One approached the subject with a certain vague picture already in one's mind, in which (a) the French Revolution is caused by Modern Ideas (tm) such as the social contract, human rights, the link between liberty and democratic forms of government, a vague link between both of those and social, technical, and moral progress, etc. Thus (b) Rousseau, Locke, Diderot, and Montesquieu are the important thinkers who provided the main motive ideas driving the Revolution. And so (c) it is natural that the Revolution inaugurated the worst persecution of Christians since Diocletian and attacked the Catholic Church.
But while this vague interpretation contains important truths, one found in reading the sources close-up and in context, the interpretation is quite inadequate. It leaves out a very important part of the story, in which believing Catholics who fall across the spectrum in terms of their attitude towards what we would call "The Enlightenment" (and what they referred to as philosophie) embraced the Revolution and helped carry out some of the leading attacks on the Catholic Church as it then existed in France. And all the while, these men (including some clergy and canon lawyers) claimed not to be in schism and only to be making changes to things falling outside of the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical power.
All of which raise numerous questions : what exactly is "the Church"? What is "religion"? What is worship, and what is its connection to the Church? Is the Church a thing that preaches or a thing that worships?
Which preamble leads me to discuss today's important terms. Because I am a reader who thinks in English, studying a culture that thought and wrote in French, I run up against certain issues of translation: the French use the word eglise (from Latin ecclesia, from Greek ἐκκλησία, = assembly) for both the church building and for the universal Church (l'Eglise catholique) and for local churches* ( l'eglise d'Alexandrie ). They also used temple for the buildings, and they use culte where we would use "religion" or "denomination." Temple is funny, because we never use that, so it contains connotations of pre-Christian Jewish sacrificial worship or of pagan religion. One can get over the false cognate of "cult" quickly enough, and remember Latin cultus as worship or a particular form of worship, as for the specific prayers and rites used for a certain god, patron saint, or festival ("the cult of x").
* Another difficult term -- remember that exchange between Kasper and Ratzinger on the relationship between local churches and the universal church?
So what does "church" connect to? Interestingly enough, I learn from the Oxford English Dictionary that church, though it comes to us from Germanic languages, reached them from Greek-speaking Christian groups. The Christians used the term "the house of the Lord," κυριακὸν δῶμα, which got shortened to just κυριακόν. ("We're going to the Lord's [house] this Sunday"). This word kyriakon spread among German-speaking groups and gradually became something like "kirk" (still this way in Scotland). As with lots of Germanic words (cattle, carta, castle, frank) the hard "c" softened into our "ch" sound (chattel, chart/er, chateau, french/franchise), leaving us with "church." As the dictionary stateth:
According to most modern views, the word was probably borrowed early into West Germanic from the ecclesiastical usage of the Christian communities of the colonial cities of the Rhine area. The Greek noun is well attested in eastern sources during the early 4th cent., and was probably current also in the use of the early Christian church in the Rhine area, where Greek models were influential. As a word for a very basic part of the material culture of the Christian faith it was probably well known even to pagan Germanic peoples bordering the imperial frontiers, and to those encountering Christian peoples in both the Roman and post-Roman periods.
...
In each of the West Germanic languages the word probably originally denoted a church as physical building (as in Greek), but was early extended to denote also the church as an institution and as a body of worshippers, probably after the range of meanings of post-classical Latin ecclesia and its etymon ancient Greek ἐκκλησία (as used in Hellenistic Greek). Application to the holy buildings of other faiths is also found in various other early Germanic languages.
So church did really derive from the building, although for Christians holding the doctrine of Sts. Peter and Paul, the building is also the body whose head is Christ, while other parts of the (non-Semitic speaking) Christian world spoke of the Assembly or the whole body of those called together.
Doesn't necessarily solve all my issues with l'Eglise constitutionnelle in revolutionary France, but it is fascinating, so I share.
