A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

nominalism was a corrosive doctrine for the accepted principles of medieval Western Christianity; while still glorying in the disputes of scholastic debates, nominalist academic debaters disrupted many of the given principles within those debates, and split apart the concerns of philosophy and theology.

Printed texts made far more easily available to an increasingly literate public the writings of the mystics, or works which meditated as John de Caulibus had done (see pp. 417–18) on aspects of the life of Jesus. For someone who really delighted in reading, religion might retreat out of the sphere of public ritual into the world of the mind and the imagination.

The idea of imitating Christ was not much older in the Western tradition of Christianity than the twelfth century; it sat uneasily with Augustinian assumptions about fallen humanity. It was also a solvent of that assumption which had developed particularly in the West, that clergy and religious had a better chance of getting to Heaven than laity.

Wyclif argued that it was more likely that rulers chosen by God like kings or princes were in this happy condition than was the pope, and therefore dominium should be seen as being entrusted to them.

Wyclif deeply loathed not merely the eucharistic doctrine of transubstantiation which was now standard within the Western Church, but the whole notion of divine bodily presence in bread and wine. He regarded the doctrine as a clerical deception developed during the Church’s eleventh-century usurpation of worldly power – so his philosophical realism had led him in a completely different direction from Aquinas’s Aristotelian realist arguments.

when printing technology arrived in the early fifteenth century, the supply of vernacular Bibles hugely increased: the printers sensed a ready market and hastened to supply it in languages which would command large sales.

translations predate printing

Since at least the eleventh century, it had been one of the best-regulated parts of the Western Church, and accordingly had bred many clergy with ultra-rigorous standards, who were not going to cease lamenting clerical faults just because Wyclif had been part of the stream of lamentation.

particular view

Their rebellion against the Church was very qualified, for many of them remained involved in its life alongside their clandestine religious activities, rather as early Methodists were half inside, half outside the official English Church in the eighteenth century.

surely this is true of all movements at this point

in 1414 they began offering consecrated wine as well as bread to the laity in their Eucharists, for the first time in centuries.

wine to the people

So important was the latter to the mainstream Hussite Bohemian Church that it took the name ‘Utraquist’. From 1471 the Utraquist Church had no archbishop of its own, and in a curious compromise with the rest of the Catholic world, it sent prospective priests off to Venice for ordination by bishops in that independent-minded republic.

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.

Formally separate after 1457 from the Utraquists were remnants of the more radical Hussites, the Union of Bohemian Brethren (Unitas Fratrum). What survived of their religious radicalism had major social implications, for, inspired by the south Bohemian writer Petr Chelcický and in the name of New Testament Christianity, they condemned all types of violence, including political repression, capital punishment, service in war or the swearing of oaths to earthly authorities.

A further complication is that ‘humanist’ has come to be used in modern times for someone who rejects the claims of revealed religion. This was not a feature of the movement we are considering. The vast majority of humanists were patently sincere Christians who wished to apply their enthusiasm to the exploration and proclamation of their faith. They were trying to restore a Christian perfection to humanity.

The rediscovery of texts had galvanized intellectual life in ninth- and in twelfth-century Europe to create two earlier Renaissances. But now the impact was far more widely spread, because the technology of printing on paper opened up rapid possibilities of distributing copies of the texts, and gave much greater incentives for the spread of literacy associated with these innovations. This meant that the new haul of rediscovered ancient manuscripts, often lying neglected in cathedral or monastery libraries since earlier bursts of enthusiasm for the past, had a much greater impact than before, once they had been brought back into scholarly consciousness.

Medieval western Europe had access to remarkably little Greek literature; the text of even such a central work of literature as Homer’s epics was hardly known until the fifteenth century. Few scholars had any more than the vaguest knowledge of the Greek language. If they knew a learned language other than Latin, it was likely to be Hebrew, for the good reason that while there were virtually no Greeks in the west, there were plenty of argumentative and ingenious Jewish rabbis with an awkward ability to question Christianity, forcing refutations with reference to their own Hebrew literature. Now, however, Western humanists needed Greek if they were to make use of the texts suddenly available.

Greek manuscripts came in the baggage of scholars fleeing from the wreckage of Christian commonwealths in the east, or were snapped up by Western entrepreneurs profiting from the catastrophe.

From one perspective, a century or more of turmoil in the Western Church from 1517 was a debate in the mind of the long-dead Augustine.

Protestant Bible commentaries rammed home this message later, and drew gratefully on Erasmus’s other redefinitions of biblical terms in order to cut down to size Mary, her cult and her ability along with the lesser saints to intercede with her Son to the Father.

Much of the traditional case for this belief, which has no direct justification in scripture, was based on allegorical use of Ezekiel 44.2, which talks about the shutting of a gate which only the Lord could enter. This was then bolstered by the forced Greek and Latin reading of Isaiah’s original Hebrew prophecy that a young woman would conceive a son, Immanuel (Isaiah 7.14; see p. 81). Erasmus could not read these texts as Jerome had done. In response to shocked complaints about his comments, he set out a precise position: ‘We believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary, although it is not expounded in the sacred books.’

Of course he said respectful things about both liturgy and Church, and on one occasion he even composed a rather moving liturgy for a Marian Mass, but one should never place too much faith in individual writings of Erasmus, who wrote a great deal for effect, for money and to curry favour.

By contrast, Erasmus was enthusiastic for godly princes substituting for what he saw as the official Church’s failures.

Erasmus’s discreet fascination with Origen and equally discreet coldness towards Augustine was a pointer to a possible new direction for Western Christianity in the early sixteenth century. It was a direction rejected alike by mainstream Protestantism and those who remained loyal to the pope, but it did inspire many of the more adventurous minds of the period, radicals who refused to be absorbed into hardening theological categories – many of whom no doubt first encountered the unfamiliar name of Origen through the pages of Erasmus’s Enchiridion.

And it was hard to miss one very individual strand running through so much of Erasmus’s writing: he brought an ironic smile to the contemplation of the divine and the sacred, and he discerned an ironic smile on the face of the divinity. That sense of irony has not left Western theology since.79

Erasmus was a humanist pleading for people to be reasonable – and also saying bluntly that unreasonable people should not be brought into technical discussions of theology.

If we believe that Christ redeemed men by his blood, we are forced to confess that all of man was lost; otherwise, we make Christ either wholly superfluous, or else the redeemer of the least valuable part of man only; which is blasphemy, and sacrilege.16 This parting blow in his book was the very heart of the Reformation’s reassertion of Augustine, proclaiming that the humanist project of reasonable reform was redundant.

Another text from Paul lit up for him: Romans 13.1, ‘Let everyone obey the superior powers, for there is no authority except from God’.

Reformed Protestantism from the beginning differed from Luther’s Reformation – much to his fury – in several key respects, principally its attitude to images, to law and to the Eucharist.

The description ‘magisterial Reformation’ is worth using, and I will frequently use it in this narrative, because there were nevertheless still many radical Christians, who proposed their own versions of religious revolution, and whose radical Reformations remained very different in character and belief from magisterial Protestantism.

That would end the assumption which both he and Luther held as dear as the Pope, that all society should be part of the Church in Christendom. So from 1526 Zürich, embittered by the recent Farmers’ War, persecuted Anabaptists to the extent of drowning four of them in the River Limmat, just at the time when the old Church began persecuting champions of the magisterial Reformation.

Perhaps basic to all of it was a newly negative view of the Emperor Constantine I – ‘the Great’, as he had so long been called. It was a general conviction among radicals that over the previous millennium the Church had made a grave error in entering into alliance with the powerful, after a decisive wrong turn in Constantine’s alliance with Christianity.

McDiarmid sees the rejection of authority as stemming from theology. I have always seen the radicals as looking for theklogy ideas to explain the evils of authority they believe.

In 1525 the Estates in Upper Austria backed the Habsburg King Ferdinand’s suppression of the Farmers’ War, but their price for further cooperation in suppressing Anabaptists was to force him to tolerate evangelical activists and preachers in the mould of Luther.

conservative alliance against radicals

His Reformation owed most to the example of Strassburg and the Swiss, though in his vernacular liturgy for the English Church, the Book of Common Prayer of 1549, revised in more uncompromisingly Reformed style in 1552, Cranmer was ready to draw on any useful precedent.

prose which can be spoken generation on generation without seeming trite or tired – words now worn as smooth and strong as a pebble on a beach.

Armed demonstrations across south-eastern England forced the kingdom’s leaders to accept the claim to the throne made by the dead king’s Catholic half-sister, the Lady Mary.43 Although Mary’s status as King Henry’s daughter probably mattered to the kingdom more than her religion, once she had thrust aside Queen Jane, she embarked on as great an experiment as that of Edward, but in mirror-image.

Other major theologians lined up with Calvin against dogmatic Lutheranism, often regretting the division, but seeing little other option:

Very often revolutionary Reformed leaders were actually noblemen rebelling against their monarchs; rather than humble enthusiasts like the Anabaptists, they were themselves magistrates with power granted by God, just like kings or princes.

but its very public discipline, complete with penitents sitting on a special bench before the gaze of the whole congregation in crowded churches Sunday by Sunday, gave the congregation a significant say both in choosing elders who maintained the system and in monitoring the sincerity of those who did public penance.

Yet even when the Catholic Habsburgs acquired the territory and did their best to chip away at its religious liberties, the Torda agreement obstinately left its mark on Transylvania’s religious landscape.

The agreement of 1573 gave credibility to the proud Polish claim (almost but not quite true) to be a land without execution of heretics: a ‘State without Stakes’.

Imperial institutions continued to operate, and provided a framework for German life, but Christian rulers would have to devise other ways of understanding how and why they ruled.

To emphasize the sacraments placed more importance on the special quality and role of the clergy who performed the sacraments, so sacramentalists were also more clerical in their outlook than was common among English Protestants.

Worse still for the population was one respect in which the regime was not tidy-minded: it tolerated with different degrees of reluctance a variety of radical sects who were widely seen as offending against all convention. There were English Baptists, who took up the principle of adult or believers’ baptism like the Anabaptists of mainland Europe in the previous century; Baptists had been a tiny group before the civil wars began, but their numbers swelled in the Parliamentary army and in the country at large in its aftermath, causing huge offence to the vast majority who took it for granted that a Christian society depended on all its members being baptized in infancy.

Alongside Anglicanism was a strong and irrepressible Protestant Dissent.

The point was that Ursula, in the course of what appears to have been a scribal error in a medieval manuscript, had acquired eleven thousand virgin companions, all massacred by an industrious army of Huns near Cologne.

The Holy Spirit did not oblige, and with Pole’s defeat there died the last chance of a peaceful settlement of religion in Western Christendom of which his hero Erasmus might have approved.

indeed no Jesuit has ever sat on an inquisitorial tribunal, leaving that duty to the various orders of friars.

They did not wish to become an enclosed monastic order because Ignatius passionately wanted to affirm the value of the world, and believed that it was possible to lead a fully spiritual life within it.

this uniformity of worship had no precedent in the history of the Western or indeed any other branch of Christianity, with the recent but significant exceptions of England and some Lutheran Churches.

In the very different situation of the nineteenth century, the first Vatican Council of 1870 formally made the resolution in favour of papal primacy which had been impossible in the 1560s (see pp. 824–5).

Pole was now back in his native land, having succeeded the executed Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury.