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Hello everyone, recently I am very interesting in the below topic and write some words in the spare time, but how can I stick the explanatory notes?

Thought behind Disaster: A Comparative Study of the Divine Retribution Ideology between Medieval China and England

Chapter I

The Black Death spread through England from 1348 to 1350. Confined by the poor level of public health, it was difficult for the contemporay to make a scientific judgement about the epidemiology of the plague. It was the Church that made an understanding of the plague of wide-ranging impact on society and that regarded the plague as the God’s punishment for human sinfulness. In Canterbury, the Prior of Christchuch wrote a letter to the Bishop of London in September 28 1348, he said:

Terrible is God toward the sons of men, and by his command all things are subdued to the rule of his will. Those whom he loves he censures and chastises; that is, he punishes their shameful deeds in various ways during this mortal life so that they might not be condemned eternally. He often allows plague, miserable famines, conflicts, wars and other forms of suffering to arise, and uses them to terrify and torment men and so drive out their sins. And thus, indeed, the realm of England, because of the growing pride and corruption of its subjects, and their numberless sins, has on many occasions stood desolate and afflicted by the burdens of the wars which are exhausting and devouring the wealth of the kingdom, and by many other miseries. And it is now to be feared that the same kingdom is to be oppressed by the pestilences and wretched mortalities of men which have flared up in other regions.

William Zouche, Archbishop of another province York, had made the same interpretation of the great plague in 28 July 1348. Then, what kind of sin provoked the divine anger? Henry Knighton, an Augustinian canon of Leicester, described that the wrath of God was due to the frequent participations of some women in the tournaments, and ‘they neither feared God nor blushed at the criticism of the people, but took the marriage bond lightly and were deaf to the demands of modesty’. William Edendon, Bishop of the Winchester, attributed it to human sensuality which ‘as a result of Adam’s sin’ and “producing a multitude of sins”. In this case, only by confession could people be rescued and by prayer could people gain God’s mercy. Otherwise, ‘a similar pestilence will stretch its poisonous branches into this realm, and strike down and consume the inhabitants.’ In view of this, the Church had developed a detailed plan, in which ‘Bishops and priests should celebrate masses and should organise, or have organised, sermons at suitable times and places, along with processions every Wednesday and Friday; and should perform other offices of pious propitiation humbly and devoutly.’
Because of the nescience of theepidemiology, those actions arranged by the Church had met with little success in control of the great plauge. How could such interpretations and arrangement also spread? This was involved with the Christian ideology of Divine Retribution. ‘Original Sin’ was the starting point and premise of Christian belief. By the thought of ‘Original Sin’, the earthly life of Christian was a life with guilt feelings: the earthly life of human beings was just a transition period, which was also a process of human’s atonement whose purpose was return to paradise; the death of Jesus was an atonement for human beings and an uttermost symbol of their evil and tribulations.In this process of atonement, human beings with the ‘Original Sin’ often committed ‘Personal Sin’, for which God frequently made punishment. However, in the primitive Christianity, the object of God’s punishment was not strictly divided into the Chosen People and their enemies, but it was entangled with the devastating punishment to the Christian’s enemies on the Doomsday. With the growing numbers of Christians and the increasingly stable status of the Church, the original missionary activities of Christian groups prepared for the arrival of the Doomsday had gradually been discarded, and God’s punishment for the ‘Personal Sin’ of human beings became an effective way of more thorough atonement of human according to the Catholicism theologians in the Middle Ages. In the view of Saint Augustine, God’s allowance for evil was for the purpose of eliciting good, thus evil become a structure in the universe, and a structure being indulgent to the good souls. Thomas Aqiunas, the idea collector in Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, also believed that, although the penitents were free from God’s eternal penalty, yet some temporal punishment to them in this life was a compensation owed to God. Such penalty could also avoid the future crimes. This is just the ‘fruit of repentance’. In this way, warning, caution and rescue became indispensable constituents of Devine Retribution Ideology. Even some of the secular sufferings were regarded as God’s grace. For instance, the lepers’ affliction in this life would offset the sufferings in the afterlife.
What was the specific guilt getting God angry? In Christian theology, ‘Salvation’ was closely related to ‘Original Sin’, while one of the overriding concerns of the medieval church was the issues about the sacred virtues (or obligations) and the next life, i.e., which kind of sacred virtues or obligations should people perform in order to be saved by God? How people live in this life for the supreme joy in the afterlife? In view of this, as mentioned earlier, the social moral issues such as ‘virtues of women’ and lechery had become the objects of the Church’s interpretation about the plague.
However, plagues, wars, famines and the like in reality were often far greater than the destructions of Personal Sins. With regard to the reason why God severely punished the criminals, Anselmus, the archbishop of Canterbury in England in 12th century, and others had made a systematic discussion. Although this discussion had not make a strict distinction between Original Sin and Personal Sin, yet it provided the practicability for the medieval people in interpreting the horrifying divine retribution based on ‘Personal Sin’. Anselino said:

… if God reprimands human in accordance with the just punishment, the purpose of God’s creation of human beings will not be able to achieve, and people are unable to make sufficient penance; the reasons are: first, what human do should never exceed their duty; second, it is impossible for human to make a proper compensation for their acting against God’s will and damaging God’s glory; last, the whole world is insufficient to compensate for human’s any violation of God’s will, and the penance corresponding to human sins must be greater than anything excluding God in the universe.

It will be seen that, according to the Catholicism theology in medieval Western Europe, human beings commit ‘Personal Sin’ because of their ‘Original Sin’, and therefore, God throws far more severe disasters to them than the just punishment in order to warn them to make better atonement.

[Melisende]

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