GREAT CHASTISEMENT DURING MIDDLE AGES WAS FEROCIOUS SPREAD OF 'BLACK DEATH'

Let's take a look, today, and in a second installment next week, at the "black death," which occurred in the 14th century.

That great disaster -- one of the greatest on record -- took place at a time of immorality, irreligion (the Mass was celebrated in some places like a circus), and materialism.

It followed on the heels of a climate swerve -- decades of strangely warm weather (corn was grown as far north as Norway) and ferocious storms, followed by a sudden cooling.

In England a monk named Gervase of Canterbury reported that in 1178 "on the Sunday before the Feast of St. John the Baptist after sunset when the moon had first become visible a marvelous phenomenon was witnessed by some five or more men who were sitting there facing the moon. Now there was a bright new moon, and as usual in that phase its horns were tilted toward the east; and suddenly the upper horn split in two. From the midpoint of the division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the moon which was below writhed, as it were, in anxiety, and, to put it in the words of those who reported it to me and saw in with their own eyes, the moon throbbed like a wounded snake."

It sounded like they had seen asteroids hitting the lunar surface, while on earth there were wholesale migrations.

Whether from heightened El Niño activity, tidal waves that may have resulted from meteors, or some mysterious shift, Indians in South America seemed to be avoiding the coasts and islanders were moving all over the Pacific.

Crops crashed and starving peasants roamed the countryside. As the weather continued to change, prophets rose with hysterical prophecies (the antichrist, the end of the world).

"The mountain Tsincheou disappeared and enormous clefts appeared in the earth," recounted writer George Deaux. "Near King-sai, it was said, the mountains of Ki-ming-chan utterly fell in and in their place appeared suddenly a lake more than a hundred leagues in circumference."

There was "subterranean thunder" in Canton and a flood along the Yellow River that a climatologist named H. H. Lamb described as "one of the greatest weather disasters ever known, alleged to have taken seven million lives in the great river valleys of China.

In a province "hard by Greater India" were "horrors and unheard of tempests" for a span of three days, according to a Flemish missionary who reported to Church authorities that "sheets of fire fell upon the earth, mingled with hailstones of marvelous size; which slew almost all, from the greatest to the least."

In Europe, earthquakes shook Greece, washed it with tidal waves, collapsed highland in Cyprus, and did the same in Naples, Pisa, Padua, Bologna, and Venice.

The Middle Ages were not overrun by abortion (it was forbidden in the Latin text of the Hippocratic Oath), but there was plenty of other sin, sin attracts demons, and evil brings accidents and illness.

If modern Americans studied this time period, they would find it sobering (to say the least).

People forgot devotion in the High Middle Ages, they forgot the truths of the Savior, they had fallen deeply into materialism, there was crime, there was corruption in the Church, there was suddenly high fashion, and vanity (it was even when they invented the vanity mirror), and so something began to arrive, something so grave as to defy prophecy, something that, as it turned out, was like Pompeii and the destruction, thirteen centuries before, of Jerusalem.

Born in the Asian hinterlands and carried by Mongol horsemen, the disease was marked by fever and huge swellings the size of eggs, a combination of several bacterial agents that thrive in rats and their fleas. Most prominent was a lethal bacteria that caused pneumonic and septicaemic illness -- attacking the lungs and causing dark blotches on the skin -- the pneumonic aspect similar to what has been reported in certain mutant strains of the current H1N1 virus.

Perhaps the skin discoloration or the fact black rats were carriers was why they called it the "black death," but more likely it was simply its lethality, the utter darkness of its effect -- the fact that once introduced into an area it could spread by human contact and kill in days.

It preyed especially on populations like China's (where ironically the zodiac included a "Year of the Rat" and where the droughts, locusts, and floods had weakened the population in the 1330s), and although we don't know exactly how many died from it there, the Chinese population would be reduced from 123 million in 1200 to a mere 65 million by the end of the 14th century.

It does us well to revisit what plague can do -- and why we need God's protection.

In 1339 the first record of the plague's westward movement showed in mortalities near Lake Issyk in the Tien region. From central Asia it moved on overland routes or through merchant shipping to the Middle East and then Europe (for by now Asia was a source of silk, spices, and other luxuries). In 1345 the plague was at Sarai, a major trading center on the lower Volga in what is today Russia, and within a year it was in the Caucasus and Azerbaijan.

Dead bodies littered territories from Armenia to India, the infirm no doubt fleeing to Vedic gods as this mysterious and awful ailment, this horrid coughing of blood, which could be spread by merely breathing near or touching someone -- simple contact with contaminated clothing -- depopulated much of the subcontinent and found its way around Yemen to the Red Sea.

Kurds fled in vain to the mountains and hardly anyone survived in places like Caesarea (the current⌐day Iran⌐Iraq region). Syria and Egypt were hit, and so was Mecca -- despite Mohammed's preaching that disease would never reach the Holy City.

Within two years the entire Islamic world would be engulfed -- losing from a third to fifty percent of its population. Strange phenomena were noted, including lights at tombs and aerial phenomena.

As the disease made way over commercial routes, the Christian parts of the eastern Mediterranean were likewise devastated.

After ravaging Constantinople, the Black Death was carried on Italian ships to Cyprus in 1347 -- the same year that this region (as if in pre-warning) suffered an earthquake and several tidal waves.

The water had swept over large parts of the island, destroying olive groves and fishing fleets.

Islanders murdered many of their Arab slaves for fear they would take advantage of the chaos, and then fled inland but couldn't avoid what one chronicler called "a pestiferous wind" that spread "so poisonous an odor that many, being overpowered by it, fell down suddenly and expired in dreadful agony."

Earthquakes also did severe damage in Rome, Naples, Pisa, and Venice just before the plague arrived in those places. The entrance into Western Europe came at least in part through the Sicilian port of Messina, where residents insisted there were demonic entities transfigured into the shape of dogs and that these dogs wreaked the harm on human beings.

So aghast was the populace that few ventured from their homes until by common consent and at the wish of the archbishop they gathered their courage and marched around the city reciting litanies.

According to a scribe named Michael of Piazza, "while the whole population was thus processing around the streets, a black dog... appeared among them, gnashing with his teeth and rushing upon them and breaking all the silver vessels and lamps and candlesticks..."

It was a terrifying and prodigious vision and such was also captured by artists who portrayed the plague as spread by demons.

Pope Clement VI declared it a "pestilence with which God is afflicting Christian people" and it seemed indeed like the stench of hell, a plague so disgusting that it inspired less pity than detestation.

Many theorized that poisonous fumes were rising from cracks in the earth. Sulfur from the netherworld?

Meteors were seen (known as "black comets"), and there were reports of strange columns of fire. These were witnessed in Florence and Avignon -- above the papal palace (which was now in France)! A ball of flame was also seen over Paris, and there were phantoms -- demons that in places like Messina were said to transform into frightening "dogs."

More horrid, however, was the disease itself, which rapidly moved west and north, striking Avignon. The death rate there was fifty percent. Hundreds who worked at the papal palace were turned into corpses; Pope Clement VI fled, and such was the shortage of priests that laymen had to give Last Rites. In Vienna the evil came as a hovering light that was exorcised by a bishop.

Spain fell under assault. Five million died in France. Throughout Europe cadavers were left in the front of homes like refuse and even scavenging animals wouldn't touch them. In England in one field 5,000 lay dead and within two years half of the 17,500 monks, nuns, and friars in that nation's monasteries were no longer counted among the living.

An astonishing 66 percent of clergy in Buckinghamshire were killed, and by 1350 the death toll was at least 35 percent in London. It was relentless. It was sinister. At sea, ghost ships wandered. It was as if the whole world had been placed "within the grasp of the Evil One," noted a friar in Kilkenny, Ireland, who wondered just before his own death if "any child of Adam may escape this pestilence."

It was a good question; never before (at least not since Noah) had there been a trauma like this; on three continents the very existence of homo sapiens was threatened. Men and women, driven to despair, wandered as if mad across the breadth of Europe.

According to the Neuburg Chronicle "cattle were left to stray unattended in the fields for no one had any inclination to concern themselves about the future.

The wolves, which came down from the mountains to attack the sheep, acted in a way which had never been heard before. As if alarmed by some invisible warning they turned and fled back into the wilderness."

In desperation the residents of Messina, Italy, fled by foot and horse six miles outside of town to get an image of the Madonna said to have special power, but as the horse carrying it approached Messina the animal suddenly stood motionless and fixed like a rock.

That was interpreted as a sign that what was occurring was God's requital of an unrighteous, blood⌐stained people and that Mary was not to intervene.

In the words of Michael of Piazza, the Blessed Mother judged the city to be "so hateful and so profoundly stained with blood and sin that she turned her back on it, being not only unwilling to enter therein, but even abhorring the very sight thereof."

Really Mary never turned her back on her children but the protection of Heaven did seem absent and there was a lapse in the Virgin's apparitions, which had been ongoing for many decades -- a relative silence during the 1340s, except at a Ukrainian monastery called Pochaiv -- as the scourge continued to cause wreckage.

It was the same casualty count -- one⌐third -- as prophesied in Revelation 9:15.

Aimless ships were spotted with dead crews and by December of 1347 the disease had spread to much of southern Europe, making its entry through various ports and fishing villages.

There it coursed into the central and northern parts of Europe through other harbors like Genoa, where three galleys which had put to port after being driven by fierce winds from the East were found to be laden not just with the sought-after spices but also with Pasteurella pestis.

Terrified residents had attacked the ships with flaming arrows "and diverse engines of war" in hopes of keeping it out, but it was already too late:

In hard-hit Florence an estimated 100,000 died, the stately homes, the grand palaces, all evacuated. Brothers abandoned brothers, uncles their nephews, parents their children.

As the classicist Giovanni Boccaccio phrased it, "there came the death⌐dealing pestilence, which, through the operation of the heavenly bodies or of our own iniquitous dealings, being sent down upon mankind for our correction by the just wrath of God, had some years before appeared in the parts of the East, and after having bereft these latter of an innumerable number of inhabitants, extending without cease from one place to another, had now unhappily spread towards the West."

It was devastating. It was eerie. As the plague arrived church bells were silenced and black flags flapped in the quiet breeze.

While conservative estimates say 33 percent of Italians succumbed, many scholars would put the mortality for that particular nation -- lined as it was with ports -- at forty or even fifty percent.

This is our great chastisement today:

Ezekiel 7

Impending Disaster

7The word of the Lord came to me: 2You, O mortal, thus says the Lord God to the land of Israel:
An end! The end has come
upon the four corners of the land.
3Now the end is upon you,
I will let loose my anger upon you;
I will judge you according to your ways,
I will punish you for all your abominations.
4My eye will not spare you, I will have no pity.
I will punish you for your ways,
while your abominations are among you.
Then you shall know that I am the Lord.
5 Thus says the Lord God:
Disaster after disaster! See, it comes.
6 An end has come, the end has come.
It has awakened against you; see, it comes!
7Your doom* has come to you,
O inhabitant of the land.
The time has come, the day is near—
of tumult, not of revelling on the mountains.
8Soon now I will pour out my wrath upon you;
I will spend my anger against you.
I will judge you according to your ways,
and punish you for all your abominations.
9My eye will not spare; I will have no pity.
I will punish you according to your ways,
while your abominations are among you.
Then you shall know that it is I the Lord who strike.
10See, the day! See, it comes!
Your doom* has gone out.
The rod has blossomed, pride has budded.
11 Violence has grown into a rod of wickedness.
None of them shall remain,
not their abundance, not their wealth;
no pre-eminence among them.*
12The time has come, the day draws near;
let not the buyer rejoice, nor the seller mourn,
for wrath is upon all their multitude.
13For the sellers shall not return to what has been sold as long as they remain alive. For the vision concerns all their multitude; it shall not be revoked. Because of their iniquity, they cannot maintain their lives.*
14They have blown the horn and made everything ready;
but no one goes to battle,
for my wrath is upon all their multitude.
15The sword is outside, pestilence and famine are inside;
those in the field die by the sword;
those in the city—famine and pestilence devour them.
16If any survivors escape,
they shall be found on the mountains
like doves of the valleys,
all of them moaning over their iniquity.
17All hands shall grow feeble,
all knees turn to water.
18They shall put on sackcloth,
horror shall cover them.
Shame shall be on all faces,
baldness on all their heads.
19They shall fling their silver into the streets,
their gold shall be treated as unclean.
Their silver and gold cannot save them on the day of the wrath of the Lord. They shall not satisfy their hunger or fill their stomachs with it. For it was the stumbling-block of their iniquity. 20From their* beautiful ornament, in which they took pride, they made their abominable images, their detestable things; therefore I will make of it an unclean thing to them.
21I will hand it over to strangers as booty,
to the wicked of the earth as plunder;
they shall profane it.
22I will avert my face from them,
so that they may profane my treasured* place;
the violent shall enter it,
they shall profane it.
23Make a chain!*
For the land is full of bloody crimes;
the city is full of violence.
24I will bring the worst of the nations
to take possession of their houses.
I will put an end to the arrogance of the strong,
and their holy places shall be profaned.
25When anguish comes, they will seek peace,
but there shall be none.
26Disaster comes upon disaster,
rumour follows rumour;
they shall keep seeking a vision from the prophet;
instruction shall perish from the priest,
and counsel from the elders.
27The king shall mourn,
the prince shall be wrapped in despair,
and the hands of the people of the land shall tremble.
According to their way I will deal with them;
according to their own judgements I will judge them.
And they shall know that I am the Lord.

Sometimes a disease is just a disease. Asserting that it is heavenly wrath forces some unkind observations. Such as that heaven favors the wealthy, for they suffer far less than the poor, and that the faithful often perish where the heathen survive and prosper.

After a major plague, until we understood the causes of plague, there was usually a decline in the faithful, because as a group they tried to pray the disease away, and died as a group, infecting each other in church.

So while it is not wrong to pray for preservation from plague, it is also very wise to do those things that prevent disease transmission. For it has long been said that heaven helps those who help themselves.

“Sometimes a disease is just a disease.”

Ditto! While there’s always plenty of evil to go around in this world, it’s rather a stretch to connect moral misbehavior to natural disasters. Now supernatural disasters are a completely different thing, but I haven’t noted any of those recently. Plenty of natural ones. No supernatural ones.

All the same, the author recounts the plague years in a rather interesting fashion. It’s certainly worthwhile knowing the history of these epidemics, just as it is useful to study the characteristics of the influenza epidemic of the early 20th century. That century had no shortage of disasters. There were epidemics, wars, attempted mass annihalations of entire races, even tens/hundreds of millions exterminated by the various flavors of Socialism (Communism, National Socialism etc. excercising their wiles upon their own populations). The “body count” in the 20th century was nothing to sniff at, and every bit of it was caused by man or natural disasters. Again, no supernatural disasters that I’m aware of.

Now, having said that, I’ll be interested to see if the author can make a credible case for supernatural disasters in his/her next installment. God can certainly get directly involved if he wishes. I’m certainly not one to stop him. The point is, that the natural Universe and the disfunctional elements within the world’s population, do a swell job of tearing things up as it is.

I want a front row seat when God gets directly involved. As a recipient of certain small, but not insignificant interventions by God on behalf of my family, I can spot supernatural events easier than most. I would be fascinated in seeing a global intervention on the part of God. Setting the matter of faith aside, it would be inspiring to see a sublime supernatural act. I don’t need it to believe, but it might be useful to those whose faith and situational awareness is poor. As of yet, I haven’t seen a big ‘un, but I appreciate whats come my way already.

Sure, not every sort of disease or pestilence should be interpreted as a clear chastisement from God, at least beyond the sense that disease in general is a consequence of our fallen human hature. There has always been disease in human experience, and there always will be. But it was only natural for the people dealing with the Black death to assume that there was, in fact, just that sort of chastisement at hand. The totally unprecedented scale of it alone was a clear "sign" to them. Is God constrained by any "law" to only chastise His wayward children via clearly "supernatural" means, or does His sovereignty extent to employing apparently natural occurences, too, especially when they clearly appear to be on a scale beyond that which has "natural" precedent?

Regarding your objection that epidemic-scale diseases cannot be attributed to any sort of chastisement, unless one is willing to concede that God favors the wealthy in their course: I can only deny that such was the case during the Black Death. As far as I can tell, there was no particular advantage to being wealthy at all. All social classes died like flies in this epidemic. The wealthy tended to live in towns, and the higher population density of towns, of course, was one of the key ingredients in the spread of the plague. Also, the state of medical knowledge and procedures in the 14th Century was utterly insufficient to deal with the Black Plague, and no amount of money could procure medical "solutions" for the wealthy. If anything, the extremely poor rural peasant class had the best chance of survival, as their contact with others was, by the very fact of their lack of neighbors, much more limited than that of village- and city-dwellers.

Before we go any further, let me ask the rhetorical question: Are the people of the world, right now, the most wicked and sinful people in the entire history of the world?

I say this as a rhetorical question, because right now, we face a plague so fearsome as to make the combined black plagues of the 14th and 17th centuries combined look like puny in comparison.

Some estimates put the potential mortality of the Avian flu at well over a billion people. Even the most recalcitrant and isolated governments of the world, such as North Korea, have been persuaded by their medical doctors to fully participate with any means the world can come up with to try and mitigate this horror.

If one million people a day died from this disease, it would still be almost three years to kill a billion people. And it may kill one billion people in just six months.

The United States will likely do well, compared to many other nations. Perhaps only one out of every 10 people you personally know will die. On average. Entire families you know might be wiped out. Every person in a small town. Most of the people in an apartment building. Others will likely survived unscathed, except psychologically.

In the 1980s, I interviewed some of the survivors of the Spanish flu epidemic. It only killed about 3% of the world’s population at the time, and 1/3rd of the world’s population was infected. It only had a mortality rate of 10-20%.

The mortality rate of those infected with Avian flu has remained at around 60%. If 1/3rd of the world was infected with Avian flu, at that mortality rate, 1.2 billion people would die. 1,200,000,000.

30,000,000 American sinners? If we are lucky.

Something else has long been said. ;0)

Jeremiah 5

Verse 21- Now hear this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears and hear not:

ST. Matthew 13-

Verse 13- Therefore I speak to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.

Verse 14- And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of E-sai-as’ which saith, By hearing ye shall hear and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and not perceive:

Verse 15- For these people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted and I should heal them.

““Sometimes a disease is just a disease.”
That has an underlying current that says such are not allowed by God to correct evils. A disease, as all things, are in His hands regardless of how we decide to define such.”

Well! That’s an interesting read on it. Calvinism was based on the belief that God was something of a control freak, to the point that there was not even free will. He rather extended his philosophy to the concept of predestination wherein it was already decided by God who would, and would not be saved. An individual was not even allowed to reject God’s grace. You were in, or out, and you had no choice in the matter.

Folks hereabouts reject that notion (Libertarianism and that sort of thing). For most, there is the implicit assumption that our actions have consequences in the physical and metaphysical world. Personally, I rather like that idea. It makes me feel like less of a “religious appliance”. Obviously others think differently, which makes it fun to compare and contrast.

As to natural disasters, I’ve never really felt that God ALWAYS (not yelling, merely emphasizing) gets involved in each and every tsunami or fender-bender. It’s a big Universe, and I figure he’s got a few other things to be concerned about than whether we get drowned, or have a boo-boo on our finger. S-word happens, but I don’t blame God for it, anymore than I believe that God caused the Holocaust. There’s enough sociopaths in government, and on my street to cause all of the man-made disasters/atrocities one can imagine without blaming God for it. You might want to have a kinder attitude towards our Deity. After all, he was nice enough to create us. I’m sure he must have some redeeming qualities (pun intended).

God gets a bad wrap when those with religious credentials claim disasters are “God’s Will”. It is certainly a counter-intuitive notion at the least, and a wrong-headed notion about God at the worst (just my opinion, I don’t claim to KNOW God’s nature). Mortality has limitations. :-)

“I believe that AIDS (just a disease) was allowed as an act of mercy.”

Oh my goodness! That one certainly seems to have come out of left field. Not trying to put words in you mouth, but do you suppose we could replace AIDS with....pancreatic cancer like my mother died from? Could we paste any human affliction into this space? Just wondering, because if God really, really controls and manipulates EVERYTHING, it makes him look like a very nasty fellow indeed. Certainly not the kind of person I’d let babysit my daughter.

(God. I’m just discussing this with the nice gentleman. Not dissing you by any means. I don’t need a lightning bolt through the window in December. We just laid carpet.) :-)

Of course, I don’t believe AIDS is manna from Heaven. AIDS is a bad thing, and I certainly don’t want to get it as an act of mercy (or any other kind of act for that matter). You might want to think that one through again. Just sayin’.

Before we go any further, let me ask the rhetorical question: Are the people of the world, right now, the most wicked and sinful people in the entire history of the world?

I'm not particularly inclined to suppose the answer to that question is "within my pay grade." I'd rather let the answer to that come from the one source capable of being authoritative: God Himself.

However, it is clear enough, on perfectly objective grounds, that our current generation, within former Christendom anyway, is p4retty near the top as far as sinfulness goes. Why? Well, on the whole, we have abandoned the Christian Faith in staggering numbers, and cannot possibly plead ignorance while doing so. We live in an era of (more-or-less) universal literacy, with instantaneous communications ability in a variety of different media formats. Anyone can learn the basic tenets of the Christian Faith at his or her leisure. The very culture still, in spite of everything, has a Christian underpinning to its most basic assumptions.

We are entirely capable, then, of informing our consciences and acting on the promptings of God's grace - which we presume He makes available as a norm - within the context of Christian life and morality. Yet, for the most part, the Western world refuses Him. Europe - the former heart and soul of Christendom - is effectively mission territory, and the EU is consciously distancing itself the Christian heritage of Europe with little protest from the citizenry. The Christian Faith of most of the rest of the West is, despite the bluster, pretty "soft" really. Were it otherwise, the political situations found in the countries involved (and the US is "Exhibit A" of the problem) would be radically different. The very sense of "sin" is gone, even in the minds of many people who consider themselves to be Christians. It's all about "personal failures" now, and offenses against Almighty God, considered directly as such, are not regularly contemplated by anyone. The best-known, and most trotted-out, Scripture verse in the West is "Judge not, that you not be judged," used out-of-context by unthinking hypocrites everywhere to bludgeon into silence anyone protesting even the most sordid and vile behavior. That's what Christianity has devolved down to! We call ourselves "Christians" even while we make a perversion of Christianity's most basic teachings!

So, yes, I believe that our generation is proportionately more evil than most others. I'm just not in a position to give it some sort of exact ranking. A chastisement is probably long overdue. Perhaps that is about to change. I wouldn't be surprised, and, while I suppose I don't have to "like" being caught-up in one, I can't deny that, collectively, we certainly have it coming.

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