A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The two Christian victories at Constantinople and in France between them preserved a Europe in which Christianity remained dominant, and as a result the centre of energy and unfettered development and change in the Christian world decisively shifted west from its old Eastern centres. By contrast, a crushing Islamic victory over Chinese armies in what is now Kyrgyzstan in 751 laid open Central Asia to Islam, bringing eventual ruin to the Church of the East.

was natural that many Christians should assume that the Arab conquests signalled the end of the world, and there was much excited writing to that effect, but, as has so far proved the case in Christian history, apocalypse was postponed and everyday life took over.

Christians learned about Islam, not always with great accuracy,

conquest, that ‘these Arabs fight not against our Christian religion; nay, rather they defend our faith, they revere our priests and Saints, and they make gifts to our churches and monasteries’.

Muslims were torn between the general cultural respect for ascetic holy men in the Middle East, attested in the Qur’an itself, and other pronouncements of the Qur’an which condemn monks as dangerous charlatans.19 One device for protection against negative opinions was

One of the most influential theologians for Byzantine Orthodoxy in the years around 700 (see pp. 447–8) spent all his life as a subject of the Umayyad caliph in Damascus, and he was indeed ethnically an Arab, as his family name, Mansūr, revealed; he has come to be known as John of Damascus.

His intimacy with the elite of the new dispensation did not prevent him from writing combatively against Islam and even calling it ‘forerunner of the Antichrist’.22

When the Abbasid dynasty overthrew the Umayyads in 750, they moved the centre of government in the caliphate into Mesopotamia, where from 762 they designed a new capital with no links to previous imperial histories. Baghdad replaced both Damascus and Seleucia-Ctesiphon as the key city of the Middle East. In the battle for prominence among the various factions of Christianity, that shift eastwards would inevitably favour the Dyophysite ‘Church of the East’ against the Melchites and Miaphysites, and the Abbasids gave an unprecedented official jurisdiction to the Dyophysite patriarch over all Christians in their caliphate, which stretched from Egypt into Central

The late eighth and early ninth centuries were promising times for the Church of the East, aided by the fact that through forty years from the 780s its patriarch, Timothy I, was an outstanding diplomat in his dealings with caliphs who continued to be erratic in their attitude to the Church.

in the mid-eighth century, thanks to the patronage of one general victorious in civil wars, Christians found themselves over several decades in a position of advantage in China which would not be repeated for some centuries.

Yet Dyophysite Christians were also ready to model themselves on another faith which the Chinese recognized as having come from beyond their borders, but which was by now well established and widely respected: Buddhism.

The problem for the Dyophysites of China was that integration into Chinese society also meant dependence on power within it.

When the Tang dynasty finally collapsed in 907, the western trade routes which remained the lifeline of the Church were closed and the possibility of renewal through missions for the time being came to an end.

Mongol Khan of the Keraits, adrift in a snowstorm, became convinced that he would die lost and alone, but the saint promised deliverance in return for conversion, and deliverance from the blizzard duly arrived. The Dyophysite clergy who then received the large numbers

Mongols preserved a comfortable mixture of Christianity and tradition. It is clear from archaeological finds

the greatest Mongol ruler of them all, Temüjin, who in 1206 was proclaimed ‘Genghis Khan’ (‘Ruler of the Ocean’), had been the vassal of a Christian Kerait khan and married his overlord’s Christian niece.30 It was through Temüjin’s leadership that, in the space of a few decades, the Mongols became a world power to terrify people from the Mediterranean to the China Sea.

the new diplomatic possibilities, led by a formidable set of missionaries from an innovative Latin organization, the Order of Franciscan Friars

The Mongols were unimpressed by their increasing acquaintance with Christian rivalries, which had not previously been apparent in Mongol homelands in Dyophysite Central Asia,

Timur’s orgies of destruction hit Christian populations in Central Asia which had already been terribly reduced by the advance of the plague which western Europe would come to know in 1348–9 as the Black Death.

authorities. Even when Timur found no successors in his cruelty and the Mongol threat receded, the growing power of the Ottoman Turks (see p. 483) continued the pressure on non-Muslims.

Western Christians have forgotten that before the coming of Islam utterly transformed the situation in the eastern Mediterranean and Asia, there was a good chance that the centre of gravity of Christian faith might have moved east to Iraq rather than west to Rome.

surviving Church under the Roman obedience still sustains one of the world’s oldest monarchies, based on the claim to succeed Peter as Bishop of Rome and to be the guardian of his tomb.

Lawrence’s and St Peter’s churches thus witnessed to the newly Christian Emperor’s special concern for death and honourable burial, a contrast to the attitude of the Saviour himself.

After a highly discreditable election, in which his partisans slaughtered more than a hundred supporters of a rival candidate, and some very shaky years following that while he established his authority, Damasus sought to highlight the traditions and glory of his see.11 He was the first pope to use the distant language favoured by the imperial bureaucracy in his correspondence. He took a keen interest in the process of making Rome and its suburbs into a Christian pilgrimage city, financing a series of handsomely sculpted inscriptions at the various holy sites in indifferent but lovingly and personally composed Latin verse, some of which survive.

All this promotion of Peter was not merely for the pope’s greater glory; it was a conscious effort to show that Christianity had a past as glorious as anything that the old gods could offer.

One feels that he was a man with a six-point plan for becoming a saint, taking in the papacy on the way. After Damasus’s death Jerome abruptly relocated to Palestine, though the precise reasons for his departure from Rome have now somehow disappeared from the record.

Study and writing, he insinuated, were as demanding, difficult and heroically self-denying as any physical extravagance of Syrian monks,

The Roman elite also put a positive value on wealth, unlike the wanderer Jesus, who had told the poor that they were blessed and told a rich man to sell all he had.

bishops were aware of the advantages to themselves and to the prestige of the Church in general of being able to dispense generous charity to the poor.

Provincial administrators did not only become Christian poets; increasingly, they or their relatives became bishops, taking with them the mitres which were part of the uniform of officials at the imperial Court in Byzantium.

That is interesting proof that Christian communities still had genuine choices of leadership to make even in a key strategic city, but it also meant that the occasion threatened to turn into the sort of murderous riot which had marred Damasus’s election as pope.

Consecrated bishop after an indecently hasty progress through baptism and ordination, Ambrose proved a remarkable success, at least in political terms.

Piling audacity on audacity, he then put workmen to dig up the floor in his newly built church, where they unearthed the bodies of two martyrs from the time of Nero’s persecution, complete with names, Gervasius and Protasius, ‘long unknown’, and indeed the first martyrs ever known in the Church of Milan.

Both atrocities had taken place hundreds of miles from Milan, but this made it clear that a bishop of the Church universal could indeed be an international statesman.

Westerners have generally seen Paul through Augustine’s eyes. He is one

When, in later years, Augustine came to discuss the concept of original sin, that fatal flaw which in his theology all humans have inherited from the sin of

Adam and Eve, he saw it as inseparable from the sexual act, which transmits sin from one generation to another. It was a view momentous in its consequences for the Western Church’s attitude to sexuality.

Augustine discerned within humans an image of the Trinity, or at least analogies by which fallen humans might understand. First, Father, Son and Spirit could be represented respectively by three aspects of human consciousness:

For Greeks, this ‘psychological’ image of the Trinity ultimately proved unacceptable, largely because Augustine coupled with it a particular understanding of how the Spirit as love or will related to the other persons of the Trinity.

the relationship of Son to Father had been described like that of physical son to parent: ‘begotten’ of the Father.

Augustine decided that it would be wise to preserve the Spirit’s equality by asserting that the Son participated in the Spirit’s ‘proceeding’ from the Father. Had it not been the resurrected Jesus Christ, Son of

Augustine about double procession, the question came to split the imperial Church: we will see that while the West eventually agreed that this alteration should be made to the Creed, the alteration became a matter of high offence in the East

In one of the greatest disappointments ever experienced by the Church, the Western Roman Empire of the 390s, which had promised to be an image of God’s kingdom on earth, disintegrated into chaos and futility. Augustine himself died in 430 during a siege of his beloved Hippo by the Arian Vandals, who captured all North Africa and bitterly persecuted the Catholic Church there for sixty years.

Not long afterwards, in 372, Martin was one of the first ascetics anywhere in the Church to be chosen as a bishop, in the Gaulish city far north of Poitiers called Civitas Turonum (now Tours).

Martin was said to have torn his military cloak in half to clothe a poor man, who was later revealed to him in a dream as Christ himself.

good deal of Jerome’s troubles in Rome stemmed from his fervent promotion of asceticism among his aristocratic Roman patrons, provoking particular public hostility when one of his spiritual protégées, a young lady called Blesilla, apparently died as a result of fasting and generally excessive spiritual rigour.

It is doubtful whether Cassian and Augustine would have differed much in their everyday practice of an austere Christian life, but Augustine’s view of grace offended Cassian’s theology of salvation, grounded as it was in the rival tradition of Origen and Evagrius.

In particular, Vincent, a monk on the island of Lérins (Ile-Saint Honorat), admired much of Augustine’s writings where he dealt with the Trinity and Christ’s incarnation, but he also felt that on the subject of grace both Augustine and Prosper had gone beyond the bounds of doctrine as understood in the universal Church.

suggestions that Benedict may not even have been a single individual, but a representative ‘blessed one’ (Benedictus in Latin), to whom a bundle of ideas came to be attributed as the ‘Rule’ of St Benedict, which was certainly compiled in the sixth century.72 In fact we now know that the Rule draws heavily on a previous text called ‘The Rule of the Master’ (Regula Magistri), probably drawn up some decades before, at the beginning of the sixth century.

Discipline, in fact, proved to be one of the chief attractions of Benedictine monasteries, in an age enmired in terrifying lawlessness which longed for the lost order of Roman society.