The dissolution

of Germanic racial care by medieval Christianity (1)

by Hans F. K. Günther

 
In the following, we will not examine whether the church teachings to which the Germanic peoples were to be converted could still adequately represent the pure teachings of the Galilean Jesus. This original teaching, as scientific biblical criticism has shown, can hardly ever be adequately understood. In any case, Christianity came to the Germanic people as an essentially alien, oriental teaching. That it was intended as a teaching for orientals is perhaps already shown by Jesus’ words that he had not come to abolish the Jewish law, and may also be indicated by words such as Matthew 10:5 and 6; 15:21; 15:26, which indicate that Jesus only wanted to address his preaching to the Jews. (The words ‘Go and teach all nations’ have been shown to be inauthentic, a later addition.) The question of the rapacious direction of Christianity can, however, remain undiscussed here, since we shall only consider how the church teachings – which are by no means the same as original Christianity – must have influenced the Germanic racial cultivation since the age of the Frankish wars of apostasy against the pagan Germanic people.

Since the zeal for conversion, which stands for a faith as an oriental phenomenon, eradicated as far as possible all evidence of the pagan past in contrast to the characteristically Nordic tolerance of the Indo-European form of faith, hardly any evidence has survived about the effect of the collision of church teachings with Germanic tradition on the Germanic racial cultivation. It is therefore necessary to attempt a fundamental comparison of both religious worlds with regard to this racial cultivation, a comparison which, in the interests of brevity, must be somewhat rough and schematic, especially since the reality of human life can also combine ideas from contradictory spiritual worlds with one another to form the most diverse balances. In reality, the struggle between the spiritual worlds described continues to this day, and the Christianity of both major Christian denominations is no longer the Christianity of the early Middle Ages preached to the Germanic peoples and its adherents in the then ‘racial chaos of the Mediterranean countries’.

Medieval Christianity initially opposed the barriers between peoples and avarice as being contrary to God: here there is neither Jew nor Greek, here there is neither slave nor free, as Paul said in Galatians 3:28. This was certainly said in relation to otherworldly values: towards God there is neither lord nor slave, neither free nor unfree. The New Testament is also indifferent to the slave question, and this is due to logical thinking, because all earthly circumstances are of no importance compared to otherworldly values, except that wealth can detract from otherworldly values. Furthermore, the slavery question and the class question could not gain any significance in an eschatological otherworldly belief, i.e. a belief in an imminent end to the world and the coming of the Kingdom of God. But when this end of the world did not occur, a worldly conclusion was drawn from such statements as Paul had expressed: the abolition of national and racial barriers, of the barriers between free and unfree. Paul taught the Athenians (Acts 17:26) that all people were created from one blood: ex uno sanguine, as the Bulgata translated, the wording of which became binding Holy Scripture for the Germanic peoples through the conversion in the West.

In Athens, this message of equality was not a new doctrine, for the late Hellenes, a confused, degenerate mixture, thought the same way for the most part. They were, at least in the cities, also mostly descendants of slaves of the earlier, now extinct Hellenes and descendants of the immigrated foreigners (Metoics), and such populations always tend towards the doctrine of equality, which is intended to justify or conceal their descent. Likewise, the Jews, from whose spiritual training Paul came, in Hellenistic and Roman times liked to spread doctrines of equality wherever they were opposed by a traditional consciousness of the other’s species. Jews in particular were involved in the reinterpretation of a term of Indo-European origin such as humanitas from a goal concept of full humanity and success in a national sense to a catchphrase concept of a ‘humanity idea’ that abolished all differences in ancestry. However, the ex uno sanguine was now preached to the Germanic peoples who still lived entirely in the racial tradition of the Indo-Europeans, and indeed as a religious obligation written down in the Holy Scripture.

The grave finds may well give the impression of a rapid racial cross-breeding; but, as always in such cases, the tradition of a certain racial separation, only gradually fading away, probably continued for several centuries, even though church doctrines rejected such a separation. First of all, the occurrence of non-Nordic forms in the graves could only indicate an equally careful burial of the free and the unfree classes, whereas previously only the free had been buried more carefully in the row graves. Gölder also suspects such a process before the actual racial cross-breeding: With the introduction of Christianity, a change of this kind began in all graves in Germany, which can only be explained by the fact that the brachycephalic (short-headed) people, who had long existed alongside the non-Germanic type as serfs and servants, were gradually no longer buried separately. In pre-Christian times, unfree people and foreigners were buried separately.

The church often made serfs into clergy, thereby raising them to the status of free men. Some bishops appear to have admitted serfs into the clergy precisely because of their greater docility. B. Hölder refers to chapter 119 of the decisions of the Synod of Aachen in 816-17 to support this assumption. In the Frankish Empire: priests were mainly taken from the serf class, because a free man could not become a priest without the king’s permission. In the 11th and 12th centuries, however, celibacy among the lower clergy became the norm, which again inhibited the reproduction of the families raised to the status of free men.