Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"It was the entry of new wealth and talent into the churches from around the year of 370 onward, rather than the conversion of Constantine in 312 which marks the turning point in the Christianization of Europe."

"For [wealthy] donors [to the church], wealth did not stand in the way of heaven. Rather, when given to the church, wealth opened a high road to the future and a prospect of properties and institutions that might enjoy an indefinite future on earth because they were bathed in the soft glow of perpetual treasure in heaven."

"For this was the time when Christianity ceased to be confined to the cities and spread throughout the country and spread throughout the countryside" - peasants found it easier to understand the news goals of Christianity?

"With this shift from the poor to the monks as the primary intercessors for the sins of all Christians, an ancient Christianity died"

"We also have to reckon with a significant change of goals within Christianity itself....In Matt. 25:41-46 Christ showed no mercy to the goats...In the sixth century, by contrast, it was precisely the potential goats who expected Christ's mercy...They expected to gain that mercy through the intercessions of the saints."

"Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers." - an argument for an open society?

"At first, proceeding from the problems of our age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position."

"Any attempt to appropriate the wealth of the church or to misuse church funds was immediately presented as an attack on the helpless poor."

"By insisting on their perpetual rights over freedman and over other forms of tied labour, the administrators of the estates of the church pointed the way toward a general movement to reassert and tighten control over those who worked the land" - i.e. serfdom

"Long after the empire had vanished, fiscal privileges inherited from imperial times and renewed by local kings remained crucial to the social position of the churches. Landed wealth, in and of itself was not enough."

"The conflict between Symmachus and Laurentius... leading clergymen were killed as rival factions clashed in the streets of the city."

"The common sense of an entire society still bathed in Roman law made [bishops] domini whether they liked it or not."

"Ideally, the bishop was a managerial figure. He was not a landowner but a good steward." - the agency dilemma in the early church.

"In 502...They incorporated Basilius's principal complaint, agreeing that the wealth of the church should be inalienable. But it was the pope - not the Senate - who would ensure that's it integrity was preserved..."

"...many who became priests and deacons had been slaves. Many more had been obnoxii - farmers permanently tied to the estate on rich they were registered as taxpayers. [serfs?] Clerical status freed them from these bonds."

"[Gregory the Great] went out his way to obtain ... slaves....the laboratory of barbarian slaves on the estates of the church enabled him to care for "the poor of the church" in Rome." - i.e. Roman citizens.

"...in the last half of the fifth century. The church of Rome got richer. The senatorial aristocracy grew poorer, mainly as a result of the loss of their overseas estates in Africa and the Balkans."

"For it was only then - in the later fifth century - that the church emerged as the owner of great wealth that made it for the first time the equal of the landed aristocracy."

"Ever since the fourth century, [the leading town councillors] had grown rich through manipulating the tax machine of the Roman state at the expense of their peers."

Would be nuns, monks and clergymen were disinherited by their families, a new format of estate planning.

"...which, had [Salvian] lived in the nineteenth century, would certainly have made him a Socialist of the extremist type."

"Impoverished by Adam's fall, the human approach red God as a down-and-out client might approach a patron."

"Would the churches continue to be churches of the mediocres? Or would a new model of ecclesiastical leadership imposed from the top by vivid leaders of monastic background such as Hilary, establish itself as the normal?"

"For Cassian...the powerful had (long) "preferred to base their lives on plunder rather than live from the sweat of craftsmanship and labor"."

"[The monks] continued the same sublime indifference toward wealth that had long been associated with the ideal of otium in aristocratic and philosophical circles."

"Remember the tide of evolution never flows backward' - yes, it does

'Because Berkeley made an invariable practice of going through doors instead of walls' - this argument is a firm indication that its advocate doesn't 'get' philosophy.