September 25, 2022
by Linda A. Dove
In my talk today, we’ll discover some roots of our many-branched Unitarian-Universalist tree, mainly in Europe. Later, we’ll climb some of our younger branches reaching into the western world. This way, I hope all of us will come to share an appreciation of how our roots and branches spread, and how we must now stand tall as a mature, life-sustaining tree. I hope this will help fertilize seedlings for the future of HUU.
UU-ism has a history of over 2,000 years and here I can only condense rich details into broad summary for the first 1,500 years, centered on Europe. I’ll emphasize events which proved turning points on our ancestors’ path and how those events point to themes relevant for us today.
I came to live here in 2009. If anything, I was spiritual agnostic/humanist. My only knowledge of UUs was from a visit to the Arlington, Virginia congregation. I found that uncomfortable; the congregation was too large for me, the worship too formal and uninspiring, and no one welcomed me, even in coffee time. Of course, it wasn’t fair to make judgements in a single visit; but I did so out of spiritual longing. After I settled here, I discovered HUU. All I remember is loving the old school-house, observing how the congregational personality was outspoken, and then, in the potluck, being wooed by the membership chair. Though protesting I was not a joiner, I came back and became a member before too long. I felt comfortable with you friendly folk also traveling your various spiritual paths. And, importantly, my soul resonates with our Principles. As I talk, you can refer to them, just after the preface in “Singing the Living Tradition.”
The term “Unitarian” wasn’t around until the seventeenth century, and “Universalist” even later. But the enlightenment and scientific rationalism of the seventeenth century began to make secularism respectable. Debates about how truth can be known—faith or science—grew heated. And notice how today we UUs still tend to live in our heads and take positions that often lead to factions and friction—in the non-scientific past, usually about how many angels can dance on the point of a pin. The fallings out have, in my view, reduced UU-ism’s potential to focus on making a positive impact. Even today, there’s not universal acknowledgment that truth, deriving from experiential faith-based sources, is valid, though of a different quality from truth logically- or empirically-derived.
In this series, I’ll identify the most important historical figures who’ve contributed to UU-ism. And you can find the details of their lives on line. We need to honor them, including all those I can’t mention now, for their compassionate ideas and deeds, and their sincerity, courage and sacrifices in resisting authoritarianism and injustice.
In the first three centuries after Jesus, Christians were respectful of other faiths, such as animism, sun and moon worship, and prophets and sages of Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism. Even then, Christians debated issues such as to whether Jesus was a human prophet or divine. But they focused on him as a model of how to live a good life and, thus, how, by being good themselves, they could experience Jesus’s heaven on earth.
By the third century A.D., the Roman Empire was declining. The ruling elite saw Christianity as a dangerous populist movement and the Christian faith as attack on the Emperor’s divinity. In the next century, the Emperor Constantine personally converted to the faith and decreed Christianity one among many official Roman religions.Whether deliberate or not, this was a far-reaching strategy: “If you can’t beat “em, join ’em.” Then, as the Empire crumbled, the Catholic Church took over as the Holy Roman Empire. As with any institution, the Church was keen to build its authority; it did so by discouraging ideas contrary to ever-evolving official doctrines.
Over the next twelve hundred years, the Church became rigidly doctrinaire and controlling but it failed to stifle bitter, theological disputes. The main issues raised are important because they contain the roots of later Unitarian and Universalist ideas. In a nutshell, for centuries, the key theological questions were:-
- Does God’s mercy or our good works on earth lead to our after-life in heaven?
- Do humans have free will or are we predestined in our fate?
- Should Church sacraments, such as the Eucharist, be exclusive or open to all?
Notice how these early questions seeded our Principles today—most notably, our emphasis on compassion, individual freedom and responsibility, and inclusiveness.
The Church responded to the controversies with ever more articles of faith, rules, and punishments for disobedience.
- The aim of creating heaven on earth through the good life was translated into the doctrine of a heaven in an afterlife for the faithful and a fiery hell for the unfaithful.
- Free will was replaced with predestination. The absurdity was that the Church was in charge of interpreting God’s will to people who were denied the right to take personal responsibility for their actions. This didn’t stop the Church punishing those who acted against its dictates.
- The Church’s refusal to offer the sacraments to all kept its hold over the faithful and increased exclusivity.
The early centuries also saw bitter battles over core doctrines of faith expressed in creeds. When I was searching for a spiritual home here I visited several Anglican Churches, the denomination of my early years. But the dogmatism of their creeds put me off. On learning UUs don’t have a creed, my heart responded.
In the early Middle ages, two key leaders in promoting a creed were Athanasius and Arius. Several creeds were in contention. The quarrels focused on whether God was three-in-one, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, or the One God. In the sixth century, with careful, negotiated wording, the Trinitarian creeds triumphed and the Arian-Unitarians became an underground movement for the next thousand years.
In this way, the new concepts of orthodoxy and heresy arose. Arius’ monotheists were labelled heretics and this label gave the medieval Church social control that evolved from routine excommunications and burnings-at-the-stake into the unholy tortures of the inquisition. In Christian churches today, you’ll come across different creeds but I admire our UU Principles that reject rigid doctrines and unquestioning faith. Instead, we espouse “A free and responsible search for truth . . .” and “the right of conscience . . .”.
As we’ll see, UU-ism was still entangled in the disputes between Athanasianism and Arianism centuries later in the New World. And we only settled on our Principles in the twentieth century.
Dee will now lead us with:
HYMN 138, “These Things Shall Be.”
In the ninth century, three centuries after the Catholic Church decided God was three-in-one, Scotus fertilized more seeds of today’s Universalism. He defended the idea that, if the Divine was loving and merciful, he would grant salvation to repentant sinners and not consign them to damnation. In the eleventh century, mainly over this, the Greek Orthodox Church broke away from the Roman Church. And to be fair, the Church did compromise by offering temporary purgatory for sinners on the way to heaven or hell. Read Danté’s Inferno again to get the flavor. Today, remember, our UU Principles are permeated with the idea of human love and compassion for “the independent web of all existence of which we are a part.” We owe a lot to Scotus for our Universalism today.
Our first principle, “Respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person,” derives too from early ideas. For example, in the fifth century, the age of St. Augustine, the puritanical, reclusive Cather monks, a subgroup of Arians, promoted the idea of two Gods, one good and one evil. The Cathers managed to contradict both the Trinitarian orthodoxy and their Unitarian Arian brothers; and they were severely persecuted. This movement, though, offered the Church a powerful way of spreading fear of the Devil and helped keep the superstitious masses in line. Today, we UUs, contemplating our first principle, still wrestle with how to deal with evil while respecting everyone, no matter what.
In the later Middle Ages of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the tree of UU-ism began to sprout branches across Europe. John Wycliff made and disseminated the first English translation of the Latin Bible, aided by the new printing press. This was against the Church’s practice of having priests interpret Christianity to the ordinary people who had no direct access to Latin scripture and today this is echoed in our American and UU emphasis on individual determination and sense-making. Wycliff also campaigned against corruption in institutions such as monasteries and the priesthood. His writings were suppressed but he was a key figure in the trend towards the Protestant “reform-ation” and democratization—our UU “use of the democratic process” principle. One example: in the next century, the liberal city of Prague began offering communion not just to Church members but to all who wanted it. Green leaves sprouting on the tree of Universalist inclusiveness.
And in the sixteenth century, Luther and Calvin advanced the, by-then, militant Protestant movements. Luther protested the Church’s loss of spirituality and was condemned as a heretic. Like Wycliff, he also railed against corruption and exploitation of the poor and vulnerable—selling of indulgences, for example,—and so he too advanced the UU social justice principle.
Calvin’s tome entitled, The Institute of the Christian Religion, advocated similarly for direct access to God through his Word, the Bible, not via priests. He was also against the doctrine of predestination, though off-and-on. In all this, he fertilized UU concern for our “free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” the “right of conscience . . .”, and “pursuit of justice for all.” And by espousing monotheism he helped the Arian-Unitarians emerge into daylight.
Michael Servetus was a like-minded colleague of Calvin. A medical doctor and a polymath, he was courageous, fanatical, and ego-driven. If you like suspense and mystery novels, do explore his controversial history. He established branches of UU-ism in Transylvania and Romania by spreading Calvin’s writings. He reinforced the ideas of a unitary God and mankind’s free will. But he alienated both the Catholic and the Protestant authorities before going into hiding. Calvin notoriously betrayed his whereabouts in Vienna and later he was burned at the stake by the Catholics.
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, many other social, cultural and scientific events helped fray the binding ropes of faith. I mention only two here. Copernicus’s empirical observations overthrew the idea of the earth and mankind as the center of God’s universe. This revolution towards truth as evidence- and reason-based, rather than faith-based, sowed more seeds of secularism and threatened Christianity’s monopoly on truth. Today, as you know, many UUs are secular and humanist; and “sense-making” is one of our HUU tenets. The discovery of the Americas also shook the Church when its missionaries evangelized among the “savages” of far-flung territories. This led to more debate about inclusiveness—now a tenet HUU holds dear.
During this time, Servetus’ influence spread from western to eastern Europe, mainly through three key figures, Hungarian, David Ference, and Italians, Dr. Georgio Biandrata and Lelius Socinus. Their story is complex, but, in essence, Biandrata’s and Ference’s writings and sermons marked the beginning of an identifiable “Unitarianism,” named as such. The Transylvanian king adopted Unitarianism for its tolerance and free thought. But he ruled, ingeniously, that Transylvania would have no official religion. This was a strategy to keep the peace among the many factious Christian and Muslim sects there. Echoes among our US founding fathers?
The next developments owed a lot to Socinus’ son, Faustus. In sum, after many typical ups-and-downs and fallings-out, Unitarianism spread across Poland. The age of reason, following Francis Bacon’s work, was well underway by this time and in 1680 a new Eastern-European Racovian Catechism espoused Unitarianism and questioned religious beliefs that couldn’t be validated scientifically. Of course, today, some of us query this as the sole basis for truth that is internal, experiential.
Nevertheless, through the 1700s, our ancestor UUs were still Christians and they spread out geographically, mainly because of the Catholic Church’s continued persecution of dissidents. They fled, seeking freedom of worship from old Europe to east Russia, Hungary, Romania, and the Netherlands. From there, next time, I’ll be happy to climb the limbs of our ever-branching UU tree with you in England and North America.
For this series I owe a lot to my own reading, the UUA website, and the series Long Strange Trip viewed by our Conscious Living Adults in 2015. The DVDs should be in our Shared Ministry room library. Some of you too have studied UU history and I welcome your input, both in our community dialogue and as notes. Pat will post those on our website when you mail them to her. She has already posted excerpts from her late husband Jim’s files about our early-1990s efforts to understand who we HUU’s were in our congregation’s early days.
Thank you and Namaste,
For comments on Linda’s talk, see Our Branching Tree: Member Comments (huuweb.org)
You can read Our UU Origin Story: Part II: Our Branching Tree