Some Historical Roots of Scripture Alone

Here is part of an enlighting article I read over a Pontifications. Check out the link for the full article.




Somehow this changed in the shift from traditional society to modern. We see it already in the Peasants’ Revolts of the late Middle Ages. One of the consistent and most urgent targets of peasant mobs when they sacked monasteries or castles was the archives, in order to burn the documents which established the monks’ or the princes’ claims to ownership of the peasant holdings, hence their claims to annual income in money or produce from the peasants, their claims to obligatory labor services and so forth. Notice what has happened here. In the past, after such a sacking, the monks or the prince would simply have reasserted their claims and would have won their case if they were considered credible. Ancient custom dominated and was adjudicated by the collective memory. The princes, the monks, the barons had the upper hand, the greater claim to credibility but they had to refute counterclaims. By the late Middle Ages, for a variety of reasons, the peasants felt confident enough in their status (partly the result of inflation and scarcity of labor after the Great Plague that added up to increased economic power in the hands of peasants vis-a-vis an increasingly impoverished nobility and monastic network) to think that, if they could just destroy the written documents, they could assert their freedom from rents and duties and have a chance of carrying the day.
Other factors are involved. The Renaissance scholars were engaged in an archaeologizing approach to history, to the past. For whatever reasons, the immediate past had come to represent decline and decrepitude while the distant past, the Glorious Roman antiquity, promised renewal, revival, renascence. So they pored over ancient texts (having little direct, organic linkage to their ancient Roman past) and reconstructed the “Truth” about the ancient heritage. Of course, it bore the marks of their own locus in history, their own predilections and assumptions. But they didn’t know that. In the process, the written text became more important than the living, organic memory–because they either no longer had access to the living traditing of that memory or longer trusted such living bearers of that memory as they did have access to.
Coupled with this was the steady spread of Roman civil law which, unlike common law, depended on codification and written texts more than collective memory. In a world in which ancient custom, living memory is up for grabs; in a world in which great conflict brews over the heritage of the distant past, an easy but in the long term fateful shortcut is to appeal to written texts–if you are in power and therefore get to determine the meaning of the written texts. If you can discredit the living bearers of a tradition who are waning in influence or power, who seem down-at-the-heels and disreputable, then you can introduce a constitution or a set of Scriptures as, in themselves, the more authoritative.