 The Myth of the World
Penitence and Fear of God
Isaia said: "The people had not evolved towards those who struck them, in fact there was among
them a certain hardness of heart combined with a paralysis of intelligence." Thinking about it
one could understand that in God it would have been the best thing but for them God remained a
distant uncertain Being. Luckily, God has some representatives on earth that are the saints. Their
bodies are almost deified by the people, they are exposed to the public, they are transported in
procession, they are left to be touched, they are considered physical presences of the divine.
Miracles represent the presence of the saints in the earth, a return of God that had been disturbed
by the action of the Malignant.
What did the authorities do against the "the evil ardent"? The Abbot, Bishop and Duke, after being
consulted, ordered a three days feast, and after that a penitence had to begin again. The penitence
of the believers, the synod of the bishops and the action of the relics had had good effects on the
"the evil of the ardent", therefore it was useless to look for an explanation for this epidemic
arrest. If the veneration of the relics involved all men, the penitence could take particular
forms depending on the social classes. It is really against these the prelates reacted, threatened
with being put out of the church and deprived of external salvation. The varied components of the
social classes made an oath putting their hands on the relics, through this peace, public order was
maintained in the feudal society, in fact in that period there was the same desire between all the
bishops, which was to organise a society, headed by the clergy, followed by the warriors, and by
the farmers. This three-functional system had never corresponded to the reality.
In One Thousand in the western countries, since then, inaccurate geographical notions became a
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"In the Middle Ages it was the universal belief that the world had to end by the year One Thousand.
" This phrase by Jules Michelet hasn't stopped being discussed yet since a century ago.
For men of the year One Thousand, the end of the world wasn’t improbable, but the end of the world
didn’t provoke only terror in people, but for some unfortunate ones, it was the object of hope.
Waiting for this end which became particularly acute around the end of the year One Thousand, due
to the calamities that happened in that period, it seemed that the order of the seasons was inverted
that the elements followed new laws. Another calamity was the famine that went together with the end
of all morals and the transgression of taboos. That famine brought the worst aggressions, the plague
seemed to bring the warriors to a conversion, in fact, under the control of the church they gave up
robberies and violence. With the conversion they realised that they needed to purify their souls
and therefore big donations were made to the church to obtain the mercy of God.
cultural reality with the birth of Christianity.
Almost all the European inhabitants were baptised and could be considered Christians, but their
faith was a bit particular, it was not certain.
The theory that there was another life besides that terrestrial one existed and for which men got
ready on earth. Men of the year One Thousand, obsessed by the anguish of salvation and by the fear
of hell, tried to ransom their sins or to acquire suffrages for which they would have needed to
face the celestial judgement. Therefore they delegated the function of prayer to the experts and
the monks had the assignment to calm the anger of God; to get mercy from Him, through the miracles,
that re-establish order, upset by the sins. The development of monachism was the exact answer,
it was a sign of deep spiritual aspirations that had sometimes taken excessive forms called
heretical by the church.
The remarkable figures of monachism thought the salvation of man really came true only by a
break-up of the world and its dominant values: warlike violence, sex and money. The monasteries
were made to be islands of holiness. Some reformal movements were developed with the purpose of
finding the purity and integrity of the Rule of St. Benedict.
Again from the origins of monachism, cenobytism was developed in the West, while Hermitism was
developed in the East. At the horizon of monachism, Hermitism or a community was the conversion
of the world and its salvation. It was necessary for this reason to break with the world, to better
conform ones body and ones spirit to the wishes of God through his ascent and to pray better. To
die for the world, without a doubt, but to live with Him a true life.
