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August 22 - September 29, 2016
The monks of Christ Church Canterbury, who had never liked Becket in life, had plenty of reason to be grateful to him after his death, since he attracted a considerable pilgrimage cult to their cathedral, magnificently rebuilt to highlight his shrine.
In many kingdoms of Europe, particularly in Aragon, monarchs were known to assert their own semi-priestly character by themselves preaching sermons on great occasions, despite angry protests from senior churchmen.21
‘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.
Kings and noblemen in Europe saw the usefulness of competent bishops to improve their own administration and drafted them into their own governments.
In the long term, it was not a healthy development, and it bred a constant succession of tensions between clergy and people with which episcopal systems have continued to struggle – most damagingly for the Western Church in the sixteenth-century Reformation.
The universality of the Gothic style is one of the symptoms of the way in which Gregory VII’s vision of a single Catholic Church seized the Western Church in the two centuries after his turbulent tenure of the Throne of St Peter.
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.
Not all the armies were led by kings or nobles, although that was generally the case with the forces which genuinely had the organization to make it to the Middle East.
The Latin kingdom, at its greatest extent approximately the size of the modern State of Israel,
With or without the occupied territories?
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.
one of the most permanent achievements of the crusaders was fatally to weaken the Christian empire of the East.
The mood is expressed in a fresco that can still be seen in the crypt of Auxerre Cathedral: here the Bishop of Auxerre, a protégé of Pope Urban II and himself active in the First Crusade, commissioned a picture of the end of time in which Christ himself was portrayed as a warrior on horseback. It was an image impossible to imagine in the early Church, and at the time it was still alien to the Greek East; at much the same time, a Greek visiting Spain was offended when he heard St James of Compostela referred to as a ‘knight of Christ’.42
Like Manichaeism facing the early Church (see pp. 170–71), the essence of Cathars’ beliefs was dualist; they believed in the evil of material things and the necessity to transcend the physical in order to achieve spiritual purity.
There were advantages for donors in this: wildernesses were cheaper investments for benefactors than long-standing, well-cultivated estates – but the Cistercians did go to the length of creating wildernesses by destroying existing villages, sometimes not without a certain shamefacedness.
First, a number of English Benedictine abbots conferred in the 1120s and, in their enthusiasm for the Mother of God, began promoting the idea that Mary had been conceived without the normal human correlation of concupiscence (lust); because her conception was immaculate, unspotted by sin, so was her flesh.
Churches which did not possess any relic of any significance – that was particularly likely in northern Europe – could trump the competition simply by commissioning a statue of Our Lady, which with luck, divine favour, local enthusiasm or assiduous salesmanship might produce evidence of its miraculous power and become the focus of pilgrimage.
Now many people found themselves faced with the excitement and terror of new situations, new structures of life; their uncertainties, hopes and fears were ready prey for clergy who might have their own emotional difficulties and quarrels with the clerical hierarchy. This has been a repeated problem for institutional Christianity in times of social upheaval.
Very personality based perspective
This organized exploration was christened ‘theology’, a concept essentially an invention of the Western Church: the word was first given currency in the 1120s by the Paris theologian Peter Abelard when he used it as title of a controversial discussion of Christian thought, his Theologia Christiana.4
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.
unlike some of the other leaders of new movements in his age, he was intent on emphasizing his close loyalty to the pope, and Pope Honorius III took a personal interest in drafting the document which in 1217 named Dominic’s new organization as an Order of Preachers – the only order, one contemporary noted, to take its name from its function.11
Luckily for his future, alongside his almost pathological nonconformity, Francis was deeply loyal to the Western Catholic tradition.
There was nothing new in the council’s stipulation that confession should be to one’s own priest, or that both sides should preserve absolute secrecy in what was said, but what was new was the universality of the demand; it was an extraordinary attempt to get everyone to scrutinize their lives, with the aid of expert help. Priests were now expected as a matter of course to instruct as well as tend their flocks: manuals of instruction for pastoral care and preaching proliferated.
is easy to confuse the doctrine of the ‘Real Presence’, the general devotional belief that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are to be identified with the body and blood of Christ, with the doctrine of transubstantiation, which is just one explanation of this miracle.
During the twelfth century (it is not clear originally where or when), a new liturgical custom became very common in the Mass. Clergy consecrating the eucharistic elements lifted high the bread and chalice of wine as they pronounced the Latin words which echoed what Jesus had said at the Last Supper, Hoc est enim corpus meum, ‘For this is my body’. This ‘elevation of the host’ became a focus for the longing of the Catholic faithful to gaze upon the body of Christ: the dramatic high point of the Western Latin Mass.
That may seem strange for a work which, in its standard English edition, runs to sixty-one volumes and which remained unfinished at Aquinas’s death in 1274, but what this greatest of scholastic theologians understood was that all language about God had to employ the sideways glance, the analogy, the metaphor.
‘Faith, our outward sense befriending, makes our inward vision clear’: there is the resolution to the puzzle posed by the Summa‘s affirmation that no words may describe God.
Increased focus on individual spirituality
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).
This is a study of relationships which are familiar to us from our daily lives, but in which the haloes of Mother and Son, and our knowledge of the sacred story, pull us beyond our own experience, to the relationships of love which form the heart of Christianity’s story of salvation.34
it was in the later thirteenth century that Mary too became not a benevolent but distant monarch, a model for queen dowagers and empresses everywhere, but a wretchedly mourning mother
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.
The early fourteenth century added a new set of conspirators: Satan and his agents on earth, witches.
The two hundred or so visions of Agnes which the friar recorded during the early 1290s make a good deal of use of the metaphor of clothing and unclothing to signify her contact with God (there are naked dancing nuns and friars in her Heaven). Her relish in the Feast of the Circumcision, which led her to imagine swallowing the foreskin of Christ, was one of the issues which raised a good deal of worry when the manuscript was first put into print in the eighteenth century. Agnes’s visions were infused with everyday perceptions transformed into symbol; in one of them, Christ appeared to her in
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in telling the Orthodox story there is a real problem in recovering the reality of personalities or events which at particular moments provided alternative routes to the future, and who have accordingly won a negative presentation from later Orthodox historians.
There were very few burnings in the Byzantine Empire and they ceased soon after the West resumed burnings in the eleventh century, although in later centuries burnings resumed in Orthodox Muscovy – apparently first thanks to prompting from envoys of the Holy Roman Emperor in 1490.
but the hymns of hate remained, liturgical affirmations that there was one truth in Orthodoxy which had fought its way past a series of satanic temptations to error.
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’.
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. What Justinian was doing in his major programme of building in the capital and the creation of a constant round of sacred ceremony around Hagia Sophia was to make himself and the imperial Court the focus of a society where every public activity which formerly had been part of the non-Christian structure of the empire was now made holy and consecrated to the service of God.
only Alexandria was left as a centre of ancient non-Christian learning until the Islamic conquest.
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.
Hierarchy causes its members to be images of God in all respects, to be clear and spotless mirrors reflecting the glow of primordial light and indeed of God himself. It ensures that when its members have received this full and divine splendour, they can then pass on this light generously.
The Logos was thus to be met both in Jesus and in all creation; it was also to be met in scripture. In a remarkably physical picture of the ‘Word’, Maximus said, ‘The Word is said to become “thick” … because he for our sakes, who are coarse in respect to our mentality, accepted to become incarnate and to be expressed in letters, syllables and words, so that from all these he might draw us to himself.’
To seek after these meanings was yet another pathway back to the Creator, and it was a path directed by love. Love ‘is the producer par excellence of deification’.
much greater emphasis on knowing god as route to salvation
Maximus was one of the chief voices opposing this ‘Monenergism’ or ‘Monotheletism’. He said that God had too much respect for his creations, humans included, to allow the Logos to assume anything less than true created human nature in all its fullness: so the incarnate Christ must have had a fully human activity and fully human will.
This was a bold claim, based on a largely novel vision of the will as self-determination both rational and beyond conscious reason; no Greek philosopher, let alone theologian, had fully enunciated this before, or made the will so central to an understanding of Christ.
John was the last Eastern theologian to have a continuous impact on Western Christian thinking until modern times.
Charlemagne was impelled to condemn the theology of the East which promoted images, and he authorized theological statements which minimized the value of images; they have been known in history as the ‘Caroline Books’ (Libri Carolini).
politics trumps theology
‘In the course of almost 180 years of debate, Greek theologians produced a radical change in the language with which they framed the icon. In so doing, they raised the status of the work of art to that of theology and the status of the artists to that of the theologian.’
Soon the liturgies used by monasteries, lovingly commented on in treatises by a sequence of monks from the time of Maximus the Confessor onwards, merged with the liturgy of the Great Church of Hagia Sophia to create a liturgy for the whole Church.62
monasteries moving out of palestine
This slow liturgical dance through scripture means that, for better or worse, the Orthodox approach the Bible and its meaning with much less inclination to separate out the activity of biblical scholarship from meditation and the everyday practice of worship than is the case in the Western tradition.
Indeed, Photios’s exceptional learning aroused suspicions among monks who accused him of being a closet pagan – it was claimed that he recited secular poetry under his breath during the liturgy.
