A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Boniface went on to claim jurisdiction for the papacy throughout the world in a bull of 1302, Unam Sanctam (‘One Holy [Church]’). This was a culminating moment in the universal pretensions of the papacy, but the Pope’s aspirations were curtailed by his imprisonment and humiliation at the hands of King Philip the Fair of France. A French successor-pope then chose to live in the city of Avignon, a small papal enclave in southern France. There were many good reasons why Pope Clement V should choose Avignon in 1309: it saved him encountering the constant infighting in Rome, and since the papal court was now a bureaucratic centre affecting all Europe, it made sense to find a more accessible place from which it could operate.

In most of Europe, when printing technology arrived in the early fifteenth century, the supply of vernacular Bibles hugely increased: the printers sensed a ready market and hastened to supply it in languages which would command large sales. Between 1466 and 1522 there were twenty-two editions of the Bible in High or Low German; the Bible reached Italian in 1471, Dutch in 1477, Spanish in 1478, Czech around the same time and Catalan in 1492. In 1473–4 French publishers opened up a market in abridged Bibles, concentrating on the exciting stories and leaving out the more knotty doctrinal passages, and this remained a profitable enterprise until the mid-sixteenth century. Bernard Cottret, Calvin’s biographer, has suggested that this huge increase in Bibles created the Reformation rather than being created by it.

Only a few German-speaking areas and a few royal free cities within the Bohemian kingdom retained their papal loyalty through the fifteenth century. These lonely outposts of obedience to Rome in Bohemia are worth noting, because they represented the only part of medieval Europe to which the description ‘Roman Catholic’ can be applied with any meaning. It may at first sight seem surprising that this term familiar in the anglophone world makes no sense before the Reformation, but it is clearly redundant when applied to an age when everyone outside Bohemia consciously or unconsciously formed part of the same Catholic Church structure, tied in so many complex ways to the heart and head of the whole organization in Rome.

Jerome had done his considerable best to re-examine the Hebrew text behind the Septuagint; nevertheless, faults remained. Some of his mistranslations in the Old Testament were more comic than important. One of the most curious was at Exodus 34, where the Hebrew describes Moses’s face as shining when he came down from Mount Sinai with the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Jerome, mistaking particles of Hebrew, had turned this into a description of Moses wearing a pair of horns – and so the Lawgiver is frequently depicted in Christian art, long after humanists had gleefully removed the horns from the text of Exodus. They are sported by Michelangelo’s great sculpted Moses now in the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli (‘Saint Peter in Chains’), yet another commission for Pope Julius II. One finds them frequently in the paintings of Moses and Aaron flanking the Commandment boards in English parish churches, dating as late as the nineteenth century.

When Granada fell, Isabel gave Jews in Castile the choice of expulsion or conversion to Christianity. The excuse was yet another blood-libel accusation, this time from Toledo in 1490, that Jews had murdered a Christian boy, who has become known to his devotees as the Holy Child of La Guardia and was later attributed the significant name Cristóbal – Christ-bearer. 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 (since the Jews had applied the Hebrew word Sefarad to Spain). Yet more Jews chose to convert rather than leave their homes, and the authorities were determined that their conversion should not be a token one.53 By contrast, at first there was an official agreement to allow the continued practice of Islam in Granada, but harassment by the Church authorities led to rebellion.

This was the first republic in human history where those in charge narrowly defined the concept of ‘republic’ as necessarily involving rule by the whole people – Savonarola’s Florence has not often been awarded the credit for this innovation. That legacy of a particular and rather frightening Christian vision of reform has become one of the most important political ideas of the modern world.

Luther used a battery of biblical arguments to offset the Ten Commandments; as early as 1520, when preparing teaching material on the Commandments, he showed his characteristic ability to play fast and loose with scripture by omitting all reference to the Commandment prohibiting images. He was certainly not going to adopt the ‘Zürich’ renumbering: the result, bizarrely, is that the Churches of western Europe still number the Ten Commandments differently, and the split is not between Roman Catholics and Protestants, but between on the one hand Roman Catholics and Lutherans, and on the other all the rest – including the Anglican Communion.

Las Casas insisted that Augustine of Hippo’s gloss on the biblical text ‘Compel them to come in’ (see p. 304) was simply wrong: Jesus had not intended conversion to his ‘joyful tidings’ to be a matter of ‘arms and bombardments’ but of ‘reason and human persuasion’.6 His writings about Spanish barbarity in America were so angry and eloquent that ironically they became part of the general Protestant stereotype of Spaniards as a naturally cruel race. At one stage he suggested a fateful remedy for the exploitation of native labour: African slaves should be imported to replace natives on plantations, radically extending the slave trade which the Portuguese had pioneered in the previous century. Las Casas eventually realized his mistake, but it was too late.

The most remarkable church in Cholula is the Capilla Real, built in the 1540s for the far-off Emperor Charles V as his symbolic Chapel Royal, but also as a gift to the defeated nobility of the region. This presents a complicated message about past and present. It is unlike any Christian church building in Europe, for inside and out it is a deliberate replica of the Grand Mosque of Cordoba, without obvious orientation or liturgical focus, and with the same forest of arches inside and vast courtyard outside. Back home, Spanish Catholics had crushed Islam and turned mosques into churches. Now in New Spain they had crushed other false gods and conquered the native princes. So, here in Cholula, they celebrated a new victory in the same way by building the princes a church which looked like a mosque.

Baptists gave no single opinion on the Revolution, mindful of the angry reaction which they had provoked in that same Continental Congress when they had complained about New England’s compulsory levies for the established Congregational Church. The irony of the revolutionary slogan ‘no taxation without representation’ was not lost on Baptists.

Nevertheless, because the revolutionary leadership sprang from the social establishment in several colonies, it included many who were Anglicans by denominational loyalty, no less than two-thirds of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence.88 Elite education tended to lead these Founding Fathers not to the Awakenings but to the Enlightenment and Deism (see pp. 786–7): cool versions of Christianity, or virtually no Christianity at all.

The polymath Benjamin Franklin seldom went to church, and when he did, it was to enjoy the Anglican Book of Common Prayer decorously performed in Christ Church, Philadelphia; he made it a point of principle not to spend energy affirming the divinity of Christ. Thomas Jefferson was rather more concerned than Franklin to be seen at church on key political occasions, but he deplored religious controversy, deeply distrusted organized religion and spoke of the Trinity as ‘abracadabra … hocus-pocus … a deliria of crazy imaginations, as foreign to Christianity as is that of Mahomet’.89 In the face of such low-temperature religion, many on the present-day American religious right, anxious to appropriate the Revolution for their own version of modern American patriotism, have sought comfort in the ultimate Founding Father, George Washington, but here too there is much to doubt. Washington never received Holy Communion, and was inclined in discourse to refer to providence or destiny rather than to God.

What this revolutionary elite achieved amid a sea of competing Christianities, many of which were highly uncongenial to them, was to make religion a private affair in the eyes of the new American federal government. The constitution which they created made no mention of God or Christianity (apart from the date by ‘the Year of our Lord’). That was without precedent in Christian polities of that time, and with equal disregard for tradition (after some debate), the Great Seal of the United States of America bore no Christian symbol but rather the Eye of Providence, which if it recalled anything recalled Freemasonry (see pp. 771–2).91 The motto ‘In God We Trust’ only first appeared on an American coin amid civil war in 1864, a very different era, and it was 1957 before it featured on any paper currency of the United States.

Evolution turns some of the human characteristics which seem most divine – moral fastidiousness, love – into products of self-interested evolution. It robs the world of moral or benevolent purpose, and even if God is taken as a first cause as the Origin still proclaimed, it is difficult to summon up enthusiasm for worshipping an axiom in physics.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has described Nietzsche as the central figure in a trilogy of what he usefully terms ‘the masters of suspicion’, the predecessor being Karl Marx and the successor Sigmund Freud: those who gathered together the two previous centuries of questions posed to Christian authority, and persuaded much of the Western world that there was no authority there at all. Behind all three lies Ludwig Feuerbach, who first voiced the idea that God might be part of humanity’s creation, rather than vice versa.

Far less equivocal than the philosophes were Pennsylvania Quakers, whose tradition enabled them to be less reverent towards biblical authority (see pp. 782–3). They anticipated Sewall by twelve years, with a petition against slavery in Pennsylvania from some Dutch Quakers in 1688. Their brethren at that stage chose to ignore the initiative, but, tempted in the early eighteenth century to join their fellow colonists in using the growing number of slaves to sustain their Quaker haven, the Pennsylvania authorities now displayed their usual consecrated cussedness and came down firmly against slavery of any sort in 1758, the first Christians corporately to do so.

As Federal government expanded west, Christianity experienced growth as vigorous as any in the nineteenth century. At the time of the Revolution, despite all the bustle of the Great Awakenings, only around 10 per cent of the American population were formal Church members, and a majority had no significant involvement in Church activities.94 In 1815 active Church membership had grown to around a quarter of the population; by 1914 it was approaching half – this in a country which in the same period through immigration and natural growth had seen its numbers balloon from 8.4 million to 100 million.

The greatest casualty commemorated in this multitude of crosses and symbols of war is the union between Christianity and secular power: Christendom itself. By the end of the 1960s, the alliance between emperors and bishops which Constantine had first generated was a ghost; a fifteen-hundred-year-old adventure was at an end. The war which began in August 1914, triggered by complex diplomacy and a tangle of fears and aspirations, did not seem likely to set any such new patterns. It involved four Christian emperors – German and Austrian Kaisers, the Russian Tsar and the British King-Emperor3 – but such rulers had habitually ignored their common faith to fight each other. They went to war over a long-standing cause of instability for Christendom: the gradual disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, or, more precisely, the competition to dominate its former Balkan conquests.

Religion lurked in unpredictable ways. When the German Kaiser’s armies invaded Belgium to strike at the Franco-Russian alliance, they were violating the neutrality of a state formed in the 1830s specifically to accommodate the Roman Catholic faith of its inhabitants. Britain fought ostensibly to enforce that neutrality under guarantees that it had made to Belgium in 1839.

There were cars for Sunday family jaunts instead of morning church; there was television around which the whole family could sit after tea instead of evening church.39 These findings could endlessly be reproduced through European society from the early 1960s. In particular, that mainstay of Protestant Church practice from the eighteenth century, the children’s Sunday School, melted away. In 1900, 55 per cent of British children attended Sunday School; the figure was still 24 per cent in 1960, but 9 per cent in 1980 and 4 per cent in 2000.40

Around the family, other shifts occurred. ‘Companionate’ marriage created high expectations which were all too frequently disappointed. In the 1970s, divorce rates began rising across Europe, and against furious protests from the Roman Catholic Church, the possibility of divorce was introduced into the law codes of Catholic countries where it had previously been outlawed – in Italy, for instance, in 1970. That was a remarkable shift from the moment in 1947 when the constitution of the new Italian Republic had only missed affirming the indissolubility of marriage by three votes in the Constituent Assembly.41 Rates of extramarital births soared: in the nations already cited over four decades from 1960, twentyfold in Ireland, sixteenfold in the Netherlands and thirteenfold in Norway.

Taboos around abortion broke down, in the face of the reality of death and physical damage in clandestine illegal abortions. In country after country there was legislation to legalize abortion, most famously in the United States through a judgement of the Supreme Court in 1973, Roe v. Wade. Homosexuality became less a subject of public paranoia. The first stage was its decriminalization in law, a measure not designed to make homosex...

It is observable that certain aspects of the Christian past are being jettisoned without fuss even within self-consciously traditional religion. The most notable casualty of the past century has been Hell. It has dropped out of Christian preaching or much popular concern, first among Protestants, then later among Catholics, who have also ceased to pay much attention to that aspect of Western doctrine which seemed all-consuming in the Latin Church on the eve of the Reformation, Purgatory.107 One might see this merely as a result of European secularization: does this continent, arguably so far the world’s most successfully balanced consumer society, need a Christian Heaven and Hell? It has lived through its own self-made hells in two world wars, seen the folly of blindly dogmatic belief, and now it has tried to build something less ambitious than paradise on earth, without the aid of sacred stories or absolutist ideologies.