 |
 |
John Mundy wrote: >Dear List: Admirable though Moore's work is, I agree with Landes that >there were persons in some quantity who diverged from, or held differing >beliefs from the post-Gregorian "orthodox" church. Some, it seems clear, >were Judaizing, as their enemies maintained, but most, it appears, were >not. What many of them shared with the Jewish community (as with Muslims) >was a relative absence of a formally demarcated ecclesiastical order. >Also, to judge by the Cathars (surely a vastly important religion), not >all were moved by communitarian beliefs on the model of the Acts of the >Apostles. In my reading, Catharism in its heyday was a relatively >upper-class faith, unlike most of the Waldensians, Humiliati, etc. And >also only sects of the Waldensian type seem to have insisted on a measure >of real equality for women in an institutional sense, although most >religions seem to assert it in a "spiritual" sense. As to manual labor, >that's more Waldensian-type than Cathar-type also, or so it seems. >Lastly, it is surely unlikely that communitarianism, an accent on manual >labor and the institutional equality of women and men were characteristic >of the general run of medieval Judaism. While the methodological integrity of determining the content of allegedly "heretical" solutions/practices/beliefs to Scripturally based problems of community discipline and ecclesiastical order on the basis of the label under which their condemnation eventually solidified and was pronounced is suspect and sticky at best, I have found it useful to compare the unfolding interior logic of such condemnations in widely differeing circumstances.In discussing Moore's text and in particular, the growth and naming of heretical mvts. in post-Gregorian Christianity , R.Landes observed in a note:" that this apostolic xnty was perceived by the clergy, correctly, as a form of judaizing. the executions are the index of how threatened the clergy of france was in the early 11th cn." What precisely in that vision of apostolic Christianity could be called Judaizing.... especially since the term had such a long and rich history of accretions which cast a wide net from apostolic Christianity? The association with "Judaizing" in this type of situation is not unique.The often noted efflorescence of popular heretical movements in Russia in the second half of the 14thc and early 15thc ___ (both in the North ( Novgorod) and the South ( Kiev, and Caucasus), seems to me to parallel the Walendsian/ Humiliati/Cathar patterns in the West ( in the sense of sharing the common characteristic of the conscious absence of formally demarcated ecclesastical order and some sense of communally owned/shared resources) and yet were all lumped together under the term "Judaizers", or "Judaizing", and officially condemned as such. None of the groups in question seem to have anything to do with the Judaism that might have been known to the condemning councils,( the communities in Lithuania, and Novgorod) yet the clerical response to any lessening of clerical status was to pass immediately to accusations of "spreading the teachings of the Jews by denying Christ.". " Judaizing" was the accusation most frequently cast about by the local councils, and, in fact, by the great reforming councils of 1498 - 1506, applied even to those "pious monks" who opposed the possesion of land/property by monastic communities. While making no sense theo-logically, these claims did make powerful propaganda sense in the sublation of opposition to princely and ecclesiastical power politics. Josef Gulka Josef Gulka [log in to unmask] 215- 732-8420 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%