Page 259 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1560 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Two patterns of religion in world history
have been the spread of religions and the use
of religion in healing. This small Catholic
chapel, El Santeria de Chimayo, in New
Mexico was built by Spanish settlers and is
a pilgrimage site for people seeking cures.

Religious Expansion
and Division
Meanwhile, for a thousand years Buddhists were on the
move. They came from India into many parts of China,
just as they had expanded into Sri Lanka. Mahayana, a
new form of Buddhism, developed in northern India. It
was a more aggressive and proselytizing faith than the
passive Buddhism of earlier years. Shrines and giant stat-
ues of Buddha marked the path of their progress.
Emperor Shomu in Japan embraced Buddhism in 737.
Spared in an epidemic, he credited Buddha and erected
the Great Buddha at Nara. Like Christianity and Islam,
Buddhism spread not only with armies but also through
energetic missionaries and proselytizers. Each left in its
trail and on its soil great houses of worship and thou-
sands of smaller ones, places for pilgrimage and devo-
tion, libraries for the encouragement of learning and piety
—in short: civilizations. some princes in the Holy Roman Empire (much of
While western Catholic Christianity that was centered today’s Germany) and elsewhere, these questioners
in Rome dominated Europe, with the Muslim present in undercut the teachings and much of the edifice of
the West, in Spain, and threatening in the East toward Catholicism, though it continued to dominate in most of
Vienna, and with Jews surviving as an often sequestered Europe. But as the new movements called Protestant after
minority, one church system set the terms for religious 1529 made their way, often in alliance with the state in
and much of civil life. The Catholic church was in posi- Germany, England, Scandinavia, the Lowlands, and else-
tion to enforce loyalty and persecute dissenters.The head where, they helped assure that Europe would be divided
of Catholicism, the pope, could not only field an army religiously. This became doubly evident as Protestants
but also demand and frequently gain obedience from themselves were divided, in no position to be attracted
monarchs whose people would be denied access to back to Rome as a unit or to be destroyed as one.
heaven if their rulers did not acquiesce to Rome. When the western hemisphere became a subject of
It was in that context that all over Europe restless knowledge in Europe, Catholic Christianity prevailed in
reformers began to question the Catholic system and to the central and southern Americas. Meanwhile, Dutch,
subvert it. Their main instrument was the preached and Swedish, and especially English churches had turned
taught Bible, a book of divine revelation that became Protestant. Merchants and explorers from these countries
available in the fifteenth century CE as Johannes Guten- dominated in that part of America that became the
berg’s invention of movable type and new presses helped United States, as well as in all of Canada but Quebec.
ordinary people gain access to it and its message. In
German-speaking Saxony a monk, Martin Luther, after Renaissance, Enlightenment,
1517 preached a gospel of liberation and came to storm and Secularism
the official church, which hounded him in turn. Joined by While the faith was spreading, Christianity and to a lesser
Swiss and other reforming scholars and with support of extent all religions in the sixteenth century began to face