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This edited compilation of the four Gospels was known as the Diatessaron—meaning “according to the four”—and was the subject of much controversy among Syriac-speaking Christians, for some preferred it to the four canonical Gospels and others rejected it altogether—a controversy that was not quickly resolved, for the Diatessaron was still read in some Syriac churches as late as the seventh century.
To this mix was added the presence of at least one ancient Christian Gnostic sect—the Elkesaites. By the seventh century, this was the confused and confusing picture of Christianity that Muhammad came to know and to reject.
While the subtle differences between Arianism and Nicene Christianity seem to have been of little interest to these Germanic peoples, Arianism did provide them with a church and a hierarchy that were independent of both Rome and Constantinople, and therefore fostered a sense of identity that they would take into the territories they conquered. Thus, it was as they became assimilated into Roman culture and traditions that most of them abandoned Arianism and converted to Nicene Christianity. Fragments of the Gothic version of the Gospels by Ulfila still survive.
This notion of the mass as sacrifice eventually became standard doctrine of the Western church—until it was rejected by Protestants in the sixteenth century.
But, while earlier Christian teachers had sought to preserve Christian faith free of popular superstition, Gregory readily accepted the stories circulating at his time as if they were simple and direct confirmation of the Christian faith.
Monothelite—that is, a follower of a christological heresy claiming that Jesus Christ had two natures but only one will.
Muhammad claimed that he was not preaching a new religion, but simply the culmination of what God had revealed in the Hebrew prophets and in Jesus, who was a great prophet, although not divine as Christians claimed.
The first is radical monotheism, and Muhammad’s role in preaching it under divine guidance: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his Prophet.” The second is ritual prayer, prescribed at specific times. The third is zakat, which is often translated as “almsgiving,” but whose full meaning includes taxation, and specifically that the poor have a right to some of the wealth of the rich. Of the Five Pillars, it is this that has been most debated and modified in various Muslim communities. The fourth pillar is fasting during the month of Ramadan, in celebration of the month when the Qur’an was
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For this reason, at the behest of Leo, she called a new council, which met at Chalcedon in 451 and which eventually became known as the Fourth Ecumenical Council. This council condemned Dioscorus and Eutyches, but forgave all others who had participated in the Robber Synod of Ephesus two years earlier.
Finally, the council produced a statement that was not a creed, but rather a Definition of faith, or a clarification of what the church held to be true.
It is clear that this manner of speaking of the Savior is far distant from that of the Gospels, and has been deeply influenced by extrabiblical patterns of thought. But, given the manner in which the issue was posed, it is difficult to see what else the bishops gathered at Chalcedon could have done in order to safeguard the reality of the incarnation.
In both cases, their theological objections were also spurred by resentment against the central government in Constantinople, which collected taxes in the provinces and did not return to them proportional benefits.
But this created a new stir, for many, particularly Pope Felix III, declared that the emperor had no authority to prescribe what was to be believed. Since Zeno had the support of Patriarch Acacius of Constantinople, the dispute resulted in an open breach between the bishops of Rome and Constantinople. Called the Schism of Acacius, this separated the East from the West until 519, well after the death of both principals. At that time, Emperor Justin and Pope Hormisdas reached an agreement that was in fact a return to the decisions of Chalcedon.
Finally, the Sixth Ecumenical Council, gathered at Constantinople in 680–681, condemned Monothelism, and declared Pope Honorius to have been a heretic. (Much later, in the nineteenth century, this condemnation of a pope as a heretic came to the foreground in the discussions surrounding the proclamation of Papal Infallibility.)
In any case, the entire empire was soon divided between “iconoclasts”—destroyers of images—and “iconodules”—worshipers of images.
This assembly distinguished between worship in the strict sense, latria, which is due only to God, and a lesser worshipful veneration, dulia, which is to be given to images.
Augustine and others had suggested that, since a thousand years are as a day in the eyes of God, the end of the first millennium would bring about the consummation of creation.
Eventually, what earlier had been required only of monks and nuns would also be required of the clergy.
At some point in the process, apparently in Milan, the “Patarines” arose. These were overzealous promoters of clerical celibacy who held that the marriage of priests was really a form of concubinage, called priest’s wives harlots, and insisted that they must simply be expelled from their husband’s households.
it was Urban II who, at the Council of Clermont in 1095, responding to a request for support against the Turks from Byzantine Emperor Alexis I, proclaimed the great enterprise, to which those present responded with cries of Deus vult—“God wills it.”
Some had visions of comets, angels, or the Holy City suspended over the eastern horizon.
The rigorists insisted on strict obedience to the founder’s instructions.
The price that the popes demanded was ecclesiastical reconciliation, and this was achieved at the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1439.
For nearly seventy years, while still claiming to be bishops of Rome, the popes would generally remain in Avignon. This period, often called the “Avignon Papacy” or the “Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” was marked, not only by the absence of the popes from Rome, but also by their willingness to serve as tools of French policy.
(One could still find echoes of the medieval flagellants in the Americas even into the twenty-first century, for instance, among the penitentes of New Mexico.)
But it is quite likely that they contributed to the radical Anabaptist movement of the sixteenth century.
Finally, the tendency of Western theology to make salvation a goal to be attained by human action reached its high point in late medieval theology, for which even attendance at communion became a pious work meriting salvation.
There were even legends ascribing particular territories to specific apostles, and arguing that the ancestors of the unbelievers now living in those areas had been given their opportunity to believe at the time of the apostles, and that those now living were condemned as a result of the obstinacy of their ancestors.
