Reason and Science in Danger.
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The emperor Julian had to use troops to stop the Christians cutting each others’ throats in the streets, so they were never a united movement.
You are still confusing or mixing early Christians with Roman Catholics Early Christians vanished with the emerge of feudalism As I said before every religion has been related to a mode of production. The spgb has republished a good pamphlet titled. How the gods were made which covers all those aspects about religion as well max Weber described the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism
Protestantism likes to claim the early Christians as its own, but the two have little in common. It is the traditionalist and fundamentalist sects of the Eastern churches that come closest today to the demeanour and religion of the early Christians.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/early-christianity/index.htm
This is the best description of the history of the early Christians
https://www.marxists.org/archive/keracher/1929/how-gods-made.htm This is one of the description of the origin of religion based on the materialist conception of history
I think you are romanticising early Christianity. It was a long time before the medieval Roman Church, which took western Europe forward whilst the East fossilized and remained a chattel-slave owning society, came about.
At the time of the destruction of the libraries, the Roman Church was a remote entity with little influence.
In the East, after much violence between Christian parties, which lasted for centuries, the Athanasian faction triumphed and became the Orthodox Church. Dissent never ceased, however. The Copts and Nestorians went their own ways. If you are referring to the pre-Nicaean churches, they were never united. The Jewish Christians were reabsorbed into Judaism, the Pauline Gentile Christians were belligerent from the beginning. The Tertullianites practised self-castration. The protestant myth of a sole early Christian Church is just a myth.
Indeed, Calvinism was a bourgeois movement from the 16th century. Lutheranism, however, was not. To combat protestantism, the Counter-Reformation produced a new, streamlined and ferociously disciplined Roman Church which served the new capitalist Catholic states, primarily Spain. The Tridentine Church was a new creature, quite different from the medieval Church.
In England, the Dutch Republic and Switzerland you are correct in identifying protestantism as being the bourgeoisie’s religion of choice. However, Tridentine Catholicism adequately served bourgeois aspirations in Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Flanders and Spanish America, Asia and the Indies.
In Lutheran Germany and the Orthodox East things were frozen. Also in the Protestant principalities scattered throughout central Europe, where Protestantism was happily embraced by feudal princelings such as the Nadasdys and Bathorys.
Tridentine Catholicism was just as favourable to the new capitalism as was Calvinism.
The movement of the proto-socialists of Europe in the early modern period was not protestantism but Anabaptism. It is Anabaptism which would lead, through Unitarianism, to rationalism, materialism, utopian socialism, and eventually to scientific socialism.
Thomas Moore – I was under the impression that the several attempts by the Bourgeoisie to take power in Spain was thwarted, to a great degree, by Catholicism and its support of Absolutism. What is this ‘Tridentine Catholicism’ that you claim was favourable to the capitalist class in Spain?
Even more in Haiti they were part of the coup against Aristide and the coup in Chile by augusto Pinochet the coup against Juan Bosh in the Dominican Republic , their participation with the criminal of Argentina and videla where priests killed others priests in Brazil with the military coups Their criminal activities is longer than a rosary and all the concordatos signed with dictators
I always found Johnson’s book on the History of Christianity a useful read on how all the various city states treated them as criminal “heretics” to the original gods – and later once the roles were reversed and the shoe was on the other foot, the believers in the old gods became “heretics” “idolators” to be persecuted.
A bit on and the heretics became the Marcionism and Arians etc etc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heresies_in_the_Catholic_Church
As for the very early Jesus followers such as the Ebionites, there just isn’t sufficient surviving evidence to really make any firm conclusions since they are only mentioned briefly in the passing by those little interested in describing them with any accuracy.
There is also a 10 volumes books written by Deschner that I have I have read and it covers all the criminal acts of the Catholic Church and the Protestants, it does not make any difference how they are called, they are all sects of the catholic church, and they took with them most of the pagan doctrines of Catholicism, they Catholics without a pope, or the Roman bishop. The Russian Orthodox Church also collaborated with Joseph Stalin during WW2 and they participated in the killing and many were carrying guns and rifles, like in Spain many priests participated in the wars and they carried rifles, and machine guns
I didn’t think that Weber’s linking of capitalism and Protestantism was about Protestant churches and religious leaders supporting capitalism but about how Protestant teaching on how an individual should behave (work hard, don’t enjoy yourself) encouraged the accumulation of capital as opposed to spending wealth on luxuries.
This would explain why so many early capitalists were Protestants. In England many early capitalists were “Nonconformists” such as Quakers, Congregationalists and Baptists as non-Anglican Protestants were known (the Church of England being semi-Catholic anyway). Their attitude to non-essential consumption was illustrated by their opposition to drinking alcohol for which they were popularly known. Even in Catholic countries most early capitalists were not Catholics.
So I think it is fair to say that Protestantism was the religion of capitalism. This doesn’t mean that the Roman Catholic Church didn’t support capitalism but that Catholicism didn’t reflect or encourage “the spirit of capitalism”; in fact it was against economic liberalism and free market capitalism wanting to restrain it through social reforms.
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