A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Still in the eighth century of the Christian era, the great new city of Baghdad would have been a more likely capital for worldwide Christianity than Rome. The extraordinary accident of the irruption of Islam is the chief reason why Christian history turned in another direction.

For most of its existence, Christianity has been the most intolerant of world faiths, doing its best to eliminate all competitors, with Judaism a qualified exception, for which (thanks to some thoughts from Augustine of Hippo) it found space to serve its own theological and social purposes.

I would now describe myself as a candid friend of Christianity. I still appreciate the seriousness which a religious mentality brings to the mystery and misery of human existence, and I appreciate the solemnity of religious liturgy as a way of confronting these problems. I live with the puzzle of wondering how something so apparently crazy can be so captivating to millions of other members of my species.

But historians do not possess a prerogative to pronounce on the truth of the existence of God itself, any more than do (for example) biologists.

Furthermore, I am not ashamed to affirm that although modern historians have no special capacity to be arbiters of the truth or otherwise of religion, they still have a moral task. They should seek to promote sanity and to curb the rhetoric which breeds fanaticism. There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified.

Religious belief can be very close to madness. It has brought human beings to acts of criminal folly as well as to the highest achievements of goodness, creativity and generosity.

So the words ‘logos’ and ‘Christos’ tell us what a tangle of Greek and Jewish ideas and memories underlies the construction of Christianity.

At Socrates’s trial, Plato portrays the philosopher as insisting in his speech of defence that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’.

Western culture has borrowed the insistence of Socrates that priority should be given over received wisdom to logical argument and rational procession of thought, and the Western version of the Christian tradition is especially prone to this Socratic principle.

Because of its immediacy theatre, even more than philosophy, confronts and crystallizes the most profound dilemmas in human life, and it may provide perverse comfort in revealing that dilemmas have no solutions, as human misery is played out against the indifference of the cosmos, in the same way that the landscape stretches behind the Greek theatre stage and dwarfs it.

Thucydides had grasped that vital historical insight that groups of people behave differently and have different motivations from individual human beings, and that they often behave far more discreditably than individuals.

They are collectively called the Gospels, a word which started life as the Greek for ‘good news’, evaggelion. Significantly, the first Latin Christians did not seek an exact equivalent in their own language and simply slurred the word with a Latin lilt into evangelium.

The Epistle to Philemon is a Christian foundation document in the justification of slavery.13

Evil simply exists; life is a battle between good and evil, in a material world wholly beyond the concern of the true God.

The fading of Paul from popular devotional consciousness and from much share in the charisma of Rome is one of the great puzzles of Christian history, but it is obvious that part of the answer to the puzzle lies in a vast expansion of the power and prestige of the Bishops of Rome.

The unnerving self-confidence of Christians and their view of every other form of religion as demonic contrasted with the comfortable openness to variety normal in contemporary religious belief.

As Christian communities established themselves as recognizable communities in cities, they often did not endear themselves to people.

What really offended was the opposite: Christian secretiveness and obstinate separation into their own world.

The attractive feature of a martyr’s death was that it was open to anyone, regardless of social status or talent.

Absent is the representation which modern Christians might expect, but which was nowhere to be found in Christian cultures before the fifth century: Christ hanging on the Cross, the Crucifixion. Christ in the art of the early Church was shown in his human life or sprung to new life – never dead, in the fashion of the crucifixions which were to become so universal in the art of the later Western Church.

A military leader and a ruthless politician rather than an abstract thinker, Constantine was probably not very clear about the difference between a universal sun cult and the Christian God – at least to start with. As he began showering privileges on the Christian clergy, it is unlikely that many of them considered whether the Emperor should be given a theological cross-examination before they accepted their unexpected gifts.

25 The idea of a seated bishop presiding over the liturgy but also pronouncing on matters of belief and adjudicating everyday disputes, became so basic to Western Christian ideas of what a bishop represented that the Church annexed a second Latin word for ‘chair’, cathedra, previously associated with teachers in higher education, and used it for the city church in which the bishop’s principal chair could be found: his cathedral.

Human societies are based on the human tendency to want things, and are geared to satisfying those wants: possessions or facilities to bring ease and personal satisfaction. The results are frequently disappointing, and always terminate in the embarrassing non sequitur of death.

All Christian monasticism is an implied criticism of the Church’s decision to become a large-scale and inclusive organization.

The Holy Fool was destined to have a long history in the Orthodox tradition (although for some reason the Serbs never took to him).

Simeon the younger Stylite (521–97) is rather implausibly said to have insisted on spending his infancy on a junior pillar, but there is no doubt that he eventually graduated to a full-scale pillar near Antioch, of which there are remnants even more substantial than those of his elder namesake. It was possible for pilgrims to get there without too much trouble from the city, making for an edifying day out. Simeon does not seem to have protested while a large expensive church (whose ruins also still survive) was being built round his pillar, thus making this ragged hermit into a bizarre living relic, sole exhibit in a Christian zoo.

Such belief did lead monks in the Syrian tradition into their extraordinary self-punishments to achieve such imitation, but it also represents an optimistic pole of the Christian spectrum of beliefs in human worth, potential and capacity, because if Jesus had a whole human nature, it must by definition be good, and logically all human nature began by being good, whatever its subsequent corruptions. This was a contrast with the savage pessimism that has often emerged from Latin Western Christianity, following Augustine of Hippo’s emphasis on original sin

There is much in modern Muslim practice which would have been familiar to seventh-century Christians, and which is likely to have been borrowed from the Christian practice which Muhammad observed: the fast of Ramadan has the intensity of early Christian observance of Lent, and the characteristic prostration of Muslim prayer was then normal in the Christian Middle East, where it still survives in some traditional Christian communities. Prayer mats, still one of the most familiar features of the mosque today, were extensively used by Christian monks as far apart as Syria and Northumbria or Ireland

He even provided theological reasons for the repression: he pointed out to one of his Donatist friends that Jesus had told a parable in which a host had filled up places at his banquet with an order, ‘Compel them to come in’.37 That meant that a Christian government had the duty to support the Church by punishing heresy and schism, and the unwilling adherence which this produced might be the start of a living faith. This was a side of Augustine’s teaching which had much appeal to Christian regimes for centuries to come.

Celibacy set up a barrier between the clergy and laity, becoming the badge of clerical status; at a time when everyone was being called to be holy, celibacy guaranteed that clerics still stole a march in holiness on laypeople.

Aggression was certainly one of the main characteristics of their most formidable early representative, Bernard of Clairvaux, and his electrifying preaching was influential in launching the Second Crusade in 1145.

Another late-eleventh-century religious order made a permanent success of monastic simplicity: the Carthusians. Like the Cistercians, they take their name from their first house, the Grande Chartreuse (Maior Cartusia in Latin; a Carthusian monastery was domesticated in English to ‘Charterhouse’), but their inspiration is not so much the Benedictine tradition as a rediscovery of the monasticism of the East which had provided the first models for Western monasteries. A description bestowed on them by successive admiring popes was ‘never reformed because never in need of reform’ (nunquam reformata quia nunquam deformata).

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. The doctrine was controversial: Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the loudest advocates of devotion to Mary in his preaching, said flatly that the idea of Immaculate Conception was a novelty which Mary would not enjoy, and that no conception, not even hers, could be separated from carnal pleasure.

the doctrine chimed usefully with a devotional belief current in both East and West that Mary’s flesh should not see the normal corruption of death, and it also creatively interracted with a notable and highly significant absence throughout the Christian world: any tradition of Mary’s burial, tomb or bodily relics. The next stage was an accident waiting to happen: in the late 1150s, a mystically inclined nun in the Rhineland, Elizabeth of Schönau, experienced visions of Our Lady being taken into Heaven in bodily flesh. The account of these apparitions, enthusiastically written up by her clerical brother with convenient brevity, was within a few years a manuscript best-seller all over Europe, not least thanks to the international contacts of the Cistercians.

Religious dissent had developed throughout Europe, particularly its most prosperous and disturbed parts, from the early eleventh century. The Church gave much of it the label heresy and in 1022 King Robert II of France set a precedent by returning to the Roman imperial custom of burning heretics at the stake.

In 1321 there was panic all over France, ranging from poor folk to King Philip V himself, that lepers and Jews had combined together with the great external enemy, Islam, to overthrow all good order in Christendom by poisoning wells. Lepers (as if they had not enough misfortune) were victimized, tortured into confessions and burned at the stake, and the pogroms against Jews were no less horrific. Muslims were lucky enough to be out of reach on that occasion.

In the mopping-up operations which ended the Albigensian Crusade, Dominicans found employment as investigators in the tribunals known as inquisitions, and soon dominated inquisitions as they became the chief weapon against religious dissidence wherever it appeared in Europe. In a rueful division of their Latin name, some came to call them Domini canes, ‘hounds of the Lord’.

The inquisitors’ outlook has been likened to that of officials in the Cheka, early revolutionary Russia’s secret police, where the aim was not merely to repress, but to change society for the better – there is often a fine line between idealism and sadism.

a knowledge of Latin would be enough to make one understood by everyone who mattered in society from Stockholm to Seville.

At the other end of the scale of acceptance from Porete was Bridget of Sweden, a fourteenth-century Swedish noblewoman, who founded the monastic order for women and attendant priests which came to take her name; she derived the considerable detail of her foundation from a single vision of Christ, who had considerately spoken to her in Swedish.

It is a peculiarity of the Orthodox tradition of public worship that it contains hymns of hate, directed towards named individuals who are defined as heretical, all the way from Arius through Miaphysites, Dyophysites and Iconoclasts.

In fact there was a long tradition in the Orthodox Church of leading churchmen criticizing burnings at the stake, which has little or no parallel in medieval Western Catholicism.

Pope Nicholas was very ready to intervene on the Byzantine frontier, and various rulers in the region were not slow to exploit the resultant possibilities of playing off the Christians of West and East against each other.

In the long struggle between Orthodox and Catholic in central Europe, the line of cultural differentiation between Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, which has so recently poisoned their relationship despite their common language, has ended up as not so different from that division of the empire originally set by Diocletian.

from the late ninth century, Churches of Orthodoxy have diversified through a remarkable variety of language families and the cultures which those languages have shaped; in fact it is the Church’s liturgy which has been the major force in deciding which languages should dominate cultures in various parts of the Orthodox world.

Orthodox Churches have shown a considerable relish for quarrels over jurisdiction and consequent separations or schisms.

In the course of the fighting, Kmel’nyts’kyi came to ally directly with Muscovy in 1654: a move of huge significance for the future. Nearly two decades marked by exceptional atrocities left the Commonwealth shattered, perhaps a third of its population dead; it was the beginning of its long decline towards eighteenth-century partition and oblivion, and also the beginning of a long identity crisis between East and West for the Ukrainian people.

In 1290 in Paris a Jew had supposedly stabbed a eucharistic wafer with a knife and it started bleeding. Among the hundred or so blood cults which appeared over the next three centuries, mainly in the Holy Roman Empire, a majority involved a story of Jewish desecration.

European society in the wake of the Black Death remained preoccupied by death and what to do about it. No wonder the eleventh- and twelfth-century development of the doctrine of Purgatory was one of the most successful and long-lasting theological ideas in the Western Church. It bred an intricate industry of prayer: a whole range of institutions and endowments, of which the most characteristic was the chantry, a foundation of invested money or landed revenues which provided finance for a priest to devote his time to singing Masses for the soul of the founder and anyone else that the founder cared to specify

great activist and reformer Jean Gerson did propose a general ban on Bible translations to the Council of Konstanz; he was worried that the laity would spend too much time reading for themselves and not listen to the clergy’s increasingly generous supply of preaching.