The speed of light, illustrated here by a beam of light traveling from Earth to the Moon
in 1.26 seconds, would limit the speed at which messages would be able
to travel in the interplanetary Internet. Due to the vast distances
involved, much longer delays may be incurred than in the terrestrial
Internet.Simplified Interplanetary Internet overview, Mars to Earth communication
The interplanetary Internet is a conceived computer network in space, consisting of a set of network nodes that can communicate with each other. These nodes are the planet's orbiters and landers, and the Earth ground
stations. For example, the orbiters collect the scientific data from
the Curiosity rover on Mars through near-Mars communication links, transmit the data to Earth through direct links from the Mars orbiters to the Earth ground stations via the NASA Deep Space Network, and finally the data routed through Earth's internal internet.
Interplanetary communication is greatly delayed by interplanetary distances, as data transmission can only go as fast as the speed of light, so a new set of protocols and technologies that are tolerant to large delays and errors are required. The interplanetary Internet has been envisioned as a store and forwardnetwork of internets
that is often disconnected, has a wireless backbone fraught with
error-prone links and delays ranging from tens of minutes to even hours,
even when there is a connection.
As of 2024 agencies and companies working towards bringing the network to fruition include NASA, ESA, SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Challenges and reasons
In the core implementation of Interplanetary Internet, satellites
orbiting a planet communicate to other planet's satellites.
Simultaneously, these planets revolve around the Sun with long
distances, and thus many challenges face the communications. The reasons
and the resultant challenges are:
The motion and long distances between planets: The
interplanetary communication is greatly delayed due to the
interplanetary distances and the motion of the planets. The delay is
variable and long, ranging from a couple of minutes (Earth-to-Mars), to a
couple of hours (Pluto-to-Earth), depending on their relative
positions. The interplanetary communication also suspends due to the
solar conjunction, when the sun's radiation hinders the direct
communication between the planets. As such, the communication
characterizes lossy links and intermittent link connectivity.
Low embeddable payload: Satellites can only carry a small payload,
which poses challenges to the power, mass, size, and cost for
communication hardware design. An asymmetric bandwidth would be the
result of this limitation. This asymmetry reaches ratios up to 1000:1 as downlink:uplink bandwidth portion.
Absence of fixed infrastructure: The graph of participating nodes in
a specific planet-to-planet communication keeps changing over time, due
to the constant motion. The routes of the planet-to-planet
communication are planned and scheduled rather than being opportunistic.
The Interplanetary Internet design must address these challenges to
operate successfully and achieve good communication with other planets.
It also must use the few available resources efficiently in the system.
Development
Space communication technology has steadily evolved from expensive,
one-of-a-kind point-to-point architectures, to the re-use of technology
on successive missions, to the development of standard protocols agreed
upon by space agencies of many countries. This last phase has gone on
since 1982 through the efforts of the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS),[10]
a body composed of the major space agencies of the world. It has 11
member agencies, 32 observer agencies, and over 119 industrial
associates.
The evolution of space data system standards has gone on in
parallel with the evolution of the Internet, with conceptual
cross-pollination where fruitful, but largely as a separate evolution.
Since the late 1990s, familiar Internet protocols and CCSDS space link
protocols have integrated and converged in several ways; for example,
the successful FTP file transfer to Earth-orbiting STRV 1B on January 2, 1996, which ran FTP over the CCSDS IPv4-like Space Communications Protocol Specifications (SCPS) protocols. Internet Protocol use without CCSDS has taken place on spacecraft, e.g., demonstrations on the UoSAT-12 satellite, and operationally on the Disaster Monitoring Constellation.
Having reached the era where networking and IP on board spacecraft have
been shown to be feasible and reliable, a forward-looking study of the
bigger picture was the next phase.
The Interplanetary Internet study at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was started by a team of scientists at JPL led by internet pioneer Vinton Cerf and the late Adrian Hooke. Cerf was appointed as a distinguished visiting scientist at JPL in
1998, while Hooke was one of the founders and directors of CCSDS.
While IP-like SCPS protocols are feasible for short hops, such as ground station to orbiter, rover to lander, lander to orbiter, probe to flyby, and so on, delay-tolerant networking is needed to get information from one region of the Solar System to another. It becomes apparent that the concept of a region is a natural architectural factoring of the Interplanetary Internet.
A region is an area where the characteristics of
communication are the same. Region characteristics include
communications, security, the maintenance of resources, perhaps
ownership, and other factors. The Interplanetary Internet is a "network
of regional internets".
What is needed then, is a standard way to achieve end-to-end
communication through multiple regions in a disconnected, variable-delay
environment using a generalized suite of protocols. Examples of regions
might include the terrestrial Internet as a region, a region on the
surface of the Moon or Mars, or a ground-to-orbit region.
The recognition of this requirement led to the concept of a
"bundle" as a high-level way to address the generalized
Store-and-Forward problem. Bundles are an area of new protocol
development in the upper layers of the OSI model, above the Transport Layer
with the goal of addressing the issue of bundling store-and-forward
information so that it can reliably traverse radically dissimilar
environments constituting a "network of regional internets".
Delay-tolerant networking
(DTN) was designed to enable standardized communications over long
distances and through time delays. At its core is the Bundle Protocol
(BP), which is similar to the Internet Protocol, or IP, that serves as
the heart of the Internet here on Earth. The big difference between the
regular Internet Protocol (IP) and the Bundle Protocol is that IP
assumes a seamless end-to-end data path, while BP is built to account
for errors and disconnections — glitches that commonly plague deep-space
communications.
Bundle Service Layering, implemented as the Bundling protocol suite for delay-tolerant networking,
will provide general-purpose delay-tolerant protocol services in
support of a range of applications: custody transfer, segmentation and
reassembly, end-to-end reliability, end-to-end security, and end-to-end
routing among them. The Bundle Protocol was first tested in space on the
UK-DMC satellite in 2008.
An example of one of these end-to-end applications flown on a space mission is the CCSDS File Delivery Protocol (CFDP), used on the Deep Impact
comet mission. CFDP is an international standard for automatic,
reliable file transfer in both directions. CFDP should not be confused
with Coherent File Distribution Protocol, which has the same acronym and is an IETF-documented experimental protocol for rapidly deploying files to multiple targets in a highly networked environment.
In addition to reliably copying a file from one entity (such as a
spacecraft or ground station) to another entity, CFDP has the
capability to reliably transmit arbitrarily small messages defined by
the user, in the metadata
accompanying the file, and to reliably transmit commands relating to
file system management that are to be executed automatically on the
remote end-point entity (such as a spacecraft) upon successful reception
of a file.
Protocol
The Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) packet telemetry
standard defines the protocol used for the transmission of spacecraft
instrument data over the deep-space channel. Under this standard, an
image or other data sent from a spacecraft instrument is transmitted
using one or more packets.
CCSDS packet definition
A packet is a block of data with length that can vary between successive packets, ranging from 7
to 65,542 bytes, including the packet header.
Packetized data is transmitted via frames, which are
fixed-length data blocks. The size of a frame, including frame header
and control information, can range up to 2048 bytes.
Packet sizes are fixed during the development phase.
Because packet lengths are variable but frame lengths are fixed,
packet boundaries usually do not coincide with frame boundaries.
Telecom processing notes
Data in a frame is typically protected from channel errors by error-correcting codes.
Even when the channel errors exceed the correction capability of
the error-correcting code, the presence of errors is nearly always
detected by the error-correcting code or by a separate error-detecting
code.
Frames for which uncorrectable errors are detected are marked as undecodable and typically are deleted.
Handling data loss
Deleted undecodable whole frames are the principal type of data loss
that affects compressed data sets. In general, there would be little to
gain from attempting to use compressed data from a frame marked as
undecodable.
When errors are present in a frame, the bits of the subband
pixels are already decoded before the first bit error will remain
intact, but all subsequent decoded bits in the segment usually will be
completely corrupted; a single bit error is often just as disruptive as
many bit errors.
Furthermore, compressed data usually are protected by powerful,
long-blocklength error-correcting codes, which are the types of codes
most likely to yield substantial fractions of bit errors throughout
those frames that are undecodable.
Thus, frames with detected errors would be essentially unusable even if they were not deleted by the frame processor.
This data loss can be compensated for with the following mechanisms.
If an erroneous frame escapes detection, the decompressor will
blindly use the frame data as if they were reliable, whereas in the case
of detected erroneous frames, the decompressor can base its
reconstruction on incomplete, but not misleading, data.
However, it is extremely rare for an erroneous frame to go undetected.
For frames coded by the CCSDS Reed–Solomon code, fewer than 1 in 40,000 erroneous frames can escape detection.
All frames not employing the Reed–Solomon code use a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) error-detecting code, which has an undetected frame-error rate of less than 1 in 32,000.
Implementation
The InterPlanetary Internet Special Interest Group of the Internet Society has worked on defining protocols and standards that would make the IPN possible. The Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group (DTNRG) is the primary group researching Delay-tolerant networking (DTN). Additional research efforts focus on various uses of the new technology.
The canceled Mars Telecommunications Orbiter
had been planned to establish an Interplanetary Internet link between
Earth and Mars, in order to support other Mars missions. Rather than
using RF, it would have used optical communications using laser
beams for their higher data rates. "Lasercom sends information using
beams of light and optical elements, such as telescopes and optical
amplifiers, rather than RF signals, amplifiers, and antennas"
NASA JPL tested the DTN protocol with their Deep Impact Networking (DINET) experiment on board the Deep Impact/EPOXI spacecraft in October, 2008.
In May 2009, DTN was deployed to a payload on board the ISS. NASA and BioServe Space Technologies, a research group at the
University of Colorado, have been continuously testing DTN on two
Commercial Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus (CGBA) payloads. CGBA-4 and
CGBA-5 serve as computational and communications platforms which are
remotely controlled from BioServe's Payload Operations Control Center
(POCC) in Boulder, CO. In October 2012 ISS Station commander Sunita Williams remotely operated Mocup (Meteron Operations and Communications Prototype), a "cat-sized" Lego Mindstorms robot fitted with a BeagleBoard computer and webcam, located in the European Space Operations Centre in Germany in an experiment using DTN. These initial experiments provide insight into future missions where
DTN will enable the extension of networks into deep space to explore
other planets and solar system points of interest. Seen as necessary for
space exploration, DTN enables timeliness of data return from operating
assets which results in reduced risk and cost, increased crew safety,
and improved operational awareness and science return for NASA and
additional space agencies.
DTN has several major arenas of application, in addition to the
Interplanetary Internet, which include sensor networks, military and
tactical communications, disaster recovery, hostile environments, mobile
devices and remote outposts. As an example of a remote outpost, imagine an isolated Arctic village,
or a faraway island, with electricity, one or more computers, but no
communication connectivity. With the addition of a simple wireless
hotspot in the village, plus DTN-enabled devices on, say, dog sleds or
fishing boats, a resident would be able to check their e-mail or click
on a Wikipedia article, and have their requests forwarded to the nearest
networked location on the sled's or boat's next visit, and get the
replies on its return.
Earth orbit
Earth orbit is sufficiently nearby that conventional protocols can be used. For example, the International Space Station has been connected to the regular terrestrial Internet since January 22, 2010 when the first unassisted tweet was posted. However, the space station also serves as a useful platform to develop,
experiment, and implement systems that make up the interplanetary
Internet. NASA and the European Space Agency
(ESA) have used an experimental version of the interplanetary Internet
to control an educational rover, placed at the European Space Operations
Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, from the International Space Station. The
experiment used the DTN protocol to demonstrate technology that one day
could enable Internet-like communications that can support habitats or
infrastructure on another planet.
Encyclopedia Galactica is the name of a number of fictional or hypothetical encyclopedias containing all the knowledge accumulated by a galaxy-spanning civilization, most notably in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.
The concept of a "future encyclopedia" has become "something iconic
among many lovers of the science fiction", and has been reused by
numerous other writers.
Asimov's Encyclopedia Galactica
Encyclopedia Galactica first appeared in Isaac Asimov's short story "Foundation" (Astounding Science Fiction, May 1942) (although it did not originally use that name, being referred to as the Encyclopedia until the later publication of the fix-upFoundation (1951)). Asimov's Encyclopedia Galactica was a compendium of all knowledge then available in the Galactic Empire, intended to preserve that knowledge in a remote region of the galaxy in the event of a foreseen galactic catastrophe. The Encyclopedia
is later revealed to be an element in an act of misdirection, with its
real purpose being to concentrate a group of knowledgeable scientists on
a remote, resource-poor planet named Terminus,
with the long-term aim of revitalizing the technologically stagnant and
scientifically dormant empire. Originally published in a physical
medium, it later becomes computerized and subject to continual change.
Asimov used the Encyclopedia Galactica as a literary device throughout his Foundation series, beginning many of the book sections or chapters with a short extract from the Encyclopedia as epigraphs, discussing a key character or event in the story. This provides the reader with a hazy idea of what is to come.
Theodore Wein considers the Encyclopedia Galactica as possibly inspired by a reference in H. G. Wells's The Shape of Things to Come
(1933). The future world envisioned by Wells includes an "Encyclopaedic
organization which centres upon Barcelona, with seventeen million
active workers" and which is tasked with creating "the Fundamental
Knowledge System which accumulates, sorts, keeps in order and renders
available everything that is known". As pointed out by Wein, this Wells
book was at its best-known and most influential in the late 1930s –
coinciding with "the period of incubation" when the young Asimov became
interested in science fiction, reading a lot of it and starting to
formulate his own ideas.
Patricio Manns analyzed the Encyclopedia Galactica as a paratextual element of Asimov's work, intended to contextualize the action, to bring the trilogy closer to the historical novel and to inform the reader about a possible palimpsestic reading.
Later instances in fiction
Various authors in addition to Isaac Asimov have invoked the Encyclopedia Galactica. According to the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, the first to use the term was Frank Holby in his short story "The Strange Case of the Missing Hero" in the July 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which features Sebastian Lelong, editor of the Encyclopedia Galactica. An Encyclopedia Galactica was a common fixture in previous incarnations of the Legion of Super-Heroes comic books, and has appeared in the Star Wars expanded universe and Superman comics set in the future.
The Encyclopedia Galactica is mentioned as a collection of all the knowledge of a galactic Empire in the 1989 science fiction short story "The Originist" by American novelist Orson Scott Card, which is set in Asimov's "Foundation" Universe. Robert A. Heinlein mentioned the Encyclopedia in chapter three of To Sail Beyond the Sunset
(1987): "... the computer that led the Lunar Revolution on time line
three, code 'Neil Armstrong.' Let's skip the details; it's all in Encyclopedia Galacta (sic) and other books." In Arthur C. Clarke's and Gentry Lee's novel Rama II
(1989), Nicole des Jardins says to Richard Wakefield, "Just think, the
sum of everything all human beings know or have ever known might be
nothing more than an infinitesimal fraction of the Encyclopedia Galactica." Encyclopedia Galactica is also mentioned by Charlie Sheen's character in The Arrival (1996), and by Jodie Foster's character in Contact (1997).
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words "DON'T PANIC" inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
The Orion's Arm worldbuilding project uses a fictional database called the Encyclopaedia Galactica as its primary framing device, each page presenting itself as an individual article of the Encyclopaedia and focusing on a specific aspect of the Orion's Arm universe.
Other uses
A series of five video documentaries produced by York Films of England and distributed by Encyclopædia Britannica (Australia) in 1993 were collectively titled Encyclopædia Galactica;
episode titles were "The Inner Solar System", "The Outer Solar System",
"Star Trekking", "Discovery", and "Astronomy and the Stars".[12] Other entities associated with the production of the video series were Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation, The Learning Channel (retitled Amazing Space), The Discovery Channel Europe, S4C Wales, System TV France and Yleisradio Finland.
An Encyclopedia Galactica: from the Fleet Library aboard the Battlestar Galactica was published in 1978. Aimed at a juvenile audience, it was a tie-in to the Battlestar Galactica television series being broadcast at the time.
The term has been used in non-fictional contexts as well. One example is its use by Carl Sagan in his 1980 book Cosmos, and the 12th episode of his documentary of the same name, to refer to a text where hypothetical extraterrestrial civilizations could store all of their information and knowledge.
A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of a company or a nonprofit organization.
CEOs find roles in various organizations, including public and private corporations, nonprofit organizations, and even some government organizations (notably state-owned enterprises). The governor and CEO of a corporation or company typically report to the board of directors and are charged with maximizing the value of the business, which may include maximizing the profitability, market share, revenue,
or another financial metric. In the nonprofit and government sector,
CEOs typically aim at achieving outcomes related to the organization's
mission, usually provided by legislation. CEOs are also frequently assigned the role of the main manager of the organization and the highest-ranking officer in the C-suite.
Origins
The term "chief executive officer" is attested as early as 1782, when an ordinance of the Congress of the Confederation of the United States of America used the term to refer to governors and other leaders of the executive branches of each of the Thirteen Colonies. In draft additions to the Oxford English Dictionary published online in 2011, the Dictionary says that the use of "CEO" as an acronym for a chief executive officer originated in Australia, with the first attestation being in 1914. The first American usage cited is from 1972.
Responsibilities
The responsibilities of an organization's CEO are set by the organization's board of directors
or other authority, depending on the organization's structure. They can
be far-reaching or quite limited, and are typically enshrined in a
formal delegation of authority regarding business administration. Typically, responsibilities include being an active decision-maker on business strategy and other key policy issues, as well as leader,
manager, and executor roles. The communicator role can involve speaking
to the press and the public, as well as to the organization's
management and employees. The decision-making role entails making
high-level decisions regarding policy and strategy. The CEO is
responsible for implementing the goals, targets, and strategic
objectives as determined by the board of directors.
As an executive officer
of the company, the CEO reports the status of the business to the board
of directors, motivates employees, and drives change within the
organization. As a manager, the CEO presides over the organization's
day-to-day operations. The CEO is the person who is ultimately accountable for a company's
business decisions, including those in operations, marketing, business development, finance, human resources, etc. The CEO of a political party is often entrusted with fundraising, particularly for election campaigns.
The use of the CEO title may be used by for-profit companies or non-profit or charitable organisations, such as the Wikimedia Foundation.
International use
In some countries, there is a dual board system with two separate boards, one executive board for the day-to-day business and one supervisory board for control purposes (selected by the shareholders). In these countries, the CEO presides over the executive board and the chairperson
presides over the supervisory board, and these two roles will always be
held by different people. This ensures a distinction between management by the executive board and governance
by the supervisory board. This allows for clear lines of authority. The
aim is to prevent a conflict of interest and too much power being
concentrated in the hands of one person.
In the United States, the board of directors (elected by the shareholders) is often equivalent to the supervisory board, while the executive board may often be known as the executive committee (the division/subsidiary heads and C-level officers that report directly to the CEO).
In the United States, and in business, the executive officers are
usually the top officers of a corporation, the chief executive officer
(CEO) being the best-known type. The definition varies; for instance,
the California Corporate Disclosure Act
defines "executive officers" as the five most highly compensated
officers not also sitting on the board of directors. In the case of a sole proprietorship, an executive officer is the sole proprietor. In the case of a partnership, an executive officer is a managing partner, senior partner, or administrative partner. In the case of a limited liability company, an executive officer is any member, manager, or officer.
Depending on the organization, a CEO may have several subordinate
executives to help run the day-to-day administration of the company,
each of whom has specific functional responsibilities referred to as
senior executives, executive officers, or corporate officers. Subordinate executives are
given different titles in different organizations, but one common
category of subordinate executive, if the CEO is also the president, is
the vice president
(VP). An organization may have more than one vice president, each
tasked with a different area of responsibility (e.g., VP of finance, VP
of human resources). Examples of subordinate executive officers who
typically report to the CEO include the chief operating officer (COO), chief financial officer (CFO), chief strategy officer (CSO), chief marketing officer (CMO), and chief business officer (CBO). The public relations-focused position of chief reputation officer
is sometimes included as one such subordinate executive officer, but,
as suggested by Anthony Johndrow, CEO of Reputation Economy Advisors, it
can also be seen as "simply another way to add emphasis to the role of a
modern-day CEO – where they are both the external face of, and the
driving force behind, an organization culture".
In the US, the term "chief executive officer" is used primarily in
business, whereas the term "executive director" is used primarily in the
not-for-profit sector. These terms are generally mutually exclusive and refer to distinct legal duties and responsibilities. The CEO is the highest-ranking executive in a company, making corporate
decisions, managing operations, allocating resources, and serving as
the main point of communication between the board of directors and the
company.
United Kingdom
In the UK, chief executive and chief executive officer are used in local government, where their position in law is described as the "head of paid service", and in business and in the charitable sector. As of 2013, the use of the term director
for senior charity staff is deprecated to avoid confusion with the
legal duties and responsibilities associated with being a charity
director or trustee, which are normally non-executive (unpaid) roles.
The term managing director is often used in lieu of chief executive officer.
Celebrity CEOs
Business publicists since the days of Edward Bernays (1891–1995) and his client John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) and even more successfully the corporate publicists for Henry Ford, promoted the concept of the "celebrity CEO". Business journalists
have often adopted this approach, which assumes that the corporate
achievements, especially in the arena of manufacturing, are produced by
uniquely talented individuals, especially the "heroic CEO". In effect,
journalists celebrate a CEO who takes distinctive strategic actions. The
model is the celebrity in entertainment, sports, and politics – compare
the "great man theory". Guthey et al.
argues that "...these individuals are not self-made, but rather are
created by a process of widespread media exposure to the point that
their actions, personalities, and even private lives function
symbolically to represent significant dynamics and tensions prevalent in
the contemporary business atmosphere". Journalism thereby exaggerates the importance of the CEO and tends to
neglect harder-to-describe broader corporate factors. There is little
attention to the intricately organized technical bureaucracy that
actually does the work. Hubris sets in when the CEO internalizes the
celebrity and becomes excessively self-confident in making complex
decisions. There may be an emphasis on the sort of decisions that
attract the celebrity journalists.
Research published in 2009 by Ulrike Malmendier
and Geoffrey Tate indicates that "firms with award-winning CEOs
subsequently underperform, in terms both of stock and of operating
performance".
Criticism
CEO selection and performance evaluation
CEOs and senior executives are governed by the board of directors.
The proper selection and evaluation of the CEO and the executive team is
critical to the company’s performance. Yet there is no established
standard framework to evaluate and govern the CEO performance. Aside
from Sarbanes Oxley Act
legal standard to govern the financial reporting of public companies
and hold the CEO & CFO accountable, there are no industry standards
to test the CEO competency and actions or to help align the performance
of the executive team with the shareholders' interest and performance
expectations. One initiative proposes a standardized questionnaire used
in annual CEO reviews and senior executive recruitment. These
questionnaires help guide CEO strategy and assure the shareholders that
the company and its executive team are on the right track. According to
the Executive Institute, the top 10 questions every board must ask its
CEO, include the following:
Are we in the right business/market segment(s)? What are the growth areas to invest in and loss areas to divest?
What are the emerging PESTEL (Political, Economic, Societal, Technological, Environmental & Legal) risks and opportunities
What market data supports our strategy?
What are our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOTs)?
What are we doing to address each one of the SWOTs?
What are our core competencies? How we can leverage them better?
What are the operational or execution risks, and how do you manage them?
What are our key performance indicators (KPIs) and targets that help us measure our performance?
How do you plan to achieve those targets and in what timeframe?
How can we build a sustainable competitive advantage?
Every CEO and C-level executive must be able to provide specific
answers to the preceding questions, readily and clearly. Additionally,
these questions can also be used as a framework for evaluating potential
candidates for the succession planning and selection process.
Executive compensation has been a source of criticism following a dramatic rise in pay relative to the average worker's wage. For example, the relative pay was 20-to-1 in 1965 in the US, but had risen to 376-to-1 by 2000. The relative pay differs around the world, and, in some smaller countries, is still around 20-to-1. Observers differ as to whether the rise is due to competition for talent or due to lack of control by compensation committees. In recent years, investors have demanded more say over executive pay.
Lack of diversity amongst chief executives has also been a source of criticism. In 2018, 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs were women. In 2023 the number rose to 10.4% of for Women CEO's of Fortune 500 companies. The reasons for this are explained or justified in various ways, and
may include biological sex differences, male and female differences in Big Five personality traits and temperament, sex differences in psychology and interests, maternity and career breaks, hypergamy, phallogocentrism, the existence of old boy networks, tradition, and the lack of female role models in that regard, countries have passed laws mandating boardroom gender quotas. In 2023 Rockefeller Foundation awarded a grant to Korn Ferry to research strategies and then action a plan to help more women to become CEO's.
There are contentious claims that a significant number of CEOs have psychopathic
tendencies, often characterized by power-seeking behavior and
dominance. These individuals can often conceal their ruthlessness and
antisocial behavior behind a facade of charm and eloquence. Traits such
as courage and risk-taking, generally considered desirable, are often
found alongside these psychopathic tendencies.
Tara Swart, a neuroscientist at MIT Sloan School of Management,
has suggested that individuals with psychopathic traits thrive in
chaotic environments and are aware that others do not. As a result, they
may intentionally create chaos in the workplace. This perspective is explored in the book Snakes in Suits, co-authored by Robert D. Hare.
However, Scott Lilienfeld
has argued that the attention given to psychopathy in the workplace by
both the media and scholars has far exceeded the available scientific
evidence. Emilia Bunea, writing in Psychology Today, has linked psychopathic traits in managers to workplace bullying,
employee dissatisfaction, and turnover intentions. Despite this, Bunea
cautions that excessive worry about supposed psychopathic managers could
discourage individuals from pursuing careers in corporations and deter
employees from addressing issues with difficult bosses.
Controversies
There have been several notable controversies involving famous CEOs.
Some of the most prominent controversies were a result of the MeToo Movement including Harvey Weinstein and the Weinstein Company, Steve Wynn and Wynn Resorts Ltd., and Leslie Moonves & CBS.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, Inc. and SpaceX,
has been the subject of several controversies. In 2018, Musk tweeted
"[a]m considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured" in the
middle of a trading day and a few weeks later, Tesla announced it would
go private. The SEC investigated Musk shortly after his tweet and
charged him with securities fraud. Musk settled the controversy and
stepped down as chair of Tesla's board but remained the company's CEO.
Musk and Tesla both paid a $20 million penalty to be distributed among
harmed investors.
The history of Christian thought has included concepts of both
inclusivity and exclusivity from its beginnings. These have been
understood and applied differently in different ages, and have led to
practices of both persecution and toleration. Early Christian thought established Christian identity, defined heresy and orthodoxy, and separated itself from polytheism and Judaism.
Nearly all scholars prior to the late twentieth century claimed
Christian thought was intolerant, as evidenced by the persecution of
pagans and violence in the centuries after Christianity became favored
by Christian emperors in the Roman Empire. However, the majority of
modern scholars say that the change to Christian leadership did not
cause the persecution of pagans, and that violence in society did not
increase.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, Christian thought focused more on preservation than origination. This era of thought is exemplified by Gregory the Great, Saint Benedict, Visigothic Spain, illustrated manuscripts, and progress in medical care through monks. Although the roots of supersessionism, the theory that Christians replaced Jews as God's chosen, and deicide can be traced to some second century Christian thought, Jews of the Middle Ages lived mostly peacefully alongside their Christian neighbors because of Augustine of Hippo's teaching that they should be left alone. In the Early Middle Ages, Christian thought on the military and involvement in war shifted to accommodate the crusades by inventing chivalry and new monastic
orders dedicated to it. There was no single thread of Christian thought
throughout most of the Middle Ages, as the Church was largely
democratic and each order had its own doctrine.
The High Middle Ages were pivotal in both European culture and Christian thought. Feudal kings began to lay the foundation of what would become their modern nations by centralizing power.
They gained power through multiple means including persecution.
Christian thought played a supportive role, as did the literati, a group
of ambitious intellectuals who had contempt for those they thought
beneath them, by verbally legitimizing those attitudes and actions. This contributed to a turning point in Judeo-Christian relations in the 13th century. Heresy became a religious, political, and social issue which led to civil disorder and the Medieval Inquisitions. The Albigensian Crusade
is seen by many as evidence of Christianity's propensity for
intolerance and persecution, while other scholars say it was conducted
by the secular powers for their own ends.
The Late Middle Ages are marked by a decline in papal power
and church influence, with accommodation to secular power becoming an
increasingly prominent aspect of Christian thought. The modern
Inquisitions were formed in the Late Middle Ages at the special request
of the Spanish and Portuguese
sovereigns. Where the medieval inquisitions had limited power and
influence, the powers of the modern "Holy Tribunal" were taken over,
extended, and enlarged by the state into "one of the most formidable
engines of destruction which ever existed." During the Northern Crusades, Christian thought on conversion
shifted to a pragmatic acceptance of conversion obtained through
political pressure or military coercion even though theologians of the
period continued to write that conversion must be voluntary.
By the time of the early Reformation (1400–1600), the conviction developed among the early Protestants that pioneering the concepts of religious freedom and religious toleration was necessary say tolerance has never been an attitude broadly espoused by
an entire society, not even western societies, and that only a few
outstanding individuals, historically, have truly fought for it. In the West, Christian reformation figures, and later Enlightenment intellectuals, advocated for tolerance in the century preceding, during, and after the Reformation and into the Enlightenment. Contemporary Christians generally agree that tolerance is preferable to
conflict, and that heresy and dissent are not deserving of punishment.
Early Christian thought from the first century to Constantine
Historical background
In its first three centuries, Christian thought was just beginning to define what it meant to be a Christian, distinct from paganism and Judaism, through its definitions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Early Christian writers worked to reconcile the Jewish founding story, the Christian gospel of the Apostles,
and the Greek tradition of knowing the divine through reason, but the
substance of Christian orthodoxy was increasingly found in the
homogeneous canon of writings believed to be apostolic (written by the
apostles), that had circulated widely as such, and the writings of the Church Fathers that were based on them.
Persecution and tolerance are both the result of alterity, the state of otherness, and the question of how to properly deal with those who are 'outside' the defined identity. Like the other Abrahamic religions,
Christian thought has included, from its beginnings, two ideals which
have affected Christian responses to alterity: inclusivity (also called universality) and exclusivity, or as David Nirenberg describes them, our "mutual capacities for coexistence and violence."There is an inherent tension in all the Abrahamic traditions between
exclusivity and inclusivity, which is theologically and practically
dealt with by each in different ways.
Justo L. González traces three veins of Christian thought that began in the second century. Out of Carthage, Tertullian the lawyer (155–200 CE) wrote of Christianity as a revelation of the law of God. From the pluralistic city of Alexandria, Origen
wrote of the commonalities between philosophy and theology, reason and
revelation, seeing Christianity as the intellectual pursuit of
transcendent truth. In Asia Minor and Syria, Irenaeus
saw Christianity as God working in human history through its pastoral
work of bringing people into God's love. Each vein of thought has
persisted throughout Christian history and has shaped attitudes toward
and practices of tolerance and persecution.
Inclusivity, exclusivity and heresy
Early Christian communities were highly inclusive in terms of social
stratification and other social categories, much more so than were the Roman voluntary associations.Heterogeneity characterized the groups formed by Paul the Apostle, and the role of women was much greater than in either of the forms of Judaism or paganism in existence at the time. Early Christians were told to love others, even enemies, and Christians of all classes and sorts called each other "brother" and "sister".
These concepts and practices were foundational to early Christian
thought, have remained central, and can be seen as early precursors to
modern concepts of tolerance.
Though tolerance was not a fully developed concept, and was held with some ambivalence, Guy Stroumsa says Christian thought of this era promotes inclusivity, yet invents the concept of heresy at the same time. Tertullian, a second-century Christian intellectual and lawyer from
Carthage, advocated for religious tolerance primarily in an effort to
convince pagan readers that Christianity should be allowed into the
religious "market-place" that historian John North proposes second century Rome had become.
On the other hand, Stroumsa argues that Tertullian knew co-existence
meant competition, so he attempted to undermine the legitimacy of the
pagan religions by comparing them to Christianity at the same time he
advocated for tolerance from them.Justin Martyr (100–165 CE) wrote his First Apology (155–157 CE) against heretics, and is generally attributed with inventing the concept of heresy in Christian thought. Historian Geoffrey S. Smith
argues that Justin writes only to answer objections his friends are
facing and to defend these friends from ill treatment and even death. He
quotes Justin in a letter to Emperor Antoninus Pius
as saying he is writing: "On behalf of those from every race of men who
are unjustly hated and ill-treated, being one of them myself." However, Alain Le Boulluec
argues it is within this period that use of the term "heretic" in
Christian thought and writings changes from neutral to derogatory.
Supersessionist thought is defined by "two core beliefs: (1) that the nation of Israel has forfeited its status as the people of God through disobedience; and (2) the New Testament church has therefore become the true Israel and inheritor of the promises made to the nation of Israel." It has three forms: punitive, economic, and/or structural supersessionism. Punitive supersessionism is the 'hard' form of supersessionism, and is seen as punishment from God of Jews.
Economic supersessionism is a more moderate form concerning God's
economy: His plan in history to transfer the role of the "people of God"
from an ethnic group to a universal group. The third form involves the New Testament taking priority over the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) and ignoring or replacing the original meaning of Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) passage:
For example, within the early church, the rise of the use of Greek
philosophical interpretation and allegory allowed inferences to be drawn
such as the one Tertullian drew when he allegorically interpreted the
statement "the older will serve the younger", concerning the twin sons of Isaac and Rebekah (Genesis 25:23), to mean that Israel would "serve" the Church.
There is no agreement on when supersessionism began.
Michael J. Vlach notes that some claim it began in the New Testament;
some say it began with the Church Fathers; and others place its
beginnings after the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE. The 70 CE siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple, and the later Bar Kokhba revolt, both had a profound impact on Jewish–Christian relations. Many saw the still-extant Jewish Christians as traitors for not supporting their non-Christian Jewish kinfolk, and Vlach says supersessionism grew out of those events. Scholars such as Walter Kaiser Jr. see the fourth century, after the ascension of Constantine the Great, as supersessionism's true beginning, because that is when a shift in Christian thought on eschatology took place. The early Church reinterpreted Revelation 20:4–6—and its hope for a millennial reign of Jesus with a "redeemed" Israel after his Second Coming—and replaced it with a "historicized and allegorized version" that positioned the Church as the metaphorical Israel instead.
Tracing the roots of supersessionism to the New Testament is
problematic since "there is no consensus" that supersessionism is a
biblical doctrine at all. Vlatch says one's position on this is determined more by one's beginning assumptions than it is by any biblical hermeneutic.
Arguments in favor of supersessionism have traditionally been based on
implications and inferences rather than biblical texts themselves.
Vlach asserts that the Church has also "always had compelling
scriptural reasons, in both Testaments, to believe in a future salvation
and restoration of the nation Israel."
Therefore, supersessionism has never been an official doctrine and has
never been universally held. Supersessionism's alternative is chiliasm,
also known as millennialism: the belief that Jesus will return to Earth
in visible form and establish a 1000-year kingdom. This was the
traditional and more universally held view of the first two centuries,
and has remained an aspect of Christian thought throughout its history. Scholar Steven D. Aguzzi suggests that supersessionism was still seen as a "normative view" in
the writings of early Church Fathers like Justin, Barnabas, and Origen,
and has been part of Christian thought for much of the Church's history.
However, the early Patristic focus on millenarianism, influenced by Second Temple Judaism, helped counteract the more violent forms of supersessionism.
Evaluation
Supersessionism is significant in Christian thought because "It is undeniable that anti-Jewish bias has often gone hand-in-hand with the supersessionist view." Many Jewish writers trace antisemitism, and the consequences of it in World War II, to this particular doctrine among Christians. Twentieth-century Jewish civil rights leader Leonard P. Zakim
asserted that, despite the many possible destructive consequences of
supersessionism, as theology professor Padraic O'Hare writes:
supersessionism alone is not yet antisemitism. John Gager makes a distinction between nineteenth-century antisemitism and second-century anti-Judaism, and many scholars agree, yet there are those who see early anti-Judaism and later antisemitism as the same.Anders Gerdmar [sv]
sees the development of antisemitism as part of the paradigm shift that
occurred in early modernity. Gerdmar argues the shift resulted from the
new scientific focus on the Bible and history that replaced the primacy
of theology and tradition. Christopher Leighton associates anti-Judaism with the origins of Christianity, and antisemitism with "modern nationalism and racial theories".
Deicide
Deicide as the prime accusation against the Jews appears, for the first time, in a highly rhetorical second-century poem by Melito of Sardis, of which only a few fragments have survived. In the fourth century, Augustine of Hippo refuted the accusation, saying the Jews could not be guilty of deicide as they did not believe Jesus was God. Melito's writings were not influential, and the idea was not
immediately influential, but the accusation returned in fourth-century
thinking, sixth-century actions, and in the Middle Ages.
Constantine
Gold coin depicting "Unconquered Constantine" with Sol Invictus, 313 CE
Christian thought was still in its infancy in 313 when, following the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine I (together with his co-emperor Licinius), issued the Edict of Milan granting religious toleration
to the Christian faith. The Edict not only protected Christians from
religious persecution but also all religions, allowing anyone to worship
whichever deity they chose. After 320, Constantine supported the
Christian church through his patronage, had a number of basilicas built for it, and endowed it with land and other wealth.
He outlawed the gladiatorial shows, destroyed temples and plundered
more, and used forceful rhetoric against non-Christians. Still, he never
enacted a formal purge of non-Christians: "He did not punish pagans for being pagans, or Jews for being Jews, and did not adopt a policy of forced conversion," argues Christian theologian Peter Leithart.
While not making a direct personal contribution to Christian
thought, the first Christian Roman emperor had a powerful impact on it
through the example of his own conversion, his policies, and the various
councils he called.
Christian thought at the time of Constantine believed that victory over
the "false gods" had begun with Jesus and ended with the conversion of
Constantine as the final fulfillment of heavenly victory—even though
Christians were only about 15–18% of the empire's population.
After Constantine, the empire gradually shifted toward Christianity as the Roman state religion. Many historians view the Constantinian shift as turning Christianity from a persecuted religion into a persecuting one.
However, the claim that a Constantinian shift occurred has been
challenged. Leithart argues that there was a "brief, ambiguous
'Constantinian moment' in the early fourth century," but that there was
"no permanent, epochal 'Constantinian shift". According to Michele R. Salzman,
fourth century Rome featured sociological, political, economic and
religious competition, producing tensions and hostilities between
various groups, but that Christians focused on heresy more than pagans.
Historians and theologians refer to the fourth century as the "golden age" of Christian thought. Figures such as John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, Basil, Gregory of Nazianus, Gregory of Nyssa,
and the prolific Augustine, all made a permanent mark on Christian
thought and history. They were primarily defenders of orthodoxy. They
wrote philosophy and theology as well as apologetics and polemics. Some
had a long-term effect on tolerance and persecution in Christian
thought.
Fourth century Christian thought was dominated by its many conflicts
defining orthodoxy versus heterodoxy and heresy. In what remained of the
Eastern Roman empire, known as Byzantium, the Arian controversy began with its debate of Trinitarian formulas which lasted 56 years.
It gradually trickled over into the Latin West so that by the fourth
century, the center of the controversy was the "champion of orthodoxy", Athanasius. Arianism was the reason for calling the Council of Nicea.
Athanasius was ousted from his bishopric in Alexandria in 336 by the
Arians, forced into exile, and lived much of the remainder of his life
in a cycle of forced movement. The controversy became political after
Constantine's death. Athanasius died in 373, while an Arian emperor
ruled, but his orthodox teaching was a major influence in the West, and
on Theodosius, who became emperor in 381. Also in the East, John Chrysostom,
Bishop of Constantinople, who is best known for his brilliant oratory
and his exegetical works on moral goodness and social responsibility,
also wrote Discourses Against the Jews which is almost pure polemic, using replacement theology that is now known as supersessionism.However, Chrysostom did not advocate for killing heretics, even though
he did advocate censoring them; he writes, "He [Christ] doth not
therefore forbid our checking heretics, and stopping their mouths, and
taking away their freedom of speech, and breaking up their assemblies
and confederacies, but our killing and slaying them".
By 305, after the Diocletian persecution of the third century, many of those who had recanted during the persecution, wanted to return to the Church. The North African Donatists
refused to accept them back as clergy and remained resentful toward the
Roman government. Catholics wanted to wipe the slate clean and
accommodate the new government. The Donatists withdrew and began setting
up their own churches. For decades, Donatists fomented protests and
street violence, refused compromise, attacked random Catholics without
warning, doing serious and unprovoked bodily harm such as beating people
with clubs, cutting off their hands and feet, and gouging out eyes.
By the time Augustine became coadjutor Bishop of Hippo in 395, the
Donatists had been a multi-level problem for many years. Augustine held
that belief cannot be compelled, so he appealed to them verbally, using
popular propaganda, debate, personal appeal, General Councils, and
political pressure. All attempts failed.
The empire responded to civil unrest with force, and in 408 in
his Letter 93, Augustine began defending persecution of the Donatists by
the imperial authorities saying that, "if the kings of this world could
legislate against pagans and poisoners, they could do so against
heretics as well."
He continued saying that belief cannot be compelled, however, he also
included the idea that, while "coercion cannot transmit the truth to the
heretic, it can prepare them to hear and receive the truth."Augustine did not advocate religious violence, as such, but he supported the power of the state to use coercion against those he saw as behaving as enemies. His authority on this question was undisputed for over a millennium in Western Christianity, and according to historian Peter Brown, "it provided the theological foundation for the justification of medieval persecution.
Augustine had advocated fines, imprisonment, banishment, and
moderate floggings; when the state's persecution of individual Donatists
became extreme, he attempted to mitigate the punishments,and he always opposed the execution of heretics. According to Henry Chadwick, Augustine "would have been horrified by the burning of heretics."
In 385, Priscillian,
a bishop in Spain, was the first Christian to be executed for heresy,
though this sentence was roundly condemned by prominent church leaders
like Ambrose.
Priscillian was also accused of gross sexual immorality and acceptance
of magic, but politics may have been involved in his sentencing.[
Polytheism began declining by the second century, long before there
were Christian emperors, but after Constantine made Christianity
officially accepted, it declined even more rapidly, and there are two
views on why. According to the Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity,
scholars of Antiquity fall into two categories, holding either the
"catastrophic" view, or the "long and slow" view of polytheism's decline
and end.
The traditional "catastrophic" view has been the established view for
200 years; it says polytheism declined rapidly in the fourth century,
with a violent death in the fifth, as a result of determined anti-pagan
opposition from Christians, particularly Christian emperors.Contemporary scholarship espouses the "long slow" view, which says
anti-paganism was not a primary concern of Christians in antiquity
because Christians believed the conversion of Constantine showed
Christianity had already triumphed.
Michele R. Salzman indicates that, as a result of this "triumphalism",
heresy was a higher priority for Christians in the fourth and fifth
centuries than was paganism. This produced less real conflict between
Christians and pagans than was previously thought. Archaeologists Luke Lavan and Michael Mulryan indicate that
contemporary archaeological evidence of religious conflict exists, as
the catastrophists assert, but not to the degree or intensity previously
thought.
Laws such as the Theodosian decrees attest to Christian thought
of the period, giving a "dramatic view of radical Christian ambition".Peter Brown says the language is uniformly vehement and the penalties are harsh and frequently horrifying. Salzman says the law was intended as a means of conversion through the
"carrot and the stick", but that it is necessary to look beyond the law
to see what people actually did.
Authorities, who were still mostly pagan, were lax in imposing them,
and Christian bishops frequently obstructed their application. Anti-paganism existed, but according to Rita Lizzi Testa, Michele Salzman, and Marianne Sághy who quote Alan Cameron: the idea of religious conflict as the cause of a swift demise of paganism is pure historiographical construction.
Lavan says Christian writers gave the narrative of victory high
visibility, but that it does not necessarily correlate to actual
conversion rates. There are many signs that a healthy paganism continued
into the fifth century, and in some places, into the sixth and beyond.
According to Brown, Christians objected to anything that called
the triumphal narrative into question, and that included the
mistreatment of non-Christians. Temple destructions and conversions are
attested, but in small numbers. Archaeology indicates that in most
regions away from the imperial court, the end of paganism was both
gradual and untraumatic. The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity says that "Torture and murder were not the inevitable result of the rise of Christianity." Instead, there was fluidity in the boundaries between the communities and "coexistence with a competitive spirit."
Brown says that "In most areas, polytheists were not molested, and,
apart from a few ugly incidents of local violence, Jewish communities
also enjoyed a century of stable, even privileged, existence."
Having, in 423, been declared by the emperor Theodosius II not to
exist, large bodies of polytheists all over the Roman empire were not
murdered or converted under duress so much as they were simply left out
of the histories the Christians wrote of themselves as victorious.
After the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, life in the West returned to an agrarian subsistence style of living, becoming somewhat settled sometime in the 500s. Christian writers of the period were more concerned with preserving the past than in composing original works. The Germanic tribes which had overthrown Rome became the new rulers, dividing the empire between them. Gregory the Great
became pope in 590 AD, and he sent out multiple missionaries who
peacefully converted Britain, Ireland, Scotland and more. Learning was
kept alive in the monasteries they built which became the sole source of
education for the next few centuries.Patrick Wormald indicates the Irish and English missionaries sent out to those territories that would become the Holy Roman Empire and then Germany, thought of the pagans on the continental mainland with "interest, sympathy and occasionally even admiration."
In most of history, victors of war imposed their religion on the
newly subjugated people, however, the Germanic tribes gradually adopted
Christianity, the religion of defeated Rome, instead. This brought, in its wake, a broad process of cultural change that lasted for the next 500 years.
What had been formed by the unity of the classical world and
Christianity, was now transplanted into Germanic tribal culture, thereby
forming a new synthesis that became western European Christendom.
The Church had immense influence during this time due to the endless
commitment and work of the clergy and the "powerful effect of the
Christian belief system" amongst the people.
Erigina was not a major theologian, but in 870, he wrote On the Division of Nature which foresaw the modern view of predestination denying that God has foreordained anyone to sin and damnation. His mixture of rationalism and Neo-Platonic mysticism would prove
influential to later Christian thought, though his books were banned by
the Roman Catholic church in 1681.
Partial inclusivity of the Jews
According to Anna Sapir Abulafia,
"Most scholars would agree that, with the marked exception of
Visigothic Spain (in the seventh century), Jews in Latin Christendom
lived relatively peacefully with their Christian neighbors through most
of the Middle Ages."
Scattered violence toward Jews occasionally took place during riots led
by mobs, local leaders, and lower level clergy without the support of
church leaders or Christian thought. Jeremy Cohen says historians generally agree this is because Catholic thought on the
Jews before the 1200s was guided by the teachings of Augustine.
Augustine's position on the Jews, with its accompanying argument for
their "immunity from religious coercion enjoyed by virtually no other
community in post-Theodosian antiquity" was preceded by a positive
evaluation of the Jewish past, and its relationship to divine justice
and human free will.
Augustine rejected those who argued that the Jews should be killed, or
forcibly converted, by saying that Jews should be allowed to live in
Christian societies and practice Judaism without interference because they preserved the teachings of the Old Testament and were living witnesses of the truths of the New Testament.
Gregory the Great
is generally seen as an important pope in relation to the Jews. He
denigrated Judaism but followed Roman Law and Augustinian thought with
regard to how the Jews should be treated. He wrote against forced baptism. In 828, Gregory IV wrote a letter to the Bishops in Gaul and the Holy Roman empire warning that Jews must not be baptized by force.Gregory X repeated the ban. Even Pope Innocent III, who generally found the behavior of Jews in
Christian society to be "intolerable", still agreed that the Jews should
not be killed or forcibly converted when he called for the Second
Crusade.
Jews and their communities were always vulnerable. Random ill
treatment, and occasionally real persecution, did occur. However, their
legal status, while it was inferior, was not insecure as it became later
in the High Middle Ages. They could appeal to the authorities,
and did, even on occasion appealing to the pope himself. While the
difficulties were not negligible, they were also not general enough to
fundamentally impact the nature of Jewish life.
Inclusive Benedict
St. Benedict
(480–547) was another major figure who impacted pre-modern ideals of
tolerance in Christian thought. Considered the father of western
monasticism, he wrote his Rule
around three values: community, prayer, and hospitality. This
hospitality was extended to anyone without discrimination. "Pilgrims and
visitors from every rank of society from crowned heads to poorest
peasants, came in search of prayers or alms, protection and
hospitality."
Exclusive Spain
Visigothic leaders in Spain subjected the Jews to persecution and efforts to convert them forcibly for a century after 613.Norman Roth says Byzantine legal codes were the method used to reinforce anti-Jewish attitudes. The Breviarium of Alaric summarizes the most significant anti-Jewish legislation of the Byzantine codes, and it was written in the sixth century.
Christian thought from its early days had generally frowned upon
participation in the military, but that became increasingly difficult to
maintain in the Middle Ages. Chivalry, a new ideal of the religious
warrior who fought for justice, defended truth, and protected the weak
and the innocent formed. Such a knight was ordained only after proving
his spiritual and martial worth: robed in white, he would swear an oath
before a cleric to uphold these values and defend the faith.
While contemporary definitions of religious persecution typically do not include actions taken during war, the Massacre of Verden
represents an event that is still often seen as persecution by
Christians. The massacre took place in 782, in what had been Roman Gaul, and would one day be modern France.
Charlemagne had become King of the Franks in 771, and ruled most of western Europe
of the time. He advocated Christian principles, including education,
openly supported Christian missions, and had at least one Christian
advisor. But he also spent his entire life fighting to defend his empire and his faith. The Franks had been fighting the Saxons since the time of Charlemagne's grandfather. Charlemagne himself began to fight the Saxons in earnest in 772, defeating them and taking hostages in a battle on the upper Weser. "Time and again the Saxon chiefs, worn down by war, sued for peace,
offered hostages, accepted baptism and agreed to allow missionaries to
go about their work without hindrance. But vigilance slackened, Charles
was engaged on some other front, rebellions broke out, Frankish
garrisons were attacked and massacred, and monasteries were pillaged". Repeatedly, Saxons rose, pillaged and looted and killed, were defeated,
and rose again, until after 779, Charlemagne felt he had pacified the
region and gained genuine oaths of loyalty from the Saxon leaders. In 782, Charles and the Saxons assembled at Lippe, where he appointed "several Saxon nobles as Counts as a reward for their loyalty".
Shortly thereafter, in that same year of 782, Widukind
the Saxon leader, persuaded a group of Saxons who had submitted to
Charlemagne, to break their oaths and rebel. Charlemagne was once again
elsewhere, so the Saxons went to battle with the part of the Frankish
army that had been left behind and the "Franks were killed almost to a
man." They killed two of the King's chief lieutenants as well as some of his closest companions and counsellors. "In great anger at this breach of the treaty just made", Charlemagne gathered his forces, returned to Saxony, conquered the
Saxon rebels, again, giving them the option to convert or die. The
Saxons largely refused, and though no one knows the number for sure, it
is said 4,500 unarmed prisoners were murdered in what is called the
Massacre of Verden. Massive deportations followed, and death was decreed
as the penalty for any Saxon who refused baptism thereafter.
After this, Charlemagne transported ten thousand families from the most
turbulent district into the heart of his own territory, and the Saxons
were finally settled.
Historian Matthias Becher asserts that the number 4,500 is
exaggerated, and that these events demonstrate the brutality of war of
the period. Yet it is clear something untoward occurred, since Alcuin of York,
Charlemagne's Christian advisor who was not present in Verden, later
wrote the king a rebuke concerning them, saying that: "Faith must be
voluntary not coerced. Converts must be drawn to the faith not forced. A
person can be compelled to be baptized yet not believe. An adult
convert should answer what he truly believes and feels, and if he lies,
then he will not have true salvation."
From the beginning, the crusades have been seen from different points of view. Darius von Güttner-Sporzyński explains that scholars continue to debate crusading and its impact so
scholarship in this field is continually undergoing revision and
reconsideration.
Many early crusade scholars saw crusade histories as simple recitations
of how events actually transpired, but by the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, scholarship was increasingly critical and skeptical of that
perspective. Simon John writes that Christopher Tyerman
is in the forefront of contemporary scholarship when he says that the
"earliest of crusade histories can not be regarded by scholars even in
part as 'mere recitation of events.' Instead, they should be treated in
their entirety as 'essays in interpretation'."
At the time of the First Crusade, there was no clear concept in Christian thought of what a crusade was beyond that of a pilgrimage. Hugh S. Pyper says the crusades are representative of the "powerful sense in
Christian thought of the time of the importance of the concreteness of
Jesus' human existence... The city [of Jerusalem's] importance is
reflected in the fact that early medieval maps place [Jerusalem] at the
center of the world."
By 1935, Carl Erdmann published Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens
(The Origin of the Idea of Crusade), stressing that the crusades were
essentially defensive acts on behalf of fellow Christians and pilgrims
in the East who were being attacked, killed, enslaved or forcibly
converted. Crusade historian Jonathan Riley-Smith says the crusades were products of the renewed spirituality of the central Middle Ages. Senior churchmen of this time presented the concept of Christian love for those in need as the reason to take up arms. The people had a concern for living the vita apostolica
and expressing Christian ideals in active works of charity, exemplified
by the new hospitals, the pastoral work of the Augustinians and
Premonstratensians, and the service of the friars. Riley-Smith
concludes, "The charity of St. Francis may now appeal to us more than
that of the crusaders, but both sprang from the same roots." Constable
adds that those "scholars who see the crusades as the beginning of
European colonialism and expansionism would have surprised people at the
time. [Crusaders] would not have denied some selfish aspects... but the
predominant emphasis was on the defense and recovery of lands that had
once been Christian and on the self-sacrifice rather than the
self-seeking of the participants."
At the opposite end is the view voiced by Steven Runciman in 1951 that the "Holy War was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God..." Giles Constable says this view is common among the populace. According to political science professor Andrew R. Murphy, concepts of tolerance and intolerance were not starting points for
thoughts about relations for any of the various groups involved in or
affected by the crusades. Instead, concepts of tolerance began to grow during the crusades from
efforts to define legal limits and the nature of co-existence.Angeliki Laiou
says that "many scholars today reject [Runciman's type of] hostile
judgment and emphasize the defensive nature of the crusades" instead.
The crusades made a powerful contribution to Christian thought
through the concept of Christian chivalry, "imbuing their Christian
participants with what they believed to be a noble cause, for which they
fought in a spirit of self-sacrifice. However, in another sense, they
marked a qualitative degeneration in behavior for those involved, for
they engendered and strengthened hostile attitudes..."
Ideas such as Holy War and Christian chivalry, in both Christian
thought and culture, continued to evolve gradually from the eleventh to
the thirteenth centuries. This can be traced in expressions of law, traditions, tales, prophecy,
and historical narratives, in letters, bulls and poems written during
the crusading period. "The greatest of all crusader historians, William, archbishop of Tyre wrote his Chronicon from the point of view of a Latin Christian born and living in the East".
Like others of his day, he did not start with a notion of tolerance,
but he did advocate for, and contribute to, concepts that led to its
development.
High Middle Ages (c. 1000–1200)
Historical background
In the pivotal twelfth century, Europe began laying the foundation
for its gradual transformation from the medieval to the modern.
Feudal lords slowly lost power to the feudal kings as kings began
centralizing power into themselves and their nation. Kings built their
own armies, instead of relying on their vassals, thereby taking power
from the nobility. They started taking over legal processes that had
traditionally belonged to local nobles and local church officials; and
they began using these new legal powers to target minorities. According to R.I. Moore and other contemporary scholars such as John D. Cotts, and Peter D. Diehl "the growth of secular power and the pursuit of secular interests,
constituted the essential context of the developments that led to a
persecuting society."
Some of these developments, such as centralization and secularization,
also took place within the Church whose leaders bent Christian thought
to aid the state in the production of new rhetoric, patterns, and
procedures of exclusion and persecution. According to Moore, the Church "played a significant role in the formation of the persecuting society but not the leading one."
By the 13th century, both civil and canon law had become a major aspect of ecclesiastical culture, dominating Christian thought.
Most bishops and popes were trained lawyers rather than theologians,
and much of the Christian thought of this period became little more than
an extension of law. According to the Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, by the High Middle Ages, the religion that had begun by decrying the power of law (Romans 7:6)
had developed the most complex religious law the world has ever seen, a
system in which equity and universality were largely overlooked.
Mendicant orders
New religious orders, that were founded during this time, each
represent a different branch of Christian thought with its own distinct
theology. Three of those new orders would have a separate but distinct impact on Christian thought on tolerance and persecution: the Dominicans, the Franciscans, and the Augustinians.
Dominican thought reached beyond a simple anti-heretical
discourse into a broader and deeper ideology of sin, evil, justice, and
punishment. They conceived themselves as fighting for truth against heterodoxy and heresy. St. Thomas Aquinas,
perhaps the most illustrious of Dominicans, supported tolerance as a
general principle. He taught that governing well included tolerating
some evil in order to foster good or prevent worse evil. However, in his Summa Theologica II-II qu. 11, art. 3, he adds that heretics—after two fruitless admonitions—deserve only excommunication and death.
The Christian thought of St. Francis
was pastoral. He is recognized for his commitment to issues of social
justice and his embrace of the natural world but, during his lifetime,
he was also a strong advocate of conversion of the Muslims, though he
believed he would likely die for it. Francis was motivated by an intense devotion to the humanity of Christ,
a regard for his sufferings, and by identifying the sufferings of
ordinary people with the sufferings of Christ. Through the teachings of
the Franciscans, this thinking emerged from the cloister, reoriented
much Christian thought toward love and compassion, and became a central
theme for the ordinary Christian.
Although the debate over defining the Augustinianism of the High Middle Ages has been ongoing for three quarters of a century, there is agreement that the Order of the Hermits of St. Augustine supported the development of church hierarchy and embraced concepts such as the primacy of the pope and his perfection.
The question of church authority in the West had remained unsettled
until the eleventh century when the Church hierarchy worked to
centralize power into the pope. Although centralization of power was
never fully achieved within the Church, the era of "papal monarchy" began, and the Church gradually began to resemble its secular counterparts in its conduct, thought, and objectives.
Inquisitions, authority and exclusion
The medieval inquisitions were a series of separate inquisitions beginning from around 1184. The label Inquisition is problematic because it implies "an institutional coherence and an official unity that never existed in the Middle Ages."
The inquisitions were formed in response to the breakdown of social
order associated with heresy. Heresy was a religious, political, and
social issue, so "the first stirrings of violence against dissidents
were usually the result of popular resentment. There are many examples of this popular resentment involving mobs murdering heretics.
Leaders reasoned that both lay and church authority had an obligation
to step in when sedition, peace, or the general stability of society was
part of the issue.
In the Late Roman Empire, an inquisitorial system of justice had
developed, and that system was revived in the Middle Ages using a
combined panel (a tribunal) of both civil and ecclesiastical
representatives with a bishop, his representative, or sometimes a local
judge, as inquisitor. Essentially, the Church reintroduced Roman law in
Europe in the form of the Inquisition when it seemed that Germanic law
had failed.
The revival of Roman law made it possible for Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) to make heresy a political question when he took Roman law's doctrine of lèse-majesté, and combined it with his view of heresy as laid out in the 1199 decretal Vergentis in senium, thereby equating heresy with treason against God.
Much of the papal reform of the eleventh century was not moral or
theological reform so much as it was an attempt to impose this kind of
Roman authority over the vast variety of local legal traditions that had
existed up through the early Middle Ages. However, no pope ever succeeded in establishing complete control of the
inquisitions. The institution reached its apex in the second half of
the thirteenth century. During this period, the tribunals were almost
entirely free from any higher authority, including that of the pope, and
it became almost impossible to prevent abuse.
New persecution of minorities
The process of centralizing power included the development of a new kind of persecution aimed at minorities.
R. I. Moore says the European nation-states had not exhibited a "habit"
of persecuting minorities before the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Jews, lepers, heretics and gays were the first minorities to be persecuted, and they were followed in the next few centuries by Gypsies,
beggars, spendthrifts, prostitutes, and discharged soldiers. They were
all vulnerable to whatever degree they existed "outside" the community.
Religious persecution had certainly been familiar in the Roman Empire,
and remained so throughout the history of the Byzantine Empire, but it
had largely faded away in the West before reappearing in the eleventh
century. The various persecutions of minorities became established over
the next hundred years. In this it was "determined, not only over whom, but also by whom, the [increasing] power of government was to be exercised.
For example, Peter Comestor (d. 1197) was the first influential scholar to interpret biblical injunctions against sodomy as injunctions against homosexual intercourse.
The Third Lateran council of 1179 then became the first ecclesiastical
council to rule that men who engaged in homosexual activity should be
deprived of office or excommunicated. However, "the real impetus of the attack on homosexuality did not come from the Church." The Fourth Lateran council reduced those penalties, and though Gregory IX (1145–1241) ordered the Dominicans to root out homosexuality from the territory that later became the nation of Germany,
a century earlier, the kingdom of Jerusalem had spread a legal code
ordaining death for "sodomites". From the 1250s onwards, a series of
similar legal codes in the nation-states of Spain, France, Italy and
Germany followed this example. "By 1300, places where male sodomy was
not a capital offense had become the exception rather than the rule."
Centralization of power led all of Europe of the High Middle Ages to become a persecuting culture.
Christian thought, along with the intellectuals of the day who
published their pejorative views of minorities in writing, helped make
persecution a tool of the process of centralization as well as its
inevitable result.
Together, secular rulers and writers, along with Christian leadership
and thought, created a new rhetoric of exclusion, legitimizing
persecution based on new attitudes of stereotyping, stigmatization and even demonization
of the accused. Moore says this contributed to "deliberate and socially
sanctioned violence ... directed, through established governmental,
judicial and social institutions, against groups of people defined by
general characteristics such as race, religion or way of life.
Membership in such groups in itself came to be regarded as justifying
these attacks."
Instead of having to face one's accuser, new laws allowed the
state to be the defendant and bring charges on its own behalf. The Assize of Arms of 1252 appointed constables to police breaches of the peace, and deliver offenders to the sheriff. In France, the constabulary was regularized in 1337 as a military body
used to enforce the new laws. There were new funds to pay them as cities
introduced several direct taxes: head taxes for the poor, and net-worth
taxes or, occasionally, crude income taxes for the rich. New gold coins, trade and the new banks also made private policing possible. The inquisitions were a new legal method that allowed the judge to investigate on his own initiative without requiring a victim (other than the state) to press charges. Together, these enabled secular leaders to gain power by making others powerless.
During the fourteenth century, the kings in France and England
were successful at centralizing power in their nations, and many other
countries wanted to imitate them and their governing style.
Other countries were not alone in that: the Church wanted to imitate
the secular kings as well. The primary success of the fourteenth century
popes was in amassing power into the papal position, making any pope
similar to a secular king. This is often called the papal monarchy or the papal-monarchial idea. As part of that process, popes in this century reorganized the
financial system of the Church. The poor had previously been allowed to
offer their tithes 'in kind', in goods and services instead of cash, but
these popes revamped the system to only accept money.
The popes then had a steady cash flow, along with papal states:
property the Church owned that was ruled only by the pope and not a
king. This gave them almost as much power as any king. They governed as
the secular powers governed: with "royal [papal] secretaries, efficient
treasuries, national [papal] judiciaries, and representative
assemblies". The pope became a pseudo-monarch, and the Church became
secular, but the popes were so greedy, worldly, and politically corrupt,
that pious Christians became disgusted, thereby undermining the papal
authority that centralization was supposed to establish.
Historians agree that the period which spanned the eleventh, twelfth
and thirteenth centuries was a turning point in Jewish-Christian
relations.Bernard of Clairvaux
(1090–1153), pillar of European monasticism and powerful twelfth
century preacher, provides a perfect example of a Christian thinker who
was balancing on a precipice, preaching hateful images of Jews but
sounding Scripture based admonitions that they must be protected despite
their nature." Low level discussions of religious thought had long existed between
Jews and Christians. These interchanges attest to neighborly relations
as Jews and Christians both struggled to fit the "other" into their
sense of the demands of their respective faiths, and balance the human
opponents who were facing them, with the traditions which they had
inherited. By the thirteenth century, that changed in both tone and quality, growing more polemical
In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council, known as the Great Council, met and accepted 70 canons (laws). It hammered out a working definition of Christian community, stating
the essentials of membership in it, thereby defining the "other" within
Christian thought for the next three centuries. The last three canons
required Jews to distinguish themselves from Christians in their dress,
prohibited them from holding public office, and prohibited Jewish
converts from continuing to practice Jewish rituals. As Berger has articulated it: "The other side of the coin of unique toleration was unique persecution." There was an increased and focused effort to convert and baptize Jews rather than tolerate them.
Trial of the Talmud
As their situation deteriorated, many Jews became enraged and
polemics between the two faiths sunk to new depths. As Inquisitors
learned how the central figures in Christianity were mocked, they went
after the Talmud, and other Jewish writings.
The Fourth Lateran council, in its 68th canon, placed on the secular
authorities the responsibility for obtaining an answer from the Jews to
the charge of blasphemy. For the first time in their history, Jews had
to answer in a public trial the charges against them. There is no
consensus in the sources as to who instigated the trial against the
Talmud, but in June 1239, Gregory IX
(1237–1241) issued letters to various archbishops and kings across
Europe in which he ordered them to seize all Jewish books and take them
to the Dominicans for examination. The order was only heeded in Paris
where, on June 25, the royal court was opened to hear the case.
Eventually, each side claimed victory; a final verdict of guilt and
condemnation was not announced until May 1248, but the books had been
burned six years before.
One result of the trial was that the people of Europe thought
that, even if they had once had an obligation to preserve the Jews for
the sake of the Old Testament, Talmudic Judaism was so different from
its biblical sources that the old obligations no longer applied. In the
words of Hebrew University historian Ben-Zion Dinur,
from 1244 on the state and the Church would "consider the Jews to be a
people with no religion (benei bli dat) who have no place in the
Christian world."
The situation of the Jews differed from that of other victims of
persecution because of their relationship with civic authorities and
money. They often filled the role of financial agent or manager for the
lords; they and their possessions were considered the property of the
king in England; and they were often exempted from taxes and other laws
because of the importance of their usury. This attracted unpopularity, jealousy and resentment from non-Jews.
As feudal lords lost power, the Jews became a focus of their opponents. J. H. Mundy has put it: "The opponents of princes hated the Jews" and "almost every medieval movement against princely or seignorial power began by attacking Jews." Opposition to the barons in England led to the Jewish expulsion in
1290. The expulsion from France in 1315 coincided with the formation of
the league against arbitrary royal government.
As princes consolidated power to themselves with the institution
of general taxation, they were able to be less monetarily dependent on
the Jews. They were then less inclined to protect them, and were instead
more inclined to expel them and confiscate their property for
themselves.
Townspeople also attacked Jews. "Otto of Friesing reports that
Bernard of Clairvaux in 1146 silenced a wandering monk at Mainz who
stirred up popular revolt by attacking the Jews, but as the people
gained a measure of political power around 1300, they became one of
Jewry's greatest enemies."
Local anti-Jewish movements were often headed by local clergy, especially its radicals. The Fourth Lateran council of 1215 required Jews to restore "grave and immoderate usuries". Thomas Aquinas
spoke against allowing the Jews to continue practicing usury. In 1283,
the Archbishop of Canterbury spearheaded a petition demanding
restitution of usury and urging the Jewish expulsion in 1290.
Emicho of Leiningen, who was probably mentally unbalanced,
massacred Jews in Germany in search of supplies, loot, and protection
money for a poorly provisioned army. The York massacre of 1190 also
appears to have had its origins in a conspiracy by local leaders to
liquidate their debts along with their creditors. In the early fourteenth century, systematic popular and judicial attack
left the European Jewish community impoverished by the next century.
Although subordinate to religious, economic and social themes, racist concepts also reinforced hostility.[120]: 60
Anti-semitism
The term anti-semitism
was coined in the nineteenth century; however, many Jewish
intellectuals have insisted that modern anti-semitism, which is based on
race, and the religiously based anti-Judaism of the past, are two different forms of a single historical phenomenon. Other scholars such as John Gager make a clear distinction between anti-Judaism and anti-semitism.
Craig Evans defines anti-Judaism as opposition to Judaism as a
religion, while anti-semitism is opposition to the Jewish people
themselves.Langmuir
insists that anti-semitism did not become widespread in popular culture
until the eleventh century when it took root among people who were
being buffeted by rapid social and economic changes. Anders Gerdmar [sv]
sees the development of anti-semitism as part of the paradigm shift of
early modernity that replaced the primacy of theology, and the tradition
of Augustine, with the primacy of human reason.
Some have linked anti-semitism to Christian thought on
supersessionism. Perhaps the greatest Christian thinker of the Middle
Ages was Thomas Aquinas, who continues to be highly influential in
Catholicism. There is disagreement over where exactly Aquinas stood on
the question of supersessionism. He did not teach punitive supersessionism, but did speak of Judaism as fulfilled and obsolete. Aquinas does appear to believe the Jews had been cast into spiritual exile for their rejection of Christ, but he also says Jewish observance of Law continues to have positive theological significance. For all the destructive consequences of supersessionism, Padraic O'Hare writes that supersessionism alone is not yet anti-semitism. He cites Christopher Leighton who associates anti-Judaism with the origins of Christianity, and anti-semitism with "modern nationalism and racial theories".
The Latin word deicidae was a translation of the Greek
word that first appeared in Melito of the second century. Augustine had
long ago rejected the concept, but the accusation began to flourish,
within the altered situation of the High Middle Ages, when it was used
to legitimize crimes against the Jews. The debate within Christian
thought over the transubstantiation of the communion host helped foster the legend that Jews desecrated it. The ritual murder legend can also be tied to the accusation of Jewish deicide. By 1255, when Jews were charged with Hugh of Lincoln's ritual murder, it was not the first time they had been charged with such a crime. At other times, such allegations were rejected after full investigations had been conducted.
Heresy
There is a vast array of scholarly opinions on heresy, including whether it actually existed.Russell
says that, as the Church became more centralized and hierarchical, it
was able to more clearly define orthodoxy than it ever had been before,
and concepts of heresy developed along with it as a result.Mitchell Merback speaks of three groups involved in the persecution of heresy: the civil authorities, the Church and the people. Historian R. I. Moore
says the part the Church played in turning dissent into heresy has been
overestimated. According to Moore, the increased significance of heresy
in the High Middle Ages reflects the secular powers' recognition of the
devastating nature of the heretic's political message: that heretics
were independent of the structures of power.James A. Brundage
writes that the formal prosecution of heresy was codified in civil law,
and was generally left to the civil authorities before this period. Russell adds that heresy became common only after the Third Lateran Council in 1179.
The dissemination of popular heresy to the laity (non-clergy) was
a new problem for the bishops of the eleventh and twelfth centuries;
heresy had previously been an accusation made solely toward bishops and
other church leaders. The collection of ecclesiastical law from Burchard of Worms around 1002 did not include the concept of popular heresy in it.
While there were acts of violence in response to heresy undertaken by
secular powers for their own reasons, Christian thought on this problem
(at the beginning of the High Middle Ages) still tended to coincide with
Wazo of Liège who said reports of heresy should be investigated, true heretics excommunicated, and their teachings publicly rebuked.
By the end of the eleventh century, Christian thought had evolved
a definition of heresy as the "deliberate rejection of the truth". This shifted attitudes concerning the Church's appropriate response. The Council of Montpellier in 1062, and the Council of Toulouse
in 1119, both demanded that heretics be handed over to secular powers
for coercive punishment. As most bishops thought this would be
participation in shedding blood, the Church refused until 1148 when the
notorious and violent Eon de l'Etoile was so delivered. Eon was found mad, but a number of his followers were burned.
Map of Languedoc on the eve of the Albigensian Crusade
Cathars, also known as Albigensians, were the largest of the heretic groups of the late 1100s and early 1200s. Catharism
may reach back to the age of Constantine in the East, but there is
consensus among most modern scholars that Catharism as an identifiable
historical movement did not emerge in Europe until around 1143, when the
first confirmed report of a group at Cologne is reported by the cleric Eberwin of Steinfeld Abbey. From 1125 to 1229, Cistercian
monks left their isolation and served as itinerant preachers traversing
town and country in anti-heretical campaigns aimed increasingly against
the Albigensians. The Dominicans, founded in 1206, followed in this practice and approach. In 1209, after decades of having called upon secular rulers for aid in dealing with the Cathars and getting no response,Pope Innocent III and the king of France, Philip Augustus, began the military campaign against them.
Scholars disagree, using two distinct lines of reasoning, on whether
the brutal nature of the war that followed was determined more by the
pope or by King Philip and his proxies.
According to historian Elaine Graham-Leigh, Pope Innocent believed the tactical, as well as policy and strategic decisions, should be solely "the papal preserve".J. Sumption and Stephen O'Shea paint Innocent III as "the mastermind of the crusade".
Markale
suggests the true architect of the campaign was the French king Philip
Augustus, stating that "it was Phillip who actually petitioned Innocent
for permission to conduct the Crusade." Historian Laurence W. Marvin says the pope exercised "little real control over events in Occitania." Konrad Repgen writes: "The Albigensian war was indisputably a case of the interlinking of religion and politics."
Massacre at Béziers
On 22 July 1209, in the first battle of the Albigensian Crusade,
mercenaries rampaged through the streets of Béziers, killing and
plundering. Those citizens who could, sought refuge in the Churches and
cathedrals, but there was no safety from the raging mob. The doors of
the Churches were broken open, and all inside were slaughtered.
Some twenty years later, a story that historian Laurence W. Marvin calls apocryphal, arose about this event claiming the papal legate, Arnaud Amaury, the leader of the crusaders, was said to have responded: "Kill them all, let God sort them out."
Marvin says it is unlikely the legate ever said any thing at all. "The
speed and spontaneity of the attack indicates that the legate probably
did not know what was going on until it was over."
Marvin adds they did not kill them all at any rate: "clearly most of
Bezier's population and buildings survived" and the city "continued to
function as a major population center" after the campaign.
Other scholars say the legate probably did say it, that the
statement is not inconsistent with what was recorded by the
contemporaries of other church leaders, or with what is known of Arnaud
Amaury's character and attitudes toward heresy. Religious toleration was not considered a virtue by the people or the Church of the High Middle Ages. Historians W A Sibly and M D Sibly
point out that: "contemporary accounts suggest that, at this stage, the
crusaders did not intend to spare those who resisted them, and the
slaughter at Béziers was consistent with this."
The pope's response was not prompt, but four years after the
massacre at Béziers, in a 1213 letter to Amaury, the pope rebuked the
legate for his "greedy" conduct in the war. He also canceled crusade
indulgences for Languedoc, and called for an end to the campaign.
The campaign continued anyway. The pope was not reversed until the
Fourth Lateran council re-instituted crusade status two years later in
1215; afterwards, the pope removed it yet again.
Still, the campaign did not end for another 16 years. It was completed
in what Marvin refers to as "an increasingly murky moral atmosphere"
since there was technically no longer any crusade, no dispensational
rewards for fighting it, the papal legates exceeded their orders from
the pope, and the army occupied lands of nobles who were in the good
graces of the Church.
"People living during what a modern historian has termed the
'calamitous' fourteenth century were thrown into confusion and despair".Plague, famine and war
ravaged most of the continent. Add to this, social unrest, urban riots,
peasant revolts and renegade feudal armies. From its pinnacle of power
in the 13th century, the Church entered a period of decline, internal
conflict, and corruption and was unable to provide moral leadership. In 1302, Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303) issued Unam sanctam, a papal bull proclaiming the superiority of the pope over all secular rulers. Philip IV of France responded by sending an army to arrest the pope. Boniface fled for his life and died shortly thereafter. "This episode revealed that the popes were no match for the feudal
kings" and showed there had been a marked decline in papal prestige.George Garnett
says the implementation of the papal monarchial idea had led to the
loss of prestige, as the more efficient the papal bureaucratic machine
became, the further it alienated the people, and the further it
declined. Theologian Roger Olson says the Church reached its nadir from 1309 to 1377 when there were three different men claiming to be the rightful pope.[39]: 348 [58]: 248
"What
the observer of the papacy witnessed in the second half of the
thirteenth century was a gradual, though clearly perceptible,
decomposition of Europe as a single ecclesiastical unit, and the
fragmentation of Europe into independent, autonomous entities which were
soon to be called national monarchies or states. This fragmentation
heralded the withering away of the papacy as a governing institution
operating on a universal scale."...The [later] Reformation only administered the coup de grâce."
According to Walter Ullmann,
the Church lost "the moral, spiritual and authoritative leadership it
had built up in Europe over the centuries of minute, consistent,
detailed, dynamic forward-looking work. ... The papacy was now forced to
pursue policies which, in substance, aimed at appeasement and were no
longer directive, orientating and determinative."
Ullmann goes on to explain that Christian thought of this age lost its
objective standpoint, which had been based on Christianity's view of an
objective world order and the pope's place in that order. This was now
replaced by the subjective point of view with the man taking precedence
over the office.
In the turmoil of nationalism and ecclesiastical confusion, some
theologians began aligning themselves more with their kings than with
the Church.
Devoted and virtuous nuns and monks became increasingly rare. Monastic
reform had been a major force in the High Middle Ages but is largely
unknown in the Late Middle Ages.
This led to the development in Christian thought of lay piety—the Devotio Moderna—the
new devotion, which worked toward the ideal of a pious society of
ordinary non-ordained people and, ultimately, to the Reformation and the
development of the concepts of tolerance and religious freedom.
Response to reform
Advocates of lay piety who called for church reform met strong resistance from the popes. John Wycliffe
(1320–1384) urged the Church to give up ownership of property, which
produced much of the Church's wealth, and to once again embrace poverty
and simplicity. He urged the Church to stop being subservient to the
state and its politics. He denied papal authority. John Wycliff died of a
stroke, but his followers, called Lollards, were declared heretics. After the Oldcastle rebellion many of its adherents were killed.
Jan Hus (1369–1415) accepted some of Wycliff's views and aligned with the Bohemian Reform movement
which was also rooted in popular piety and owed much to the evangelical
preachers of fourteenth century Prague. In 1415, Hus was called to the Council of Constance where his ideas were condemned as heretical and he was handed over to the state and burned at the stake. It was at the same Council of Constance that Paulus Vladimiri presented his treatise arguing that Christian and pagan nations could co-exist in peace.
The Fraticelli, who were also known as the "Little Brethren" or
"Spiritual Franciscans", were dedicated followers of Saint Francis of
Assisi. These Franciscans honored their vow of poverty and saw the
wealth of the Church as a contributor to corruption and injustice when
so many lived in poverty. They criticized the worldly behavior of many
churchmen.[151]: 28, 50, 305 Thus, the Brethren were declared heretical by John XXII (1316–1334) who was called "the banker of Avignon".[152]: 131
The leader of the brethren, Bernard Délicieux
(c. 1260–1270 – 1320) was well known as he had spent much of his life
battling the Dominican-run inquisitions. After torture and threat of
excommunication, he confessed to the charge of interfering with the
inquisition, and was defrocked and sentenced to life in prison, in
chains, in solitary confinement, and to receive nothing but bread and
water. The judges attempted to ameliorate the harshness of this sentence
due to his age and frailty, but Pope John XXII countermanded them and delivered the friar to Inquisitor Jean de Beaune. Délicieux died shortly thereafter in early 1320.
Although inquisitions had always included a political aspect, the Inquisitions of the Late Middle Ages became more political and highly notorious. "The long history of the Inquisition divides easily into two major
parts: its creation by the medieval papacy in the early thirteenth
century, and its transformation between 1478 and 1542 into permanent
secular governmental bureaucracies: the Spanish, Portuguese, and Roman
Inquisitions... all of which endured into the nineteenth century."
Historian Helen Rawlings says, "the Spanish Inquisition
was different [from earlier inquisitions] in one fundamental respect:
it was responsible to the crown rather than the pope and was used to
consolidate state interest."
It was authorized by the pope, yet the initial inquisitors proved so
severe that the pope almost immediately opposed it, to no avail. Early in 1483, the king and queen established a council, the Consejo de la Suprema y General Inquisición, to govern the inquisition and chose Tomas de Torquemada
to head it as inquisitor general. In October 1483, a papal bull
conceded control to the crown. According to José Cassanova, the Spanish
Inquisition became the first truly national, unified and centralized
state institution. After the 1400s, few Spanish inquisitors were from the religious orders.
The Portuguese Inquisition
was also fully controlled by the crown from its beginnings. The crown
established a government board, known as the General Council, to oversee
it. The Grand Inquisitor, who was chosen by the king, was always a
member of the royal family. The first statute of limpieza de sangre
(purity of blood) appeared in Toledo in 1449 and was later adopted in
Portugal as well. Initially, these statutes were condemned by the
Church, but in 1555, the highly corrupt Pope Alexander VI approved a
"blood purity" statute for one of the religious orders.
In his history of the Portuguese Inquisition, Giuseppe Marcocci says
there is a deep connection between the rise of the Felipes in Portugal,
the growth of the inquisition, and the adoption of the statutes of
purity of blood which spread and increased and were more concerned with
ethnic ancestry than religion.
Historian T. F. Mayer writes that "the Roman Inquisition operated to serve the papacy's long standing political aims in Naples, Venice and Florence."
Under Paul III and his successor Julius III, and under most of the
popes thereafter, the Roman Inquisition's activity was relatively
restrained and its command structure was considerably more bureaucratic
than those of other inquisitions. Where the medieval Inquisition had focused on heresy and the
disturbance of public order, the Roman Inquisition was concerned with
orthodoxy of a more intellectual, academic nature. The Roman Inquisition
is probably best known for its condemnation of the difficult and
cantankerous Galileo which was more about "bringing Florence to heel"
than about heresy.
Northern (Baltic) crusades
Baltic Tribes c. 1200
The Northern (or Baltic Crusades), went on intermittently from 1147 to 1316, and according to Eric Christiansen,
they had multiple causes. Christiansen writes that, from the days of
Charlemagne, the free pagan people living around the Baltic Sea in
northern Europe raided the countries that surrounded them: Denmark,
Prussia, Germany and Poland. In the eleventh century, various German and Danish nobles responded
militarily to put a stop to it and make peace. They did achieve peace
for a time, but it did not last; there was insurrection, which created a
desire for more military response in the twelfth century.
Another factor adding to the desire for military action was the
result of the longstanding German tradition of sending Christian
missionaries to the area northeast of Germany, known as the Wendish, meaning Slavic "frontier", which often resulted in the untimely death of said missionaries.
Dragnea and Christiansen indicate the primary motive for war was
the noble's desire for territorial expansion and material wealth in the
form of land, furs, amber, slaves, and tribute. The princes wanted to
subdue these pagan peoples, through conquering and conversion, but
ultimately, they wanted wealth.Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt
says, the princes were motivated by their desire to extend their power
and prestige, and conversion was not always an element of their plans. When it was, conversion by these princes was almost always as a result
of conquest, either by the direct use of force or indirectly when a
leader converted and required it of his followers as well.
There were often severe consequences for populations that chose to
resist. For example, the conquest and conversion of Old Prussia resulted
in the death of much of the native population, whose language subsequently became extinct.
According to Mihai Dragnea, these wars were part of the political reality of the twelfth century.
The popes became involved when Pope Eugenius III
(1145–1153) called for a Second Crusade in response to the fall of
Edessa in 1144 and the Saxon nobles refused to go to the Levant. In
1147, with Eugenius' Divini dispensatione, the German/Saxon nobles were granted full crusade indulgences to go to the Baltic area instead of the Levant.
Eugenius' involvement did not lead to continuous papal support of these
campaigns however. For the rest of the period after Eugenius, papal
policy varied considerably.For example, Pope Alexander III,
who was pope from 1159 to 1181, did not issue a full indulgence or put
the Baltic campaigns on an equal footing with the crusades to the
Levant.
According to Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt, after the Second crusade, the
campaigns were planned, financed and carried out by princes, local
bishops and local archbishops rather than popes until the arrival of the
Teutonic order. The idea to employ crusaders seems to have originated with the local bishops. The nature of the campaigns changed when the Teutonic Order arrived in the region in 1230. The Danes regained influence in Estonia, the papacy became more involved, and the campaigns intensified and expanded.
Forced conversion and Christian thought
The Wendish crusade offers insights into new developments in Christian thought, particularly with respect to forced conversions.deas of peaceful conversion were rarely realized in these crusades
because the monks and priests had to work with the secular rulers on
their terms, and the military leaders seldom cared about taking the time
for peaceful conversion.
"While the theologians maintained that conversion should be voluntary,
there was a widespread pragmatic acceptance of conversion obtained
through political pressure or military coercion."
The Church's acceptance of this led some commentators of the time to
endorse and approve it, something Christian thought had not done
previously.Dominican friars
helped with this ideological justification. By portraying the pagans as
possessed by evil spirits, they could assert the pagans were in need of
conquest, persecution and force to free them; then they would become peacefully converted.Another example of how the use of forced conversion was justified to
make it compatible with previous Church doctrine on the subject, can be
found in a statement by Pope Innocent III in 1201:
[T]hose who are immersed even though reluctant, do belong
to ecclesiastical jurisdiction at least by reason of the sacrament, and
might therefore be reasonably compelled to observe the rules of the
Christian Faith. It is, to be sure, contrary to the Christian Faith that
anyone who is unwilling and wholly opposed to it should be compelled to
adopt and observe Christianity. For this reason a valid distinction is
made by some between kinds of unwilling ones and kinds of compelled
ones. Thus one who is drawn to Christianity by violence, through fear
and through torture, and receives the sacrament of Baptism in order to
avoid loss, he (like one who comes to Baptism in dissimulation) does
receive the impress of Christianity, and may be forced to observe the
Christian Faith as one who expressed a conditional willingness though,
absolutely speaking, he was unwilling.
Eric Christiansen writes that "These crusades can only be properly
understood in light of the Cistercian movement, the rise of papal
monarchy, the mission of the friars, the coming of the Mongol hordes,
the growth of the Muscovite and Lithuanian empires, and the aims of the
Conciliar movement in the fifteenth century."
The Conciliar movement arose out of the profound malaise within western
Christendom over schism and corruption in the Church. It asked: where
did ultimate authority in the Church reside? Did it reside in the pope,
the body of cardinals who elected him, the bishops, or did it reside in
the Christian community at large?
Conditional toleration and segregation
Conditional toleration that included discrimination was common
everywhere in Europe of the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance era.
Prior to the Thirty Years' War, there was conditional toleration between
Catholics and Protestants. While Frankfurt's Jews flourished between
1453 and 1613, their success came despite significant discrimination.
They were restricted to one street, had rules concerning when they could
leave it, and had to wear a yellow ring as a sign of their identity
while outside. But within their community they also had some
self-governance, their own laws, elected their own leaders, and had a
Rabbinical school that became a religious and cultural center.
"Officially, the medieval Catholic church never advocated the expulsion
of all the Jews from Christendom, or repudiated Augustine's doctrine of
Jewish witness... Still, late medieval Christendom frequently ignored
its mandates..."
Political authorities of the day maintained order by keeping
groups separated both legally and physically in what would be referred
to in contemporary society as segregation. By the Late Middle Ages: "The
maintenance of civil order through legislated separation and
discrimination was part of the institutional structure of all European
states ingrained in law, politics, and the economy."
Protestant Christians pioneered the concept of religious toleration There was a concerted campaign for tolerance in mid-sixteenth century northwestern Switzerland in the town of Basle. Sebastian Castellio
(1515–1563), who was among the earliest of the reformers to advocate
both religious and political tolerance, had moved to Basle after he was
exiled from France. Castellio's argument for toleration was essentially
theological: "By casting judgment on the belief of others, don't you
take the place of God?" However, since he also pled for social stability and peaceful co-existence, his argument was also political. Making similar arguments were Anabaptist David Joris (1501–1556) from the Netherlands and the Italian reformer Jacobus Acontius (1520–1566) who also gathered with Castellio in Basle. Other advocates of religious tolerance, Mino Celsi (1514–1576) and Bernardino Ochino (1487–1564), joined them, publishing their works on toleration in that city.
By the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth
centuries, persecutions of unsanctioned beliefs had been reduced in most
European countries.
One of the leading secular skeptics of tolerance in the sixteenth century was Leiden professor Justus Lipsius (1547–1606). He published Politicorum libri sex
in 1589 which argued in favor of the persecution of religious
dissenters. Lispius believed that plurality would lead to civil strife
and instability, and said: "it is better to sacrifice one than to risk
the collapse of the whole Commonwealth."Dirck Coornhurt
responded by eloquently defending religious liberty using his belief
that free access to what he saw as the ultimate truth in the scriptures
would bring about harmony and stability.
Historians indicate that Lispius was not out of step with
religious leaders in recognizing the problematic nature of reconciling
religious tolerance with political reality. Luther
saw this as well. He was fully in favor of religious toleration in 1523
writing that secular authorities should never fight heresy with the
sword. Yet, after the Peasants War in Germany in 1524, Luther determined that lay authorities had an obligation to step in when sedition, peace, or the stability of society was part of the issue, thus he unintentionally echoed Augustine and Aquinas.
Geoffrey Elton says that the English reformer John Foxe (1517–1587) demonstrated his deep faith in religious toleration when he attempted to stop the execution of the English CatholicEdmund Campion and the five Dutch Anabaptists who had been sentenced to be burned in 1575.
Toleration from the Reformation to the Early Modern Era (1500–1715)
While the Protestant Reformation changed the face of Western Christianity forever, it still embraced Augustine's acceptance of coercion, and many regarded the death penalty for heresy as legitimate.Martin Luther
had written against persecution in the 1520s, and had demonstrated
genuine sympathy towards the Jews in his earlier writings, especially in
Das Jesus ein geborener Jude sei (That Jesus was born as a Jew) from 1523, but after 1525 his position hardened. In Wider die Sabbather an einen guten Freund (Against the Sabbather to a Good Friend), 1538, he still considered a conversion of the Jews to Christianity as possible, but in 1543 he published On the Jews and their Lies, a "violent anti-semitic tract".John Calvin helped to secure the execution for heresy of Michael Servetus.Although he unsuccessfully requested that he should be beheaded instead of being burned at the stake.
In England, John Foxe, John Hales, Richard Perrinchief, Herbert Thorndike and Jonas Proast all only saw mild forms of persecution against the English Dissenters as legitimate.
Most dissenters disagreed with the Anglican Church only on secondary
matters of worship and ecclesiology, and although this was a considered a
serious sin, only a few seventeenth century Anglican writers thought
that this 'crime' deserved the death penalty. The English Act of Supremacy significantly complicated the matter by securely welding Church and state.
The Elizabethan bishop Thomas Bilson
was of the opinion that men ought to be "corrected, not murdered", but
he did not condemn the Christian Emperors for executing the Manichaeans for "monstrous blasphemies". The Lutheran theologian Georgius Calixtus
argued for the reconciliation of Christendom by removing all
unimportant differences between Catholicism and Protestantism, and Rupertus Meldenius advocated in necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas (in necessary things unity; in uncertain things freedom; in everything compassion) in 1626.
The English Protestant "call for toleration"
In his book on the English Reformation, the late A. G. Dickens argued that from the beginning of the Reformation there had "existed in Protestant thought – in Zwingli, Melanchthon and Bucer, as well as among the Anabaptists – a more liberal tradition, which John Frith was perhaps the first to echo in England.
Condemned for heresy, Frith was burnt at the stake in 1533. In his own
mind, he died not because of the denial of the doctrines on purgatory
and transubstantiation but "for the principle that a particular doctrine
on either point was not a necessary part of a Christian's faith." In other words, there was an important distinction to be made between a
genuine article of faith and other matters where a variety of very
different conclusions should be tolerated within the Church. This stand
against unreasonable and profligate dogmatism meant that Frith, "to a
greater extent than any other of our early Protestants", upheld "a
certain degree of religious freedom".
Frith was not alone. John Foxe,
for example, "strove hard to save Anabaptists from the fire, and he
enunciated a sweeping doctrine of tolerance even towards Catholics,
whose doctrines he detested with every fibre of his being".
In the early seventeenth century, Thomas Helwys was a principal formulator of that distinctively Baptist
request: that the Church and the state be kept separate in matters of
law, so that individuals might have a freedom of religious conscience.
Helwys said the King "is a mortal man, and not God, therefore he hath no
power over the mortal soul of his subjects to make laws and ordinances
for them and to set spiritual Lords over them.King James I had Helwys thrown into Newgate prison, where he had died by 1616 at about the age of forty.
By the time of the English Revolution,
Helwys' stance on religious toleration was more commonplace. While
accepting their zeal in desiring a "godly society", some contemporary
historians doubt whether the English Puritans
during the English Revolution were as committed to religious liberty
and pluralism as traditional histories have suggested. However,
historian John Coffey's recent work emphasizes the contribution of a
minority of radical Protestants who steadfastly sought toleration for
heresy, blasphemy, Catholicism, non-Christian religions, and even atheism. This minority included the Seekers, as well as the General Baptists and the Levellers.
Their witness of these groups together demanded the Church be an
entirely voluntary, non-coercive community able to evangelize in a
pluralistic society governed by a purely civil state.
All of these individuals considered themselves Christians or were
actual churchmen. John Milton and John Locke are the predecessors of
modern liberalism. Although Milton was a Puritan and Locke an Anglican, Areopagitica and A Letter concerning Toleration are canonical liberal texts. Only from the 1690s onwards did the philosophy of Deism
emerge, and with it a third group that advocated religious toleration.
But, unlike the radical Protestants and the Anglicans, the deists also
rejected biblical authority; this group prominently includes Voltaire, Frederick II of Prussia, Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, Thomas Jefferson and the English-Irish philosopher John Toland. When Toland published the writings of Milton, Edmund Ludlow and Algernon Sidney, he tried to downplay the Puritan divinity in these works.
In 1781, the Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II, issued the Patent of Toleration which guaranteed the practice of religion by the Evangelical Lutheran and the Reformed Church
in Austria. For the first time after the Counter-Reformation, the
political and legal process of religious equality officially began.
Following the debates that started in the 1640s, the Church of England was the first Christian church to grant adherents of other Christian denominations freedom of worship with the Act of Toleration 1689, which nevertheless still retained some forms of religious discrimination
and did not include toleration for Catholics. Even today, only
individuals who are members of the Church of England at the time of the
succession may become the British monarch.
Renaissance, Reformation and witch hunts occurred in the same centuries. Stuart Clark
indicates that is no coincidence, that instead, these different aspects
of a single age are representative of a world in the process of
revolutionizing its way of thinking and understanding. Clark says that
understanding one aspect of the age, such as the witch hunts, can lead
to a greater understanding of another, such as the development of
tolerance.
Until the 1300s, the official position of the Roman Catholic Church was that witches did not exist. In medieval canon law, Christian thought on this subject is represented by a passage called the Canon Episcopi.Alan Charles Kors explains that the Canon is skeptical that witches exist while still allowing the existence of demons and the devil.
By the mid-fifteenth century, popular conceptions of witches changed
dramatically, and Christian thought denying witches and witchcraft was
being challenged by the Dominicans and being debated within the Church.
While historians have been unable to pinpoint a single cause of what
became known as the "witch frenzy", all have acknowledged that a new but
common stream of thought developed in society, as well as in some parts
of the Church, that witches were both real and malevolent.
Scholarly views on what caused this change fall into three
categories: those who say the learned in the Church spread it, those who
say popular tradition did so, and those who say witchcraft was actually
being practiced.
Of these three possibilities, Ankarloo and Clark indicate the main
pressure to prosecute witches came from the common people, and trials
were mostly civil trials. Everywhere in Europe, the higher up in either the ecclesiastical or the
secular court system a case went, the more reluctance and reservations
there were, with most cases ending up dismissed.
In regions that were the most centralized, appellate jurisdictions
acted in a restraining capacity, but areas of weak regimes, lacking
strong legal or political control, were a disaster for witches.
Witch trials were more prevalent in regions where the Catholic church
was weakest (Germany, Switzerland and France), while in areas with a
strong church presence (Spain, Poland and Eastern Europe) the witch
craze was negligible.
Eventually, Christian thought solidified behind Cautio Criminalis (Precautions for Prosecutors) which was written by Friedrich Spee, in 1631.[193]: vii
As a Jesuit priest, he personally witnessed witch trials in Westphalia.
Driven by his priestly charge of enacting Christian charity, he
describes the inhumane torture of the rack with the graphic language of
the truly horrified saying, "it makes my blood boil.
As a professor, Spee sought to expose the flawed arguments and methods
used by the Dominican witch-hunters along with any authority who allowed
it, including the emperor. Spee's primary methods for doing so were
sarcasm, ridicule and piercing logic.
The moral impression of his book was great, and it brought about the
abolition of witch trials in a number of places, and led to its gradual
decline in others. Witch trials became scant in the second half of the seventeenth century
and eventually simply subsided. No one can explain, definitively, why
they ended any more than they can explain why they began.
Modern era
Roman Catholic policy
In 1892, Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903) confirmed Thomas Aquinas's view of tolerance as a necessary aspect of governing well in Acta Leonis XIII 205.
On 7 December 1965, the Catholic Church's Vatican II council issued the decree "Dignitatis humanae", which addressed the rights of the person and communities to social and civil liberty in religious matters. The Vatican II document Nostra Aetate
absolved the Jewish people of any charge of deicide and affirmed that
God has always remained faithful to his covenant with Israel.
In 1987, Pope John Paul II appealed to the world to recognize religious freedom as a fundamental human right. Pope John Paul II was quoted by the Los Angeles Times
as saying: "Religious freedom, an essential requirement of the dignity
of every person, is a cornerstone of the structure of human rights, and
for this reason, an irreplaceable factor in the good of individuals and
of the whole of society as well as of the personal fulfillment of each
individual." On 12 March 2000, he prayed for forgiveness because "Christians have
often denied the Gospel; yielding to a mentality of power, they have
violated the rights of ethnic groups and peoples, and shown contempt for
their cultures and religious traditions."
Protestant Christian thought
After World War II and the Holocaust, many Protestant theologians began to reassess Christian theology's antisemitism, and as a result, felt compelled to reject the doctrine of supersessionism. Numerous leading Christian thinkers continue to find "keys to truth" in ancient writings such as Augustine's Confessions, and Aquinas's Summa Theologica. Modern discussions of the Kingdom of God are still influenced by the nineteenth century view of the eschatological Jesus.
Colin Gunton and Richard Swinburn use traditional motifs to creatively reinterpret atonement theories in ways that are not reliant on beliefs rejected by most contemporary Christians, such as demonology
or the belief in witches. They do not employ the morally objectionable
transfer of liability and still effectively convey their belief that
Jesus's death is more than just a moral example.
Today's debates over inclusivity reach to the heart of what it means to be a Christian both theologically and practically.Bruce L. McCormack says that is why Karl Barth's theology of neo-orthodoxy remains popular even in the "post-modern"
twenty-first century. Though Barth advocates the exclusive
Jesus-centered discipleship of orthodoxy, his view is also inherently
inclusive, since, in his view, every human is among those God has set
apart for that discipleship.
Contemporary global persecution and sociology
"The exceptional character of persecution in the Latin
West since the twelfth century has lain not in the scale or savagery of
particular persecutions, ... but in its capacity for sustained long-term
growth. The patterns, procedures and rhetoric of persecution, which
were established in the twelfth century, have given it the power of
infinite and indefinite self-generation and self-renewal."
Tolerance, as a value, has grown out of humanity's experiences with
social conflict and persecution, and is part of the legacy garnered from
this.
But there are also ideals similar to the concept of modern tolerance
throughout the history of Christian thought (and philosophy and other
religious thought) that can be seen as the long and somewhat torturous
"prehistory" of tolerance. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 included the first statement of freedom of religion in modern history. In the twenty-first century, nearly all contemporary societies in the world include religious freedom in their constitutions or other national proclamations in support of human rights. However, at the symposium on law and religion in 2014, Michelle Mack
said: "Despite what appears to be near-universal expression of
commitment to religious human rights, ... violations of freedom of
religion and belief, including acts of severe persecution, occur with fearful frequency. In 1981, Israeli scholar Yoram Dinstein wrote that freedom of religion is "the most persistently violated human right in the annals of the species". In 2018, the U.S. Department of State, which releases annual reports in
which it documents varying types of restrictions which are imposed on
religious freedom around the world, detailed country by country, the
violations of religious freedom which are taking place in approximately
75% of the 195 countries in the world.
R. I. Moore says that persecution during the Middle Ages "provides a striking illustration of classic deviance theory as it was propounded by the father of sociology, Emile Durkheim. Strong social-group identities, with attitudes of group loyalty,
solidarity, and highly perceived benefits of belonging, make it likely
that an individual or a group will become intolerant when identity is
threatened. This indicates intolerance is more of a social process, tied to social identity, than an ideological one.
Contemporary persecution is often part of a larger conflict
involving emerging states and established states in the process of
redefining their national identity. For example, Christianity in Iraq dates from the Apostolic era
in what was then Persia; the U.S. Department of State identified 1.4
million Christians in Iraq in 1991 when the Gulf War began. By 2010, the
number of Christians dropped to 700,000 and it is currently estimated
there are between 200,000 and 450,000 Christians left in Iraq.
During that period, actions against Christians included the burning and
bombing of churches, the bombing of Christian owned businesses and
homes, kidnapping, murder, demands for protection money, and anti-Christian rhetoric in the media with those responsible saying they wanted to rid the country of its Christians.
Serbia has been Christian since the Christianization of Serbs by Clement of Ohrid and Saint Naum
in the ninth century. Within a relatively peaceful Serbia, the province
of Kosovo has long been a site of ethnic and religious tensions. In the
1990s, it drew attention for frequent discrimination and acts of
violence toward Albanians: 90% of Kosovo's Albanian population is
Muslim. Eventually, Kosovo erupted in a full-scale ethnic cleansing,
resulting in armed intervention by the United Nations in 1999. Serbs
attacked Albanian villages, killed and brutalized inhabitants, burned
down houses, and forced them to leave. By the end of 1998, approximately
3000 Islamic Albanians had been killed and more than 300,000 expelled.
By the end of the "action", around 800,000 of the roughly two million
Albanians had fled.
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