heiss93
5th November 2010, 17:52
This is an interesting work by Karl Kautsky on the influence of democratic communist ideas on the medieval monastic movement. He argues that they preserved and restored the original communism of primitive Christianity. The communist mode of the monasteries provided an important role in preserving civilization during the dark ages. Unlike heretical communist movements, monastic communism was able to peacefully coexist with the dominant feudal structure.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1908/christ/ch13b.htm#s5
Monasticism
The Catholic Church, especially after it had achieved government recognition, transformed the principles of the original Messianic community into their exact opposite. However, this was by no means a peaceful process without opposition and strife. For the social conditions that had created the original democratic communism of Christianity continued to exist, and even became more aggravated as the Empire decayed.
We have seen how movements of protest against the new trend appeared from the outset. After it had become the dominant and official trend of the church, and no other was permitted within the community, new democratic and communistic sects kept arising alongside of the Catholic Church. In North Africa, for instance, at the time of the Church’s recognition by Constantine, the sect of Circumcelliones was widespread. Fanatical beggars who carried to an extreme the struggle of the Donatist sect against the official church and the state, preached war against all the noble and rich. As in Galilee at the time of Christ, the peasant population of the fourth century in North Africa rose in desperation against their oppressors, and their protest took the form of banditry. As the Zealots had done before them, and probably the first adherents of Jesus as well, the Circumcelliones now gave these bands a goal, emancipation from all subjection. They boldly stood up in battle to the imperial troops who, hand in hand with the Catholic priests, sought to suppress the uprising, which lasted for decades.
This attempt to revive communism within the church failed, and so did every other, whether peaceful or violent. They all failed for the same reasons that had finally changed the first attempt into its opposite, and continued to operate, just as the need for such attempts persisted. This need was reinforced by the increasing distress; but it must not be forgotten that the church also was increasingly able to keep a large part of the proletariat from the worst distress by means of its charitable institutions, and also to make it dependent on the clergy, to corrupt it, to smother all enthusiasm and all higher thoughts in it.
When the Church became the State Church, an instrument of despotism and exploitation, on a scale of wealth and power that history had never yet known, the end of all its communistic tendencies seemed to have arrived. And yet these tendencies were to gain new strength precisely out of the state religion.
Up to the time of its official recognition, the expansion of the Christian community life had been confined essentially to the large cities. That was the only place it could maintain itself during the persecutions. In the country, where the individual is easily observed, secret organizations could exist only if they were supported by the entire population, like the Irish secret societies of the nineteenth century. Any minority movement of social opposition encounters tremendous difficulties in the country; and this was true for Christianity as well during the first three centuries.
There were no obstacles to Christianity’s expansion in rural districts once it had ceased to be an opposition movement and been recognised by the state. For three hundred years Christianity, like Judaism, had been almost exclusively a religion of the cities. Now it began to be a religion of peasants too.
Christianity brought with it to the country its communistic tendencies. Here however these tendencies had much more favorable conditions than in town, as we have seen in discussing the Essenes. Essenianism awoke at once to a new life in Christian form, once it was possible to form open communistic organizations on the land; and this indicates how great the need for it was. Just at the time when Christianity was accepted by the government, at the beginning of the fourth century, the first monasteries came into existence in Egypt, soon to be followed by others in all parts of the Empire.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1908/christ/ch13b.htm#s5
Monasticism
The Catholic Church, especially after it had achieved government recognition, transformed the principles of the original Messianic community into their exact opposite. However, this was by no means a peaceful process without opposition and strife. For the social conditions that had created the original democratic communism of Christianity continued to exist, and even became more aggravated as the Empire decayed.
We have seen how movements of protest against the new trend appeared from the outset. After it had become the dominant and official trend of the church, and no other was permitted within the community, new democratic and communistic sects kept arising alongside of the Catholic Church. In North Africa, for instance, at the time of the Church’s recognition by Constantine, the sect of Circumcelliones was widespread. Fanatical beggars who carried to an extreme the struggle of the Donatist sect against the official church and the state, preached war against all the noble and rich. As in Galilee at the time of Christ, the peasant population of the fourth century in North Africa rose in desperation against their oppressors, and their protest took the form of banditry. As the Zealots had done before them, and probably the first adherents of Jesus as well, the Circumcelliones now gave these bands a goal, emancipation from all subjection. They boldly stood up in battle to the imperial troops who, hand in hand with the Catholic priests, sought to suppress the uprising, which lasted for decades.
This attempt to revive communism within the church failed, and so did every other, whether peaceful or violent. They all failed for the same reasons that had finally changed the first attempt into its opposite, and continued to operate, just as the need for such attempts persisted. This need was reinforced by the increasing distress; but it must not be forgotten that the church also was increasingly able to keep a large part of the proletariat from the worst distress by means of its charitable institutions, and also to make it dependent on the clergy, to corrupt it, to smother all enthusiasm and all higher thoughts in it.
When the Church became the State Church, an instrument of despotism and exploitation, on a scale of wealth and power that history had never yet known, the end of all its communistic tendencies seemed to have arrived. And yet these tendencies were to gain new strength precisely out of the state religion.
Up to the time of its official recognition, the expansion of the Christian community life had been confined essentially to the large cities. That was the only place it could maintain itself during the persecutions. In the country, where the individual is easily observed, secret organizations could exist only if they were supported by the entire population, like the Irish secret societies of the nineteenth century. Any minority movement of social opposition encounters tremendous difficulties in the country; and this was true for Christianity as well during the first three centuries.
There were no obstacles to Christianity’s expansion in rural districts once it had ceased to be an opposition movement and been recognised by the state. For three hundred years Christianity, like Judaism, had been almost exclusively a religion of the cities. Now it began to be a religion of peasants too.
Christianity brought with it to the country its communistic tendencies. Here however these tendencies had much more favorable conditions than in town, as we have seen in discussing the Essenes. Essenianism awoke at once to a new life in Christian form, once it was possible to form open communistic organizations on the land; and this indicates how great the need for it was. Just at the time when Christianity was accepted by the government, at the beginning of the fourth century, the first monasteries came into existence in Egypt, soon to be followed by others in all parts of the Empire.