----- Original Message ---- From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Sun, March 21, 2010 4:54:18 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Texas school board drops Jefferson, adds Calvin
I think you're right about the medieval church and about celibacy. I had occasion recently on this list to recommend Perry Anderson's account from a generation ago, Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism, which remains after all these years the best general account.
Of course the classic observation on the ecclesiastical continuation of the Roman system came from an acute critic:
"...if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof." (Hobbes, Leviathan, 1660)
Anderson is more, so to speak, nuanced:
"One single institution, however, spanned the whole transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages in essential continuity: the Christian Church. It was, indeed, the main, frail aqueduct across which the cultural reservoirs of the Classical World now passed to the new universe of feudal Europe, where literacy had become clerical. Strange historical object par excellence, whose peculiar temporality has never coincided with that of a simple sequence from one economy or polity to another, but has overlapped and outlived several in a rhythm of its own, the Church has never received theorization within historical materialism ... Its own regional autonomy and adaptability -- extraordinary by any comparative standards -- have yet to be seriously explored..."