A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Constantine only ever attended Christian worship on very special occasions, as was the case with some of his successors as emperors right up to the end of the fourth century, so it is unsurprising that congregational churches were not his prime interest.

Moreover, it was in Damasus’s time that Peter came to be regarded not merely as the founder of the Christian Church in Rome, but also as its first bishop.13 Ironically, it was actually a North African bishop, point-scoring against his local Donatist opponents by stressing the North African Catholics’ links to Rome, who is the first person known to have asserted on the basis of Matthew 16.17–19 that ‘Peter was superior to the other apostles and alone received the keys of the kingdom, which were distributed by him to the rest’; yet significantly it was in the time of Damasus that this thought occurred to the North African, some time around 370.14

Augustine of Hippo, whom we will meet as the prime theologian of this new era in the Western Church, made an adroit appeal to aristocratic psychology in one of his sermons when he said that the poor who benefited could act as heavenly porters to the wealthy, using their gratitude to carry spiritual riches for their benefactors into the next life.

The Church, particularly after the terminal crisis of the Western Empire in the early fifth century, became a safer prospect than the increasingly failing civil service for those aspiring to serve or direct their communities; often Roman noblemen would become bishops because they saw the office as the only way to protect what survived of the world they loved.

Ambrose proved a remarkable success, at least in political terms. He was ruthless in dealing both with the opponents of Nicaea and with a series of Christian emperors. It was an extraordinary transformation of fortunes for Christianity that a man who might easily have become emperor himself now wielded the spiritual power of the Church against the most powerful ruler in the known world.

The contradictory influences of career and Christian renunciation came to tear him apart and made him disgusted with his ambitions. To add to his pain, on his mother’s urging, in 385 he broke with his mistress in order to make a good marriage. The woman went back to Africa, swearing to remain faithful to him – in the middle of his narrative of worldly renunciation in the Confessions, Augustine at least had the grace to record her resolution, even though he could not bring himself to name her. We may wonder what she felt as she slipped out of the life of the man who had been her companion for fifteen years, leaving behind her charming and talented teenage son to her lover’s care.30

Proud of their unblemished record in time of persecution, they proclaimed that the Church was a gathered pure community. Augustine thought that this was not what ‘One, Holy and Catholic’ meant. The Catholic Church was a Church not so much of the pure as those who tried or longed to be pure. Unlike the Donatists, it was in communion with a great mass of Christian communities throughout the known world. The Catholic Church was in fact what Augustine was not afraid to call ‘the communion of the emperor’.35

For Augustine, evil is simply non-existence, ‘the loss of good’, since God and no other has given everything existence; all sin is a deliberate falling away from God towards nothingness, though to understand why this should happen is ‘like trying to see darkness or hear silence’.

Pelagius’s views have often been presented as rather amiable, in contrast to the fierce pessimism in Augustine’s view of our fallen state. This misses the point that Pelagius was a stern Puritan, whose teaching placed a terrifying responsibility on the shoulders of every human being to act according to the highest standards demanded by God. The world which he would have constructed on these principles would have been one vast monastery.46 It would have been impossible to sustain the mixed human society of vice and virtue which Augustine presents in the ‘City of God’, where no Christian has the right to avoid everyday civic responsibilities in this fallen world, even to be a magistrate who is responsible for executing other human beings, precisely because we are all caught up in the consequences of Adam and Eve’s fall in the Garden of Eden.

In the process, Augustine’s thoughts about the nature of grace and salvation were pushed to ever more extreme positions, which can be traced both through The City of God and the long series of tracts which he wrote attacking Pelagian thought. Eventually he could say not simply that all human impulses to do good are a result of God’s grace, but that it is an entirely arbitrary decision on the part of God as to who receives this grace. God has made the decision before all time, so some are foreordained to be saved through grace – a predestined group of the elect. The arbitrariness is fully justified by the monstrousness of Adam’s original fall, in which we all have a part through original sin: Augustine repeatedly uses the terrible word ‘lump’ (massa) to describe humanity in its state of loss. It is a word to which he often returned, associating it with Latin words for ‘loss’, ‘sin’, ‘filth’.

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.

The reputation of the Merovingians still enthrals many who prefer to construct the past through cloudy esoteric conspiracy theories rather than pay attention to the exciting realities of Christian history.

I have no idea what this means

Christ built his Church on St Peter, and so in the apostolic see the Catholic faith has always been kept without stain. There is one communion defined by the Roman see, and in that I hope to be, following the apostolic see in everything and affirming everything decided thereby.9

Lays the basis for papal infalliability

The island had no central authority, or (importantly) any memory of one, and instead there was a large collection of groupings (tuatha) headed by dynastic leaders. Their power over kin and clients was based both on their ability to provide defence against other dynastic leaders and to intercede with supernatural powers for the prosperity of crops and cattle. To call these leaders kings may be misleading, since there could have been anything between 150 and 200 of them in the island at any one time.

As a result, there grew a network of Christian communities intimately involved in the life of each local dynastic grouping, fostering Christian life throughout the island all the more powerfully because monasteries were so enmeshed in the pride and pre-Christian traditions of each tuath. There was nothing fixed or enduring about many tuatha, and reflecting the itinerant character of much of Irish society, the Church developed the peculiar phenomenon of roving ecclesiastical families, in whom priesthood and care of churches descended from one generation to another; they carried with them in their migrations the stories of their founding saints, spreading the same cult to widely separated parts of the island.19

The Irish clergy developed a series of ‘tariff books’ for their own use. These were based on the idea not only that sin could be atoned for through penance, but that it was possible to work out exact scales of what penance was appropriate for what sin: tariffs of forgiveness. They saw the spiritual life as a constant series of little setbacks, laboriously compensated for before the next little lapse. They used their tariff books to help layfolk who were oppressed by guilt and shame.

Instead, the new Bishop Augustine recognized reality and established himself in the extreme south-east in Kent, the nearest kingdom to mainland Europe, where pagan King Ethelbert had married a Frankish Christian princess called Bertha, and where there was still a lively sense of the importance of the Roman past. The Kentish royal capital was a former Roman city now called Canterbury. When political power later shifted away from Kent, successive Anglo-Saxon bishops and archbishops in Augustine’s line found advantages in being slightly at a distance from imperious monarchs in Wessex or Mercia, and stayed in Canterbury. Only much later did twelfth-century Angevin monarchs turn a revived city of London into their capital, also developing a palace immediately to its west in Westminster. The Archbishops of Canterbury then experimented with exploiting the possibilities of a newly acquired property in the heart of London itself, on the site of what is now the parish church of St Mary-le-Bow, but they soon changed tack. They thought it wise to develop a minor estate of theirs at Lambeth, which was a quick barge journey across the River Thames from Westminster, and the new palace there became their true centre of operations, rather than Canterbury itself. One late-twelfth-century archbishop even tried to fulfil Gregory’s plan and move his cathedral to Lambeth, a scheme foiled only by his death on crusade.28

He frequently tells us specifically the status and source of his information, and one can picture him on his eager quest for what would now be called oral history – ‘The priest Deda … a most reliable authority … told me that one of the oldest inhabitants had described to him …’, etc.29 Bede is the equal of Thucydides in this respect, and a good deal less credulous than Herodotus (see pp. 35–6).

Herodotus gives way more sources than Thucydides. Although does not sort.

one curious fact must strike anyone reading the letters of Gregory to Augustine preserved by Bede. Certain purple passages on the subject of conversion are always quoted from them, but in reality a large proportion of Gregory’s attention is taken up with discussing sex – to be more specific, ritual impurity. Gregory argued at great length against people who had been perplexing Augustine because of their strong opinions about what constituted sexual uncleanness among their contemporaries. These rigorists wanted to borrow Old Testament exclusions from participation in the Temple liturgy and apply them to pregnant women and the sexual relations of married couples.

The Church could also be sensitive to the pride of newly Christianized rulers and noblemen, enabling them to marry new to old.

The Church encouraged royal families to extend their genealogies further beyond the Germanic god Woden, not to leave him out, but to go all the way back to biblical Adam.

Why was Solomon’s Temple so important to Bede? Because it stood for him as one image in a pair of opposites, the other being the Tower of Babel. The Tower represented human pride, and pride led to a confusion of tongues. The Temple represented obedience to God’s will, and it led to the healing of the terrible divisions of Babel.

Development of nationhood

The troubled people of Europe sought not only good drains and elegant tableware, but a glimpse of the light which would make sense of their own brief flights out of the darkness. The missionaries of Christianity talked to them of love and forgiveness shaping the purposes of God, and there is no reason to believe that ordinary folk were too obtuse to perceive that this could be good news.

afterlife? not sure

Pope Hadrian I (772–95) changed the dating custom used by the popes. He began dating his administrative documents and correspondence not by the regnal year of the emperor in Constantinople, but by the year of his own period in office and by the regnal year of the King of the Franks. By now this was the son of Pippin, Charles, the first Frankish king to visit Rome, during the military campaign of 774 which crippled Lombard power. Charles’s reign was long, 768 to 814, and history soon christened him Charles the Great, Carolus Magnus – Charlemagne.

It might be possible to outflank the Byzantines; so Charlemagne put out diplomatic feelers to the great Islamic Abbasid caliph, Hārūn ar-Rashīd, far away in Baghdad.

We can call them forgeries, but our attitudes to such matters are conditioned by the humanist historical scholarship which emerged in Italy in the fifteenth century. That leads us to expect that our history must be based on carefully checked and authenticated evidence, or it simply cannot exist. For centuries before, though, people lived in societies which did not have enough documents to prove what they passionately believed to be true: the only solution was to create the missing documentation.65

huh?

The forged Donation much fired the imagination of later popes and clerical supporters of their power, who saw it as a manifesto for a world in which Christ’s Church would be able to rule all society. It is possible to see that as a noble vision.

There are many possibilities..

Benedict had not put up any resistance to his abduction, so it was reasonable to suppose that he approved of it, and thus he gave his formidable blessing to the whole people of Francia. 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.

Equally, humility could be a useful instrument of policy: if an emperor was forced to change his mind in some radical way, he had a ready-made method of performing his political U-turn in the Church’s language of penitence and forgiveness.76

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 weak concept of individuality in this society; in early medieval eyes, God would not mind who actually performed the penance demanded, as long as it was done. So the regular round of communal prayer demanded by Benedict’s Rule was an excellent investment for the nobility; it saved them from the powers of Hell, which were as near and real as any invading army on their territory. Monasteries were fortresses against the Devil, the monks the garrison, armed with prayer.

Although Orthodoxy also has its services for the dead, they are significantly not Eucharists.

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. In the privacy of a nunnery with a good library, they and their nuns, who also tended to be from elite families, might become as well educated as any monk.

In fact those abbesses presiding over the greatest houses came to wear the headgear worn by abbots and bishops which symbolized authority in the Church: the mitre.

Etheldreda’s memory is still honoured by the Anglican Dean and Chapter who now cherish the magnificent Romanesque cathedral on its bracingly windswept scarp. Such royal princesses were invaluable in bringing a sacred character to their dynasties, now that kings were subject to the Church and could not fully play the role of cultic figures, as they had in pre-Christian religions.80

A large proportion of the rural population was reduced to serfdom: farmers became the property of their lords, with obligations to work on the newly intensive agricultural production.4 Economic productivity dramatically rose as a result. There were better food supplies and more wealth. Surplus wealth and the need for ready exchange in which to transfer it meant that money became a more important part of the economy than it had been for centuries. Trade

tenth cenyury on

From the eleventh century to the twentieth, the second half of Christianity’s existence so far, the parish was the unit in which most Christians experienced their devotional life. Only now has that ceased to be the case. As parishes were organized, it became

The parish system covering the countryside gave the Church the chance to tax the new farming resources of Europe by demanding from its farmer-parishioners a scriptural tenth of agricultural produce, the tithe. Tithe was provided by many more of the laity than the old aristocratic elite, and was another incentive for extending the Church’s pastoral concern much more widely. This

By the 1170s, theologians observing this growth of popular theology of the afterlife had given it a name: Purgatory. Never a notion which gained currency in the Eastern world, despite its precedent in Greek-speaking theologians, Purgatory was to become one of the most important and in the end also one of the most contentious doctrines of the Western Latin Church.7

It was striking that the Church was appealing to consciences right across the social spectrum, even if the net result was to confirm and strengthen the new order of society.

All ways of reinforcing social order

The papacy’s intervention was particularly significant for the future, because it pointed towards an inexorable conclusion: if a single problem occurred all over Europe, then it was best dealt with by a single authority.8

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

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.

It is possible to be cynical and suggest that a principal motivation for this otherwise puzzling excess on affinity (a motivation, indeed, for the Church’s general concern to regulate marriage) was a wish to see property left to churches rather than to a large range of possible heirs in the family. The more limits were placed on legal marriage, the more chance there was of there being no legal heir, so that land and wealth would be left to the Church, for the greater glory of God.

Most readers will agree that the Church’s new approach was preferable to forcible male castration, which was employed with distressing frequency by certain European noblemen in the eleventh century as a means of neutralizing potential competing founders of landed dynasties.13

Certainly it is true that churchmen were deeply concerned about the loss of ecclesiastical estates to possession by families; that had a further effect on the Church’s regulation of marriage. 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.

They strode through the congregation up to the altar and placed on it the Pope’s declaration of excommunication, quitting the building with a ceremonial shaking of its dust from their feet, amid jeers from a hostile crowd. This was only a personal excommunication of the Patriarch and his associates, but unlike the Acacian schism of the late fifth century (see p. 234), Pope and Oecumenical Patriarch did not declare the excommunication revoked for another nine hundred years after the events of 1054, and even now in many areas the reconciliation between Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism is distinctly shaky.17

This one man’s vision can be compared in its consequences over centuries with the vision of Karl Marx eight hundred years later; indeed, all the signs are that it will prove far longer-lasting in its effects.

In confrontations which sometimes became military campaigns, popes were able to wound the empire without effectively dominating it.