Medieval Christianity Christ the World Conqueror Refresh your memory from last time by answering these questions. What historical forces led to the Christianization of the Roman Empire? What are the pre-modern meanings of bishop, catholic, council of Nicaea, trinity, new testament, and saint?
What kinds of new Christian orthodoxy and orthopraxy appeared in late antiquity? Part 1 The West and the East part ways. Following the Christianization of the Roman world, a large stream of Christianity became more institutionalized and endorsed as the official religion of the Roman government. This was variously called the Imperial, Orthodox, or Catholic Church. You can see this transformation symbolized in the appearance of the Christ Pentecostal.
Jesus is both the one who blesses the world, but also is the emperor, the world conqueror. This political vision of Jesus was worlds away from the Galilean peasant movement of centuries past. Christ was triumphant in moral power, and this is proven by the power of his political institutions. The success of Christianity is evidenced by the success of Christian Rome, and the success of Christian Rome proves the truth of the imperial, official Roman Christianity. But what happens when the institution that binds the governmental church together breaks down?
Even before Christianity was the official religion of Rome, the Roman Empire was roughly divided into the Greek-speaking East and the Latin-speaking West. Although the Eastern Roman world would remain in existence until the 15th century, the Western Roman world fell a thousand years before in the 5th century. The Western Roman system of government fully collapsed in the year 476, dying a slow death after a long series of political and economic missteps and a slew of invasions by barbarian tribes.
There was no more Rome in the western half of Europe. So the question arises, what does it mean to live under the official Roman government's Christianity when you don't actually live under the official Roman government? In place of the Roman emperors, the western lands gradually started to shift from imperialism to local monarchies, hereditary kingdoms, each with their own line of kings and aristocrats.
These kingdoms would be the political norm for the west. throughout the Middle Ages, and in some cases well into the modern period. But for Christianity as an institution, the church itself still behaved quite like the Roman government, with political hierarchies and regional offices that reached across borders. The power of the emperor wasn't there, but there remained a notion that everyone lived under a power structure that spanned the world.
Now, it just wasn't about the Roman Emperor, but about Roman bishops. And, specifically, the Bishop of the City of Rome itself. He was increasingly considered something like the Emperor of Christianity. While there were still regional bishops, and all were equal successors to the Apostles, those bishops answered to the Bishop of the City of Rome, the Pope, the Father of the Christians, and the Regent, who ruled the world.
in place of Christ himself. It isn't entirely clear when the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, started to be treated as something more than just one of the other bishops. By the 5th century though, that is, right as the Western Roman Empire was collapsing, Pope Leo I began to argue that the Pope was the successor of the Apostle Peter specifically, as Peter appears to have been Jesus'own closest associate.
and Peter later moved to the city of Rome, where he was martyred. There is a correlation between the apostle Peter, the city of Rome itself, and the bishops who governed over that city. Look at this passage from Matthew that we've seen already.
Peter answered, You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God. Jesus replied, Blessed are you, For this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter.
And on this rock I will build my church. Pope Leo, and probably some popes long before him, interpreted this passage to mean that there was something especially foundational about Peter. He was the rock on which the church was to be built.
And as Peter later ministered specifically to the city of Rome, it was argued that the bishop of Rome, the pope, was the proper successor of Peter. and so the central authority of the church everywhere. Now remember that as the significance of the Western Roman government was breaking down, the institutions of the Roman government also disappeared in the Latin West. Things like hospitals, schools, orphanages, and armies. The welfare systems of the government.
They started to vanish as the government itself did. So the church could step in, and filled the vacuum. The Pope and the other Western bishops could protect the people.
The Church could patronize hospitals or educational systems, or even the military, in the absence of a Roman government. The Westerners not only needed the Church for their spiritual needs, but they needed it for very practical needs too. In a time of political instability, the Western leaders of the Church could offer safety and order. Sure, the local kingdoms could do this too, in a way, but in the West there was an increasing bifurcation of which social roles were managed by the bishops. There was a growing distinction between the two powers.
There were the worldly rulers, the regional kings and their local lords, and the spiritual rulers, the international papacy and their local bishops. This would, in hindsight, be the first clear ancestor of the now standard western division between church and state. But we aren't quite there yet. There was still quite a bit of overlap between worldly and spiritual power.
The Pope and his bishops crowned kings at their coronation ceremonies. Secular power seemed to come from the church, at least according to the Pope's own view of things. The church and the kingdoms often struck rather uneasy alliances with each other. And yet they somehow all worked together to keep the lawlessness of the post-Roman world in check. And this was quite to the reverse of what was happening in the still Roman East.
In the East, the emperor supported the bishops and endorsed their decisions. The universal ruler, the emperor, could grant power to regional bishops. But in the post-Roman West, the universal bishop, the pope, He was the one who supported the regional kings. The eastern bishops bowed to the emperor, whereas the western kings, in theory, bowed to the bishops. The western bishops, and the popes most especially, tried to wield a kind of power totally unknown by their eastern counterparts.
This transformation in western Christianity, this imperial Christianity but without an empire, would lead to a series of tensions between East and West. On the surface, they were mostly about theological matters, but quite often it was much more worldly and political than that. For instance, Western priests and bishops were increasingly practicing celibacy.
They weren't getting married or having children. But the Eastern priests could marry. The theological argument here would seem to be about morality.
If a person wants to live a holy life, do they have to renounce sexual activity in marriage? But there's also a much more worldly concern here, which is in truth a lot more important. Imagine a priest who lived in the 11th century, and he has congregants who build him a nice new local church for everyone to pray in.
If this priest has a wife and children, Well, then he also has heirs, and those heirs are due an inheritance. So, if this priest dies, do his children inherit his property? Do they inherit the church that he had built?
Well, in the East, this wouldn't be an issue, because the church's property is actually the property of the Roman government. The emperor owns the church. But in the West, the church is semi-independent of the rulers.
So, the child of this dead priest could legally argue that the church his father had built was now his own legal property. So there was a financial benefit to the Western Church to have its priests unmarried and childless. And they slowly started to enforce this as their official position. If an official policy of the Pope is that priests are supposed to be unmarried, what does that mean about the priests over in the East who are married?
Are they disobeying the Pope? Are they heretics? Sinners? An even bigger wedge was the Filioque. After the Council of Nicaea in 325, there arose a question about how the substances of the Trinity related to each other.
The question was, does the Spirit proceed from both the Father and the Son, or does it just proceed from the Father? Does Jesus send the Spirit along with the Transcendent Father, or is it just that the Father relates the Spirit on his own? When a Christian states their beliefs, are they supposed to say, the Spirit proceeds from the Father filioque and the Son, or just say, the spirit proceeds from the Father. The Western bishops tended to argue that the spirit comes to us from both the Father and the Son, while the Eastern bishops tended to argue that no, the spirit proceeds just from the Father.
Now this is a very abstract issue, and frankly, it makes little difference to how one actually practices Christianity. And no argument from scripture, tradition, or logic could resolve the issue in either direction. But it would end up being offered as evidence from both the Eastern and Western bishops that those bishops on the other side of the world didn't know what they were talking about. The Easterners could use this really abstruse issue to claim that, well, see, the Latins do whatever the Pope tells them to do. And the Westerners could likewise say, see, the Greeks just aren't obedient to Peter's successor, the Pope.
Over matters like this, bishops on both sides of the divide would condemn the other for interpreting Christianity differently. Minor theological differences of opinion would be evidence that the church itself was breaking in half. The Western bishops stopped answering to the emperor in the East, and the Eastern bishops stopped answering to the Pope in the West. In the year 1054, bishops from both sides started to excommunicate each other.
They started to publicly declare their rivals were non-Christians. There were now clearly two different churches, who both claimed to be the official Christianity. Both East and West claimed to be true, and Orthodox, and the universal Catholic religion. Now, later, the Eastern Church came to be called the Orthodox Church, while the Western Church came to be called the Catholic Church.
But just remember that both sides would have argued that their Christianity was the right opinion, Orthodox, and that their own Christianity was universal, or Catholic. But for the sake of clear labels, Orthodox Christianity refers to the Greek Roman Eastern Church, while Catholic Christianity refers to the Latin Western Papal Church. Part 2. The Crusades.
It was more clear by the day that the theological and political differences between the Orthodox and the Catholics were not going to be resolved by force of argument alone. If one form of Christianity was to prove its political dominance, it would have to take it. In the East, there was no way for the bishops to seize the West by force.
They didn't have that kind of political power. Only the Emperor did. And the Emperor had no reason to invade half of Europe. It was a massive amount of land, which had been in a state of economic chaos for centuries. And so there was no reason to even attempt such an undertaking.
The emperor didn't need the West, and he didn't want it. But in the West, the bishops, and specifically the Bishop of Rome, could summon up armies and lead them into battle. And yet, what were they supposed to do?
Overthrow the emperor? Force the bishops at sword point to affirm the legitimacy of the pope? And frankly, the Westerners were also quite aware that the Emperor had far superior military technology and much more money. So direct military action was useless anyway. But what about indirect military action?
Well, that's where Jerusalem comes into it. By the way, this gets a little complicated, so let's just try to make things more clear. Let's start using the Western name for the Eastern Roman Empire. The Byzantines. Byzantines just means those Roman emperors from Constantine onwards who had their capital in the eastern city of Byzantium, which was later renamed Constantinople.
They didn't call themselves the Byzantines, mind you, they just called themselves Romans, because they were Romans. So when you hear Byzantine Empire, just remember that means the Eastern Roman Empire. Now, remember how many Christians didn't accept the theological and political legitimacy of the Roman imperial form of Christianity?
Well, many of these same Christians suffered persecution and heavy taxation from the Byzantine government just for this. This included the Christians of the city of Jerusalem. But these Jerusalemite Christians saw a way to get out of the oppressive rule of the Roman Byzantines. A new power was arising in the Middle East, Islam, and Muslims weren't really that interested in the internal theological debates of Christians.
So, in the year 638, the Christians of the city of Jerusalem struck a deal with one of the Muslim rulers. Jerusalem would become part of the Islamic Empire, and Muslims would give the local Christians lower taxes and freedom to practice Christianity however they wanted to. Although Jerusalem passed from Christian Roman to Muslim hands quite peacefully, the Byzantines and other various Muslim empires fought over their shared borders on and off for centuries.
Now most of the time they were at peace with each other and trade moved between them freely. But as neighbouring empires tend to do, Border disputes were not uncommon. In the 11th century, a new series of skirmishes broke out between the Byzantines and the Seljuks. That was a later dynasty of Muslim rulers.
They had nothing to do with the earlier Islamic empires of the 7th century, 400 years before. The Byzantines were losing badly, and so the Byzantine emperor reached out to the pope for military support. He was asking the Pope to send some troops, but he didn't. The Pope ignored the Byzantine Emperor's letter for backup. But two decades later, there was a new Pope, named Urban II.
And like all Popes up to this point, he had no power in the East. Actually, he spent most of his time dealing with the various infighting of his own Western European monarchies. But Urban had an idea. What if he could use this 20-year-old Byzantine invitation to send troops into the Byzantine lands as a way to bolster his own papal authority, while simultaneously ending the infighting in his own western lands?
The western armies couldn't actually overthrow the Byzantines, but maybe they didn't have to. So, Urban II argued that he could send troops to the east to fight the Seljuks. Supposedly, in order to help the Byzantines.
Now, Western kings didn't care about the Byzantines and their fights with the Seljuks thousands of miles away, so what if some snobby Byzantine emperor was fighting with some people we never heard of? But Western Christians did care about the city of Jerusalem. It was a holy place once inhabited by Jesus himself. So instead of attacking rival Christians in the east, Urban argued that Christians had a religious claim over the city of Jerusalem, which was now being held by the Seljuks. It was their obligation as Christians to liberate Jerusalem from the evil enemies of Christ.
By the way, the city of Jerusalem, even under Muslim rule, was still mostly Christian. But, you know, details. It was a bold political move on Urban's part. Catholic Christian forces could take Jerusalem.
Urban could, in a single move, prove the superiority of the papacy to Byzantine Christians, end the infighting of the Western Christians by giving them a common enemy, and open new trade routes with the East, bringing wealth flooding back to the West. Assuming it all worked. If Catholic rulers did succeed in taking Jerusalem, They would win themselves new lands, the gratitude and favor of the Pope, and presumably, the pleasure of God.
And if they failed, well then they would be martyrs. They would free themselves from their sins. So, whatever happened, it was a win-win for Urban II and the papacy.
And so, in 1095, Urban II called for a crusade, literally a taking up of the cross. an explicit nod to Jesus'command in the Gospels. If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. Again, like the desert fathers and mothers centuries before, Urban could use this biblical command to strive for martyrdom in new ways.
Now though, They were military ones. And so the Western rulers started to send their armies to Jerusalem, passing freely through the land of Israel. the Byzantine lands.
And there they could claim Jerusalem on behalf of Latin Catholic Christianity. In 1099, the first crusaders arrived in Jerusalem. They laid siege to the city, and finally they killed most of the inhabitants of it, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim alike.
There, they briefly set up a series of small crusader states, ruled by Catholic kings and lords. giving the Pope power on both sides of the Mediterranean, and, not coincidentally, on both sides of the Byzantine Empire. These crusader kingdoms didn't hold long.
A new Islamic dynasty, the Ayyubids, arose in Egypt. The Ayyubids rallied the various Muslim powers around this new common enemy, and together they picked off the crusader states one by one. The Catholic forces continuously tried to retake the land they had lost, leading to a series of crusades, one after the other, but they made very little headway.
Realizing Jerusalem was a lost cause, some crusaders tried to reroute the crusading zeal towards the Byzantine Christians, their more immediate enemies. The Fourth Crusade actually just tried to lay siege to Constantinople itself, but the crusaders failed there too. The Crusades as a political movement didn't successfully take any permanent hold in Jerusalem or anywhere else in the Eastern world. And now, the already sour relationship between the Orthodox and the Catholic churches was worse than ever. Plus, all these Crusades were bloody, with huge death tolls that repeated themselves for centuries.
So, what difference did all that make? Part 3. Medieval Catholicism. While the Crusades as political ploys to reconcile the Orthodox and the Catholics by diverting their energies against the Muslims amounted to nothing in the end, the Crusades did transform Christianity severely. First, the Great Schism of 1054 between the East and the West was sealed. To this day, Catholic Christianity The Latin Western Imperial religion and Orthodox Christianity, the Eastern Greek Imperial religion, remain discrete.
Truth be told, the differences between the Orthodox and the Catholics are usually very minute. They both believe in the Trinity, in councils, in the same Bible, in the authority of the bishops as inherited from the apostles, and the popular authority of saints who live Christ-like lives. There are small distinctions between them.
for instance over the issue of the Filioque, but the major wedge remained the issue of authority. Do they answer to the power of the Bishop of Rome? For the Catholics, the answer is yes.
While for the Orthodox, the answer is no. Second, those Western Catholics had a new, much more powerful interpretation of the Pope. Sure, there was an ancient Christian tendency to privilege to the Bishop of Rome. But the Crusades strengthened the papacy dramatically.
The Pope could successfully command kings and armies. And therefore, the Pope wasn't just a spiritual leader. He was the linchpin for all of Western Europe.
The Pope stood over regional kings and princes, stabilizing their claims to power and pulling the strings of governments. The Pope, in a more limited sense. filled the void left by the disappearance of the Western Roman emperors.
The Pope could raise funds, build great public works, and establish the first Western universities, many of which are still in existence today. Third, this new and much more powerful role for the Pope allowed him to delegate how Christianity in the West would manifest itself. This took the form of new religious orders. which the Pope could assign certain functions. So, when a new interpretation of Christianity would arise in the West, the Pope would officially recognize it, or suppress it, as he wanted.
For example, a would-be crusader named Francis from the town of Assisi began a monastic community based on embracing poverty in the name of spiritual renewal. These Franciscans would be endorsed by the Pope, to care for the poor and preach the gospel. Francis himself would even travel to Egypt, on a sort of spiritual crusade, in an attempt to convert the Muslim sultan.
himself to Catholic Christianity. Naturally, the Sultan didn't convert, but apparently the monk and the Muslim got along quite swimmingly. Fourth, the new power of the Pope and his religious orders, like the Franciscans, stabilized a great deal of the chaos left in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West from centuries before.
Education and literacy was increasingly more common. Reliable trade with the East through the Islamic world brought new products, new wealth, and new literatures into the Latin West. And the more stable the politics and the economy, the more that would allow Catholic culture to thrive.
Reliable sources of income and trade allowed for large monastic communities to take root in the West. There, People could devote their time to study and prayer and reading in a way unimaginable before. A side effect of this was also a turn to Catholic monasticism. Although there had been Christian monks and nuns since ancient times, they were previously quite rare in Western Europe.
To live your entire life in a cell or a cave was one thing in the Middle East, where you could live with minimal shelter year round. But in Europe, living in the wilderness in the middle of the winter was simply not an option. But with a strong economy and a strong church, nuns and monks could live in large artificial communities paid for in cash by the church, the kings, or other wealthy benefactors.
And in turn, these affluent, well-cared-for monastic communities would develop novel forms of Christian mysticism. Not coincidentally, many of the most famous mystics of the Catholic Church lived in the Crusading era. Francis of Assisi was just one of them. Of particular note were women mystics.
Since women couldn't hold any official church offices and rarely wielded political roles either, mysticism was a way medieval Catholic women could claim authority in a very patriarchal age. After all, what pious man would question the opinion of someone who had direct contact with God, even if she was a woman. Mystics like Hildegard of Bingen would rise to a kind of unofficial power through mystical experiences and education.
Hildegard claimed to have had a number of mystical visions throughout her life, prompting her to write spiritual treatises, poetry, and, most famously, music. The music playing in the background right now is actually a piece she wrote. Hildegard became the overseer of several large monasteries, and she studied medicine, the natural sciences, and had the ear of several secular rulers, as well as several popes. What king would disregard the wisdom of this famous prophet in the Rhineland?
But there was a problem built into the institutionalization of the Roman Catholic Church. The more powerful the pope and his religious orders became, the more rigid they became too. If your religious opinion is interlocked with your political allegiances, there was bound to be pushback.
Disagreeing with the official religion, even over honestly believed and spiritually sound points, could be interpreted as revolt. The Christianization of the Roman world in the 4th century caused theological infighting, leading to the permanent division between the Orthodox East and the Catholic West. Now, something similar is going to start to happen again, ending in the earth-shattering 16th century, the arrival of the Protestant Reformation, and modernity.
Some questions to take away. What was the Great Schism of 1054, and what were its causes? How did the Crusades arise, and what were they trying to do? What were the effects of the Crusades on medieval Catholicism?