Moreover, Christianity appealed to the Germanic peoples by its concept of a community, the church, which transcended kindred, tribe, and territory. On the one hand, Christianity, in contrast to Germanic paganism, treated kings not as descendants of gods, but as human beings subject, like all other human beings, to punishment by God for their sins. On the other hand, the Germanic rulers remained the supreme religious heads of their respective peoples, appointing bishops and dictating liturgical and other religious matters. In addition, they could begin to make wider claims to the allegiance of people of other kindreds, tribes, and territories: to bring them to the true faith, or, if they were already converted, to unite them in the true church.
In general, Christian beliefs and practices had a great appeal to Germanic man. They brought him, for the first time, a positive attitude toward life and toward death, a larger purpose into which to fit the tragedies and mysteries of his existence. Beside Christianity, the old pagan myths seemed harsh and bleak. One can sense the passion in King Alfred’s words, in the famous “Addition” to his translation of Boethius, “I say, as do all Christian men, that it is a divine purpose that rules, and not fate.” At the same time, the Christian cosmology and the Christian ethic were not easy for Germanic man to grasp. If taken seriously, they threatened to undermine not only his former system of beliefs but, also, his entire social order.
From: Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition by Harold J. Berman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 63.
Berman (1918-2007) was a well-known legal scholar who specialized in the history of law and the relationship between law and religion. He was Professor of Law at Harvard University Law School (1948-1985) and at Emory University Law School (1985-2005). This book won the 1984 SCRIBES Book Award of the American Bar Association for the best new book on a legal subject. A companion volume, Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformation on the Western Legal Tradition, was published in 2004.
