David Quinn
A protective mask has been put on the face of a statue of Italy's patron saint, St. Francis, in San Fiorano.
Photo: Marzio Toniolo/via REUTERS We shouldn’t take for granted the moral revolution that Christianity started in the world, writes David Quinn
Sometimes you read something that really sticks in your mind. Recently I came across one of those facts, namely that the first hospital in Wuhan, the city in China where this coronavirus originated, was founded by an Italian Franciscan, Bishop Eustachius Zanoli in 1880.
We imagine that hospitals are something that arise naturally in the course of a society’s development, but that is simply not the case. In country after country the first hospitals were founded by Christians, and that includes China, a very ancient civilisation.
Today, we tend to take for granted the monumental achievements of Christianity and the moral revolution it started when it first appeared in the world.
Just before the lockdown began, I attended a talk by the historian of Church art, Liz Lev in the University Church on St Stephen’s Green. Her topic was the Sistine Chapel. We still marvel at Michelangelo’s art, but do we really see it through the eyes of those who first beheld it? The answer is, probably not, because it has become so familiar to us. Liz Lev’s purpose was to try and enable us to see his work as if we were viewing it for the first time, and to properly appreciate his achievement and how innovative it was.
Fresh eyes
I think we need to learn to see Christianity again with fresh eyes and to appreciate how it must have looked when it was new. To many of us, it has come to seem very stale, because it is now so old, at least in our part of the world. We take it for granted, and a lot of people have come to despise it, because Christians have committed so many sins and also because the institutional Church has often cared more for its own worldly position than its true mission, which is showing the true face of Christ to the world.
A number of books I’ve read in the last year or so have helped me to appreciate again what the Church must have looked like when it was young and how it transformed the world for the better. They are: Inventing the Individual by Larry Siedentop, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought by Robert Louis Wilkens, The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark and Dominion by Tom Holland.
These books (only Wilkens is a Christian out of the four of them) bring out how radical Christianity looked compared with the mores of Ancient Rome and the pagan world in general. The only thing comparable at the time was Judaism, which placed great stress on charity. But Judaism is not an evangelical religion and it did not seek to convert the gentiles.
Once the very early Christians – all of whom were Jewish – decided that gentiles could also become Christians, Christianity began to enjoy explosive growth with its message of love and mercy, forgiveness and repentance, of a God who had become Man and who died and rose to save us from us sins, of our moral equality before God.
Christians from the very start began to perform acts of charity. We read in the Acts of the Apostles how the Christians of Antioch (in modern Turkey) sent aid to Christians in Judea when Judea was struck by famine.
Christians are sometimes accused of teaching ‘pie in the sky’. In fact, Christianity is a very practical religion. When we see aid being sent to disaster-struck regions today, we must understand that, to all intents and purposes, this has its origins in the acts and practices of those first Christians.
The early Church aroused plenty of pagan opposition and savage persecution, but one of the things that impressed ordinary people was that Christians would risk their lives to save others.
What is particularly relevant in the context of the present pandemic is that during truly devastating plague outbreaks in the Roman world in the 2nd and 3rd Centuries it was often Christians who stayed behind in the plague-ridden cities to care for the sick and dying.
When we see doctors and nurses fighting against this disease…we are seeing the heirs of Christianity even though many will not be Christians”
There was, for instance, the Antonine Plague of the 2nd Century which may have killed off a quarter of the population of the Roman Empire of that time, and then the even worse Plague of Cyprian of the following century. On both occasions many Christians performed heroically and that made a lasting impression.
Why did they behave heroically? Because the object of their worship, Jesus Christ, had told them to “love their neighbours as themselves”, to look after the sick and the poor and the hungry, and to see his face in everyone.
Rodney Stark points out that the way Christians looked after each other during these terrible plague outbreaks also meant that their survival rate was higher than among those who adopted an ‘every man for himself’ approach.
As he says: “Christian values of love and charity had, from the beginning, been translated into norms of social service and charity.”
Again, this was something new in the world. What other religion outside of Judaism encouraged people to be willing to die for others (except in battle) in this way?
When we see doctors and nurses fighting against this disease, with all the tools of modern medicine at their disposal, we are seeing the heirs of Christianity even though many of them will not be Christians and could even be hostile to the Faith. They might protest that they are inspired by humanism, not religion.
But that only goes to show the now taken-for-granted nature of our societies because even secular humanism is built on Christianity. Even secular humanism rests on the essentially Christian (and Jewish) belief that we are all morally equal.