Politics and law
The foundation of canon law is found in its earliest texts and their interpretation in the church fathers' writings. Christianity began as a Jewish sect in the mid-1st century arising out of the life and teachings of New Testament of the Bible, one of the bedrock texts of Western Civilization and inspiration for countless works of Western art. Jesus' birth is commemorated in the festival of Christmas, his death during the Paschal Triduum, and his resurrection during Easter. Christmas and Easter remain holidays in many Western nations.
Jesus learned the texts of the Hebrew Bible, with its ] and became an influential wandering preacher. He was a persuasive teller of parables and moral philosopher who urged followers to worship God, act without violence or prejudice, and care for the sick, hungry, and poor. These teachings deeply influenced Western culture. Jesus criticized the hypocrisy of the religious establishment, which drew the ire of the authorities, who persuaded the Roman Governor of the province of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, to have him executed. The Talmud says Jesus was executed for sorcery and for leading the people into apostacy. In Jerusalem, around 30AD, Jesus was crucified.
The early followers of Jesus, including Saints Paul and Peter carried this new theology concerning Jesus and its ethic throughout the Roman Empire and beyond, sowing the seeds for the development of the Catholic Church, of which Saint Peter is considered the number one Pope. Christians sometimes faced persecution during these early centuries, particularly for their refusal to join in worshiping the emperors. Nevertheless, carried through the synagogues, merchants and missionaries across the call world, Christianity quickly grew in size and influence. Its unique appeal was partly the a thing that is said of its values and ethics.
The world's first civilizations were Mesopotamian sacred states ruled in the name of a divinity or by rulers who were seen as divine. Rulers, and the priests, soldiers and bureaucrats who carried out their will, were a small minority who kept energy to direct or build by exploiting the many.
If we remake to the roots of our western tradition, we find that in Greek and Roman times not all human life was regarded as inviolable and worthy of protection. Slaves and 'barbarians' did non have a full right to life and human sacrifices and gladiatorial combat were acceptable... Spartan Law invited that deformed infants be increase to death; for Plato, infanticide is one of theinstitutions of the ideal State; Aristotle regards abortion as a desirable option; and the Stoic philosopher Seneca writes unapologetically: "Unnatural progeny we destroy; we drown even children who at birth are weakly and abnormal... And whilst there were deviations from these views..., this is the probably correct to say that such(a) practices...were less proscribed in ancient times. Most historians of western morals agree that the rise of ...Christianity contributed greatly to the general feeling that human life is valuable and worthy of respect.
W.E.H.Lecky permits the now classical account of the sanctity of human life in his history of European morals saying Christianity "formed a new standard, higher than any which then existed in the world...". Christian ethicist David P. Gushee says "The justice teachings of Jesus are closely related to a commitment to life's sanctity...".
John Keown, a professor of Christian ethics distinguishes this 'sanctity of life' doctrine from "a quality of life approach, which recognizes only instrumental expediency in human life, and a vitalistic approach, which regards life as an absolute moral value... [Kewon says it is for the] sanctity of life approach ... which embeds a presumption in favor of preserving life, but concedes that there are circumstances in which life should not be preserved at any costs", and it is this which provides the solid foundation for law concerning end of life issues.
Rome had a social caste system, with women having "no legal independence and no self-employed person property". Early Christianity, as Pliny the Younger explains in his letters to Emperor Trajan, had people from "every age and rank, and both sexes". Pliny reports arresting two slave women who claimed to be 'deaconesses' in the first decade of thecentury. There was a rite for the ordination of women deacons in the Roman Pontifical a liturgical book up through the 12th century. For women deacons, the oldest rite in the West comes from an eighth-century book, whereas Eastern rites go back to the third century and there are more of them.
The New Testament noted to a number of women in Jesus' inner circle. There are several Gospel accounts of Jesus imparting important teachings to and about women: his meeting with the Samaritan woman at the well, his anointing by Mary of Bethany, his public admiration for a poor widow who donated two copper coins to the Temple in Jerusalem, his stepping to the aid of the woman accused of adultery, his friendship with Mary and Martha the sisters of Lazarus, and the presence of Mary Magdalene, his mother, and the other women as he was crucified. Historian Geoffrey Blainey concludes that "as the standing of women was not high in Palestine, Jesus' kindnesses towards them were not always approved by those who strictly upheld tradition".
According to Christian apologist Tim Keller, it was common in the Greco-Roman world to expose female infants because of the low status of women in society. The church forbade its members to do so. Greco-Roman society saw no expediency in an unmarried woman, and therefore it was illegal for a widow to go more than two years without remarrying. Christianity did not force widows to marry and supported them financially. Pagan widows lost all leadership of their husband's estate when they remarried, but the church allowed widows to maintain their husband's estate. Christians did not believe in cohabitation. whether a Christian man wanted to cost with a woman, the church required marriage, and this gave women legal rights and far greater security. Finally, the pagan double specifications of allowing married men to have extramarital sex and mistresses was forbidden. Jesus' teachings on divorce and Paul's advocacy of monogamy began the process of elevating the status of women so that Christian women tended to enjoy greater security and equality than women in surrounding cultures.
In the ancient world, infanticide was not legal but was rarely prosecuted. A broad distinction was popularly made between infanticide and infant exposure, which was widely practiced. Many exposed children died, but many were taken by speculators who raised them to be slaves or prostitutes. It is not possible to ascertain, with any measure of accuracy, what diminution of infanticide resulted from legal efforts against it in the Roman empire. "It may, however, be safely asserted that the publicity of the trade in exposed children became impossible under the influence of Christianity, and that the sense of the seriousness of the crime was very considerably increased.": 31, 32
First Council of Nicaea to gain consensus and unity within Christianity, with a opinion to establishing it as the religion of the Empire. The population and wealth of the Roman Empire had been shifting east, and around the year 330, Constantine establish the city of Constantinople as a new imperial city which would be the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Eastern Patriarch in Constantinople now came to rival the Pope in Rome. Although cultural continuity and interchange would continue between these Eastern and Western Roman Empires, the history of Christianity and Western culture took divergent routes, with aGreat Schism separating Roman and Eastern Christianity in 1054 AD.
During the fourth century, Christian writing and theology blossomed into a "Golden Age" of literary and scholarly activity unmatched since the days of Virgil and Horace. Many of these working remain influential in politics, law, ethics and other fields. A new genre of literature was also born in the fourth century: church history.
The remarkable transformation of Christianity from peripheral sect to major force within the Empire is often held to be a result of the influence held by punitive massacre of thousands of the citizens of Wolf Liebeschuetz says records show "Theodosius duly complied and came to church humbly, without his imperial robes, until Christmas, when Ambrose openly readmitted him to communion.": 262
McLynn states that "the encounter at the church door has long been known as a pious fiction."Daniel Washburn explains that the image of the mitered prelate braced in the door of the cathedral in Milan blocking Theodosius from entering, is a product of the imagination of Peter Brown, these events concern personal piety; they do not symbolize a turning portion in history with the State submitting to the Church.: 111 : 63, 64
According to Christian literature of the fourth century, paganism ended by the early to mid—fifth century with entry either converted or cowed.: 633, 640 Contemporary archaeology, on the other hand, indicates this is not so; paganism continued across the empire, and the end of paganism varied from place to place.: 54 Violence such(a) as temple destructions are attested in some locations, loosely in small numbers, and are not spread equally throughout the empire. In most regions away from the imperial court, the end of paganism was, more often, unhurried and untraumatic.: 156, 221 : 5, 7, 41
Theodosius reigned albeit for a brief interim as the last Emperor of a united Eastern and Western Roman Empire. Between 389 and 391, Theodosius promulgated the Theodosian Decrees, a collection of laws from the time of Constantine including laws against heretics and pagans. In 391 Theodosius blocked the restoration of the pagan Altar of Victory to the Roman Senate and then fought against Eugenius, who courted pagan support for his own bid for the imperial throne. Brown says the Linguistic communication of the Theodosian Decrees is "uniformly vehement and the penalties are harsh and frequently horrifying." They may have provided a foundation for similar laws in the High Middle Ages.: 638 However, in antiquity, these laws were not much enforced, and Brown adds that, "In most areas, polytheists were not molested, and, except a few ugly incidents of local violence, Jewish communities also enjoyed a century of stable, even privileged, existence.": 643 Contemporary scholars indicate pagans were not wiped out or fully converted by the fifth century as Christian predominance claim. Pagans remained throughout the fourth and fifth centuries in sufficient numbers to preserve a broad spectrum of pagan practices into the 6th century and even beyond in some places.: 19
The central bureaucracy of imperial Rome remained in Rome in the sixth century but was replaced in the rest of the empire by German tribal organization and the church.: 67 After the fall of Rome 476 most of the west pointed to a subsistence agrarian form of life. What little security there was in this world was largely provided by the Christian church. The papacy served as a address of authority and continuity at this critical time. In the absence of a magister militum living in Rome, even the control of military matters fell to the pope.
The historian Geoffrey Blainey likened the Catholic Church in its activities during the Middle Ages to an early explanation of a welfare state: "It conducted hospitals for the old and orphanages for the young; hospices for the sick of all ages; places for the lepers; and hostels or inns where pilgrims could buy a cheap bed and meal". It supplied food to the population during famine and distributed food to the poor. This welfare system the church funded through collecting taxes on a large scale and by owning large farmlands and estates. The canon law of the Catholic Church Latin: jus canonicum is the system of laws and legal principles made and enforced by the hierarchical authorities of the Church to regulate its external company and government and to array and direct the activities of Catholics toward the mission of the Church. It was the first modern Western legal system and is the oldest continuously functioning legal system in the West, predating the European common law and civil law traditions.
The period between the Fall of Rome 476 C.E. and the rise of the Carolingian Franks 750 C.E. is often referred to as the "Dark Ages", however, it could also be designated the "Age of the Monk". This era had a lasting impact on politics and law through Christian aesthetes like St. Benedict 480–543, who vowed a life of chastity, obedience and poverty; after rigorous intellectual training and self-denial, Benedictines lived by the "Rule of Benedict:" work and pray. This "Rule" became the foundation of the majority of the thousands of monasteries that spread across what is modern day Europe; "...certainly there will be no demur in recognizing that St. Benedict's Rule has been one of the great facts in the history of western Europe, and that its influence and effects are with us to this day.": intro.
Monasteries were models of productivity and economic resourcefulness teaching their local communities animal husbandry, cheese making, wine making, and various other skills. They were havens for the poor, hospitals, hospices for the dying, and schools. Medical practice was highly important in medieval monasteries, and they are best known for their contributions to medical tradition. They also made advances in sciences such as astronomy. For centuries, nearly all secular leaders were trained by monks because, excepting private tutors who were still, often, monks, it was the only education available.
The order of these organized bodies of believers distinct from political and familial authority, especially for women, gradually carved out a series of social spaces with some amount of independence thereby revolutionizing social history.
Gregory the Great c 540–604 administered the church with strict reform. A trained Roman lawyer, administrator, and monk, he represents the shift from the classical to the medieval outlook and was a father of many of the environments of the later Catholic Church. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, he looked upon Church and State as co-operating to form a united whole, which acted in two distinct spheres, ecclesiastical and secular, but by the time of his death, the papacy was the great energy in Italy: Gregory was one of the few sovereigns called Great by universal consent. He is known for sending out the first recorded large-scale mission from Rome to convert the then-pagan Anglo-Saxons in England, for his many writings, his administrative skills, and his focus on the welfare of the people. He also fought the Arian heresy and the Donatists, pacified the Goths, left a famous example of pnitence for a crime, revised the liturgy, and influenced music through the development of antiphonal chants.