Page 268 - Encyclopedia Of World History

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I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple,
pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion,
and it is the spirit. • Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931)

and the like. Despite these multiplying political and doc-
Ecumenicism trinal divisions, the ideal of a single universe of believers

lingered throughout Christianity’s second millennium.
cumenicism is the striving for reconciliation and Much as in the other major Eurasian civilizations, a frag-
Eunity across the diversity of Christian denominations. mented reality was being measured against the standard
To a lesser extent, it can also mean a looser goal of of a unified golden age. It was believed that cleavages of
harmony among religions, both Christian and non- nation, race, and class should properly yield to the ulti-
Christian. The term ecumenicism comes from the Greek mate solidarity of the faithful.
word oikoumene, designating the entirety of the inhabited Of course, broader ecumenical patterns of thinking
earth (in the scope of Greek knowledge, roughly the lands had long allowed intellectuals to imagine unity, or at least
from the western Mediterranean to India). It is one convergence, across the boundaries of sect and rite. Mys-
among many modes of universalistic thinking in world tics within the world religions have often believed that
history. ultimate spiritual truth, being higher than any doctrine or
practice, cuts across the world religions. The most ecu-
Premodern Ecumenicism menically minded groups have included world renounc-
The first wave of Christian ecumenicism occurred in the ers like the gnostics, the Sufis, and the Upanishadic
centuries after the split between Rome and Byzantium. forest dwellers. But even more mainstream theologians in
The fairly short-lived unity of early Christendom had each of the world religions have found ways to justify
rested on the success of the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) interreligious openness. For medieval Catholics, there
and Constantinople (381 CE) in stamping out heretical was the idea that other religions, even if they lacked the
sects, and of the far-reaching rule of the Roman empire, crucial centrality of Jesus as savior, at least reflected nat-
which had adopted Christianity as its official religion in ural law and an innate human tendency to seek the
the fourth century.The division between the Latin West, divine. Islam had a framework of respecting other reli-
centered on Rome, and the Orthodox East, centered on gions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism,
Byzantium, came to involve differences deeper than mere as legacies of earlier divine revelations that had become
politics: a divergence of ideas about state–church rela- distorted over time. And the various branches of Hin-
tions, the relative strength of Roman and Greek cultural duism tended to imagine all religions as alternative paths
legacies, and so on. When the Crusades brought more to the same goal. This kind of ecumenical openness has
intense contact between western and eastern Christen- been a recurring theme in those world-historical encoun-
dom, the greater visibility of contrasts only worsened the ters that go beyond trade and migration into the more
state of ill will. Ecumenical thinking in these centuries challenging realm of intellectual dialogue. Religious cos-
revolved around the perceived need to restore the unity mopolitans have always tried to step back from superfi-
of Christendom as one expanding community of believ- cial differences of practice and symbolism, to find
ers defined by correct doctrine and loyalty to one organ- common ground in divine or human nature. Examples
ized church (in practice, given the greater Western interest include the interreligious councils of Akbar and Abu’l
in ecumenicism, the Catholic Church with its pontiff at Fazl in Mughal India, and the entry of Jesuit missionar-
Rome). ies to Confucian China in the 1500s.
To a lesser extent, the same kind of thinking appeared
in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century western Europe. Ecumenicism in Modernity
The Protestant Reformation had put an end even to the The twentieth century saw a second major wave of Chris-
unity of western Christendom, which had rested on the tian ecumenicism. At first the need for a common front
cultural-religious-intellectual syntheses of Aquinas, Dante, in European colonial missionary activity drove the search