A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

particular, monks within the Benedictine tradition creatively adapted Benedict’s twin commands to ‘labour and pray’ so that labour might include scholarship.

called the Dark Ages, was a rich and creative period in the development of the West, and ‘early medieval’ might describe it more neutrally and fairly.

Perhaps most significantly, in the decades after 550, Latin culture came within a hair’s breadth of extinction:

bishops of the Catholic Church were the only form of Latin authority left, since the imperial civil service had collapsed.

continued to stand aloof from the Arianism of the Gothic peoples, but it increasingly distanced itself from Constantinople, and it developed an increasing focus on the Bishop of Rome.

with all the resources of Christian art and architecture. Despite bombing hits in both world wars of the twentieth century, Sant’ Apollinare and the other Ostrogothic survivals in Ravenna are among the few witnesses to Arian culture and literature, when virtually everything else produced by the Arians has been deliberately erased from the record.

If the balance of preferences among barbarian monarchs had been swayed by the Spanish Visigoths rather than by Clovis of the Franks, European Christianity could have remained a decentralized Arianism rather than a Roman monarchy; and the consequences are incalculable.

The three great Catholic saintly patrons of the Frankish dynasty thus comprised two bishops, one a monk who was an ex-soldier, together with a saint highly unusual at the time or indeed at any other: a woman who had pioneered the monastic life and also shown the qualities of a soldier.

The end of the Acacian schism in 519 produced renewed assertions of the pope’s spiritual authority.

single united empire of East and West based on Constantinople.

Gregory was the first monk to become pope, although this was not monasticism as Pachomius or even Martin had known it: Gregory financed the foundation of the monastery which he entered, built on a family property within the city, and a later tradition asserted that his mother, Silvia, customarily sent him vegetables to his monastery on a silver dish.

He strongly objected to the title of Oecumenical or Universal Patriarch which the Patriarch of Constantinople had used for the past century, particularly because its justification was that the patriarch was bishop in the Universal City of Constantinople, ‘Universal’ because it was capital of the empire.

Gregory did have a strong sense of urgency in his papacy, for the good reason that he believed that the end of the world was imminent. It was easy to assume this, amid the political

Gregory is the first writer whose work has survived who spends much time discussing how clergy should offer pastoral care and preach to laypeople: a very different clerical duty from the contemplative life of a monk, to which he had withdrawn before his election as pope.

Gregory’s dispatch of a mission to the English in Britannia marked a crucial stage in the Western Latin Church’s change of direction away from Byzantium and towards the north and west. Once the Western Church had been the poor relation of the Greek East in terms of numbers and theological sophistication. It had been tied to the fortunes of an empire in increasing disarray and was then confronted by rulers with an alien variety of Christian faith. Now it was reaching out beyond the boundaries of the Roman imperial world.

Patrick faced a good deal of distressing opposition alike in Britain, southern Scotland and Ireland, much of which was from fellow Christians, but this opposition is left behind in subsequent legend. Patrick was to become Apostle to Ireland and eventually, through the worldwide wanderings of the Irish, a saint inspiring veneration throughout the modern Catholic Church

inspired countless Africans who also found themselves victims of enslavement by Europeans

To call these leaders kings may be misleading, since there could have been anything between 150 and 200 of them

the bishops realized that the Church could be rooted in Irish society by founding monasteries and nunneries.17

monasteries became part of the joint estate of great families.

The inquisitive and gossipy historian Gerald of Wales

in Scotland, Ireland and Wales people were more afraid of breaking oaths taken on bells, crosiers and the like than they were of breaking oaths taken on Gospel books.

Celtic monasteries took the same line as their fellow monks John Cassian and Vincent of Lérins in the struggle against Augustine of Hippo over grace (see pp. 315–17): they wanted to emphasize the importance of humans striving as best they could towards perfection.

When missionaries from Ireland and Scotland started spreading their faith in northern and central Europe in the seventh century, they brought tariff books with them; these were the first ‘penitentials’ or manuals of penance for clergy to use with their flocks. The idea was hugely popular – who would not jump at the chance of being able to do something concrete and specified, however hard, in order to lift a burden of guilt?

Columbanus’s first journeys (probably in the 580s) were into Christian Gaul, where his foundation of monasteries was met with less than wholehearted gratitude by the existing episcopate. One liturgical issue which was to prove a recurrent source of annoyance between Celtic and non-Celtic Catholics was their disagreement about the date for celebrating Easter, that earliest and most important of Christian festivals.

model of the great Martin, who had demonstrated the power of the Christian God against all inferior competitors. The stories of his feats probably provided a handy distraction for his biographers from his confrontations with Frankish bishops.

597, the year that Abbot Columba died far away in Iona, a party of monks and priests set out from Rome on the Pope’s command; they were bound for the Atlantic Isles under the leadership of a monk from Gregory’s monastery of St Andrew, called Augustine. There is a certain air of haste and improvisation about this mission to the Anglo-Saxons, which suggests that Pope Gregory may have been fired by a sudden enthusiasm for England.

the new Bishop Augustine recognized reality and established himself in the extreme south-east in Kent, the nearest kingdom to mainland Europe, where pagan King Ethelbert had married a Frankish Christian princess called Bertha, and where there was still a lively sense of the importance of the Roman past. The Kentish royal capital was a former Roman city now called Canterbury. When political power later shifted away from Kent,

One late-twelfth-century archbishop even tried to fulfil Gregory’s plan and move his cathedral to Lambeth, a scheme foiled only by his death on crusade.

lived a century after Augustine’s mission (c. 672–735). Bede was the greatest historian of his age in all Europe, perhaps the greatest for many centuries either side of his own time.

Bede is the equal of Thucydides in this respect, and a good deal less credulous than Herodotus

The Roman missionaries were facing difficulties because they were coming up against a significant body of well-informed local Christians with different standards from themselves.

So what was different about Augustine’s mission? Chiefly, but crucially, its emphasis on Roman obedience.

Augustine’s missionary party tried to turn Canterbury into Rome and Kent into Italy. They

It took the next century from 597 to ensure Christianity’s full sweep throughout the kingdoms occupying the former Britannia.

The Church encouraged royal families to extend their genealogies further beyond the Germanic god Woden, not to leave him out, but to go all the way back to biblical Adam.

it was two centuries after Gregory’s death before Rome caught up with his cult, enshrining the Pope alongside Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine as one of the ‘Big Four’ theologians of the earlier West, the four Latin Doctors.

The crucial decade was the 670s, when a couple of councils of English bishops made decisions for the whole Church in the various kingdoms of England, first at Hertford in 673 and then at Hatfield in Yorkshire in 679.

Israel was most at one with God in its covenanted status when it was united, and at its most glorious when that unity was under single monarchs, David and Solomon. Bede caused the English to meditate on Solomon in another of his works beside his History.

Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Christians between them made the Atlantic Isles in the seventh and eighth centuries a prodigious powerhouse of Christian activity.

These conversions sponsored by missionaries from Ninian through Patrick and Augustine far into central Europe were not conversions in the sense often demanded by evangelists in the twenty-first century, accepting Christ as personal Saviour in a great individual spiritual turnaround.

1386? At the time, those who described the experience normally used more passive and more collective language than the word ‘conversion’: a people or a community ‘accepted’ or ‘submitted to’ the Christian God and his representatives on earth.

Everyone wanted to be Roman: the memory of the empire stood for wealth, wine, central heating and filing systems, and its two languages, Latin and Greek, could link Armagh to Alexandria.

680–81, when Constantinople hosted yet another major council of the Church (reckoned as the sixth held there). It finally reaffirmed the imperial Church’s commitment to the decisions of Chalcedon against any attempt to placate Miaphysites in the empire, ending the so-called ‘Monothelete’ controversy (see pp. 441–2). Roman representatives joined Eastern bishops in condemning as heretical four Patriarchs of Constantinople and, more reluctantly, one former Roman pope, Honorius; his name was discreetly inserted in the middle of the list of patriarchs to minimize Roman embarrassment.

Outstanding among them was Chrodegang, a great aristocrat and Merovingian palace official who, in the 740s, also became Bishop of Metz in what is now north-east France; he may have been the leading bishop in the anointing of Pippin in 751.54

Chrodegang intended Metz to be a local symbol of the unity of the Church, a lesser reflection of Rome, just as the monk Augustine had done in Anglo-Saxon Kent in his mission from 597.

The alliance between the Franks and the popes ripened. Chrodegang was a key negotiator for Pippin in Rome, eventually receiving the pallium

Bishops and aristocrats still thought that the best way to battle against monastic complacency and corruption was to devote huge resources in land and wealth to the creation of ever more splendid Benedictine houses.

Cluny saw the Christian world as clothing itself with ‘a white mantle of churches’, having safely passed the watershed of 1000, when the end of the world might have been expected

From the eleventh century to the twentieth, the second half of Christianity’s existence so far, the parish was the unit in which most Christians experienced their devotional life. Only now has that ceased to be the case.