious indifferentism of Voltaire than orthodox Church teaching. Similarly, when paying tribute to the greatness of the later Middle Ages, Kurth comments that "the Catholic spirit kept intact the great principle of the Christian republic (my emphasis) of the Middle Ages" (49). I am not certain what Kurth meant by "republic" in a world of emperors, kings and Italian city-states.
Overall, however, Professor Kurth's limitations concerning Protestantism, scientism and the modern totalitarian republic constitute minor blemishes in an otherwise remarkable piece of historical analysis. His cogent presentation is an excellent starting point for a person who wishes to begin to learn the history of the Church, the most important history of all. Besides, supplements to his weaknesses are readily available. One can go to Jacques Maritain's Three Reformers for a devastating portrait of Luther and Luther's thought. Dr. David Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion is a superb puncturing of the pretensions of scientism, just as Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America thoroughly explores the Neo-Caesarist possibilities of modern democracy.
Unfortunately, one cannot recover the world in which Professor Kurth lived. We in 2008 exist in a world awash in degrees and bereft of scholarly accomplishment. The prefatory remarks to The Church at the Turning Points in History note on Kurth's behalf that "footnote citations were not provided for the facts cited, as most were presumed to be well known to readers." I have a Master's degree in history and yet profited from Professor Patrick Foley's compilation of footnotes for this edition of the lectures. Bishop John P. Carroll of Helena, Montana, translated Professor Kurth's lectures into impeccable English in 1918. Presumably, he did his work in the snatches of time available from his primary duties as bishop. I formally studied French for six years and believe an additional decade of study would not have brought me even close to equaling the quality of Bishop Welsh's translation. I do know that I am not alone in my barbarous ignorance. The lectures were originally delivered to a "Women's University Extension" in Antwerp. In all likelihood very few of those women had more than high school educations. Today, I venture to say, modern men and women have vastly more of the credentials suggesting education and vastly less of the knowledge that constitutes true learning. In the future, when the Church as part of its renewal takes its necessary role as the guide of learning, we can begin to return to the high scholarship of Professor Kurth and the impressive knowledge of regular Catholics. Until that time, we will be grateful for the availability of such impressive histories as The Church at the Turning Points of History.
1 Genesis 2:11-12 (Douay-Rheims translation).
2 Mounir Farah and Andrea Berens Karls, World History: The Human Experience (New York: Macmillan, third edition, 1992), p. 42.
3 St. Matthew 2:1.
4 That is, the royal French version of Neo-Caesarism as embodied in the Four Articles of 1682. The first article, for example, declares the pope's authority to be limited to purely spiritual matters.
5 The Old Regime and the French Revolution.
6 Will Durant, The Reformation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. 361.
7 Ibid.
8 R.R. Palmer and Joel Colton, A History of the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, sixth edition, 1984), p.286.
9 Farah and Karls, p.578.
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