Lent 2020 - Day Eight
It occurred to me many years ago that the Christian Church in the Middle Ages was the world's first multinational corporation. Headquartered in Rome, with a well-organised hierarchical structure and strong network across Europe; like today's multinational corporations, it touched the lives of everyone. It had one mass-market product on offer - spiritual salvation. It also had a 'premium' product - available only to the ruling classes - social control.
For most people, salvation of the soul was something worth buying into, worth investing in. Before the Enlightenment, everyone believed in God. The word 'atheist' didn't originally mean someone who didn't believe in a deity, but someone who believed in another deity than the one you happened to believe in. And along with belief in deities came a belief in the afterlife; a release from worldly travails, but on condition that one's life was judged to be without sin. It would only be in the 18th century that outright rejection of a Supreme Being would become a concept among philosophers.
Before that, the Reformation - the philosophical disputes of the age centred about the nature of the Christian religion, its place between God and Man. Two and half centuries would have to pass after Martin Luther published his Ninety Five Theses before philosophers started to question the existence of God in any appreciable number.
In a world in which everyone believed in God, salvation of the soul was an easy sell. Indulgences were commercialised - buying time off in Purgatory in lieu of penance. It was the abuse of this practice that led to the Protestant Schism, and the Thirty Years' War that left eight million Europeans dead.
The rise of science following the Enlightenment (or indeed, that resulted from the Enlightenment), created fertile ground for the abandonment of the human need for God. Over my lifetime I have seen the continuation of the drift away from organised religion, be in Anglicanism in Britain or Roman Catholicism in Poland. Secular rationalism and materialism, are powerful antidotes to a belief in God and the afterlife. Salvation of the soul is not a product one can easily sell today.
But what if you are not looking for salvation? Today's troubled times (though let's face it - nowhere near as troubled as the first half of the sixteenth century in Central Europe!) generate woes of a different nature. Peace of mind is at a premium - a life that's calm, unhurried, joyful and spiritually rewarding.
While building your own religion today, it would be useful to see which needs are to be addressed; peace of mind would come high on such a list. Can it be delivered a places deemed sacred, deploying ritual deemed symbolic, using music and art? Referring back to the past two days' posts, what basic principles, what trappings of religion would be most effective at delivering peace of mind?
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| "On my planet, there is no unease" |
This time five years ago:
Spiritual evolution - are we in a New Age?
This time eight years ago:
S2 - a year from completion?
This time nine years ago:
In praise of blue skies
This time ten years ago:
A piano, tuned
This time 12 years ago:
Four weeks into Lent
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