A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Churches of Ruthenian or other Orthodox origin in communion with Rome now prefer to term themselves ‘Greek Catholics’,

Prince Ostroz’kyi had long cherished a vision of overall reunion of East and West, including the Protestants, with whom he had excellent relations, but he was infuriated by the terms which the Catholics laid down, since they gave no role to the Oecumenical Patriarch.

To the fury of Rome but to the relief of moderates on both sides, he recognized the independent Orthodox hierarchy once more in ‘Articles of Pacification’. From now on there were two hierarchies of Ruthenian Orthodox bishops side by side, one still Greek Catholic and loyal to Rome, the other answering to a metropolitan in Kiev in communion with Constantinople.

On the death of Ivan IV’s son, Tsar Feodor I, in 1598, there was no obvious heir to the throne and civil war reduced the country to its ‘Time of Troubles’.

there were Swedish armies in the north and Polish armies penetrating as far east as Moscow.

In 1613 the teenaged Mikhail Romanov was declared tsar, the first in the dynasty which ruled until 1917.

Since the Patriarch then became the real ruler of Muscovy through a decade and a half of his son’s reign, there could hardly have been a closer union of Church and throne.

By the end of the thirteenth century, the Western Latin Church had created nearly all the structures which shaped it up to the Reformation era.

the popes made large claims to be the focus of unity in all Christendom.

Church as the heir of the Roman emperors,

an emperor, now calling himself both ‘Holy’ and ‘Roman’.

it was a siege by plague-stricken Mongols from the Kipchak Khanate of a Genoese trading post in the Crimea in 1346 which first brought Europeans into contact with the Black Death.

Genoese fleeing the horror instead took the disease first to Constantinople, then around the whole circuit of the Mediterranean.

Black Death in Europe was more thoroughgoing than any other recorded disaster: proportionally, it was far more destructive than the First World War, with perhaps as many as one in three of the population dying, and in some places up to two-thirds.

The Church was revealed as better at celebrating the end of catastrophe than preventing or halting

outbreaks of flagellant activity became associated with quite exceptional anti-Semitic violence, which included the torturing and burning alive of Jews in groups. This was justified by accusations that Jews had

this was ‘the most severe persecution of Jews before the twentieth century’.4 By autumn 1349 Pope Clement VI, lobbied by

which had grown up in the thirteenth century, and singled out the themes of suffering, the Passion and death.

One of the earliest, Henry III’s effort to start a Holy Blood cult in Westminster Abbey in the mid-thirteenth century, to rival King Louis IX’s sensational acquisition of the Crown of Thorns

after the Black Death, blood cults gathered momentum, and like so much else in Passion devotion they acquired an anti-Semitic edge, because they were often associated with stories

chantry, a foundation of invested money or landed revenues which provided finance for a priest to devote his time to singing Masses for the soul of the founder and anyone else that the founder cared to specify

It was a splendidly mutual system, and a particularly neat aspect was the developed institution of indulgences, which had originated in the first enthusiasm of the Crusades

The treasury of merit can then be granted to the faithful to shorten the time spent doing penance in Purgatory. That grant is an indulgence.

Eventually their thanks-offerings became effectively a payment for the indulgence, although all indulgences were very careful to lay down proper conditions for use, particularly instructions to the purchasers to go to confession, and also, in a specialized form of welfare relief, free indulgences were offered to the destitute.

Another important symptom of a north–south difference on salvation occurs in the many books published to provide clergy with models for sermons about penitence.

Martin Luther’s rebellion against late medieval views on salvation was also a rebellion against papal authority, but he was by no means the first to question the assumptions of papal monarchy.

In order to become pope, Boniface had summarily displaced and brutally imprisoned a disastrously unworldly hermit-partisan of their movement who had been unwisely elected pope as Celestine V.15

Franciscan philosopher-theologians, the Englishman William of Ockham, was among those leading the campaign. He had no hesitation in declaring Pope John a heretic to whom no obedience was due:

large deposits of alum were discovered at Tolfa, in the papal territories north-west of Rome. This mineral was highly valuable because of its use in dyes, and before that it could only be imported at great expense from the Middle East. The new source of income (which the popes were careful to ensure became a monopoly supply of alum in Europe) began

new style of piety arose in that increasingly large section of society which valued book-learning for both profit and pleasure; the Netherlands, which had a level of urban life more concentrated than in any other part of Europe and high levels of literacy, were particularly prominent in this development.

Despite this, the Devotio Moderna was never a purely clerical movement.

Instead, Lollardy’s repression included one feature unique to England. Wyclif’s Oxford admirers had followed his teaching on the unchallengeable authority of the Bible by producing the first complete translation of the Vulgate into English, so that all might have a chance to read it and understand it for themselves. In 1407 all existing versions of the Bible in English

Jean Gerson did propose a general ban on Bible translations to the Council of Konstanz; he was worried that the laity would spend too much time reading for themselves and not listen to the clergy’s increasingly generous supply of preaching.

Bernard Cottret, Calvin’s biographer, has suggested that this huge increase in Bibles created the Reformation rather than being created by it.

Hus preached a series of increasingly outspoken sermons in Prague, and his attacks on the Church were like Wyclif’s, easy to link to contemporary politics:

Hus and his followers made a particularly provocative gesture: in 1414 they began offering consecrated wine as well as bread to the laity in their Eucharists, for the first time in centuries. This restoration of the elements ‘in both kinds’ became central to the movement which now developed in Bohemia; the eucharistic chalice containing the

Yet soon Hus himself was dead, betrayed at the Council of Konstanz in 1415 when the assembled clerics prevailed on the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund to set aside an imperial promise of safe conduct to the Prague Reformer. After being imprisoned in vile conditions, Hus was burned at the stake. It was a powerful symbol that the institutional Church was no longer capable of dealing constructively with a movement of reform.

an independent Hussite Church structure still survived, grudgingly and incompletely recognized by Rome.

Church: its use in worship of Czech, the language of the people, rather than Latin, and its continuing insistence on reception in both kinds or species (sub utraque specie). So important was the latter to the mainstream Hussite Bohemian Church that it took the name ‘Utraquist’.

Ficino’s insight that Plato’s writings had profoundly affected early Christian thought was one of humanism’s legacies to our understanding of Christianity, long after his apocalyptic excitement had faded.

Cabbala embraced a vision of humanity as potentially divine and indwelt by divine spirit. It was the hope of Ficino, or of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the aristocratic translator of Cabbala, that cabbalistic and hermetic ideas together might complete God’s purpose in the Christian message by broadening and enriching it. These themes were to play a great part in intellectual life and discussion throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while also attracting derision and hostility from many theologians in both Catholic and Protestant camps. We will find that, in the end, they helped to bring the Reformation era to a close

developing ways of telling a good text from a corrupt text: looking at the way in which it was written and whether it sounded like texts reliably datable to the same historical period.

A ‘source’ (fons) for authority now outweighed the unchallenged reputation of an auctoritas, a voice of authority from the past. Ad fontes, back to the sources, was the battle-cry of the humanists,

The shock of the familiar experienced in an unfamiliar form was bound to suggest to the most sensitive minds in Latin Christianity that the Western Church was not so authoritative an interpreter of scripture as it claimed.

Increasingly, the Bible would be perceived as a single text and read as other texts might be – or perhaps, more accurately, as a library of self-contained continuous texts, each of which might be read in a different

In 1391, a particularly vicious wave of anti-Jewish preaching provoked the massacre of around a third of the Jews in Christian Spain,

Perhaps 70,000 to 100,000 Jews chose to become refugees abroad rather than abandon their faith, forming a European-wide dispersal which has been called Sephardic Judaism

So it became increasingly necessary for loyal Spanish Catholics to prove their limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), free of all mudéjar or Jewish taint.

Without the Elector Friedrich’s support (puzzling in its consistency – he did not know Martin Luther well and never approved of his religious revolution), it is likely that Luther would have suffered the fate of Jan Hus a century before, burned by the authority of the Church.

Perhaps it was his order’s devotion to Augustine that directed Luther to his fresh perception of Augustine’s views on salvation and grace, but he was hardly alone around the turn of the century in returning to Augustine’s grand narrative of human helplessness remedied by divine mercy.