Continued from last week…
Remember the Germanic tribes that came thundering across the
frozen Rhine river (maybe) around 400 AD? They did quite well for themselves.
They carved up the western Roman empire, establishing kingdoms in France,
Spain, North Africa and Italy. By this time most of them were Christians. There
was a problem as far as the Catholics of the western Roman Empire were
concerned.
The Germans were Arian
(not to be confused with “Aryan,” the made-up race of Hitler and his friends.
Our Arians were the followers of the crackpot Egyptian Christian priest Arius
who, around 300AD, claimed there was no such thing as a Trinity). Christians
who believed that Jesus – though
really, really special – was not
eternal, but created in time. The people over whom new German kings ruled were
Trinitarian, Catholic Christians and could be troublesome. The King of the
Franks converted to Catholicism, but more about him later. Enter Reccared, the Visigoth king of
Spain as well as part of southern France from 586 to 601. He decided to
renounce Arianism and accept Catholicism.
The Third Council of Toledo (Spain, not Ohio)
met in King Reccared's name in May 589, and there his declaration accepting
Catholicism was read aloud. The Catholic bishop, St. Leander
preached the closing sermon, which his little brother St. Isidore called
the “…triumph of the Church upon the conversion of the Goths”. Some say that
King Reccared celebrated the triumph of Catholicism by forcing Jews and Arians
to convert to mainline Catholicism. Others blame St. Leander and the Catholic
bishops for the new anti-Jewish attitude in Spain. Jews had been guaranteed
certain freedoms in the Church laws of Spain, but after the council of Toledo
those freedoms were increasingly limited. Reccared’s involvement in the new
anti-Semitism of the young Spain is disputed by modern historians, but what do
they know anyway?
No matter whose fault
it was, things got a lot tougher for Jews in Spain. The important reason as far
as this disquisition goes, is the why of the new anti-Semitism. The why is
quite simple: replacement theology, at least that’s the theory of the brilliant
David Goldman in his 2011 book How
Civilizations Die. The theory
goes like this. In order to sweet talk King Reccared into becoming the new
protector of the Church, it was aired about that the Visigoths, at least the
Catholic ones, were the new “chosen people” of God. You can’t have two chosen
peoples. God must have dumped one and taken up with the other. This arrangement
had already been hinted at in the Christianization of the Roman Empire, but
since the empire was just that, an empire, you didn’t really have a people so
much as a collection of peoples. The emperors however already saw themselves as
the chosen vessels of God.
Emperor Constantine
who began the Christian-ization of the Roman Empire in the early fourth century
had himself buried in the church of the Holy Apostles, the idea being that he
was also an apostle of God chosen to do God’s work on earth. The plan was to gather relics of all of the
Apostles in the church so that Constantine could spend eternity in the company
of his fellow apostles. They only managed to get Saint Andrew, Saint Luke and Saint Timothy, only one of whom is
actually an apostle, but the point had been made. In the Orthodox Church,
Constantine is still called “isapostolos” or in English “the equal of the Apostles.”
In the western
kingdoms it was possible to go the whole route. Baptize a king, and you baptize
a whole nation. The chosen people was us! It didn’t matter if I believed it.
The king believed it. We believed it. Depending on whose bread was to be
buttered, the Franks, the Burgundians the Lombards, the Vandals the Visigoths
as well the Ostrogoths, and any other Goth who managed to conquer a country and
wear a crown could be the chosen people, and it anointed sovereign, a New
Israel and a new Solomon or David.
Since then nations have regularly decided that they are the
new chosen people. The Spanish, the English, the Irish, the list is rather
long. The Germans and the Russians were late to assume the mantle of
chosen-ness. They decided they were chosen nations sometime in the nineteenth
century and they did so with a vengeance. The problem with being a chosen
nation was that there were always those pesky Jews, who used to be chosen. Best
to be rid of them, no? It is interesting to me that one cannot find the phrase
“New Israel” in the New Testament. There is new covenant and new Jerusalem, but
no new Israel.
In its beginning, the
Church grew by individual conversion claiming that one could be adopted into
the people of Israel by baptism. All one needed now was water, buckets and a
tribe of barbarians whose king told them to go along with the whole thing. Up
until that point one joined Israel by personal conversion. The Gentile,
the non-Jew, could join himself to Israel of God by baptism. In effect he
joined a people. He became member of the tribe of Christians as Josephus the
Jewish historian of the first century called us. However, when you move from
God’s choice of persons as members of his chosen people the whole thing
changes.
There was no more tribe of Christians there were the Christian tribes of
the Vandals or the Visigoths or the Franks, who happened to be the first to
take the plunge into the Catholic, Roman, non-Arian baptismal pool. The Franks
had great names like Kings Chlodiwg, Sigebert, Chilperic, Queen Brunhilda and Queen Fredegunda, who couldn’t stand
each other. I mention them just because these are really cool names. King
Chlodwig, however, is important for our story.
He was the first of
the Arian German kings to convert to Catholicism, admittedly under pressure
from his Catholic wife Queen Clothilda. He realized that it could be a win-win
situation. The pope in Rome was being browbeaten by the emperor in
Constantinople, and Chlodwig – or as you may know him, Clovis – was being browbeaten by
his Romano-Gallic nobility in what is now France. When he became a Catholic,
the pope got a protector and Clovis got legitimacy in France. It was smiles all
around. The dynasty of Clovis eventually gave way to the dynasty that included
Charlemagne, God’s chosen monarch par excellence!
The Franks slowly became the French who talked about the deeds of God through
the French (Gesta Dei per Francos).
They never quite got over the idea, at least not until recently when they,
along with the rest of Europe stopped believing in God.
Where did this leave
the un-chosen Jews? Pretty much moving from country to country until the czars
of Russia invited them to live in the Slavic lands of the east. By the way,
King Clovis, the king of the Franks and protector of the Roman Church was buried
in; you guessed it... a church in France called the Church of the Holy
Apostles, just like Constantine.
Next week: How the
west lost its Christian faith 400 years ago and nobody noticed until just now.
Posts
on to part 17
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