BOOK REVIEW
Probing History
Godfrey
Kurth, The Church at the
Turning Points of History (Norfolk, VA: Gates of Vienna Books, 2007)
$14.95, 126 pp., Paper.
Diane Moczar, Ten Dates Every
Catholic Should Know: The Divine Surprises and Chastisements That Shaped the
Church and Changed the World (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press,
2005) $13.95, 177 pp., Paper.
Reviewed
by James G. Bruen, Jr.
“In the history
of mankind considered as a whole there are two grand divisions,” writes Godfrey
Kurth to introduce The
Church at the Turning Points of History. “On the one hand, there is the
ancient world seated in the darkness of death; on the other hand, the modern
world which advances in the light of the Gospel. This is, beyond compare, the
greatest fact of history.”
Kurth writes not
from the crimped secular perspective so typical of modern historians, but
instead looks for the eternal and the transcendent. In this, of course, he is
not alone. In Christ’s tomb, Chesterton observed in The
Everlasting Man, “the whole of that great and glorious humanity which
we call antiquity was gathered up and covered over; and in that place it was
buried. It was the end of a very great thing called human history; the history
that was merely human.”
The “Christian
era,” Kurth explains, “opens the annals of a new creation and a new humanity.”
Christian civilization and ancient society are based on “essentially opposed”
principles. “The two societies differ in their respective conception of life
and the solution they give to the problem of existence.” Antiquity offered
transient pleasure “summed up in two words: idleness and voluptuousness,” which
“could be the lot of but a small minority. If a man lives without work, he forces
others to work for him. If he lives for pleasure, it is necessary for him to
have an army of people who will furnish him amusement.” Christianity offers
happiness that is eternal union with God. “The happiness of the pagan is not
possible without the corresponding misery of the majority of the human race.
The Christian cannot be truly happy unless he makes as many as possible of his
fellow men participate in his happiness. … In principle, a Christian society is
a society of brothers, just as in principle, a pagan society is a society of
slaves.” Indeed, the contrast between paganism and Catholicism is so stark that
Chesterton called paganism “the one real rival to the Church of Christ.”
The Incarnation,
Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ is the pivot point of history. We
measure time as the temporal distance from Christ, despite modern obscurant
efforts to adopt the term Common Era and the abbreviations C.E. and B.C.E,
which themselves nevertheless still use Christ as the pivot point.
The Church,
Kurth notes, “has received charge to teach all nations … and with regard to
this duty, every man has the right to call her to account.” So, Kurth defines
his task: “How has the Church fulfilled her mission? … Has she been, has she
truly remained, that universal and indefectible society that contains within
itself all civilization, or would she be merely one of those fleeting forms, in
which, at a given moment, the human race embodied its ever changing
aspirations?”
The first test
came swiftly, and Kurth’s retelling of it is direct and vivid.
The great obstacles, or rather, the chief danger that
the Church encountered in her first years lay in her ignorance of the attitude
to be assumed concerning the Ancient Law and Israel. The lapse of time has solved
this problem clearly and with precision, and now it is within the grasp of a
child. There is nothing now in common between Israel rejected, shut up within
her synagogue, and the people of God gathered about the Church. But it was
quite different when the Church came into being. Far from considering Israel as
the people of reprobation, the Christians, one and all – the apostles at their
head – continued to regard the Jews as the people of God. Being Jews themselves
and holding fast to the Law of Moses, they saw in Christianity the complement
of the Law and in the Church the consummate flower that came forth to crown the
fertile root of Jesse.
And how could
they have believed otherwise?
Godfrey Kurth, a
Belgian Catholic historian who authored more than 20 books and contributed more
than a dozen articles to the Catholic Encyclopedia, was a professor at
the State University of Liège and Secretary of the Belgian Historical Society
in Rome. Based on a series of lectures he delivered at the end of the
nineteenth century, The Church at the Turning Points of History, does
not suffer from recent confusions that so thoroughly obscure things which
formerly were within the grasp of a child that now even some members of the Church’s
hierarchy seem incapable of comprehension.
“This does not
mean that this Christian Church of Jewish nationality wished to close her doors
to Gentiles,” Kurth continues. “On the contrary, she dreamed of gathering
within her embrace all the people of the earth, in order to comply with the
demand of Christ.” The Jews saw themselves as “the circle of the elite; … the
race marked forever with a sign of predilection, the priestly tribe which stood
as the intermediary between God and man.” The first Christians carried this
“Jewish viewpoint … with them into Christianity. They saw in the Church a
synagogue of superior order to which God had revealed the obscure meaning of
the prophecies, but a synagogue nevertheless into which no one could enter
without being a member either by birth or by adoption by the people of Israel.”
“Now then, I ask,” Kurth asks rhetorically, “was this really the way to
bring nations to embrace the Gospel – to oblige them to give up their
nationality as well as their religion?” Were first century Greeks and Romans
eager to become Jews? Would Pope Benedict XVI’s Anglican prelature stand any
chance of succeeding if Australian or American or English Episcopalians were
told that they first had to become Italians or Germans in order to become
Catholics? “Here we see how Israel by her pretensions to leadership in the
kingdom of God hindered the propagation of the Gospel. So long as Israel stood
between the Savior and the human race, the human race was bound to keep away
from the Savior.”
Peter’s vision,
recounted in Acts 10:9-20, “is the divine solution of the irritating problem;”
it “announces that the ancient law is no longer binding on the Christians, and
that consequently one can be a Christian without being a Jew.” And thus, “In
vain then does Israel promise herself the first place in the kingdom of God.
Israel can disappear without causing a vacancy; her mission is ended and her
place henceforth will be taken by a spiritual Israel made up of all the
faithful.”
Peter’s vision
and his baptism of Cornelius and his family, however, did not by itself
immediately precipitate a dramatic change. “Those Christians who put their
Jewish patriotism above their Christian faith did not give up their favorite
idea concerning the privilege of Israel. This doctrine was part, so to speak,
of their flesh and blood; it was one of the constituent elements of their
faith; it was identified in their thoughts with the Christian doctrine. They
seemed to have let the baptism at Caesarea pass as a miraculous exception, not
as a rule.”
Then, from
Antioch, came the news that Gentile converts were receiving baptism without any
other initiation or the imposition of Jewish practices. “And to make it clear
that they meant to inaugurate a new tradition and break with the past, they
were taking a name never before in use among the faithful, a name that had been
recently coined at Antioch: they were calling themselves Christians!”
Now, “the
scandal was great. … they were abolishing the privilege of Israel. … Were these
innovators to triumph it would be a seeming abandonment of the Christians of
the first hour who formed the nucleus of the faithful and among whom were the
most devoted disciples of Christ; to say the least it would be for them a very
bitter humiliation.” The Church’s first Council, the Council of Jerusalem,
resolved the dispute: “It hath seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us, to lay
no further burden upon you than the necessary things.” As Pope Benedict XVI
noted in Jesus of
Nazareth, “A literal application of Israel’s social order to the people
of all nations would have been tantamount to a denial of the universality of
the growing community of God.”
“The Council of
Jerusalem had saved Christianity,” Kurth says, “but it had sacrificed Judaism.
In deciding that the Church would be Catholic, that is international, it had
killed the national pretensions of the Jewish clique.” Some of the Jewish
Christians resisted, but “the catastrophe in which Jerusalem perished some
years later drowned their opposition in a deluge of blood and was, to the
Christian Jews, a decisive revelation which came to confirm that of Joppe
[where Peter had his vision]. After this it was plain that Israel was no longer
the chosen people of God but a rejected nation.”
So complete was this rejection of Israel, thought Kurth, that “it is no
longer worth while to fix upon it the attention of history.” This is a bit of
overstatement, or at least somewhat ambiguous. While Israel is no longer at the
center of salvation history, and indeed, has been supplanted by the New Israel
that is The Church, E. Michael Jones demonstrates in The Jewish
Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History that continuing
Jewish antipathy to Christ and His Church throughout history cannot be ignored
without peril.
Kurth thus
labels the Council of Jerusalem “first turning point in the history of the
modern world.” At it, the Church “separated her cause from the precarious
destiny of a nation [and] refused to espouse the cause of the petty
contingencies of history so as not to fail in her universal mission.” Frank
Sheed and Masie Ward insisted that Kurth’s treatment of the Council was a
source that “must be used” by Catholic Evidence Guild lecturers on the Church
and Judaism.
In Ten Dates Every
Catholic Should Know, Diane
Moczar “tried” to “present ten significant dates … around which the reader can
group the main themes of the history of Christendom.” The dates “represent
extremely handy ‘pegs’ on which to hang the major developments of Catholic
history.”
Moczar begins
after the apostolic era with a dramatic retelling of the story of Constantine
and the events leading to the Edict of Milan, “the great charter of liberation
of the Catholic Church,” in 313 A.D., and its aftermath. “So, was the period
following the Edict of Milan a utopia for the Church? Far from it.”
Christianity would become the official religion of the Roman Empire, “but the
empire was doomed.” So, in 452, Pope St. Leo staves off the Huns, refuting the
claim that the barbarians were an admonition for substituting Christ for the
Roman gods and also establishing that “the destiny of Europe was not to be a
province of Asia.” Soon thereafter, with the baptism of Clovis in 496, France was
born: “The conversion of the Franks proved to be of enormous importance for the
future of Catholic Europe. Catholicism was no longer the weak and inferior
religion of the conquered. It was plain to pagans and Arians alike that the God
of the Catholics was far stronger than theirs, since he gave his followers such
spectacular victories. On this barbaric habit of thought the Church was able to
build.” From there, it’s on to 800 A.D. and the Crowning of Charlemagne,
“protector of Rome, unifier of Europe, and Father of Western Christendom. It is
hard to think how Catholic Europe would have emerged from the Dark Ages without
him.”
Kurth also
addresses Constantine’s conversion, the fall of Rome, and the baptism of
Clovis, all in a single chapter that stresses the universality of Catholicism.
Kurth emphasizes the attraction of the “sweet yoke of Christ,” rather than the
attraction of a “stronger” God who delivered “spectacular victories.”
“Rome, in the
language of its pagan worshipers, was called the Eternal City, and Christianity
in borrowing this appellation from the civil language, did not wish, at least
in the beginning, to modify its traditional sense,” Kurth writes. Indeed, he
notes, early Christian apologists pointed to their belief in the eternity of the
Roman Empire as proof of their patriotism. “Just as the Christian Jews were
firmly convinced that the future of Christianity was indissolubly united with
the future of their own people, so the Christian Romans imagined that their
future was one with the future of the Empire.” But the Church “understood her
role better … if she had not risen above the resentments of blind patriotism,
Christianity would not have survived, but would have sunk into the abyss along
with the Roman Empire.” Citing Augustine, St. Gregory the Great, and others,
Kurth writes, “the Catholic Church unlocked the gates of her sanctuaries and
opened the road of salvation to the new nations. Thus is explained her
prodigious success during the sixth century with the Barbarians, whether Arian
or pagan. When these became convinced that they could carry the sweet yoke of
Christ without submitting to the heavy yoke of Rome, their prejudices against
the Catholic Faith fell to the ground, and its natural superiority over heresy,
as well as over paganism, found no longer any obstacle.”
Others,
including Moczar, compare the baptism of Clovis to that of Constantine, but
Kurth maintains that, “it matches in a remarkable way, the baptism of the
centurion Cornelius:”
Then, the Church, separating her cause from that of
the people of Israel, had gone to the nations and received them into the
Christian community without imposing upon them the obligations of the Judaic
Law. This time, detaching her destinies from those of the Empire, she went to
the Barbarians and put into their hands the scepter of the world without
requiring them to wear the dress of the Roman civilization. On both occasions
it was a stroke of strategy of the same superior order. On both occasions,
Christianity, the common patrimony of all humanity, had escaped utter
destruction. Instead of weeping on the graves of extinct civilizations,
Christianity had busied herself with winning to the faith of Christ the nascent
communities. She had thus indicated in a precise and explicit manner, and for
all centuries to come, that, as she is created to spread the kingdom of God on
earth, she cannot identify herself with any of those ephemeral things which are
called dynasty, nation, social class, civilization.
As
Chesterton observed, Christianity has “died many times and risen again; for it
had a God who knew the way out of the grave.” Or, to bastardize Belloc’s famous
aphorism, Europe
is not the Faith, and the Faith is not Europe. The Faith will not perish but,
quoting Belloc, “Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish.” The
Catholic churches in Europe may all become museums, but the Catholic Church
itself will never become a museum or a museum piece.
Professor
Kurth’s turning points of history also include the Church’s escape from lay investiture
in the feudal period, neo-Caesarism’s dissolution of Christian republics and
the consequent end of the Crusades, the Church and the Renaissance, and the
Church and the French Revolution. “The evil of the Revolution is its pretension
to treat political society as if it were the creation of pure reason,
independent of the action of the divine laws which rule the life of the world
and of humanity.” Moczar includes Cluny, the Protestant “catastrophe,” Lepanto,
and Fatima among the surprises and chastisements that shaped the Church and
shaped the world. Moczar’s book is a more popular treatment; Kurth’s is a
deeper probe.
James G. Bruen, Jr. writes frequently for
Culture Wars.
This review was
published in the December, 2010 issue of Culture
Wars.
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