Medieval legacy
To begin to heal our schisms we need to see where they came from.
Some time in the medieval era, the question the Western church asked changed. It had been "How can we serve?" It changed to "How can we rule, and call it service?"
The medieval mindset prized order above all things, all serfs and kings and bishops and laymen kept neatly in their places and all ideas knitted up in orderly obedience to a regulating scheme, and with that vision came the need to make it so--by insistence or by force. The right ordering of people, things and ideas became an obsession that lasted, in some quarters, well beyond the middle ages.
Love of the medieval ideal of all-pervading social and intellectual order must be accompanied by the desire for power, so as to impose order. Otherwise it is only a daydream, for absent some compulsion, people and ideas simply cannot be relied on to act that way. When people fail to love the established order they must be corrected. Like Galileo, they may be suppressed, arrested and called upon to recant, or in other cases they may be burned alive.
Authoritarianism, harsh censures, centralized decision making, government-issue opinions and assigned roles in life are not inventions of the twentieth century socialist nirvanas, but reversions to the feudal and medieval thought that if all things and people are set in order by a wise earthly authority, the world will be a better place.
Both the Orthodox versus Catholic Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation were reactions, in some measure, to medievalism in Catholic practices. The Orthodox objected to excessive Roman intrusion into church organization and operation; the Protestants objected to Catholicism's heavy hand on people inclined toward thinking and questioning. But look at it from the Catholic point of view: They wanted control for your own good.
To begin to heal our schisms we need to see where they came from. While there were a number of factors involved in fracturing the church, the authoritarian flavor of Roman religion, arising in the medieval era, needs to be seen as a factor of central importance.
Here are a couple of recent-era quotes to keep your brain cells moist. I place them here to show that there is a strain in present day thought that is decidedly soured on the idea of authoritarian exercise of power for our own good. The medieval ideal has failed mankind, or perhaps we have failed at it. In any case, there is no going back.
Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters. — Daniel Webster
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. — C.S. Lewis
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