A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

North of the furthest imperial frontiers in Britain, an ascetic called Ninian established a mission around 400 in what is now south-west Scotland, reputedly building a church in stone, such a rare sight in the area that it was called the ‘White House’, Candida Casa.

By leading the campaigns to label these two for posterity as theological deviants, Jerome took a significant step in the long process, particularly pronounced in the Western Church, by which the celibate state came to be considered superior to marriage.

Even so, it was not an encouraging precedent for later Christianity when, in 385, the usurping emperor in Gaul, Magnus Maximus, took over an ecclesiastical case against Priscillian; in an effort to build up support in the Christian establishment, Maximus had the ascetic leader and some of his close circle executed for heresy, the first time that this had happened within the Christian community. He was burned at the stake, the only Western Christian to be given the treatment which the pagan Emperor Diocletian had prescribed for heretics until the eleventh century. It is to Bishop Martin’s great credit that he furiously protested against this act of tyranny, and to express his continuing disapproval, in a species of reverse miracle or sanctified work-to-rule, he announced that his spiritual powers were diminished by his own association with the crime, however marginal that had been. ‘[I]n curing the demoniacs, he took longer than he used to do,’ Sulpicius noted, with uncharacteristic scrupulousness.66

Politically, the area of the former empire was transformed into a series of ‘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.

We have already noted that young Gallo-Roman noblemen are said to have formed a disproportionate number of those joining the pioneer monasteries of Bishop Martin of Tours in the late fourth century, and that many of them went on to be bishops (see p. 313). Frequently bishops of the Catholic Church were the only form of Latin authority left, since the imperial civil service had collapsed.

The Western Church has remained notable for the presence within its clerical ranks of a great many who are interested in clear rules and tidy filing systems. Western canon law was one of the West’s intellectual achievements long before its systematization in the twelfth century (see p. 377), and Western theology has been characterized by a tidy-mindedness which reflects the bureaucratic precision of the Latin language: not always to the benefit of its spirituality.

Theoderic and other ‘barbarian’ rulers who did not match his flamboyance could be seen as protectors of the Western Catholic Church against Byzantine emperors who, from the mid-fifth century, frequently alienated and angered Catholic leaders in the West.

the pronouncement of Papal Infallibility at the first Vatican Council of 1870

Gregory did have a strong sense of urgency in his papacy, for the good reason that he believed that the end of the world was imminent.

Gregory’s dispatch of a mission to the English in Britannia marked a crucial stage in the Western Latin Church’s change of direction away from Byzantium and towards the north and west. Once the Western Church had been the poor relation of the Greek East in terms of numbers and theological sophistication. It had been tied to the fortunes of an empire in increasing disarray and was then confronted by rulers with an alien variety of Christian faith. Now it was reaching out beyond the boundaries of the Roman imperial world.

The English mission was the first in which a Bishop of Rome had made any effort to extend the existing frontiers of Christianity. It is curious and probably significant that previous major Christian missionary efforts had nearly all been undertaken by people whom the imperial Chalcedonian Church labelled as heretics – Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia and the ‘Arian’ Ulfila to the northern ‘barbarians’, the Syriac Miaphysite Jacob Baradeus in the Middle East and the Syriac Dyophysites who spread Christianity into Arabia, Central Asia and (initially) to Ethiopia. The one substantial exception to this had been the initiatives of Celtic Britons, who were Catholic Christians, strongly influenced by the vigorous Catholic Church of Gaul.

Patrick and Ninian would both have been alive and active in Christian ministry when the great theologian Augustine was Bishop of Hippo.

When missionaries from Ireland and Scotland started spreading their faith in northern and central Europe in the seventh century, they brought tariff books with them; these were the first ‘penitentials’ or manuals of penance for clergy to use with their flocks.

Columbanus had set a pattern of mission from Ireland and Scotland, and other Celtic monks extended his initiative still further by taking Christianity beyond the ghost of the imperial frontier into northern Europe. But now another mission had been launched in the opposite direction, from Rome itself, by Pope Gregory I. In 597, the year that Abbot Columba died far away in Iona, a party of monks and priests set out from Rome on the Pope’s command; they were bound for the Atlantic Isles under the leadership of a monk from Gregory’s monastery of St Andrew, called Augustine.

A paradoxical feature of these vigorous Anglo-Saxon affirmations of Western Latin theology was that the Archbishop of Canterbury presiding over the councils was a brilliant Greek, a scholar named Theodore who, like the Apostle Paul, came from Tarsus. Maybe Pope Vitalian had sent him to England because he was worried that Theodore might be disruptive in Rome, but it was still a remarkable reminder that England’s links to a wider world were overwhelmingly thanks to the Church. One of Theodore’s most important and energetic colleagues was the Abbot of St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, Hadrian, sent to England by the Pope more or less to keep an eye on the archbishop; Hadrian was just as exotic as Theodore, since he was a refugee from the now beleaguered Church in North Africa.

The Emperor’s advisers drew up systems of law to regulate all society by what they saw as the commandments of God; among Charlemagne’s favourite reading was Augustine’s City of God.

A formal break between Rome and Constantinople in 1054 (see p. 374), not seen as significant at the time, signalled not simply a new era in relations between the two, but the culmination of a process in which the papacy made its claim to a primacy in the whole Church ever more formal.

This had a large number of consequences, not least in the Church’s attitude to sin. It certainly did not denounce as sinful the movement to enserf a large section of the population, any more than it had challenged slavery in the ancient world; that was hardly surprising, since very often great monasteries like Cluny were in the forefront of imposing serfdom on their tenants.

Tithing

As the parish and tithe system developed, this older approach would not do: some other way must be devised to cope with the hopes and fears of a sinful population who could not afford such provision. This was where the idea of a middle state between Heaven and Hell, first envisaged in the theology of the Alexandrian theologians Clement and Origen at the turn of the second and third centuries, proved so useful and comforting. The instinct for justifying salvation by human effort, a constant thread from Origen through Evagrius and John Cassian, emerged once more to confront the ‘grace alone’ theology of Augustine.

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries it did its best to gain more control over the most intimate part of human existence, sexual relationships and marriage; increasingly Church councils convened as part of the Peace movement began making orders which had nothing directly to do with peace, but regulated people’s private lives.9 The Church successfully fought to have marriage regarded as a sacrament: Augustine of Hippo had thus described it, in what was then a rather vague use of the word ‘sacrament’, but now precision was brought to the idea. Marriage became seen as one of seven sacraments which had been instituted by Christ himself, all marked with a sacred ceremony in church. A ‘church wedding’ had certainly not been known in the first few centuries of Church life; the laity were much slower (by several centuries) to accept this idea as the norm, and the efforts of some extremist theologians completely failed to impose the doctrine that the priest performed the marriage, rather than witnessing a contract between two people.

A new custom of ‘eldest takes all’ (primogeniture) became widely established by the twelfth century,

Very many clergy at that time who were not monks customarily married. Married clergy might well found dynasties, and might therefore be inclined to make Church lands into their hereditary property, just as secular lords were doing at the same time. The result was a long battle to forbid marriage for all clergy, not just monks: to make them compulsorily celibate. There had been occasional efforts to achieve this before, and the Western Church had from the fourth century generally prevented higher clergy from being married, but in 1139 a second council to be called at the pope’s residence in Rome, the Lateran Palace, declared all clerical marriages not only unlawful but invalid.

Pope Leo IX (reigned 1049–54) was in the final year of his pontificate responsible for the drastic step of excommunicating the Oecumenical Patriarch Michael Keroularios in his own cathedral in Constantinople. The immediate issue was a dispute about eucharistic bread.

Once pope, Gregory was free to pursue the programme of Church reform which now had all Europe as its canvas, and which, in a series of formal statements entered into his administrative register, was centred on a definition of the pope as universal monarch in a world where the Church would reign over all the rulers of the earth.

The popes had earlier built up a permanent staff of assistant clergy, cardinals. They were so called from the Latin cardo, meaning a wedge rammed between timbers, for ‘cardinals’ were originally exceptionally able or useful priests thrust into a church from outside – their appointment had systematically breached the early Church’s (fairly breachable) convention that clergy should keep in the same place for life.

While Christian leaders had once simply tried to stop Christians from being soldiers (see pp. 156–7), now the Church came to see warfare as something it might use for its own purposes. The notion of holy war, crusade, entered Christianity in the eleventh century, and was directed against the religion which from its earliest days had spoken of holy war, Islam.

At a council of churchmen and magnates called to Clermont in France and in a flurry of papal letters accompanying it around 1095, Urban described renewed but completely imaginary atrocities against Christian pilgrims by Muslims in Jerusalem, so that he could arouse appropriate horror and action would follow. The effect was sensational: noblemen present hastened to raise their tenants to set out on a mission to avenge Christian wrongs in the East. In this state of heightened excitement, the Pope took time to consecrate the high altar of his old monastery of Cluny, dedicating the final enlargement of that gargantuan building; so the culmination of Cluny’s glory can never be separated from the launch of the Crusades (see Plate 29).38

A great momentum had by now developed behind the papacy’s assertions of its power. Noblemen and humble folk alike flocked on the proclaimed crusade because they were excited by the Pope’s promise that this was a sure road to salvation. Urban made it clear that to die on crusade in a state of repentance and confession would guarantee immediate entry to Heaven, doing away with any necessity of penance after death: papal grants associated with this promise were the origins of the system of indulgences, later to cause such problems for the Western Church

The mainstream armies which he inspired did not behave as bestially as those raised by a charismatic preacher called Peter the Hermit. As they gathered in the cities of the Rhineland in 1096, they perpetrated Christianity’s first large-scale massacres of Jews, since this was an identifiable group of non-Christians more accessible than Muslims to Western Europeans spoiling for a fight, and generally not able to put up much resistance. It would not be the last time that recruiting for Crusades led to such atrocities.

By then the Holy Land itself was long lost. Jerusalem had fallen in 1187 to the armies of the Kurdish military hero Saladin (Salāh al-D n); its inhabitants were treated with ostentatious magnanimity to contrast with the atrocities of 1099. It was only temporarily restored to Christian rule between 1229 and 1244, and in 1291 Islamic armies pushed Westerners out of their last strongholds in Palestine.

The crusaders’ initial success in 1099 was actually a disastrous chimera; it held out the prospect that God would repeat his favour, and the piling up of evidence to the contrary did not prevent the triumph of hope over experience, prolonging the efforts to achieve new victories. Ironically, as we will see, one of the most permanent achievements of the crusaders was fatally to weaken the Christian empire of the East. In 1204 a crusade which had begun with the aim of attacking Muslim Egypt turned instead to Constantinople, had no hesitation in sacking it and then set up a ‘Latin’ empire there. This catastrophe led to deep bitterness among the Greeks against Westerners, which ruined the chances for any scheme of religious reunion before the final destruction of Byzantine power in 1453 (see pp. 475–7).

It was against such a background of changed assumptions that in the wake of the First Crusade there emerged monastic orders of warriors dedicated to fighting on behalf of Christianity, principally the Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaller.

Thus a form of holy warfare which had begun with Islam as its enemy ended up with Christians fighting Christians.

During the thirteenth century, the idea of crusade reached its most strained interpretation when successive popes proclaimed crusades against their political opponents in Italy – chiefly the Holy Roman Emperor and his dynasty – and in the end, when the papacy itself splintered, even between rival claimants to the papal throne. Such campaigns dragged on intermittently until the 1370s. For the papacy, these were just as much a logical defence of the Church as crusades in the East, but it was not surprising that crowds did not rush to support the Holy Father, and that plenty of faithful Christians were perfectly ready to fight papal armies.

The Church gave much of it the label heresy and in 1022 King Robert II of France set a precedent by returning to the Roman imperial custom of burning heretics at the stake.

Once they were translated into Latin, the effect was profound: Western thought, enriched afresh by manuscripts containing Classical learning, experienced another movement of renewal, which has been called the twelfth-century Renaissance. Despite much initial official hostility, Aristotle and his analytical approach to the world, his mastery of logical thought, confronted the Platonism of Christian theologians. A debate opened up, in dialogue also with Arab and Jewish commentators on ancient thought, discussing the old problem of how to relate the work of reason to the revealed truths of Christian faith.

By the end of the twelfth century, the Western Church was thus facing challenges both from heresy and from the potentially uncontrollable nature of scholastic thought, bred in new institutions, the universities.

Punishment was thus directed to outsiders as well as to sinful Christians. One of the characteristics of Western Christianity between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries is its identification of various groups within the Western world as distinct, marginal and a constant potential threat to good order: principal among such groups were Jews, heretics, lepers and (curiously belatedly) homosexuals.

From the mid-twelfth century, a particularly persistent and pernicious community response to the occasional abuse and murder of children was to deflect guilt from Christians by blaming Jews for abducting the children for use in rituals. This so-called ‘blood libel’ frequently resulted in vicious attacks on Jewish communities.

more complex and positive response to dynamic popular movements emerged at the end of the twelfth century, although in the end it allied itself and indeed helped to structure this ‘formation of a persecuting society’. It produced two great religious leaders, Dominic and Francis. They were utterly different personalities, but they founded in parallel the first two orders of friars (an English version of the word fratres, Latin for ‘brothers’).

In his own body, Francis is the first person known to have suffered stigmata, fleshly wounds which followed the patterns of the wounds of the crucified Christ (see Plate 25). This echo of Paul’s mysterious remark in Galatians 6.17, ‘I bear on my body the marks of Jesus’, has since been a recurrent phenomenon among ascetics of the Western Church.

This fourth Lateran Council embodied the Gregorian aim of imposing regulated holiness on the laity and ensuring uniformity in both belief and devotional practice.

There was another side to this universality of Catholic faith in Western Latin society. In order to ensure uniformity of belief among the faithful, the Lateran Council created procedures for inquisitions to try heretics. It is difficult for modern Westerners to feel any sort of empathy with the inquisitorial mind, but we need to understand that an inquisitor could see his role as an aspect of pastoral work.

there is often a fine line between idealism and sadism.

The problem was that he came late in the day to the foundation of orders of friars. Dominicans and Franciscans treated him as unwelcome competition; a major council of the Church at Lyons in 1274 decided to suppress ‘all forms of religious life and the mendicant Orders’ founded after the fourth Lateran Council of 1215. While many Franciscans furiously debated among themselves about the justice of the council’s narrowing of religious possibilities, the Order of Apostles actively resisted suppression and in 1290 its members were collectively condemned by the Pope. Soon afterwards, the Church started burning them.

His movement split between those who wished to remodel the order to make it more like the Dominicans, and ‘Spirituals’ who wished to reject all property, and by implication all ordered society, on the basis that Christ and his Apostles had no private possessions – that nagging truth embedded in the Gospels, which the Apostle Paul had first considered a problem

Those who listen to the vapid rock anthem ‘The Age of Aquarius’ are catching a last echo of the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot whose vision was of a dawning new age.

Pope John XXII, a strong-minded and not always admirable cleric, was driven in 1318 to condemn the Spirituals as heretical. Four of them were burned at Marseilles for proclaiming that Christ had lived in absolute poverty; it was a sensitive issue, reflecting adversely on the clerical hierarchy’s wealth and therefore on their power.

If Gregory was the most decisive personality of the eleventh-century Church and Bernard of Clairvaux its greatest preacher in the twelfth, then Aquinas’s system of thought, Thomism, in the thirteenth represents a defining moment in the theology of the medieval West.

Aquinas’s huge corpus of writings mark the height of Western Europe’s enthusiasm for Aristotle (who was for him simply ‘the Philosopher’), and he encouraged the translation into Latin of all Aristotle’s works then known.