As this work
reminds us, the Church, throughout much of its history didn’t go out of its way
to offer loving comfort to the poor and oppressed (or anyone else, for that
matter) as they made their way through this vale of tears, and what made
matters worse was that “opting out” wasn’t an option. Essentially, you were
born Catholic (or heathen, but that’s another story) and you were expected to
stay that way. Deviation on the smallest
point of doctrine might well earn you a visit from your friendly and enthusiastic
inquisitor.
So what did
the Church do with this captive audience?
Bombard them fairly constantly with harangues about their own state of
deathly sin in this life and the promise of unceasing torment in the next,
that’s what! In Sin and Fear (1990), Jean Delumeau more than supports this thesis with anecdotes, sermons,
lyrics, and other writings from throughout Europe that ceaselessly dwell on
human unworthiness, the unavoidable punishment of sin (even the rules for
sexual relations within wedlock could be so convoluted as to require a tax
attorney to interpret them, let alone some poor illiterate peasant), the
general suckiness of life and the overwhelming stench of death. The words and
images emphasizing the morbidity of the flesh and the stink of corruption were
omnipresent, and all it took was a good outbreak of the plague to reinforce the
truth and hopelessness of it all as, to quote Lou Reed, “all the dead bodies
piled up in mounds”.
In short,
you pretty much had it drilled into you what a worthless bag of worm meat you
were, and your hopes for at least some comfort in the afterlife were pretty
much nil. Delumeau at one point quotes a sermon wherein
the priest tells his congregation that there wasn’t a damn one of them that had
the remotest chance of escaping hell.
This isn’t to say that maybe you lucked out and got a humane, kindly
village priest, but he was probably the anomaly, and anyway if word filtered up
that he was coddling his flock with some fool notions of God’s mercy and loving
kindness, he was likely to be shipped off for “re-education”, because, as everyone knew, God the Father* was a real son of a bitch.
Now, sadly,
I’d like to tell you that the Reformation (and the seemly endless cycle of
religious wars - how’s that for an oxymoron?) showed the Church the error of
its ways, but of course as we all know, Luther, Calvin, et al., fine products
of the guilt culture that they were, were just as merciless in their grim
accounting of the corruption of the human soul, and Jonathan Edwards’ key sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry
God” only proves to show that, far from being just an outgrown medieval
mindset, this madness was still alive and kicking well into the 18th
century and beyond. In the psychological
dimension, the author makes a pretty good case that the relentless instillation
of fear and guilt over a period of centuries created a cultural psychosis that
we, at least in the west, are still a
far ways from escaping.
*At one
point in this heavy tome, Delumeau reminds us that the original association of
the word “father” was not some gentle and forgiving Ozzie Nelson-type bumbling
around in a cardigan, but rather a violent, demanding autocrat with a short
fuse, so whether you’re thinking of the God of the Old or New Testaments, the
parish priest, the Bishop of Rome (whose informal title, after all, derives
from the Latin papa) or even dear old
Dad, the initial association in the early days of the church one was not
necessarily a positive one.
