In the novels of the Western world today, it seems to me that religion struggles to be of interest to readers. Increasingly, secularism looms as the predominant humour in the novels of modern writers in America as well as in Europe. It would be very difficult and probably futile to spend much time in a scholarly effort to explain this grand phenomenon. My hunch would be, however, that the explanation might be “the absence of challenge, threat, widespread need or impending disaster.”
In the Army there’s a term widely used in combat: “foxhole faith.” In the face of death, the soldier quickly learns to recognize that God is in charge of everything and to pray fervently. But much of life in the Western world is complacent, not so threatening. It seems there is the perception that God is no longer needed.
In the early Middle Ages, however, the era in which The Sebastian Chronicles occur, faith was at the epicenter of life. For most people, i.e, the peasants, life was “ugly, brutal and short”, as one historian put it. Cultivating the earth by the sweat of one’s brow was what most people, i.e. the peasants, were doing - with the threat of diseased harvests, floods, intemperate weather, lack of law, and greedy landlords always in the offing. Add to that the scourge of war – forced conscriptions that took the peasant away from his land, the additional taxes in kind to pay for the fighting, the loss to families when their principal breadwinner did not return.
Another constant calamity was disease: dysentery, TB, arthritis, compounded by lifelong hard, physical labor, influenza, plague, born in the midst of filth, bad water, rats, fleas and head lice, to name just a few perils. Infant mortality was heavy, to say the least, female deaths in childbirth were commonplace.
And war was inevitable. Fighting was simply “what a warrior does.” During the long reign of Charlemagne, there were few years when the king did not drag his warriors out to the Maifeld to go and wage war against somebody – usually the closest pagan.
Clearly, the early Middle Ages were filled with dread and death at an early age. So men and women prayed. They clung to their God and their Church with desperation and with profound hope. The Christian Church was only a few centuries old. It was primitive by today’s standards. There weren’t enough priests and consequently a great deal of ignorance on the part of the people. But the Church was emerging as an enormous force. Even the lords and monarchs found it increasingly difficult to challenge.
Why? Because the people of that era had great need of consolation and comfort, spiritual help and understanding. God was real and immediate.
So if you are going to read novels about the Middle Ages, you are going to find a lot or religion! Unlike today, it was a major force then in the lives of the people. What I find most striking about that reality is that, as far as I can see, the peoples’ faith was genuine and it sustained them, even though its major influence came in the modest circumstances of rural life, amidst ignorance and poverty. Somehow that seems biblically appropriate.
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