A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Genovefa (in later French, Geneviève),

Towards the end of her life, she had a great personal influence on Clovis when Lutetia’s surrender to his armies became inevitable.

Martin of Tours and Denis of Lutetia, later Île de la Cité in Paris. .

Geneviève

Joan of Arc,

down to the nineteenth century, and later French monarchs came to glory in their title of ‘the Most Christian King’.

Acacian schism

Hormisdas

Emperor Justinian

in 533 Justinian began his programme of reconquest in Italy, and in 536 publicly proclaimed his programme of reuniting the Mediterranean under Byzantine rule.

the papacy became irresistibly drawn into the military confrontation between Ravenna and Constantinople.

Vigilius,

Vigilius

Justinian

for the first time since the days of Constantine I, there was now a division in the Church leadership’s attitude to the emperor.

Pope Gregory I

Ambrose

Gregory was the first monk to become pope, although this was not monasticism as Pachomius or even Martin had known it:

Gregory

Gregory

The English mission was the first in which a Bishop of Rome had made any effort to extend the existing frontiers of Christianity.

Syriac Miaphysite

Syriac Dyophysites

Celtic Britons,

Hibernia

north of Hadrian’s Wall,

Patrick,

Patrick

groupings (tuatha)

there could have been anything between 150 and 200 of them in the island at any one time.

the Church could be rooted in Irish society by founding monasteries and nunneries.

Patrick

the Church developed the peculiar phenomenon of roving ecclesiastical families, in whom priesthood and care of churches descended from one generation to another;

A surprising number of early Christian buildings can still be seen in the west of Ireland and its remote Atlantic islands, mostly monastic sites:

manuscripts illuminated and written in a beautiful and individual Latin script, bronze bells, metal crosiers, lovingly preserved despite the violent and destructive later history of Ireland

Spiritually, Celtic monastic life was as intense as anything in the deserts of Egypt or the Middle East.

contacts with Syrian or Egyptian Christians, at least through books which had started life at the furthest margins of the Byzantine Empire and had been brought west.

The Book of Durrow

copy of a Syriac manuscript of the Gospel Harmony called the Diatessaron.

they wanted to emphasize the importance of humans striving as best they could towards perfection.

Out of this theology of moral struggle came a distinctive Irish devotional practice which was to become a major feature of the whole Western Church.

penance,

It became the basis of the medieval Western Church’s centuries-long system of penance:

the whole system directly contradicted Augustine’s theology of grace,

Columba

Columbanus),

But now another mission had been launched in the opposite direction, from Rome itself, by Pope Gregory I. In 597,

The Anglo-Saxons preserved a self-congratulory anecdote which is probably still the best-known memory of Gregory’s interest in England:

The Kentish royal capital was a former Roman city now called Canterbury.

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