A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Benedict takes over the Master’s brutally contemptuous description of two other variants on the monastic life: groups of two or three living without a Rule, and those individual monks who wandered from place to place – the Rule regards them as parasites on settled communities.

This attitude set a pattern which made Western monasticism distinctive, because the wandering holy man remained a common and widely honoured figure in the Eastern Churches.

under the same Rule as communities round it, yet fully independent of any other.

The developed Rule’s single-minded emphasis on obedience,

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.

Because of its simplicity, it has proved very adaptable,

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

For EfM on 4/22 - 5/27 2021

‘early medieval’

The laborious process of copying manuscripts, the only way in which the fragile products of centuries of accumulating knowledge could be preserved, virtually came to an end,

‘barbarian’ kingdoms, mostly ruled by Arian Goths, who preserved their Arianism as a mark of cultural distinction from the Catholic Christians of the old Latin world.

Bishop Martin of Tours

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

How would the Western Latin Church as a whole react to this new situation? Would it look to the Greek East and identify itself wholeheartedly with the Byzantine attempt at reconquest? Would it disappear, like all the other institutions of the old empire? Would it follow the new configuration of power and melt into a series of Arian Churches, separated into the various ethnic groupings which now occupied the West?

In fact the leadership of the Western Church chose a middle path which was to prove of huge significance for its future. It 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.

the Arian Ostrogoth military leader Theoderic seized the city of Ravenna, at the head of the Adriatic, the last ...

(Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo

One intact sequence of original mosaic friezes, safely remote from the viewer at the very highest level of the walls, although it spans the whole length of the church on either side of the nave, seems to emphasize the Arian view of the nature of Christ.

the miracle worker and teller of parables is depicted as a young beardless man,

Alongside his lavish gifts to the Arian Church, Theoderic allowed the Catholic Church to flourish, and used the skills of Roman and Catholic aristocrats in his administration.

Boethius,

The Consolation of Philosophy.

embedded Plato in Western thought for the next few centuries

Theoderic

The Council of Chalcedon in 451

Pope Leo I

Haha

successive emperors desperately trying to placate their Miaphysite subjects

‘Acacian’ schism of East and West between 482 and 519

Pope Gelasius I

tried to pull Constantinople back into line, in the tradition of Ambrose’s consecrated bullying of the Emperor Theodosius.

God had provided two ruling authorities in the world, monarchs and bishops.

Clovis;

Merovech,

‘Meroving...

Becoming king of one branch of the Germanic people known as Franks in 481, Clovis proved to be a successful warlord who extended his family’s powe...

Like other Germanic leaders, he dallied with Arian Christianity, and members of his famil...

he developed a devotion to the saint of the Catholic Church who had been first a s...

Martin of...

Bishop Gregory,

538-594

Bishop of Tours,

eighteen monarchs of what became the kingdom of France were christened with his name, which in its French mutation of the Latin Ludovicus became ‘Louis’.

Theoderic.

just what a near-miss Arian Christianity proved in the West. 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;

At the heart of the Catholic victory was the dead bishop-saint Martin of Tours, now a trophy saint for the Merovingian dynasty.

He had become a potent symbol of the triumph of Catholicism over Arianism as far away as Byzantine Italy and the late Arian Ostrogothic kingdom of Ravenna.

Under Theodoric

The Frankish Merovingian dynasty survived far longer than any of its Arian or pagan rivals among the former barbarian peoples,

Martin of Tours,

Dionysius (in later French, Denis);

an extraordinary woman contemporary of Clovis,