[lbo-talk] papal logic

[C. G. Estabrook]

You're quite right that clerical office couldn't be inherited.  That was the 
church's way out of the family and pseudo-family alliances that were the basis 
of feudal polity. But that didn't mean that clerical office necessarily went to 
the  aristocracy.  Quite the contrary -- it was the route for men (and even 
women) of talent to rise, throughout the Middle Ages.  Thomas Becket (whose 
father was a cloth merchant) and Thomas Wolsey (whose father was a butcher) are 
well-known English examples.

And in fact it was the monasteries, not the episcopate, that were the major 
landowners (as, e.g., Henry VIII's button-man, Thomas Cromwell, well understood).

Eliding the Reformation and the Great Revolution is at best a bit Whiggish, but 
in fact the Reformation was inter alia a feudal movement.  The new absolutist 
states of the 16th century -- state feudalisms, as Perry Anderson explains in 
"Lineages of the Absolutist State" (!974) -- seized control of the church 
apparatus throughout Europe.  That's why areas where the state already 
controlled the church ca. 1500 (e.g. France) remained Catholic, while areas 
where it didn't (e.g. England) became Protestant. --CGE

Shane Mage wrote:
> 
> This couldn't be further from reality.  Who the hell spawned the episcopate
> -- serfs? Clerical celibacy was the iron link binding the Church to feudalism
> -- because clerical office couldn't be inherited recruitment had to come from
> the aristocracy and no self-perpetuating clerical caste could ever take
> shape.  Meanwhile the lower clergy, deprived of legal sanction for their 
> family lives, became itself an army of serfs for the episcopate -- while the 
> Church itself was becoming by far the largest feudal landlord everywhere in 
> Europe.  Estabrook would present the Reformation and the French Revolution, 
> which both *began* by abolishing celibacy, as "feudal" movements!
> 
> On Apr 21, 2009, at 9:18 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> 
>> In fact, the RCC fought a thousand-year battle with feudalism, and one of 
>> its scars, so to speak, was clerical celibacy.  If you'll forgive the 
>> quotation--
>> 
>> "Celibacy was made the rule in the western church in the course of the 11th
>>  century in a struggle for the independence of the christian movement from 
>> feudalism, [which] rebuilt society according to family relations, natural 
>> and artificial: a vassal was a son to his lord, and obligations were 
>> respectively filial and paternal. To our eyes the feudal order collapsed 
>> the distinction between public and private; it produced an entire society 
>> -- which lasted a thousand years, roughly from the 8th through the 18th 
>> centuries -- structured like the mafia. The church sought to throw off 
>> control by the new lords of Europe by celibacy, which ended the natural 
>> family ties, and by what came to be known as 'the investiture controversy,'
>>  which cut the artificial ones. The uniqueness of the church order that
>> grew from feudalism is due in part to the uniqueness of feudalism itself --
>> a polity that finds a parallel only in pre-modern Japan (where christianity
>>  was officially suppressed)..." -- "Sex and Power in Catholicism" 
>> <www.counterpunch.org/estabrook0420.html>.
> 
> 
> Shane Mage
> 
>> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it always was and is and 
>> shall be: an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in 
>> measures."
>> 
>> Herakleitos of Ephesos