The First Fundamentalists

Before I get back to the beginning of fundamentalism, take a look at a few quotes through the ages of Christianity. Try to determine what time they come from.

“The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremist agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse."

 “With regard to heretics two points must by observed: one, on their own side; the other, on the side of the Church. On their own side there is the sin, whereby they deserve not only to be separated from the Church by ex-communication, but also to be severed from the world by death. For it is much graver matter to corrupt the faith which quickens the soul, than to forge money, which supports temporal life.”

"From this disease of curiosity are all those strange sights exhibited in the theatre. Hence men go on to search out the hidden powers of nature (which is besides our end), which to know profits not, and wherein men desire nothing but to know. Hence also, if with that same end of perverted knowledge magical arts be enquired by. Hence also in religion itself, is God tempted, when signs and wonders are demanded of Him, not desired for any good end, but merely to make trial of."

The first are the words of Cardinal John Henry Newman. He was recommended for canonization by Tony Blair. He wrote eloquent apologia that brought Anglicans back to the Roman Catholic Church. He wrote this in his book, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 1864. The second is Thomas Aquinas, considered one of the more liberal theologians. He was considered a heretic in his time, in the late 13^th century, for attempting to reconcile faith with reason. He was later canonized not long after his death. The last is from the 4^th century, from St. Augustine. He wrote prolifically during a time when no one was quite sure what the gospels and epistles meant. The Universal Church owes many of its concepts to him.

 In the time of Augustine, there were no Popes and the Bishops rarely met. For the peace of Rome, this was a problem. Most of you have probably heard of the emperor Constantine and the council of Nicea in A.D. 325. It is true that he called the council to try to settle the discord with the many Christian sects. There are many myths about what was settled. I’m going to skip the gory details, but I will refer you to A.D. 381, a great book on the topic. One myth I will dispel is that Constantine did not create the connection between government and religion. His meddling in religious affairs however did create a pattern that led to it.

Before the councils, and mentioned much less often, Constantine declared Christianity legal. That is, he passed a law of religious tolerance. Unfortunately that did not last. After Constantine, succeeding emperors continued to hold councils attempting to influence Christianity for their benefit. None succeeded at it until Theodosius. If you look him up in the Catholic Encyclopedia you will find some euphemistic language about how he expelled the Arian influence and spread the Augustinian understanding of the Trinity throughout Byzantium. It doesn’t mention how he did that.

The word was spread because if you were a Bishop and you didn’t spread it, you didn’t keep your church. And you weren’t given a pink slip and a pension. If you were non-Christian, your temple might be destroyed and your books burned. If you were Christian but not the right type of Christian, you might do a little better. The difference in types are hardly worth discussing, but they carried the maximum penalties at the time. It was chiefly a matter of Jesus’ divinity. Was he there at the beginning, did he get the Holy Spirit through God at birth, or did he receive it at his Baptism, or what? Apparently getting this right was more important than remembering how to smelt iron or maintain the aqueducts or how to read Greek or any number of things that had been important just a few decades earlier.

There is no way to know all of the things they lost or destroyed but one interesting story tells us that science was on the verge of becoming modern just as Rome was falling. Newton’s discovery of Calculus in the 17^th century led to all of the great discoveries of electricity, flight, even space travel, but 1,900 years earlier, Archimedes had begun to discover the very same principles. We know this because a book of Prayers was found in 1908 that had been written on papyrus that had Archimedes notes on it, but had been erased by a 14^th century monk. Where would we be now if that math had been developed 1,000 or more years earlier?

Augustine introduced the metaphor of philosophy as the handmaiden of religion. “Natural Philosophy” at that time being a precursor to science. It is a fashion now to credit Augustine’s idea as a contributing factor to the discovery of technology throughout the Middle Ages. But that does not answer why literature, architecture, medicine and basic technologies not only didn’t progress under Roman Catholic rule, they regressed. While Spain and Baghdad were cultural centers, Europe languished. Europe’s Kings were more concerned about the Second Coming or correctly understanding the Trinity than the education of their people

Two hundred years without a strong class of scholars and a weakening empire led to another turning point with Pope Gregory the Great. He would have known of the politicking at the Council of Constantinople in 381 and that Augustine’s version of the Trinity would not have come to dominate Christianity without the support of emperor Theodosius and his military. Yet, he writes, “all the four holy synods of holy universal church we receive as we do the four books of the holy gospels” and of course he added his own authority as the successor to Peter. With this he proclaimed that the Bishops of the 4^th century merely clarified the word of God. The history of emperors and armies enforcing their interpretation was swept under the rug.

More than history was lost. The Greek philosophers were comfortable with the idea of not knowing something. They were exploring the idea of the supernatural, not just a single god and how it was constructed and how its words were delivered. They were asking about the universe, not simply one god’s interest in the works of men and women. For the Church though, that one god and its relation to man, was the primary issue. This to me is what it means to be a fundamentalist. Regardless of what you think that one god stands for.

When Europe began to consolidate again after Charlemagne in 800 A.D., the wars continued. The need to reconquer Jerusalem led to the first Crusade in 1096. Pope Urban II offered everyone an indulgence remission of sins allowing for direct entry to heaven or reduced time in purgatory. This was the first time this was tried and I suspect the response was more than he expected. Again, a precedence was set and such indulgences continued for centuries. The definitions of Jesus set down in the 4^th century were further enforced by the Inquisitions in the 12^th century. As Christendom spread to the New World, the idea of bringing souls to Christ spread with it. As seen in the quotes at the top of this entry, these ideas influence Western thought right up to the present.

First in the series