Philosophy of Death

Here reply to The Next Turn in our argument on the role of Christianity in the Black Plague.

Hello,

I tried to be more succinct this time. If you need more information on a topic ask. Before we start I want set you straight the religious actions you sited were not likely to have been thought of as appeasement. Generally, in Christian thought prayer is seen as pleading or penitence even though the theological development of the early middle ages was primitive they likely would have had a more nuanced view of their actions than you are portraying.

An Argument of Philosophy
I have answered your philosophical argument that Christianity is opposed to looking for material answers to problems. I demonstrated Bible verses showing that people were to looking for material as well as spiritual answers to their problems. I spoke about how Ultimate and Proximal causes are a way in which Christians who believe that the God is the ultimate source of all things investigate other causes. Finally, I talked about how the theology of Aquinas was the driving force of the literacy and investigations of the Medieval Period. Thus far you have disputed none of these points.

I went further by suggesting both the wild parties and unproductive feelings of hopelessness that were common in the time could have been a natural out pouring of ideas such as Epicureanism. You did not comment on this.

An Argument in Practices
You have asked for examples of “secular” reasoning besides the health ordinances of Pistoia but I don’t feel that the health measures of Pistoia were in sharp contrast to the prayer for which you offered more links. I feel like you are asking me to offer evidence that there were more “secular” (whatever that means) rather than spiritual investigations by showing more sources but this is a clear representation of how it was. This concept of “secular” vs. “spiritual” or yours and would not have been shared by medieval people. “Secular” investigations were done alongside prayer and fasting and was mostly conducted by the RCC itself. There is no evidence that other investigations were considered alternative explanations to God having caused the plague except, of course, astrology which the RCC condemned.

Some of my better sources in showing that the Devine vs. Natural dichotomy did not exist were in fact your sources. Such as your Galileo source. To show how false dichotomy it is the nun proscribes prayer and medicine you can see she advises him to take the remedies known to the people of the time. This nun who your source describes as “extreme” is actually carrying out ‘secular science’ by experimenting with herbal remedies.

This same source is also interesting in that it expresses that quarantines were used in places other than Pistoia. You will likely say that these quarantines were later development but progress is as consistent with a religious worldview as with secular one. But in cause you still doubt that quarantine was common place The Great Mortality John Kelly page 289 states that Florence and Venice both had quarantine and Florence created the plague house all within years of the first outbreak meaning investigation were cared out right away.

Another source of yours that was really helpful was this . It shows people investigating within the Christian perspective.

In The Great Morality by John Kelly makes a more emphatic statement about how the Christian perspective allowed for thought about dealing with the plague than I can.

“Untroubled by theological dilemmas, Christian writers were free to concentrate their energies on preventive stratagems.” (172) Then he goes on to talk about the attempts at cures they used. You will likely be critical of these cures which were based on trail and error and faulty Greek science but they were common, extensive and went beyond praying.

There was at least one truly secular investigation (it would have been disapproved of by the Catholic Church) and that was the Paris Consilium which rejected the notion that the plague was influenced by God and came to the conclusion that it was caused by the alignment of the planets. I prepared to show any number of sources that this was the most common notion of people who rejected the concept of God as an influencer of events.

You will likely argue that the Paris Consilium was bad science but the flagellants were bad Christianity. Also, the Paris Consilium is important because it is an example of people doing exactly what you thought they should do putting away the notion of God as a ultimate cause and doing an investigation. But the Paris Consilium was not helpful.

It may surprise you learn that Europe’s largest collection of medical texts was the Vatican and that RCC occasionally allowed human dissections which were never allowed in more secular Rome.

Secular causes were thought of with religious minds and cures you would consider “secular” were implemented with a religious understanding. For example ships arriving in new cities were quarantined for 40 days (a period of time important in Christian theology). (Plague and Pestilence: A history of Infectious Disease, Linda Jacobs Altman p23)

I thought I would show that people were investigating any possible preventives and treatments at the time even though they also believed in prayer. However, how often prayer was used by itself as an question that is only relevant if I assume (as you do) that it was ineffective and that there was something more wise they should have been doing instead.

An Argument Of Alternatives
Both Galen’s Theory of the Humors and Astronomy were explanations offered by Medieval people. You introduced the idea of an investigation into the cause of the plague. However, this is only compelling if 1) without Christianity this sort of investigation would have happened 2) it would have uncovered the source of the bubonic plague and offered helpful answers to the problem that people would not have otherwise had.

1) The Universities of Europe were founded not by secular rulers but by churches even most of North America’s older universities were founded by churches.

The RCC was almost the exclusive producer of books between the forth century fall of Rome and the year 1200. Europe had access to secular Roman and Greek writings as well as the Arabic tradition but only because religious people were preserving them. There is no evidence, that I am aware of, that any secular rulers were pursuing literacy for their kingdoms at all. The vast majority of secular leaders were illiterate.

There is no reason to believe that a Europe would have preserved writing, much less the academic tradition without Christianity. And in that environment I don’t see how an investigation like the one you proposed would have been possible. (The Web of Text and the Web of God pg 25 and 26)

2) If we assume that the tools of investigation were available, universities were founded, and the Greek and Arabic traditions were preserved and a belief in a knowable (Aquinas style universe) existed it would still be really hard to expect that people would come to the solution you suggest.

Observations of cities effected would show that all major cities were effected and only some rural monasteries were spared. If they did make an observation of rats, they would note that cities with the most rats were hit the weakest because plague would have been preceded by a rat die off because the flee that caries the disease does not favor humans (Herlihy p21).

You state that people would likely have had three week window before the plague over-ran a city. In that space of it would not have been possible to identify the rat connection and take action.

Alexandre Yerson required more than three weeks to make the rat connection in the early twentieth century and this was after the disease Bactria had been identified under a microscope. (The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco, Marilyn Chase.) Also, note that even in the twentieth century quarantine remained a critical way of dealing with the plague. To this day it quarantine is suggested by some medical professionals.


Other arguments

You also argue that science got better with time. I don’t know how this is suggestive that people might have been better off if Europe had not had religious beliefs. Certainly, improvement of technology is to be expected as society progressed. You seem to feel this is due to people being more “secular” but religious people are involved in scientific investigations to this day and some of the more important discoveries were by religious believers.

Governments in this time period did not consider public health part of their responsibility. All health measures that would have existed before the first pandemic would have been implemented by the RCC. Hospitals and public health care, food for the destitute, shelter against the elements, places of exile for refugees existed only as provided by the RCC. The degree to which public misery could have been worsened by the absence of these helps is difficult to calculate but certainly quite real.

Also real is the physiological needs that would certainly have been neglected had there been no religion in Medieval Europe. Atheists typically desire burial rights to the same degree as their religious counter parts. No one outside of the religious establishment attempted to provide any acknowledgment in death. Even in Norway today acknowledgment in death frequently comes from religious sources.

If you would like sources on public health, care for the poor, or acknowledgment of death practices I would be glad to show that.

Finally, spiritual needs of the people, while you don’t consider it real, was very urgent to the people at the time and it is an articulated need of most of humanity to this day. It was in this area that the people felt most cheated.

“People began to long for a more intense, personal relationship with God. …The upswing in religious feeling was accompanied by a deepening disillusionment with the Church” (Kelly 290). Some writers believe that for better nourishment of their spiritual needs people following the plague began the
Protestant reformation (http://www.uic.edu/classes/osci/osci590/6_3Plague.htm). Rather than a world turning away from Christianity the Enlightenment seems be most notably market by a movement toward Christian thinking as evidence by and upshot in names from the Christian rather than Teutonic tradition (The Black Death and Transformation of the West, David Herlihy, p8).

Your Questions
So why didn’t God warn people of the danger of transporting of animals or rodents?

I have answered this already. Nobody transports rats on purpose. Even today rats get on ships. During the Third Pandemic (the Asian one around 1900) San Francisco was gassing Asian ship holds to prevent the spread of the disease but rats infected with Bubonic Plague still managed to inter the city (The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco, Marilyn Chase.)

To this day we have not been able to really totally control rats but make no mistake the ancients hated them. Not only did they associate them with disease (The Great Mortality, John Kelly p 65){You can get it on Google books} they feared that they would eat their crops . Even in early Middle Ages before the plague there was a wide market in anti-rodent remedies (Kelly 65).

“The folklore of medieval and early modern India and China also contains several references to the connection between Rattus rattus and Y. pestis.” (Kelly 65). I am not saying they fully understood but they certainly were not dieing because they thought rats were harmless.

Why didn’t God clearly explain germ theory, or explain the dangers of letting the rodent population get out of hand?

You know it is not rational to ask for defense of omniscience. If God is all knowing than it follows that we who are not may not understand all he does? Is a God we understand worth worshiping? Just showing that God commanded something that I don’t understand does not logically show the command to be wrong or God to be nonexistent.

However, this question is kind of funny because I think if you try to explain germ theory to people who don’t have refractive lenses you might not like what you end up saying.

Invisible creatures that travel through the air attack your body causing sickness. Sounds like evil spirits to me.

Besides, germ theory by itself is not helpful. It needs other science to make any since or offer any advice. Finally the OT cleanliness laws were not written to the Europeans but to Jews in Ancient Israel however they would have been really helpful for medieval Europe and were when they were incorporated. Christians tended to look to the OT for principles and not specific rules, one main principle one comes from reading Leviticus is that keeping clean is important against disease.

Why did God only provide help which was already obvious to people, such as cleanliness?

It was not oblivious. It is only oblivious to you since you were raised in a society where this was common knowledge. Cleanness had to compete with ideas like the positions of the stars, pleasant thoughts and sweat foods as ways to prevent disease in the medieval mind. New Galen thinkers even thought bathing was bad because it opened up one’s pores to disease.