A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

It was in the process of approaching faith through reasoned argument that Aquinas found Aristotle so useful, particularly Aristotle’s newly translated works on logic and metaphysics (see pp. 33–4). Building on Aristotle’s idea that everything created must have a cause from which it receives its existence, he could construct a system in which everything that is and can be described is linked back in a chain of causation to God, the first cause of all things. This God is still primarily the ‘Unmoved Mover’, Plato’s perfect, passionless God, so it would be a caricature to see Thomas as rejecting Plato in favour of Aristotle; he was using any intellectual resource at his disposal in order to create his system.

For nearly two centuries from around 1200, the climate of the northern hemisphere generally got colder.

Francis’s search for God had a new perspective. Not only Anselm but Augustine of Hippo and Dionysius the Areopagite had seen God primarily as Plato’s ‘Unmoved Mover’: so, after Francis’s time, did Thomas Aquinas. But rather than perceiving God as this self-sufficient divine being, Francis saw a person: his Lord. Again and again, Francis calls God ‘Lord God’ (Dominus Deus). The Lord enters agreements – covenants – with his people, just as he did with the people of Israel (see pp. 60–61). As his side of the bargain in covenanting, he acts, rather than simply is.32 His greatest action is in becoming truly human in Jesus Christ through his mother, Mary. Francis called people to see the ordinariness, the humanity, in Christ, in order that they could love and worship him better as God. It was Francis who built the first Christmas crib, complete with apocryphal ox and ass, as a devotional object in church.

Augustine of Hippo had declared that God had allowed the Jews to survive all the disasters in their history to act as a sign and a warning to Christians. They should therefore be allowed to continue their community life within the Christian world, although without the full privileges of citizenship which Christians enjoyed: God only intended them to be converted en masse when he chose to bring the world to an end. So Jews continued to be the only non-Christian community formally tolerated in the Christian West, but their position was always fragile, and they were excluded from positions of power or mainstream wealth-creating activities. One result was that a significant number turned to moneylending at interest (usury), an activity which, thanks to half-understood prohibitions in the Tanakh, the Church prohibited to Christians. That trade could bring wealth to Jews, but certainly not popularity.

Yet the tragedy remains: the heirs of the apostle of love, Francis, were among the chief sustainers of the growing hatred of Jews in medieval Western Europe. It was in this atmosphere that England pioneered Western Europe’s first mass expulsion of Jews when, in 1289, Edward I’s Parliament refused to help the King out of his war debts unless he rid the realm of all Jews; other rulers followed suit later. Such anti-Semitic ill-will continued to be balanced, in the untidy fashion of human affairs and with Augustine’s lukewarm encouragement, by perfectly cordial or straightforward relations between Jews and Christians, but the impulse to harass or persecute Jews became a persistent feature of Western Christianity which it has only now properly confronted in the wake of terrible events in the twentieth century.38 Jews were not the only group to be scapegoated: we have already noted (see pp. 400–401) the way that in bad times, lepers and homosexuals could also be seen as conspiring against Christian society.

The early fourteenth century added a new set of conspirators: Satan and his agents on earth, witches. Pope John XXII, a man much exercised by enemies and disruptors of the Church like the Spiritual Franciscans, crystallized a good deal of academic debate about magic and witchcraft which had been building up during the previous half-century. In 1320 he commissioned a team of theological experts to consider whether certain specific cases of malicious conjuring could be considered heresy, a controversial proposition generally previously denied by theologians, who had tended to treat magic, spells and meetings with the Devil as devilish illusions without substance. In the wake of the Pope’s commission, six or seven years later he issued a bull, Super illius specula, which now proclaimed that any magical practices or contacts with demons were by their nature heretical and therefore came within the competence of inquisitions. This was one of those ideas which bide their time; for the moment witches were not much troubled by the Church’s discipline, but more than a century later, with the aid of new publicists fired by their own obsessions, the Western Church and its Protestant successors were to initiate more than two centuries of active witch persecution

an intensification of personal mysticism, particularly among women recluses and religious. As with the emergence of a more personalized view of the Christian story among Western Christians generally, there were previous precedents. The most famous twelfth-century female mystic was Hildegard of Bingen, Abbess of Rupertsberg, who a generation before Joachim of Fiore recorded her visions and prophesied about the end of time, and whose writings cover a range of interests unusual at the time in male scholars let alone abbesses: cosmology, medicine, musical composition as well as theology. Hildegard was speaking and writing at the end of the age when women in monasteries were likely to have as good an access to scholarship as men. In her lifetime, the first universities were taking shape, all-male institutions which were to gather to them most of the intellectual activity of Western Latin culture. Perhaps that is why women were now so attracted to a mode of spirituality which was independent of formal intellectual training, but in which mind and imagination sought out the hiddenness of God, beyond doctrinal propositions or the argumentative clashes of scholasticism. Such mystics reversed the normal priorities of Western spirituality, which privileges the positive knowledge of God and affirms what Christian teaching positively says about him, to join Easterners in privileging silence and otherness.

Instead, the Byzantine emperors and the ideal of Christian governance which they represented became the vital distinguishing force in the Churches later known as Orthodox, long after the last emperor had died defending Constantinople in 1453.

It is a peculiarity of the Orthodox tradition of public worship that it contains hymns of hate, directed towards named individuals who are defined as heretical, all the way from Arius through Miaphysites, Dyophysites and Iconoclasts.

In fact there was a long tradition in the Orthodox Church of leading churchmen criticizing burnings at the stake, which has little or no parallel in medieval Western Catholicism.

What Hagia Sophia did do was decisively to promote the central dome as the leading motif of architecture in the imperial Church of the East and in those Churches which later sought to identify with that tradition. Moreover, following the precedent of Hagia Sophia, the dome became a major Islamic feature in mosques, once mosques became covered spaces rather than open courtyards.

Worship in the Orthodox fashion came to propel first monks, then laypeople beyond the monasteries, towards an idea which over centuries became basic to Christian Orthodox spirituality: union with the divine, or theosis – dizzyingly for humanity, and alarmingly for many Western Christians, the word can be translated as ‘deification’. The concept was likely to take the Christian believer in a very different direction from Augustine’s Western emphasis on the great gulf between God and humanity created by original sin. It asserted that human society could be sanctified through the ministry and liturgy of the Church, and by the meditations of those who were prepared to enter such difficult and testing labour.

As a result, by the eleventh century, it was overwhelmingly the convention in the East that bishops should always be monks, and so it has remained in Orthodoxy.20 The convention has led to a two-track career for Orthodox clergy, for in complete contrast to the medieval West, clergy with no intention of hearing a call to either monasticism or the episcopate have customarily continued to follow the practice of the early Church; they have been married men with families, and minister to the laity in their local churches.

Maximus eagerly absorbed these themes and applied them in much greater detail to many different aspects of spirituality and worship. For him, theosis or deification was the destination for human salvation, whose attainment Adam’s sin in Eden had imperilled but not rendered impossible; in fact all the cosmos was created to arrive at deification.

Love ‘is the producer par excellence of deification’.

Accordingly, Leo began to implement iconoclast policies. The struggle which followed over more than a century was not simply inspired by Islam; it exposed one of the great fault lines within Christianity itself, reflecting its dual origins in Hebrew and Greek culture. The pre-Christian Greeks, as we have seen, regarded it as natural to portray the divine in human form, and their sculptural art was dominated by such depictions (see p. 23). After the Jews had struggled with the various cults around them, Judaism came to take precisely the opposite attitude.

However much popular support there was for iconophobia, the iconoclastic controversy badly damaged the empire. The policy caused deep offence in Rome, driving popes into increasingly close alliance with the Frankish monarchy (see p. 350). In the emperors’ own dominions, it provoked much anger, bitterly dividing Byzantium during its continuing military emergencies.

Their revival of Byzantine fortunes paralleled the imperial Church’s moves to expand the bounds of Orthodox religious practice, Photios’s lasting legacy. Orthodoxy owes its present cultural extent to his initiatives, which partly account for the dismal reputation that this patriarch long enjoyed in the Christian West.

During the 850s and 860s a momentous event took place showing the possibilities and dangers of alternative conversions; it must have stimulated the imperial Church’s moves beyond the frontiers. The entire people of a powerful and strategically important kingdom to the northeast of the Black Sea, the Khazars, were led by their khan to convert to Judaism, and no amount of persuasion by some of Photios’s ablest advocates of Christianity could change the Khan’s mind

The great contribution to the Orthodox future from Cyril and Methodios (and, behind them, their patron Photios) was to establish the principle that the Greek language did not have a monopoly on Orthodox liturgy. So, from the late ninth century, Churches of Orthodoxy have diversified through a remarkable variety of language families and the cultures which those languages have shaped; in fact it is the Church’s liturgy which has been the major force in deciding which languages should dominate cultures in various parts of the Orthodox world. Not all of these cultures are Slavonic: one of the largest Orthodox Churches has come to be that of Romania, which, as its name implies and the forms of its language make clear, cherishes a Latin past. It is not surprising that across such a tangle of different peoples and societies, Orthodox Churches have shown a considerable relish for quarrels over jurisdiction and consequent separations or schisms. Yet that tangled history does not render totally absurd Orthodoxy’s pride in its uniformity of doctrine. Schism is not the same as heresy.

As we have noted, that common heritage goes so far as to provide the worshipping congregation with corporate ways of ceremonially denouncing Christians who do not accept it: the ninth century, the era of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, was probably the time at which the Orthodox hymns of hate first entered the performance of the liturgy.

The Byzantine victory also brought defeat and death for Sviatoslav, the ruler of a pagan monarchy far to the north in Kiev, who had his own designs on Bulgaria. Through the conversion to Christianity of Sviatoslav’s son Vladimir in 988, Orthodox Christianity was established in another new region, with momentous consequences for its future

In 1081 the most successful of the imperial generals, Alexios Komnenos, seized power and established his dynasty on the throne, fighting on all fronts to save the empire from disintegration. As emperor, Alexios found that neither his family nor his army could be fully trusted in his struggles, and it may have been this insecurity which made him look beyond his frontiers for allies.7 He repeatedly appealed to Western leaders for help against various enemies, and in 1095 for the first time he was given a serious hearing. It was this request which led Urban II to launch the publicity campaign which triggered the First Crusade (see pp. 383–4).

The Venetians were not going to lose their investment. They forced the crusaders uncomfortably camping out on the Lido to fulfil their bargain in a way that would suit Venetian interests. This involved an expedition not against Muslim Cairo, but against the great Christian power of Byzantium.

In both Byzantium and West Asian Islam, much faith was placed in calculations that the seventh millennium since creation was about to be completed; this meant that the Last Days were due in the year equivalent to mid-1492-3 in the Common Era. It was such a firm conviction in educated Muscovite circles that the Church did not think to prepare any liturgical kalendars for the years after 1492; these kalendars were essential guides to knowing when the movable feast days of Orthodoxy should be celebrated in any given year. Given the absence of any end to the world in 1492, the task had to be hastily undertaken by Metropolitan Zosima himself. But as is usually the way with the non-appearance of the End Times, the disappointed made the best of their disappointment.

That anarchic fools should be honoured in Red Square is remarkable, because the Church of the Intercession was commissioned by the man who came to symbolize the dismal extremity of what Muscovite autocracy might mean: Ivan IV, known to anglophone history as ‘the Terrible’.

Ivan IV won decisive victories over the remaining Tatar khanates in the 1550s, and it was to commemorate these, in particular the capture of the Tatar city of Kazan in 1552, that he ordered the building of the Red Square Cathedral of the Intercession. It is an extrovert symbol of the Tsar’s joy in victory and his gratitude to Mary, the Mother of God, the Trinity and the various saints whose intercession he had successfully invoked against the Tatars.

These had set up Churches which retained Eastern liturgical practice and married clergy, but which were nevertheless in communion with the pope and accepted his jurisdiction and the Western use of Filioque (see p. 276). Such Churches have often been referred to as ‘Uniates’, though generally the Churches of Ruthenian or other Orthodox origin in communion with Rome now prefer to term themselves ‘Greek Catholics’, the name bestowed on them by the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa in 1774, to stress their equality of status with Roman Catholicism.

Yet during Nikon’s exercise of his patriarchate, he took a second initiative in liturgical reform which struck at the very heart of Russian tradition. In Russia, the details of Christian doctrine mattered much less to people than the details of Christian practice in worship. Popular religion based itself on the sacred drama which was the liturgical round controlled by the Church’s kalendar, but Nikon was conscious that in many respects this drama had departed from the script set by the contemporary Church in Constantinople. Moreover, it was mixed up with a good deal of local ritual which he strongly suspected predated the arrival of Christianity, particularly since most of it seemed designed to enhance the gaiety of everyday life.

In particular, Nikon courted disaster by insisting on an alteration in that most powerful of Christian visual sacramental actions, and that most frequently performed by clergy, the manual blessing. In 1667 a synod of the Church backed up earlier directives of Nikon ordering all Orthodox, clergy and laity alike, to make the sign of the cross with three fingers, symbolizing the Trinity, rather than with two, symbolizing the two natures of Christ.76 Amid a welter of reforms which antagonized both clergy and congregations, this apparently trivial but salient symbol of change became the rallying point for a movement of resistance to centralized interference in personal devotion. The opposition drew on centuries of less than reverent obedience to the commands of the hierarchy, and popular lay dissidence combined with clerical outrage.

Avvakum possessed as formidable a will as Patriarch Nikon, and like Nikon he had started as a close friend of the Tsar. His talents and connections had brought him promotion as archpriest (dean) of a cathedral. After initially supporting the reforms – indeed personally smashing up carnival tambourines and masks and abducting two dancing bears – he took up the cause of tradition. He suffered for his leadership: for years on end he was imprisoned in a cellar, and eventually in 1682 he was burned at the stake.

In 1721 Peter proclaimed himself Emperor of All the Russias, setting patterns for Russian expansion which through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created one of the largest empires the world had seen, stretching from eastern Europe to the Pacific. The transformation of Muscovy into a newly conceived empire was accomplished not merely by military conquest but by Peter’s obsessive pursuit of Western skills and information, which he used to remould the culture of the governing elite.

With the memory of Patriarch Nikon’s extravagant claims for power in his father’s reign, he determined that never again would a tsar face a similar challenge from an ecclesiastical rival; the Church should concentrate on its preaching of obedience.

He hete refders to Peter the Great

The Church was an organ of government, symbolized by Peter’s decree of 1722 which required priests hearing sacramental confessions to disregard the sacred obligation of confidentiality and report any conspiracies or insulting talk about the tsar to the security officials of the state, under severe punishments for non-compliance.82

Some Old Believers refused to eat the tsars’ recommended new staple food, the potato, because it was an import from the godless West – potatoes were generally hated among the Russian peasantry on their first arrival, before their value in making vodka became apparent. ‘Tea, coffee, potatoes and tobacco had been cursed by Seven Ecumenical Councils’ was one of the Old Believers’ rallying cries, and at various times, dining forks, telephones and the railways were to suffer the same anathemas.

Sometimes Russian dissidence spiralled off into the most alarmingly eccentric varieties of Christianity ever to emerge from meditation on the divine, usually fuelled by the belief which had once been the mainstay of the official Church, that the world was about to end and the Last Judgement was to come.

‘Achieve stillness and thousands around you will find salvation,’ he said.

During the eighteenth century, throughout the Orthodox world still ruled by Muslims in the Balkans and the East, Churches began looking with increasing hope to this great power in the north which proclaimed its protection over them, whose Church still announced itself to be the Third Rome, and which pushed its armies ever further into the lands so long languishing in the hands of the Grandsons of Hagar. Soon in its efforts to fulfil its ambitions at the expense of the decaying Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire would clash with heirs of the Western Reformation, with consequences disastrous for all those drawn into the contest. It is to the West that we now return, to trace the story which led Christendom to the events of 1914.

Indulgences were as ubiquitous as the modern lottery ticket, and indeed the earliest dated piece of English printing is a template indulgence from 1476.

It was imperial spokesmen who first regularly termed the pope ‘Antichrist’, that enemy of Christ constructed out of various apocalyptic passages in the Bible – papal spokesmen were rather less successful in fastening the same image on the emperor. The Franciscan Spirituals elaborated talk of the Antichrist, particularly to condemn Pope Boniface VIII (Pope 1294–1303). In

Alexander followed the example of Nicholas V with an adjudication in 1493–4 between the claims of the two European powers which were now exploring and making conquests overseas, Portugal and Spain; he divided the map of the world beyond Europe between them, commissioning them to preach the Gospel to the non-Christians whom they encountered, in an action which had all the ambition of the twelfth-century papacy.

Julius II relished being his own general when he plunged into the Italian wars which proliferated after the French invasion, and he was especially proud when in 1506 he recaptured Bologna, second city of the Papal States after Rome, lost to the papacy seventy years before.23 Nor was Julius a pioneer in this. He merely improved on the previous practice of the Papal States, where for a century or more cardinals had been the military commanders most trusted alike by the pope and by their mercenary soldiers. One of the most effective generals of the early fifteenth century had been a cardinal, Giovanni Vitelleschi; his spiritual duties as Archbishop of Florence, still less his titular status as Patriarch of Alexandria, do not seem to have curbed his streak of sadism. A recent study describes him as ‘a master of sackings, massacres and summary executions’, and his own death by summary execution in 1440 had reputedly forestalled his seizure of the papal fortress in Rome, Castel Sant’Angelo, with a view to the papal throne itself.24

Wyclif’s Oxford admirers had followed his teaching on the unchallengeable authority of the Bible by producing the first complete translation of the Vulgate into English, so that all might have a chance to read it and understand it for themselves. In 1407 all existing versions of the Bible in English were officially banned by the English Church hierarchy, and no replacement was sanctioned until Henry VIII’s Reformation in the 1530s.

No other part of Europe went to such lengths, even though that great activist and reformer Jean Gerson did propose a general ban on Bible translations to the Council of Konstanz; he was worried that the laity would spend too much time reading for themselves and not listen to the clergy’s increasingly generous supply of preaching.

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.

Even a well-meaning and conscientious Bishop of Chichester, Reginald Pecock, was accused of heresy in 1457–8. He was forced to resign and recant because he chose to defend the Church against Lollardy by privileging reason over the authority of scripture and the Fathers of the early Church; moreover, contrary to Gerson, he questioned the value of preaching without the laity doing their own reading to reinforce the message from the pulpit.

The Emperor Charles, also King of Bohemia, had made Prague his capital, lavishing money on it to create one of the most spectacular ensembles of public buildings in central Europe, providing Prague not merely with the beginnings of a great cathedral but with a new university. Such a lively city, owing its beauty to Charles’s determination to make his capital a new Jerusalem for the Last Days of the world, was a natural breeding ground for urgent advocacy of Church reform even before the dean of the university’s Philosophical Faculty, the priest Jan Hus, became fired by Wyclif’s reforming message.

In default of a native episcopate, effective power in the Church was firmly in the hands of noblemen and the leaders of the major towns and cities. It was an extreme example of a transfer which was quietly happening in large areas of Europe, and which became a major feature of the official ‘magisterial’ Reformations in the following century: a slow decentralization of the Church from below, inexorably working against the late medieval papacy’s attempts to reassert its authority.

After yet further upheaval in Bohemia in 1547, much of the group took refuge in the province of Moravia, and they came to be known as the Moravian Brethren. It was a curious turn of history that successors of these Moravians, whose first hero Hus had taken inspiration from the writings of one great English Christian, eventually after three centuries had a major influence on another Englishman who sparked great religious change: John Wesley

Among the flood of new and strange material from the ancient world, which might or might not be valuable if put to use, was a set of writings about religion and philosophy purporting to have been written by a divine figure from ancient Egypt, Hermes Trismegistus. In fact they had been compiled in the first to third centuries CE, at much the same time as early Christianity was emerging. Some were then codified in Greek in a work now known as the Corpus Hermeticum, and others later translated into Latin and Arabic. Some dealt with forms of magic, medicine or astrology to sort out the problems of everyday life; some appealed to the same fascination with secret wisdom about the cosmos and the nature of knowledge which had created gnostic Christianity and later Manichaeism