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Pagan Christianity?
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hotaire
43 posts

Re: Pagan Christianity?
Oct 15, 2009, 23:47
Branwen wrote:
The change within the roman church from co-ed monesteries being run by male or female bishops, with families etc was stopped by the church to stop lands passing to their children, that was why a lot of the "rigours" which distracted you from god were removed. The church got the land and increased its wealth by such methods.


Excuse me, Branwen, but the idea of early abbots, abbesses, etc., having children is way off the mark. By the c8th., church standards had certainly declined, but, even then, a child was a step too far, and something to be gotten rid of sharpish. In 746/7, St. Boniface wrote to King Aethelbald of Mercia complaining about the actions of many disreputable nuns :

“… when these harlots, whether nuns or not, bring forth their children conceived in sin they generally kill them and so, instead of enlarging the Church by bringing in adoptive sons of Christ, they fill graves with corpses and hell with unhappy souls.”

The rigours that concentrated the mind on God alone were never formally discouraged but died out simply because, shortly after 700, the church declined in standards and young men and women didn’t enter it with anything like the same fervour.

By 732, Bede – a lifelong adherent of Roman procedure – could not but look back at the Iona/Lindisfarne approach in admiration - and with not a little remorse at what had been lost by his own time :

“For in those days the sole concern of these teachers was to serve God, not the world ; to satisfy the soul, not the belly. Accordingly the religious habit at that time was held in high esteem. … On Sundays the people flocked to the churches and monasteries, not to obtain food, but to hear the word of God. … This continued to be the general practice for some years among the churches of the Northumbrians.”
- Historia Ecclesiastica, Book iii, Chapter 26.

The church, from the c8th. on, was land-hungry and wealth orientated – you’re certainly right there – but the above were not the methods of obtaining it.
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