The Roman Catholic Church's claim the plague was the punishment for the sinners. This deadly disease is God’s wrath to wash out human’s sin of “Plunder, looting, rape, prostitution, war, and drinking”. However, this claim has serious logical fallacy. It contents deductive logical error which is appeal to authority. At the age of 1347, the Roman Catholic Church may have the inherent right to explain that some extraordinary events were the arrangement of God. The Roman Catholic Church is not medical specialist; it has no authority to explain the cause of this disease. Their claim actually would raise more confusion to people. What was God’s fairness in this event, if this claim was true?
First of all, if the purpose of God’s wrath is to punish all the sinners, then why monks-who choose to live in a life of monastic simplicity- had a higher death rate than average in this event? As we read from the background, “many monasteries were completely wiped out”. The monks dedicated their life completely to God and they lived separately from “plunder, looting, rape, prostitution, war and drinking” life. They should not belong to sinner’s group. Why they took a heavy heat from this deadly disease? At this point, the Roman Catholic Church’s claim is a failure.
Secondly, we realize that “the death rates among the nobility and the nobility of the church were very low”. If the plague is the wrath from God, why these nobilities who got drunk often, had sexual activities much more frequently than ordinary folks were survived the most? Did they deserve no punishment for what they had done? The truth behind this claim is that the Roman Catholic Church tried to take this event as their opportunity to defend their supreme status above the civilians. Their higher survive rate may be credited to their nutritional diet and better living environment. Did they impressed God by following God’s rules and therefore they were survivors? I doubt it.
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.
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ReplyDeleteI do agree with you about the Roman Catholic Church. They always seem to want to dictate people’s lives – no divorce, no birth control, no abortion and the list goes on. The plague gave them the perfect opportunity to do so. With the plague the Roman Catholic Church gain the ammunition of the wrath of god in their efforts to control the uncontrollable section society-the sinners. They were not going to let a little thing like the fact that monks were among the highest fatality rate stop them from leading an attack on society.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you too and find we have similar argument about the death rate of the monks and nobility.(hi 5!)
ReplyDeleteReligious people always put "God" above everything, and they ignore or even destroy any other possibilities but only see things through "God". They tend to mislead people to follow their never-changed rules, but never ask themselves if the rules are sound in the virtual world.
Well we want to keep in mind though that monks are not infallible. In fact, many monks exploited their powers by taking sexual advantage of their fellow convent members, or engaging in homosexual relations with each other, or drinking excessively. Increasingly monks became the scholars who taught royalty and this led to many becoming corrupt and decadent by the 18th century (thereby leading to the French Revolution)
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