On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 4:17 AM, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
What are you talking about? In communist countries the working class rules unified and unbroken! :)
True, but what I think I am poiting at is that the Church was not simply some kind of adjunct of feudalism that provided ideological justification for it. It stood largely outside of the system of lords and manors (and definitely outside of hereditary passage of property after the introduction of celibacy, which as far as I know was done for precisely this reason).
Well, oftentimes the Church was the lord and the manor. (Many of the petty German "princes" were bishops, for instance, and of course there were the Papal States and so on.) And there was the longstanding tradition of bishops being recruited from second sons of some particular noble family. It's hard to generalize, though - are there any medievalists on the list? "Feudalisms" were diverse.
In any event I don't think this bisection of the elite is unusual either - think about the role of the state in contemporary capitalism or the relationship between Party and bureaucracy under Leninism.
I'm sure somebody somewhere must have fleshed out the idea that the Church represented some kind of survival of the system of the Roman Empire.
I think maybe it would be profitable to compare the situation of the Church in Medieval Europe to that (historically later) of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was ground underfoot by Peter the Great and very definitely made into an adjunct of the state.
And of course "the state" was kind of an anachronism in much of Western Christendom.