A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Only a few decades before the arrival of Augustine, the balance of power through lowland England had still been not with Saxon warlords but with Celtic British. Certainly the British population had not been wiped out or driven to the far west, as historians have often in the past assumed, but had stayed put, while proving rather more able and willing to learn Anglo-Saxon than the Anglo-Saxons were capable of learning Celtic languages

So what was different about Augustine’s mission? Chiefly, but crucially, its emphasis on Roman obedience.

Augustine’s missionary party tried to turn Canterbury into Rome and Kent into Italy.

The crucial decade was the 670s, when a couple of councils of English bishops made decisions for the whole Church in the various kingdoms of England, first at Hertford in 673 and then at Hatfield in Yorkshire in 679.40 Hertford gave shape and discipline to the English Church, beginning to set up a single system of written law for it to operate under, at a time when no king in England contemplated such an idea. At Hatfield, the bishops supported the Pope’s condemnation of the continuing Byzantine efforts to conciliate Miaphysites, and also gave their assent to the ‘double procession’ of the Spirit from Father and Son, that proposition of Augustine’s which so infuriated the Byzantine Church.

The Temple represented obedience to God’s will, and it led to the healing of the terrible divisions of Babel. It foreshadowed the unity of tongues which Bede cheerfully anticipated coming very soon in history, in the Church of the Resurrection: that cosmic unity at the end of time might first be foreshadowed in England.42

These conversions sponsored by missionaries from Ninian through Patrick and Augustine far into central Europe were not conversions in the sense often demanded by evangelists in the twenty-first century, accepting Christ as personal Saviour

a people or a community ‘accepted’ or ‘submitted to’ the Christian God and his representatives on earth.

eleven out of eighteen popes in the period 650–750 had a Greek or Eastern background.49 There was still a sense among ordinary Christians and ordinary clergy that they were part of a single Mediterranean-wide Church. One proof positive of that is the way that, during the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries, fragments of Greek liturgical hymns and psalms were incorporated into various western Mediterranean worship traditions, often without even translating them into Latin, in a variety of settings, from Spain to Italy – Rome itself, Milan, Benevento.

Usurped the last Merovingian king

Frankish bishops invested the installation of the new King Pippin III with an unprecedented degree of ceremonial.

Pippin further bolstered his saintly support by enlisting another celebrated former Bishop of Paris, Germanus (Germain),

He energetically summoned councils of his clergy and imposed reforms on his diocese, including a strict code of rules for the clergy of his cathedral church. He set out a system which made their community life much more disciplined, like that of a monastery, but still left them free to exercise pastoral care in cathedral and diocese – a model much imitated later. Since the Greek word for a rule or measure is kanōn, the word ‘canon’ became increasingly commonly applied to members of such regulated bodies of clergy in cathedrals or other major churches.

first time in northern Europe, he organized ‘stational’ services around a rotation of the churches of Metz,

he had founded one of Europe’s most enduring political units, the Papal States of central Italy, whose final dissolution in the nineteenth century still shapes the mindset of the modern papacy

On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charles as a Roman emperor,

Like the Papal States which his father had brought into being, Charlemagne’s new empire of the West was destined to persist in one form or another for a thousand years as one of the cornerstone institutions of Europe. In the middle of the twelfth century, emperors began referring to it as the ‘Holy’ empire and later as the ‘Holy Roman Empire’, largely because they had come to experience problems with the successors of Leo.

In this spirit, there emerged one of the most significant forgeries in history: the so-called Donation of Constantine. The document claims to be the work of Constantine I; after reciting a story of his healing, conversion to Christianity and baptism at the hands of Pope Sylvester, it grants the Pope and all his successors not merely the honour of primacy over the universal Church but temporal power in the territories of the Western Empire, reserving to himself the empire ruled from Byzantium

suggested that the papacy could construct Church law for itself, without references to the deliberations of bishops gathered in general councils of the Church, which had been the real source of the crucial decisions on discipline and theology made in the fourth and fifth centuries.67

He encouraged a massive programme of copying manuscripts, his scribes developing from earlier Merovingian experiments a special script for fast writing and easy reading, ‘Carolingian minuscule’. This spread throughout western Europe and was so influential that it is the direct ancestor of the typeface at which you are looking now.

Alcuin proved one of the most important architects of Charlemagne’s renewal programme, bringing with him the range of learning which had made England such an exceptional region of the Western Church since the days of Bede half a century before and which now returned to enrich the new empire.

The possession of his bones in Frankish lands was a major reason why first the Franks and then other peoples who admired Frankish Christianity adopted Benedict’s Rule as the standard in monastic life.

During the eighth century they and their admirers had radically changed the older Christian idea of confession as a single event in an individual’s life, something like a second baptism, into an encounter with a priest to be repeated again and again. Now laity who confessed could expect to have to perform regular real penances for their regular real sins: fasting, or abstention from sex, with the penalties laid out in the Church’s penitential books.77

It has been pointed out that if the Norman armies who won the Battle of Hastings in 1066 had carried out the penances which the contemporary penitentials laid down as atonement for their fighting, they would have been too physically weak to go on to conquer England.78 There was a solution: monasteries could use their round of prayer to carry out these penances on behalf of the noblemen and warriors who had earned them.

Monks had rarely been ordained priests in earlier centuries, but now they were ordained in order to increase the output of Masses in a monastic community. Accordingly, the Mass began to change from the weekly chanted celebration of Eucharist on which congregational life in the early Church had centred. Now it commonly became a spoken service, the ‘Low Mass’, to be said as often as possible, often with only a server as token congregation. Because a Mass needed an altar, side altars began multiplying in Charlemagne’s abbey churches, so that many Low Masses could be said alongside the sung High Mass which remained the centrepiece for the whole community at the high altar.79

Although Orthodoxy also has its services for the dead, they are significantly not Eucharists. There is nothing in Orthodox liturgy quite like the purposeful concentration on the passage of death to be found in the developed Latin service of requiem Mass, with its black vestments, its dark-coloured candles and its sense of negotiating a perilous path.

During the early medieval period, the monastic life offered a golden opportunity for talented women of noble or royal families to lead an emancipated, active life as abbesses, exercising power which might otherwise be closed to them and avoiding the unwelcome burdens of marriage.

None of the roles of a Benedictine monastery just described – scholarship, eucharistic intercession or social engineering – had played any part or received any mention in the Rule of St Benedict. Nevertheless, because of them, the ninth to eleventh centuries were a golden age for monasteries of the Rule; the survival of European civilization would have been inconceivable without monasteries and nunneries.

Fleury drew on its de facto possession of the bones of Benedict to negotiate the right to appeal directly to the pope against any bishop in the Frankish Church,

In 972 the Emperor Otto II outdid the Carolingians: he married into the imperial family of Constantinople.