A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Few people can regard their drearily unspectacular sins as justifying hellfire, but most would agree with the Alexandrians that life on earth provides hardly enough time to remedy even those sins and enter Heaven without further purgation.

Never a notion which gained currency in the Eastern world, despite its precedent in Greek-speaking theologians, Purgatory was to become one of the most important and in the end also one of the most contentious doctrines of the Western Latin Church.

This sacramental view of marriage meant that the Western Church saw a union blessed in Church as indissoluble; there was no possibility of divorce – again, not a common view in the first few centuries before Augustine – and the best one could hope for was a declaration that (on a variety of grounds) a marriage had never actually existed and could be declared null.

Married clergy might well found dynasties, and might therefore be inclined to make Church lands into their hereditary property, just as secular lords were doing at the same time. The result was a long battle to forbid marriage for all clergy, not just monks: to make them compulsorily celibate. There had been occasional efforts to achieve this before, and the Western Church had from the fourth century generally prevented higher clergy from being married, but in 1139 a second council to be called at the pope’s residence in Rome, the Lateran Palace, declared all clerical marriages not only unlawful but invalid.

They drew on their predecessors’ centuries of claims about their place in the Church, which had previously given the pope a position of great honour but not much real power. Popes had not appointed bishops; rulers like Charlemagne or the local bishops who were their creations had called councils to decide on Church law and policy, even contradicting papal opinions from time to time.

Pope Leo IX (reigned 1049–54) was in the final year of his pontificate responsible for the drastic step of excommunicating the Oecumenical Patriarch Michael Keroularios in his own cathedral in Constantinople.

the Latin West had come to use unleavened bread (azyma in Greek) at the Eucharist. Azyma had the advantage of not dropping into crumbs when it was broken, a matter of some importance now that eucharistic bread was increasingly identified with the Body of the Lord – yet the Greeks (rightly) regarded this as yet another Western departure from early custom. Was such bread really bread at all?

Gregory’s successors took a new title, more comprehensive than ‘Vicar of Peter’, more accurately to express his ideas: ‘Vicar of Christ’.

Given the new importance of canon law, it was no coincidence that every pope of significance between 1159 and 1303 was trained primarily as a canon lawyer.27

Stained glass became one of the most compelling though also one of the most vulnerable media for conveying the doctrine of the Western Church

Urban made it clear that to die on crusade in a state of repentance and confession would guarantee immediate entry to Heaven, doing away with any necessity of penance after death:

One of the effects of the Crusades was to establish an extraordinary new variant on the monastic ideal. The hugely popular military saints of the early Church – Sergius, Martin, George – had gained their sanctity when they renounced earthly warfare; now the very act of being a soldier could create holiness.

Religious dissent had developed throughout Europe, particularly its most prosperous and disturbed parts, from the early eleventh century. The Church gave much of it the label heresy and in 1022 King Robert II of France set a precedent by returning to the Roman imperial custom of burning heretics at the stake.

Elsewhere, there were more extreme forms of dissent. From at least the beginning of the thirteenth century, self-appointed leaders roamed Europe preaching that individuals could meet God through an inner light; it might be that God’s Spirit could be found in all things, in a form of pantheism.

With the exception of one or two ecclesiastical foundations, the Italian universities resolutely kept their lay-dominated character for centuries to come, even when the pope came to license new foundations.

the Sorbonne, after one of the university’s leading colleges) continued to be much used by popes when they needed specialist expertise to pronounce on a disputed question. This advisory role was a completely new development in Christianity, and again it represented a borrowing from the way in which scholars of Islamic religious law advised rulers in the Muslim world.

later episodes of mass flagellation were certainly not so benevolent, for, like the earlier campaigns to gather crusader armies, they were often associated with crowds turning in violence on Jewish communities.

From the mid-twelfth century, a particularly persistent and pernicious community response to the occasional abuse and murder of children was to deflect guilt from Christians by blaming Jews for abducting the children for use in rituals. This so-called ‘blood libel’ frequently resulted in vicious attacks on Jewish communities. Sometimes higher clergy did their best to calm the community hysteria in such cases; sometimes they allowed shrine-cults of the murdered victims to develop. Recurrences of the blood libel persisted into the twentieth century as a blemish on Christian attitudes to Jews, spreading from the West into Orthodoxy in later centuries.10

The new friars also quickly gained the nickname Dominicans, and otherwise Blackfriars, from the black hood which they wore with their white robe. They avoided holding property so that they would not build up wealth like the monastic orders; instead, they lived by begging from people in ordinary society (hence the alternative name of friars, ‘mendicants’, from the Latin verb for begging). This mobility in the world was a significant addition to the West’s armoury of spiritual resources, recreating a form of monastic wandering which always remained common in the Eastern Churches, but which centuries before had been firmly discouraged for Western monks by no less a figure than St Benedict himself

he realized that the blessed biblical figures of Job and Lazarus had been lepers – it was he and not they who needed healing.

In his own body, Francis is the first person known to have suffered stigmata, fleshly wounds which followed the patterns of the wounds of the crucified Christ

In the last weeks of his life in 1226 he dictated a Testament expressing his fears that his commitment to poverty would be sidelined by the newly institutionalized ‘Franciscans’. In particular he warned against their large-scale campaign of building convents for themselves. Francis was justified in his worries.

Priests were now expected as a matter of course to instruct as well as tend their flocks: manuals of instruction for pastoral care and preaching proliferated.

‘Real Presence’, the general devotional belief that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are to be identified with the body and blood of Christ, with the doctrine of transubstantiation, which is just one explanation of this miracle.

So it is with transubstantiation from bread and wine into divine body and blood. Breadness and wineness have gone in substance, but something more, by divine providence, has happened: divine corporal substance has replaced them.

The inquisitors’ outlook has been likened to that of officials in the Cheka, early revolutionary Russia’s secret police, where the aim was not merely to repress, but to change society for the better – there is often a fine line between idealism and sadism.

In the period 1249–57, of 306 recorded penalties handed out by inquisitions, only twenty-one were burnings; secular courts were much more likely than inquisitors to impose death penalties.17

Carmelites started their existence as an informal group of hermits living on Mount Carmel in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, probably as refugees when Jerusalem was first recaptured by the Muslims in 1187. Conditions grew impossible for them when the whole kingdom collapsed, so they migrated westwards across the Mediterranean. After they reached Europe, they accounted for their odd history to a wary Church hierarchy by the drastically ingenious means of inventing an even more exotic origin, in the time of the Prophet Elijah, a much earlier enthusiast for Mount Carmel. Thus they became the only religious order ever to claim a pre-Christian past, as well as the only order of contemplative religious to take their origins among the Latin settlements of the East.

Those who listen to the vapid rock anthem ‘The Age of Aquarius’ are catching a last echo of the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot whose vision was of a dawning new age.24

Four of them were burned at Marseilles for proclaiming that Christ had lived in absolute poverty; it was a sensitive issue, reflecting adversely on the clerical hierarchy’s wealth and therefore on their power. The most extreme Spirituals, one of whose leaders

If Gregory was the most decisive personality of the eleventh-century Church and Bernard of Clairvaux its greatest preacher in the twelfth, then Aquinas’s system of thought, Thomism, in the thirteenth represents a defining moment in the theology of the medieval West.

It was in the process of approaching faith through reasoned argument that Aquinas found Aristotle so useful, particularly Aristotle’s newly translated works on logic and metaphysics (see pp. 33–4). Building on Aristotle’s idea that everything created must have a cause from which it receives its existence, he could construct a system in which everything that is and can be described is linked back in a chain of causation to God, the first cause of all things.

what this greatest of scholastic theologians understood was that all language about God had to employ the sideways glance, the analogy, the metaphor.

The early fourteenth century added a new set of conspirators: Satan and his agents on earth, witches. Pope John XXII, a man much exercised by enemies and disruptors of the Church like the Spiritual Franciscans, crystallized a good deal of academic debate about magic and witchcraft which had been building up during the previous half-century.

Peter’s successors revived the aspirations of Roman emperors to rule the world, and they managed to prevent the successors of the Emperor Charlemagne from gaining a monopoly on this monarchical role in the Christianity of the West.

Orthodox Christianity prides itself on its faithfulness to tradition: its majestic round of worship, woven into a texture of ancient music, sustained with carefully considered gesture and choreography amid a setting of painting following prescribed artistic convention,

It is a peculiarity of the Orthodox tradition of public worship that it contains hymns of hate, directed towards named individuals who are defined as heretical, all the way from Arius through Miaphysites, Dyophysites and Iconoclasts.

Continuity is not the same as changelessness.

culturally this is something many take pride in--continuity for its own sake

destruction of the empire in 1453 did not merely encourage the Church to cling fiercely to its evolved theological identity, denying that any other could be or had been possible;

(Hagia Sophia)

Justinian and Theodora were the last Christian monarchs before the nineteenth-century British Queen Victoria to wield an influence throughout all sections of the Christian world in their age,

the dome, a recreation of the canopy of Heaven.

In a much later development, a screen called an iconostasis customarily shut off the altar (see pp. 484–5), but this was not how such church interiors were originally conceived for five centuries or more after Justinian’s time.

Interestingly, the ordering of saints in Byzantine church interiors does not much reflect the passing of the seasons of Christian worship; they tend instead to be grouped in categories, such as martyrs or virgins.

Moreover, from an early date, Eastern Christians seem to have concluded that it was enough for worshippers to be present at the Eucharist without receiving bread and wine. This seems to have been a measure of the awe which attached to the experience of eating the body and blood of Christ, which is how the Eucharist was now perceived. Laypeople’s reception of these elements became a very occasional, perhaps once-yearly, experience, much earlier than the same development in the West.

singing of the liturgy imitated the music of Heaven, with angels in the same choir alongside the worshippers, and much of that music was intended for processions, for all to sing. The tradition allowed for voices alone, without instruments,

‘deification’. The concept was likely to take the Christian believer in a very different direction from Augustine’s Western emphasis on the great gulf between God and humanity created by original sin. It asserted that human society could be sanctified through the ministry and liturgy of the Church, and by the meditations of those who were prepared to enter such difficult and testing labour.

hagiographies (biographies of saints, their miracles and the wonders associated with their shrines) became the staple fare of Byzantine reading.

in his preoccupation with defeating his enemies in east and west, Heraclius had missed the importance of the new invaders from the south, the Muslim Arabs.

While in hindsight we can see this Byzantine victory as a decisive move blocking westwards Islamic advance into Europe for centuries, there would have been little reason to feel relief at the time.