Question #1:
The statement that the plague was caused by God's wrath can be disproved in a couple of ways:
First, the Roman Catholic Church claimed that The Plague was caused by God to punish people's sin. According to the definition of a deductive fallacy, it is impossible for the premises of an argument to be true and have a false conclusion. If we put the church's claim into this perspective, we can clearly see that such claim leads to a false conclusion, especially because according to the Catholic Church we are all sinners. Example: (1) People who sin will be punished by the Plague (2) All people are sinners (3) All people will be punished by the Plague. According to the background reading only one-third of all people in Europe died. For this argument to be air tight all of Europe would need to be dead by the Plague. Also according to the background story even monasteries received the Plague.
Second, The church claims that because of the “sins’ being committed, God has shown his wrath like it has before using as an example the flood during Noah’s time and the destruction of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. If we apply this to a good inductive argument it will still be invalid. For example: (1) Because of their sins, God has shown his wrath with Noah and the people of Sodom and Gomorrah in the past (2) And as such he has shown us his wrath with the Plague.
Clearly because something has happened in the past does not mean for certain that this is why a completely different incident has happened today.
Question #2:
I think that the Church used their statement to scare people. By making this claim they hope that more people try to “get rid of their sin” and attend the church more (therefore increasing their revenue). I personally feel that in our modern day, this would be a silly claim to make. But because of the time (and the lack of science and technology) I understand why people would believe this argument. To me, the most logical explanation for the Plague is that of lack of proper sanitation.
Background Reading
In October 1347, Italian ships on the Black Sea en route to and from China dock in Messina, Sicily -- their crews are dead or dying. Whatever is killing them quickly spreads ashore. Within a month, it passes through Sicily and moves back out over water. By January 1348, it has penetrated France via Marseille and North Africa via Tunis, and by July 1348, it spreads through France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Eastern Hungary, and Southern England. This is all the more amazing given that at this time it took a person one to three months to travel from London to Rome. The plague died out in the winters and was resurrected in the springs. At the end of 1349, it had spread throughout the British Isles and Scandinavia and continued to move east.
The death toll was massive -- the "official" figure is one-third of Europe dead between 1348 and 1351, when it temporarily abated, but keep in mind that in some towns the death toll was 90 percent -- in others 10 percent. Further, the poor and anyone else living in close quarters (monks, for instance) died at a higher rate. Many monasteries were completely wiped out, but the death rates among the nobility and the nobility of the church were very low. Understandably, people wanted to know why this was happening to them. Here are the four prominent hypotheses of the day:
The claim of academics and physicians: The plague was the result of a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars on March 20, 1345.
The Roman Catholic Church's claim: God's wrath -- it was a punishment for the people's sins.
The claim of the mayors and town-controlling nobles: Poor sanitation. Dumping waste in the streets leads to sickness (a revolutionary claim at the time -- no one actually knew this to be true).
The claim of the masses (i.e., everyone else): The Jews are poisoning the wells.
Here is the "evidence" used by each group, respectively, to support its claim:
Medicine at the time was based on astrology and astronomy. Most physical sickness was attributed to poor alignment of the stars. The conjunction had happened, and it was a rare celestial event. Other events had been tied to celestial causes. Many were waiting to see what the triple conjunction would cause, and when the Black Plague occurred, they felt that they had found out.
The Church said, "Look around." Plunder, looting, rape, prostitution, war, and drinking were everywhere. God's wrath had shown itself in destructive ways before -- the people of Noah's time were hit with a flood, and the people of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.
The sanitation workers were among the first to die, and other diseases were suspected to be related to poor sanitation.
Christians tortured "confessions" out of Jews. The Jews were believed to be "jealous" of the Christians (because, it was thought, the Jews knew "in their hearts" that they were damned). The lepers had been blamed for poisoning the wells and causing the typhus outbreak in 1320 (after the Black Plague, it was believed that the Jews set them up to it).
Here are some problems people at the time saw with the evidence:
Nobody but the academics and physicians believed their explanation!
If God's wrath already has descended, there's no reason to change one's behavior. The attitude was roughly, "If we're already doomed, why alter our behavior?"
Later sanitation workers appeared to be immune (unknown to the people, they'd been exposed and had developed a resistance). If it really was poor sanitation, why weren't they still dying? In fact, this immunity among sanitation workers caused many people to think the sanitation workers had magical powers. People followed them on their street-cleaning routes, trying to absorb some of the immunity. Others, more desperate, actually applied waste to themselves, thinking that it would keep the disease away.
So many Jews died too (Why would any community poison itself?). The other problem is that the plague was present in areas where no Jews lived.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
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ReplyDeleteI do not really agree with your statement. The lack of poor sanitation might have enforced the spreading of the plague, but there is not logical explanation that it was the main cause of the disease. The death causing plague started in China and made its way across Asia to the Black Sea by 1347. First, the bacteria developed in the lungs of marmots, spreading to fleas, to rats, and eventually to humans.
ReplyDeleteI read each argument a couple of times over to see how many fallacies I could come up with and I came up with a lot. Your first argument though, about all people being sinners never occurred to me. The church does nothing more than tell every one of their followers that no one is perfect and everyone is a sinner, of course which is true because no one truly is perfect but also conveniently makes for a great business angle for the Catholic Church. If the plague was God's attempt of wiping away sinners then why were only 1/3 of the people affected and why did the nobility and the nobility of the church survive at higher rates? Because as history shows they were the biggest sinners of all.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you the fact that since something happened before does not mean that God is doing the same thing with the people with Black Plague today. And also the fact, that because people are committing sins does not mean that God will punish each and every person who are not committing sins. Then the monasteries would not have come in contact with this disease.
ReplyDeleteI think you are right. Just because something happened before it doesn’t mean that it will happen again. However I do think that some of the things from the past can be taken into account in the present because if not how would we know what we know today? It’s been because things have passed from generation to generation. Plus we all need to learn from the errors of the past, if not we would be doing the same things again and again. Nevertheless I completely agree with you that the fact that it happened in the past cannot be used as evidence, maybe to expand the topic but not to support the argument.
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