This Week’s Newsletter

Posted by The Treasurer, on September 10th, 2017

Here is this weeks newsletter: St Stephen’s News XXVIII No 35

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1 comment to This Week’s Newsletter

• The Reverend Peter M. Hawkins

  September 10, 2017 at 11:59 AM

  This is a replay of the Gibbon Thesis and misunderstands the nature of Roma Society and it’s problems.
  Roman sexual morality was about the status of the individuals involved. Thus a man may marry a person, usually a woman, but could be a man, of the same class as himself. A slave could be made the same class as the man for the purpose of marriage. A man would have sexual relations with those inferior to him in his household as a matter of course. He should not do so in some one else’s household without the agreement of the housholder. Marriage was monogamous.
  Women could also be libertine if they had the resources.
  Christians had to work out their sexual morality on the basis of Jewish sexual morality and the example of Christ. Thus it was best not to engage in sex at all. This was a new idea, the Romans did have periods of abstention, but permament celibacy was an astonishing idea. If one was to marry, then the Roman practice of Monogamy was to be followed and the Jewish practice of Polygamy to be rejected. Other sexual relationships were to be avoided.
  The Roman Empire certainly lasted two thousand years, and continues in the various continuing medieval states of Europe today. The problems were not about sexual moraily but about resources. In the expanding period the Empire was funded by the conquest of new resources in the areas around the Mediteranean being the main highway of the Empire. There came a time when distant resources were not worth the effort, so Hadrian’s Walls in the North of Britain and in North Africa, set economic limits.
  As the Western part of the Empire was overcome by “barbarians”, so the Roman way of life was continued in self supporting “villas” which we would call monasteries, and they continue to this day. the most ancient is perhaps that of Saint Catherine, at Sinai. These institutions taught the local people the civilized way of life, how to read, write, sing, play music, make paper, glass, steel, iron, plumbing, sewage disposal,cut stone,how to be hospitable, to care for the sick and so forth. Thus Charlemagne used the Benedictine order to civilize his barbarian peoples, and his Chapelle at Aachen shows us the way forward, it is modelled on those to be seen at the time in Byzantium.
  Thus the church spread amongst the barbarians and civilized them as their tutor, and that role continues to this day in Europe and thus the English Government is representative like a Church Synod, but not really democratic, and is centred on the Abbey of Saint Peter and Shrine of Saint Edward, being the Minster in the West of London.
  The expansion of the English Kingdom to include territories across the globe followed the Roman Example and was for profit. The government and the religion of such, was that as inherited from Rome, Representative and Ecclesial.
  Democracy was not an idea that Romans used and only comes to the fore in Europe in the 18th Century. The American Revolution at the time seemed contrary to what the Roman and Christian inheritence had given the world. The idea that the payment of taxes demanded representation in government, was surprisng, for it had never been so before.