A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Yet soon Hus himself was dead, betrayed at the Council of Konstanz in 1415 when the assembled clerics prevailed on the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund to set aside an imperial promise of safe conduct to the Prague Reformer. After being imprisoned in vile conditions, Hus was burned at the stake. It was a powerful symbol that the institutional Church was no longer capable of dealing constructively with a movement of reform.

Humanist scholars could therefore easily portray themselves as practically minded men of ideas, closely involved with ordinary life and government, in contrast to isolated ivory-tower academics who wasted their time arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin (this famous caricature of scholasticism was invented by humanists).

He constructed a salon of the imagination, embracing the entire continent in a constant flow of letters to hundreds of correspondents, some of whom he never met face to face. Erasmus should be declared the patron saint of networkers, as well as of freelance writers.

Naturally, with his usual instinct for self-preservation, Erasmus made disapproving noises in his writings about the officially condemned side of Origen’s thought – the amount of Platonizing heresy which he had produced – and he also covered his tracks thoroughly against charges of Pelagianism, a word which Augustine had established as one of the ultimate put-downs in Christian vocabulary.

In modern societies, these ‘Calvinist’ systems have a dark and oppressive reputation, but we forget that they worked because people wanted them to work. Rates of reoffending were low. Reformed discipline provided structures for controlling a frighteningly violent and arbitrary world, and involved the whole community in doing so.

it has remained vital for anglophone culture worldwide: the ‘King James’ version beloved of conservative Christians professing their faith in Churches of whose nature the original King James would profoundly disapprove.

First was a decree on authority, which emphasized the importance of seeing the Bible in a context of tradition, some of which was unwritten and therefore needed to be exclusively expounded by an authoritative Church.

the Roman authorities then forced Galileo to deny that the earth moved round the sun and not the other way round, because his observations challenged the Church’s authority as the source of truth. There were good theological reasons why they should reject heliocentric theory: the Bible presents creation in moral terms, and depicts a cosmic drama of sin and redemption centred on God’s relationship with humankind. It was not unreasonable to assume that in his creation, he would have made the planet earth, the stage for that drama, the centre of his universe, rather than a morally neutral fiery disc.

Protestants should not be too quick to sneer at Pope Urban VIII, because much Protestant scholarship showed itself just as suspicious of the new science of observation.

Both sides based their beliefs on the pronouncements of the Bible, however much they disagreed on what the Bible meant. Those who appeared to challenge that authority, like radical Christians or Galileo, could expect to find themselves regarded as enemies of God.

many were excited by Hobbes’s sledgehammer demolition of the sacred authority of clergy in the interests of civil power, and by the boldness of his theological revisions: Hobbes denied that it was possible for a God to exist without material substance, delicately ridiculed the Trinity out of existence and gave broad hints to his readers that they should take no Christian doctrine on trust.

Even the cross-references of the Encyclopédie (an innovative way of making novel links between subjects) appeared subversive – in the reference to Anthropophages (cannibals) was the straight-faced instruction to ‘see Eucharist, Communion’.

It was he who in a short essay of 1784 gave the most celebrated answer to a question about this new movement posed by one of his Berlin contemporaries, ‘What is Enlightenment?’: ‘Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity’.

During the Yugoslav war that followed, Mary’s Catholic partisans in Herzegovina became virulent anti-Muslim nationalists, who also bizarrely threatened to blow up the Catholic cathedral in Mostar if the bishop there did not abandon his scepticism about the heavenly visions.

Among them was Ludwig Feuerbach, whose reading of Hegel led him along with a number of self-styled ‘Young Hegelians’ to the conclusion that Christianity must be superseded because it represented a form of ‘false consciousness’. Humanity’s sense of its intimacy with God arose from the fact that humanity itself had created God in its own image: ‘the object of any subject is nothing else than the subject’s own nature taken objectively. Such are a man’s thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much worth as a man has, so much and no more has his God.’40 That which was called divine revelation only revealed humanity to itself.

popular Catholic support for suffering clergy was too strong for a state whose liberal instincts forbade the extreme violence which would have been necessary to make a success of its authoritarian policies.

For Alexander, religion was a necessary component of absolute power. That led him in 1815 to conclude a so-called ‘Holy Alliance’ with the Catholic Emperor of Austria and the Protestant King Friedrich William III of Prussia – the British government kept its distance from any public commitment to this unprecedented exploration of ecumenical despotism.

The first successful suicide bombers in human history were anarchists responsible for the murder of Alexander II in 1881.

Beyond the materialism of Feuerbach and Marx was a vigorous hostility to Christianity developed by the son of a Lutheran pastor, Friedrich Nietzsche. His experience of revelation in August 1881 was the exhilarating discovery that to be conscious of the lack of divine purpose or providence is to find freedom.

In summer 1914 the Second Socialist International tried in vain to summon up a cross-border solidarity of workers against the growing crisis; it found that far more were swayed by the rhetoric of nationalism backed up by the institutions of Christianity, which caused a continent-wide outpouring of popular enthusiasm for war.

The Catholic Church’s record in regard to Fascists might charitably be regarded as unimpressive.

In Croatia, Ante Pavelić ran a self-consciously Catholic regime, devoted to ridding a multi-ethnic state of Jews, Roma and Orthodox Serbs (though, curiously, not of Protestants or Muslims). His sadistic methods shocked even the Nazis. Nor did the Catholic Church condemn the forced conversions of the Orthodox which were part of Pavelić’s programme. A Franciscan friar, Sidonje Scholz, visited concentration camps, offering Serbs conversion or death. When he was killed by Serb resisters, the newspaper sponsored by Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb described Friar Scholz as a ‘new martyr who died in the name of religion and for Catholic Croatia’.

Throughout the world at the present day, the most easily heard tone in religion (not just Christianity) is of a generally angry conservatism. Why? I would hazard that the anger centres on a profound shift in gender roles which have traditionally been given a religious significance and validated by religious traditions. It embodies the hurt of heterosexual men at cultural shifts which have generally threatened to marginalize them and deprive them of dignity, hegemony or even much usefulness

At that stage, of course, American politicians were not generally keeping a worried eye on Evangelical political opinion. When in the 1980s they did, they discovered a large constituency emphatically in favour of Israel, for reasons related to the apocalypse.

Given the powerful fund of goodwill towards Serbia built up in the West through the alliance in the First World War, this ideology need not necessarily have become anti-Western, but a significant influence moving it in that direction was that of the Serb theologian and hagiographer Justin Popović, whose interwar studies in Oxford’s Theology Faculty had not ended happily, when his doctorate on Dostoevskii was failed after the examiners’ criticisms of its resolute hostility to Western Christianity.

Even Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, so influential in the reconstruction of Russian Orthodox church music, which remains one of the main ambassadors of Orthodoxy beyond its boundaries, was an aggressive atheist.