Catholicism

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22 July 2022

Catholicism, or more specifically Roman Catholicism, refers to the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. Roughly speaking, we may outline the origins of Catholicism as follows.

From the various Judaisms of the first century AD, two victorious sects, or tendencies, emerged. The process was messy and complex, but once the dust settled these groups mainly headed toward what would become known as Christianity and rabbinic Judaism.^[1]

Although Christianity began translating the Bible early into other languages, we might say to a first approximation that the language of earliest Christianity was Greek, and that they used a Greek New Testament and the Septuagint as their Bible. As the Church consolidated institutionally, it moved toward a hierarchical organization with various sorts of clergy, headed by bishops.

Various power struggles ensued, but we might say that the mainstream of Christianity was noticeably something like a single organization for a long time. If not a single organization, a network of organizations that mutually recognized each other and, roughly speaking, held to a view that they mutually held as theologically orthodox. We could call this organization-like thing the "Catholic Church", in an early sense, and we could call the various splinter movements outside of it "heresies".

Yet, over the centuries, much of Christianity, step by step, began sorting itself into two distinguishable camps. This split was influenced by some of the same realities that forced the Roman Empire to split into two separate administrative halves. About 476, the Western Roman Empire fell altogether, while the the East limped on until 1453; historians call the East after the fall of Rome the Byzantine Empire, although its inhabitants called it the Roman Empire.

For the earliest Christians who left behind much literature, the Bible was for practical purposes the Greek New Testament and the Greek Septuagint, although it was recognized that many of the Old Testament books had been translated from Hebrew. In an Empire bringing its core language of Latin onto a Greek substrate, it was to be expected that a movement like Christianity would follow the trend. A noticeable pick-up in Latin usage in Christian texts occurred in the 4th century -- that is, after the time that the Empire was divided. Around 400 AD, Jerome produced a translation of the Bible into Latin, and notably he preferred Hebrew to Greek readings for his Old Testament. His work was useful because of a shift that had been occurring in parts of the church toward a greater use of Latin in worship. After the fall of the Western Empire in 476, the cultural and governmental split was very noticeable: the West used Latin, the East Greek. There were other groups, of course, and hopefully I will cover them at the appropriate time.

The end of the (Western) Roman Empire did not mean the end of the use of Latin. In fact, Latin held so tightly that the languages today known as Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian are its derivatives. And you could say that the void left by the Roman Empire was filled by the Catholic Church. While the Western Empire fell, the Western Church succeeded it as an international institution based in Rome, using the Empire's language, ruled by a Bishop of Rome. The Church, though not a government in the ordinary sense, claimed the authority to dispense rewards and punishments, developed a body of law, held territory, and even launched wars. Meanwhile, the Eastern Roman Empire was ruled from Constantinople, the bishop of which held a position in the East analogous to that of the Bishop of Rome in the West.

Tensions between the two sides came to a head in 1054, with a series of mutual anathemas, definitively splitting the Church in two. In the West were Roman Catholics; in the East the Eastern Orthodox. At the risk of sounding offensive, I can say that, for myself and many others, the most interesting intellectual and historical developments, at least of the kind that will be of interest for the purposes of this website, occurred in Western, Latin-based Christianity. In the long run, it is the West that produced most modern Christianity. Using Wikipedia's count, there 1280 million Catholics, 920 million Protestants, and just 270 million Eastern Orthodox.

Though Jerome's translation wasn't the whole Bible, and some books had to be revised by others, broadly speaking we can say that Jerome's Vulgate gained support and came to dominate in the Western tradition. For the New Testament, it basically supplanted knowledge of Greek -- the Western Church did its theology and biblical study in general straight from the Vulgate. For the Hebrew Bible, it completely supplanted knowledge of Hebrew. For about 1,000 years, nobody in Western Christianity bothered to systematically study the Hebrew Bible in its original languages.^[2]

When Protestantism started about 1517 AD, along with it came a move back to the sources (ad fontes, as the cool kids say). Catholicism resisted this move for quite a while. As late as about a century ago, English-speaking Catholics were still using Latinized names for biblical figures, for example.^[3]

For the most part, it's fair to say that this resistance to Hebrew translation has evaporated in the Catholic Church. While Catholics do still hold to a broader canon of the Old Testament than the Hebrew Bible, in those portions that coincide, they largely use the Hebrew as the basis for their translations.