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…whatsoever your sickness is,
know you certainly, that it is God's visitation.
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Book of Common Prayer, Order for the
Visitation of the Sick
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Traditional Christian doctrine held that illness was caused
by sin. This belief was exactly in line with the gospels*
and was specifically confirmed by the Lateran Council in 1215.
So it was that for centuries the sick and dying could safely
be shunned and ignored. They must have deserved their condition,
and attempts to help them were attempts to defy God's will.
Monstrous human births were caused by the Devil having corrupted
infants" souls, even before birth.
Since disease was God's punishment for sin, it was clearly
a pious duty to accept that punishment. To minimise it or seek
to avoid it would be further sin. This attitude led to a form
of fatalism still widespread in the East and once common in
Western Christendom too. If God wants a person to suffer or
die, it is plainly blasphemous for that person to try to avoid
their fate. Since the victims of plague were destined to die
by God's decree, the disease could not really be contagious
in any conventional sense , and there was no point in taking
precautions against catching it. Many thousands of devout Christians
thus suffered avoidable death and suffering. For example, during
the Black Death in Britain in 1665, pious Christians declined
to take precautions for the protection of their families, claiming
that they did not wish to pervert God's will. As Daniel
Defoe noted, places where this fatalistic attitude was common
suffered significantly higher mortality rates than elsewhere.
Well into the twentieth century, devout Christians relied on
Psalm 91, which they said clearly confirmed that God would protect
them from pestilence and other evils. The devout were held to
be immune from epidemics, whatever the evidence might be. To
be inoculated against disease was to doubt God's word,
and therefore plainly sinful. So it was that many of the devout,
and their trusting children, died unnecessarily in epidemics
following the advice, or the orders, of their religious leaders.
Lepers were treated as God required in the Old Testament:
He is a leprous man, he is unclean: the priest shall pronounce
him utterly unclean; his plague is in his head. And the leper
in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and his
head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip,
and shall cry, Unclean, unclean.
Leviticus 13:44-45
God had condemned lepers to a living death, so Christians behaved
accordingly. A ceremony was performed for the living dead parallel
to that for the fully dead. When someone was thought to have
contracted the disease, a neighbour would denounce the unfortunate
person to the Church. An investigation would then be undertaken
on behalf of the Church, often without medical assistance. If
leprosy was established the parish priest would perform the
"Office for the Seclusion of a Leper". He would go
to the afflicted person's house, sprinkle the person with
holy water, and offer him or her the chance to make confession
for the last time. The afflicted person was then taken to the
local Church where he or she was made to adopt a pose "in
the manner of a dead man" before the altar, beneath trestles
covered by black cloth. The idea was that the leper should resemble
a body in a coffin. During the service, lepers were informed
that their disease was God's punishment for sin, and sometimes,
paradoxically, that this was a special divine favour. According
to the ritual used at Vienna, the priest would say: "My
friend, it pleaseth Our Lord that thou shouldst be infected
with this malady, and thou hast great grace at the hands of
Our Lord that he desireth to punish thee for thy iniquities
in this world"*. After
a ceremony the leper was dragged backwards or otherwise escorted
out of the church. Earth was cast at his or her feet, as into
a new grave, while the priest said "Be thou dead to the
world, but alive again unto God". The person was then admonished
never to enter a church or other public place again, and was
banished from the community. Lepers were dead not only spiritually
and socially but also legally. They could not inherit property.
At the Council of Westminster in 1200 they were forbidden to
make wills or appear in court. The Church taught that the exterior
physical body reflected the interior soul, so anyone with such
a dreadful disease must have been excessively sinful. Leprosy
was believed either to be a venereal disease or to be caused
by lustful thoughts. Either way, leprosy was the visible sign
of a soul corroded by the vitriol of sexual sin.
Since lepers were by definition given to sin, and excluded
from the community of good Christians, they provided convenient
scapegoats. By marginalising them, Christendom made them into
targets for unwholesome fantasies. Like all other minority groups
they were accused of unlikely crimes. In 1321, for example,
they were accused of poisoning wells in France. Lepers in Périgueux
were rounded up and tortured until they confessed their guilt,
and were then burned at the stake. The confessions prompted
a terror similar to that more usually generated by Jews and
witches. A story grew that a huge network of lepers, funded
by the Muslims and aided by the Jews, had planned to poison
all water supplies in the land. Forged letters turned up confirming
the foul plot. King Philip V ordered the arrest of all lepers
in France. Those who failed to confess were to be tortured.
Those who did confess were to be burned alive, their goods being
forfeit to the King. No records were kept of how many lepers
died as a result*.
Equating sin with illness is now widely considered absurd,
though it is has been confirmed even by liberal denominations
even in recent times. A report of the Anglican Church from the
Lambeth Conference in 1958 confirmed the principle while shifting
ground to avoid the traditional implications, so that the blame
did not need to be pinned on any individual: "It is cruel
and false to brand every sufferer as a sinner: much suffering
and sickness is due to the sin either of other persons or of
society in general". Since then the whole subject has become
an embarrassment, except to a few sects that continue to hold
to the traditional teaching. Mainstream clergymen go to extreme
lengths to pretend that the biblical passages that confirm the
link between sin and illness do not exist, or else mean something
quite different.
Not so long ago Christians accepted the views of St Augustine
that deaf mutes were debarred from the faith*.
Like Augustine, they cited St Paul's assertion that "faith
cometh by hearing" (Romans 10:17). The deaf were thus incapable
of becoming Christians. For centuries they were marginalised,
rejected and persecuted by all right-thinking Christians. The
Church would not allow them to marry, nor to inherit. The deaf
were not the only ones persecuted in this way — so were
those with other disabilities, since disabilities were also
evidence of God's unfavourable judgement. As late as the
1970s Roman Catholic priests were protesting publicly about
Communion being given to disabled children. God had no use for
the physically impaired. Physical handicaps were, along with
servile birth and illegitimacy, bars to ordination. Canon 1029
of the Roman code of canon law still requires those to be ordained
to have appropriate physical qualities.
 Another
idea propounded by the Church, and explained in Malleus
Maleficarum*, was
that God allowed demons to steal children and substitute subhuman
infants, called changelings, in their place. This was
likely to happen to children before they had been baptised,
or before their mother had been churched. Such stories were
used to encourage baptism and churching, and also to explain
the existence of weak and sickly children. Sometimes children
had withered limbs, or were deaf, blind, backward or crippled.
Roman Catholics and Protestants alike imagined that these handicapped
children — these changelings — were not human beings
at all. Martin Luther, for example, advised that they be drowned.
They were he said only lumps of flesh lacking a soul*.
This sort of approach was not an isolated exception. Walter
Bachmann, who made a study of Christian attitudes to changelings,
summed up the position as follows:
It is doubtful if the handicapped have ever, in any other
cultural domain in human history, been more wronged and despised
or treated with greater intolerance and inhumanity, than in
Christendom*.
Christian priorities are made clear in its surviving buildings.
Almost every ancient village in Europe has a church, but almost
none has a hospital — and the hospitals that were built
were usually to ensure the segregation of lepers.
Vestiges of traditional Christian attitudes remain - many Churches
still disriminate against the handicapped in a variety of ways
- emloyment, marriage, rights within the Church, etc although
secular laws are slowly eliminating the ways they are allowed
to discriminate. For example it took an anti-discrimination
suit by the American Civil Liberties Union againt the Oral Robets
University before disabled people were allowed on the campuses
of all God-inspired evangelical American universities. *
It is notable that the worst excesses were particularly Christian.
Before the Churches" rise to power, non-Christians had
formed rational explanations for illness and infirmity. Socrates
(in Plato's Cratylus) recognised that the deaf
were just as intelligent as everyone else. When the Church was
most powerful, the only people effectively exempt from its rules
— rich and influential nobles — were able to teach
their deaf children to read and write. In this way they circumvented
Church restrictions, and such children were permitted to marry
and inherit. If churchmen had thought about this, they could
easily have reached the same conclusion as Socrates.
More social issues:
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