The frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes's "Leviathan" of 1651 shows a famous figure. A crowned giant rises up behind a landscape, a sword in his right hand, a crozier in his left. His body is made up of thousands of tiny people pressed together into a single shape. Above the picture stands a verse from the Book of Job: "Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei" — "There is no power on earth to be compared with him." On the lower half of the title page the symbols of secular and spiritual power are arranged in parallel — castle and church, royal crown and mitre, cannon and the lightning of excommunication, battle flags and the forked arguments of theological disputation.
Hobbes himself was an agnostic. He had lived through the English Civil War and gone into exile in France. His Leviathan is not a glorification of the Church — on the contrary, he called the Catholic Church the "ghost of the Roman Empire" and firmly rejected its claim to control the conscience and religious practice of the faithful independently of the states. His sovereign holds the crozier precisely so that the Church should be subordinate to the state and not the other way round. What lay before Hobbes in 1651 was a sixteen-hundred-year history in which the Church itself had become the Leviathan — a Megamachine that knew how to hold the sword and the crozier in one hand, not as a secular sovereign but as a power of its own above the secular sovereigns.
This paper asks about the people who built that crozier. It asks how the message of a Galilean itinerant preacher, crucified by the Roman occupiers for his anti-authoritarian stance, became an institution that seventeen hundred years later was the most powerful construct in the intellectual history of Europe — and that today, a further three hundred years on, still persists as a large-scale structure, with its own state, its own bank, its own diplomacy, its own legal system, its own media.
We go through the history chronologically — Jesus, Peter, Paul, Constantine, Augustine and the long shadows of their heirs. At the end stands the question of what this history has to tell us today — about the Megamachine as Europe's longest-lived institution, about what it made out of an original movement, and about why the Beguines, whom we discussed in the previous paper, had to be crushed by this Megamachine.
I. Jesus — what he was not
Anyone who speaks historically about Jesus enters uncertain territory. Over the last two centuries historical research has made considerable progress on the question of what in the Gospel narratives is historical and what is later community theology. The consensus of today's historical-critical scholarship — represented by researchers such as Geza Vermes, John Dominic Crossan, E.P. Sanders, Bart Ehrman and, in Germany, Gerd Theißen — is roughly this: Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish itinerant preacher, probably born around 4 BCE, executed between 30 and 33 CE in Jerusalem under the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. His message was strongly apocalyptic — he expected the imminent arrival of the "Kingdom of God", in which existing conditions would be turned upside down. The poor would become rich, the rich poor. The mighty would be cast down, the powerless raised up. The last would be first.
What Jesus historically was not: he was not the founder of a church. The word "church" — in Greek "ekklesia" — hardly occurs in the oldest Gospel sources. It appears only in later layers. The famous passage Matthew 16:18 — "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church" — is widely regarded in historical-critical scholarship as later community theology, not as a historical saying of Jesus. It has been "editorially reshaped", which is a polite formula for retrospective construction. Jesus set up no hierarchy, named no successor, prepared no succession. The idea of an institutional church with bishops, priests, hierarchy and dogma was, as far as we know, foreign to him.
What Jesus was: a religious and social provocateur who stood up against the Temple priesthood of his time, violently disrupted the money-changers' business in the Temple court, denounced the established religious leaders as hypocrites, gathered around himself a mobile wandering community in which women played prominent roles, ate together with social outcasts — tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers — and proclaimed a message of the equality of all before God that was incompatible with the hierarchical structures of his time. He was executed for it — by the Roman occupiers, with the involvement of the Jewish Temple elite, by the punishment Rome reserved for political agitators: crucifixion.
Anyone who looks honestly at Jesus sees a figure who was foreign to the later institutional Church and in many respects its very opposite. The Beguines and Beghards, whom the previous paper dealt with, were in many aspects closer to this original movement — wandering women and wandering men without hierarchy, without mediation by priests, with direct access to the holy, with solidarity among themselves — than the institution that persecuted them. What has been handed down as "Christian tradition" has a double root: the message of Jesus and the construction of the Church that invokes him. The two are not identical. In part they are incompatible.
II. Peter — a construction
Peter is a complex figure. What we know about him historically is little. He was a fisherman from Galilee, one of the first disciples of Jesus, in the innermost circle. After Jesus's death he seems to have played a leading role in the early Jerusalem community — that is, in the small group that formed in Jerusalem in the years after 33 and continued to see itself as part of Judaism. The Acts of the Apostles, written in the 80s or 90s of the first century, portrays him as one of the most important apostles. Whether Peter was ever historically in Rome is disputed. Tradition asserts it; historical research sees no compelling evidence.
What matters about Peter for our subject, however, is not the historical person but the construction that was made of him after his death. This construction runs over several centuries and culminates in the claim that in Matthew 16:18 Jesus appointed Peter the "rock" of the Church and entrusted him with "the keys of the kingdom of heaven", and that Peter passed this office on to his successors — the bishops of Rome — in an "unbroken apostolic succession" down to the present Pope.
This construction is of enormous legal and political consequence. It turns the Bishop of Rome — one bishop among many — into the central authority of the whole of Christendom. It turns his see into the centre of the Church. It turns his voice into the authoritative interpreter of Christian doctrine. It turns his jurisdiction into the highest tribunal of the Church. All of this rests on a single sentence in the Gospel of Matthew which, according to the current state of research, is not a historical saying of Jesus but a creation of the community in the second or third generation.
This is one of the most remarkable events in the intellectual history of Europe. An entire architecture of power — more than a thousand years of papacy, with everything that entailed — rests on a sentence smuggled into the text after the fact. Historical-critical scholarship has documented this since the late 19th century. The Catholic Church itself today concedes in its academic theology that Mt 16:18 is editorial. But the institutional consequence — giving up the claim of the papacy — is not drawn from it. The construction remains standing, even though its foundation has been recognised as a construction.
This is a way of functioning we recognise from the Megamachine series. An institution, once established, no longer lives from the truth of its original justification but from the inertia of its own structures. Once Pope, always Pope, even if the verse on which the papacy is founded is not historical. Once bishop, always bishop, even if apostolic succession is a retrospective construction. The Megamachine generates its own legitimacy by continuing to run.
III. Paul — the real founder
If anyone is to be named as the real founder of the Christian Megamachine, it is Paul. It was he who transformed the small Jewish sect that invoked Jesus into a universal religion, detached from Jewish tradition and capable of hierarchical structure. It was he who supplied the theological foundations on which the later Church could build. It was he who designed the organisational structures that would turn the house communities into an institution. It was he who supplied the formula that for almost two millennia was to legitimise submission to secular power in religious terms.
Paul, whose Jewish name was Saul, was not a disciple of Jesus. He never met Jesus during his lifetime. He was a Hellenised Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia, a Roman citizen, educated in the Pharisaic tradition. By his own account he originally persecuted the Christian communities — until he had a conversion experience which he describes as an appearance of Christ on the road to Damascus. He began to missionise, above all among non-Jews — Greeks, Romans, people of Asia Minor — and he claimed for himself the title "Apostle to the Gentiles".
Paul's theological work consists of the seven letters now regarded as undisputedly written by him — Romans, both letters to the Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, First Thessalonians, Philemon. They are the oldest writings of the New Testament, older than the Gospels. They are the foundation of Christian theology. What Paul develops in them is a doctrine of sin, redemption and justification by faith that is not identical with the historical message of Jesus. Where Jesus spoke of repentance and of the coming Kingdom of God, Paul speaks of redemption through the death and resurrection of Christ. Where Jesus preached a concrete social practice, Paul preaches a theological construction. Where Jesus lived the equality of all before God in a concrete community of life, Paul lays the theoretical foundation for understanding this equality only as spiritual, not as social.
The key passage is Romans 13:1-7: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation." These sentences are the founding formula of the Christian Leviathan. They turn every secular power — even the most unjust — into a God-willed institution to which one must submit on religious grounds. Over two millennia they have given religious legitimacy to slavery, serfdom, despotism, dictatorship and fascist regimes. They are among the most influential political texts in world history — and they come from a man who never met Jesus and whose message stands diametrically opposed to the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount.
Added to this are Paul's passages on women — the command that women should keep silent in the congregation (1 Corinthians 14:34), the decree of a hierarchical order of the sexes (Ephesians 5:22 — "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord"), the theological justification of female subordination by Eve's fall (1 Timothy 2:11-14, which does not come from Paul himself but was canonised under his name). For two millennia these texts gave religious legitimacy to the patriarchal order of the sexes. They are the foundation on which the Beguines were persecuted, the witch hunts ran, women were excluded from the priesthood — and they were formulated not by Jesus but by Paul and his disciples.
Anyone who reads Paul sees clearly: the shift from the Jesus movement to the Christian Church is not a natural development but a rupture. Paul is the architect of this rupture. He turned an egalitarian, anti-hierarchical, anti-imperial movement into a religion compatible with every hierarchy, every empire, every structure of domination. That was the precondition for its becoming, three hundred years later, the state religion of a world empire.
IV. Constantine — the imperial Church
In the year 312 a Roman general named Flavius Valerius Constantinus won a decisive battle at the Milvian Bridge outside the gates of Rome against his rival Maxentius. Tradition reports that before the battle he saw a sign in the sky — the Chi-Rho monogram of Christ — and won with the words "In hoc signo vinces" ("In this sign you will conquer"). What actually happened historically is uncertain. What happened politically is clear. Constantine became emperor and promoted the Christian Church.
In 313, together with the eastern emperor Licinius, he issued the Edict of Milan, which established religious freedom for Christians. That was the end of the persecution of Christians. It was also the beginning of something else. Constantine quickly understood that the Christian Church was a politically usable structure. It had survived more than two hundred years of persecution. It had networks, discipline, the loyalty of its members. It had a theological language that could be instrumentalised for imperial purposes.
In 325 he convened the Council of Nicaea — the first "ecumenical" council of Christendom. The occasion was the dispute between Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria and the presbyter Arius over the question of whether Christ was of the same substance as the Father ("homoousios") or only of similar substance ("homoiousios"). A theological hair-splitting, one might think. In truth it was a question of power. Athanasius held the position that Christ was to be thought of as of the same substance as God — which raised the authority of the Church that teaches him to the absolute. Arius held the position that Christ was subordinate to the Father — which relativised ecclesiastical authority. Constantine decided in favour of Athanasius. The Nicene Creed was formulated. Whoever did not sign it was banished — the first two bishops who refused went into exile.
With that a precedent was set that was to carry the next 1,700 years. Theological disputes were no longer settled within the community, through discussion and a shared search. They were decided at councils, with imperial participation, by majority vote, with punishments for the minority. The term "heresy" — originally in Greek merely "choice, school, direction" — acquired a new meaning. From now on heresy was the position that had lost at the council. From now on heretics were the persecuted of their own Church.
Constantine himself was baptised only on his deathbed in 337 — probably because, according to the ideas of the time, baptism wiped out all sins, and as emperor he had many sins to his account, among them the execution of his own son Crispus and his wife Fausta. What he left behind was not a converted person but a converted institution. The Church, which under him went from persecuted outsider to large organisation close to the state, was from then on part of the empire — and the empire was part of the Church. What Hobbes 1,300 years later described as the "ghost of the Roman Empire" begins here.
In 380 Theodosius I took the last step. With the edict "Cunctos populos" he declared Nicene Christianity the state religion. Other religions were no longer merely tolerated — they were forbidden. In 391 he closed the pagan temples. In 392 he banned idolatry. With that the imperial Church was complete. What had begun as a persecuted movement from below had become a persecuting great power from above — within eighty years.
V. Augustine — the theological completion
What Constantine built up politically and institutionally needed a theological foundation. This was supplied by Augustine, Bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa (354-430). Alongside Paul he is the most influential theologian of Western Christendom. What he wrote has shaped Catholic theology to this day — and, through the Reformers who expressly invoked him, Protestant theology as well.
Augustine's principal work "De civitate Dei" (The City of God) was written between 413 and 426 as a response to the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. Pagans held Christianity responsible for the fall of Rome — the old gods who had protected Rome had been displaced by Christianity, and that was why Rome had fallen. Augustine replied with a theory of history in which Rome was merely a passing episode. There were two cities — the civitas terrena (the earthly city, governed by self-love and power) and the civitas Dei (the city of God, governed by love of God). The one was transitory, the other eternal. The Church was the herald, almost the prototype, of the civitas Dei.
This theory had an enormous effect. It made the Church the true and essential element of history. It made the empire the transitory and incidental. A hierarchy was thereby erected that was to shape the whole Middle Ages: the Church stands above the state because it represents the eternal, while the state merely administers the temporal. That was the theological basis of the medieval Investiture Controversy, of the struggle between pope and emperor, of the Pope's claim to supremacy over all secular rulers.
Augustine's second great doctrine was the doctrine of original sin. He developed the thesis that with Adam's fall the whole of humanity lives in a corrupted condition. Every human being is sinful from birth. Without the grace of God — mediated through the sacraments of the Church — he cannot be saved. This doctrine had two massive consequences. First, it made the Church the indispensable mediator of salvation. Whoever dies without baptism is lost — unbaptised children too. Whoever does not make confession cannot be saved. Whoever refuses the sacraments is separated from God. The Church thereby acquired power over the eternal fate of every single human being.
Second, the doctrine of original sin supplied the anthropological basis for the necessity of rule. If man is corrupt by nature, he needs supervision, punishment, discipline. He cannot be left to himself. He must be led. For over a thousand years this construction legitimised every form of authority — the authority of the father over wife and children, of the lord over the servant, of the king over the people, of the Church over the Christian. It is what Hobbes would later repeat in secular form: in the state of nature man is "a wolf to man" and needs the Leviathan to keep him in check. Augustine made the same argument in religious form — man is corrupted by original sin and needs the Church to lead him to salvation.
Augustine's third momentous doctrine was the justification of "compelle intrare" — forced conversion. In the Donatist controversy, which split the North African Church in the 4th and 5th centuries, Augustine at first opposed state coercion. Later he changed his mind. Citing a passage from the Gospel of Luke ("compelle intrare" — "compel them to come in", Lk 14:23), he justified the use of state force to convert heretics. That was a theological innovation of enormous consequence. It supplied the basis for the Inquisition, for the Albigensian Crusades, for the persecution of the Beguines, for the witch hunts, for the conversion missions in America. Whoever would not accept the teaching of the Church could be forced to do so by violence — theologically justified by Augustine.
VI. What the Megamachine was in the fifth century
With Augustine's death in 430 — he died in the city of Hippo while it was besieged by the Vandals — the architecture of the Christian Megamachine in the West is essentially complete. It has all the components that will carry it through the next 1,500 years.
It has a hierarchy — Pope, patriarchs, archbishops, bishops, priests, deacons — supported theologically by apostolic succession (the Peter construction) and institutionally by imperial recognition (Constantine).
It has a system of dogma, decided at councils, which every Christian must accept on pain of heresy and hence persecution (the Nicaea model).
It has a system of sacraments — baptism, Eucharist, confession, later five more — which monopolises access to salvation (the Augustinian doctrine of original sin).
It has a political theory that justifies its precedence over the state (the Augustinian doctrine of the two cities, later radicalised in papal theocracy).
It has a legitimation for state violence to enforce its teaching (the Augustinian compelle-intrare doctrine).
It has a legitimation for submission to secular rulers, insofar as they support it (Paul's Romans 13).
It has a legitimation for the patriarchal order of the sexes, which excludes women from every office and regulates their ways of life (the Pauline passages).
It has wealth — land, buildings, revenues — which over the following centuries will become the greatest concentration of property in Europe.
These eight components together are a Megamachine. It was not built by one person. It grew over four centuries out of several people, several councils, several imperial decisions. No one had planned it as a whole. Each individual component could be justified in its own time. Taken together they produced a construct that would dominate the next millennium and a half — and that still exists in its present form.
VII. How the Megamachine grew — the long centuries
What Augustine had laid out was extended in the following centuries. In the fifth and sixth centuries the Church increasingly took over the administrative functions that the disintegrating Western Empire could no longer perform. The bishops became lords of cities, the monasteries economic centres, the libraries the only places of book production. The Church survived the fall of the Western Empire because it was structurally more flexible than the imperial institutions.
In the eighth century came the Carolingian alliance. Pippin the Younger was anointed king by Pope Stephen II in 754 — a theological innovation that made secular rule sacral and thereby positioned the Pope as the one who can make kings. In return Pippin gave the Pope a territory in central Italy — the beginning of the Papal States, which were to last until 1870. The interweaving of papacy and Frankish rule culminated in 800 in the coronation of Charlemagne as emperor by Pope Leo III — once again a demonstration of the papal power to install a world ruler.
In the eleventh century came the Investiture Controversy. With the Dictatus papae of 1075, Pope Gregory VII ventured the most radical formulation of papal claims — the Pope could depose emperors, the papal office alone was universal, no one could judge the Pope. In 1077 Henry IV went to Canossa to have his excommunication lifted. It was the high point of papal power. What took shape here was the Megamachine in full form — an institution that placed itself above empires because it controlled the sacraments that every person needed for salvation.
In the thirteenth century came the crusades against its own competitors. The Albigensian Crusade of 1209 to 1229 destroyed the Cathar movement in southern France — a massive anticlerical movement of piety with its own traditions. Hundreds of thousands dead, whole towns wiped out (Béziers 1209: the famous "Kill them all, God will know his own"). In the same century the Inquisition was established as a permanent institution — first against the Cathars, then against the Beguines and Beghards, then against the Waldensians, then against the Templars, then against the Jews, then against the Moors in Spain, then in the early modern period against the witches. The Megamachine had established its permanent enforcement machinery.
In the sixteenth century came the Reformation as a rupture — but not as a dissolution. Luther, Zwingli and Calvin turned against the Catholic hierarchy, but they took over the Pauline and Augustinian foundations. Luther was a passionate Augustinian — the doctrine of original sin, the doctrine of justification, the doctrine of authority as ordained by God (Romans 13) were not softened by him but sharpened. What the Reformation changed was the institutional form — not one papacy but many territorial churches — but the Megamachine principle remained. The Protestant churches were no less authoritarian than the Catholic one. In 1525 Luther explicitly took the side of the princes against the rebellious peasants and wrote the notorious pamphlet "Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants", in which he called for the massacre of the peasants — citing Romans 13.
VIII. Hobbes's frontispiece — the Megamachine as image
We return to Hobbes's frontispiece of 1651. Anyone who has the sixteen-hundred-year history in view sees this picture differently. The giant who holds the sword in his right hand and the crozier in his left is not Hobbes's invention. He is the historical reality of the Christian Megamachine that lay before Hobbes.
What Hobbes wanted was a reform — he wanted to transfer both swords to the secular sovereign, so that two competing powers (pope and emperor, bishop and king) would not trigger civil war. His sovereign was to integrate both functions. That is a secular variant of what the Church itself had been doing since Constantine — the union of secular and spiritual power in one hand. Only now the hand was to be a secular one, no longer a spiritual one.
What Hobbes did not foresee was that both models would continue to run, in parallel and interlocked. Since the 17th century the modern state has gathered power that used to be the Church's — education, welfare, family, morality, the monopoly on violence. But the Church has not given up its power. It has reshaped itself, but it has remained. In Italy the Vatican concluded the Lateran Treaties with Mussolini in 1929 and founded its own state — Vatican City. In Germany the Catholic Church agreed with Hitler in the Reich Concordat of 1933 that it could keep its institutional structures if it held back politically — a pact that was never subsequently revoked. In most European states there are to this day concordats, church taxes, religious education in state schools, theological faculties at state universities. The Church has not handed over the crozier. It has merely shared part of its power with the state.
IX. The Megamachine today
The Catholic Church today is one of the oldest continuous institutions in the world. By its own account it has around 1.4 billion members worldwide, roughly seventeen per cent of the world's population. It has its own state — Vatican City — with its own diplomacy, its own bank (the Istituto per le Opere di Religione, IOR), its own administration, its own laws. It has its own legal system (canon law). It has its own education system, reaching from primary school to university. It has its own health system with thousands of hospitals worldwide. It has its own welfare system. It has an estimated asset base whose size is hard to quantify but which certainly ranks among the largest institutional fortunes in the world.
The Protestant churches have shrunk in recent decades — above all in Western Europe — but they remain institutionally present, with concordats, church taxes, their own education system, their own welfare system. The Protestant Church in Germany (EKD) today (as of 2024) still has about 18 million members, the Catholic Church in Germany 20 million. Together that is just under half the German population. They are interwoven with the state through the church tax — the state collects the contributions for them, keeps an administrative fee for doing so, and protects the tax privilege against attempts at reform.
What characterises the churches today is no longer the persecution of heretics at the stake. They lost their direct power of violence to the state in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. What they have kept is institutional inertia, the asset base, special legal status, social presence, media power. They are no longer the Megamachine they were in the 13th century. But they have remained a Megamachine.
The scandals of recent decades — the abuse scandal, asset management, the Vatican Bank affairs, the money-laundering allegations, the cover-ups — have shown that the institutional logic of the Megamachine still takes hold. Whoever commits abuse is protected by the institution, because its preservation matters more than clearing things up. Whoever demands clarification is marginalised. Whoever leaves is ignored. The mechanisms are the same ones with which the Beguines were already treated in the 14th century — only the methods have become subtler.
X. What is especially oppressive about this history
What is especially oppressive about the history of the Christian Leviathan is not any single crime. It is the patience of the construction and the patience of the liquidation it carried out over sixteen centuries. It is the fact that a movement that was originally anti-authoritarian, anti-imperial and egalitarian was transformed into an institution that became the strongest pillar of authority, empire and hierarchy — and that this transformation did not happen in one revolutionary act but in thousands of small steps, each of which seemed justifiable.
Paul presumably did not think he was building a Leviathan. He wanted to make the Christian message accessible to a Hellenistic world. Constantine presumably did not think he was creating a Megamachine. He wanted to stabilise the empire. Augustine presumably did not think he was preparing the Inquisition. He wanted to resolve the Donatist controversy. Each individual step was pragmatic, situational, justifiable. Together they produced an edifice that far exceeded their own ideas.
This is the way the Megamachine works in its purest form. It is not built consciously. It arises from a sequence of decisions, each rational in itself, whose cumulative effect nobody explicitly wanted. Once it is established, it is no longer called into question — because its structures legitimise themselves, because its bearers no longer question its existence, because its competitors are crushed before they become a threat.
What Jesus was — an anti-authoritarian, egalitarian, anti-imperial voice — was turned into its opposite, without the transformation as such ever having been explicitly decided. It happened because it corresponded to the logic of power. Whoever had power extended it. Whoever had no power was incorporated into the structures of power. Whoever resisted incorporation was liquidated. The Beguines were only one in a long line of movements that resisted this process and were crushed for it.
XI. What must be remembered
Anyone who thinks about the churches today should keep two things in view at the same time. The one is that the churches — both the Catholic and the Protestant ones — are large organisations with a history, with their own positive contributions (education, welfare, cultural heritage) and with their dark side (Inquisition, persecution of women, abuse, authoritarian structures). To condemn them wholesale would be wrong. To play them down wholesale would be just as wrong.
The other is that the churches, as an institutional form, are what we call a Megamachine — not as an anomaly, but as one of the earliest and longest-lived examples of this form. Anyone who wants to understand the Megamachine can study its mechanisms particularly well in the churches — the diffusion of responsibility across many actors, the accumulation of small decisions into large consequences, the erasure of the memory of competitors, self-legitimation through institutional inertia, resistance to any reform that does not come from above.
What is especially important to remember in this history is the original message. Jesus was not an authoritarian. He was not a hierarch. He was not a defender of the existing order. He was an itinerant preacher who stood up against the religious and political authorities of his time and was executed for it. What was built in his name over the following centuries was in many respects the opposite of what he had lived. To see this difference is not anti-Christian. On the contrary, it is what Jesus himself would have done — to test the religion that bears his name against the message he left behind.
The Beguines, whom the previous paper dealt with, did this in their own way. They invoked the equality of all before God that corresponds to the original message. They lived without the structures of mediation the Leviathan had erected. They were persecuted for it — by an institution that invoked the man to whose message they were closer than the institution itself. That is the tragedy of Christian history.
XII. Conclusion — the giant and the voice
Hobbes's giant still stands today. He has changed, divided, become disfigured — but he has not disappeared. In one hand he holds the crozier — the institutional power of the churches, which is weakening in Europe but growing in other parts of the world (in Africa Christianity today has more followers than in Europe). In his other hand he holds the sword — the power of the state, which in many respects has taken over the former functions of the Church. Both hands belong to the same body.
What lives on quietly is the other voice — the voice of the anti-authoritarian itinerant preachers, of the Beguines and Beghards, of the mystics, of the peace churches, of the liberation theologians, of the base communities in Latin America, of the many small groups that invoke the original message without falling into Megamachine mode. They are small. They are marginalised. They are forgotten. But they are there.
The Christian Megamachine is one of the most durable edifices in European history. It was made out of an anti-authoritarian movement. It persecuted its competitors over sixteen centuries. It selectively constructed its own memory. It still stands today, albeit in altered form. Whoever remembers its history without falling into wholesale condemnation can at once acknowledge what it has achieved and see what it has suppressed. Both belong to the truth.
Anyone who is young today and thinks about religion must know this history in order to find a position of their own. It is not about being against religion. It is about being able to distinguish between the original message and the Megamachine that invokes it. Whoever does not make this distinction falls either into uncritical defence or into wholesale rejection. Both are too little.
The Beguines understood this in their own way. They lived the original message — equality, solidarity, direct access to the holy, freedom to shape their own lives — and they did so not by breaking with the Megamachine but by finding a form of their own that could exist in parallel. The Megamachine could not bear it. It liquidated them. But it did not erase their message. It is still here, in the texts, in the béguinages, in the few initiatives that invoke them today.
The same holds for the larger message on which they drew. It has not been erased. It lies buried under sixteen centuries of institutional construction. Whoever brings it back to light has gained a tradition far older than the institution that invokes it. That is the task for everyone who thinks about religion today — to recognise the construction and to hear the voice beneath it. Both demand patience. Both demand differentiation. Both demand the willingness not to let the great institutions dictate what religion is.
Hobbes was right — the giant with sword and crozier is a real power. But he was not entirely right either. There is the other voice. It was always there. It is still there today. Whoever wants to hear it must become quieter than the giant.