Church History in Plain Language

by Bruce L. Shelley

around the year 320, a former soldier named Pachomius instituted the first Christian monastery.

Basil, who died in 379, was especially important as the designer of the Rule of Discipline under which the monasticism of Greek Orthodoxy is organized to this day.

To reach this goal and not be hindered on their way, the monks assumed a threefold vow: poverty, chastity, and obedience. Thus the true spiritual warriors tried to divest themselves of their possessions, their marital happiness, and their freedom to choose. Today we call these “basic rights.” The monk considered them the roots of ego and obstructions to communion with God.

Manichaeism, like Gnosticism, taught that the true spiritual Jesus had no material body and did not actually die.

The Donatist name arose from Donatus, an early bishop of Carthage (313–355) who led the protest against Catholic practices. Donatist charges centered on the fact that certain Catholic bishops had handed over the Scriptures to be burned during the persecution under Diocletian.

What did Pelagius teach to arouse Augustine’s vigorous opposition? The monk denied that human sin is inherited from Adam. Man, he said, is free to act righteously or sinfully.

Pelagius found no real need for the special enabling power of the Holy Spirit.

Augustine taught that the whole human race was “in Adam” and shared his fall. Mankind became a “mass of corruption,” incapable of any good (saving) act.

Since man of himself can do nothing good, all power to do good must be the free gift of God, that is, grace.

Arles, in 314, was a general council of the churches in the West, and Nicaea, in 325, the first general council of the whole church.

In May 381 the new emperor called a general council at Constantinople.

The great theme of Orthodox theology is the incarnation of God and the re-creation of man.

Theosis or deification.

A champion Greek theologian, Athanasius, pictured Jesus fully sharing in the corrupted world of humans so that we could fully share in the incorruptible fellowship of God; he becomes man so that men can become gods.

In the Church of the Twelve Apostles, which he had built, Constantine prepared in the midst of the twelve symbolic tombs of the apostles a thirteenth, for himself.

John of Damascus

In the late Middle Ages the original territories of Greek Orthodoxy were reduced to western Turkey, the Balkans, and Cyprus.

After they had attended services in the great Church of Holy Wisdom, the envoys told their master, “We know not whether we were in Heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such splendor or beauty anywhere upon earth. We cannot describe it to you; only we know that God dwells there among men, and that their service surpasses the worship of all other places. For we cannot forget that beauty.”

Boniface

Today the tales are long lost, but we retain Thor’s day in our Thursday and another god’s name, Wodin, in our Wednesday.

The Arian influence apparently began with missionary work among the Visigoths.

Ireland became the base for the evangelization of Britain.

an Irish monk named Columba led in the founding of a monastery on Iona, an island off the coast of Scotland. Iona, in turn, gave a new and vital impulse to the preaching of Christ in Britain.

St. Gall and Bobbio were two of the most famous Celtic monasteries. These were the days before the bishops of Rome gained general recognition as popes, so this Celtic influence on the Continent and the independent spirit of the Irish and British monks became in time a disturbing factor to Roman Christianity.

In 596 Pope Gregory the Great (596–604) sent a party of Benedictine monks to distant and barbaric England under the leadership of Augustine—another St. Augustine, who would become known as St. Augustine of Canterbury.

The king was so persuaded by Augustine that he granted land for the foundation of a monastery at Canterbury, ever after to be the seat of the English religious leader.

Synod of Whitby in 664,

The most famous British missionary of the Middle Ages was Winfrid, better known as Boniface. Born in Devonshire, Boniface was commissioned by Pope Gregory II in 729 to evangelize Germany.

pretending to be baptized were offenses punishable by death.

missi dominici, the king’s envoys. Pairs of these itinerant officials, usually a bishop and a lay noble, traveled throughout the realm to check on the local administration.

1806, when the Holy Roman Empire was terminated by another self-styled emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte.

By the end of the eleventh century, the ceremony included the vassal kneeling before the feudal lord. The vassal would join his hands and extend them. The feudal lord would clasp his hands around the vassal’s hands, pull him up, and kiss him. The vassal’s hands joined and extended have become the symbol and posture of prayer today.

Peace of God and Truce of God movements.

simony, the purchase or sale of a church office.

The ultimate goal of the Cluniac reformers was to free the entire church from secular control and subject it to papal authority.

Thus on the way to the Holy Land the crusader wore the cross on his breast. On his journey home, he wore it on his back.

“The first key to wisdom,” Abelard asserted, “is assiduous and frequent questioning . . . . For by doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we arrive at the truth.”

The overall thrust for Aristotle was not to separate two unfitting dimensions (the conceptual and material), but was to discover and admire how the best thinking integrated or fit with the material world by God’s special design.

Things changed with the arrival of Thomas Aquinas. His life work was to insist that good thinking never leads the learner away from God’s truth. The truth that God reveals surpasses the truth we can achieve by reasoning, but they never contradict. As the popular saying goes, “All truth is God’s truth.”

Christ won grace; the church imparts it.

Since sin remains a problem for the baptized Christian, God provided penance, the sacrament of spiritual healing.

political Christianity is only partial Christianity.

Modern Christians find it all but impossible to understand the medieval attitude toward heresy. We believe deeply that religious faith is a matter of personal choice but we seldom think of religious beliefs as life-and-death matters. Why should anyone either die for his own faith or kill another for his?

Medieval Christians, however, never considered faith strictly private. Christian beliefs were the cement of society; denying a doctrine was tantamount to treason.

Waldenses.

“reformers before the Reformation.”

Cathari, which means pure ones.

Albigenses.

Arnold and Waldo refused to submit to church authorities, but the Cathari rejected not only popes and bishops but basic Christianity.

Dominic believed that the heretics would listen if the preachers themselves were committed to poverty. To win the heretics, Dominic went forth among them as a poor man, barefoot and begging.