Essay on "Religious and Secular Influence in Europe"

Essay 5 pages (1629 words) Sources: 5

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Religious and Secular Authority

The period from 1500 to 1900 is frequently viewed as a time of upheaval and change for Europe, and for good reason. These four centuries saw waves of rapid change, including the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the colonization of the Americas and beyond. Empires rose and fell, and by the end of the 1800s, Europe was moving exponentially faster toward two world wars and a century of technological and social progress. However, for all this change and upheaval, the overarching power structures remained largely unchanged, because religious authority continued to trump any notion of secular power. This was true despite the drive toward reason produced by the Enlightenment, because, like with anything else that threatens its authority, religious ideologies merely adopted the language of the Enlightenment in order to reestablish their power. By examining a number of theoretical and literary texts spanning from 1500 to 1800, one is able to better understand how religious authority remained influential and overwhelming despite the attempted rise of secular authorities and ideas.

To better understand how the state of religious authority in the sixteenth century opened up the space necessary for the Enlightenment in the eighteenth, one may begin by considering Desiderius Erasmus' essay the Praise of Folly, originally published in 1511. In the essay, Erasmus takes on the voice of Folly, and uses it in order to critique what he perceived to be the excesses and theological inaccuracies of the Catholic church. Folly constantly talks herself up, and Erasmus uses this satirical approach to criticize "several seemingly great and wise men, who with a new-fashioned modesty employ some paltry orator or scribbling poet, whom they bribe to flatter them with some high-flown character, that shall consists of mere lies and shams."

Perhaps more interesting than Erasmus' criticisms of the Catholic church, however, is the fact that he ends the Praise of Folly not with an appeal to reason or secular society, but rather with an enumeration of what he perceives to be the correct Christian theology and practice.

Erasmus' ending is interesting because it demonstrates that while the authority of the monolithic Catholic church was diminishing, the centrality of religious authority to European society was in no way diminished, but instead was rapidly becoming more distributed among the general populace. Thus, while the major religious institutions were losing some official power, that power was not necessarily being transferred to secular institutions, but rather was being co-opted by smaller religious movements and individuals with their own take on theology. So, for example, when John Milton wrote Paradise Lost nearly a hundred and fifty years later, he was essentially claiming some piece of the authority ceded by the Catholic church and reiterating that authority but through a Protestant lens. Thus, when he claims that his goal is to "justify the ways of God to men," Milton is effectively taking over the traditional role of the priest, but using the history of epic poetry in order to make his religious message more palatable to a wider audience.

This is important to recognize because it demonstrates how the split between the Church of England and the Catholic church, which occurred in the previous century as a result of England's secular authority asserting itself, did not actually cause a lessening of religious authority, but rather vested that authority in the hands of more and different people.

Of course, at the same time that religious authority was being distributed across a much wider swath of society, there were thinkers and critics who hoped for, and attempted to create, a movement towards a more uniform secular authority free from religious tradition. Jonathan Swift's famous essay "A Modest Proposal" adopts the language of reason in order to make a point about the injustices suffered by Ireland in the midst of an ostensibly Enlightened Europe. This focus on social justice and humanist philosophy blossomed during the 1700s, and gave rise to a number of works attempting to establish the secular basis for governance and society. One of the most important of these works was Jean-Jacques Rousseau's the Social Contract, which argued, among other things, that the authority to govern ultimately stems from the consent and authorization of the governed, rather than any kind of divine right or blessing.

One could be forgiven for imagining that the Enlightenment really did mean the decline of religious authority and the rise of secular authority and influence, because these ideas were extremely influential; for example, the founding of the United States and its particular system of democratic republicanism would not have been possible without the theories of Rousseau and others, who for the first time were attempting to determine where authority actually comes from. For many of the most influential leaders and thinkers of the time, the centrality of religion had become a thing of the past, and if they did hold any religious belief, it tended to be of the deist variety, with very little of the theological arcana that characterized earlier periods.

However, as seen with the split between the Catholic church and the Church of England, the official, hierarchical decline of religious authority did not necessarily mean that religion was becoming any less influential. Instead, its influence shifted so that it began to move from the bottom up, rather than the top down, particularly due to the fact that only those with relative wealth or privilege could even have access to the works of science and reason that contributed to the official decline of religion in the first place. Thus, as secular authority gained more official influence as a result of Enlightenment ideas, religious authority gained more unofficial, distributed authority, as individuals took on the mantle of religious apologist, a role that would have previously been filled by a priesthood, and enacted through force.

A major reason religious authority did not truly decline following the Enlightenment, as many critics believed it would, was religion's ability to constantly adapt and absorb new ideas. In the same way that the Catholic church adopted many of the pagan rituals and customs of the areas it conquered by re-framing them in a Christian context, so too did religious individuals and texts adopt the language and style of reason and science in order to perpetuate religion's power. Of course, this adoption was never complete, because religion by definition relies on a lack of evidence, something science cannot accept, but it was nevertheless effective in continuing religious authority's influence by giving it the veneer of reasoned argument.

Perhaps the best example of this comes from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's the brothers Karamazov, where he outlined the notion that without a god or some eternal, objective standard of morality, "nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism."

Of course, this is not actually accurate, because as the history of human society demonstrates, human beings are quite capable of developing social norms and mores independent of an eternal god, but the fact remains that Dostoyevsky's point has been convincing precisely because it sounds like reason and argument, instead of mere declaration. In much the same way that Milton's Paradise Lost was an example of religious influence being directed not towards a centralized priesthood but rather towards the wider populace, so too is Dostoyevsky's idea regarding the necessity of a god directed toward precisely the kind of characters featured in the novel, because it is ultimately those individuals who will wield religious authority most effectively by allowing it to permeate every other area of their lives.

In many ways the changes which occurred in Europe over the course of the four centuries between 1500 and the end of the 1800s help to explain the current issues facing the world today, and particularly the ongoing conflicts between religious groups and secular governments, whether they be Islamic terrorists in… READ MORE

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