[Music] they found him in a forest outside rome hiding gregory who had been elected bishop of rome was well qualified to be pope he had been born into a noble roman family and he served as ambassador to the imperial capital of constantinople but he didn't want the job it was a terrible time to be pope rome was under siege uh he was also being racked by a plague that had claimed the life of the previous pope all gregory really wanted to do was to be left alone in his monastery but reluctantly he embraced his duty and he followed the people back to the city although he didn't want to be pope gregory would end up being one of the most influential popes in history his papacy marked a turning point in the history of the west by the time he died 14 years later gregory had expanded the authority of the pope and the western church more than almost any other pope in history before or since in 14 years gregory brought order to the western church wrote thousands of letters to bishops all over the world sent out hundreds of monks as missionaries and organized church doctrine into a theological system still embraced today by the largest group of christians in the world roman catholicism that's quite an accomplishment for a man who didn't even really want to be a pope gregory is considered the first medieval pope and he greatly contributed to making the papacy a position of global importance but he wasn't the first pope in history where did the idea that the bishop of rome had special authority and responsibility over other churches come from to answer that question we have to go back to the second century the bishop of rome's power and authority started growing steadily in that century and that happened for a number of reasons the first was just natural significance rome was a large and important city and for the first three centuries of church history it was the capital of the empire so it was natural that the bishop of such an important city would have a lot of influence a second reason was that rome had a reputation for orthodoxy at the great doctrinal councils of the church during the reign of constantine they developed a reputation for being on the right side of the major doctrinal disputes the western church never suffered from the deep theological divisions over the trinity or the nature of christ that tore apart churches in the east and so rome gained more of a leadership role in the universal church from the time of constantine on the bishop of rome was considered to be first among equals among the bishops and the council of constantinople officially recognized that role in 381 another reason for rome's importance was the east-west split after constantine moved the imperial capital to the east in 330 the west went into political decline and during the barbarian invasions that began in the 5th century roman bishops were often better leaders than the political leaders of the city pope innocent the first managed to negotiate with the visigoths in 410 and save the city from being burned down in 452 leo the first became known as leo the great because he persuaded attila the hun not to destroy rome the competence a lot of popes displayed increased the prestige and power of the office of the bishop of rome and due to the popular perception that god had given the pope special grace a theory called the petrine theory began to develop this theory was built on christ's promise to build his church upon this rock which they interpreted to be the apostle peter himself the theory was that peter had been given primacy over the other apostles and since church tradition said that peter also ended up becoming the first bishop of rome he was said to have passed his authority down to his successors through apostolic succession in the year 445 emperor valentinian iii officially endorsed the petrine theory by declaring that the bishop of rome had universal authority on spiritual matters so by the time gregory became pope in 590 the authority of the papacy was a well-established fact however gregory wielded that authority more effectively than anyone before him ever had as historian bruce shelley writes gregory combined great executive ability with warm sympathy for human need so as we said before gregory became pope during a siege and during the siege gregory oversaw distribution of food to the needy oversaw the rebuilding of the city's infrastructure and the training of military troops and later he negotiated peace with the lombards directly gregory also did the work of an evangelist and convinced the lombard leaders to convert from arianism to orthodoxy now once peace was restored in rome gregory was so popular that he became the de facto political leader of the city people referred to him as god's consul and his combining of political and spiritual authority set an important precedent for future popes in spite of his newfound political authority gregory continued to take his spiritual tasks very seriously he was a diligent shepherd he wrote thousands of letters to bishops all over the world and penned a book on the principles of christian ministry he was also a competent administrator he helped the church run budget surpluses for several consecutive years and he did all of that in spite of being in poor health he had gout for most of his life he also managed to stay humble he was the first monk ever to become a pope and he chose to lead a simple life and reject the title of universal bishop instead he preferred to refer to himself as servant to the servants of god gregory's greatest legacy though is his passion for foreign missions the story is told of gregory coming across a group of blond-haired blue-eyed boys for sale as slaves one day in a slave market in rome gregory asked the slave dealer where the boys were from and after he responded that they were angles from daeiri the old roman word for england gregory was deeply moved and he corrected the slave trader he said no they are not angles but angels and while they may be from daeiri they will be saved de ira which is latin for from the wrath of god gregory then commissioned a benedictine monk named augustine not to be confused with augustine of hippo to be the church's first official missionary to england augustine was able to convert the king of kent and he became the first archbishop of canterbury so far we've talked about gregory's positive accomplishments he was probably one of the most good-hearted popes in history in terms of theology however gregory also laid the groundwork for medieval roman catholicism and his views which relied heavily upon church tradition which he considered equal to scripture as well as his own personal experience set some negative precedence for the next thousand years gregory softened augustine's views on original sin he believed that humankind had inherited adam's tendency to sin but not adam's guilt he also rejected the idea that saving grace was irresistible instead he taught that people could cooperate with grace and therefore at least to some extent people could merit salvation gregory also believed that baptism only washed away the sins a person had committed before conversion sins committed after baptism had to be dealt with through penance a process that involves repentance confessing to a priest and doing meritorious works to make up for the sin the more serious the sin the more a person has to do to make up for them and if the person fails to fully deal with their sin in this life they will have to make up for it in purgatory now purgatory shouldn't be confused with hell hell is the place of damnation for the unrepentant purgatory is a place of purification for saints whose sanctification in this life was incomplete gregory wasn't the first person to believe in purgatory but he did add to it the idea that believers time in purgatory could be shortened by the intercession of those who had accumulated merit for their good works especially the saints in heaven gregory wrote our holy martyrs are ready to be your advocates they desire to be asked indeed if i may say so they entreat that they may be entreated seek them as helpers of your prayer turn to them that they may protect you in your guilt for gregory however the supreme means of grace was the mass or communion during a church service to gregory the eucharist offered during the mass was not just an act of remembrance or thanksgiving for christ's sacrifice it was a sacrifice once the priest consecrated the elements they became the literal body and blood of christ sacrificed anew for those participating in the mass gregory also believed that a mass could be performed vicariously for people who were already dead and in purgatory gregory based that last doctrine on his own personal experience one of his monks had broken his monastic vows and hoarded money and he died before he was able to do penance for his sin since gregory believed that that man had gone to purgatory he began doing 30 days of masses to help shorten the man's suffering on the 30th day the man's brother who had been unaware that the masses were being performed came and told gregory that he had had a dream in which he had seen his brother going to heaven gregory took that as confirmation that the masses he had been performing vicariously for this man had been effective this tendency to base doctrine upon experience rather than scripture inflicted a lot of theological damage upon the western church furthermore the elaborate system of penance that gregory introduced introduced a strong element of works righteousness into the church's theology that undermined the new testament's emphasis on the finished work of christ in my opinion it's difficult to find another person in church history who is simultaneously as good-hearted and as theologically misguided as gregory the great many historians see gregory's papacy as the dividing line where the classical age ends and the middle ages begin some historians would draw the line earlier say at the rise of constantine in 313 or the fall of the last roman emperor in 476 but i think gregory's papacy is the correct place to draw the line for two reasons first as we've already mentioned it was during gregory's papacy that the church came to hold significant political power as an institution and the struggle between church and state for political power would be one of the major themes of the middle ages second it was during gregory's papacy that the grace of god became seen as something tied almost exclusively to the institution of the church and the sacraments that only the church could dispense now both of these developments gave great power to the papacy and helped make the church a dominant institution in european life for the next thousand years but gregory is really the first person in history to hold that kind of power and so the middle ages begin [Music] so i know this is a course on church history but we actually have to talk a little bit about the rise of islam because the islam emerged around this period in history and it actually had a lot of interaction with and a lot of influence on the history of christianity one of the biggest misconceptions that people have about the middle ages is that it was a period during which hardly anything changed at all and really nothing could be further from the truth uh there has never been an era in the history of europe when there were greater mass migrations than during the period following the breakup of the roman empire we've already talked in previous lessons about the movement of the germanic tribes across europe as they conquered rome and as they kind of resettled the continent in the 7th century though the church faced a new threat and a new uh series of mass migrations um from the east in the and there was a brand new religion that spread out of the east uh known as islam islam originated on the arabian peninsula and where six years after the death of gregory the great a bedouin camel driver named muhammad claimed that he had received a divine calling to preach a new monotheistic revelation muhammad's revelation strongly rejected uh the idols common to the arabs at the time and his preaching stirred up so much opposition that he was forced to flee his hometown of medina to the nearby city of mecca and the year that he fled was 622 and that year has since become year one in the muslim calendar during his exile in mecca muhammad preached his new religion to the arabian tribesmen from the desert and according to muslim belief allah also dictated the quran which is the muslim holy book to muhammad by means of the angel gabriel during this period the quran lays out the basics of the islamic faith islam believes that there is only one god allah who makes his will known to men through the prophets and the quran actually acknowledges a lot of the same biblical characters that christians believe in such as abraham moses and jesus as prophets but it denies jesus's deity or his death on the cross and declares that muhammad is the last and the greatest of the prophets to muhammad the duty of human beings was to submit to the will of allah the word islam actually means submission allah's will includes praying five times a day facing mecca regularly reciting the muslim creed that there is no god but allah and that muhammad is his prophet uh includes fasting giving alms to the poor and making a pilgrimage to mecca at least once in your life if that is within your means doing good works is really important to islam because it makes it more likely that a person will go to heaven but according to islam no one can know with certainty whether they will be accepted into paradise until their deeds are weighed on the last day i kind of learned that in person several years ago i was in boston staying at a hostel ended up rooming with a guy from algeria and we kind of struck it up struck it off because we both spoke french and as i was uh sharing my beliefs with him and he was sharing his with me i learned that uh muslims do not have any assurance of salvation he was saying really nobody knows until their deeds are weighed at the end of their life whether they're going to get in and go to heaven and so i was sharing with this man you know that's a big difference between what you believe and what i believe because i believe that you can know today that your sins are forgiven and have assurance of of god's acceptance and that you can go to heaven but muslims do not have that same assurance and so doing good deeds is very important and participating in what muslims call jihad or struggle against the enemies of islam greatly increases one's chances of going to heaven in muslim belief and so um jihad can be interpreted different ways some muslims interpret it as an internal struggle other muslims have interpreted as actual warfare against the enemies of islam but either way that that internal struggle increases the likelihood of you getting accepted and so it becomes a very important part of the muslim faith muhammad's message was very popular with the arabs that he preached to by the year 630 muhammad had so many followers that his forces were actually able to conquer the entire city of mecca and after muhammad's death muslim armies spread the faith far beyond the arabian peninsula often at the edge of the sword uh by 640 they had conquered syria by 650 egypt and persia were also under their control and after achieving dominance in the middle east muslims spread as far east as afghanistan and as far west as asia minor and they threatened the heartland of eastern christianity itself in 672 they sank the byzantine navy and laid siege to the city of constantinople and they probably would have taken the city if not for the fact that the byzantines uh the eastern christians discovered greek fire which is kind of a pressurized combination of gas sulfur and pitch that explodes on context and that water can't extinguish it's kind of like the napalm of the ancient world they discovered this just in the nick of time and were able to fight off the the muslim attackers so constantinople remained free but the byzantines lost most of their eastern territories to islam by the 8th century the muslims were threatening the west as well from egypt they swept all the way across north africa crossed the strait of gibraltar came up through spain conquered all of that and then crossed the pyrenees mountains into france and made deep advances into frankish territory until frankish forces under charles martell whose name means the hammer were able to stop them at a city called poitiers and drive them all the way back across the pyrenees mountains where the muslims would continue to rule spain until shortly before the time of christopher columbus so after about a century of remarkable conquests the muslims finally settled down and started focusing on building their empires instead of conquering new territory the rise of islam affected christianity in a lot of different ways in the west most of which did not fall under islamic subjugation it actually brought certain benefits for instance muslim scholars preserved the works of aristotle and then passed them on to the west through spain islam's rise to power also strengthened the pope's claim to be the universal bishop of all christians by placing most of his rivals such as the formerly powerful patriarchs of alexandria and antioch under muslim domination and for the next several centuries even constantinople would be fighting justice just to survive in the east christians had a very different experience many christians fell under muslim rule muslim rulers weren't always hostile in fact they often respected christians as people of the book and saw them as superior to pagan idolaters and they allowed christians to continue practicing their faith and occasionally they even engaged in respectful dialogue with christians uh for example in 781 uh caliph mahdi of the abbasid empire in what is now iraq met with patriarch timothy of baghdad for two days and discussed the doctrine of the trinity and patriarch timothy later published their dialogue as a document in it that's still available today in an effort to win muslims to christ so muslims weren't always hostile to the christian faith however christians living in muslim lands were always treated as second-class citizens and those who refused to convert to islam were required to pay tribute and for people who were muslims converting to any other faith was always illegal and so as a result the number of christians in areas under muslim control slowly began to dwindle particularly in north africa north africa if you'll remember was already kind of divided the christians there were divided uh by the donatist controversy over whether uh you know priests who had sold out under roman persecution uh could could resume their their offices after the persecution ended and whether uh sacraments performed by those priests were actually valid or not and so christians were really divided by that conflict and so when the muslims came through a lot of people were willing to convert to islam or at least willing not to fight that hard against islamic control and so by the year 700 really just 80 years after muhammad lived and preached in arabia the entire region of north africa which once it had a very solid church which had produced leaders like origen and tertullian and augustine had basically almost disappeared and so the islamic wave kind of took certain areas out of the christian world and to this day north africa is a solidly muslim region the middle east is a solidly muslim region and that goes back to this period to the rise of islam and kind of the retreat of christianity into europe and it's increasing identification as a more european centered faith so in the last lesson we talked about the rise of islam and how islam came to dominate much of the formerly christian world probably the most significant consequence of the rise of islam was the redirection of christian missionary efforts and expansion away from the area around the mediterranean sea since muslim governments made christian missionary efforts in the lands that they conquered next to impossible missionaries increasingly turned away from the mediterranean region to areas north and west to parts of europe that were not yet christianized in these distant lands missionaries often encountered peoples who were culturally very primitive and many of the missionary stories from this period of christian christianization uh can be funny and uh some of them are often pretty raw for instance in 596 a king ethelbert of kent in what is now england uh would received an envoy from pope gregory who sent augustine to go evangelize uh his country and uh he agreed to meet with augustine because he had a christian wife who had kind of been bugging him for years to to convert but he would only agree to meet with uh pope gregory's envoy outside and there was a a really good reason for that ethel bert had heard that augustine had magical powers and that he could do things like make tales grow on the backs of people that displeased him and he believed that being outside would neutralize augustine's powers and so he would only agree to meet with him out in a field ethel bert eventually did convert he did become a christian and uh so far as we know he remained the tale free for the rest of his life a few decades later uh catholic missionaries moving north through england ran into celtic missionaries who had been originally sent out by saint patrick in ireland and had established a base in scotland and were kind of moving south through the island and these two groups of missionaries clashed they had different traditions uh they did things like celebrate easter on different dates and there were just a lot of quirks and differences between them and so they increasingly came into conflict and eventually uh the king of england king oswie convened a council to decide which version of christianity his country would adopt that council met in the year 664 and the two groups at the council debated back and forth on things like you know the proper date of easter and different traditions uh and it kind of went back and forth inconclusively until the catholics happened to mention that their faith was ruled by the successor of saint peter and saint peter was the man to whom jesus had entrusted the keys to the kingdom of heaven and as we asked the celts uh did he really and uh you know they were forced to admit that that yes because you know all christians believed that at that point and he asked uh the celts did he give a set of keys to any of you and so they replied well no and osb said well then i i shall not contradict him or else when i come to the gates of heaven peter may refuse to let me in and so uh that's how england became catholic that's how they decided to follow the catholic uh traditions rather than the irish traditions uh after their conversion the british began sending missionaries back to the continent and the most famous of these missionaries uh was a man named boniface who received a papal commission to evangelize the the saxon people in what is now germany and boniface made quite the impression with the saxons because he chopped down their sacred oak which was dedicated to thor and used its timber to build a chapel and since the oak was dedicated to thor the saxons expected boniface to drop dead at any moment and when he didn't many of them were so impressed that they became christians themselves boniface became known as the apostle to the germans and he eventually did die but not at the hands of thor he went to what is now the netherlands and was sharing the gospel there and a pagan tribe uh murdered him um and he actually refused to take up arms to defend his own life and willingly laid his life down uh for the gospel's sake the west sent out more missionaries than the east because the west generally had less problems with islam but eastern christians also managed to take the gospel to new lands during this period in particular there were two missionaries named cyril and methodius who found success in the one direction that was not closed off to the eastern empire by muslim expansion which was the north they went to the slavic peoples who inhabited the great eastern european plane and had evangelistic success there since these peoples were illiterate cyril actually invented an alphabet for them which is still in use today it's called the cyrillic alphabet it's uh if you've ever seen russian written on paper that's the alphabet it's written in and they also translated the bible into the slavic language and cyril and methodius's evangelistic efforts bore a lot of fruit and they were crucial to the survival of the eastern church when the muslims finally conquered constantinople in 1453 the center of eastern christianity actually moved up to moscow and moscow became known as the third rome and still russians still kind of think of themselves in some ways as the as the center of eastern christianity and uh that's a result of this period of history in spite of cyril and methodius missionary success however uh the rise of islam did weaken the byzantine empire to the point that the pope in rome actually went looking for a new ally somebody stronger than constantinople who could protect the western church and since charles martel had been the guy who won the big victory over the muslims in 732 in france that motivated pope gregory iii to go make an alliance with the frankish government and that alliance strengthened the church and led to a rebirth of sorts of the roman empire later on it also led to kind of an emergence of a christian europe sometimes called christendom which is a set of christian states all united under the spiritual leadership of the pope the overall effect of the rise of islam was to shift christianity's center of gravity further north and further west and it might be helpful to think of christian influence during this period as a kind of spotlight you know the spotlight uh moving across a theater stage as it moves uh across the stage some areas uh such as north africa and the middle east are kind of receding into darkness but at the same time the light is widening and moving to different parts of the stage uh touching new areas like russia like scandinavia like the british isles uh very far from where the faith had begun in uh the city of jerusalem so to close this lesson i'd like to read you an excerpt from a document written by monks who helped evangelize the saxons in germany one of the areas the light was touching for the first time and this document is called the heliand or saxon gospel and it was a harmony of the four gospels into one and it combined them into a narrative poem since most saxons couldn't read the idea was to make the story as easy to memorize as possible and what makes the document especially fun for us today is that the monks also tried to contextualize the stories to fit the saxon's chieftain culture and so i'm going to read you how the helian presents the lord's prayer so here it goes best of all born his followers said teach us the secret runes the powerful one the son of the chieftain had a good word ready right after that in reply when you men want to speak to the ruling god he said to address the most powerful of all kings then say what i now teach you father of us the sons of men you are in the high heavenly kingdom blessed be your name in every word may your mighty kingdom come may your will be done over all this world just the same on earth as it is up there in the high heavenly kingdom give us support each day good chieftain your holy help and pardon us protector of heaven our many crimes just as we do to other human beings do not let evil little creatures lead us off to do their will as we deserve but help us against all evil deeds you